My DSL went down. Horrible. I had to dust off my old modem skills, call colleagues for dial-up numbers and perform a few other mental gymnastics (like remembering dial-up procedures at http://www.westfalen.de/) just to get an ISDN internet connection running again. Now the world wide web crawls here at rural 64 KBit per X75 encoding over the line ... Welcome to the stone age
One less great voice.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
He can use the forced break to ride his bike more and improve his fitness for the tour.
At Radsport-News.com I found the original article.
The image field is then approximately 6 x 4 millimeters. In the image, a spine attachment of a cactus. And you can also photograph a cactus mite with it. The main problem is focusing: since I don't have a focusing rail, the cactus and equipment had to be moved. Image field selection via the ball head, rough focusing also via the ball head, fine focusing by carefully moving the subject. That's why the cactus mite isn't perfectly sharp either - for that you really do need the focusing rail.
Oh man, now there's already something like dialers for cell phones. And it's being built in right from the sale. Rip-offs everywhere. Of course Vodafone is leading the way - yes, exactly, the ones with the million-dollar severance packages for managers who just got a tax gift after fraudulent stock price manipulation ...
At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet I found the original article.
For size comparison: the distance between the centers of the two darker bars is one millimeter! The image is not optimally sharp, as I had to capture the whole thing relatively primitively - for example, at the time of shooting I didn't have a macro focusing stage for focus adjustment, but had to do it manually. Still, it's impressive what kind of images you can get with relatively little effort.
Necessary subsidy cuts - at the expense of the disabled. How wonderfully social.
The original article can be found at WDR.de.
That certainly sounds quite interesting
At DIE ZEIT: Feuilleton I found the original article.
Another one with a scrambled brain ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there's the original article.
Well - the European Parliament is repeatedly sidelined and outvoted by the Council and Commission. That's crap. Just like the fact that the Union in the Bundesrat massively obstructs legislation in the Bundesrat. Both have their causes in the political systems: the Commission and the EU Council are also - admittedly very indirectly through the national governments and their appointed representatives - democratically legitimized. So far so bad.
But what is crystal clear: poor voter turnout in EU elections won't convince the people who already don't take Europe seriously in national governments that the EU Parliament deserves more attention. And we voters have that in our hands: if voter turnout is correspondingly higher, if voters actually treat the election as such, then eventually even the last office jockey in the government apparatus won't be able to ignore it.
Of course, the fact that Commission members and various councils have distinguished themselves through corruption and incompetence is a problem. But that needs to be fixed where it originates - in the respective countries. Because German representatives in the various bodies were sent by our own government.
So don't vent your frustration about the nonsense of politicians in the various governments on the EU Parliament. On the contrary: that should be an incentive to show that as a citizen you do value the EU Parliament. And the best way to do that is through participation in the election. Better to cast an invalid ballot than not to go, because voter turnout itself is a statement. And a statement that says I don't give a damn will definitely not change anything for the better. At Der Schockwellenreiter there's the original article.
I just wanted to do a sync after several days, and iSync suddenly wants to copy all my appointments from the organizer to my Mac - without me making a single change to any of these appointments on the organizer. That's absolutely ridiculous. And you can't even tell from the message that mentions 132 new objects which objects those actually are and which device they're coming from - at first I suspected the sync was coming from my phone.
Why can't Apple get synchronization right and why do they pester us with this pathetic pile of junk?
Sure, it's nice that you can synchronize all kinds of devices with iSync and even sync multiple devices at once. But that's completely useless if synchronization regularly duplicates and scrambles your data.
Oh yes, retroactively fulfilled prophecies. What the colleague here "analyzes" with Reagan and Bush and their supposedly perhaps much cleverer approach, others do in the same form: only "analyze" it so that Nostradamus was a clairvoyant ...
Sorry, but just because the Soviet Union collapsed, and Reagan was president at that time, doesn't automatically make the president and his policies the reason for the collapse. You could just as easily claim that Kohl brought about reunification - instead of the more correct analysis that he just happened to be Federal Chancellor at that time.
Someone is always American president or German Chancellor or great guru of Humba-Humba at the time of a major event. And someone will also implement some policy. So what?
Reducing major historical events to only the years before the event ignores the history and the internal development that underlies the whole situation. The changes in the USSR began independently of Reagan and even earlier. It's possible that the Americans' insane arms buildup was one factor - but certainly not the only one, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't even the most important one.
Ultimately, something shimmers through in the argument that has always annoyed me about history class: the reduction of history to the behavior of princes, kings, warriors or other big shots. Sorry, but that's nonsense.
At Ideas and Errors - Excursions through the New World Order there's the original article.
Who is looking for an algorithm could find it in the NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures - the chances are very high given the abundance of algorithms cataloged there.
At Gary Kings unCLog I found the original article.
Here's my favorite Seibel priest ( Masematte for blabbermouth) at it again: he wants to change the calendar so that Christmas and a few other holidays always fall on a weekend, so that lazy workers have to toil more. Yet another idiotic proposal that our March Hare will certainly be happy to pick up ... Here's the original article.
