Möllemann Affair: Donor Names on the Table

Good. Maybe the swamp can still be drained a bit after all ...

I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.

Trouble at Bianchi

More talk about money than about cycling again.

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - Nachrichten-Gesamtübersicht you can find the original article.

Berlusconi: Judges are 'mentally disturbed'

Wow. He's really gone nuts ...

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

Legal dispute Obelix vs. MobiliX finally concluded

Great. Another proof that these trademark law issues are anything but sensible. Nobody among us should confuse mobile Unix with fat Belgian comic characters anymore. We customers are too stupid to think and the court has now officially confirmed that. Wonderful.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Supermen for the Pentagon

Sounds like some people in the Pentagon have watched too many bad science fiction movies - unfortunately, they seem to mean it seriously.

At Der Rollberg you can find the original article.

Digital Outback Photo Reviews Photokit Sharpener

The description sounds very interesting, it seems to be a very powerful tool. However, I have some concerns about the price: is a tool just for sharpening really worth 99 dollars? The normal PhotoKit costs only half that (and includes a whole bunch of useful tools). Sure, the sharpening functions in PhotoKit aren't as sophisticated, but somehow I'm reluctant to spend 100 bucks just for this one aspect.

At PhotographyBLOG you can find the original article.

FaceSpan 4.0 Public Beta

Hmm. Does FaceSpan really make sense anymore in times of (free) AppleScript Studio? AppleScript Studio can also create completely AppleScript-based software, and with the help of Interface Builder there's also a very good GUI design tool, and the integration is also very high. And above all, extensions and performance-critical areas can be implemented quite easily in Objective-C. I don't know if FaceSpan really makes sense there anymore.

At welcome to macscripter.net | applescript and script resource there's the original article.

Florida-Rolf and the Right Brain Hemisphere of Social Minister Schmidt

Exactly that - a purely populist decision. With this method, you're giving the Bild newspaper a free pass to make politics. And all this just for very few special cases that could have been left for courts to clarify. Of course, one doesn't need to mention that the Union (at least Stoiber) believes that this is far from going far enough. Politicians are not above letting themselves be made a fool of in such ridiculous ways by a trashy tabloid like the Bild newspaper.

I found the original article at TAZ.

Tobit celebrates ClipInc radio MP3 software as the most important IFA innovation

It's quite amusing when a manufacturer calls itself (or rather, one of its own campaigns) the most important IFA novelty. But things get really ridiculous when the homepage for this project is entirely built in Flash. Marketing gimmickry to get press coverage, that's all this is. Yes, the Website is only Flash. No skip button, no alternative presentation, nothing. Just Flash. But don't worry, even if the browser can't handle Flash, this silly website still sets a cookie. And don't even think that this Flash stuff has realized any special usability – quite the opposite, I've never seen such a pointless structure: a movie that plays, the menu items are points on the movie's timeline. After selecting a point, the movie continues from there.

Well, it seems Tobit really doesn't care about people with disabilities.

At heise online news there's the original article.

20 Years of BTX

Hachja, BTX - and its users. The candy-loving space cadets of the 80s

Of course, people like us were active in mailbox networks (yeah yeah, those animal nets, first Fido, soon then Maus) and of course we didn't have any fancy pictures, no chats (ok, the Fidos had something like that, but they were hardly better than the BTX folks), no commerce and therefore it was all better.

Or so.

At heise online news there's the original article.

AppleScript to open POPFile links from Entourage X

A small AppleScript that jumps to the link to Popfile in messages that were filtered by Popfile. Unfortunately for Entourage, I think I'd need to rewrite it for Mailsmith sometime. For that I'd probably need to know a bit more about AppleScript ... Here's the original article.

Dramatic Budget Situations in NRW and Berlin

At the WDR it says that even though the ruling will have no direct consequences for the state government, - please, what? So the state government violates the state constitution. But of course that has no impact. Weird. Well, if I look at the vultures of the Union who also want to run down NRW, then it might actually be quite good if it has no impact. It's quite scary when you'd rather have the constitutional violators than the alternative that's (not really) up for election.

At tagesschau on the internet there's the original article.

SCO must pay administrative fine

Oh come on, 10,000 euros, SCO will certainly notice that. Ridiculous. They try to get money through extortion and coercion (for which any respectable mobster would end up in prison if he applied the same behavior in the restaurant business), but from the court they just get slapped with a small fine.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Tom Waits, Blood Money ...

