andreas.beckmeier.net

I give you something to choose from:

a) In your life you will be killed on a certain day, but you don’t know the date when you will die, neither that you will die whatsoever.
b) You don’t live at all.

If those two options were presented to you, i’m pretty certain you would go for the first one. You might ask yourself what the hell i am talking about? Eating meat.

I’m really annoyed by those pseudo pro-life people who eat no meat and annoy me with how immoral it is to eat meat. You you eat no meat, fine, but don’t try to talk me into it.
Because i eat meat, some animals have to die, but those animals would never live in the first place if there weren’t people like me who will eat them later. This huge amount of cows, pigs and the like would never be alive. And that is a very disturbing fact for those pseudo pro-life plant eaters. More so, some of them claim that we can live just by eating plants. Maybe we can, but there have been numerous cases where children die, because their parents don’t give them meat. Here is a very funny thing to think about, we all know we must die, unlike most/all animals, but we don’t know the date. Now, and this is just a possibility, maybe God eats humans. If God exists and created us in the first place, would you now think that God is evil.

I for one take it like this: I know that animals die for me and i am grateful to every animal who dies because of the way i choose to live. I think that each animal should be treated with respect and have the right to live a good life. But the same way, if animals could think like this, the least they could do would be to thank me, for i am the reason they live. If this is the same for God and us, like it is for us and animals, i’m very grateful to him, for the life he granted me.

Now, if you excuse me, i gonna grab a burger with 3 layers of meat.

You might know of Wolfgang Schaeuble, the present Minister of the Interior of Germany. You might also know of his quest for creating a police state in Germany, he would deny this of course. Nevertheless, he said openly in an interview, that if it has a chance to prevent an act of terrorism, the presumption of innocence should not be applied.

In my view, i would rather die by a terrorist attack, than living in a state where one is guilty unless proven otherwise. Even more, a democracy should be stable not because the state knows of everything about its people, but rather that the people should know everything about the state. Also the head of the state should listen to the people and give them a clear presentation of what is happening in the world from a neutral point of view. Currently, the head of our state seems to have stopped listening to the people and tries to actively alter what the people have to think. After each election, the new elected government should try to do what has been promised in the election. SPD promised the VAT (value added tax) should stay at 16%, CDU/CSU said 18%. Now, both are forming the head of state, one would expect 17% VAT as a compromise, but instead we got 19%.

What does this show us? I would say the head of our state stopped listening to the people, some might say they intentionally lied to the people, so they would be elected and can do what they want afterwards. This cycle seems to be repeating itself, like what was said about the toll system for the German autobahn. Our government said the data collected would be only used to collect the toll. After the system was implemented, it was decided that the data will also be used for localization of criminals, with following reason:
Now that we have the data, why shouldn’t we use it…

And this is where i go back to the top of this post, Wolfgang Schaeuble and his quest for a police state, as i would say it. We already got a law where certain data will be collected and stored for 6 months when using any sort of telecommunication, only to be used for the pursuit of serious crimes. From what i know of our current government, after a certain period of time, this data will be used for any kind of crime. There is another thing going through the press right now, the so called “Bundestrojaner”, or state trojan. Wolfgang Schaeuble wants to permit online searches of a target computer by the police with the means of trojans, only for infiltrating terrorist networks of course. At least he says directly, that it wont necessarily stop at that point.

Where does this leave us? I for one, use my computer as some kind of extended memory, i’m really bad at remembering things after all. So you could say my computer and the data stored on it is a very important part of my private freedom and to an extend would even show what i am thinking. Also i am some times visiting a certain site by a white supremacist in America, not because i share his views, but rather because i want to know what my personnel enemy is doing right now. Just because this, i might fall into a certain grid of potential suspects if the police would ever do a dragnet investigation of the Internet usage of the people in Germany. And if things like a ~25$ internet fraud justifies a house search, i would be sure as hell on the list where a house or online search is on the line.

And this is were i will later go on to the second part of “The long way for private security”

