ifttt / About ifttt. Sounds interesting: a simple event-action mechanism on the web that can connect various channels (Facebook, Twitter, Email, and so on) with actions - for example, create a tweet when someone tags you in a picture on Facebook or something like that. Although you probably have to provide your login details for some services, which you shouldn't necessarily do for every service ... (still in beta, access only by invitation) - a few more details about the motivation and the ideas behind it on the IfThisThenThat blog.
Linkblog - 15.4.2011 - 4.5.2011
Scala 2.9.0 RC3 | The Scala Programming Language. Hmm, especially the parallel collections sound interesting - so to speak map/reduce for multicore on local data structures.
jQuery: » jQuery 1.6 Released. Regarding jQuery - a new version has been released. I personally find this .attr vs. .prop change somewhat unpleasant - it could bite me in a few places where I work directly with input fields (various widget code in a rather heavy Django application). Of course, it's great that it gets faster - faster is almost always good.
jgrowl. Definitely check it out, because our hand-knitted notifications are just not as nice and stable. jGrowl makes a much better impression, and as a jQuery plugin, it should also not collide with our jQuery codebase.
the m8 metadata project. Information about the EXIF metadata in Leica M8 image files. Very interesting, especially because of the information about the estimated aperture - the M8 has the mysterious blue dot for this, which is used to determine the ambient light and then, by comparing it with the TTL measurement, an approximate aperture is derived. I had already wondered why in Lightroom my pictures had meaningful aperture values ...
inotify - get your file system supervised. Bookmarked for later - a daemon that automatically triggers scripts on file events. This could be used to implement automatic image imports via upload from Dropbox, for example.
Ettenheim: Awarding of the Small Art Prize: Georg Schramm causes a scandal in the Europa-Park. Well, Georg Schramm is just a cabaret artist with guts and not such a softie like the gentlemen and ladies in the Europa-Park would probably have preferred. But as they say: those who can't handle the heat shouldn't be in the kitchen. You don't invite Georg Schramm for friendly, nice words. He is the personification of anger. And as such, he speaks for many (and I am one of them).
UNO III Streetbike at Firebox.com. Transformers are here! We live in the future! I already have trouble imagining sitting on a motorized two-wheeler, so I'd rather say thank you and pass on such a vehicle - but it looks cool.
Nubrella.com. Ok, looks weird, but could be really interesting for some situations. As often as I've seen people in Münster riding bikes with umbrellas in the wind, something like this would actually improve traffic safety.
PyPy Status Blog: PyPy 1.5 Released: Catching Up. Yay! PyPy is now on par with CPython 2.7! And again a few additional performance improvements. Moreover, the interface for CPython extension modules (i.e. those not written in Python) has been improved, first successes are Tkinter and IDLE.
spock - The Chicken Scheme wiki. If Dylan doesn't fit on JavaScript, how about Scheme? What's interesting here is the connection to Chicken Scheme - Chicken Scheme is one of the more interesting Scheme implementations in recent times that specifically focuses on integration into normal system environments (FFI and easy linking with C libraries), so this also lets us expect a bit from Spock in terms of JavaScript. And the documented functions already look quite good - not just a toy implementation, but apparently already a lot of functionality.
ralph. And if JavaScript under Flusspferd becomes too stupid for someone, they can simply install Ralph and then have a Dylan-like Lisp that compiles its function definitions to JavaScript. For whatever reason one would want that, maybe just because it's possible.
Flusspferd - CommonJS platform | Javascript bindings for C++. For those who want to play with JavaScript completely outside the client world, Flusspferd might be interesting. It is a REPL for JavaScript and various JavaScript libraries (which are oriented towards CommonJS).
PDP-11 emulator. In JavaScript. Runs Unix System 6. Yes, just like that, with disk access and all the well-known programs from back then. Because there aren't enough strange things already.
Paper Airplanes HQ. Paper airplanes. That's all.
kiorky/spynner. Wow, that sounds really interesting - a programmatic (i.e., without a user interface) web browser based on QtWebkit as a Python extension. The advantage? Since a full web engine is underneath, you can use all the features of the web browser - for example, client-side JavaScript and all the other things used in web applications. This could be very interesting for automated testing of web applications - or for scraping more complex websites.
IgniteInteractiveStudio/SLSharp. Net - Write GLSL Shaders in C#, the IL code is then automatically loaded onto the GPU. High-Performance-Computing anyone?
