Flat-panel iMac production to be terminated?

Flat-panel iMac production to be terminated? - hey! They can't discontinue that before I get one! Seriously ...

Rürup calls for order

Rürup calls to order - wow, the commission is certainly starting off with full competence. I wonder if anything sensible can come out of it?

Found at tagesschau online.

The Song

Den Song could have easily been played on the radio again at Christmas. Oh well, they really don't make proper Christmas songs like that anymore ...

Rürup Commission: You're in for 900 euros!

Rürup Commission: Get involved with 900 euros! - I'm hoping this is just half-baked stuff that reporters picked up and published in a way that's not quite but almost completely different from what was intended. Because if that's actually the plan, the whole thing becomes absurd. Then we're moving sooner or later toward American conditions and should already start looking for where we want our slums to be...

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Botanical Garden

[

][0] [

][1] Two images from the Botanical Garden Münster from The Witch - Juttas Fotoalben.

Found at The Witch - Juttas Fotoalben.

Lost...

Lost....

 > look You are in a twisty maze of python build dependencies, all covered with inscrutable error messages. There are exits to: N, S, E, W. What do you do? > python setup.py build A compiler goblin rushes out of one of the passages, scribbles on a wall and runs gibbering down another passage. > help There is no help for you. > n You are in a twisty maze of python build dependencies, all covered with inscrutable error messages. There are exits to: N, S, E, W. What do you do? > get coffee

[ richard's stuff : /python] So (s/coffee/apfelschorle/) fühle ich mich auch manchmal. Meistens aber mit Perl, wenn eine Modulinstallation gleich das ganze Perl selber mit installieren will aufgrund seiner Abhängigkeiten ...

Gefunden bei richard's stuff : /python.

There's one thing I'm certain of: Return I will To old Brazil": Kate Bush, from the greatest ...

"There's one thing I'm certain of: Return I will To old Brazil ": Kate Bush, from the greatest of all movies: Brazil.

Simply beautiful. The film. And music by Kate Bush. Unfortunately, we haven't heard from her in far too long. A shame.

Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link.

Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Pevenage leaves Team Telekom

Pevenage leaves Team Telekom - a shame, his team management was really good, even if the Tour victory only worked out twice. Well, with the whole team in transition, it was perhaps exactly the right time. The main thing is that the magenta train keeps going (and more reliably than the railway)

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

19C3: The Linux Xbox Hack and the Future of Palladium

19C3: The Linux Xbox Hack and the Future of Palladium - I'm currently being attacked by perverse thoughts of an X-Box cluster ...

Found at heise online news.

Prominent .de domains: Not paid and blocked

Prominent .de domains: Not paid and blocked - unbelievable. Not that the domains were neglected - given the story, that's no surprise. But the fact that prominent companies actually register their domains through third-level resellers instead of handling it properly themselves through a primary domain provider is really embarrassing. Honestly, anyone who does something that stupid deserves what they get ...

Found at heise online news.

The Raelians

The Raelians - oh yes. Such people are of course absolutely predestined for cloning humans. Completely credible bunch. Sure. (Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link)

Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Schröder announces hard line

Schröder announces tough course - ok, when will ministerial salaries and parliamentary allowances be cut? When will companies be taxed appropriately again? When will those with assets have their wealth taxed again? What does "we're not doing that" mean? Strange. Oh right, tough only for employees. A very peculiar definition of "everyone".

Found on tagesschau on the Internet.

Schröder or Stoiber: Who has the best website?

Schröder or Stoiber: Who has the better website? - wow. That's pretty terrible, what's lurking in the websites of the Chancellor and the candidate. Well, so much for competence with new media...

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The Polaroid 600SE is one of my cameras. Tony is always a bit hard to find, so here's a link to his shop. You'll find lots of interesting information about the system from him. And I can only confirm one thing: the Polaroid 600 SE is a great camera. A photo album full of Fuji 100 B really makes an impression...

Criticism of Fischer from his own ranks

Criticism of Fischer from within his own ranks - Making wars is modern

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Mehdorn threatens with fair-weather traffic

Mehdorn threatens with fair-weather traffic. The railway wants to maintain train service in the future even during extreme weather conditions. With this clarification, the company responded to a threat from railway chief Mehdorn. He had considered in "Focus" to completely stop trains in the future during freezing rain. - could these be the last convulsions of the railway chief? After all, it's quite an unusual situation when a company clarifies statements made by its chief ... Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Photo albums on the OUT e.V. server

Photo albums on the OUT e.V. server now automatically create an RSS feed of new images, so these can be subscribed to in a news aggregator like "Radio Userland". This way you can easily keep track of where new photos have been added, even with photo albums.

