Aid measures: Dispute looms between UN and USA

First class, quickly exploit the flood disaster politically. Here opposition politicians are attacking the government because it allegedly isn't being cooperative enough with the relatives of vacationers in the disaster area (as if the government knew more than anyone else - in the disaster area, sometimes those present on site don't even know exactly what's going on) and now the USA is hacking against the UN. As if we didn't have more important things to do

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there is the original article.

Earthquakes shifted the Earth's axis

Wow!

At NETZEITUNG.DE Science you can find the original article.

Kyocera Discontinues Some 35mm Film Products

The dismantling is beginning. Kyocera is phasing out the analog line - something that had been expected for quite a while and was already in the works. But now even the bestselling Aria and the RX2, which was launched only relatively recently, are being discontinued. And a whole range of lenses. It's a shame - one of the most fascinating SLR systems is slowly disappearing from the market. And sorry, but the N1 and its lens lineup are nice, but definitely not comparable to the MM System. That one had grown over many years and was therefore nearly perfect in its equipment by the end. It will take quite a while before the N1 reaches that point.

I found the original article on PhotographyBLOG.

Alice - functional language and environment

Alice is a very exciting new language from the ML family. It offers many interesting approaches to well-known problems and extends ML with meaningful features such as a functional model for multithreading. What particularly fascinates me is the discussion of lazy evaluation, futures and promises in the Alice tour - that hit exactly the nerve, as I had just finished building my own package for Python (lazypy). I immediately extended it with futures. An OS X version of Alice is also planned - I'm really curious, as the screenshots of the environment suggest quite a lot of promise. Previous ML implementations have tended to be rather austere in their user interface.

Here you can find the original article.

dirtSimple.org: More forward-chaining twists

Phillip J. Eby is thinking about how to implement a forward-chaining factbase (a fundamental mechanism of AI systems that enable rule- and fact-based programming) in Python. Very fascinating to read - he actually comes from the OO corner of Python (as one of the PEAK programmers - PEAK is basically the J2EE of the Python world) and here has his first hard encounters with functional programming. The whole thing also has practical implications: in PyProtocols (another project by Phillip), there is now already quite an advanced extension of Python's OO system towards a more CLOS-like environment with generic functions and multi-parameter dispatch for methods. Very interesting, as it opens up completely new possibilities. Here's the original article.

South Asia

Wow, the Wikipedia page on the Indian Ocean earthquake is really impressive. Lots of information and well-presented too.

I found the original article at Wortfeld.

The Graphing Calculator Story

Nette Story.

Here's the original article.

Submarine earthquake kills thousands in Southeast Asia

Oh shit.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Delayed Execution with Python

The original text has moved to the PyDS weblog. The reason is that I cannot manage the text properly with the new software because the necessary tools are not available here (specifically, source code formatting doesn't work here, and besides the text is too huge - at least when it is saved as XHTML).

Delayed Execution with Python

Delayed execution - delayed execution or lazy evaluation - is a very practical tool in programming. Unfortunately, not all programming languages support this tool directly. Languages that support closures and objects, however, can be extended quite easily to support delayed execution. I describe one approach for Python in this text. The text contains a series of Python code examples that show how a whole range of powerful Python language features can be used. The text could also be interesting for those who have less interest in lazy evaluation. Here's the original article.

Brian Mastenbrook: Forth porn

Memories come flooding back. PowerMops - an integrated Forth environment for the Macintosh - is now also available for OS X. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but the description still sounds as cool as it did back then. Direct native code compilation and integration with the various toolboxes and nowadays also with the Cocoa frameworks. And all of this in an object-oriented Forth.

I found the original article at Planet Lisp.

Successful Separation of Cassini and Huygens

They gave me a Saturn moon probe for my birthday, isn't that nice?

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Photos confirm abuse in the Bundeswehr

Digital cameras and camera phones will probably now be banned at the German armed forces.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Microsoft attempts to patent object persistence

Toll - simple and banal object serialization. That sort of thing has existed for years, nonsense for decades. And Microsoft wants to patent it...

At kasia in a nutshell there's the original article.

Adding Optional Static Typing to Python

Guido van Rossum is thinking about optional static typing for Python. Very interesting, because optional static typing on one hand preserves the highly dynamic nature of Python, while on the other hand offering type declaration as an option for optimization. You can get a great sense of what something like this could accomplish by trying out PyRex - which already offers something like statically typed Python today. Here's the original article.

Asteroid discovered in immediate Earth proximity

Darn, missed it again.

At NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft you can find the original article.

The "Thank you Poland!" Letter

Hey folks, thank you!

I found the original article at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

eBay could not prevent password theft

We take this problem very seriously. - sure, and pigs can fly.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Siemens CEO announces painful cuts in communications division

With only an operating profit of 1.3 billion euros and a surplus of still 650 million euros, one has to do that too. Rip-off artists and liars.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Ok, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff. But this Ruby introduction is really completely insane. Definitely worth checking out. Even if you have zero interest in Ruby or programming languages. The author must be completely out of his mind - I don't know what he's taking to produce books like this, but I'd like two kilos of it.

Here you can find the original article.

Everything new for OS/2

OS/2 - yes, there was such a sad system back then, long long ago

At heise online news there's the original article.

Bellhop 1.0.1b4

Hmm. Writing OS X Services in scripting languages like AppleScript or Ruby. That actually sounds quite interesting - for example, you could integrate reStructuredText or Markdown as a service and use it in any blogging software ...

I found the original article at welcome to macscripter.net | applescript and script resource.

Cadmium batteries to be (partially) banned in the future

Ouch. Bad times for photo flash units. They draw so much power that NiMh batteries typically have significantly longer flash charging times compared to NiCd batteries. And far from all flash units offer LiIon batteries.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

German WordPress Community

For Wordpress there is a German community website with documentation, tips and tricks. Perhaps interesting for one or another - I still get pimples from PHP, but if it has to be PHP and this glorified index-file-handler called MySQL, then please something like Wordpress Here's the original article.

EFF & TOR

Good news: EFF will support TOR (The Onion Router). That's a good opportunity to point out the excellent guide on using TOR and Privoxy. With it, you can not only reliably cover your tracks (you can't erase anything, as becomes clear again and again - but you don't have to make it unnecessarily easy for people) but also defend yourself against overly curious websites. All in all, a very sensible thing.

Update: I've installed a tor server on simon.bofh.ms. If this doesn't completely eat up my bandwidth (I have 250 GB free space on the server, which should be sufficient) and the server performance doesn't suffer either, it will become a permanent installation. Projects like tor live on the fact that as many people as possible participate and provide resources.

And tor is practically end-user friendly - although network speed over tor is of course not comparable to raw network connection. Concepts like Onion Routing always have performance implications. While tor is slower than naked internet access, it's quite usable - unlike freenet, for example, where access to sites becomes an absolute ordeal.

At raben.horst I found the original article.

EU Court President Confirms Sanctions Against Microsoft [Update]

Good then.

At heise online news there is the original article.

IRC, identd and Privacy

IRC and Privacy

IRC is fundamentally a privacy problem when it comes to data protection: on one hand, an IRC user reveals quite a bit of data through their client and client connection — not necessarily more than with a web browser, but still enough to identify them. On the other hand, IRC is precisely the kind of place where people voluntarily say a lot about themselves — or at least claim to. So it makes sense that people want to appear anonymously on IRC — perhaps not in technical support channels, but there are other channels too.

So it seems natural to simply access the IRC network of your choice via Tor and thus achieve technical anonymization.

However, this presents some specific problems with IRCNet in Germany: on one hand, connections are not accepted from all external computers, and on the other hand, identd user resolution is required. Both of these, of course, create problems with anonymizing networks: I cannot ensure that I access a network through these methods and always come from a German node — the whole point of anonymization is precisely to distribute access across the entire world.

Additionally, an identd query creates a problem: it would have to be handled on the Tor server from which the connection goes out. This can certainly be done — there are identd servers that simply return default values for queries. But nonetheless, it's certainly a strange situation: in order to access IRC I have to allow access to my computer. By the way, this already creates a problem with firewalls if they don't properly provision identd responses.

The reason is of course clear: the network administrators want to ensure they have at least minimal control over what connects to their servers. An understandable requirement. On the other hand, this makes it difficult to operate, for example, help forums on the German IRCNet — I know from my own experience with a channel that it's absolutely not trivial for many users to configure their client accordingly. And anonymizing networks are completely left out.

I have no idea what the solution is here — except to move a help forum to a network that doesn't have these problems.

By the way, OS X users have another problem: IRC clients with SOCKS support (necessary for Tor) are few and far between. socat can help here — with it you can create a connection to a service via a SOCKS proxy without the client software having to support it. However, installing and using socat is not necessarily beginner-friendly. It's a shame that Apple hasn't implemented an appropriate mechanism in the operating system itself that would automatically use a SOCKS proxy — regardless of whether the client software supports it or not.

