Smile and SmileLab Home Page. Hmm, maybe not uninteresting for playing around - data analysis and graphical preparation with AppleScript in a scripting environment. Features look quite interesting (diagrams, XML, TCP, HTTP server and client ...) out.
Linkblog - 27.10.2011 - 8.2.2012
Tour de France: Cycling pro Contador banned for two years. Good that this silly fuss (caused only by the Spanish cycling federation acting in a rather absurd manner) is finally over. Even if the revocation of Tour victories only elicits yawns these days (and Armstrong was unfortunately allowed to keep his wins).
python4delphi - Embedding Python within a Delphi application. Tutorials allegedly also work with Lazarus and Free Pascal, and probably rudimentary also under OSX. Could be interesting for one of these crazy projects that keep haunting me.
Lawyers consulted for this research are also surprised that Wulff allegedly made his name available free of charge to a law firm for more than 15 years, without being compensated for it or making arrangements for a later return to the firm. For example, the managing director of a large law firm that employs former government members calls Wulff's account to tagesschau.de "absolutely unrealistic": "That a politician provides his reputation and thus also his contacts out of pure charity is not known to me, lavish fees are usual" explained the lawyer, who does not want to be named.
via Bundespräsident Wulff verschwieg Beziehung zu Geerkens. Sometimes you don't need to write anything more about the news, sometimes they just speak for themselves.
Iñigo Quilez - fractals, computer graphics, mathematics, demoscene and more. Interesting small programs that generate beautiful images and provide some background and mathematical foundations for some of the algorithms. And also a lot of other interesting graphics stuff. Something to browse through for quiet hours and perhaps some inspiration to program one thing or another (where he provides the basics).
Technical Documentation of the Pistos Diaspora forks with a whole lot of interesting features that go beyond the normal Diaspora code. There are some things in there that really interest me, maybe I should think about moving to Amsterdam. Therefore, here's a blog reminder.
FPC New Features 2.6.0 - Lazarus wiki. And further nice changes in FreePascal, especially the new Delphi features will certainly interest one or the other, or also the further expanded ObjectPascal dialect for Cocoa programming under OSX. If now Lazarus switches from Carbon to standard Cocoa and thus also becomes fully 64-bit, it will become really interesting even for normal work with it. In any case, if you don't like Objective-C. Or if you prefer the Delphi-like environment of the XCode environment.
Sony "approves" the launch the new hybrid AlphaNex mount camera (sort of fullframe NEX-7!). It's much more fun when you simply release new cameras instead of finally expanding the system. Somehow you might get the idea that Sony is spreading itself too thin with the new camera models. Sure, they are great - the 5N is really nice and the 7 sounds really good and this one also sounds interesting. But I can't help but notice that the 50/1.8 is still not available in Germany and some other lenses are also not yet available - and even if all the announcements are finally here, there are still big gaps in the setup. A system only truly comes to life when it can be used as a system - otherwise it is at best a kind of "configurable compact". And the system is actually too interesting to be parked on the sidelines. For me, this has led to a reorientation towards my Micro-4/3 equipment, because there is clearly more movement there at the moment (and thus the chance that the holes that bother me will be filled sooner).
charles leifer | Updates to peewee, including atomic updates, select related and basic transactions. The small ORM for Python is slowly growing up and learning transactions, atomic updates and select related. Very interesting for smaller tools because you can simply save the entire infrastructure of a full Django project and copy the ORM as a single Python file.
Linux L2TP/IPSec with iPhone and Mac OS/X clients | PEEN.NET. Helped me install an L2TP/IPSec Gateway on my server that works with the iPhone. This is already a quite nice solution to not shout all data out loud at hotspots. However, due to the deactivated NAT transport in the Ubuntu package (due to security concerns), it is a bit fiddly because you really have to manually compile the strongswan package. Additionally, it's a bit annoying that you always have to manually activate the VPN on the iPhone - it doesn't stay active at the top. What you actually want with VPNs is for them to always be active - because otherwise you end up sending data accidentally over unencrypted and listenable paths.
Distribunomicon | Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!. Interesting article about distributed processing with Erlang and the pitfalls you can fall into (e.g. the note that remote links can produce an event storm if the network fails over which the remote links go).