IronScheme. Interesting - a Scheme for .NET. And unlike some dead projects I found, something seems to be happening here. Ok, I probably tend more towards IronPython, F# or if it's supposed to be Lisp, Clojure for .NET (there are now quite up-to-date binary packages to try out, unfortunately probably only Windows, at least it spits out errors under Mono).
F Sharp Programming - Wikibooks, open books for an open world. Seems to be a quite nice basic overview of F# - so especially for those who don't already have prior experience (e.g. from OCAML).
Tomtom apologizes for sharing data with radar traps. It's all quite funny in a way. On the one hand, the naivety of a data provider ("hey, they won't just use my data for something that might be embarrassing for us"), and on the other hand, the innovativeness of a government. (It is still unknown at this hour whether "experts" will run amok again and urge buyers of TomTom devices to sue the manufacturer or the Dutch state.)
Apple Q&A on Location Data. Will the experts who made some rather obscure claims now correct their statements? Or will there now be a great, embarrassing silence? Alternatively, I also have a nice conspiracy theory ready, that always works on the Internet.
Home - Redline Smalltalk - Smalltalk for the Java Virtual Machine.. Not very far yet, but could become interesting at some point - and as an old Smalltalk fan, I naturally have to make a blog mark here.
Comics by Nick St. John. That's what it says. Just take a look. Simply and simply drawn, but in a peculiar way appealing to me (especially "How I Came to Work at the Wendy's").
Download Adobe Lens Profile Creator Preview - Adobe Labs. At the bottom of the page are download links. Once the mentioned Profile Creator, with which you can create your own profiles for cameras and lenses. But almost even more interesting is a Profile Downloader - with this you can download profiles from other Lightroom users. This can be useful if there is no profile from Adobe for your own combination yet. I also need to check if there is already a profile for the Zeiss C-Biogon (although it hardly needs one, it behaves so kindly when used).
Geotagging: Fotospot makes digital cameras GPS-capable. Rube Goldberg Geotagging. Honestly, people, if you actually need to carry around a local WLAN with a server to geotag your photos, then it doesn't matter if the server is shoved into the hot shoe of your camera - that's just silly. Just buy a camera that has on-board geotagging. Or a simple tip: with the iPhone and the built-in camera app (because of the metadata) just take a photo at every location, and then later transfer the geodata from these images to the others - there's already finished software for various systems that does this.
Serious PSN hack: Personal customer data copied. Now it's out why PSN was offline for so long (not that it affected me particularly - I don't have a PlayStation - but the silence around the downtime was quite strange).
Photosmith – The Grand Tour | Photosmith – the iPad mobile companion for Adobe Lightroom. Hmm - interesting approach. An app that syncs with Lightroom via a plugin and makes capturing metadata and rating photos on the iPad easier. However, I use a MacBook Air, which is already compact enough for the purpose - and has the advantage of a real keyboard (not necessarily wrong for metadata capture) and can run Lightroom directly. But for a vacation trip, it might be quite cool - import photos via CCK and then tag them there and transfer them later.
Lightroom Auto Sync: HOW to use it. Wow. I've been using Lightroom for a long time, but I didn't know that - you can enable automatic synchronization of settings, so that when you make changes to images in a series, you can jump between these images and make changes, but these are applied to all images. Very practical if you want a consistent look for a series of images, but you need to experiment with all the images to see what that look will be.
The plan for mods : The Word of Notch. This is how other game studios should handle mods. Don't sue the people who build on your game, but openly welcome them. Notch even releases the entire source code for mod developers.
tvON / python-wordpress. And to get posts and images into WordPress, I could work with this - a Python library that provides various WordPress functions. However, it comes in different versions, in different states of non-maintenance, so I have to go through it and see if everything runs as I want it to.
Backing Up Flickr. Because I just stumbled over it (I'm looking for ways to automatically push Flickr uploads to the WordPress media library, preferably from the server, without me always having to manually intervene. For this, I would actually have to marry this with WordPress functions (it is a Python script that backs up Flickr images to directories). The backup functionality works, by the way. Maybe not such a bad idea to back up your Flickr account from time to time ...
AWS Developer Forums: Life of our patients is at stake - I am ... - I hope this is a fake, but I fear it's actually true, that a company has been running life-critical monitoring systems for heart patients on EC2 without using multiple Availability Zones or having a failover plan ....
