MY WORLD IS A LITTLE DARKER… - I don't often write obituaries here, but well, with Martin Gardner, a hero of my childhood has passed away. His mathematical games and puzzles were for me what new Batman or Spiderman comics were for other kids. Discovering an unknown issue of Spektrum in the city library with puzzles by him, or finding one of his books, was always a highlight.
Linkblog - 7.4.2010 - 23.5.2010
Whack’em - if you get the chance to hear them: do it! That's super-groovy sound.
Federal Court of Justice: Green light for software patents - shit. Then we can probably soon bury the German software SMEs. Innovation has never come from the corners of the big stables, but they are the ones who are most likely to push through the patent procedures for their half-baked and only reheated broth. And the patent office will then drown and no longer keep up with the flood, just like in the USA - which will then again harm the actually innovative companies because their - legitimate - patent applications will take even longer.
Landis admits doping - when I read such confessions, I automatically wonder if the athlete wants to write a book. But the reaction from the UCI chief is quite amusing - the reputation of his sports association is completely ruined, and this is partly due to the very strange approach of the UCI against doping. And of course also because it seems that the entire cycling sport is just a rolling pharmacy. The fact that he now complains that an athlete has come clean is a clear sign of how seriously the UCI takes the fight against doping.
RFC1437 on the Road: Archive - hey, Tumblr has a new archive format, and I find it nice. In the last few months, Tumblr has proven to be a really fun photo blogging solution for me, especially because it allows title-free posts. Having to come up with a title for each photo has kept me from posting many times.
Waveboard – Google Wave Client for iPhone and Mac - I actually don't do anything with Google Wave, simply because so far (despite account) no opportunity has arisen, but the apps here - both for OS X desktops and iPhone (and I suspect in the long run also iPad) look quite nice.
AKW-Laufzeiten sollen ohne Bundesrat verlängert werden - wasn't that the Bundesgrüßaugust who was outraged just recently that the Constitutional Court is constantly being called upon? Did he really mean that nonsense seriously?
Clojure - datatypes - what I like about Clojure: pragmatic and compact solutions for typical programming problems. Clojure 1.2 will introduce the possibility of having better descriptions of data structures with functionalities defined on them. And not some monstrous construction like CLOS or other Lisp-OO extensions, but rather lean constructs that also fit well with the host environments (JVM and CLR). Looks quite interesting. The downside of all the changes in Clojure: books become outdated faster than they can be printed ...
Deutsche Bank fined for banned bets - but Uncle Ackermann said the Deutsche Bank had nothing to do with the financial crisis! He wouldn't have lied, would he!
Koch insists on cuts in the education sector - quite amusing, first the states demand more independence in education policy and then it's too expensive for them. Will someone ever tell the Union clowns that the NRW-CDU has particularly failed in education policy in the last election?
Köhler criticizes the litigiousness of German politicians - has the Federal August ever noticed how often such lawsuits have been successful recently? How does this fit with the alleged constitutional conformity that he attributes to majority decisions? The fact is that some of the biggest active enemies of the constitution are currently sitting in the Bundestag. To see this, one only has to read the reasons given by the Federal Constitutional Court in some of its recent decisions.
Rubinius : Use Rubyâ„¢ - I'm not a big Ruby fan, but Rubinius (Ruby-in-mostly-Ruby) has been released as version 1.0. And the various projects to bring Ruby to a mostly Ruby-based platform with LLVM underneath still make me envious. I would love to have something like that for Python ... (yes, I know Unladen Swallow and PyPy - but both are still miles away from a serious version, unfortunately)
Street View: Google eavesdropped on open WLANs - that's exactly the problem with Streetview. Not in the pure photos. But in the entire program - the integration of various things in a large-scale scan. The combination with all the databases that Google already has. The merging of various information sources, purely from the geek's perspective as "wow, hey, look at all the stuff we've got, now let's just pull out everything we can". Or put another way: just imagine, the cars didn't belong to Google, but to the state. And the program, the databases and the information gathering frenzy wasn't a company in America, but our state. Would the accumulation of information and data then appeal to you as much as Streetview? If it were the state, at least there would be the appearance of democratic control over this gigantic database.
alienscience's leiningen-war - interesting plugin for Leiningen, the build tool in and for Clojure. Provides commands that quickly and easily generate .war files, which can be used for deployment to the Google App Engine, for example.
hiredman's lein-gae - Documentation is practically non-existent, but it only provides a simple command that prepares the war structure for a Google AppEngine project and adjusts the project.clj. Another way to build Clojure programs for the AppEngine.
