Hmm. 13 seconds behind the leader is already a good sign. But let's wait and see how he does at the Deutschland Tour. The Hainleite circuit race may be a demanding race - but still, it's only a one-day race.
I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.
Very nice. Of course, I'm a bit biased: the winner of the mountain classification in the Giro (ok, he still has to finish within the time limit today, but he should manage that) comes from Münster.
With all the sponsors that have dropped out and are dropping out, it's nice when a sponsor clearly stands by the sport.
At Radsport-News.com I found the original article.
I find the price then - given the fact that a 1 GB microdrive can be obtained for a maximum of 150 euros, which for 12 GB would only be 1500 euros - a little bit overpriced
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Today we visited the Henrichenburg ship lift in Waltrop, near Datteln. It's only about an hour's drive from Münster - and it's absolutely worth it! For one thing, of course, there's the old ship lift from 1899. Then there are all the outdoor facilities - at the upper water level there are complete canal port facilities. And finally, there's also the museum in the boiler house, which houses a complete steam engine that still functions. In addition, there's plenty more to see all around: the motor boat harbors, the old lock system from the same time as the ship lift, and of course the new ship lift as well. All of it can be visited as part of the Westphalian Industrial Museum. However, you should bring more time than we had - you can easily spend an afternoon there seeing everything.
Where we're on the subject of lawyers and their dubious dealings. It's not a violation of anything if a lawyer lends his name as Admin-C for something like malvorlagen.de. But of course it is a violation of the Legal Advice Act if one offers forums in which those affected by precisely this offer - as it exists on malvorlagen.de, for example - can exchange information. The lawyer certainly finds all of this quite normal. Does anyone still wonder why lawyers have such a terrible reputation?
At heise online news there's the original article.
Little known, according to Huffnagle, is that the gut is also involved in immune defense against respiratory diseases. Pathogens arriving in the airways are transported by the cilia of the bronchial mucosa toward the pharynx and swallowed from there. This way they reach the gut, where the immune system recognizes them. Defense cells are formed that also reach the lungs via the blood, where they help fight the infection. Very interesting article. For someone with chronic allergies, finally a glimmer of hope - because previous allergy medications are either chemical sledgehammers or symptom suppressants. But one would have to get at the real causes of allergies; then one could finally get rid of these annoying problems.
At passe.par.tout I found the original article.
I'd much rather deport hate preachers like Beckstein - but what country would want them... At das Netzbuch you can find the original article.
I already revealed (P2235) that I'm a Jim Jarmusch fan. But today I finally put the Ghost Dog DVD in the player. Simply genius. I had only seen it once on television before. Just fantastic. How those old mafiosi discuss rappers, Native Americans and their names - hilarious absurd dialogues. And then there's the ice cream vendor with the speech problem. How can anyone come up with such crazy characters? Brilliant.
What stupid drivel from Zypries. Show me the open source project or small company that can afford patent proceedings - let alone the later enforcement if one of the large corporations grabs the subject. Conversely, large corporations will use the patents to block others. That won't create jobs. Except perhaps for patent lawyers ...
At heise online news there's the original article.
Of course. Where else can you achieve such high results with such cheap lies as here (wild rationalizations, idiotic high salaries and million-dollar severance packages for failed executives) ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Well. What do I expect from a distribution? And why do I use Debian in particular - and have for years? Probably it's different expectations that's why I'm so satisfied with Debian.
A distribution must realize the base system for me - this must be stable (which is why I almost always use Debian Stable), but should be easily expandable (which is why I use backports from Unstable or Testing at selected points).
