JazzScheme - interesting "new" (not really, already 12 years old, but soon to be open source) Scheme environment. Unfortunately only X11 under OSX so far. But the GUI screenshots look very interesting.
Linkblog - 17.10.2008 - 24.11.2008
Mankind's new best friend? - Rats against landmines and TB!
Molotov Alva - Movies completely created in Second Life - with an interesting story and by someone who knows how to make movies. Already from 2007, but still good (and yes, I once met Molotov Alva inworld).
arRsync - an Rsync GUI for Mac OS X - Title says it all. Addendum: the programmer was probably on drugs. You can't enter ssh servers or anything, only paths. What the hell is rsync good for local paths? The advantage of rsync is especially on network connections ... (oh, and no documentation and no status, unless you sacrifice an email address for "information about the new release")
duplicity - hmm. Could potentially be interesting to back up my server when I shut down the second one next month and instead back up to S3, for example.
IT-Gipfel: VertrauenswĂĽrdige De-Mail von Innenministerium und Telekom - so the company that wants to put a trojan on every PC and the company that decided arbitrarily and unilaterally to tap phones that interest them, want to build a "trusted" email platform together. Did I get that right?
Mercurial hosting — bitbucket.org - might be quite interesting, simply because it offers simple and easy publishing of small projects. Essentially something like Flickr for projects (on Mercurial - for Git there's GitHub, but I just prefer Mercurial)
Modular camera with a 6 x 17 cm giant sensor - wow. That's finally a format!
Respectful Insolence: That'll teach 'em for using an actual valid placebo control - "Alas for poor Dr. Ng, he was tripped up by the vagaries of comparing two different (and almost certainly equal) placebos against each other. Do such studies long enough, and inevitably sometimes the "wrong" placebo will win. Science is like that."
Wikipedia shut down - great, another bunch of people (at least the member of parliament and the judge) who don't understand the internet. Couldn't the judges just burst out laughing when they receive requests to block wikipedia.de and fine the applicant for mocking the court?
I'm actually Knuth's homeboy on Flickr - damn, I'm jealous of such a photo.
ISS advises against using Trend Micro's ServerProtect - Security vulnerabilities in security software. Great job!
Microsoft explains seven-year patch delay - seven years. For a glaring hole. Great. Proprietary software is so damn secure because only professionals work on it and security is of course the highest priority. (and anyone who finds sarcasm in that sentence can keep it)
The world’s most super-designed data center – fit for a James Bond villain - now that's a data center after my own heart!
To WebKit or not to WebKit within your iPhone app? - interesting article about WebKit on the iPhone in your own applications.
Deutsche Bank sues Lehman Brothers - will Ackermann still sound so arrogant? But it's probably just peanuts anyway ...
The flying car - let's be honest: when I look at typical road behavior, I really don't want flying cars to be built someday ...
Train drivers jump from freight train - "Because the brakes of their freight train failed, two train drivers jumped from the moving train on Monday evening (10.11.08) in Frechen. The train only came to a stop several kilometers later when it crashed into a warehouse in Cologne." - please what?
CLPython - an implementation of Python in Common Lisp - I think I've already mentioned this, but good things are worth repeating. And they seem to have been busy - they're already very close to a Python 2.5 implementation. I really should play with this a bit, as it combines two of my favorite languages and could help solve one of the central CL problems: the rather meager selection of good (meaning currently maintained and combinable) libraries. But whether I can get it running on Allegro CL 3.01 on my EeePC is rather questionable. I fear that in the last 5 major releases, quite a bit has happened ...
CouchDBX Revival - CouchDB as an application under OS X (Leopard only).
Nagare - from the description it sounds a bit like Uncommon Web and Seaside (the two leading web frameworks for Common Lisp and Smalltalk). And it uses Stackless - in my opinion, Guido should have included Stackless on the roadmap for Python 3000.
The Picodore 64 - a Commodore 64 PDA - from a modified toy (there were two joysticks and obviously a racing game with built-in C64).
Fabric - interesting small tool for simplified deployment of software on clusters or distributed systems.
