Stoiber angry about Merkel-Schröder meeting

And another couple of politicians worried about citizens being bored during the summer break

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Leica Digital Modul for the R8 & R9

Hey, the conference isn't until 6:00 PM tonight! Well, Leica already has it posted on their own pages anyway.

About the module: do I want it? I'm not sure. A factor of 1.37 is quite reasonable. 10 megapixels too. And the combination with the Leica R8 or R9 makes a pretty decent camera (even though I still think the R8/9 body is ugly as sin). The combination also looks quite usable. But the price: 4500 euros. Plus the body for 1000 euros and the lenses (depending on needs - and Leica lenses aren't exactly in the budget category).

But what's nice is the idea of a well-designed manual digital camera, especially now that the Contax N Digital is off the market. Even if a digital camera without autofocus seems a bit odd at first glance.

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

Standard Integrals

He can do arithmetic, but his spelling is still a bit lacking

At Mathematische Kleinigkeiten you can find the original article.

Consumer centers surprise with 0190 service numbers

Hmm. The consumer centers recommend citizens install 0190 number blocks to avoid unexpected charges. And they offer their services via 0190 numbers. Yes, that's a strategy. I just don't know exactly what for yet.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Winokurow wins Tour de Suisse

Nice success for Team Telekom!

I found the original article at tagesschau im Internet.

Wolfowitz to be in Charge of Military Tribunals

Great, one of the worst agitators of the US government team as head and responsible for military tribunals. Presumably also for those in Guantanamo Bay who are supposed to condemn alleged terrorists in secret and execute them on the spot. That certainly increases the chances of survival in the camp there immensely.

I found the original article at Warblogs:CC.

COW - Programming for Bovines

Moo!

Here's the original article.

Gene food on European tables?

Just saw it on the Today Journal: the Americans are increasingly pushing to be able to sell their genetically modified plants to Europe as well. Nothing new, but what does give me pause: We have repeatedly tried to reach an agreement with the EU, now our patience has run out (roughly from an interview with an American on the subject of Europeans' blocking stance against genetically modified food). Sounds pretty damn similar to what was said about Iraq, doesn't it?

By now, I'm absolutely fed up with the arrogant behavior that the loudest parts of America are displaying. And no, it doesn't help to trot out the oft-cited "I know plenty of Americans who are all really great buddies" lines. Anti-Americanism? Yes. It's becoming necessary. Because I want to continue being able to decide what I eat, what I read, where I travel, what I think and what I say, without having to worry about whether Dubya and his power-hungry friends approve of it.

Threat of Fines for Missing Website Blocks in North Rhine-Westphalia

No class. So the district government is not only unable to grasp that the blocking measures are almost ineffective, but they're also unable to oversee how they can verify their own demands. Pathetic. And downright embarrassing, this demonstration of total lack of professional expertise.

At heise online news there's the original article.

New Federal Office for Civil Protection

A German version of Homeland Security? No thanks.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Olympus E-1 Digital SLR

And there they are, the first data on Olympus's 4/3 system. The feature list sounds like it's straight out of the wet dreams of digiphilics. But the price, sorry, that's clearly quite hefty. Why pay 2200 US dollars for a 4/3 system (which will probably end up being 2500 - 3000 euros) when you can get digital SLRs from Canon for less? I don't think such a price is justified, because the smaller chip is simply a compromise solution (selective sharpness becomes much more difficult when focal lengths get shorter). And the factor here is 2, which means significantly shorter focal lengths than even in Canon's consumer segment.

Let's wait and see what kind of performance this system will deliver in September when it becomes available.

At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) you can find the original article.

Syndication

I'll skip the usual talk about stop energy just because someone blogs (sorry, blocks) about an innovation and instead explain why I think this undertaking makes sense.

RSS is a format that has been developed in many different directions by various people. There are two main streams. The RDF-based formats with their peak in RSS 1.0, with design-by-company and sometimes even by-committee. And the keep-it-far-too-simple stream from Dave Winer with its peak in RSS 2.0, which attempts to marry RSS and RDF, but isn't really coherent either (for instance, lately Dave labels anything that uses namespaces as "funky RSS" - I hate funk!).