Cartel Office Initiates Investigation Against Gas Supplier

About time...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

No end in sight for copy protection cease-and-desist wave

Further nonsense from the law firm Waldorf and Statler (or something like that - the Muppets are far more entertaining than the rip-off lawyers of the music industry).

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Larry Hagman on a Hysterical Country

Highly recommended interview. And hilarious. (Dallas was still unwatchable TV trash!)

You can find the original article at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Laurenz Meyer steps down

And goodbye ...

Also a way to renew the party: over the course of a non-governmental phase, lose all well-known politicians through suspicion of corruption and similar things. Those who aren't corrupt are then sidelined professionally (which doesn't really require much for some Union politicians). And yet Auntie Merkelnix keeps patting herself on the back about how well she's doing her job ...

While it's overall rather unproductive for the Union, I actually quite like that about it

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

NeolithicOffice/J: OpenOffice derivative for OS X

Yeah, things are finally getting somewhere. Life without Microsoft - though on the Mac that was already possible thanks to RagTime and Papyrus Office. But with an open source software, the whole thing of course looks considerably better.

I found the original article at The Macintosh News Network.

Paolo Amoroso: McCLIM works with CLISP

Way cool: the most portable of all Common Lisps has received a few modernizations lately. And now McCLIM runs on it too - though of course only on CLX, and thus on OS X only under X11. But at any rate, it's quite an interesting platform. Especially since CLISP is the Common Lisp that most closely resembles a scripting language in terms of its environment.

Hmm. CLISP runs on the Zaurus. The Zaurus also has a system variant with X11. With CLISP+CLX+McCLIM+X11 you should be able to build the smallest reasonably complete Lisp machine in the world on the Zaurus.

At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.

Pornographic images on police computers

The Goats While Gardening ...

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

SCO vs. Linux: The Roller Coaster is a Bad Business

They're actually even more audacious at SCO than our managers in Germany

At heise online news there's the original article.

Ann: Revival of the BytecodeHacks

Some of you may still remember it: the Bytecodehacks for Python. A wild module that allowed all sorts of shenanigans with code blocks - and was used, among other things, in older Zope versions for restricted execution of Python methods. Certainly, the whole thing is the wrong approach and violates good taste and sensible programming. I love it.

Here's the original article.

...out of the potatoes: Software patents postponed

Postponed is unfortunately not cancelled ...

At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.

Enzensberger discontinues his 'Other Library'

Ugh. I just gave Jutta the Humboldt books for her birthday ...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Hamburg Regional Court: Top Level Domain .at Without Reference to Austria

I can imagine that the Austrians might see it differently.

At heise online news there's the original article.

SnakeSQL -- Pure Python SQL database supporting NULLs and Joins

Nett - a SQL database in Python that supports significantly more than Gadfly (for example, simple joins, foreign keys, and null values). Ok, like Gadfly, it won't be a miracle for performance, but as a SQL option for installations that don't require a C compiler, it's certainly useful.

Here's the original article.

Brian Mastenbrook: Old News

An interesting side note: the Xerox Lisp Emulator - an emulator developed by Xerox for their Interlisp machines - is included as part of the Grammars Writer Workbench. I still have a set of Medley Lisp floppies lying around at home - and two Xerox Lisp machines sitting in the corner. Nice devices with a neat graphical system. Ok, far from the performance of a Symbolics, but since they were my first Lisp machines, I like them anyway somehow.

Included with the Xerox files are emulators for DOS, Linux, SunOS and Solaris. So I might have a chance to get my old Medley Sysouts running on Linux.

Somewhere in there is also the Medley Common Lisp - so not just the Interlisp-D, which is somewhat archaic compared to more modern Lisps (for example, it only has dynamic scope). However, I would first need to dust off my old Interlisp-D knowledge to figure out how to open a Common Lisp listener on the machine again, if it's not in the root menu...

I found the original article at Planet Lisp.

No Software Patents

Web-Demo against software patents by ffii. Get involved!

Here's the original article.

Another Update: how to get rcxcomm working with OS X 10.2

The problem with the rcxcomm stuff under 10.2 is that the headers from the JNI under 10.2 have incorrect links and therefore don't work. To fix it, you simply need to add to the line in lejos_2_1_0/rcxcomm/src/Makefile where CCOPT is defined:

 CCOPT = -g -O ${JNILIB_TYPE} -framework IOKit -framework CoreFoundation -I/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Headers -I/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.3.1/Headers

The latter part is the new one - I simply added the correct include path and then it finds jni.h. And it can compile. However, I haven't tested yet whether the whole thing actually works.