The XML URL for the RSS feed can also be extended with a second parameter "&count=NN" to select the number of current images. The default is 10, which should be sufficient. I may make some optimizations to the server software later to keep transfers and CPU load from getting too high.

A few image albums can be seen in my list of subscribed news feeds on the right (e.g. Leicaesk, hugo.f-2.org, the drf image critique pages).

home

Cat jumping - somewhat dark, but still a nice picture from The Witch - Juttas photo albums. You can see the technique in the light arc in the background, she probably moved along. Not so easy to do with a manual focus camera. Found at The Witch - Juttas photo albums.

home

One of my images made from ropes and pulleys. I like this album somehow, even though the images themselves don't convey much meaning, but rather serve the presentation of form and light play. Not every image has to convey a message...

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Matthew Thomas: When good interfaces go crufty. Worth reading. The explicit examples in particular are very interesting. Found via Scripting News.

Found at Scripting News.

Ook!!!

Ook!!!. http://bluesorcerer.net/esoteric/ook.html: "Specially for orang-utans an Ook# .NET Compiler v1.0 has been developed. The syntax only contains one word, namely Ook,... - crazy. Funny, but completely crazy ";->" (found via BloQ).

Ook.

Found at BloQ.

Tales for the 1337

Tales for the 1337 - ROTFL. World literature course for c001 hax0r5

BloQ

BloQ. Jürgen M. is coming back one hundred percent, so the memory bloq is now obsolete :) - Cemetery of the cuddly Jürgens? horror (and I still believe that this time it will really tear him apart)

Found at BloQ.

Günter Grass drums against Bush

Günter Grass drums against Bush - well, the Americans will probably tar and feather him for that. But Grass is right with what he says - Bush is a warmonger. Bush is not interested in a political solution to conflicts, he just wants to impose his stamp and his ideals on the whole world. If necessary, by armed force. But Bush will also have to learn that not the whole world wants to be American according to his example - that doesn't even apply to America itself ...

Found at tagesschau on the Internet.

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From Der Schockwellenreiter:

[Exotic Programming Languages]: Type inference in Icon(

, 192 KB). »The original, interpretiveimplementation of Icon performs rigorous run-time type checking and incurs significant overhead as a result. A new optimizing compiler for Icon, on the other hand, has a type inferencing system that is effective in determining type usage and in eliminating much of the run-time checking that otherwise would be required.« It's a shame that highlights like Icon are now being treated as exotic programming languages. Icon is, after all, the continuation of ideas from Snobol into a programming language with proper syntax. Well, what Icon has suffered from (and still suffers from) is a library that's too simple. While there are modules for every conceivable thing, serious networking libraries, standard protocols, and more advanced features like database connections, GUIs, XML parsers, etc. are unfortunately missing. Icon never got out of the toy stage and the "hack together a quick filter" stage.

The Icon compiler itself is actually old news, it existed back then - and already with type inference. The latter is also old hat; in Lisp compiler construction it's used all the time, and in the realm of functional programming languages (ML, Haskell, OCAML) it's indispensable (though implemented much more elegantly there than in other languages, where type inference can never be complete).

It's a shame, Icon really had the makings of a usable alternative to Perl, Python, and Ruby today.

Found at Der Schockwellenreiter.

Rail operator rejects criticism of crisis management

Railway rejects criticism of crisis management - exemplary response? Ridiculous. In the morning, supposedly all trains in Münster were ready to run through again, and in Osnabrück our visitor had to wait again, for an indefinite period. Then was rerouted via Hamburg. Apparently nothing was moving around Bremen anymore. But from Münster to Osnabrück is only 25 minutes - why didn't anyone in Münster know beforehand that it would only go as far as Osnabrück? Similar situation in the evening, this bungling by the railway was already somewhat embarrassing.

And best of all: in the traffic information on the railway's websites, the current message still only contains changes due to flooding. The entire black ice situation wasn't reflected anywhere on the websites at a single location.

