Artikel - 2.1.2003 - 14.1.2003

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Hmm. How do you best switch your blogging tool? I'm currently using Radio, but I want to switch to the Python Desktop Server. Logically, I'm writing it for that reason anyway. Now the question arises: what do I do with the Radio blog? I'm porting the postings, that much is clear. But what about links pointing to the site?

I have several options to choose from. I can park the blog and start fresh at a different address. I can simply wipe everything and start over with a new layout and new links. And I can leave both together in the data pot, since most of it doesn't overlap.

The third option is certainly interesting, but on the other hand also quite absurd - old links continue to point to old layouts and old content, the new stuff is stored alongside. The advantage is that no old links break.

I have a fourth option as well: migration pages. Simply create an HTML page with a redirect to the new page for all old pages. That way all old pages continue to work, but appear in the new layout. You'd have to be able to script it. A bit of fiddling, but in principle it should work.

Hmm. Not entirely simple, this whole thing. If anyone has suggestions, please send me an email. Surely someone has switched blogging tools before with a simultaneous new link structure.

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Current Status on PyDS: I won't be writing much more here about it, there's a dedicated weblog for that, or rather two: Hackers Guide to the Galaxy is my new programming-related blog, where of course PyDS and PyCS will be discussed primarily, but also other hacks. And the Python Desktop Server Weblog is the actual PyDS homepage, in English. News about PyDS will appear there (though generally less frequently than in the German blog, I can't be bothered to write myself to death). This blog here will probably — at least in this category — dry up in the long run, or be integrated into the Hackers Guide. We'll see.

Steve Case Definitively 'Gecased'

Steve Case finally 'gecased' - in the news he was called one of the pioneers of the Internet. Nonsense. When Jon Postel died, there was barely any news coverage - and that was a real pioneer of the Internet. Case is just one of the big rip-off artists, and not even the first one at that. AOL refused for a long time to offer users even halfway direct Internet access. Everything was nicely filtered and prepared through the silly colorful happy-world interface. Dumb software for dumb customers (who, according to their own advertising, are too stupid to even program a video recorder). And to this day, AOL's access software and access structure is one of the most absurd things you can have in the field of access providers. Just look at their DSL access technology: PPP over AOL over PPP over Ethernet ...

Found at Dotcomtod.

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The case against crawler918.com - what on earth? A web spider that searches for trademark violations to enable lawsuits and also violates the robots.txt convention? Could easily be something the Freiherr came up with, but unfortunately it's not a joke. Recommendation to admins: block the specified IP range. After all, they're violating web spider conventions, a clear breach of access restrictions.

Found at Advogato.

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The case against crawler918.com. I saw some hits on my web site the other day from machines in crawler918.com. Always curious about new developments in web searching, I thought I'd find out about it. It's not a happy story. [ Advogato]

Nuke them from orbit ...

Found at Advogato.

Sony's new organizer flagship

Sony's new organizer flagship - wow. Now just add a folding knife part from Victorinox and MacGyver would dream about it.

Found at heise online news.

All Death Row Inmates in Illinois Pardoned

All death row inmates in Illinois pardoned - well, an American governor actually had a good idea there. It's surprising that he only forms his assessment of the American legal system and grants the pardon at the end of his term in office. Doesn't he think it would have had significantly more impact if he had done it during his term? But better late than never to spare people from the death penalty. Incidentally, Germany still has the death penalty in the state constitution of Hesse. However, it can no longer be imposed because Article 102 of the Basic Law explicitly states "The death penalty is abolished," and federal law takes precedence over state law. I seem to recall that one of the new federal states also had the death penalty in its constitution, but I think that has already been revised.

Found at tagesschau on the Internet.

Colani Presents Blue Police Uniforms

Colani presents blue police uniforms - ouch. Why do I suddenly have an image in my head of a police officer in a strangely bulging uniform?

But the fact that he wants to disguise the "Greens" as "Blues" is pretty strange. The Greens aren't exactly respectable (ok, Fischer thinks they are, but who believes that anyway?), but the Blues? Well, cheers to that.