The leJOS Tutorial

Anyone who wants to see what's possible with LeJOS can have it demonstrated in this tutorial. Since the LeJOS documentation itself is limited to the API, this tutorial is all the more important. After all, the demo robots supplied with LeJOS are also quite sparse ...

Here's the original article.

Update to Mindstorms System Overview

I've installed LeJOS. Cool stuff - the first time I can actually use Java for something. The only thing that doesn't work on OS X 10.2 is direct communication between the host computer (OS X machine) and the target computer (RCX brick) via the IR tower - so you can't build distributed applications between these two systems. The reason appears to be an incompatibility with the JNI (Java Native Interface) used to integrate the communication routines (written in C) into the Java classes. Otherwise everything works quite well - even exotic sensors (I have the IR proximity sensor and the ultrasonic distance sensor from HiTechnicStuff) work flawlessly. And the VM is small enough at 16 KB that you still have plenty of space for your own Java programs.

There's also an emulator included with which you can test your RCX programs on the host computer. Very practical for debugging - the RCX is a bit too primitive for that anyway. Even though the emulator is very primitive - it just spits out traces of what happened. No graphical display, no sensor simulation, etc. But still better than nothing.

Important constraints of the Java VM:

• no garbage collection. So you have to make sure you don't constantly instantiate new objects and that memory is allocated statically if possible - otherwise the RCX will eventually run out of memory (does that sound familiar from the Mars robots?)
• some language restrictions like no switch, no long data types, arrays with a maximum of 511 elements, no interface safety (you can put objects into wrong slots without getting exceptions - some of Java's type safety is lost)
• no introspection (so you can't look at your own classes). In a robot that's probably acceptable anyway - it should look at the world, not at itself
• the entire JDK isn't there - logically, the whole thing is an extremely restricted environment. The RCX only has 32K of memory...
• a very primitive toolchain - everything command line and so on. Maybe you could get a graphical Java environment to integrate everything correctly, because basically LeJOS uses the normal Java compiler. Something like Eclipse would probably be overkill in my opinion for programming a small RCX

I think I'll refresh my Java skills a bit during my pre-Christmas vacation and see if I can finally get my ideal freely moving robot working - one that doesn't bump into everything and at least builds up a rudimentary memory of its surroundings. After all, I have two RCX bricks - maybe I can finally realize my envisioned Lego truck with two brains (one for locomotion and basic collision avoidance sensing and one for spatial orientation). And as usual with Lego planning, you first realize that you simply don't have enough Lego bricks. I think that could go down in history as Hugo's first law: You never have enough Lego bricks.

XS: Lisp on Lego MindStorms

Cool - a complete Lisp that runs directly on the RCX. Perfect for the holiday season.

Unfortunately no OS X version, only something for Windows or Linux - and the latter only for the serial tower. Let me see if I can get something working for OS X with the USB tower. I also stumbled upon TinySOAR, a complete AI Agent Runtime for the Mindstorms RCX brick. Also very interesting - and hopefully also runnable on OS X through its embedding in TCL. And also new to me is the Java VM for the RCX: LeJOS. I don't like Java much, but it's definitely interesting for the RCX. And the oldy-but-goldy: LegOS, the complete operating system for the RCX written in C. However, due to its rather hefty toolchain (a complete GCC configured as a cross-compiler), it's somewhat tricky to install. Besides, it's now called BrickOS and is incidentally also under the Lisp as runtime. Here's the original article.

Top lawyers under suspicion of perjury

Tjaja, the oh-so-upright lawyers. Sounds more like a case from a television court, specifically the most primitive private TV variety ...

At WDR.de there's the original article.

Data Protection Officer: Security Gaps in Tax Software

I think it's absolutely ridiculous that the tax authorities want to force this stuff on people before it's even available on all the important platforms. But the fact that you can actually file a tax return or submit a sales tax advance notification using only a tax number and address (which according to impressum requirements must be stated in that document anyway for businesses!) without any kind of verification whatsoever — that really takes the cake.

Brainless, thy name is tax authority ...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

German Music: Red-Green Advocates for Radio Quota - Culture - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Red-Green is trying to overtake the Union on the right. What a bunch of nonsense. These federal idiots have time for such crap.

Hier gibts den Originalartikel.

Energy companies defend natural gas prices

And they keep lying.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.