Wow, update…

I got a Vista Business License and directly installed it. One of the many benefits my job offers.So far it runs very smooth, the Aero surface is fast and visually a long awaited addon.
At first i felt somehow overwhelmed/out of place. Microsoft redesigned / renamed many user folders and improved security greatly. That is, if the user wouldn’t simply ignore those popup windows asking him to verify that a action/program is allowed to make changes to the system and just clicks OK or just deactivates this security feature. If you don’t know what i mean, in Vista an user in the administrator group runs as a simple user without administrative rights. A good idea i think. That is, if it wouldn’t be one popup every time for every program and any system tool. Now, if you want to delete the recycle folder, Vista uses a new folder for that, you have to click 5 times: delete, yes delete, use administrative rights, (popup) yes use administrative rights, yes delete. 5 times for deleting an obsolete folder. Not only that, if you use multiple drives you have to add user rights for all drives, and that takes some time since the rights have to be set for every file and folder on that drive. Strangely enough, Vista does set the rights automatically for every partition on the first drive where Vista has been installed into. At this point, i decided first that i should simply disable this security feature but reenabled it after Vista started annoying me that there are security risks. I should be able to disable this warning but currently i don’t wanna bother with it, there are other problems to solve.
So after setting the rights right, i installed my favorite programs. No real problems occurred, besides Vista asking me after some installations if the setup installed correctly. One of those programs was Winrar, i downloaded the newest version, installed with no problem. But when i first used it Vista started to ask me if i want to run with administrative rights. OK no problem, since i already started ignoring the Vista popups. The real problem was that i wasn’t able to extract via the right click drag and drop method i used for years. It simply did nothing. So i googled for a solution. It was simple enough, i just had to install a previous version which i had to download over rapidshare.
On the hardware side there are more problems. My wireless lan card was not installed, no big problem because i don’t have to use wireless lan for my internet connection anymore. Another problem was my onboard audio, a realtek ac 97 chip. Windows did install a driver, but my most common problem hit me again, the digital output was not working. After searching i found a new driver on the realtek homepage. Tried to install it and directly told me that this drivers is for Vista only. And i thought i was running Vista. Done some things which had nothing to do with this problem, tried installing again and this time it worked. Whatever… So after the restart the next problem hit me and it hit me really hard. No, the digital output was working. Every time i tried opening the control panel the explorer crashed. So this official driver i downloaded from the manufacturers homepage killed a very important part of my system. Somehow i had some luck and it just killed the directory listing of the control panel so i was able to deinstall the sound drivers. I started google again and did some digging. While i found no problems like mine, the driver was just released today, there were some hints that i can install drivers designed for Windows XP. And those drivers do work, with digital output and they even warned me that they are not designed for Vista but simply let me install. I was not able to active AC3 passthrough but even on Windows XP it was a pain, so i should be able to figure it out after some time.

Thats it for now, but i am sure there are more Vista problems i can write about.

While i had the plan to write about Preemptive Fire yesterday, there was little time so i pushed it back a day.

First i will give some infos of Return Fire, since it is the base i start working from.
Return Fire was an arcade game for Windows 95, running with 256 colors at a 640×480 or 320×240 resolution. If you had windows running at 16bit or more you had to reduce to 256 colors, which was rather annoying. The objective was to find and recover the enemy flag, hidden in one of many flag towers. For reaching that goal you had 4 different vehicles, a jeep, a tank, a rocket tank and an helicopter. The Jeep was fast, but would be destroyed with 1 hit, but was the only vehicle able of carrying the flag and it could blow up the tires so it could swim over water. The tank was the working unit, neither fast nor slow with medium armor and firepower. The rocket tank was very slow, but had great firepower and the best armor. Additionally it was able to lay mines, which were frequently used for laying onto of the enemy bunker in a 2 player game. The helicopter was fast and had 2 different weapons, strong short range air to ground missiles and weaker air to air rockets. But it had a very weak armor and fuel was always a problem.
Speaking of fuel, every unit had a gas tank and limited ammo, but could refill each in either the own bunker or some resupply stations all over the map, but like all buildings in the game, they could be destroyed rather easily.
For defense there were rocket towers, in multiplayer each side side had some, in singleplayer only the AI had them, since the AI wasn’t able to control vehicles. That was one mayor reason why singleplayer was skipped by most players.
The multiplayer game however was brilliant, for that time. Still it had its problems, since it was split screen only the game was limited to 2 players and when both players were using the same keyboard it often happened that some key strokes were not registered since many keyboards were not able to register 6 or more keys at the same time. So it happened frequently that 1 player was not able to fire while the other was moving in circles around him firing everything there was.
And this is where Preemptive Fire comes into play. Some features i plan on implementing are 4+ player network games, AI controlled vehicles for single- and multiplayer and the support of the original music and maps of Return Fire. Maybe i can even add new game modes like cooperative play or deathmatch. I can even think of game modes like chickenrun where you have to hold the flag as long as possible and so on.

This should be enough right now, next time i will most likely write about the printer daemon i build.

Welcome to my new host,
well, i got the host already 1 year ago, but i never finished working on my own pages since the IE isn’t fully CSS capable.
So i have decided to use a 3rd party software, WordPress as you can see.

If you wonder what happened in my 2 years absence, the short version would be: “Not much”
The kinda longer version would be:
I’m still studying computer science, got a job as a technical assistant (or something) in the IRB at the “Universität Paderborn”. Basically i make sure our windows machines and all the servers are running and students can use them, a windows and hardware bitch so to say.
I am still working on my project “UP” but decided to lay it on ice until i got some more experience with writing stuff in C++, but started working on a project i call “Preemptive Fire”, a remake of a 1995 game called “Return Fire”.
Another new project is a windows daemon for printer management, since quite a part of my working hours are used for reinstalling the printers at the university and i got bored of such a low level job.

That said,
so long bitches…