Hesse Significantly Expands Police Powers
Police State Hesse?
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Artikel - 26.11.2004 - 16.12.2004
Green light for EU Council software patent directive
And democracy is being trampled on. The European economy too. The only ones profiting from this are the large multinational corporations that are already trying to eliminate their competitors today in areas where it's possible - mainly the United States of Dementia - with idiotic patents. And of course the many patent shakedown companies that try to push through the most absurd things as patents just to make quick money without any performance of their own.
One has to ask oneself who the members of the EU Council (and the national governments supporting them) are actually being paid by. The whole thing simply stinks of corruption.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Red-Green Gets Serious About Access to Files
I don't believe even this watered-down form has a chance of really being implemented - too many refuse and stand against citizens' access to files. Which in my opinion is an absolute scandal in itself - we're supposed to cough up money for projects, but we should absolutely not see what is being done with it. Already absurd.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Al Qaeda, Ku-Klux-Klan - and PDS
Not much comes to mind about that anymore
Hamster question? Höhn has an answer
We can and will solve the hamster question at the Neurath location.
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Pirates Response to DreamWorks
Even though the blogosphere is now puzzling over what retractable batons are - the answer to Dreamworks is actually quite funny. Unfortunately, you can't write something like that in this country anymore, because our legal system is increasingly approaching the American garbage heap and, thanks to Schily and other blockheads, is even overtaking it on the right ... By the way, batons are rubber truncheons or police batons - retractable batons being those nice telescopic batons you sometimes see in movies. I won't translate what it means to sodomize oneself with retractable batons.
I found the original article at Der Schockwellenreiter.
The Daily Whim: MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site
An interesting article about the impact of blog spam, especially on Moveable Type hosters. Gigantic server load just because the comment forms of Moveable Type are most frequently attacked by spambots and because the anti-spam plugins for MT are anything but optimal for server load.
US film industry wants to take action against BitTorrent
Eventually the film industry will then sue the plastic bag industry because you can secretly smuggle illegal DVDs in them...
At heise online news there is the original article.
Who says safe computing must remain a pipe dream?
Bruce Schneier with a few tips about computer security. I want to share the most important one here, because I absolutely agree with it: If possible, don't use Microsoft Windows. Buy a Macintosh or use Linux.
Dual system changes ownership
We're outsourcing our shit too. And our fee revenues right along with it. What a bunch of crap.
At WDR.de there's the original article.
BBC NEWS | Europe | Ukraine candidate 'was poisoned'
Well. Dioxin in borscht. I also find the comments from the doctors amusing - they said they had no idea what a high dose of dioxin would cause - previous dioxin poisonings were usually from low doses over a long time. Now they know.
gb - CIA
A fascinating project, the CIA Open Source Notification System. You stick a small script into your CVS and it diligently logs, saves, and distributes every commit. There are RSS feeds for every view and contrary to many other projects that aggregate some large amounts of data, this one is also blazingly fast. By the way, the title links to my user and shows my three projects being monitored there. So if you're curious what I'm currently breaking, you can subscribe to the appropriate RSS feed.
Languages for the Java VM
For those interested in what programming languages are available on the JVM - yes, there are far more than just Java. And many of them are far more interesting than Java. And many integrate very well with Java libraries. In any case, Robert Tolksdorf has started building such a list here. I have no idea if it's complete, but the selection is enough for me ...
(although of course I'm biased and would only take either a Lisp dialect or Jython anyway)
SLAVEGROOVE
William Gibson with a few excerpts from an American tract about slavery in the American South. In it, slavery is portrayed as the last harmonious multicultural society and as a particularly Christian society. And this is being read in lessons at a Christian school in the USA. On Gibson's blog I found the original article.