... hand me a cup of whisky, a cigar and the right (smoky) dive bar

Ullrich: Poisoned Infusion Responsible for Tour Fever

Yikes. That's not good, stuff like that. But it's pretty crazy what performance athletes will do to themselves. Us ordinary folk find infusions disgusting and unpleasant, and they're having protein run straight into their veins.

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - Nachrichten-Gesamtübersicht you can find the original article.

Vuelta: Zabel leads Telekom

That's what I like about Zabel: there's no fatigue, no talk of giving up before things have really started, and no complaining – just hard and good work, great performances, and – almost always – a grin in interviews.

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - News Overview you can find the original article.

The Big Jackpot

Financial aspects were placed above human suffering. Drop bombs on people, who cares, as long as the cash register rings

And of course no one will hold the war profiteers accountable, no matter how dubious their connections to the US government are.

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

The Winner: The Pharmaceutical Industry

How great - people are dying en masse and the pharmaceutical industry continues to secure its profits. At the expense of the dying people, of course. It doesn't matter anyway, money is much more important than human lives

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

Ullrich: I Would Have Ended My Career With Tour Victory

Oh boy, is Ullrich already thinking about quitting? And what's this about him saying he wouldn't give up so much to save a team - wasn't Coast in trouble, and wasn't he too? Has he already forgotten about that? Well, I'm not sure that's the right attitude...

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - Nachrichten-Gesamtübersicht you can find the original article.

Period and Comma in the Brain

Damn, just a reset for brief perception sequences. I was already hoping we could finally boot a few colleagues

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

Diggler

Yes, that's quite practical. Together with the Web Developer Toolbar, Firebird is already a really great tool.

Addendum: The Toolbar used to be good - version 0.2 ran well on Firebird under OS X, version 0.3 doesn't work at all. And the author has such wonderful HTML on his pages that you can't find an email address anywhere and the contact form is of course broken (validation with JavaScript code that won't accept my email address). Idiotic communication prevention. Another addendum: ok, that was only with Safari and Firebird 0.6.1, not with Firebird 0.6 - at least sending an email works with that. But the toolbar still doesn't work...

At Markus Kniebes Journal you can find the original article.

Faction on Schill: "He needs help"

Anyone who lets themselves be manipulated by Schill for so long, clings to someone like that, and thinks they can move up in the world that way either desperately needs help themselves or is already so corrupted by power hunger that they can't be helped anymore.

That said, perhaps the Schill faction shouldn't throw stones in their glass house too carelessly...

At tagesschau im Internet you'll find the original article.

Hardware is stupid

Anyway, if it breaks. My Minolta scanner is finally back from repair today (after being away twice for 4 weeks each - the first time it came back unrepaired) and it's in one piece. While testing it, I discovered that my G3 Mac is probably really fried: it only starts sporadically. Based on the symptoms, I'd suspect a defective mainboard. Damn. Can you still get Blue & White G3s repaired?

Freedom of Information from 2004?

It's about time too!

You can find the original article on Telepolis News.

Merkel: Exit atomic phase-out if election victory

Great prospects. Operating nuclear power plants as long as they want - that means for Germany financing this nonsense for as long as the monopolists want to rip people off. And renewable energies would be pushed back again. And of course Merkelnix will certainly busily transport nuclear waste through Germany and protect it with huge police presence. All very sensible ... At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

Gerolsteiner has interest in Beloki

Wow - CSC with Jaksche and Voigt as new signings, that would be something. And Beloki at Gerolsteiner - that would be quite a bombshell. Beloki would certainly be a highly motivated rider for the overall classification next year at the Tour - and an Armstrong being attacked by Gerolsteiner, Telekom and Bianchi will definitely work up a sweat.

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - Nachrichten-Gesamtübersicht you can find the original article.

Strato and MTU

Well, I had to try that right away and sent some pings:

 muenster:~# ping -s 1400 www.strato.de PING www.strato.de (192.67.198.33): 1400 data bytes 1408 bytes from 192.67.198.33: icmp_seq=0 ttl=245 time=159.6 ms 1408 bytes from 192.67.198.33: icmpseq=1 ttl=245 time=157.3 ms 1408 bytes from 192.67.198.33: icmpseq=2 ttl=245 time=327.5 ms 1408 bytes from 192.67.198.33: icmpseq=3 ttl=245 time=160.3 ms 1408 bytes from 192.67.198.33: icmpseq=4 ttl=245 time=159.0 ms --- www.strato.de ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 157.3/192.7/327.5 ms muenster:~# ping -s 1500 www.strato.de PING www.strato.de (192.67.198.33): 1500 data bytes --- www.strato.de ping statistics --- 8 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

