What becomes of formerly interesting websites

Previously the source for Security Exploits. Today you can find information about warts and how to have them removed ... Here's the original article.

I'm back

After an unintended break thanks to a disk crash on my Hetzner server, I'm back now. And looking back, I have to say that Hetzner's support went well. I only have standard support, so support is only available during the specified service hours. Both days (on Monday because of the system setup on a new disk and on Tuesday because of the server restart due to a hang) they responded immediately in the morning. When I pointed out further disk errors (or rather CRC errors), they also responded immediately and rebuilt the system - apparently their disks are usually in swap frames, which also explains how they were able to install a new disk for me so quickly.

Well, let's see how long it lasts this time. In any case, I was able to test my crash recovery and have to say it works surprisingly well. Okay, there were a few minor issues of course, but it's all manageable. Only http://muensterland.org/ suffered, as the server's database file had to be rolled back one day since the most recent file didn't work. Well, manageable problems...

It's getting worse

Conscience examination for Lower Saxony hat-wearing women. All of course in the name of combating terrorism.

At Telepolis News (01.05.2004) you can find the original article.

Hondo Didn't Quite Have His Legs After All

Tough - Hondo ran out of steam in the final meters, Krohn passes him. Too bad for Danilo Hondo, especially after already crossing the finish line on the wrong side of Zabel in Cologne. Still, a great performance to lead for such a long time. Not everyone can do that.

Zabel overthought the tactics and Kummer started the chase race far too late. Annoying, because it was already visible earlier in the race. Well, nothing you can do about it - if they'd attacked earlier, they might have run out of breath and it wouldn't have worked anyway. One thing is clear: racing around the Henninger Tower is and remains an exciting event.

Dell goes crazy

Cool. Dell keeps data from computer buyers on record. That's okay. But the fact that this data can then be retrieved unprotected over the web using the identification numbers on the device - and even for people who just guess the numbers - isn't that a bit exaggerated when it comes to helpful data protection? Can you make sense of it?

At The wonderful world of Isotopp you can find the original article.

EU Council approves new regulations to protect intellectual property

Great, now the blatant rip-off by the music and film industry is also being opened wide in Europe. The lobbyists have prevailed and the will of the people is being trampled on. The voter simply still has the worst lobby in Europe.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Around the Henninger Tower: Zabel wants to stop Rebel

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he makes it.

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.

Hybrid RAW Conversion

An interesting approach: take linear RAW images and create a black and white image from them, using it to gather detail and brightness information and, for example, determine sharpness. Then create a second image that adopts the color values - in this image, for example, apply noise reduction and similar mechanisms. After that, combine these two images - take the brightness (and thus the contrasts) from the black and white image and merge the color values from the black and white image. As a result, you get an image with good sharpness and good color, but fewer artifacts from the respective optimization steps (since each optimization is only applied to the elements that can handle these optimization steps without creating problems).

Here is the original article.

Leak in Soyuz Helium Tank

The team has a satellite phone with them to get help. Calling home I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Science.

Calls of Love from the Depths

Screaming Fish - I'm always amazed at what nature still has up its sleeve ...

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

Opportunity Has Also Crossed the Finish Line

Yes. Let them run as long as possible!

At WDR: Landing on Mars you can find the original article.

Debian: Free, but Delayed

That's just how it is with Debian. Philosophy is important - sometimes just as important or even more important than the releases. I like it anyway - or precisely because of this? Because no other distribution really puts so much value on the ideas of Free Software - and is really consistent in what it does.

Sure, it's annoying sometimes when releases take years to come out. On the other hand, that's exactly what the Testing and Unstable distributions are for. Although as a user, I really only use Testing, or Stable on production servers.

Backports are relatively simple and allow you to update individual packages - but of course you're then responsible for the updates yourself. Sure, for pure users that's certainly not an option - they just want to install and not compile. On the other hand, you should always keep in mind that Linux is just a Unix - and being afraid of the compiler when using Unix is pretty out of place.

One thing is certain: I've played around with many distributions and also experimented more seriously. Except for Gentoo, none really impressed me, and Gentoo is too heavy for me for smaller machines and servers - I don't really want to fire up the compiler for every package when the machine's main load is for something else (server) or it's simply too small to convert some monster packages.