So what can a new format bring? Possibly nothing. That's fine too, then at least you know (and have it documented for reference) that RSS in its existing forms is good enough.

Or you recognize that there are weaknesses and errors in the existing pool of formats. If that's the case, there are two options again:

The weaknesses can be fixed (for example through RSS 1.0 with full RDF basis or with RSS 2.0 and a few additional namespaces). This will certainly be done - because not everyone wants to jump on a new format.

The alternative - the new format - also has its merits: it's being developed using community techniques. A wiki where everyone can contribute their two cents. So it can become quite an interesting format with many good ideas. Why shouldn't you implement it then? It would be a shame if all those ideas went to waste...

At the very least though, it's a wonderful network-psychological experiment. A bunch of pretty far-out freaks of various stripes trying to collaborate together in a wiki (remember: anyone can edit and change anything!). Hey, that's practically screaming out for chips and cola and comfortable kicking back and reading along

.

At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

Charming Python: Using combinatorial functions in the itertools module

A rather interesting article about the new functional features in itertools in Python 2.3. With itertools you can apply a programming technique that has been known in Common Lisp for quite some time as Series and is best described as lazy sequences: sequences of objects that are created on demand only as far as necessary. This opens up a whole range of very interesting techniques that can make programs much more readable.

Here is the original article.

Couchblog: Letting Go

Hit.

Here you can find the original article.

A Tremendous Smile - "Dalai Lama - Fall of a God-King" by Colin Goldner

A recommended book review by Colin Goldner: Dalai Lama - Fall eines Gottkönigs, Alibri Verlag Aschaffenburg, 1999, written by Marcus Hammerschmitt. Worth reading (yes, it's not brand new, but I stumbled upon it for the first time - thanks go to Instant Nirvana). What we in the West like to forget again and again: these friendly smiling old men (whether they are Orthodox bishops, Catholic popes, Muslim ayatollahs or Tibetan lamas) represent very old ecclesiastical structures. With very old ideas. Old is not necessarily good.

Let's remind ourselves what church means: power. Great power. In all major churches (certainly in smaller ones too, just on a smaller scale) the primary goal at the highest level is the preservation of their own power against worldly influences. States can be democratically structured, churches are not. At best, you find pseudo-democracies.

The fact that women are massively oppressed in churches and are often without rights or merely tolerated for reproduction of the faithful is nothing new. In many major churches, women are missing something essential: the possibility of reaching the top, occupying central leadership positions, having any say in matters. Instead, they can merely serve as bearers of original sin. Or perform work - gladly including sexual services. Churches are purely a male affair. Descriptions of paradise often sound more like the last trip to a brothel than like a desirable state.

So it's no wonder that Tibetan Buddhism also has plenty of skeletons in the closet and the friendly smiling gentleman from Tibet should be regarded much like the friendly smiling gentleman from Rome: with great caution and utmost skepticism. Because the goal of friendly smiling old men is not the well-being of people, but the well-being (and power) of their churches.

The goals of churches and the goals of freely thinking people contradict each other very often, indeed almost inevitably, because power structures the size of, for example, the Catholic Church simply wouldn't be possible if everyone could think what they wanted. Unless you happen to be the pope or the Dalai Lama. But even he cannot do as he wishes. But perhaps he doesn't want to do otherwise anyway.

The Tibet of the Dalai Lama is merely a religiously founded state entity. And one should be afraid of such things. Regardless of which religion. Regardless of which church.

Here's the original article.

MacOSX Packages for Mozart 1.2.5

Hey, Mozart and Oz are also available for OS X. Ok, not directly for OS X, but only as normal Unix ports for OS X - the GUI continues to be based on GTK and thus on X11. But at least you can run it on the Mac. There's also an interesting book about programming concepts, which describes them using Mozart and Oz. Here's the original article.

Try Before You Sell

Anyone who wants to participate in the Google AdSense story can try out under the link to see what ads Google would deliver for their own site. Of course, I reject advertising on my pages, but others may not have quite as many scruples.