What's happening here? I'm sending packets with 1400 byte and 1500 byte lengths. The 1500 byte ones are being nicely fragmented at our router - a Telekom router with a DSL fixed connection - and sent as fragments:

 goggle# tcpdump -i ppp0 icmp tcpdump: listening on ppp0 09:29:01.223186 62.153.201.130 > 62.226.72.1: (frag 33019:28@1480) 09:29:01.316521 62.153.201.130 > 62.226.72.1: icmp: echo request (frag 33019:1472@0+) 09:29:01.316707 62.153.201.130 > 62.226.72.1: (frag 33019:8@1472+) 09:29:01.317017 62.226.72.1 > 62.153.201.130: (frag 14273:36@1472) 09:29:01.317148 62.226.72.1 > 62.153.201.130: icmp: echo reply (frag 14273:1472@0+)

For example, that's what it looks like when I ping my machine at home. What does that point to? I'd wager that Strato has a firewall strategy where transparent firewalls sit in front of the Strato servers. And fragments are apparently getting lost there. It's possible they do this because TCP/IP fragments are often used in attacks, because fragments with incorrect header data tend to crash TCP/IP stacks. Still, I'd say that's a clear configuration error on Strato's part. At least it smells strongly of that...

The original article is here.

W3C sees danger for internet standards

Damn patents.

Even though Microsoft is on the receiving end of the lawsuit here, plugin techniques are used in many places in browsers and that also applies to free browsers. And even if Microsoft could get out of this financially, it's still unclear what will happen to free browser implementations ...

You can find the original article at heise online news here.

Robert also lost his job at Telekom

Finally. That annoying Max Headroom knockoff was really just embarrassing ...

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Banking service provider GAD closes four locations

Well, I started my apprenticeship as a data processing merchant at that store 17 years ago (to be exact on 1.8.86). It's quite remarkable how much everything has changed - back then it was a store with about 330 employees, fairly compact and with a surprisingly social management and a very pleasant work atmosphere. Today it has all become noticeably sharper and harder. Shame - because somewhere something got lost that had once made the store a dream employer in Münster. Well, for a few years now I've been sitting in a subsidiary of GAD, and in a couple more years it will probably be as big as GAD was back when I started...

Somehow I feel old now.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Bavaria plans 'integration upper limit'

It's certainly not the fault of foreign children that Bavarians can't speak German...

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Total Photography

Nice review of the digital snapshot output and collection points for the same ...

At Spiegel Online: Netzwelt I found the original article.

12:38:30: Women Are Like Web Servers

Um, yes. Or something like that.

At ::ab::gebloggt:: there's the original article.

bash is new default terminal shell in Panther

Woah! That's almost like changing VI's default editor to Emacs

Well, I think it's good, I'll admit I'm a Bash softie (but please not Emacs. My depravity has limits somewhere!).

At The Macintosh News Network you can find the original article.

Christiania should become more normal

The Danish government wants to normalize Christiania (the free zone in the middle of Denmark). The residents of Christiania (and not only they) see it somewhat differently of course: they see it as the destruction of their own small culture. That's why a demonstration is scheduled for August 30th - if you're in the area, you can demonstrate for a little bit of self-determined culture.

It's a shame how small autonomous groups are destroyed everywhere. In Germany with its obsession for order, you'd expect something like that by now (unfortunately), but in Denmark it used to be different...

Here's the original article.

Müller wants to favor parents in pensions

What nonsense. If this idiot hasn't noticed yet: we childless people already pay heavily in taxes because we have no children. Of course it then makes sense to be penalized again in retirement. What else? Bring back the Mother's Cross?

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

How Wikis Grow and Thrive

Anyone who has ever wondered what it would look like to visualize changes in wikis has found an answer with IBM Watson Research Center. Fascinating graphic depictions of, for example, vandalism in a wiki and the reactions to it.

Here is the original article.

Microsoft blocks international conference on open source

Does anyone still need proof of why monopolies and overly powerful lobbies are bad? If it were up to Microsoft and the BSA, probably even mentioning Open Source would already be punishable.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

PHP under different user permissions in Apache

An Apache module that allows PHP code to run under a different user than the one Apache is running as. This would make it possible to set up a separate environment for each user on the server using Unix file permissions and restrict them to that area - safer than the normal variant where all PHP scripts run under the Apache user. However, installing it alongside normal PHP is not so straightforward, since both depend on the same MIME type. Still, I could take a look at that.

Here's the original article.

Producing Postscript with Python

Anyone who wants to produce Postscript files (including multi-page publications) with Python can do so with PyScript. The approach is quite interesting: basically a graphics library that translates to Postscript. So you can develop everything in Python, modify, combine, and layout all graphics there, etc., and then use the result as a Postscript file (e.g., convert to PDF).

