Whitespace

And that's just one innovation: I could fit a second program in Python's indentations

I found the original article at Lambda the Ultimate.

Yahoo! Store Switches Back to Lisp

Bitter. That's a really bitter April Fool's joke

I found the original article at Lambda the Ultimate.

The US Army and the Press

So this is how one imagines dealing with the press in the land of the free? Or where did the soldiers learn such a sensitive approach?

Here's the original article.

Maher (Mike) Hawash

And further judicial arbitrariness in the land-of-the-free

I found the original article at Warblogs:CC.

Peter Arnett Falls from Grace

And another piece of evidence for what free press in the land-of-the-free really means. No Pulitzer Prize helps with that. I found the original article on Telepolis News at this link.

What you shouldn't do with Debian Linux ...

Sorry esteemed colleague, but with apt-get install mozilla, apt-get shows you exactly what it will do, including which packages will be deleted and which will be installed. Whoever carelessly answers "Yes I want to" to that, please press ctrl-c very quickly in case of justified error or suffer forever

At das Netzbuch - ralles Weblog you can find the original article.

Criticism of Rumsfeld from Within

First signs of dissolution?

At tagesschau im Internet there is the original article.

Explosion, Said to Be From Missile, Empty Mall in Kuwait

Extremely precise and intelligent cruise missile that lands in Kuwait instead of Baghdad. If the US military keeps this up, it will soon have won the war against its allies...

At New York Times: NYT HomePage you can find the original article.

http://www.tacitus[...]chives/000572.html

Hmm. Should the dolphin have more intelligence than its trainer?

I found the original article at Warblogs:CC.

Möllemann back in court

Oh yes, the FDP keeps trying to prove how much they were screwed by the Möllemännchen

At RP Online: Politik there's the original article.

Robb on the Bush Doctrine

A rather interesting analysis by John Robb about the Bush Doctrine.

I found the original article at lies.com.

USA accuse Syria of supporting Iraq

Great class. Is Rumsfeld already preparing the next war?

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

Due to Iraq War: Doctor treats no Americans

A thoroughly pigheaded attitude and in my view unlawful. After all, Americans who go to a doctor in Rendsburg are certainly not automatically war criminals just because of their origin. He should read our Basic Law, what it says on the subject of discrimination based on origin...

Apart from the fact that he's degrading himself to the level of American eBay sellers who refuse to ship to Canada or old-Europe, the Freedom Fries and -Toast and similar stupid, narrow-minded actions.

At RP Online: Politik there is the original article.

Everything is Relative

"Umm Qasr is a city similar to Southampton," UK defence minister Geoff Hoon said yesterday. "He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr" says a British Squaddie patrolling Umm Qasr. Another soldier added: "There's no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth."

Hehe

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

Java, or how it came to be

A tale about the early beginnings, people and projects that ultimately led to Java. Exciting to read.

Here you can find the original article.

Health insurance company reports doctors to companies

Yes. I am in favor of establishing a health insurance secret service. It could then spy on doctors and patients. And anyway, with the patient card you can play many more games. Best to set up an online database and book everything right away. And anyone who goes to the doctor more than once a month is a malingerer anyway. And the Americans in their data collection frenzy certainly have an interest in this, so send it straight to the USA. Chronic patients are surely actually hidden terrorists who use the time to prepare attacks. Welcome to the world of madness. Sarcasm accidentally found in this posting should please be discounted by yourself and presented to the inspectors on demand.

At tagesschau im Internet there is the original article.

Merkel wants to cut pensions for the childless

And because the whole world has gone crazy and Merkel's last shreds of reason probably got stuck in Bush's backside when she crawled back out of there, she joins right in with the parade of nonsense. Probably not even the lime loaf from Bavaria could have come up with an even more idiotic and shameless proposal.

Does the Merkbefreiung from German Usenet actually exist in real life? If so, please issue one to Ms. Merkel.

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

Meteorite crashed into house

I hope those were target practice from above and the next impact seeks out fancy white houses with old-fashioned facades

At Astronomische Kleinigkeiten you can find the original article.

Patriotic Idiots Interrupt Museum Security Mailing List

Well. In war, reason is lost and foolishness rules.

At netbib weblog you'll find the original article.

Rau: Do not go along with US line

Please, dear politicians, listen at least once to Brother Johannes.

At tagesschau im Internet there is the original article.

Snake Food

Och menno, and I still have Python 1.52 code in productive use

At Der Schockwellenreiter there is the original article.

Stop(ped) making sense

Well. Great. And Americans wonder why we think they're crazy: an eBay seller refuses to ship to countries that didn't support the USA in the Iraq War, so a Canadian can't get his printer. Those Americans are nuts.

At algorhythm you can find the original article.

US Congress Calls for National Day of Prayer

Well, that puts the USA not only close to religious fundamentalists, it's right in the middle of religious fanaticism.

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

EU: Heavy fuel oil no longer in single-hull tankers

Finally. It only cost a couple of years and oil catastrophes. We could and should have had this much earlier!

You can find the original article at tagesschau im Internet.

France boycott to extend to cellphone standards?

Great. Now some stupid American wants to prevent GSM from being implemented in the US anymore and use CDMA instead - because GSM was developed in France, after all. Good Lord, what a fucking idiot ...

I found the original article on Gizmodo.

No Patch for RPC Security Hole in Windows NT

Somehow that's a rather absurd stance. Just not closing a security hole. Well, if you put an NT server unfiltered on the internet, you probably deserve nothing better than to be screwed over by Microsoft.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Lispworks Beta for OS X

Hey! If they're making this thing native Aqua now, that's a real killer - because so far there's only Macintosh Common Lisp, since Allegro doesn't come with a GUI. However, Lispworks is unfortunately not exactly cheap, so you could almost just use MCL again.

Or OpenMCL, which costs nothing

At lemonodor there's the original article.

Once again something about us: Trackback

I was asked to do so, so I've now implemented Trackback for myself. For now, just for incoming pings, but I will also tackle outgoing ones.

Update: Outgoing pings are working now, so I went ahead and pinged my colleague right away

Panorama rules

Panorama is currently running and breaking down some alleged war reports, showing what's really behind them - in some cases just staged war games for the media, so they have flashy exploding tanks and soldiers firing wildly to show. And everyone showed them, each with appropriate commentary

Too cool for secure code

An interesting opinion from a Security Focus columnist on the topic of secure software. His basic thesis – the macho posturing of programmers who think their code in particular has no bugs, and the excessive use of low-level languages – is correct. It's really sometimes absurd with what primitive tools programs are created. And then people wonder why bugs occur that have been known for decades – well, of course tools are used that have existed just as long.

What he overlooks in his article, however, is the main motivation of many programmers in the open source area: fun. Many things come into being precisely because someone has fun doing them – but they only have fun because they use the tools of their choice.

From that perspective, we in the open source area will have to live with the fact that there are both bus drivers and fighter pilots among programmers – even if that means that parts of the system have holes from time to time. Because someone who simply enjoys C programming is not motivated by the fact that buffer overflows keep occurring to switch to Perl or Python. Even if that would eliminate entire classes of errors.

At WorldWideKlein - The Daily Durchblick I found the original article.

Uproar over Al Jazeera website

Very dubious the whole thing. But it wouldn't be the first time Verisign messed up with domain changes - so I wouldn't be surprised. Or simply a stupid mistake when changing the domain by the sender - I see that often enough, where people just don't pay attention to what they're doing. But of course it's also possible that some wheeling and dealing is going on to slow down an unwelcome sender.

I found the original article on heise online news.

Esser can hope for damages

I find it quite absurd that someone who mismanaged a company, sold off that company and its employees, and even awarded themselves an extra large bonus for it, and who now faces court proceedings for various offenses, should have good prospects in another lawsuit for damages due to allegedly unjustified suspicion.

At tagesschau online you can find the original article.

Claws Claws Claws

Now that's efficient journalism

At Der Rollberg you can find the original article.

