GNU Smalltalk - as an old Smalltalker (Methodworks anyone??) I always take a look at what's happening there. GNU Smalltalk was long the stepchild of Smalltalks, but meanwhile it has really gained a lot. Especially the support for Cairo and LibSDL brings some possibilities for graphics and Seaside is the part for web applications par excellence (with Swazoo as the web server underneath). And a native web framework of its own is already available with Iliad. And with SandstoneDB there is a persistence layer for objects. And the biggest disadvantage of GNU Smalltalk - the lack of a graphical environment - becomes a real advantage for web applications, because headless GNU Smalltalk is trivial. The next version 3.2 will be really exciting.
Linkblog - 9.9.2009 - 4.10.2009
Winclone - because I've been wondering all the time how I can properly back up my Bootcamp partition - this makes it simple and easy from OS X (which is where I spend most of my time).
Roman Polanski - since Johnny has closed the comments, my comment here. Polanski admitted to committing the rape and knowing how old she was. No, having sexual intercourse and anal sex with a 13-year-old girl whom you previously made compliant with drugs is not "seduction". It is absurd that so many people from the film industry are now taking to the barricades and thinking something like this should simply be forgotten. No, the fact that the victim has now forgiven him does not change anything. He did it. He admitted it himself. There is no discussion about the "if", but only about the "how much" - years in prison. Damn it, he raped a minor. Why do you want to defend someone like that? This advocacy for Polanski is a slap in the face of every raped and abused girl.
Chicago Boss - the no-nonsense MVC framework for Erlang - no idea what will come of it, but the beginning already looks quite interesting.
Log-structured file systems: There's one in every SSD - interesting article about SSDs and their performance behavior. Particularly interesting from the perspective that SSDs are increasingly being tried as an alternative to high-performance disk systems.
My final Ricoh GR Digital III impressions - interesting, as Wouter just takes photos and doesn't look at pixels. If he says he was a bit disappointed with the image quality, then you can take it seriously in the sense of "it would also affect me if I used it". But in any case, it will be the 20mm for the GH1 first, which is compact enough for starters.
Gabriel should become SPD party leader - Gabriel and Nahles would certainly not be the worst choice for the positions. If they are allowed to do their job and not break out again in internal party disputes and tear themselves apart, they might be able to organize something similar to opposition. At least both of them open their mouths and it's not just nonsense that comes out.
Pick up a penguin - penguins are freaks!
Plumber Jack: Python Logging 101 - this is occasionally asked in the company and I keep wondering myself. The link explains the most important things about Python Logging on an HTML page.
sink - nice little tool for comparing directories (even more than two) and synchronizing.
Dropbox iPhone App is out - and the application seems pretty well suited to what I would like to do with the Dropbox on the go. Pretty cool.
Insect sushi: creepy crawly cuisine - "However, he admits that not all insects make good cuisine. He also advises anyone trying his cockroach recipes not to think about what they are eating"
jQuery Tools: The missing UI library for the Web « Noupe - interesting lib for simple effects in JavaScript (Tabs, Scrollables, Popups).
lsyncd - could be quite nice for some purposes. Basically a live-rsync - for example, for automatically distributing config files in our production cluster, it might be quite good, as you no longer have to wait for the cronjobs.
Swarm - Concurrency with Scala Continuations - Scala 2.8 sounds increasingly interesting. Portable continuations are essentially type-safe execution states bundled and serialized, so that they can be sent over lines. Highly interesting for creating distributed applications - e.g. saving the session in the browser instead of in the database - but certainly there are also one or two security issues lurking there (serialized objects can also be deserialized and manipulated externally). Exciting to see what could come in that area.
Webber - saw the link on the shockwave. Sounds interesting and looks quite Pythonic.
Welcome To Tahoe-LAFS - an interesting project for truly secure online storage (secure in the sense that "none of the providers can mess with the data or read it").
The Twins and the Blechgang - no, I'm not afraid of anything. They are just from here!
The Utopia Timor (Folding Bike) - and this is also an option, albeit significantly more expensive - but the fully enclosed chain is of course a nice argument. Moreover, you can pull it along behind you like a rolling suitcase.
The Dahon Mµ Folding Bikes 20 Inch - Dahon Mµ XL Light, Mµ P8 Sport, Mµ P24 TR Light, Mµ Uno, Mµ EX - wow, especially the Mµ Ex looks incredibly good and the folding process is convincing. Something like this could be pretty great for my favorite activity - traveling by train to cities and exploring them.
Official Google Blog: Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more - and this is then the worst Picasa-for-Mac release I have seen in a long time. When adding folders, the thing kept crashing and it doesn't even find all the folders in subfolders and completely ignores some, the sorting into the flat folder display is completely incomprehensible and chaotic, and sometimes the thing just quits when you look at it. Sure, the face search is cute (though I rarely photograph people, so it doesn't really help me much), but it consumes resources endlessly during import.
Panasonic Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH Lens Review - hello upcoming Christmas bonus, meet your purpose. Haven't been this excited about a piece of glass in a long time.
Photic sneeze reflex - I knew it existed!
This Rocketship Will Crash - Finding blogs like this by chance makes the internet interesting.
Weird New Ghostshark Found; Male Has Sex Organ on Head - sounds like a headline from the Bild newspaper, but is actually just a very strange fish from an equally strange group of fish species.
CAIR - Content Aware Image Resizer - quite cool technology, all of it!
Diesel: How Python Does Comet - could be interesting for a few projects, looks very Pythonic compared to many other similar projects.