Here is the original article.

Spam filter for IMAP mailboxes

Those working with IMAP4 mailboxes instead of POP3 often get ignored by various filter programmers - many can only handle POP3. The link goes to a filter that uses SpamAssassin against an IMAP4 server: emails are sorted out and thrown into a spam folder. The nice thing about it is that this filter doesn't need to be built into the mail client, but also not into mail delivery. Instead, you can simply run it outside of the mail program - it can run on any machine that has access to the mail account. Quite practical if you have your mailbox with a hosting provider and want to run the filter from your own server, but your mail program runs on a notebook (and you want to avoid downloading spam mountains while on the go, for example).

Oh, and the fact that the little program is written in Python is also not without its advantages - instead of SpamAssassin, you could also integrate SpamBayes, for example.

Here's the original article.

And once again a little something about the SCO farce

SCO did release its old Unix sources up to 32V as open source. There was an announcement from back then by Caldera (now SCO). Allegedly, there was supposed to be a restriction to non-commercial use in this release. Needless to say, there is no restriction on use anywhere in the announcement, nor is there a restriction to 16-bit versions alone, as SCO is now claiming through Blake Stowell.

Could it be that SCO was a bit unprepared for the whole operation?

Here's the original article.

Why does Windows have features like BEAR, BUNNY and PIGLET?

Answers to a question I never asked myself

Here you can find the original article.

Backup software for Mac OS X and DVD-R Writer

On the Subject of Backup Software

For this reason, I'm looking for backup software that can split a volume across multiple DVDs during backup. I do my actual backup with psync, but that only backs up to another volume - in my case a FireWire drive. Occasionally, I would like to burn disk images that I can store away and that are not as susceptible to defects. Any suggestions? By the way, Apple Backup would meet these requirements. Unfortunately, Apple forces you to have a .Mac account in order to start the backup program. So you can only use and restore your backups if you still have a .Mac account. I don't really think that's fair - data backup should be something that isn't tied to a 99 euro per year internet provider...

The Evil Computer Eater Has Struck Again

At Jutta there won't be any updates for now: both the iBook has a disk failure, as well as her Linux desktop. Somehow there's a problem here, first my desktop Mac and now Jutta's two computers.

Hopefully Apple will recover the disk contents during the repair, or I'll figure out beforehand how to save the disk contents, otherwise it's going to get really messy ...

Pretty strange story with the iBook: after a while the drive just keeps clicking, as if it's hammering the read head against the end of the platter. Sometimes it's not even recognized at startup. Sounds like it's done for ...

Small update: the Debian machine is still running after all, there was just a knot in the filesystem, possibly from an earlier crash. But the iBook drive is probably really done for, but we managed to copy down the most important files ...

MacOSX::File and psync

Probably already blogged about elsewhere, but since I just installed it again: psync is a very practical software written in Perl that makes it possible to copy an entire Apple OS X volume in such a way that the result is even bootable afterwards. With this you can, for example, very easily mirror your boot partition to an external FireWire drive and use it both as a backup and as an emergency system.

There's also a GUI available for anyone who doesn't like using the Terminal.

Here's the original article.

OpenOffice for Mac OS X without X11 is taking its time

It's a shame, but not really catastrophic. On the one hand, there's already a very usable X11 implementation for Jaguar, and on the other hand, X11 is likely to become a standard component with Panther and should be even more tightly integrated (for example, X11 applications should be able to be started normally by double-clicking and will load X11 if necessary). This would give X11 a similar status to the Classic environment: not perfectly integrated, but at least well integrated enough to live with. And for those willing to pay a few euros and support a German software company, there's still Papyrus X - we'll certainly forgive them for calling it Papyrus OS/2 in the page title. At heise online news, you can find the original article.

Schill apparently threatened with outing during prime time

Does this Schill guy really believe that at a time of "I am gay and that's fine" Wowereit, anyone would be interested in such alleged outings? But what can you expect from someone like that in terms of common sense ... Anyway, the main thing is that he torpedoes this right-wing populist pile of garbage out of the Hamburg Senate

I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.

SCO vs. Linux: The Time of Conspiracy Theories

And on to the next round of the show with the exciting title: How the SCO Management is demonstrating even more clearly that it has lost touch with reality. At heise online news you can find the original article.

Venus Flower Basket as Optical Waveguide

Cool. Small fiber optic networks in the deep sea. Do they perhaps already have ATM at 5000 meters depth without us knowing about it? At Telepolis News there's the original article.