Real World Minecraft. Someone is building cardboard blocks in 1x1x1m according to the ideas from Minecraft and various other things around it and makes an installation out of it. Quite weird, isn't it? I wonder if the Creeper also explodes in real life?
Alex Levinson has some interesting comments on the "new" discovery of the collected geodata on the iPhone. Apart from the fact that it is not Apple that collects the data, but only the user's own device and computer, it is quite interesting that this "new" discovery was so well known that Alex has spoken about it at conferences and it was already described in his book on iPhone Forensics at the end of December 2010. A printed book. One of those made of paper. Something that researchers should actually read when they investigate things. So they don't make themselves look ridiculous when they write hyped articles about topics that have been known for a long time, without referring to previous research on the subject ...
Leica Summilux 35mm / 1.4 ASPH FLE. Does anyone have 3700 Euros to spare for me? Unfortunately, I don't, and that's how much this gem would cost me. I'll probably stick with my 700 Euro Zeiss C-Biogon 35/2.8, though I'm missing two stops of light intensity.
Patent lawsuit: Google convicted in first instance over Linux servers. Just when we thought patent nonsense couldn't get any worse, here's the latest example of how absurd patents on algorithms and data structures are. Especially when such cases are tried before juries, as if patent infringements were something that could be judged by the "public conscience."
Kodak DC20 Data Sheet. My first digital camera. It was somehow funny. The Wayback Machine has archived my old homepage, on which I made a photo gallery from Münster with the camera.
The Düsseldorf district government defines prohibited entertainment as an event that "is intended to provide pleasant pastimes, sociability, as well as relaxation and recreation". Exceptions may be allowed for religious or solemn events.
via Discussion about Good Friday rest. So much for the topic of secularization.
Gondor — effortless production Django hosting. Hmm, that sounds quite interesting - a tool for easier deployment including database migrations (via South). As far as I understand, it is tied to their infrastructure - so rather an alternative to Google AppEngine, directly based on Python.
Kodak 760m Review. And another camera exotic: the Kodak without anti-aliasing and without Bayer filter. So raw black and white, directly from the chip. I would wish one could order his cameras today without Bayer - because black and white is just fun.
Minolta Dimage RD3000 Digital Camera Review: Intro and Highlights. Because we talked about it in the office today - one of the most interesting camera systems that never caught on. So to speak, the precursor to what is today Micro 4/3, or the Sony NEX system represents. And namely a digital SLR for the Minolta APS SLR system.
Broadway update 3 « Alexander Larsson. No idea how I will use this or for what, but I want to! Run GTK+ applications as a client-server app with the interface in the browser - and Gimp already does it. Crazy.
Rating agency questions US creditworthiness. Maybe these mysterious rating agencies will become history if they take on the USA. Because one thing is clear: as soon as the free market economy, so propagated by the USA, hits the USA itself, they are terribly sensitive. As long as the rating agencies only drive unimportant (from the USA's perspective) European states to the brink of the abyss, it's completely irrelevant.
Snooping: It's not a crime, it's a feature. The great new photo network Color? It turns on your microphone to have another clue about location based on sounds. Did you expect that a photo-sharing app for the iPhone would eavesdrop as well, or?
Jess, the Rule Engine for the Java Platform. If you ever need a rules engine for Java, Jess is based on the core ideas of CLIPS, which has existed for quite some time now (around the mid-80s), but integrates into the Java world. An alternative would be Hamurabi, a rules engine written in Scala that features an integrated DSL with Scala language tools.
Evolutie test. Evolutionary algorithm in JavaScript with visualization in processing.js - started with a random string, the evolution function is the edit distance to the target string and the evolution is what happens - the visualization shows the spread and the convergence to the entered target string.
Re: Factor: Mail with GUI. Nice to see how a more general approach to GUIs makes the code nice and compact - this whole thing reminds me very much of CLIM in terms of structure.
Toshiba releases self-erasing drives. What could possibly go wrong.
Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?. About the legend that Chernobyl is today a paradise for animals - the studies rather indicate that it is a death trap and the animals are there only because they migrate from surrounding areas - after all, they can't see radioactivity and the consequences of the radiation there are rather insidious because they massively hinder reproduction. Oh, and the whole region is supposed to be opened for tourism according to this year's decision ...
VirtuaWin - Virtual Desktops for Windows. Because someone just asked if there is such a thing. I don't need it. I use an operating system.