Federal Environment Agency warns about RFID tags in trash - when you think about the resources wasted on this crap, it really makes you sick. Copper is getting more expensive due to wasteful use, and we have nothing better to do than to blow it on trash like RFID tags ...
Neat Graphics with Scala Processin - exactly what you need to play around with Scala, a Processing version in Scala instead of Java, but with the entire graphics API.
Google Releases A Nuke. Apple Won’t Win This Fight. - ok, that's just Techcrunch, and their "quality" isn't even good enough as toilet paper (it's just virtual) - but if Google really has the screenshot of the rejection and publishes it, I could imagine that some people in higher positions at Apple will lose their jobs. As arrogant as Apple behaves in the AppStore, they would deserve to get a slap in the face there.
lionet: Erlang, Yaws, and the deadly Tornado - very interesting comparison, as Erlang is often presented as scalable, but it is not often examined as a whole. Yucan and Misultin mentioned later in the article sound very interesting for some purposes, as scalability through the Erlang runtime becomes even easier - and process communication is simply easier to implement than with isolated Python processes. On the other hand, Python is a known quantity for me, so Tornado will certainly find its way into my toolbox.
Georg Bauer on Facebook - yes, I know, data kraken. And they make money with my content anyway. Just like Google. And Flickr. And Xing. And all the other web services. And they are all time wasters too. But it's still a practical super-aggregator for various things I do. And well, you have to be social today to be someone, right?
Online Latin Dictionary - no questions asked. I just needed it right now.
Coryell Auger Sample Trio - heard today at the Hot Jazz Club. Woah. Groovy. Super-groovy.
PubSubHubbub is a Lot Easier Than It Sounds - for about 20 seconds I considered integrating this into my software. Until I realized I couldn't care less when the posts on my blog arrive with someone. I think I'm getting old ...
The Most Useful Rope Knots for the Average Person to Know - exactly what it says on the tin. Practical rope knots and tips on how to tie them and what they're for.
No tethering for first-generation iPhone customers - you can also put it more simply: T-Mobile, a bunch of assholes. Someday, T-Mobile will be as customer-unfriendly as airlines. And that's saying something. My iPhone contract has no exclusion clause regarding tethering - but T-Mobile wants to unilaterally redefine my contract.
Termination at abgeordnetenwatch.de due to NPD - "Democracy is difficult, let's go shopping". Sorry, I am the last person to find the brown filth acceptable in any way, but unfortunately it is still a permitted party. But you may call them Nazis. So please do that, instead of pissing off and retreating into your shell. If the smarter one always gives in, the world will eventually be ruled by idiots.
libdispatch - fast interesting I find the Dispatch Library, but even more interesting are the blocks sources released simultaneously for C (basically something like closures in real programming languages).
FriendFeed's Real-Time Web Framework for Python - actually Facebook's. It's impressively powerful. Could be useful at some point.
Hurtigruten 2009 with the MS Lofoten once again - as promised, here is the better album with larger pictures and without Flash. These are the same pictures as on the other link.
Atomkraft- Beweise für Manipulation in Sachen Gorleben? - yeah, yeah, but of course everything is fine in Gorleben and there is no danger and anyway, why are we all getting so worked up. It's just all corrupt and embellished and lied about. Business as usual.
Car engines to serve as "home power plants" - ok, still fossil fuel, but at least an efficient use of it. As a concept certainly interesting, albeit not entirely without problems.
billy's band-ICM - because I just stumbled upon it and you can never have enough Billy's Band. Click, listen, and be happy.
Hurtigruten 2009 with the MS Lofoten - a small Flash gallery of pictures I took during the trip. Only small image sizes, because it already took hours to upload to MobileMe. MobileMe sucks. I'll probably finish another gallery and put it somewhere else (likely Dropbox again, it's somehow much nicer), also without Flash (that was just a test of the Lightroom gallery stuff) and with larger pictures.
Leica M9 Hands-on Preview: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - well, it does have the full-frame sensor to itself and still has an acceptable size. However, I'm not so sure anymore that full-frame sensors are really the ultimate solution. I mean, realistically speaking: the 35mm format that we so highly praise today was just an emergency format at its inception, not really comparable to the more common roll film and large format cameras of the time. So what is really "full-frame"? Just because Oskar Barnack halved a 70mm film and used it for his compact camera? And whether I would buy a manual focus camera today is rather doubtful - which has less to do with the quality of an M (I have always preferred the split-rangefinder - I still have my M6), but more to do with the performance of my eyes (which are definitely more affected by quality loss over time than my cameras).
Leica X1 and brief hands-on - well, the look is good, but whether this "quick through many automatic functions" really means quick in the sense of an M or just sluggish in the sense of an M8, that remains to be seen. And without sample images, you can't say anything, because after all, it's about the images that come out at the end. A price is not yet revealed, which would probably have a deterrent effect. Let's see what comes in January.
Pressflow makes Drupal scale - hmm, a fork of Drupal with a special focus on scalability. Unfortunately, there is a restriction to MySQL - I would have preferred PostgreSQL. But the approach of building a fork with a special focus on scalability is commendable. Although Drupal itself could also achieve this (and aims to do so from version 7 onwards).
Varnish - had I already heard of that? No idea, doesn't matter, sounds very interesting. A reverse proxy with powerful configuration and edge side includes (with which you can mix things at the proxy level). This could be very interesting at work - we mostly use non-caching Apache for such purposes, varnish could solve a lot for which we always have to build wild mod perl or mod python hacks or dive into Apache configuration orgies.