The distribution must make updating the base system simple - a base system consists of a bunch of components, all of which can have some vulnerabilities. I have no desire to deal with these potential holes - that's the job of the distribution. Debian makes this almost trivial through apt. I want to be able to see what an upgrade means - so I can decide whether to do it or not. Debian provides the tools for this (e.g., automatic display of changelogs and critical bugs before installing a package). The distribution must allow me at defined points and with simple means to break out of the normal distribution. Every binary distribution has the same problem: package maintainers decide how programs should be configured. This often works well - occasionally it goes extremely wrong. Therefore, a binary distribution must allow me to compile the packages myself if necessary. With Debian, the build structure for packages is very simple. Adapting packages, backporting packages from Unstable or Testing (to get newer versions than in Stable), and creating your own packages is easy. I'm not forced into the Stable corset - but I can still stay in Stable for the base system to take advantage of Debian's good security infrastructure. The fact that it's additionally trivial to distribute your own packages to many machines by setting up your own package repository and including it alongside the standard repositories is not just nice to have - it's essential with a sufficiently large number of machines. A distribution must have functioning package dependencies and actually use them. Consistently. I have no desire to start a program and then get strange messages just because some libraries or other tools are missing. Sure, other distributions also have dependencies - but sometimes they're optional or only used very shallowly. Debian is consistent and goes very deep - everything is built on dependencies. This means you can be relatively sure that dependencies are met when you install a package normally. If not, that's a clear bug and can be reported via bug reporting - and will be fixed. Dependencies are not nice to have, they're essential. Period. Of course, a distribution must also allow breaking out of the corset with dependencies. Debian has several nice utilities for this that let you resolve dependencies - e.g., pseudo-packages that simply say a particular package is installed. This package can certainly be installed manually. A distribution must know what config files are. That means it must under no circumstances trample on my config files. If a distribution overwrites my configs on update and I get comments like make backups of them first, the distribution is out. Sorry, but I have absolutely no tolerance for that. A distribution may only change a configuration under clearly defined circumstances. And no, I have little sympathy for Debian's debconf either - if a package upgrade shreds my configs, it rains bug reports. Config files belong to me, not the distribution. Period. A distribution should damn well not try to solve all the world's problems. And especially should not try to be smarter than the original programmers of a package. If a program has a structure of config files, then it should at least optionally be usable without problems with the distribution. And that also means the distribution doesn't trample on it just because it thinks it has a better tool for it. Besides, all configuration tools stink to high heaven.
What I'm not particularly keen on: always having the very latest packages. Sorry folks, but that's the stupid update-itis that spreads in the Windows world. Always having to have the latest. Such nonsense. Apache 1.3 does its job well, you don't even need the latest 1.3 - as long as security patches have been backported. And that's what Debian does. Security patches for Stable don't simply update silently to a new version with new, unknown problems. Instead, the patch is - if possible - backported to the old version and made available via that. Security updates should only under absolute exceptional circumstances require configuration changes from the admin or alter system components, which leads to potential problems. I want a smoothly running system before and after the update!
I'm also not particularly keen on nice graphical or text-based configuration or administration tools. Sorry, but the ideal tool for these purposes is called vim and the perfect data format is text files. And yes, I can't particularly stand debconf - fortunately you can simply work around it where it's annoying - and Debian keeps its hands off the existing standard configurations, even if a package normally uses debconf. If not, that's a bug.
But I do expect a certain transparency from a distribution in what it does. I don't like one-man shows that you can't see into - where someone autocratically decides what's good or right. Or perhaps a few. I want to be able to look into everything - because the process of distribution creation can also have bugs that are essential for me. Therefore, I'm also not keen on a company building a distribution. Sorry, but sooner or later come the nice profit-maximization strategies à la RedHat Enterprise or comparable Suse approaches. If a distribution changes the standard mailer, I want to see the discussion about why it was changed - with the pro and con arguments. I want to be able to understand why something develops the way it does. I want to be warned in advance. Of course, I'm not interested in this for every package - but for the essential ones that interest me, I want this information. Transparency is important - it starts with transparent bug tracking and ends with a transparent project structure. If I had no interest in transparency, I could just as well install Solaris. Or Windows. I have no problem with: a learning curve in using the system. System administration is a job. A job requires learning. Anyone not willing to learn should stay away from the job. Arguments like I first have to understand how the system works don't count. There are plenty of documentation and good books on Debian as a starting point. Read. Learn. That's just part of it. No colorful tools and no grandiose promises from manufacturers about the easiest-to-install Linux distribution help either - it's all bullshit. When push comes to shove, you have to master the system from the kernel to the dotfile. And you have to learn that anyway, no matter what the system is called. Learning a distribution and how it works is an investment for years. Therefore, I also don't want to see my investment go down the drain just because the system was suddenly rebuilt because it appeals to the manufacturer or because it's cooler or because it sells better or because another buzzword is fulfilled. Distributions need evolution, not revolution.
Debian is not the perfect Linux distribution - no such thing exists. But Debian is damn close.
At Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp you can find the original article.
How was that again? Privatization brings lower prices and better offerings through competition? Oh yeah. Absolutely clear.
Of course we must keep privatizing everything we can. There are still many new monopolies to create...
At heise online news there's the original article.
And once again a few impressions from walks. There's not much action on this vacation
Another tuned dinosaur returns to its ancestral world
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Sure. The software is aimed at professionals, which is why it doesn't support compact cameras with fixed lenses. But because it's so professional, it only supports JPG, not RAW images. However, the price is very professional indeed.