At Google Weblog you can find the original article.

Vim 6: A Great Linux Outliner

If you're looking for an outliner for Linux and like VI, you should check out the VIM Outliner. It's a macro package for VIM 6 that transforms it into an outliner. Unfortunately, it still has some significant limitations, such as not saving which text areas are collapsed and which are not. But basically it's quite usable. At least it's still better than the alternatives I've found so far. Besides, you don't have to boot VIM like you do with Emacs.

Here's the original article.

Anyone who still reads today is to blame themselves

Ouch. We've all pretty much embarrassed ourselves in school at some point by reading summaries and pretending to have knowledge based on them - König's Explanations or whatever they were called.

I found the original article at Telepolis News at this link.

Belgium changes war crimes law again

Was to be expected, that they would give in

At tagesschau on the internet you can find the original article.

The Hercules System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator

Because I just talked about it in chat: the link points to an emulator for IBM /370 and /390 hardware. And IBM supplies operating systems for it - old ones of course, but completely legal. OS/360 or MVS 3.8j or even an old VM/370 version on a Linux box is really a neat toy for the geek from back then

And as I just see there's now also an OS X version. Very nice.

Here you can find the original article.

ABCNEWS.com : Women Have Surgery to 'Restore' Virginity

Hymen reconstruction? What else is next? Wouldn't it make more sense to fight against this cultural nonsense, the idea that a woman must be a virgin until marriage? But no, instead we're deceiving ourselves. It doesn't matter that the world has long been very different from what reactionary fools imagine, as long as appearances are maintained. And if appearances are damaged, there's someone who will polish them up again for cash...

Here's the original article.

Former Coast Sports Director Hires Lawyer

Oh man, what a mess. Couldn't they just get back into the press with cycling performances? A "well-rested" 12th place at the Tour de Suisse is certainly not what I had in mind...

Here's the original article.

My Visit to SCO

Once again something about the SCO case: someone from the Free Software community reports here about his visit to SCO and what he is allowed to tell about the whole story under the NDA. If his assessment is correct, then SCO has a bunch of nonsense there, but not much more. It remains interesting. However, I wonder when companies in the USA will finally start taking action against SCO's FUD campaign, as was the case in Germany with the preliminary injunction against SCO.

Here's the original article.

OS X Interface for Spice

Anyone who deals with circuit simulation or is interested in it can find a graphical interface for Spice under the link, which allows you to operate the package in a somewhat more Mac-typical way. Spice is one of the most sophisticated systems for circuit simulation (so transistors, resistors, inductors and that sort of thing). Might be quite interesting for electronics hobbyists (for me it's not, I'm too stupid to hold a soldering iron the right way around).

Here you can find the original article.

Smuggler investigations also in the Bundestag

Fitting for the summer slump, a nice dirty and disgusting affair. Isn't it nice how politicians are concerned about our boredom, right?

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Thunderbird for OS X

Here's the current nightly build of the Thunderbird mail client from the Mozilla project for OS X. Makes a very nice impression, for example spam filtering works significantly better than with Apple Mail when you use IMAP4. And it can also do threading with Mail. Nice. Very nice.

Here's the original article.

EU Bishops Demand 'Christian European Constitution'

Wait a moment: The explicit mention of Christianity is "absolutely necessary". As a guarantee for human dignity and freedom, the document should also contain a reference to God. - somehow my ribs are hurting from laughing now. In whose name have more people been killed, disparaged and disadvantaged (and continue to be in some cases), if not in the name of various gods of various factions? These really don't belong in any constitutions. I recommend anyone who disagrees to read church labor law and the effects it has, for example, on hospitals or schools with church co-sponsorship (since they aren't fully funded by the church anyway, the state always contributes heavily). There is hardly anything more objectionable than the behavior the church displays in such institutions when employees don't belong to the church - and that despite the church sometimes not even bearing 10% of the actual costs. No religion in constitutions! For a clear separation of state (or confederation of states) and church!

At Der Rollberg there's the original article.