McDonald's scratch-off tickets are against public morals

Not just the scratch-off ticket

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Perl, python

What always amazes me about all this virtual machine talk: why don't these people look at where virtual machines have actually been used for a long time before implementing such things? I mean, Smalltalk has had a virtual machine since its existence and since the mid-80s a highly efficient garbage collector as well as a whole range of advanced features. Same with Common Lisp implementations - many use internally portable code based on virtual machines. There's also corresponding experience with closures and continuations. It's not as if these topics were so terribly new - on the contrary, they're pretty old hat.

But instead of looking at where there are not only working implementations, but also the full source code for study, people prefer to tinker with their own stuff and at best refer to the JVM or the .NET CLR - two of the most pathetic implementations of virtual machines that exist (among other things because their designers make exactly the same mistake and think they know better and don't need to look at the code and ideas of old hackers).

What's really ridiculous is this continuations and closure debate. Both are essential features of Scheme and addressed in all Scheme implementations, because nothing would work without them. And many of them have highly efficient implementations for virtual machines or real CPUs.

People, please look at what others have already done decades ago before you think you have the great new idea. Or don't be too surprised if you're not taken very seriously by those who know these old systems ...

At Squawks of the Parrot there's the original article.

Schröder wants to strengthen the Bundeswehr

What? There's no money for the social system, but there is for stupid weapons games?

The original article can be found at tagesschau im Internet - here.

Rope Teams

Approval and agreement. Especially when these cliques are already enjoying book and record burnings. At MEHRZWECKBEUTEL you can find the original article.

soksoksoksok

Translation from German to English

Hmm. Well, if I look at the text and effects of the story and think about it a bit, I would draw the following conclusion: a Japanese porn site is using weblogs.com and the weblogs announced there for porn spam by mirroring these sites (apparently only part of the pages), removing all references to the original site and replacing them with references to their own content. As a result, Google not only finds the content of these weblogs on the blog itself, but also on the pornified mirror.

As a result, this porn site parasitically uses the content to climb higher in the rankings itself. But since they exchange all the links, the backlinks are lost - and of course nobody links to the porn mirror (okay, nobody except Ben Hammersley). This way they can't exploit the actual ranking factor of blogs - the high linking - for their own purposes.

So all in all it's actually a pretty stupid action, especially since the site primarily targets the Asian region - and who enters German search terms there, for example?

It's of course possible that when using Japanese search engines or restricting search results to the Japanese domain space, these sites climb to the top because of the content, since they apparently use the changes from weblogs.com to also change the mirror pages - and thus pretend to be frequently changing pages that rank higher in search engine scanning and thus possibly also in the ranking.

But does it really work? In any case, I haven't seen any porn spam mirrors in my search results. However, what this shows is that we have to reckon with spam appearing in completely different areas. Comment spam already exists in the blogosphere, but website spam is not yet so common. But it will come.

To what extent one can take legal action against this content theft is unfortunately questionable, since copyright doesn't apply everywhere.

The original article is at Ben Hammersley.com, here.

British broadcasters ban dark songs

I'm thinking with horror about what would happen to our country if the broadcasters decided to do such a stupid thing. A whole day of nothing but folk music? Help!

I found the original article at tagesschau im Internet.

The Last Song of the Sirens

And once again we humans are destroying something that cannot be repaired. No, the fishermen themselves are not primarily to blame - they too just want to live. Like all other people. But for exactly that reason, the dugongs will soon be going the way of the dodo.

Will the world perish because of it? No. Will the world become poorer because of it? Yes! :-(

I found the original article on Spiegel Online: Wissenschaft.

Criticism of Police Operation Against Student Protest

How can you actually recognize violence-prone youth? Do they wear corresponding T-shirts?

Well, exaggerated police responses to demonstrators have a tradition in Hamburg, and Schill is quite a traditional ...

At tagesschau im Internet I found the original article.

New Beetle Family

Not by Volkswagen, but made by Nature. Although I have to admit I'm a bit puzzled when it comes to predatory water beetles that have forgotten how to swim. At first glance, it doesn't really sound like a good development strategy. Here's the original article.