Sorry, but you can do the same thing with some Photoshop actions, and many of these actions can be found online and purchased for little money (or created yourself). Prices of 100 dollars for a lens module are certainly not justified.
Could be quite interesting. I have some acquaintances who use Skype for calls - just Windows users (I can't exactly convert everyone to the one true faith ).
At The Macintosh News Network there's the original article.
Since today around 2:00 PM or so:
traceroute to pages.ebay.de (66.135.192.85), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 firewall (10.0.0.88) 0.751 ms 0.437 ms 0.459 ms 2 217.5.98.26 (217.5.98.26) 58.647 ms 49.401 ms 85.632 ms 3 217.237.152.194 (217.237.152.194) 46.751 ms 48.2 ms 46.915 ms 4 paix-gw12.sfo.us.net.dtag.de (62.154.5.245) 232.335 ms 232.182 ms 232.114 ms 5 * * * 6 * * *
Pretty cool. Prions have been found in muscle meat of sheep. Well, I don't eat lamb shanks or similar stuff anyway...
At New York Times: Science there's the original article.
I had already covered Prothon before - a fusion of Python and Self. Very interesting - and it has received a new version that seems much more polished.
And the spammers will certainly continue trying to get this garbage through the courts. But I hope they also fail in the next instance - these fake calls are an absolute cheek. These absurd advertising measures are just a nuisance for mobile phone users and have no real value - or does anyone really believe that mobile phone users would be so stupid as to use a paid service after it has spammed their phone multiple times? I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Internet.
Hmm. klack.de isn't so bad after all. Ok, a little colorful, but I find a TV magazine that offers RSS feeds for TV programs right on the front page sympathetic
At ab::gebloggt there's the original article.
Every time I read upgrade stories like this, I wonder what the actual advantage of Suse over Debian is supposed to be. What good is a distribution that looks nice and colorful during installation but can't be upgraded properly? And don't tell me this is an isolated case with Suse 9.1 - I've read similar horror stories about pretty much every Suse upgrade.
At Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp you can find the original article.
Ouch. I always find it amazing how they manage to get back up and then finish the race with some broken bones anyway. Somehow their pain threshold must be way outside the normal range ... I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.
Triumph? Please, what? He has the absolute majority - no wonder given the starting position in the Federal Assembly. But what kind of triumph is it when we get a Federal President that no one knows and no one can do anything with - just because the parties are stubbornly clinging to their stupid party politics again? Just because stupid power-mongering by the Union and silly haggling by the FDP had to turn the presidential election into a farce once more? What kind of triumph could possibly be represented by the election of an absolute candidate of last resort? If such embarrassments are already being counted as triumphs, I don't want to experience what such people would call a debacle...
A few impressions from the city festival. Not much - I wasn't really in the mood for more pictures.
Wow!
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Very handy: setting the various default handlers for various file types, URL types, MIME types, etc. Exactly the panel that Apple left out of System Preferences...
The final is out. However, trackbacking still doesn't work quite right - at least not when the target is a topic at TopicExchange. At WordPress WordBlog there's the original article.
Every user of a Canon digital camera that produces RAW images should get this update and install it as soon as possible. The EOS Viewer Utility is much more pleasant to use and it is significantly faster. All information is displayed well integrated - the only annoyance is the file tree that is still laid out far too thick, which never fits into the small area if you've created larger directory depths. But you can now hide it by pressing a key.
It's also annoying that you still can't open the EOS Viewer Utility with a start file under OS X - even with the new utility, only the folder of the image is opened as an overview, not the specified image directly. For integration with iView Media Pro, that's not exactly optimal.
Otherwise, it's definitely generations ahead and better than the old File Viewer Utility.
By the way: contrary to its designation as an English version, the updater also contains a German translation - at least under OS X.
At PhotographyBLOG you'll find the original article.
Cool. Exactly the right food for a programming language freak like me.
At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.
Awesome! Absolutely worth seeing remake!
At Ideen und Irrtümer - Streifzüge durch die neue Weltordnung you can find the original article.
Currently running on Pro7. This reminded me that I wanted to compile a list of the different versions of this theme sometime, so I'd have them ready when I want them. The original material is certainly Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa. But the most well-known version of the material is certainly For a Fistfull of Dollars by Sergio Leone. And then there's Last Man Standing by Walter Hill. Okay, and now for the puzzle: a few weeks ago I stumbled upon a sci-fi version of it and forgot what it was called. It wasn't impressive, but for completeness I'd like to have it listed here too. Any takers?