The Revenge of Programming Languages on XML
A page with information about the 300D firmware hack and what it can do, as well as many other tips related to the 300D. What actually surprised me a bit about it is the following small box that was on the page:
FACTOID: Did you know your 10D and 300D run DOS? That's right. Embedded in the camera is DataLight's ROM-DOS. In fact, if you use the right tool such as s10sh you can see that inside the camera is an A: and B: drive. On the A: drive reside command.com and autoexec.bat, and most interestingly, camera.exe. DOS? DOS?? Wow. Somehow a bit scary.
Wow. An entire site about knot techniques that deals specifically with shoelace knots, among other things, and explains why some people can't keep their shoelaces tied while others don't have these problems. I love the Internet!
Total radiation in Merkelnix's head ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Very interesting: a graphical visualization of security events that makes various port scan techniques visually recognizable.
The company Hydrix (apparently consisting in part of former HP RPN calculator developers) is working on a calculator based on Linux and using open source software for the tasks. Very interesting - it's supposed to come out at the end of this year. Let's see what it actually turns out to be.
For the Olympus E-1, there is now also a set of adapters for various SLR lenses - so there are now two digital options for classic lenses like the Leica R or Contax MM line. The Olympus version is even more robustly and generously designed than the EOS version, since the Olympus system has a significantly shallower flange focal distance and therefore more space remains for adapters. As a result, the adapter for the Olympus system can remain directly on the camera (with the EOS adapter it's better to keep it on the lens). Particularly interesting for people who are simply looking for a digital option for their lenses and don't want to invest in the Olympus system. Here's the original article.
This can't possibly be true. A company artificially inflates its stock price to sell itself off, the board members pocket million-euro severance packages for it, the stock price comes back down to earth, and the state — and thus all taxpayers — are supposed to foot the bill?
The whole Vodafone-Mannesmann deal is nothing but one big fraud anyway, and we get to clean up the mess. The very idea of such blatant corruption makes you pretty angry.
Tax justice in Germany has been gone for a long time. And this whole pile of garbage is the best proof of it. It can't be right that companies themselves still profit from this crap, while ordinary taxpayers are constantly hit with higher burdens because the money runs out.
If we're blowing billions up the backsides of companies for stupidity and audacity, it's no wonder money is lacking...
I don't know when I last saw such an exciting stage in a tour race. The leader and his 4 pursuers only 20 seconds apart. Several pursuers (especially Jens Voigt and Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano) attack in turns. And Patrick Sinkewitz keeps up with them. A fantastic performance - especially since he had no more helpers. Until the finish with a final sprint against Jens Voigt, he was fully involved and defended his yellow jersey brilliantly. If he keeps the yellow jersey until Leipzig, he owes it definitively to his great performance and not to the weaknesses of his opponents.
Francisco Mancebo drove out the last kilometer on the mountain sovereignly - he's simply a mountain expert.
Jan Ullrich has shown that he still needs to work on his mountain form at the Tour de Suisse to be ready for the Tour de France - on the mountain he's definitely losing far too much time.
A very interesting service - it provides (dummy) login credentials for services that require registration. For example, all those newspaper archives that need logins. If you don't want to enter your data, you simply use BugMeNot. With the bookmarklet, the whole thing is nice and easy. And you can also use the service to link to pages on services that are so heavily restricted.
Especially practical for those annoying demographic-data-collecting and we-spam-your-registration-to-death services.
Is that ethically correct? Sorry, folks, but is the constant asking for shoe size, hair color, and penis length (hey, the penis-enlargement providers have to get their addresses from somewhere) by the various archive services ethically correct?
PyBlosxom (Blosxom in Python) has been available as a 1.0 release since May 25th - still new enough that it's worth writing about now
Everything around human-computer interfaces and their origins such as the mouse, graphical user interfaces, windowing systems. Currently mainly documenting the presentation from 1968, when Doug Engelbart showed in a 90-minute multimedia presentation how to work with a networked computer with a window-oriented interface, hyperlinking and other features. It's quite fascinating what ideas and partially realized implementations already existed so early on. Here you can find the original article.
Are the toll rates hard-wired into the devices? What kind of idiots designed all this crap?
I hope it was just some official without a clue speaking again and the thing isn't actually built that stupidly. On the other hand, we're talking about Toll Collect here...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
One of the reasons why I don't like Greylisting. In short, what greylisting is: when a server makes a connection to another server for mail delivery, a triple is formed from the sending host, destination address, and source address, and it is checked whether this combination is known. If not, the combination is noted and the current mail is rejected with a temporary rejection. The theory is that mail servers attempt redeliveries but spambots and virus distributors typically do not. So far, so good. Problems with this approach:
All in all, greylisting only has an advantage temporarily: because it is rarely widespread, it is currently not taken into account by spambots. But taking it into account is trivial and would automatically happen with wider adoption. Thus greylisting is doomed to become ineffective if it spreads further.
Of course, many of the problems can be fixed. But ultimately, this is just as much an attempt to plug the holes in a sieve with paper as using rule-based spam filters against spam. Statistical spam filtering (Bayesian filter) is still the best available solution.
