Nigeria to charge Dick Cheney in $180 million bribery case, issue Interpol arrest warrant | Raw Story. Ob jetzt wohl Spam mit Dick Cheney kommt? GOOD DAY! MY NAME IS DICK CHENEY, I AM THE FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE USA AND A LEADING BOARD MEMBER OF HALIBURTON. I HAVE A PROPOSAL FOR YOU ...
Linkblog - 19.11.2010 - 3.12.2010
Mono Lake bacteria build their DNA using arsenic (and no, this isn’t about aliens) | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine. A bit more info about our arsenic-loving newcomers. They are simply another type of extremophile, although with a truly impressive trick.
NASA’s real news: bacterium on Earth that lives off arsenic! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine. Yo man. I welcome our arsenic-loving overlords. Or so. Life based on other building blocks is thus much more likely out there.
WordPress 3.0.2 is out and since it contains security fixes, an update is recommended. The German WordPress version is also already available and the update went smoothly for me. I only had to replace all occurrences of Gallerie with Galerie in the language file to make the special handling of gallery posts work (and because Gallerie just looks stupid and is wrong - I don't understand why it's still in the language file. I reported this and it was allegedly fixed a long time ago. Well ...)
agr / ropevim / source – Bitbucket. There is also a Vim integration for the other tool that interested me about Spyder: Rope. A refactoring tool for Python code. Not entirely uninteresting for a sufficiently large code base.
pyflakes.vim - PyFlakes on-the-fly Python code checking : vim online. I'm also looking at this right now, as it provides some interesting tools for Python and is quite good to use, especially with MacVim.
Download Qt for Open Source C++ development on Mac OS X — Qt - A cross-platform application and UI framework. Blogged because the direct paths from Nokia or Trolltech end up with 1G large packages that want to install all sorts of junk (and especially the debug libraries are supposedly gigantic), which you don't need at all if you just want to install pyqt4.
spyderlib - Project Hosting on Google Code. I'm currently looking at it, it's a quite interesting Python editor with many IDE features. Since it is written in Python itself, various Python tools integrate very well (Rope, Flake, PyLint).
Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag: Grüne wollen zustimmen and Germany will finally leave reality behind regarding the internet with the expected approval of this nonsense. And all the cease-and-desist scammers are rubbing their hands together due to the expected additional revenue. I would like to label my blog with a minimum IQ to ensure that the brainwashed proletarians from Berlin have to stay out. The hypocritical behavior of the Greens is absolutely undignified.
Technology - Canvas Viewer - interesting project, uses Unity3D as a platform for a Second Life and OpenSim client. If this works and is freely available for OpenSim Grids, that would be a nice window from the web for my MiniGrid..
The surreal treehoppers « Why Evolution Is True. Insects. Very strange. Extremely strange.
FrontPage - Conkeror. Well blogged as a curiosity and because such projects simply fascinate me - a browser in JavaScript with an architecture inspired by Emacs (only JavaScript instead of ELisp).
Komodo Edit is a Free Open Source Editor for Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP, Ruby & Javascript. I should check it out, as TextWrangler doesn't have folding, BBEdit is too expensive in my opinion, and TextMate has too modest Python folding support. And if this thing runs well across different systems, I would finally have a uniform GUI editor again (yes, I know, vim is available everywhere, but the GUI version just doesn't appeal to me).
Update: uh, hello, ActiveState? I understand that you want to sell your "cheap" IDE (special offer! Only $330), but at least Komodo Edit deserved the source outline, right?
Python Package Index : lupa 0.18. Brings LuaJIT2 and Python together, so that you can access Lua scripts from Python, which are then compiled by LuaJIT.
Because I just wrote about Lua: probablycorey's wax provides an Objective-C bridge to Lua, specifically for iOS devices. So you can write iPhone or iPad apps with Lua.
Have tracing JIT compilers won? | Lambda the Ultimate. Interesting discussion in which Mike Pall (LUAJit), Brendan Eich (Mozilla JägerMonkey) also participate (and specifically LUAJit is currently the King of the Mountains in terms of performance). PyPy is also mentioned, though still at a much older stage - the new 1.4 already shows much better what is possible with PyPy.