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

CDU continues retreat

CDU continues retreat - given the current political situation, I ask myself every time how politicians can even pronounce the word "social" without choking on it. Whether in the context of an alleged "new social market economy" or in connection with the Social Democrats or the Christian Social Union. I think they all deserve an "F" grade.

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Virtual Bird Can Really Sing

Virtual bird can really sing - so a Nokia ant has something going for it

Found at Telepolis News.

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Well, nothing much going on here today. No wonder, I'm currently hacking away heavily. So don't be surprised if not much happens here, I only scan my newsfeeds once a day quickly and post what catches my eye, or not.

What am I hacking on? More info coming soon (there are already a few teasers in the programming category).

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Under http://muensterland.org/users/0000006/ there's one of the first weblogs with PyDS. Yep, it's now round. At least for an alpha.

CSU exudes confidence

CSU brimming with self-confidence - yeah, sure, the CSU with leadership aspirations in the Union. Oh wow. Well, at least the Republicans can dissolve themselves then, because to the right of the CSU - is there anything left that doesn't conflict with the law?

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Sharon loses with voters

Sharon loses support among voters - no worries, the war on terror is a wonderful way to distract from domestic problems. It works for Bush too, nobody minds anymore that the guy is simply devoid of any form of knowledge or competence ...

Found at tagesschau im Internet.

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Another update on PyDS: rendering is pretty much complete, categories work fully, settings are manageable, tools can hook into the settings and everything runs smoothly. And the upstreamer logged into the community server for the first time. Of course, actual upstreaming is still missing, some time-consuming tasks are to be outsourced to separate threads and naturally all the cloud information needs to be integrated into the renderings. And then come the other tools (Stories, NewsAggregator, etc.). But so far it's going well.

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Political consultant Dick Morris wants politicians to spam. "E-mailing is the new front of political campaigning," he writes after spamming one-fourth of all residents in Arkansas last fall. [Workbench]

This deserves no comment. Only politicians and marketing guys can be that stupid.

Found at Workbench.

Möllemann is back

Möllemann is back - Out! Shoo! Yuck! Back, bad Möllemann! Wow, does he really want to meddle in politics again, where does something like that happen.

Found at tagesschau on the Internet.

Doctors want to close on Wednesdays

Doctors want to close on Wednesdays - it's astonishing how everyone keeps talking about how we all need to do our part to save the social system, but apparently everyone only means the others, never themselves. I've always found the Hartmann Association suspicious; they were far more concerned with securing their own interests than with the health system, but it was never shown as openly as it is right now.

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Konica and Minolta Merge

Konica and Minolta merge - hmm. This could get interesting, especially if Minolta puts old know-how into the Konica Hexar RF. Plus, something could happen in the digital sector too. Let's wait and see.

Found at tagesschau im Internet.

OpenOffice for Mac OS X

OpenOffice for Mac OS X - ... but the project website already shows promising screenshots. macOSXrumors has taken a first look at the - generally eagerly awaited - OpenSource office suite. Yeah, I'm also very much looking forward to it. It's silly to have to start the X Server just for an office package. Eventually Jutta can finally do her office work on her iBook too and I won't have to hear any more stories about alternatively using her Linux computer or Apple Works. Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link.

Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Distributed computing to crack Xbox Public Key [Update]

Distributed Computing to Crack Xbox Public Key [Update] - I just can't help but smile a little at that.

Found at heise online news.

bzero 0.14 available

bzero 0.14 available - now with Unicode support (ok, UTF-8 support, but that's close enough). Hmm. Now I probably need to plan that for PyDS as well? We'll see. His approach is quite simple - convert everything to &#xxx; format, which allows you to stream the result upstream without problems. Should be able to integrate that in a few places (getFirstValue, getAllValues), then that should do it.

Speaking of PyDS: categories are now there, generally the weblog is mostly complete, but the rendering part is still a bit behind - I've added some features (specifically categories and onhome) that are still missing there. And of course I still don't have upstreaming. Which limits PyDS somewhat. Found at Second p0st.

