"Cool" I thought after I'd registered my first top-level-domain containing a special character. But why the heck does it take so long to set it up? Even after 24 hours the DNS wasn't working, but.. oh wait! Firefox was able to resolve my adress. Why then, wasn't I able to ping the host? The answer is simple: The ping program installed on my system doesn't make use of libidn, which is required to turn domain names containing special characters to ascii-strings.

What can you do when the developers of the iputils don't want to use this library? Correct! Do it yourself. :-) After writing 5 lines of code I had my own Version of "ping" with libidn support. You can download the source here (orignal taken from a debian repository using apt-get source). When compiling the package you need to have the libidn library installed on your system (on debian you can use the version available over the package system).

The compiled version of ping has to be owned by root and in order to make users able to start ICMP request you also have to chmod u+s the binary. Have fun! :D

ganymed~:$ ping nördhus.se

PING xn--nrdhus-wxa.se (217.11.63.111) 56(84) bytes of data.

I recently finished my work on the small Brainfuck interpreter named "BrainStuck".. You can find a demo (Applet) in the article 'Introduction to Brainfuck'.

Developing a small but useful chat for my local network has been a "wish" for a long time. I started twice, but gave up later because I failed in inter-thread communication. Now that I finally succeded in programming a chat including a simple protocoll I'll publish some articles about this soon.

Furthermore I am working on a small Java Applet able to run Brainfuck source step-by-step so even beginners can figure out how the language works. After that I will finish my long overdue tutorial on Brainfuck programming.

As the weather gets colder here in Germany, I've some time to read books I wanted to read a long time ago.. One of them (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig) seems to be right for the time of the year. It's my first approach on Artificial Intelligence programming and in fact the first time I work with LISP (and Scheme). I hope to present some of the topics in near future on the page.

After spending lot of my time on other projects I did some updates here. There are some new articles about postfix, postgrey and amavisd.