At heise online news there's the original article.

heise Security - News - Microsoft wanted to prevent publication of exploit against IIS

Well, Microsoft will probably never learn ...

Here you can find the original article.

Hugo's House spruced up a bit

I've been tinkering with the templates a bit and experimenting with a neat little script. As a result, each month in my blog now gets its own title image - the old text title had to go (but it's still defined as a popup title on the image, and of course it's in the title tag). At least this way my images get looked at occasionally, even if it's just a small strip from the middle that's being used.

Boyz need Toyz

Jo, he's really nice, that 33er - if you look at the description, then programming-wise it's much closer to the old 41er. Ok, that's not necessarily more comfortable than RPL on the 48s and 49s, but somehow it awakens nostalgia in me. Besides, the price of 50 euros is much more reasonable. For Jutta that would be something for work, after all it can do RPN and base conversions too. However, it has an internal accuracy of 15 digits - no idea if that's enough for her work. At Der Schockwellenreiter there's the original article.

This must be fake.

Really. That can't be real. Here's the original article.

DeDRMS cracks Apple's iTunes copy protection

And on it goes with Johansen vs. Apple.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

EU wants to approve genetically modified corn

That's bullshit.

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

Steinbrück Criticizes Chimney Sweep Monopoly

Everything comes around again - P1350. Whether Steinbrück's arguments are better than those of Mr. Theisen? At WDR.de you can find the original article.

The Omni Group - Applications - OmniWeb - Beta

I've installed the current beta for Omniweb 5 again over the last few days and have been playing around with it. I have to say, I'm impressed. The annoying caching bug is gone and overall Omniweb is very responsive and quite reliable. I haven't experienced any crashes in recent days. And the highlights of the new version are really great:

• The tabs with thumbnails I find brilliant, as they let me see much faster which window I need, even when I have many tabs open.
• Site-Preferences are a good idea, even if I probably won't use them very often. But they're much more intuitive to use than the similar feature in iCab.
• I can imagine Workspaces being very practical for Zope development, since I typically have a series of related windows open there. However, I haven't tried it yet. At work I still use Linux.
• The bookmarks are quite nice - similar to Safari, but also with integration of Safari bookmarks (without constant new imports). And bookmarks can be synchronized across other computers via WebDAV - if I finally get a Mac at work, that would be very nice. Of course, most of it ends up in my Blogmarks, but I still need some bookmarks - for example for my work.
• The security system makes a very well thought-out impression. For example, you can define yourself which applications you trust to open files directly with them.
• Since the Safari rendering engine is used, you have the same capabilities. For example, the already installed SVG plugin is being used directly. Unfortunately, this also brings Safari's rendering errors along... (overflow: auto on PRE for example, when there's only too much text in width, but not in height...)

Let's see how this develops further, but based on my gut feeling, I'd say OmniGroup must be pretty close to a release.

Update: As I just noticed, it even has an RSS feed reader built in. Integrated into the bookmark management and automatic updating. And it also supports RSS autodiscovery. Nice. Not really useful for me (since I use other aggregators), but nice.

Here's the original article.

Today the Digi was cooperative for once

And that's why there are a number of new images in the image blog. And since I've already thoroughly overwhelmed my creative abilities with the invention of titles and descriptions, here's just an overview of the images. All the images were created when I went to buy cake today. An extremely satisfying result - nice images and cake

Forgent sues 31 companies over JPEG

One reason why it should be mandatory for formats that become IETF or other standards to be generally released from all patent holders as a matter of principle. Unfortunately, the opposite is rather the case.

At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) there is the original article.

Nikon Coolwalker MSV-01 Digital Photo Storage Viewer First Look

Interesting device: There are plenty of mass storage devices for images, some also with display of stored images. But this one is special because it can also display the Nikon NEF format - i.e. the RAW images from Nikons.

Here is the original article.

Wolfram's Future Math

Excerpts from A New Kind of Science - very interesting images and explanations about them - especially if you're interested in cellular automata and the complexity of their results. It reminds me of experiments I did in school with cellular automata - the results were often just as fascinating as exploring the Mandelbrot set, but much easier to perform on computers with limited resources. I found the original article at Lambda the Ultimate.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 - DVD

Hmm. Was there also a censorship beep in the cinema over Uma's performance in front of the little girl when she says her name? I can't remember that at all.