Beitrag ohne Titel

Rich Bowen: "After putting me on hold for a lengthy period of time, apparently talking to other experts, he came back and told me that the problem was beyond their expertise to deal with. He encouraged me to read the .htaccess file tutorial on the Apache web site at apache.org. Now, for those of you who don't already know, the reason that this was so very surreal is that I wrote the .htaccess tutorial on the Apache web site."

One to bang your head on the table over. Reminds me of the Korn-Microsoft debate. Lusers. [via Workbench]

Gefunden bei Workbench.

LLGPL Implementation of an XML-RPC Server and Client for OpenMCL

LLGPL Implementation of an XML-RPC Server and Client for OpenMCL - cool. I would have liked to see this come up a bit earlier, perhaps I would have written it together with the portable web server PyDS sooner as CLDS. Hmm. Sounds like a project I might still tackle.

Found at lemonodor.

"Monster von Aramberri": Erste Knochen in Karlsruhe

"Monster of Aramberri": First Bones in Karlsruhe - it would be nice if casts of the bones were assembled into a skeleton and exhibited in Karlsruhe (or elsewhere in Germany). Such a 50-ton monster would certainly be impressive to see.

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

X11 for Mac OS X by Apple

X11 for Mac OS X by Apple. Rootless, directly integrated and supposed to use Quartz. Hmm. The question is, does it already run on 10.1.5, or only from 10.2 onwards? Could be interesting, XDarwin is painfully slow and despite Oroborsx not really integrated. And occasionally I do need an X-Server after all, especially when I tunnel to my servers at the office.

First installation attempt failed anyway, the updater starts, but it won't unpack the file. Nothing, nada. No response. Strange. Maybe someone with 10.2 could test that?

Designated ECB Chief in Court

Designated ECB Chief in Court - perfect candidate. And the French really wanted to push this through? Well, Duisenberg already offered an extension ...

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Clement wants change of direction in economic policy

Clement wants shift in economic policy - yeah, great strategy, having two strategies right away. Best of all two that are incompatible with each other, then the chancellor can express a clear maybe again. Good grief, don't they have anything in their heads?

Found at tagesschau im Internet.

Microdrive gets a major capacity boost

Microdrive gets a major capacity boost - neat, 4GB Microdrives. Not only interesting for photography (although of course having larger storage media is a blessing for current high-end digital cameras), but also for example for the OpenBrick. Cool.

Found at Imaging Resource News Page.

Package metadata repository for Python

Package metadata repository for Python - very nice, a kind of CPAN for Python. It's about time, because hunting down packages - for smaller packages - can already be annoying.

Found at Python owns us.

Donut discovered in space

Donut in space discovered - please with coffee. And a little icing on top

Found at tagesschau on the Internet.

Polaroid Dust and Scratch removal

Polaroid Dust and Scratch removal - a free utility from Polaroid that's supposed to make it easy to remove dust and scratches. In addition to normal use, there's also a plugin mode for Photoshop included. Worth taking a look at (I haven't tried it yet). By the way, the installer is pretty dumb - it searches all mounted volumes for plugin folders, but of course can't find "additional modules". Rarely such a dumb idea, especially with my 120 GB Firewire disc ...

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First test results with the Polaroid filter: not bad, it determines its own masks based on damage markings and removes elements in that area by blending with the surroundings. So exactly what you need. Ok, if I open an image of several people and the filter then wants to remove someone's glasses as scratches, that's a bit overzealous, but the idea itself isn't bad in principle. I think I'll give that a try soon when I scan dusty negatives again.

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Sometimes Python messes with me. Today for example: Initializers of optional function arguments are unfortunately evaluated at the time of compilation! So if you define a now=time.localtime(time.time()) as an optional parameter, you shouldn't be surprised if now is only the time of the last module compile, and not really today. I'm still not sure if I see that as a bug or a feature.

New rdflib release

New rdflib release - I should take a look at that, because I could use that for the aggregator in PyDS.

Found at Second p0st.

OpenMCL Now LLGPLed

OpenMCL Now LLGPLed - hmm, could this be the first sign that someone will take it and build a decent GUI around it to commercialize it? If the price were significantly lower than MCL, that would be interesting to me.

Found at lemonodor.

Masturbating Orangutans

Onanierende Orang-Utans - what is it with all these orangutans at the moment

Found at Telepolis News.