I could now make the tasteless assumption that these people are concentrated in the British government apparatus. But I would never make such a mean joke at the expense of others.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
And once again a software producer that just doesn't get it. In this case, however, the problem can easily be helped along: make GAMESS so good that Gaussian software simply becomes obsolete
At heise online news there is the original article.
The advantage of vacation: you finally get to do photography again. The disadvantage: you have to come up with titles and descriptions for all the pictures ...
So they can't do that in Berlin either
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Münster it didn't become. And no, Münster is not a normal case in cultural policy. At least I hope that a disaster case like Münster is not the norm ...
Tillmann's blather can be thrown in the bin anyway - as usual. Pure hypocrisy. The only true statement was "Cultural policy in Münster remains a citizens' movement" - exactly. Citizens, not a politicians' movement. The politicians in Münster at best demonetize cultural institutions and projects - the city council hasn't actually built anything.
At WDR.de there's the original article.
Cool. The boozers have good weather today, but at the weekend during the city festival there's a wet and cold ass? Well, we'll see. But if the city festival falls through, I wouldn't like that at all ...
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Speaking of strange again: SCO's behavior probably falls under that term as well. Slowly but surely, SCO seems to be preparing a witch hunt against Free Software.
You can find the original article at heise online news under this link.
So much for our government allegedly being against software patents, as it claimed itself just recently (P2234). It was all just a lie. The original article can be found at heise online news.
Somehow the Tocqueville Foundation and their appearance on the topic of Linux seem pretty strange to me...
Well, probably Tanenbaum is right: they simply have no idea what they're writing about.
At heise online news there is the original article.
Since I'm currently playing around with blog utilities and CMSes, my current WordPress installation has already gotten some content and layout improvements. Of all the alternatives for small sites, I still like it the best. For Drupal (my current favorite for larger sites), I might also find a use case.
Do I have too many domains and sites? Oh well.
Update: since I'm now running this blog with WordPress and the other one had become outdated, I simply shut it down. One less site to maintain...
I'm currently playing around with Drupal a bit. First impression: wow! Extremely powerful, extremely many features. Though possibly too many features. But what I like right away is the very clean interface with quite logical menu structure, and how all extensions automatically hook into these menus. I also like the solution with templates and themes: themes can be divided into templates or stylesheets. This allows you to change the general system, but also just choose variants of a system. The default theme is table-based, but there's another CSS-based one to choose from. I can't really say yet how XHTML compatibility looks. Also good is the support for MySQL and PostgreSQL - I normally prefer the latter. You can also make weblogs with it, as well as static articles, entire books, stories with discussion forums similar to Slashdot or Kuro5hin and much more. However, what stands out right away is that the tools in the individual content areas are somewhat sparse - tools that specifically target weblogs often seem more complete. Specifically things like Trackback, Pingback, update pings or similar have to be installed afterwards or at least reconfigured - the standard only pings drupal.org itself for the distributed login mechanism. Also such elementary things as simple categories (more complex categories - even hierarchical - do exist, but elsewhere) for blog entries require some searching. RSS feeds are automatically created, but on some pages (for example the homepage) they first have to be linked (in user blogs the link is automatic though). Otherwise they are only contained as alternate links, but not necessarily visible to users. Overall, the whole system clearly aims to design and build entire websites with entire groups of users. However, the distributed login mechanism is really cool: users from participating systems can log into other participating systems with user@host and the login is automatically passed to the home system. Login with always the same password, but with distributed authorization. Very nice! Overall, a lot of value is placed on user management - it almost has Zope dimensions with its permission groups and the ability to create symbolic permission groups for individual activities. Less cool are the many missing metadata. There's actually hardly any metadata on content. Author, date, status - but that's more or less it (of course besides title and text, those are self-evident). Content organization is also left to the user - though there are helper tools that make creating navigation easier. However, many metadata topics (such as categories) can apparently be solved using taxonomies - these are groupings of content. The description of this is somewhat unintuitive, the topic is quite complex. Taxonomies are groupings of keywords on a topic. So I don't assign posts to categories, but rather assign keywords to posts and then organize the keywords into categories. While this provides mountains of metadata, it's far more complex than the normal blog categories you're used to.
Great again are all the content status and content versioning functionalities. All changes are logged. All changes to content are versioned. You can go back to older content and thus, for example, fix errors (or remove garbage from rogue users).