And the railway's hotline number, where you can reach a contact person for timetable inquiries, complaints, etc., wasn't even put on an answering machine, but instead landed on an error signal after a few rings (like the initial jingle of "no connection to this number").

If they consider that exemplary crisis management, I don't want to see what happens when the railway actually has a real crisis...

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

More and more spam - and perhaps stress too

More and more spam - and maybe stress too - well, I still think the approach outlined in the Plan for Spam is the best way to fight spam. I've been running an installation of bmf for a while now, which I actively train, and both the false positives (genuine mail marked as spam) and false negatives (spam that gets through) are minimal. Combined with a simple whitelisting technique and three inboxes (one for guaranteed non-spam, one for possible spam, and one for guaranteed spam), processing my mailbox is quick enough. And I currently get around 70-80 advertising emails a day...

Found at Telepolis News.

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searchebay.py is a small Python script I hacked together that performs searches on eBay, analyzes the results, extracts individual listings, and builds an RSS feed from all the data. This RSS feed can then be used in, for example, MacReporter to monitor eBay auctions without having to constantly search eBay yourself. I find it practical.

The usage is very simple: python searchebay.py +contax +zeiss -ikon -o=contax

would for example search for Contax and Zeiss, filter out all Ikon items, and primarily find Contax lenses by Zeiss.

The result is saved in contax.xml in the public_html subdirectory of the active user's home directory (~/public_html/contax.xml). On Windows, you need to set a HOME environment variable that points to a directory with a public_html subdirectory.

Then run the whole thing regularly on a web server via Crontab or Scheduler and create a corresponding plugin in MacReporter (MacReporter Forge is sufficient for this). Of course, you can also use other RSS-capable news aggregators.

Mac Essentials

Mac Essentials - especially interesting to me is the link at the very bottom to the Ogg Vorbis components for Quicktime! (Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link)

Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

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And for my birthday I got a Manfrotto 681 monopod from Jutta :-)

Freezing rain causes traffic chaos in the north

Freezing rain causes traffic chaos in the north - well, Jutta's relatives were affected too, no trains ran back to Hamburg yesterday evening. So "robber's camp" in the apartment. And this morning to catch the first train to the station. And the poor little mite (Catleya, 2 1/4 years old) had to be torn from sleep after only 5 hours. Whining and sadness for the little soul. Oh well, Christmas is exciting. By the way, it's my birthday today, but that's pretty much lost in all the chaos

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Jacob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes 2002

Jacob Nielsen's Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design 2002 is something every web designer should read. Many of the points are absolutely correct. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules, but the way the web constantly makes the exception the rule is definitely the wrong approach. Designers should think again about why a website is created in the first place and keep the primary purpose of the website in mind - many "design pieces" are simply just design-technical masturbation.

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Hmm. If all goes well, I'll soon have a 50/1.4 lens to match for the RTS III :-)

Gretag facing insolvency?

Gretag before insolvency? - oh no, that doesn't look good. I'm glad I decided on the Color Spyder, Gretag's product could now face some difficulties in the long term. It's a shame anyway, their calibration systems have a good reputation.

Former Federal Minister Krause must go to prison

Ex-Federal Minister Krause must go to prison - and another one from the dark corners of the Union? Or just a lone offender? But there are suspiciously many lone offenders in that bunch ...

Found at tagesschau on the Internet.

Süssmuth calls on Union to compromise

Süssmuth calls on Union to compromise - well, no worries, Rita Süssmuth won't prevail, instead Koch will certainly determine the Union's behavior in the coming time with his flirting with the ultra-right. Disgusting. But it's cheap to make politics out of the misfortune of others, good Germans are not affected by the agitation against asylum seekers and foreigners. All I can think of is that "every person is a foreigner, almost everywhere in the world".

Found at tagesschau on the internet.

Dieter Thomas Heck plans new 'ZDF-Hitparade'

Dieter Thomas Heck plans new "ZDF-Hitparade" - Things you really didn't want to know ... ("Thanks" for the link to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft)

Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Beitrag ohne Titel

For your stylish recovery: > Riedel Wine Glasses. Can I Have A Glass For This? Yes, you can. Riedel make the best glasses in the world (well, with a little competition...), painstakingly suiting each drink to the best shape and size of container, for the benefit of nose, mouth, eyes and hold. A very recent addition, not yet found on their official list, is the bourbon glass, made with expert advise from Fred Noe, of the legendary Noe family, overlords of Jim Beam. Form means content indeed! More's the pity that the great majority of drinks are served in inappropriate glasses and therefore never fully enjoyed. [ MetaFilter]

Although I think that Eisch makes much better glasses, especially the Scotch Malt Whisky glas of the Jeunesse series is superior to all of the multiple other glasses I tried (and I do usually use Riedel glasses for Scotch).