Yet another zombie that's still alive. When I read through the Features, tears of joy come to my eyes. Those were the days when you could program in Basic on home computers. The world was so much simpler then ... At The Macintosh News Network you can find the original article.
First SCO stands up and says there are millions of stolen lines of code. And that they can name them. Then they demand sources. They get them. Search through them for ages and find nothing. Hello? Why do they even have to search if the locations are supposedly known? And why don't they notice that the JFS for Linux is based on the OS/2 JFS? That's even stated in the documentation - if they search the sources, why don't they read it at the same time? But probably that's exactly the problem: if you don't read text, you can search through it forever without ever finding anything.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Sure, quite clearly. Windows is the easier target to hit, which is why it's not inherently less secure than Linux. And of course the security problems are due to attachment clickers - funny only that considerably more server attacks against Windows are possible, all of which have nothing to do with attachments. And all this despite the fact that with servers, Linux and Apache are definitely the train rolling through the whole city, while IIS - alongside IE and Outlook, the security hole par excellence - rather only runs in the seedier suburbs ... At heise online news there's the original article.
What a load of rubbish: clicking an application button once is the standard function, holding it for at least one second is a secondary function, and double-clicking an application button is then a tertiary function.
And for such banality, the US Patent Office grants Microsoft a patent. And we're just introducing those oh-so-meaningful and innovative software patents in the EU. Thanks, Ms. Zypries, for letting us deal with such brilliant innovative solutions and such meaningful patents in the future.
Final beginning of the preliminary end?
At heise online news there's the original article.
Bradbury certainly had a bit of a dark side. Instead of being pleased that someone like Moore was basing a film title on one of his book titles, he complained that he should have been asked. What more does he want? Should thermometer manufacturers with Fahrenheit scales also ask him for permission? Rarely a more foolish man than Bradbury...
Just stumbled upon it while flipping through channels. Absolutely well done! And interesting - the giant Andean vulture with an 8-meter wingspan (extinct) was just as new to me as the fact that New World vultures (including the condor) are related to storks and not to birds of prey, like Old World vultures are.
Wow - now they've got a recompiler for machine code in there too. That sounds increasingly interesting - a recompiler is the most important step for usable performance for such systems.
Was obvious. After all, I bought one myself and I'm quite happy with it. Whenever I get something like this, the manufacturer goes bankrupt or discontinues the product line or does something else crazy. I'm starting to feel like the rain god in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. At heise online news you can find the original article.
Just to show that the IT world has more crazy people than just the SCO boss. The SUN boss's loss of touch with reality is also quite remarkable.
They must be out of their minds. What a mess - since when can providers decide which of my email addresses are allowed to be published? The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous!
At heise online news there's the original article.
In the time trial, he clearly showed that he really is back to full strength. The fact that Michael Rich took 24 seconds from him in the end is not a big deal - you can afford to lose in a time trial against someone like Michael Rich, the man is simply an exceptional rider. So a really great race overall. But absolutely top-notch was the performance of the Gerolsteiner team: getting 4 riders into the top 8 positions is quite something. Not many people can match that.
However, the ARD should learn to use their microphones properly. That was total chaos at the end.
Great terms they have there: Copyrighted or illegal material may not be stored and may not be offered for download. Under German law, everything someone writes is automatically protected by copyright, if I remember correctly. So I wouldn't be allowed to publish my own content that I write myself if I host it there, since this own content is protected by copyright.
Ouch. A periodic table of Perl operators. Could it be that someone went a little too far with the definition of possible operators in Perl? Just a tiny bit? The original article is here.
Another example: there's constant harping on how consistent the Atom format is with respect to tags. Curiously though, while all links in the format are mapped via the Link tag (and specified with corresponding rel attributes), they define three different tags just for date specifications - even though a single Date tag with rel attribute for the type of date would be far more logical in this context.
Also amusing was the discussion about the type of API - many wanted an XMLRPC API, simply because RPC integrates well into programming. What prevailed was the document faction, who prefer an API with REST structure (because documents are natively managed there via GET/POST/PUT/DELETE). Fair enough - I can accept that. But embarrassing was the manner in which various REST proponents tried to argue why XMLRPC wouldn't work. Which is rather silly given the widespread use of XMLRPC for all kinds of purposes. And for someone familiar with RPC-style APIs, the whole discussion was more of a staircase joke than a serious technical discussion. How old is RPC as a programming technique in the Unix environment? 20 years? But of course that's all just imagination...
Well, what can you expect from people who take the fact that Googlegroups and Blogger all forcibly received Atom feeds as the basis for claiming that Atom is already more widespread than RSS today? Now can you understand why it's really no pleasure to deal with content syndication? Only psychopaths and cranks in that field, hardly a mentally normal person to be found. Can someone now explain to me why I programmed my own aggregator for the Python Desktop Server? Here's the original article.
Lots of nice bookmarklets (small JavaScript snippets that can be triggered via bookmarks) for web developers. The named anchor one is particularly handy - it makes anchors in text visible so you can link to them. Without this bookmarklet you're left digging through the source code (or possibly CSS hacks). Here's the original article.