The whole system is extensible, but I suspect (haven't checked it yet, but given the range of functionality it's a likely guess) that creating plugins and filters is more involved than with small solutions like WordPress. But that's in the nature of things.
Another potential disadvantage is the unavailability of a ready-made German translation. While there are other sites working with Drupal in German, apparently no one releases the complete translation tables for download - at least I haven't found anything, neither at drupal.org itself nor on Google.
Where would I classify Drupal? Clearly in the CMS category - that's where systems like Typo3, Mambo Open Source, Plone and similar systems shine. However, it beats discussion-oriented CMSs like Scoop or Squishdot by a mile - as well as simple blog CMSs. For a simple blog system it's clearly overkill. For a complete site it seems very usable.
If I were to slap every politician and official who doesn't suit me, my hand would fall off from pain...
At tagesschau.de - The News from ARD you can find the original article.
Once again proof of the stupidity and/or corruption of the EU Commissions and Councils. For how else could one explain such nonsense? There are not many European companies that could have an interest in software patents. But American companies are certainly ready to ram their idiotic patents through Europe and kick competitors out of the market.
There is no macroeconomic need for blocking patents - and that is precisely what software patents are.
That this decision also clearly goes against the decision of the elected representatives of the people - parliament - apparently bothers no one anymore ...
At heise online news there is the original article.
Of course such an extortion strategy is entirely in the interest of the patient and health and has nothing to do with rip-off and shirking of responsibility. How could anyone get the idea that in a health system with problems all stakeholders must accept disadvantages. Absurd notion, when it is so clearly obvious that only the patients have drawn the short straw. Whatever you do, don't touch the vested interests ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Well, it's about time that Canon cleaned up their outdated RAW utilities. The previous ones (File Viewer Utility and Image Browser) are terribly slow and rather mediocre in terms of usability. Hopefully the release of the new tools with 10D support will come fairly soon, and hopefully Canon won't forget the OS X platform again...
Oh, he apologized? Well then everything is fine. It's not really a problem anyway, he only teaches at the Bundeswehr University of Applied Sciences, where future officers are trained. And after all, they need to be prepared for when Germany defends democracy at the Hindukush or elsewhere sometime ...
At tagesschau.de - The news from ARD you can find the original article.
Did you know that with the technique of Chinese body control you can influence your testicles to withdraw into your body for protection? - I'm doing that right now! - Mulder in The X-Files. When the show was still good.
b2evolution also makes a good impression on paper. It's surprising how far all these blog programs have come while you're not looking.
In any case, b2evolution makes a very good showing when it comes to antispam and security. And it also seems to have good XHTML support and a plugin architecture. The plugins are divided by purpose (Edit-Plugins and Toolbar-Plugins). I think the somewhat simpler form of plugins in WordPress will be easier for many to understand, but programmers will probably prefer b2evolution.
Personally, the admin environment is a bit too playful for me - though I only looked at it in the online demo. Also, the standard template doesn't look as clean and tidy as WordPress's - I think with the latter you have an easier start to impose your own layout. What's definitely nice is the choice of input parser for posts - I've done something like that in the Python Desktop Server too, precisely because you don't always want to have certain plugins active. Otherwise, it's of course very similar to WordPress - it's also a b2 descendant. WordPress probably has better support for images since it can automatically create thumbnails. Also, b2evolution lacks the metaWeblogAPI. On the other hand, what's nice is the integration of referrers and search engines directly into the blog - similar to the evaluation that the Python Community Server does for me. The usability design of b2evolution seems a bit confusing in places: permalinks to posts are small chain symbols, permalinks to comments are small document symbols. It's also somewhat inconsistent in other places.
Conclusion? If I can draw one at all from this mini-test, I'd say that for me, b2evolution implements just one small checkbox, switch, or option too many for most features. Therefore, I would personally lean more towards WordPress - I can imagine the code is somewhat simpler in structure and therefore custom hacks can be integrated more easily.
In terms of function, however, b2evolution clearly wins on points. Whoever prefers lots of features and likes to draw from a full well, or who wants to venture beyond normal blogs more strongly into the CMS area, will certainly be thrilled with b2evolution.
What I don't understand with either b2evolution or WordPress: neither of the two projects implements stories. That is, article formats that are not fixed to the calendar. Sure, you can realize that with a category or with a separate blog (with b2evolution's multiblogs functionality certainly much easier than the category hack needed for WordPress), but I find it impractical that you have to go to such lengths just for an imprint...