PyPy Status Blog: PyPy 1.4: Ouroboros in practice. And with that, PyPy has now also arrived at the JIT in 64bit. In addition, VirtualEnv now works smoothly if you install a current version. And it's still fast.
Build a Bootable Rescue SD Card For Your Mac | Mac|Life. I didn't know that Macs can also boot from SD cards.
IKVM.NET Home Page provides a Java VM in .NET - you should even be able to do crazy things like running Scala 2.8 on .NET with it.
Those who prefer to work with the keyboard rather than the mouse (or other pointing devices) can use gleeBox plugins for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. This makes it quite efficient to operate a browser - and for my tortured right hand, it is sometimes better than reaching for the trackball.
MacRuby » An Introduction to GCD with MacRuby. Grand Central Dispatch is one of the cooler techniques that Apple has introduced at the OS level in recent times. And MacRuby has direct support for it. Very interesting (even if it of course only works in the OSX world).
Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress is a very nice plugin that adds Captcha to comment forms. The special feature: it only does this if Akismet thinks a comment is spam. Captcha failure is then punished with the deletion of the comment - this keeps the spam queue manageable.
As a reminder: Zach's Journal - Making a small Lisp project with quickproject and Quicklisp. Just because I otherwise quickproject and similar things will forget again. With Clozure CL 1.6 Quicklisp also works quite completely (specifically cl-fad is functional and therefore you can get a larger stack of packages to fly finally). Zach is slowly putting together a stack of tools for Common Lisp with which it is fun to play around again. Even if I will probably never become a big Emacs fan, no matter how much others swear by the part for Lisp.
Marke: Facebook will Face - classic facepalm.
Higher Order Javascript provides many ideas about JavaScript programming (and CoffeeScript) and how to use functional programming sensibly in JavaScript. After all, JavaScript is a powerful language with interesting abstractions that you can certainly use.
Backbone.js is an interesting project that provides a real backbone structure for more complex JavaScript projects. It implements the Model/View/Controller structure for JavaScript and provides a number of Collection classes with corresponding APIs. What it does not provide is a thick stack of UI stuff or the 1001st implementation of DOM navigation or similar - it should therefore work well with things like jQuery, as it actually only provides the basic structure on which one can build when one no longer wants to store everything in the DOM. However, there are already some overlaps, for example with events - these are also provided by jQuery, but here they are not bound to DOM nodes, but to arbitrary objects.
Installing and using F# in MonoDevelop - a bit further down under "Installation Instructions" and look for the description for installing the F# MonoDevelop Plugin. Unfortunately, there are currently only templates for console projects with F# in the plugin.
F# cross-platform packages and samples - just look for the Mac Installer packages there (as of November 2010 Update) or above under "Download" (the link probably changes often when new releases come out). It's a simple Mac Installer, after which you have F# (OCaml for .Net) installed.
MonoMac - Mono. Ha ha, devil's tool and sell my soul and all that, but since I need C# for work anyway, I might as well take a look at MonoDevelop and its OSX integration - if I build small tools with it, I practice C# and can use it directly at the same time.
Datejs - An open-source JavaScript Date Library - makes a good impression, for the various format parsing and calendar-related stuff.
Kasseler Documentary and Video Festival » Reality Shock. Since I'm always looking for it, I might as well bookmark it here. (and so I have a chance to get there: this is the film through which I got to know the music of Billy's Band)
Printopia turns printers connected to a Mac into a virtual AirPrint-compatible printer. Does Apple actually realize how ridiculous the restriction to just a few HP printers with AirPrint is? They act as if printing is incredibly complicated. Why do you need third-party software if you don't want to be forced by HP to buy another disposable printer?
Zirkeltraining™ ★ The Range - Take A Look At Our Bag Collection. Bags of all kinds. Made from sports equipment leather, gym mats, and truck tarps. Used, of course. I refrain from public musings on whether sports equipment leather comes from old gym teachers ... (that would be in poor taste, after all)
Pixie Scheme III. For the iPad. Perhaps not entirely uninteresting for doodling (provided it also has usable integration with the iOS API).
Blogofile - I stumbled upon this while considering what to do. One of the many static blog engines in Python with Git integration. Could potentially be interesting for smaller sites (or e.g. for a metablog).