Licenser's lein-search - and a small plugin that brings the search for modules and their versions to the (Leiningen) command line.
sethtrain's beget - alternatively to leiningen-war, you could also use this base project and simply adapt it. The Google AppEngine Tools are also fetched as a dependency here.
NRW has voted - State Election 2010 - so if you want to make me happy in Düsseldorf: whether red-green or red-red-green, just make sure that Rüttgers' face appears in the news only with the caption "former Prime Minister of NRW," okay? Leave any black-green games to others and grand coalitions are just totally out of fashion at the moment.
Mac OS X on netbooks | myMacNetbook.com - everything about Hackintoshs. Since Apple still doesn't deliver a decent subnotebook with a matte display, and my little Asus has a somewhat small display, keep an eye on it.
Bishop Walter Mixa: Mixa suspected of sexual abuse - were the biggest critics of the elephants once elephants themselves?
Family addition: Neanderthals related to humans - that explains a lot. For example, the conservatives.
Dow Falls in High-Speed Drop - WSJ.com - "Several market watchers said they heard a major firm may have accidentally released an errant program, where a trader accidentally placed an order to sell $16 billion, instead of $16 million, worth of e-minis, the futures contracts tied to equity indexes." - holy cow ...
What iPads Did To My Family - Chuck's Blog - doesn't really need much commentary. In the whole discussion about the iPad, many people forget that creative work with a computer doesn't necessarily mean programming. Whether we programmers like it or not, the devices that prevail are determined by the users - and we are only a small part of them. And the restrictions that Apple imposes on its iPhone and iPad devices primarily affect programmers and much less the users. Is that problematic? Maybe. However, I can't see the downfall of Western culture, which some people proclaim, in a device that makes computing more accessible.
Ceph: A Linux petabyte-scale distributed file system - too bad we don't need a distributed cluster file system in the company anymore because of the big NetApp - this sounds really interesting and looks like it actually addresses the weaknesses of previous solutions.
Marak's JSLINQ at master - GitHub - a nice small JavaScript library that offers a query language for JSON data. It is oriented towards Microsoft's LINQ, but currently only has simple queries implemented. Nevertheless, it might be quite interesting to make JavaScript code more flexible and readable when working with larger amounts of JSON data.
parsedatetime - a very practical library that converts "normal" date specifications (unfortunately only in English as far as I can see) into Python datetime objects.
PyPy Status Blog: Running wxPython on top of pypy - PyPy is really making huge strides towards being usable. It's already faster than CPython in some cases and now even larger C extensions like wxPython are running. Cool.
Zoolander - a small Python library that allows you to use Python as a DSL for generating CSS. Sounds silly at first, but if you want or need to produce CSS dynamically and then embed it in a web framework, it can be quite practical.
CDU comes under pressure due to "voter initiative" - oh those lovely "independent" voter initiatives that keep popping up. Or the completely "independent" initiatives against our social system - always very amusing, always very deceitful. It would be nice if this were appropriately acknowledged in the election in NRW - with a drastic loss of votes for the Union. If the other parties don't mess up too badly now, they should be able to exploit this for the election campaign. However, if I look at the clowns of the NRW SPD, I have my doubts whether they can pull something off ...
The Brads – How to Alienate a Fanbase - if anyone needs a short summary of what Adobe stands for.
Thoughts on Flash - is of course again dismissed as blah-blah by all Apple opponents, but well - the reasons are compelling. And sorry, but it's really true: Flash stinks.
django-pagination - I need to take a closer look at this, it looks interesting. Pagination is not really difficult, but it's annoying to build it yourself every time - and Django's built-in tools are not always optimal for this (especially with large amounts of data).
Henry's EuLisp - someone has revived EuLisp and gathered the sources, as well as the specification. At least historically interesting, because EuLisp was one of the standard efforts for a more modern Lisp with quite good object-oriented support. But the implementation itself also has some interesting features.
jcotton - Build animations and graphics with JavaScript and Canvas. Looks quite interesting.