News from the Devil's Digi

My digital camera wants to annoy me. Now it's running again - first it wasn't responding anymore (P2160), now it worked right away. Apparently it worked so hard during its last use that it needed a week's vacation first. Strange. Maybe that was just a fear reaction that it's now working - where I threatened to buy a new one ...

CD-RW better for archiving than CD-R?

Just one paragraph in the text, but the hint sounds interesting: CD-RWs don't use color particles that get hit by the laser and can fade later — instead they use metallic elements that reflect light differently. These elements may not be as susceptible to environmental parameters as the color particles in CD-Rs. Something similar seems to be the case with DVDs. So it could make sense to archive on RW media. Here's more information. Here's the original article.

Cinema: Death in the Children's Room

It'll take me a few more days before I get to see it. So please hold back on the spoilers!

I found the original article at DIE ZEIT: Feuilleton and the original article.

Ullrich cancels Liège and Henninger Tower

Bah.

At least Team T-Mobile still has a couple of other good riders, and maybe Vinokourov will have the right legs for the Tour again. And Gerolsteiner is also doing quite well with Hondo.

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.

Alan Kay to receive Turing Award

Great!

I found the original article at Lambda the Ultimate.

Castor Transport: NRW sues, Saxony grumbles

Yeah, Saxony wants to save money, so NRW should spend millions on a transport that makes no sense and isn't necessary. Great idea.

You can find the original article at WDR.de.

Minister Schmidt sees 'educational catastrophe' coming

I see a catastrophe coming in the face of mindless politicians. Nobody's interested either.

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

Walloon Arrow: Ullrich climbs off bike after 100km

Oh man, this won't work like this ...

At Radsport-News.com I found the original article.

Apple Xsan: an Overview

Yummy! Do I have a chance to motivate my employer to switch everything to XServes? Probably not. Too bad, actually.

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

The New Power of Authors

Well, as soon as there's something somewhere that someone could benefit from committing fraud over, there will be at least one fraudster who exploits it. It's kind of like a law of nature - and it applies to authors too.

At NETZEITUNG.DE Voice of Germany you can find the original article.

MS Explorer 'Patch': Either 14 Holes or No SSL

It's kind of funny how this software monstrosity is falling apart these days. Not really high-quality software, that sort of thing.

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

Apple's jackboots step on PlayFair in India.

Well, let's see where PlayFair shows up next. It has a bit of that tortoise and hare quality to it.

At kuro5hin.org you can find the original article.

Calzone

I don't often do this, but I have to vent my frustration: my calzone had tuna in it. Yuck. There you are hungry, have to wait over an hour for the calzone, and then something like that – tuna in the calzone without being asked.

Here's the original article.

DarwinPorts Home

I was actually a Fink fan until recently (if only because it's based on Debian utilities). But since Fink has been behaving very strangely for me lately (for example, the Fink mirrors weren't all reachable because their nameserver apparently was misconfigured or because their SVN port simply didn't work, or because support for 10.2 is a bit strange), I decided to try DarwinPorts. And I have to say, I really like the system.

However, what I don't like so much is the fact that not every program works out-of-the-box. mtr, for example, complains about raw packets that it can't generate because it's not suid-root. True - it wasn't. I don't simply install ports as root - I use a normal user for the build. That all works fine because the user has the necessary permissions. But an mtr that is suid-gb can't generate raw packets anymore, even when used by root...

However, the normal user will probably rarely stumble over this, and normal applications should work pretty much right away.

What really puzzled me, however, was my attempt to install Subversion. Okay, I can understand that Subversion needs a web server - after all, it's essential for the server (although personally I would prefer a separation into a Subversion server and a Subversion client). But that Apache2 should be fetched just so a local installation of it runs on the machine, just because you might need the Subversion client - I think that's rather awkward. Especially since there are Port variants for exactly that purpose - but Subversion only offers a mod_dav_svn and a Python variant. In the mod_dav_svn variant, Apache is a prerequisite - but I actually just wanted normal Subversion. Strange. Okay, well, I admit - if you know what APR is, it also becomes clear where Apache2 comes in. Here's the original article.

SCO vs. Linux: Baystar Capital will Investment in SCO beenden

Ouch.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Are warning letters no longer allowed to rake in money?

This might put a stop to cease-and-desist letter mania for some. If those sending cease-and-desist letters have to reckon with consequences that go beyond normal court costs, they might think twice about it in the future. On the other hand, there are still far too many situations where absurd cease-and-desist letters are successful.

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

Staged victory for Darwin opponents

I simply don't understand why people want to push through such nonsense and why politicians let themselves be harnessed to such an absurd cart. Ok, it's the Berlusconi government, which has barely missed a single gaffe and embarrassment so far, but even for them it's actually a pretty absurd matter.

Reality does not bend to the superstitious notions of some church bigwigs and their crazy followers. Evolution is reality, whether these nuts like it or not.

I hope the Italian Constitutional Court stops this nonsense before it spreads any further. It's bad enough that this nonsense keeps bubbling up in America, it doesn't need to get state support in Europe too.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Shanghai: Transrapid route sinking, hardly any passengers

73 passengers a day? And run a Transrapid for that? You might as well sink it and plow it under, that would be cheaper.

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

GROKLAW - Linux as Security Risk and the Answers to It

At groklaw there is a summary of reactions to the nonsense that was spouted by the head of Green Hills Software.

Here is the original article.

Embedded Systems Developer: "Linux is a Security Risk"

Oh man, there's someone who, in a desperate attempt to hold onto his slipping furs, shot way over the mark and made a fool of himself.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Erik Zabel wins Rund um Köln

Rode out brilliantly, absolutely sovereign. A bit of bad luck for Danilo Hondo, who was on the wrong side of Zabel. But Zabel's performance was absolutely brilliant - and with that he gets his 186th victory and ties with Cippolini.

My Digital SLR is probably dead now

As I wrote in P2139, my digital SLR (a Kodak DCS 520) was acting up. Today the digital camera part won't turn on at all - the analog part, which is an EOS 1N, works perfectly. Only the digital component supplied by Kodak refuses to respond. Shit. And I've only had the camera since January - but purchased it privately. Now I'm wondering whether I'd be satisfied with a 10D or possibly even a 300D - both are significantly slower than my DCS 520. Ok, the resolution is higher, the images larger, but I don't really need that necessarily. With the DCS 520 I was already able to print images at 20x30 cm even though it only delivered 2 megapixels. Has anyone else previously owned a fast digital SLR and switched to one of these slower Canons? Or does someone have a pro SLR for work and a consumer SLR for private use and can say something about how they subjectively compare? So it's not about the specs on paper, but about the subjective frustration that could arise from possibly slower response times. An EOS is important because only with those do I have the chance to continue using my Zeiss lenses with an adapter. Besides, I already have a quite nice lens for Canon - the 2.5/50 macro. Otherwise the Nikon D70 would be significantly more interesting from a specs standpoint, since it's considerably faster.

Somehow digital is annoying. Analog is much more reliable and the selection isn't fraught with nearly as many compromises. But unfortunately you don't get the image right away, which you sometimes would like to have...

Update: after some calculations and considerations I've added the D70 back to my selection. The speed and some missing features of the 300D make the D70 significantly more attractive - after all, you can get it together with the 60mm Micro Nikkor for the price of the 10D body, with sometimes significantly better performance. Which of course doesn't really make the choice any easier...

Stop Church Exits with Tax Advantages

What a stupid idea. Tax benefits for those who are church members. Is there really no proposal so dumb and absurd that some stupid CDU/CSU politician won't put it on the table?

The taxpayer is already financing the church anyway. Directly through tax collection executed by the state, indirectly through the many kindergartens, schools and hospitals that are allegedly run by church organizations but ultimately operated with taxpayer money.

The Catholic Church is one of the richest organizations in Germany, is tax-privileged through its church status and is now supposed to be additionally subsidized at the wish of these CDU/CSU clowns? Ridiculous!

At tagesschau.de - The ARD News you can find the original article.

Wiki Software at Webware

An interesting wiki software in Python that works with restructured Text instead of any wiki markup language. Very interesting because ReST is very powerful and also very pleasant for web-based editing - no markup, but mainly just formatted ASCII text. Unfortunately currently only available via Subversion.

Here you can find the original article.

30-meter spruce for Easter bonfire

This Easter bonfire nonsense is getting on my nerves big time. The whole area stinks like a cold ashtray. Disgusting. And every farm thinks it has to burn its own Easter fire. Nothing but pyromaniacs around here ...

At WDR.de you can find the original article.