Linkblog - 30.1.2009 - 9.3.2009

wmd - The Wysiwym Markdown Editor - brilliant. Markdown preview with JavaScript. A great thing for browser interfaces, as Markdown allows for much better reuse of text content than if it were direct HTML.

Portrait of an Artist as an Avatar - Filthy Fluno - three of his pictures hang in my living room. One of them is a picture of me. Without Second Life, I probably would never have heard of him - with Second Life, he (along with a whole range of other artists) has ended up on my friends list. But of course, Second Life is just hype and nonsense, as all the experts are so fond of telling us. How many artists do they actually know personally? How many have they watched paint over the internet? How many have they partied with, where people from all over the world participated? I mean parties where they were personally greeted and they actually knew most of the participants a little ...

Scripting Drawer für Acorn - my favorite image editor is Acorn - because it's so small, fast and sleek. Plus, I can program it in Python. And with this plugin, the windows get a Scripting Drawer à la Nodebox - with which you can then run the Python code directly, without always having to navigate through the filter menu. Nice!

Stainless for OS X Leopard - interesting project: a multi-process browser for OSX. Essentially similar to Google Chrome (each tab is its own process), but further in that each process can have a local cookie storage and separate auth sessions. So for example, you can be logged into multiple Google Mail accounts in the same browser in multiple tabs, without any problems.

Leica ceases R-series production - a shame. It was the only digital SLR with manual focus - somehow a nice, obscure dinosaur. It probably lay in the shelf like lead ... The casual way, in which the demonstrator at the fair back then, in response to my question about dust on the sensor (due to the very open construction), simply pulled a microfiber cloth from his pocket and cleaned the fully coated protective glass in front of the sensor with it - that had a bit of a macho touch ...

Nik Software, Inc. - will soon also support Lightroom (Viveza is leading the way). Great - this will make some tasks even easier with Lightroom.

long battery life - in my opinion a much more rewarding goal for the next time. Especially for notebooks. And 12 hours - that already doesn't sound bad (even if it is of course only the case without a hard drive).

Federal Constitutional Court rules against voting computers - a victory of reason over the penny-pinchers at the ballot box. Yes, it may be true that elections are expensive to conduct. But if we throw the principles of free, democratic and verifiable elections overboard just because a few euros are involved, we might as well do away with the whole state. It's a shame that in recent times, the Constitutional Court has generally had to put a stop to the madness from Berlin. One would actually think that these prolethicians in Berlin, who have to swear an oath to the constitution when they assume their ministerial offices, would actually know the constitution ...

git installer für OS X - so you don't have to go through the MacPorts installation ordeal, it's not so impractical.

Alien Skin Software: Bokeh - interesting software for creating bokeh effects. Unfortunately, it's only available as a plugin - I prefer standalone programs.

OMVViewer-light a Secondlife Text Client - could be quite interesting for on-the-go use, if I can't or don't want to start the full interface.

The man who invented the doner kebab has died - well, it's a classic Turkish dish after all - invented in Berlin in 1971.

Adapters: Micro 4/3 - well, I probably won't buy the rather expensive G1 after all (even though it handled nicely at Photokina), but if Olympus comes out with the announced compact Micro-4/3 camera, and the adapter works with it, that would be a real alternative. Especially with the cute little 90mm macro that I have for my M6 ... (though of course the question remains how focusing is supported - if it's only based on the electronic viewfinder image, I can forget it)

Alhazen - because one tends to forget all too easily what scientific achievements were made in times when, in our part of the world, the descendants of Charlemagne were still amusing themselves with their serfs and brawling with their noble friends.

ITU plans to combat cybercrime face resistance - why we definitely do not want any involvement of the ITU in any form. This is the typical megalomania of the old monopolists in the telecommunications industry and their state lackeys. Does anyone believe there would still be chances for independent projects if the ITU were to actually succeed with its idea of mandating the implementation of ITU security protocols? Especially since ITU standards are anything but free (and even patent-infested garbage can establish itself there as a "standard" that can then only be implemented in practice by stores like IBM or similar. The IETF is a chaotic bunch - but due to the quite pragmatic structure ("a standard can become what two interoperable, independent implementations can demonstrate") is much better suited for the Internet and its constantly changing situation.

StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - for the big questions in life, such as whether you should store opened mustard jars in the fridge.

Union wants to have children monitored as well - it's not about countering terrorism, but solely about establishing a surveillance state while no one is looking or the opportunity is good. The goal of a surveillance state is to secure the state as an apparatus, not the citizen. Usually, this becomes "necessary" when the state leaves the framework of the democratic rule of law, or plans to do so.

And now a physics engine for JavaScript... - Holy Cow!

zsync - interesting tool, so to speak one-sided rsync. Server only http, client then with difference transmission - the server side of the protocol is "precompiled" by the tool. Great for update distribution to many downloaders.

A high-level cross-protocol url-grabber - nett. urllib is quite ok for http, but also rather low-level. This, on the other hand, looks quite useful for typical batch programs.