Bill Clementson: LispWorks 4.4 released
Looking at how the LispWorks implementation — originally actually foreign to OS X — is gaining ground on OS X (the previous version already ran cleanly under OS X, but this one has made further progress), one can clearly see how the distributor of the originally and still macOS native MCL implementation is failing in the market. You can't really put it more positively — MCL is in my opinion to be regarded as a debacle these days. At least the biggest news on their websites for 2004 is from the summer — that they got their mailing list running again. Great. MCL was once the star in the Lisp sky. At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.
Australia: Controversial Aid Program for Aborigines
Completely crazy, the people down under ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Bundeswehr: Struck reports new abuse cases
Just isolated cases. We have no systemic problem. Move along. There's nothing to see here.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Torture threat: Prosecutor demands fine for Daschner
And Pandora's box is open.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD I found the original article.
Galactic Baby at Our Cosmic Doorstep
Oh my goodness, aren't you just sooooooo sweet
At heise online news you can find the original article.
IPython - An enhanced Interactive Python
I had already written something about this earlier, but I've only been using it more intensively now. I have to say, the whole thing has developed tremendously. With a few settings in the system and in IPython, the whole system behaves almost as comfortably as a Lisp system prompt.
The integration of display system (on OS X it's recommended to set LESS to '-R' so that color information is evaluated) and editor (of course using VIM is recommended, but it also works quite well with the bbedit command line tool) allows you to work very nicely with the Python shell. On one hand, you don't have to constantly step out to quickly look at files or change a file, and on the other hand, you really get useful information with exceptions (the automatic activation of the debugger helps here).
Automatic deep-reloading too — that is, reloading a modified module while updating the contained references — helps tremendously, since you can finally edit the files directly and test them immediately without having to exit Python every time. Existing references to objects from classes that are in the modified file of course have to be rebuilt as well, since they still reference the old class.
All in all: highly recommended.
Logix Home
A very interesting project: building a language with a far more Lisp-like structure on top of the normal Python runtime. Compiles to the same bytecode as Python. Can be mixed with Python and also supports IPython as a shell.
With Logix, for example, the boundary between statement and expression finally falls away: in Logix everything is expressions. Lambda expressions that execute multiple commands and conditional expressions without detours through boolean expressions become possible.
There are also macros. The definition looks somewhat wild, but all the mechanisms seem to be there as they are also common in Common Lisp. So not just syntactic sugar, but real code-generating macros.
Of course everything is still alpha at the moment, but it already sounds very interesting. I'll keep watching this, it could definitely be interesting for me. Especially because I can mix it with Python.
Packages and small packages are becoming more expensive
It's logical, really. When the service gets worse (because more and more postal offices are being closed), you have to raise prices. Always so counter-cyclical.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Sensation in Münster: Mammal Discovered
Monogame Guinea Pigs. Strange. I haven't quite given up hope on discovering the Honest Politician. Maybe that one can be found behind some tree stump in Bolivia too.
At WDR.de there's the original article.
Mediation Committee: Stiegler threatens to go it alone
Hello Mr. Stiegler? Yes, the Union is annoying with their fussing about seat distribution. Yes, the Karlsruhe ruling is frustrating for you. But please think about this: these are our highest constitutional judges. When they hand down a ruling, one shouldn't respond by essentially giving the court the finger with everything one says. No, because a ruling from the Federal Constitutional Court doesn't suit you is not sufficient reason to simply change the Bundestag's rules of procedure just like that. The whole thing sounds pretty absurd. So into the appropriate category ...
At tagesschau.de - The news from ARD you can find the original article.
A Lisp Comic That Explains Macros
Nice Thing - an explanation of Lisp macros for beginners. In the form of a comic. Macros are called - fittingly for the topic - SPELs.
TP: Election Fraud in Florida?
Oh man, the whole chaos with the elections in the USA is slowly taking on quite absurd proportions.
Although you're not sure what's more absurd: what is claimed to have happened, or the figure making the claims. I wouldn't be surprised if both the guy is a crackpot and the accusations are true anyway...
