RapidScript - I've been playing around with RapidWeaver again (for some purposes, creating static websites is quite interesting) and stumbled upon this plugin. Nice idea, you can generate page content via AppleScript, which is directly embedded in the RapidWeaver database. This makes pseudodynamic content possible - generated from external sources, but still static output. I found this in this quite nice thematic list of RapidWeaver plugins. The list is definitely more useful than the big grab bag at RealMacSoftware, which has no thematic grouping.
Linkblog - 15.6.2011 - 4.7.2011
...and next door the reactor site is on fire - and nobody cares because it's France, nothing bad can happen there and why should one report on reactor fires in front of one's own doorstep when there is a ridiculous operetta wedding. That's what they call quality journalism.
"We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files. By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us and those we work with to provide the Services worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works such as translations or format conversions of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service. This license is solely to enable us to technically administer, display, and operate the Services. You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission." - weil sicherlich wieder haufenweise halbinformierter Unfug geschrieben werden wird, nachdem Dropbox die ToS leichter lesbar und vervollständigt hat, hier der wichtige Punkt nochmal rausgegriffen. Nicht dass ich mich der Illusion hingebe das würde die halbinformierten Unfugposts verhindern, aber wenigstens kann ich dann einfach auf die passende Stelle zeigen.
Ubuntu Cron error - Module is unknown - after libpam upgrade. Argh!!! That really caught me off guard - I didn't notice it for a whole month, so the Metaeule wasn't updated during that time, the cron was just gone. Damn it. I only realized today to look for the cause outside the Eule and then stumbled upon the log messages. Now everything should work properly again. I hope.
Digital cameras: Ricoh buys Pentax - Golem.de. Hmm, this could really become interesting, as both Pentax and Ricoh have a lot of interesting ideas. And Pentax also brings the necessary photographic know-how (which is also present at Ricoh, but rather at an "amateur" level). The question then, of course, is what will happen to things like the Pentax Q and Ricoh GRX - they are at least overlapping in their offerings.
Downfall scenario. Never trust an infographic you haven't faked yourself - that's probably what the manager magazine thought when presenting the "evidence" that Apple is investing less in research and thus jeopardizing its future viability - while R&D expenses in Cupertino have increased, but in the representation in relation to the even more increased revenue, it then looks appropriately inappropriate. Only blogged here because probably again a lot of people will feel the need to tell me with the graphic why Apple would be bad.
Opa: Advancing web development to the next generation. I think I mentioned this in the old blog, but what the heck - now the code is on github and under an open source license. And the entire project is not just something that has recently come out - it has 10 years of research behind it, the people really know what they are doing. The idea is cool (and has already been adopted by others as well): a language from which all layers of web applications are generated, including JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and the backend. All of this with type safety and corresponding checks and, for example, resulting security against injections and XSS attacks. And the language runs on OCaml underneath, which is also not the worst language. I should really seriously deal with this, especially since distributed installation comes along with it - and thus a far easier scalability is given than with many other approaches (the one from OPA reminds in a certain way of the one from Erlang-based systems). Oh, and web applications are then simply just a single executable - and not gigantic directory structures with thirty-nine XML files (or YAML files) to customize.
SymPy. Symbolic mathematics with Python directly in the Python shell. Together with NumPy for matrix operations and SciPy for various other scientific functions, Python becomes quite a respectable mathematics system. Nothing really new except perhaps SymPy itself.
PyPy Status Blog: Global Interpreter Lock, or how to kill it. Wow, that sounds good - the PyPy project wants to mitigate the GIL through STM (Software Transactional Memory) - and has quite an interesting approach for that. Some things are only possible through PyPy, because the corresponding infrastructure for code transformations is available there, which is missing in CPython.
Great Exhibition faces London 2012 legal action. Just when you think you've seen it all, something even more ridiculous comes along - like the organizers of the 2012 Olympic Games threatening legal action against the organizers of an art exhibition in London 2012, because they (the Olympic organizers) have a trademark on 2012.
jsPlumb for those who want to display diagrams (i.e., connected graphs of objects) and need to fiddle with them to see them better or to structure them. Or simply because it's funny and cool.