Samsung Galaxy S Phones Ice Cream Sandwich Update. Well, HTC has already done the same for a series of devices with Gingerbread - just because their stupid overlay story doesn't work with the new system on older hardware (and we're not talking about really old hardware - these are devices that are a year old and usually still under contract with the provider!), there's simply no new operating system. Because this silly overlay story is much more important than current system releases. And not only are the users being screwed - the developers too, because since these devices are not really old, they then have a beautiful jungle of systems to deal with. And users will eventually have to root and install Cyanogenmod or similar if they don't want to live with old (and yes, unfortunately often quite buggy) system releases. The freedoms that Google grants device manufacturers are the biggest problem in the Android world. Bigger than any patent threat that Apple can build. The real enemies of Google's Android vision are neither Microsoft nor Apple, but the device manufacturers and providers. Because they are mentally still in the 90s and put their own control above everything.
Custom iPhone Backs. Nett - wooden backs. You almost wish the glass back would break so you have a reason to install something like this ...
Sublime Text. Hmm, just took a look and was quite surprised to realize that this is quite a nice editor. With various others recently, I thought, okay, nicely done, but not really usable features. But the 10000-feed overview for the currently active source, for example, is surprisingly easy to use - you can actually recognize the structure of your own source and quickly find positions in the source again. And the idea of commands via the command palette is also really useful. And Python plugins sound good too, even if I haven't looked at the API and performance in more detail yet. (Yes, yes, I know, I just talked about how much I like PyCharm and now another editor... it's just the eternal search for perfection!)
Phalanger 3.0 | PHP compiler for .NET. Hmm, completely passed me by - there is a PHP compiler for .NET, which makes PHP a fully integrated .NET language. And this also runs with Mono. And it's so complete that you can run a current Wordpress under mod-mono with it - and according to benchmarks, the performance goes up significantly. Maybe I'll take a look at it in a quiet hour.
web2py. As a free book for online reading or for purchase on dead wood or as PDF. Small, compact web framework in Python - if Django is too powerful, you might want to check this out.
Mac App Store - Clozure CL. One of the nicer free Common Lisp implementations is now in Apple's App Store. CCL is essentially the free and portable version of the old Macintosh Common Lisp, with integration into Objective C frameworks. So it's quite interesting to play around with if you like both Lisp and Cocoa.
Commentpress. I should check this out, it's a comment system that doesn't happen under posts, but in the margins of texts related to paragraphs. Actually a funny idea if you have longer texts. Okay, I almost only post single paragraphs, but I find the integration of comments quite nice - so the rendering of these small speech bubbles in which the comments then expand (at the moment, comments on my site are rather neglected, as they only appear on the detail pages, which are not even linked from the front for my short paragraph posts).
Clay Programming Language. Another new programming language. This one targets system programming (so the C camp) and has some interesting features. Particularly interesting for me is the implementation of Type Inference and Generic Functions - this is one of the more elegant solutions I've seen in recent times.
Thoughts on Python 3. More detailed than some "Python 3 has changed and I don't like it" articles you can find on the web, this article goes into more concrete details about the current problems with Python 3.
Learn Smalltalk with ProfStef. I've already tried Amber, which is Smalltalk 80 based on JavaScript. Now it comes with a node.js-based web server that implements minimal WebDAV and is at least compatible enough with the language that the author could port the ProfStef tutorial - and I've linked it here. Just try playing with a Smalltalk on the website for 5 minutes.
iPhone battery life issues may continue to vex users—even post iOS 5.1. Great, so still no end in sight for the problems. The iPhone 4s is by far the worst Apple product experience for me since the PowerBook 5300 and the Power Macintosh 6500 ... (what good are the features and performance if I have to plug the device into the charging station at least every day, sometimes even more often - that's the opposite of mobility)
EComStation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wow. While we're on the topic of Rexx - OS/2 is still around. Even if it's no longer made by IBM - does the company have licenses from IBM? Or do they just have a huge warehouse full of OS/2 Warp installation media lying around?
Open Object Rexx. Just noted here as a software archaeologist that there is now an open source implementation of Object Rexx. For whatever one would want that.
Using hardware controllers with Lightroom | Valokuvaaja Max Edin. Holy-Moly, that's a great idea. Simply connect a MIDI controller to Lightroom and control all the sliders via rotary knobs. That almost makes you want to get one of these controllers just to try it out.
hangout-disco - Renders a WebGL room with avatars for each participant of a Google+ Hangout, with the possibility to play music, etc. - Google Project Hosting. Fun - something like a virtual Hangout world.
BUSTED! Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps • The Register. Net - Android phones infected with rootkit/keylogger. And if I read that correctly, the software was apparently installed by network providers and/or device manufacturers. Oh, of course, it's just a "diagnostic tool" - just like the various trojans for PCs are only remote maintenance tools ...
Zinc HTTP Components. Interesting project that has set itself the task of providing as complete support as possible for all aspects of the HTTP protocol. Interesting because they start from the protocol definition and not, as in many other cases, the HTTP implementation is only as far as it was necessary for the respective web framework.
I'm a confessed PyPy fan, and with version 1.7, PyPy has done a good job - the memory leaks of version 1.6 seem to be gone, and you can now run long-running processes (like a Tornado web server here in the post) with it. Especially for more complex template engines and situations where you work internally with larger data structures to produce results, it's a real alternative - but remember, PyPy needs more memory for the same work.
GemStone Seaside | About. About Seaside: there is a pretty cool virtual appliance (i.e. pre-chewed virtual disk image) for mounting in VMWare installations with a GemStone/S installation including Seaside and a Squeak as an IDE for development for this system. So if you want to see how the big kids work with Smalltalk, click here to download and try it out.
Security flaw: Fire hazard with HP printers? - Golem.de. Finally able to remotely burn down offices. Surely every hacker dreams of that. Thanks HP for this extremely useful feature.
Python Math | Python for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch - Keep away from the last update, as you can no longer bring in external scripts into the tool, which makes it completely useless. The author promises an editor in an update, but it remains to be seen whether it will be even remotely usable. Of course, this is just one of the nonsensical Apple policies he has implemented - but the way he installs an update and only mentions it in the last line of the update information is really bad. Because if you miss that, you have an currently unusable part on the Pad or Phone.
Fliers Still Must Turn Off Devices, but Its Not Clear Why - NYTimes.com. What always amazes me about this ridiculous request to turn off electronic devices: if they were really so dangerous, why are they allowed on board? As the author correctly states in the article: the authorities panic over small bottles of hand lotion, but the electronic devices are waved through. Nevertheless, this completely ineffective request is repeated over and over again. Cargo cult security.
YaCy - Free search engine software and decentralized web search. I'm a fan of distributed systems, so I should definitely check out this distributed search engine (alongside the distributed overlay network Tor and the distributed social network Diaspora, certainly an important component in a potential "free" network).
Flight data agreement has been negotiated - fm4.ORF.at. And where are our so-called diligent data protection officers of the states and the federal government now? Oh, sorry, they must hate Facebook. It's also much more important to campaign against Like buttons and threaten websites with fines rather than standing up to their own government representatives who draft and enforce such data trading deals.
Welcome to NeuroLab’s documentation! — NeuroLab v0.2.1 documentation. Okay, I don't need it right now (and honestly, I don't know if I will ever need it), but what the heck, I'm just a fan of neural networks. And Python. And therefore, here's a reference to a library that provides a whole range of algorithms from this field for Python.
A human review of the Kindle Fire – Marco.org. Sounds like the Kindle Fire is quite unnecessary. Good thing it's not even available on the German market (I wouldn't give up my Kindle with eInk display though, it's brilliant).
forger the digital sculpting app for iPad. 3D modeling on the go on the iPad following the clay shaping model. Could be interesting for one or the other who wants to bring it over to Blender to Collada to import it into Second Life, for example.
Technical Overview : Dart : Structured web programming. Of all the current "we're reinventing JavaScript" approaches, this one is almost the most interesting - in principle, it is a classic OO language with a C#-like feature set and mapping to JavaScript. But what is interesting about this system: it is designed from the outset to also develop in a browser environment. But not just within a browser, but as its own IDE, which integrates a runtime browser. And the developer of the project is the Newspeak (previous post) developer, who has already shown very interesting ideas for an IDE. Currently, the Dart Editor is much more oriented towards typical IDEs than the more innovative ideas of the database-based IDE in my opinion.