From the "pimp my Vim" department: UltimateVimPythonSetup. I am indeed a Vim fan, and some of the tips in there sound quite interesting. However, some things also go a bit too far for me, my reason for using Vim is precisely that I don't want an IDE, but an editor that mainly does one thing - source editing. But for the one or other out there maybe still (or precisely) interesting.
"A bomb on a plane heading to Germany? Admittedly, I'm just a science journalist, deal with physical phenomena, but frankly, I don't believe this news. It all fits too well. Here in my hotel are the interior ministers, and precisely now it is announced that Germany will soon be the target of a terrorist attack. This smells like a staged event."
via With de Maizière at the breakfast table: The terror is here, the muesli is gone - taz.de.
How I build-in Tumblr in my Drupal install is already very close to what I want to do with Tumblr on my homepage. Now I just need to write a minimal widget and stuff the code in there and instead of the regular posts, only go to the photos. And I'll have Tumblr photos on the homepage again.
Update: those who look to the right can see the Tumblr photos again. So on the homepage. It works quite well and doesn't take up any more time. Someday I'll put together the plugin that I built there, at the moment it's still a bit raw.
Sunday reading: Google Streetview - linked because I'm fed up with all the pro-Streetview talk and the "who pixelates doesn't understand the net" faction. The net is a medium for the whole society and not just a playground for some tech enthusiasts. And whoever ties their net freedom to the permission for unrestricted data collection for a large corporation has a significant understanding deficit. Especially when the sole purpose of this corporation is the systematic evaluation of these data mountains for the optimization of advertising.
API | Tumblr - maybe I want to do more with it than was used in the previous PHP example.
Display photos from Tumblr (using JSON method) is PHP, but I should be able to easily rebuild this in JavaScript and then run it only client-side.
hyphenator I could take a look at, because then the hyphenation simply runs with JavaScript in the browser. It's only interesting for the websites themselves anyway, feed readers have to render themselves.
Update: yeah, looks good. Now I can look at my homepage again without getting pimples, and the integration was very simple with their custom package builder - go through a few checkboxes, build an optimized download version of the library and include it in the head of the blog. As a class, I simply used entry-content, which means that all posts (and only those) are provided with hyphenation. And since it's client-side, it doesn't affect the feed or any other internal paths.
WordPress › Support » WP Super Cache sometimes ignites a blank Home Page! Need to restart Apache - sounds exactly like my problem, but it's already a year old. Seems to be some combination of many parts. For now, I've turned off APC, as it also produces strange messages in the error log, for which there are no really satisfying comments on the net to find. Somehow, the whole PHP stuff is really shitty. Too many parts coming from too many different places and all somehow but not quite working together. Basically, everything runs, but as soon as you want to get a grip on the performance problems, there are all sorts of strange and inexplicable effects. All just wild hacks.
Is the NATO strategy the problem or the solution? An examination of NATO, its composition and position in the world, and an assessment of its position paper and strategy - especially considering the dominance of the USA in this alliance. Surprisingly critical for a contribution from the public broadcasting sector.
Logisim could have saved me a lot of DM in my youth, which I spent on TTL chips (after I had previously and in between burned the same TTL chips).
Pure CSS GUI icons (experimental) are an excellent example of what you shouldn't do with CSS. Painting with box models is rather unproductive. But somehow it's still fascinating what some people do with their time ...
Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang?. At first, I thought here comes another fringe physicist with crazy ideas or unproven claims. And then I read Roger Penrose in the article. Ooops.
BBC - Earth News - Attack of the rats. Why every 50 years in India giant hordes of rats destroy the harvest. All because of the biological clock of bamboo. Fascinating.
[WordPress › Support » [[Plugin: WP Super Cache]] Blank Pages - 500 Error - in Dashboard (sometimes the site too)](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-super-cache-blank-pages-500-errror-in-dashboard-sometimes-the-site-too). Describes my current problem since I have SuperCache - maybe this is also my solution. Otherwise, SuperCache will just be removed, because before that it actually ran well, just slowly. If it's dark (uh, white) in between, it might be due to my problem and I'm still analyzing.
Long Live the Web: Scientific American by Tim Berners-Lee. Why the web is so important to us and why and what we must protect it. Because more and more interest groups are trying to reduce the openness of the web for their purposes, ostensibly often to protect users or rights or other great and positively sounding reasons - but behind it all is simply the grab for power that one wants or fears to lose.