Paper.js is a graphics engine for the Canvas element. It all looks very nice and has a lot of features. It's impressive what you can do with JavaScript in the browser - and this could be interesting for projects, unlike booting Linux. It all comes from the Illustrator environment and is oriented towards Scriptographer, a plugin for Illustrator with which you can program graphics elements in JavaScript.
Installing gitorious on Ubuntu 10.04. Hmm - I already have an Apache2 with SSL running for my Wordpress administration. And I've also set up a DAV server for document synchronization (in case MobileMe is replaced by iCloud and loses the iDisk in the process). Besides, it's sensible anyway, because the iDisk is so slow. I could also install my own Gitorious there and put my own repositories on it. Just blogged about it, but I should really take a closer look at it.
Sync BitBucket and GitHub - Ramanas Blog. If I ever want to switch, or simply want to provide repositories for both git and bitbucket, this could be helpful. Also just to convert repositories.
Issue Bucket. There is also a BitBucket client for iOS, but it is riddled with iAds and unfortunately very limited in features. And it looks more like a finger exercise in surface design - very plain, one could almost say "loveless". But at least you can get to the most important things to look at and it costs nothing.
iOctocat is your GitHub companion for the iPhone and iPod Touch. GitHub is becoming increasingly interesting - there is also an interesting GitHub client for iOS. And it is Open Source.
NancyFx/Nancy. Nancy is already much closer to Sinatra or Scalatra, but is actually based on C# - but maybe you can also just write modules in F# there, the interoperability of the two languages is very high (comparable to Scala and Java).
Bistro. This is now a web framework for F#, inspired by Django (among others). Unfortunately not as lean as Scalatra or other micro-frameworks, but perhaps still worth a look.
scalatra/scalatra. This is something like Sinatra, but not for Ruby but for Scala. It has direct support for Scalatest and also offers some nice features and DSLs to quickly and simply get to the result - could be interesting especially for creating web services in Scala.
The Larch Environment. Worth a look - a visual programming environment for Python. Interesting detail: objects are not just displayed textually, but also graphically represented via a dedicated mechanism - sounds a bit like output-recording from CLIM. Additionally, the whole thing is structured more like an interactive document - comparable to various mathematical systems (e.g., Mathematica or Maxima). Unfortunately, it's not based on the standard Python environment, but on Jython - so JVM as the runtime underneath.
I should check this out - it allows you to run AppEngine programs on your own servers that are based on Django (the AppEngine APIs are emulated using Django means). Certainly better than using the AppEngine Dev-Server directly.
DocumentClouds VisualSearch.js. Interesting JavaScript library that implements a quite powerful search field - you can search for normal texts or for facets of the data (i.e. specific fields such as title or author) with automatic completion for these fields. This is particularly interesting for document search in semi-structured data sets and the presentation in the browser is nicely done. Good compromise for search fields into which you do not just want to put simple text searches like Google, but possibly also restrictions on metadata, without the user having to know all the options for metadata by heart in their exact syntax.
Journey North: Monarch Butterfly - what actually happens in the pupa from which an insect emerges? Was a question that always fascinated me as a child - the caterpillar digests itself and forms the nutrient solution for the formation of the butterfly from individual cells.
The Online Photographer: The Pentax Q System. Pentax jumps into the pool of small system cameras, but adds a twist: just as they once responded to the half-frame format with an 110 cassette system camera, they now deliver a compact system camera. Mini chip with interchangeable optics - and according to the lineup of lenses that will be available at launch, it's a bit more geared towards a fun camera. However, the 110 Pentax was also, on the one hand, a fun camera, but on the other hand, quite serious for some purposes - because at Pentax, even the fun is well crafted. Therefore, the Q-System could well be interesting for one or the other.
SourceTree | Mercurial and Git GUI for Mac OS X. That looks really good - although 45 euros is not exactly cheap. However, it can handle Git, Mercurial, and Subversion, so maybe I should take a look at it (there is a free trial version). Update: Short test by me and I really like it - you can integrate external diff tools (Changes is unfortunately only supported as a diff, not directly as a merge) and always have the same interface, regardless of which server is behind it. This takes away some of the pain of Git. Version tools are included internally, so you don't even need to have the command line versions installed. Looks really interesting.
GitHub for Mac. I'm a convinced Bitbucket user because of Mercurial, but this thing looks really good, you could easily switch to git just because of the interface. I'm often a mouse pusher and optics clicker underneath it all.
traits.js - Traits for Javascript. Interesting experiment for JavaScript - Traits offer better composition than classic classes and more structure than JavaScript's prototype-based OO - and here the features of Traits are well mapped to the existing JavaScript features (e.g., objects are mapped via closures). The disadvantage, as with all such language extensions, is that you can usually work with them yourself, but other libraries do not use them and thus the advantage in projects that heavily rely on third-party libraries is rather minimal.
Technical Discovery: Speeding up Python NumPy, Cython, and Weave. Interesting for number crunchers who don't necessarily want to switch to PyPy, but want to stay in the normal CPython world. Provides a quick comparison of NumPy, Weave, and Cython.
Circus Ponies NoteBook for iPad - Take Great Notes. Hmm, Circus Ponies NoteBook is one of the most powerful notebooks (with built-in outliner) on the Mac - but the reviews for the iPad version are not so great. And there is no decent sync - I really wonder why productivity app manufacturers don't just initially integrate the Dropbox library, because without usable sync, the apps are not really usable.
OmniOutliner for iPad. Wow! Why didn't I notice? There's now an OmniOutliner for the iPad! OmniOutliner is my preferred outliner on the Mac, among other things because it can be configured in many ways very similar to the Frontier Outliner (especially splitting a point with a simple Enter is something that surprisingly is not supported directly by many outliners - but essential for me when I want to write texts in the outliner). Unfortunately, only cumbersome iDisk import/export instead of a usable Dropbox sync.
Leos Home Page. Leo is an outliner and data organizer - that's nothing special at first. But this one is written in Python and portable (everywhere there is PyQT, at least in version 4.9, older ones also had Tkinter as a surface library). Can also be used as an IDE for Python.
Brennender Berg – Wikipedia. Highlight of Saarland. Some have Roman settlements, large ports, huge moors or gigantic ship lifts - in Saarland, a mountain has been burning for 250 years. That's something too.
Mozilla Firefox Add-on Builder and SDK - for creating extensions with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. The Builder is a web-based IDE and the SDK provides a whole stack of APIs for programming extensions.
Firmware 04 für Sony NEX Kameras - if you have one of these cameras, go ahead, download and install. The art filters are at best funny (funny in the Hipstamatik sense), but what really rocks is the focus peak. The edges with the strongest contrast are then optically marked in the image, which enables really trouble-free manual focusing. This might not be important for AF lenses - but for those who, like me, want to use manual lenses via adapter, it's simply brilliant. After installation, I already played around with the Zeiss 50mm 1.4, which works really well. It gets really exciting when I then put the NEX-3 behind my Contax macro equipment.
Python/Harmattan - MeeGo wiki. Very interesting in connection with the N9: a complete (and they really mean it - almost all parts of the system are accessible) API for MeeGo in Python. With this, you can program the entire phone completely in Python and also publish the applications created in this way in the Ovi Store (Nokia's variant of the AppStore). Nokia already had something similar with Symbian in the form of Python S60 and the tablets under the predecessor of MeeGo, so good Python support has almost become a tradition with them.
Nokia N9 first hands-on!. Ok, it's a MeeGo phone and after Nokia's cooperation announcement with Microsoft no one really knows where MeeGo (Nokia's Linux-based phone system) will go, but the N9 is absolutely cool. And MeeGo has underneath the Linux system that was developed with the N770/N800/N810 tablets and the N900/N950 phones (N950 is the developer version).
gcc python plugin and static analyser for CPython sources. In a very strange way cool. I mean, seriously: who looks at gcc and thinks spontaneously "oh, there I should embed a Python interpreter"? Yes, I know, the answer is "the author of this plugin". Strange things some people do ...
Dirty lens article. Afraid of scratching the front lens of your camera or worried about a bit of dust or fingerprints? Read the article, check out the example pictures. Or also this article here ("scratches"? I'd rather call that "destroyed"). And next time, just keep taking photos, because often it turns out better than you fear.
Publishers file lawsuit against Tagesschau-App. Wow, the guys from the executive floors of the digitally failed publishers are really going off the deep end now. Now, the Tagesschau-App for iOS is allegedly partly to blame for the failure of their absurd and half-baked business models on the internet. How about, for once, publishers move their ass into the digital world and actually participate, instead of constantly complaining? But that would be work, better to whine and try to impose their pathetic remaining ideas on users through legal action. I, for one, find it politically scandalous that these incompetent pseudo-managers always manage to get their way through their lobby with politics and far too often get their way - and we fee-payers have our services cut because all that blows through the publishers' heads is empty wind over barren deserts.
The story of the Gömböc. About strange geometric objects and self-righting turtles. There are so many things in the world ...
LR/Blog – Export directly from Lightroom 2 to your Blog!. I didn't have this for some reason, but now I do. With this, you can export photos directly into the WordPress media library to use them in posts. Could help me in cases where I don't want to take the detour via Flickr.
A What Is Inside A Cat. A very interesting document that describes the implementation of Wraith Scheme in great detail, specifically also the implementation of parallel processes.
SparkleShare - Sharing work made easy. Badly blogged, but this looks quite promising at first glance - a simple Git server is used. Unfortunately, it seems to be based only on SSH Git, not HTTPS, at least I don't see anything about it in the docs - HTTPS would be more universal (even if passwords would then have to be stored). What is still missing is an iOS or Android client (Android is apparently in the works), but OSX is already supported. It seems that the most activity in the open-source alternatives to Dropbox is happening here - but I'm still wondering how the server behaves with massive file additions and deletions - for example, I have the current raw photos of the last few months in my Dropbox. A "raw" Git repository grows very quickly to unimaginable sizes ... (and you probably also have to do regular packs so that changes to DNG files don't blow up the repository). One small detail on the side is still important: SparkleShare uses a public IRC server for synchronization messages - so even with self-hosting, all clients are on this server and exchange their triggers via it. Should be kept in mind, because this would be a classic attack vector (and if the IRC server fails, the self-hosted system also hangs). SparkleShare is open source, so you can certainly also plug in your own IRC server here and simply use your own packages.
Healthcare reform: Dental treatments are set to become expensive. Great idea, to give one of the medical professions with the highest incomes an extra boost. Because, it doesn't matter if you don't have any teeth in your mouth, you can still whistle La Paloma. And soup is much cheaper than solid food anyway.
SONY PRS-505 Firmware-Update + Customizing - MobileRead Forums. Important for the Russification of my old PRS 505 - after that it now works completely in Russian and with Russian eBooks. And it wasn't that complicated after I found it. The Russian menus only appear after you have gone to the Locale settings once. And don't forget the unicode font so that the menus and books can be displayed at all. And generally convert books to LRF, not to ePub - for incomprehensible reasons, ePub still shows garbage when displaying Russian books. Calibre easily converts to LRF.
Bundeswehr-Dozent: Plagiator gives back his doctorate - at least he's not being as silly as the last cases (especially Koch-Mehrin with her "but everyone already knew I copied" defense). But this idea that a revoked doctorate has no effect on a lecturer's career I find quite strange ...
The Postillon explains: What can the National Cyber Defense Center do?. Awesome. Simply awesome. Next, they'll buy a computer... (I doubt it, though, probably its purchase will be canceled for budget reasons)
Honeybees Might Have Emotions | Wired Science. Pessimistic bee is pessimistic!
Skulpt. A Python implementation in JavaScript, client-side. Also in the browser. Nice hint that you shouldn't even try to crash the server, you would only stub your own toe ... (otherwise, this is probably one of the many projects "just because it can be done")
Maxima. Nice book with many examples of how to use Maxima. Since the Schockwellenreiter just wrote about Maxima again and I liked the wxMaxima interface in his post quite a bit (and unlike some other programs, it also looks good on OSX), I will probably play around with it a bit. Especially since it is much slimmer than Sage (even if it of course can do much more, as it integrates many other math packages).