CDU party conference approves healthcare compromise
What a load of garbage: the alternative to health care reform - which is already stupid enough - has a billion-dollar funding gap and is being cheered by the union party congress. How stupid do you actually have to be to get accepted into the party? Is that enough to be declared incompetent upon joining the party?
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Knuth: Open Letter to Condolezza Rice
An open letter from Donald Knuth to his student Condolezza Rice. Written back in 2002, but I stumbled across it for the first time. Fundamentally I don't see how the government of my country has done anything whatsoever to address and correct the root causes of international terrorism. Quite the contrary; every action I can see seems almost designed to have the opposite effect --- as if orchestrated to maximize the finances of those who make armaments, by maximizing the number of people who now hate me personally for actions that I do not personally condone. How can I be a proud citizen of a country that unilaterally pulls out of widely accepted treaties, that refuses to accept a world court, that flouts fair trade with shameful policies regarding steel and agriculture, and that almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation?
If I were to write something along those lines, I'd immediately be accused of salon anti-Americanism...
Once Something Against the XML Hype
YAML is a very interesting and compact markup language. But one that is not based on XML or SGML; rather, it is principally oriented toward the old RFC mail formats. The genius of it: the contents are much easier for humans to read than all those angle-bracket dialects. And for the computer, the whole thing is also quite simple to parse - and it's still powerful in its expressive capabilities. If you feel like processing YAML files with Python, Syck is an extremely fast library that also offers an interface for Python. In the Active Storage Framework for Python I use YAML for database backup and restore and as a native data format. Importing YAML data into the database is thus very easy - and since YAML is hierarchical data and the Active Storage Framework for Python is a hierarchical database, everything fits together wonderfully. And you don't have to be afraid of hurting yourself on all those angle brackets.
Only 88.41 percent for Merkel
In the morning, the Union still loudly proclaimed that cohesion should be demonstrated through an even clearer endorsement of Merkel. Well, that went completely wrong.
But Merkel will certainly spin the whole thing positively again, that much is for sure ...
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
E.ON and RWE want to increase electricity prices
Proper rip-off. What else is the monopoly for anyway
At tagesschau.de - The news from ARD you can find the original article.
Federal Court of Justice issues ruling on domain grabbing
Hmph. On the one hand good - because not everyone can just have their domain taken away. On the other hand, though, also bad - the domain grabbers will be happy now. And anyone who's dealt with such people knows how amusing it will be to get a domain back out from someone who just registered it as a speculative object. Whether we'll have to expect similar conditions as in the USA in the near future remains to be seen. At least with .com, .net and .org addresses, one increasingly finds only generic pages from grabbers who are setting up shop there.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Living Code
A weblog from someone who programs in Python, PyGame and PyObjc under OS X (with Renaissance as a GUI system). With complete example applications available for download. If you want to take a closer look at something like this, you might find one or another piece of information there.
M-Audio Ozonic Keyboard and FireWire Interface
Holla the forest fairy! That thing is pretty neat. For me it would be — lacking musical ability — more of a torture instrument, but still, with GarageBand and a properly cross-configured software synthesizer, that would definitely be a lot of fun.
At Gizmodo there's the original article.
SCO vs. Linux: A Journalistic Revelation
The Latest Absurdities from Absurdistan
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Film Foundation Honors Artists and Cinemas
In Münster, Cinema and Schlosstheater each won a prize (20,000 and 15,000 euros). Congratulations to them! After all, these are our last bastions of independent cinemas - Cinema has existed since my school days with long cinema nights and lard sandwiches during intermission.
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Module Pycaml
Interesting project: someone has written a reimplementation of the Python/C API for OCaml (of course the native-code compiler, not the bytecode interpreter). This makes it possible to do the following things:
- Write Python extension libraries in OCaml
- Use Python-C extension libraries in OCaml
- Use Python modules in OCaml (generally use the Python interpreter in OCaml)
- Use the Python toplevel for OCaml
It all sounds very exciting and could be very interesting for some applications - OCaml produces very fast code and can easily compete with C in this area. Especially for implementing the parts of code that are too slow in Python, OCaml is of course much more interesting than C because of its significantly better type safety.