Gefunden bei MetaFilter.

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Tips for Scanning Minox Films

With the Minolta Dimage Scan Pro, there are direct 8x11mm scan masks, and thanks to the high resolution, this scanner is well-suited for Minox film. With the Minolta Dimage Scan Multi II (which I have), unfortunately there is no direct option. But the Universal Holder UH-M1 comes with a filter mask that you can cut yourself, and that should work as well. If necessary, you can also use your own filter mask made from thin opaque plastic or cardboard, which is used in the standard medium format holder MH-M1. However, it is important to use the film mask so that light doesn't come through next to the negative and overexpose the image itself. With the Multi II, it is also important to switch to 35mm multiformat so that it scans with high resolution - with medium format it scans with a wider scan line, but with lower resolution as a result.

Ingo Rammer: "Exchange Server 2000 rocks. Within a couple of hours, I've been able to render my ...

Ingo Rammer: "Exchange Server 2000 rocks. Within a couple of hours, I've been able to render my weblog posts directly from an Exchange public folder." - shudder. If you think you know it all you find that deep in the pits of hell there is even more torture ...

Found at Scripting News.

2005 Thanks TCPA: The Emasculated Computer

2005 Thanks TCPA: The Emasculated Computer - a good (shortened) version of the important article "TCPA: The Emasculated Computer" published in c't 2002, issue 24. Well worth reading, because TCPA concerns every user. (Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link)

Chimera 0.6 browser gets more features

Chimera 0.6 browser gets more features - yes please, please more stability. Because otherwise Chimera is really nice. But the occasional crashes are somewhat annoying.

Found at The Macintosh News Network.

Clouds on Titan

Clouds on Titan - and now the weather forecasts for the moon Titan for the next 7 days. After that, the vacation weather with snow forecasts ...

Found at Telepolis News.

Praise and criticism for strategy paper

Praise and criticism for strategy paper - well great, why do you vote for the government if that's what comes out of it: Praise comes instead from the CDU. The paper has great similarities with the Union's government program. Found at tagesschau on the internet.

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Kick-off X-Mas Roll-Out Memo 1. Since X-mas 2003 is practically already at the door, it's high time to start the Christmas roll-out and prepare the Christmas mailing campaigns just in time.

The kick-off event (formerly 1st Advent) for this year's SANCROS (SANta Claus ROad Show) is already taking place on November 29, 2003. Therefore, the official come-together of the Organizing Committee under the chairmanship of the CIO (Christmas Illumination Officer) was already held on January 6.

For the first time, we... [ Industrial Technology & Witchcraft]

Yeah, always these rushed releases, and by Epiphany the first bugfix release is already due...

Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Feelings are apparently deceiving: Euro is not a 'Teuro'

The feeling is apparently deceiving: Euro is no "Teuro" - well great, so now we all just eat potatoes with turkey schnitzel and lettuce and give up any form of enjoyment, then everything will become as cheap as the wise guys want us to believe.

Found at tagesschau im Internet.

Court: Internet cafés need amusement arcade permits

Court: Internet cafés need arcade licenses - and internet cafes in department stores or city libraries? The arcade license has the consequence that minors are no longer allowed inside (which is also mentioned in the article). Are minors now not allowed in the city library either, because the terminals standing there are also gaming systems? And does Karstadt now have to check IDs in the computer department because the internet cafe is located right in the middle of the computer section? It all sounds somehow a bit half-baked...

Found at heise online news.

Polyhedra Polymath. > Prof. George W. Hart, of the Computer Science Department at SUNY Stony Brook, has an enviable web presence. His Encyclopedia of Polyhedra alone is worth the visit, his geometric sculptures make the nerd in me weep at their beauty, and his trilobite recipe looks mighty yummy.

Damn. This could have been straight from asr, but it's just something I found on Metafilter. But Trilobyte recipe? This would even be strong for asr people ...

Gefunden bei MetaFilter.

Artikel - 20.12.2002 - 2.1.2003

Tips for Scanning Minox Films