Keychain reports: Access to this object is restricted - because I just had the problem again, and because it really annoys me that this nonsense is still there after so long: never use MobileMe for keychain synchronization. Sometimes it works for a while, but that's deceptive. sooner or later the sync will mess up the keychain and in the worst case you have to reset it completely (or check if you have a functioning keychain in TimeMachine). To Apple: this is really shit.
Large Kirchner Retrospective at the Städel in Frankfurt - well, I must definitely go to Frankfurt in the coming months.
HoudahGeo - Photo Geocoding for Mac - I should definitely check that out. On my last vacation trips, it was a bit of a shame that I didn't have any points on the map. And the idea of simply taking reference photos with the iPhone and using its GPS and timestamp for the subsequent coding of the photos is not a bad one at all.
Markdoc - interesting project, a simple wiki with a special feature: it is not edited via the web, but via a DVCS like Mercurial or Git. So simply normal text editors, Markdown as the format and a DVCS for versioning, rsync for distributing the generated - static! - content to the server and done. And it is written in Python.
Large manufacturer differences in digital camera defects - Golem.de - my decision for Panasonic seems to have been quite reasonable.
This Is Apple's Next iPhone - Iphone 4 - Gizmodo - ok, it's already annoying when you leave an iPhone prototype in a bar ...
Web.de calls Fraunhofer study "Microsoft propaganda" - it could of course also be because web.de and GMX are simply shit. But of course, a conspiracy by Microsoft and the Fraunhofer Institute against web.de and GMX is much more likely ...
XML in Postgres – The Game Changer « Flex and Specs() - I should really take a closer look at the new PostgreSQL features. Especially since the XML support in PostgreSQL brings some of the advantages of document-oriented databases to the relational world, without needing extra middleware.
Archives of the Caml Mailing list: O'Caml for DOS - because I just stumbled upon it again. Wow, 96, that's a long time ago. Why is OCaml always listed as such a modern language? It's already 14 years old ... (and the language on which OCaml is based - Caml Light - is even older)
Federal Environment Agency demands car toll | tagesschau.de - wouldn't it be nice if the media reported correctly, or? In WDR (by the way, one of the ARD affiliated broadcasting stations) the head of the authority had to point out several times in the interview that he and his authority by no means demand anything, but only considered how such a toll - if it were to come - should be designed in a meaningful way. It was not about "toll or not", but rather about "if toll, then how?". And in doing so, an annual vignette or similar flat-rate models were deemed nonsense and only a toll variable according to actual use with recording of the use would be sensible. And the topic of data protection was also addressed and the problems that arise from it. The basic problem is that the revenues from motor vehicle-related taxes and fees only cover part of the costs for federal roads and highways, around 46 billion euros are borne by the general public. And then a facility responsible for environmental issues thinks about how a regulation with a toll could look and how this could be used to distribute road use and cost coverage more fairly and perhaps also to get a bonus for environmental pollution. But normal procedures are not causes for excitement - which is why WDR also stirred up drivers against a previously unpublished study (and by no means a demand) in the morning. That's quality journalism in Germany.
Daring Fireball: New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone Compiler - well, of course Apple has the right to set the terms themselves. And I have the right to find iPhone programming completely uninteresting now - sorry, but I'm not going to deal with such low-level programming languages anymore.
django-ajax-filtered-fields - I need to take a closer look at this, it could be quite interesting in the Admin for larger amounts of sentences in relations.
My experience with using MongoDB for great science. - NoSQL is, after all, in many cases a playground for people who want to try out how databases actually work. With many of these projects, I already wonder what possessed them when they built it. I'd rather rely on solid and proven tools like PostgreSQL and SQLite. And if a NoSQL database, then better one that has been in productive use in larger installations for a longer time. Cassandra comes to mind, for example.
Ars Technica reviews the iPad - a very comprehensive review of the iPad, should answer all the questions that are currently circulating.
CSU: Refusal to block the internet violates agreements - Golem.de - "Content that is banned must be removed so that it is no longer accessible to anyone. Users could bypass blocks within a few minutes. Those who insist on this have no idea about modern technologies, according to the minister. 'And furthermore, we do not want such a blocking infrastructure to be set up because it inherently poses the risk that it is not only used for such content, but can theoretically also be used for other purposes,' said Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger."