Linkblog - 30.3.2011 - 27.4.2011

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.

Re: Factor: XKCD. If you want to get an impression of one of the crazier languages - John Benediktssons Blog has a lot of example snippets in Factor, which are usually directly usable in the Factor REPL (or create manageable vocabulary extensions). I am always impressed by the compactness of Factor code. John's code also has the advantage that I can usually understand what is happening - Slavas code, for example, is often much more idiomatic and therefore cryptic for me. But this is certainly also due to the fact that Slava usually writes about the internals of the language, while John simply describes small tricks.

Significantly increased radiation in the Asse. Why do atomic energy representatives still believe they have to advocate for atomic energy when we are not even capable of operating a storage facility for low and medium radioactive materials like the Asse safely and without problems? After all, this is a storage facility in a highly industrialized country that, according to the claims of atomic energy advocates, has the highest competence in atomic energy. Why does a reactor have to blow up in Japan for people to realize that our perfect atomic world is not as perfect as it seems? When we have all the problems right in front of our own door (and behind it)!

Akka Project. And I definitely had that on the old blog before, but never mind, everything is repeated on TV all the time. And a lot has happened with Akka lately, and it is increasingly establishing itself as the future platform for fault-tolerant systems on the JVM. Many parallels with Erlang's ideas, but with the broader JVM-typical platform (there is hardly anything for which there is not some Java class library and thus also for Scala). Very interesting: Akka brings an implementation of Software Transactional Memory for the Java platform.

Programming Scala. I think I already had this one, but never mind: the second online freely available book about Scala that I stumbled upon today. You can also read it alongside the other one, but it's at a similar language level (i.e., before 2.8).

ScalaQuery. Yes, Scala-Day today. One of the things I was missing so far was a good integration of databases that also makes use of the DSL features and type safety of Scala. So not just sending SQL around via JDBC, but something like LINQ, only for Scala. This looks quite nice.

Programming in Scala, First Edition. And since I have Scala on my mind: the first edition of Programming in Scala is now freely available on the web. Of course, it lacks some things that came with the current Scala version (especially the container libraries are indeed different in 2.8), but it is still certainly a good starting point to read into the language.

Scala IDE for Eclipse. Hmm, it seems that the tools are starting to develop there. I don't have anything against command lines in general and feel more at home on them than in IDEs, but for the general acceptance of languages, IDEs are quite practical. And Scala is still one of the more interesting languages in the JVM environment, even if it has become quite quiet about it in recent times.

agronholm / jython-swingutils. No idea what I could do with it yet, but if the Java world ever becomes interesting, this could become an interesting GUI library (Swing for Jython).

Code rant: Message Queue Shootout!. Not a real shootout and only an incomplete selection of message queues. But still something interesting as a result: if you have nodes that already have their own persistence and transaction solutions, between which you just want to send messages as quickly as possible - there is nothing better than ZeroMQ. It is - due to its architecture - simply the fastest solution. And we are talking about really drastic differences.

NOSQL Databases. Excellent overview of all available NoSQL databases. Good starting point if you want to inform yourself about the available systems and their orientation and implementation.

BBC News - Net giants challenge French data law. Great idea from France, mandatory storage of plaintext passwords, so they can be handed over to any random authority. The Federal Interior Friedrich will probably like that, as he is so keen on all data ... (Discussions on reddit claim that bbc misrepresented the situation, it's only about storing account data even after closing the account for one year - if a service does not do this, it will be held liable for activities of non-identifiable users afterwards - so not quite what you could read in the BBC article)

Why the VISA warning file is a mess at Metronaut.de – Big Berlin Bullshit Blog. The VISA warning file affects me directly and personally. My fiancée is Russian, her family still lives in Russia, and we will continue to make and want to make visits. I can already say goodbye to any illusion of data protection for myself and Juliana. Of course, a state has the right to protect itself from abuse, but general suspicion solely based on the use of legal possibilities is always wrong. And the VISA warning file is nothing more than the general suspicion of citizens simply because they appear once in the context of a visa application. This has nothing to do with the rule of law anymore.

visionmedia/asset. After having pip (for Python modules) and jip (for Java libraries), here is an analogous tool for JavaScript libraries. So for the automatic installation of JavaScript libraries in node.js project directories from the command line.

jRumble | A jQuery Plugin That Rumbles Elements. The new blink tag! (okay, there are indeed sensible applications, e.g., if you want to briefly display an element on the webpage to indicate that something has happened there - similar to bouncing icons in the OSX Dock).

Python Package Index : pip 1.0. For the sake of completeness, I'm blogging this even though pip is already a fixed part of the Python infrastructure for me. But maybe one or the other has not yet played around with pip, then now is probably the right time to do so. In my opinion, you should always use it together with virtualenv, because then you can easily install exactly the right dependencies for each project and keep them separate from other projects.

sunng87/jip. I'm not currently doing much with Jython, but jip sounds very practical: it's an analog to pip, but for Java libraries. So a simple command-line tool that downloads the necessary jar files and puts them in the right place. Integrated with virtualenv. Much more pleasant for me than, for example, dealing with Maven or similar Java-usual infrastructure tools.

Exploring Beautiful Languages: A quick look at APL. Simply because APL has always fascinated me. Even if I never want to be in the position, based on my own experiences with it, to have to maintain an APL program - for me, APL is the quintessential example of write-only languages.

How I learned to stop worrying and write my own ORM. A bit of background information on why Dapper was developed and which use cases it solves - it is essentially used where direct SQL access was previously "tunneled" over Linq for performance reasons, because Linq2Sql is inefficient there.

Dapper-dot-net - Simple SQL object mapper for SQL Server. Could potentially be quite interesting at work. C# also offers Linq, but according to their measurements, Dapper seems to be significantly optimized for performance.

philikon / python-weave client is even more interesting than the other tool: a Python library for accessing Mozilla Sync. With this, I could build various small tools that automatically mix links into bookmarks or extract them from the sync and move them into other bookmark files. Or how about a cron job that takes links from bookmarks in a special group and automatically posts them to the weblog? All sorts of fun things are possible ...

philikon / weaveclient-chromium. Not yet tried, it is a Chrome extension that integrates Mozilla Sync into Chrome and Chromium. With this, you could finally exchange bookmarks between Chrome and Firefox without having to go through XMarks. If someone now also builds this extension for Safari, I would be happy - the fact that I cannot properly sync between browsers, but each one cooks its own soup, is highly annoying. Mozilla Sync is free to use and behind it is a company that I trust much more in this area than all the others.

Bill Gates: “In toilets, we’re the kings”. As the head of Microsoft, I found him annoying. As the organizer of his Foundation, I find him amazing. I'm not fooling myself - he is an exception, other billionaires are probably far less motivated, but never mind. One is a start. And maybe it's just the nerd in him who wants to do something with all that money, simply because he wasn't just there for the money and the power. And that might also explain some of his time at Microsoft - he really believed in his work there. Well, if his foundation continues to save lives, then I'll forgive him Windows. I don't have to use it.

Video LightBox - embed videos with Lightbox effect on your website!. I don't do anything with video, but it looks quite interesting - it's a standalone tool that generates the files for video embedding and can send them somewhere via FTP, for example. Mac and Windows versions.

Pipe is a module with infix syntax for chained function calls over potentially lazy streams (internally these are generators). Unlike stream (which I mentioned here before), it does not support parallelism, so it's just syntactic sugar. However, I prefer the sugar from stream (i.e., the syntax) and the parallelism of stream is also more interesting than just providing a slightly different syntax.

markrendle/Simple.Data - GitHub. I should check this out, it looks quite interesting - an ORM for .NET.