Hundt wants to cut insolvency benefits

Well, now that the whole economy has gone to the dogs, the payment of insolvency benefits to the employers' liability insurance associations has naturally increased, Mr. Hundt. Just teach your members better business practices, then the payment won't be due so often and the levy will decrease again ...

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

Party of Black Funds

Nice little report about Möllemann's arms deals and those of his spiritual predecessor (in the sense that he displayed similarly creative financial conduct), Heinz Herbert Karry.

I found the original article at Telepolis News.

Pearl: Saddam was not an immediate threat

It's quite amusing how all these US hawks are so stupid and spilling the beans. What arguments for the war do Wolfowitz and Perle have left for Dubya and Blair after their recent statements?

I found the original article at TAZ.

Swindle - CLOS and more for DrScheme

This is really great: an OO extension for DrScheme built on Tiny-CLOS (where object-oriented here means the typical object+functional mix from CLOS — not those minimal OO systems from typical class-based languages). Very nice. And a large pile of additional tools and utilities on top. Basically you could say the programmer tried to implement large parts of Common Lisp in DrScheme. Nice, since I'm an old CL fan and Scheme fan, here I get the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately the system hasn't been extended to the GUI system, which still exists in the more classical OO form from DrScheme. A CLOS wrapper around it (or perhaps something like a tiny CLIM? Yeah, yeah, I'll be quiet, but one is allowed to dream) wouldn't be bad either.

Somehow DrScheme reminds me fatally of my nice Xerox 1186-compatible Lisp machines with their mix of Interlisp-D and Common Lisp in the operating system. There too the basic stuff is implemented in Interlisp-D (in DrScheme it's Scheme) and then Common Lisp is layered on top (in DrScheme then Swindle). Very nice approach.

And one more funny thing: a small graphical tool that visualizes lambda calculus. Programming with colored blocks to make things clear.

I think I like DrScheme

Here's the original article.

XchemeRPC

Should work with DrScheme 200 and newer. Of course it doesn't work with 204, which I have running. So it's back down to the software cellar again and time to fix the problems with a pipe wrench.

Here you can find the original article.

101 three sixty five

A quite interesting photography and image technology blog. Photos, explanatory articles, technical background - everything you can imagine. Quite well done. And the link collection in the blogroll on the weblog is also quite interesting.

Here's the original article.

Dieter Bohlen - Role Model for Germany?

Waaaaaa - Blockhead Bohlen for the Federal Cross of Merit? Is Griefahn still all there? And just because he pays his taxes in Germany? And because he puts himself in the spotlight with his trashy shows by rudely telling incapable kids that he thinks he's the show god? And please, what kind of role model is he supposed to be for young people: Be arrogant and misogynistic assholes? Siegmar help and prevent this horror.

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

DrScheme

A very nice Scheme programming environment whose main goal is learning programming itself - building on Scheme language scopes of varying complexity. The whole thing is well-oriented to what is necessary at each respective level. In addition, a large collection of libraries with useful function definitions, a graphical programming environment, and a corresponding library for your own programs, many useful developer tools (and some optionally installable developer tools that you can't get elsewhere), and the best part: now also runs on OS X. Nice.

Here you can find the original article.

Looking to do web stuff with Python?

Notizgeblogged, in the Web Framework Shootout it's about comparing various web frameworks for Python. Quite interesting, and maybe I can steal one or another idea for the Python Desktop Server or the Python Community Server. At Richard's stuff : /python you can find the original article.

Microphotography

A series of tips about microscopy, microphotography and similar topics. Images, descriptions, link collection etc.

Here you can find the original article.

Plonk

Oh goodness, a link battle in Blogistan.de. Folks, get out your chips, cola, and popcorn, sit back comfortably and enjoy the spectacle.

At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

Sad day... GIF patent dead at 20

And goodbye

At kuro5hin.org you can find the original article.

Text composition systems as you shouldn't do them?

I'm indeed a Lisp fan. I love Lisp-like languages and, when possible, only use languages that offer at least a certain basic set of features that Lisp implementations also provide. But this goes too far: a typesetting system with the structure of TeX, but with Lisp syntax.