Easy Things Should Be Easy

Easy Things Should Be Easy - the power of high-level libraries.

Gefunden bei PyLog.

Friday 3 January AllegroServe : 3 edits

Friday 3 January AllegroServe : 3 edits - hmm, has it quietly become OpenMCL-compatible? That would be something worth doing, maybe playing around with OpenMCL again. Perhaps a parallel implementation of PyDS as ClDS? Or at least parts of it?

PyDS is making nice progress, by the way, a simple weblog tool is already there, but rendering and upstreaming are still missing. But the infrastructure is now largely complete. Let's see, once I have rendering and upstreaming done, I could actually take my stuff down from Radio and import it into PyDS.

I could handle news with AmphetaDesk for now and just patch the template so I can post entries to PyDS. That way I could do everything I do today. Just uglier.

Found at CLiki Recent Changes.

Telephone Game

Telephone Game

"It seems the editors of DigiTimes confused iMac manufacturing with the production of TFT displays from Apple's Studio Display line." - Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link, so I don't need to panic buy. Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Railway company sues Pro Bahn in court

Deutsche Bahn sues Pro Bahn in court - instead of complaining in court, Deutsche Bahn could simply fix the problems and adapt its pricing system to match its advertising promises ...

Found at tagesschau online.

20 Years of Mouse-Controlled Computer: "Lisa" Celebrates Birthday

20 Years of mouse-controlled computers: "Lisa" celebrates its birthday - oh well, I would certainly like to have one for my collection. But they do go for a bit of money on eBay ...

Found at tagesschau on the Internet.

MacBird Open Source Release

MacBird Open Source Release - well, it's been sitting around for three years and I'm afraid no one will pick up the ball. That's a shame really, because a GUI is what Frontier/Radio is still missing. The web interface isn't always optimal and the built-in editors are usable for the predefined types, but not necessarily always ideal for real applications. OK, Dave lives in the Outliner, but there are people who still want classic applications

Found at Scripting News.

The Cultured Orangutan

The Cultured Orangutan - interesting, the orangutan apparently has a kind of transmitted culture that can vary by region.

Found at Scientific American.

home

Two cat photos (scanned from old negatives) from The Witch - Jutta's Photo Albums. Found at The Witch - Jutta's Photo Albums.

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Navigation error - someone could have given them a GPS receiver as a Christmas present ... (Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft)

Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

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I'm currently working on a larger Python project that could potentially replace Radio for me. We'll see how it goes. The infrastructure is already in place — I simply borrowed from PyCS and used the same modules. Next, I'll do some fine-tuning on the infrastructure, then comes template integration and themes. After that, I'll create the first tools. I'm curious to see how it turns out, but based on my previous Python projects, I'm actually quite optimistic. Python and all the available libraries are a fairly reliable tool — so I won't end up in the rain halfway through just because some annoying library starts acting up again...

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Cyclone 0.4 released - I talked about it with Kai at the regulars' table yesterday, and today I see the update. Ok, Kai said it means typhoon, but I think cyclone is meteorologically close enough (Found at Lambda the Ultimate)

Should I take a look at it? I've been quite happy with "Pyrex" and "Python" so far, but I still need the obligatory new programming language for this year that I want to explore ...

Found at Lambda the Ultimate.

Pornography or web radio patent?

Porn or Web Radio Patent? - ouch. A patent issue like this can have serious consequences, especially for things like the Quicktime Streaming Server (okay, Apple is behind that, they have less of a problem with it) or other open source streaming solutions (Ogg streaming for example). Internet radios would - if this patent goes through on a larger scale - probably only be feasible from the free world, no longer from regions bogged down by patent disputes like the States.

For Industrial Technology & Witchcraft this could potentially be relevant too, after all they want to set up a radiolog soon.

Found at Telepolis News.

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CBS Marketwatch: AOL said ready to boost blogging - ouch. Then the weblog infrastructure servers (I'm thinking of weblogs.com, Technorati, Blogstreet, blo.gs, the Blogs ecosystem and all the others) September ... (Found on Scripting News)

Found at Scripting News.