Anonymous(tm) - nice, readable monospace font.

British-French Nuclear Billiards in the Atlantic - err - what? Well, I don't know, but submarines with nuclear warheads and reactor propulsion should probably not ram into each other. British understatement: "Crashing a nuclear submarine is as serious as it gets."

CDU: Opponents of Internet Blocking Promote Child Pornography - sensationalist polemic instead of arguments. And all just to show absurd activism because elections are coming soon. Does anyone seriously believe that the prolethicians in Berlin care about protecting children?

py-amqplib - AMQP Library for Python, seems promising.

Rabbits and warrens - RabbitMQ and Python - a report from reality.

txAMQP: Twisted AMQP in Launchpad - hmm. AMQP and Twisted - this could make the workers even more efficiently attached to a queue.

Using RabbitMQ Beyond Queueing - interesting article that deals with multiple consumers, persistent queues, and similar topics.

zeromq: Fastest. Messaging. Ever. - another AMQP server (besides RabbitMQ, which I already had, and QPID from the Apache project, which tends to lose messages), sounds quite interesting, especially the very low resources it requires. However, there is no persistence in queues.

FragStore - A Fragmenting Asset Store at Adam Frisby - those who want to know what technical problems are behind something like Second Life, here is a blog post about the problems with the asset server of osgrid.org, an experimental grid based on OpenLife (open source reimplementation of the Second Life protocols on the server side).

FractalMaker - nice Flash visualization of fractals.

The Oarfish - A Creature Of Legend - wow. I didn't know that one yet.

Unix Lovers to Party Like It's 1234567890 - tonight at 0:31 (plus a few seconds) it's time!

Schäuble hacked (Update) - well, PHP applications are not inherently secure just because the Federal Minister of the Interior says so. However, he still claims this for electronic ID cards, mass data collection, and similar nonsense ...

Demo scripts for gnuplot CVS version - gnuplot can now output to HTML Canvas! And thus super-simple embedding of plots in web pages!

Gravenreuth must be imprisoned - "Including an additional penalty, Gravenreuth was sentenced to a total prison term of 14 months. The Berlin Regional Court did not suspend the sentence on probation, as "the defendant [...] cannot be given a sufficiently reliable positive legal and social prognosis," according to the court in September 2008." - and now it is final. I think I will open a bottle of sherry this evening in honor of the verdict!

Linzer Auxiliary Bishop claims homosexuality is curable - Holocaust denier and homophobe. These are the people the Pope wants to surround himself with. Any questions?

ExpanDrive: Ridiculously simple SFTP and FTP drive access on your Mac - also worth a look, after all I have tons of stuff lying around on SFTP servers. And while the Cyberduck is nice, I would actually prefer to use the Finder - at least, if the result is usable.

Instant color schemes for your Mac with ColorSchemer Studio OSX - and since I always use the same boring color combinations in SL, something like this might be useful.

Intaglio — Macintosh Drawing & Illustration - looks good, I should check it out. Specifically, the ability to use texts as paths could be interesting for me

VectorDesigner - and another graphics software that I should take a look at. Vector graphics would also solve some of the text problems (for SL I sometimes need text on paths and text as paths, which is rather cumbersome to do with Acorn).

Moving Forth: Part 1 - makes one nostalgic when reading the descriptions of old CPUs and still knowing the registers by name.

Wolfram Mathematica Home Edition - woooohooooo!! Wolfram finally sees the light! Ok, after clicking on the store, not available for your region. WTF?

NodeBox 2 - mean. Pictures and movies, but no test download! They can't do that to me, something like that!

US-Hacker copies RFID badges unnoticed - but our prolethicians, and above all the federal interior minister, claimed that such things would only be science fiction nonsense. And anyone who is against the RFID chips in the badges is simply a paranoid person. Why doesn't the bunch in Berlin even bother anymore when they try to screw us around?

Nokia pushes through surveillance rights for emails - we buy ourselves a government. The model will certainly soon be adopted in Germany by various large employers (Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Telekom anyone?).

Filter Forge - wow, they have a Mac beta! And it works in Photoshop Elements (though only on Windows - on OS X apparently only the big packages. Damn). Hmm, I think that would be something to test - because seamless textures is the only reason why I still need Windows, even if it's only in an emulation.

Imagelys Picture Styles - yet another generator for tileable textures. This one is free, so I should at least take a look. Unfortunately, it's only for Windows again. Somehow, there's nothing decent for Mac in this area.

LÖVE - Free 2D Game Engine - in Lua. And it's available for Mac as a Universal Binary. Screenshots look quite nice.

Online Backup: Multi-Platform, Multi-Computer | SpiderOak, Inc. - sounds like DropBox. Funny enough, also in Python (though only the server, with DropBox it's also the client). Also interesting: they publish a number of OpenSource components that they have written. Particularly the transaction-secured file system based on SQLite looks interesting.

Patterns in Python - and why many patterns are trivial with Python.