Artifacting

Of course we should focus more on the processes that create software than on alleged metrics for evaluating a project and abstract absolute values that are not tangible. This is a general problem in software development: at universities, the process of creating software itself is presented as unimportant, and only the results of analysis and design are considered important. As if analysis or design were independent of the implementation process, as if they could be directly derived from the former two. In some cases, programming itself is even separated from the normal realm of software development and packed into courses that are required as mandatory credits - but in actual teaching, it is pointed out that analysis and design predetermine the software solution, and you can do the programming in any language anyway. Absurd.

Software creation is accompanied by many components. Of course, analysis and design are among them - and not entirely unimportant ones. Preferably, these two components stand at the beginning of development. But they also accompany development during the process. But just as naturally, the actual implementation - often dismissively portrayed as mere coding, as if you were just converting one formal language into another and could hand it over to some trained monkeys - is an essential aspect that is crucially responsible for success and failure. The tools also play a role, specifically the degrees of freedom they offer, but also the degrees of freedom that programmers actively use in realization, are an essential aspect. This is not about my language being better than your language - that is banal and boring. No, it's about the fact that languages provide means of expression, just as natural languages do. Languages offer models of thinking - with 40 words for snow and ice, you can discuss snow and ice far better, but in the desert, you run out of conversation. The same is true in programming languages - they offer models of thinking that you can use. Or you can rape the language and discuss the meaning of desert with 2 words for sand.

In my opinion, it is infinitely sad that especially in the software engineering movement and in modern software development strategies (perhaps with the exception of the XP movement and the Pragmatic Programmer - but they are also often regarded as outsiders), the programming language is often dismissed as mere tool. My creed: the programming language is more than a tool. It is a way to communicate with the machine. And this communication is certainly not dry or banal or primitive. It is an intellectual challenge and a creative activity. The activity is not coding - it is communicating. The language used reveals the focus that a community has - this also applies to programming language. Its abstraction mechanisms, its degrees of freedom and expressive variety show what directions were envisioned, how the developers who designed this language see the software world. These directions and idea spaces in which a language moves are important - if I go against them in communication, I lack the words. I have to resort to circumlocutions - ugly, inelegant code is often the result.

In my now almost 20 years of programming, 16 of them professionally, I have read a lot of old code. This is essential when you spend 10 years of your working time working on an old inventory management system. And what always struck me was that inelegant code - in the sense mentioned above, but also in its most mundane form as incorrectly structured and formatted code - was almost always the code with the most bugs.

It is often a very clear sign that the failure to understand the culture of a programming language and its ethos is reflected in programming through a failure to understand complex processes - and that leads to bugs.

Ugly language designs then contribute to the fact that programs actually remind one more of curses at the machine than of what they should be (and in my opinion, are): Programs are poems for the computer!

Many programs in this context, however, remind one more of failed limericks with incorrect meter and non-rhyming lines, to which the poet has written 5 pages of explanations on how the discerning reader is supposed to interpret the poem...

At PragDave there is the original article.

CDU avoids clear position on Iraq War

On class, just keep all options open for opportunism...

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

Thank God for the Death of the UN

Horror reading for the night ...

At Telepolis News I found the original article.

Finally! FULL review of Kodak DCS Pro 14n

A very interesting detailed test of the Kodak camera with a few references to the Canon EOS 1Ds.

I found the original article at Imaging Resource News Page.

It's War, Baby

Hehe, not bad what was written in the neighborhood. Evil, but good. Ok, I'll admit it, as a Westphalian I particularly liked the Cologne beer jab

Here's the original article.

Monday 24 March XML-RPC : Add a pointer to XML-RPC for OpenMCL

Hah! If I had had that earlier, I could have written the whole Python Desktop Server in Common Lisp together with the portable allegro store and maybe a port of Woods

I found the original article at CLiki Recent Changes.

Moore blasts Bush

Well, that's what you'd expect when you give Moore an Oscar and put a microphone in his hand. I kind of like Moore, he's always ready to insult the Bush administration.

I also like his answer to reporters' questions about why he did it: Because I am an american And here's the text of his acceptance speech.

I found the original article at Warblogs:CC.

British reporter legend allegedly shot by US Marines

Great. So now these highly precise American soldiers are also shooting at British reporters. But the Americans will surely talk their way out of that one too.

Der Rollberg has the original article.