Aiming at Saturn's moon Titan and ... letting go
I find it very nice that the landing capsule is supposed to land on my birthday.
At WDR.de there's the original article.
Debate on Integration Reignited
Yes, sure, immigrants should swear an oath to the constitution. Not every German has done that - except if they're a civil servant or served in the Bundeswehr - but you can certainly demand it of immigrants. Because terrorists would never swear falsely and would be completely frightened away by it anyway and run off.
And when it comes to German language skills: we still have Bavaria in the Federal Republic, don't we?
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there's the original article.
Fangs: The Firefox Screen Reader Emulator Extension - Standards-schmandards
A screen reader emulator for Firefox. So you can see how your own pages would come across in a screen reader.
Aldipod at Heise
So actually the apple is the same as the pear. The person eating it just has to come to terms with the fact that it tastes different.
At Der Schockwellenreiter I found the original article.
Luminous Landscape field test the R-D1
The first test of the R-D1 that I've come across so far. Well, 3000 dollars (or euros) is no small change and not everyone can just pick one up right away - so it can take a while before the first tests come in. The camera is still interesting. But simply incredibly expensive.
At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) you can find the original article.
Yet another Project in Python
If you've taken a closer look at the Toolserver, you may have already suspected that I want to do more with it. A second project that I started a few days ago will serve the same purpose. Active Storage Framework for Python is a Python framework for putting data into databases. However, not one of the usual object-relational mappers, but its own database structure that simply misuses a SQL database underneath as a data storage — I didn't want to reinvent everything. The ideas of the Active Storage Framework for Python come from Userland Frontier and Mumps — so a hierarchical namespace in which all elements are automatically persistent and in which many object types are mapped as tables (similar to Frontier). The whole thing uses pretty much every introspection feature of Python that I know. Ok, there are some programs from me that use even nastier methods, but sometimes I'm ashamed of the particular hacks there — what I've done here is considerably cleaner. Mainly getattr and friends. Though taken to excess. As a starting point for the Active Storage Framework for Python, the README is a good choice. If you want to try it out: PostgreSQL and psycopg must be installed. Otherwise you just need a database and you can get started. The Active Storage Framework for Python creates the database schema automatically. At the moment it's only available in CVS, since I'm currently — it's still 0.1.0 — tinkering wildly with it. Interfaces and data structures can still change significantly.
Toolserver Framework for Python - Slides
Anyone interested in the project Toolserver Framework for Python - a server written in Python that makes creating web services simple and convenient - can take a look at the presentation I recently gave to colleagues about it. To view the presentation, you need a reasonably current browser that supports and has JavaScript and CSS enabled. Yes, even the devil's tool works with it.
If the slides seem too vague without my commentary, you can simply print the presentation in your browser. This pulls a different CSS stylesheet and the printout includes supplementary explanations. Basically what I talked about. The presentation system used is actually quite clever - it's S5 by Eric Meyer. Practically perfect for quickly putting together presentations with notes and publishing them on the web. And I still prefer vi to PowerPoint. Here's the original article.
Half a million euros fine for Prince Ernst August
Can't they finally lock this guy up?
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Large Surveillance Operation on Internet Relay Chat
What a pile of rubbish.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Criticism of ITU Proposals for Network Management
And again new brain cramps from the ITU - this time even with obvious evidence of this bureaucratic monster's technical incompetence. Sorry, but geographically or politically oriented allocation of IP addresses is simply and plainly gross nonsense - merely submitting such a proposal already disqualifies one from further discussions about technical matters of the Internet ...
Yes, RIPE and other IP registries are certainly also geographically organized - but their organization is based on the rough geographic structure of network topology. Breaking that down to such silly concepts as nation states would be utter lunacy.
At heise online news you can find the original article.