Newspeak » The Newspeak Programming Language. I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm not really linking it because of the language itself, but because of the IDE presented there - it runs within Squeak, but is largely autonomous and looks very interesting to me. From the first glance, I would say that someone is very inspired by the old Apple Dylan - the hierarchical representation of classes and methods, the linking and the general presentation of the source as a kind of hyperlinked database looks very good.
Radius limited searching with the ORM | Neogeo ramblings with a Python twist. Looking at this, there are really nice features in GeoDjango. Unfortunately, I don't currently have a project where I could use it, so just bookmarked for later. The blog also has other interesting articles about GeoDjango.
Pixelmator. For everyone who, like me, feels ripped off by Adobe because they simply pushed PSE 10 as a new product into the App Store instead of following the usual practices there and releasing it as an update for PSE 9 (not that I'm particularly surprised - Adobe has been pulling such stunts with the product for a while now, that there are no more free updates). I just want to point out Pixelmator again. Much cheaper, visually much better structured, much smaller (I find it ridiculous that a photo editor must occupy 2.6 GB on the disk without the possibility for the user to select what they really need). For me, the essential tool is the Healing Brush (since that is the retouching tool that Lightroom does not have in an adequate form), and Pixelmator also has it as a tool and delivers good results for me. PS and PSE are now history for me. Warning, Pixelmator appreciates a slightly more powerful CPU and a bit more memory - with large images, I notice short pauses on my MacBook Air 13" from time to time (not really critical, just noticeable).
LEGO Universe : Game Help - LEGO Universe. Oh no, I haven't even played it (though I bought it, just never logged in due to lack of time) and they're already shutting it down. I would have wished for a bit more patience from them - do companies now expect every idea to be instantly successful? It's a shame anyway, the ideas sounded really good.
Kodak sells Image Sensor Solutions business: Digital Photography Review. That doesn't sound good to me as a Leica M user. I hope my M8 lasts as long as possible and doesn't suffer from the digital component failures that were common with Kodak digital adaptations (I still think about my DCS 520 often).
Pinax. And once again something I think I already had. But for current reasons, it has come back on my radar, and therefore I will take a closer look at it. Something like a peddler's tray for Django projects with a focus on social networks and community sites. Sounds very interesting - a bit like Drupal with Python and on Django (so rather not finished sites but building blocks and framework for creating them).
Panasonic: Systemkamera GX1 mit Dreikern-Bildprozessor - Golem.de. Still a bit thin on information (as usual, but already more about it at dpreview), but Panasonic seems to really want to catch up with Olympus and certainly also Sony. It will be exciting again, the G3 has already shown at Panasonic what the newer generation can do and the GX1 is supposed to top that.
New55 Film. There seems to be a project in the works that wants to reinvent the Polaroid Type 55 film (the one with the simultaneous positive and negative). Their project - according to their own statements - already has successes to show, including providing a correctly exposed positive and negative (with Polaroid, only one of the two was ever correctly exposed). Hmm, if this really takes off, I'll take a few packs of it!
Pixelmator. Cheaper, smaller and visually much more appealing than Photoshop Elements Editor. And it has the Healing Brush (and an interesting alternative, where you simply paint a selection and then heal this entire selection). And supports Lion features - so versions, full screen etc. I got it, PSE will probably be filed under "paying tuition" in the round file.
Adobe Carousel: Mini-Lightroom for iPhone and iPad available. Hmm - from the description, it sounds like what Apple offers with Photostream. Ok, Photostream doesn't have non-destructive changes, and the editing options are significantly larger, but you can also handle this with Snapseed, just like sharing. On the other hand, Carousel has the clear advantage that it is foreseeable when Android and Windows will also be supported - and Android support could be quite interesting if Apple doesn't get the iPhone 4S problems under control (or Deutsche Telekom doesn't get the SIM problems under control - it doesn't matter who is to blame). I would be interested to know if you can bring Lightroom Presets into Carousel and make them available on your devices - that would be quite an interesting thing, because you could use your preferred looks everywhere. And then it would be easy to use it for taking pictures on the go.
Codify – iPad. Hey, looks nice for the iPad - a Lua IDE, where you don't provide the results as your own app, but let them run within the environment instead. Not a bad approach, the old basics were nothing else - and you can play around on the iPad without any additional tools, graphics and multitouch and stuff also work. Maybe exactly the right thing for doodling on the go.