Somehow this reminds me of the problems I have with Common Lisp: I like the language, I find most of its features brilliant to divine and I certainly have usable implementations to choose from. I don't use it anyway: I would simply have to write too much text. The identifiers are as long as COBOL syntax elements. Ugh. Similar with Scribe: while the identifiers are short, I have to write all the clutter around it. And I get those wonderful blah-blubb-fasel-blubber identifiers for various control purposes. Who wants to write all that crap? What good is a typesetting system where I have to write more markup than I would write in plain HTML? If I wanted to write that much non-content, I could just use DocBook instead...

Here's the original article.

Egon, You forgot the URL!

In the Schockwellenreiter forum there is a particularly sophisticated spambot on the loose. Cute. At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

European Software Patents Move Closer

Idiotic. Dangerous. Ultimately economically damaging. What do these foolish politicians actually think? Who's going to get these patents? The small software houses? The freelance programmers? No. The big companies will have the advantage in the long run once again. Great - Microsoft, IBM and other patent hoarders can then use expensive patent lawsuits to squeeze small shops out of the market when they get in the way. And they can expand the madness they're already pulling off with software patents in the USA to the EU as well. And in the end, the customer will be the one footing the bill for this whole nonsense again.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Mark Pilgrim to a Robot Scribbler

Woof, someone's in a bad mood there

Here's the original article.

Orrin Hatch: clueless and malevolent

Yes, great. An American senator wants to prevent internet users from using file sharing, if necessary by destroying their computers (presumably he means attacks via the internet on the operating system). Is it to be expected at some point that Americans will launch attacks on file sharing systems on the internet? Are there even more absurd ideas than those of this senator Hatch? Maybe he also wants to impose the death penalty for file sharing?

At algorhythm there's the original article.

SCO vs. IBM: Sun's McNealy Praises Solaris Advantages

Well, you can rely on the SUN chief making what would seem to be the stupidest possible attempt to position himself on a current topic and present himself as completely devoid of facts these days.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Clement: Germans should work more

Clear. The slump is simply because we all don't work enough. What, we have too many unemployed people we can't place because there isn't enough work available? Never mind, just work more, that'll help. Not the 4.5 million unemployed, not the economy, but the super minister can cozy up to employer representatives and distract from his lack of ideas, so at least it helps someone...

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

When things get really wild: Parcel services

Today I finally received the package with my teleconverter for the Contax – a Mutar II, by the way (to combine with my Sonnar 2.8/180 to make it a 360mm). Very nice.

Not so nice: the package had been here for almost a week, just not with me, but delivered to a shop in the building. I didn't have a note in my mailbox, nor was one hanging on the door. If one of the shop employees hadn't spoken to me, I would have sent even more angry emails to the shipper asking where my package was.

Even more absurd: on the entire package it's impossible to tell which delivery service actually brought it to me. There's a customs declaration from the sender (it came from the USA), but no customs stamp or notification papers. A package service doesn't just hand over a package like that to somewhere random – there will most likely be a customs invoice following that the delivery service will want payment for.

Well, it's not the first delivery service that thinks they can't find me (even though the entrance is simply on the side of the building), but in this case I find it quite outrageous.

Goodbye and Thanks for the Fish ...

Of course, one could research whales without killing them, but that would take far too long - they could go extinct before then - according to the Japanese research leader for whale research (just now on the Tagesthemen). Is there any more idiotic nonsense to justify whale slaughter?

Checkpointed Object Database

Sounds quite interesting, a database with pseudo-transparent access from Python. Objects are automatically read in and automatically written when changes occur. Objects are automatically added to the database when they are referenced by an already stored object. Databases are cleaned of garbage via reference-counting (unless you produce circular references). And there's checkpointing, which allows you to ensure that a database restarts with the last consistent state. In a broad sense similar to Metakit, but somewhat more focused on objects than on tables. This certainly allows for more elegant integration into Python code. The question is, how is the performance? Because many small object databases are terribly slow when the number of objects in them grows. And large object databases are simply overkill for something like a weblog tool. Here's the original article.