"Secure Identity = Unique Identity" - "He is convinced that citizens' informational self-determination can be better protected by new technologies, so one should not always see such systems as a threat scenario." - could it be because the protection of informational self-determination has no place at all in their entire presentation? Why is it repeatedly claimed without any basis that something protects informational self-determination, when there is no evidence or concrete example for this? A bit more care in lying would really be appropriate.
WPA allegedly crackable in less than 15 minutes - Holy Cow!
SPD rebels make Ypsilanti fail - because, Koch as Prime Minister is so much better than being tolerated by the Left. After the nonsense in Schleswig-Holstein, I actually thought the SPD would be rudimentarily capable of learning from such debacles, but the stupidity and ignorance of some prolethicians are simply boundless. Class strategy, this way you can keep spouting nonsense and always just pretend to be seriously interested in taking responsibility someday. And meanwhile, a documented right-winger can laugh into his corrupt fist.
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? - 11,000 years old. Wow.
NASA - MESSENGER Teleconference: More 'Hidden' Territory on Mercury Revealed - I am a big fan of these robotic and orbital missions. And the Mercury flybys already bring a lot of interesting images.
Otto the octopus wrecks havoc - Hermit crabs juggle and spit out lamps. New Olympic discipline and Otto gets the gold medal.
pysmell - Name completion for Python code as a small external tool that can be integrated into vim. Sounds quite interesting.
Tom Otterness - Making the Sculpture - my favorite artist for metal sculptures tells how his sculptures come to life.
JSSpeccy: A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript - ok, we can make the Internet, I've seen it all now ...
Richter: Wahlcomputer insecure - "Several judges criticized on Tuesday during the oral hearing of the court in Karlsruhe that with the current systems neither the correct storage of the votes cast nor their counting can be controlled." - what is so hard to understand that Prolethikers still argue against it?
Zed on the banking crisis - "My problem with any bailout is that I’m not getting anything in return. I mean, I’d trade my tax money for bailing out a few banks if maybe I saw some CEOs get put to the guillotine. I am actually not joking about that. I think the quickest way to get the bailout approved is to drag the leadership of every bank in the country into a large stadium and begin beheading them on national TV. Then threaten to stop the beheadings if every American doesn’t donate fifteen-thousand dollars by Monday." - I love his style!
Poladroid project : the easiest and funniest Polaroid Image Maker - check it out. I love Polaroid.
Bundestag's election inspector calls voting computers secure - why are our politicians always struck by particularly great stupidity? Isn't Hansel even able to read current press, where even in the USA states are backpedaling on the topic of voting computers, where the manufacturers of these devices had to take such massive image losses that one even changed its name? Not to mention all the incidents in Europe and the good coverage of the topic by the CCC? Are only dumb idiots getting jobs in the government? Shouldn't the protection of one of the most important democratic means - for the politicians: I'm talking about elections, not about the allowances - be particularly worthy of protection and in case of concrete indications of insecurity, rather play it safe and go with paper+pen?
CouchDB Implementation - those who want to know how CouchDB stores documents, how all access paths are structured, and what technology is behind it, can read the article here.
Critical security vulnerability: Microsoft warns of worms - "Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003 are particularly affected by this error. Microsoft classifies the issue as critical here. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are also affected, but Microsoft classifies the issue as important here because users must authenticate themselves first. Even users who are already using a pre-beta version of Windows 7 are advised to install the update." - so basically everyone.
Kidding (not) - "But, where the rubber meets the road (or more to the point where the ink hits the paper), in medium sized prints it's been almost impossible for experienced photographers who I've shown these comparison prints to to tell the difference. Scary." - und was war der Vergleich? Canon G10 (500 US$) gegen Hasselblad H2 (40000 US$) mit Ausdrucken auf A3.
Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby - Ruby is not exactly my favorite language, but this sounds very interesting. Ruby on the Objective-C runtime with syntax extensions, so that it integrates directly into the Mac world. Certainly very interesting as a way to play with the Objective-C frameworks.
John Nack on Adobe: The DNG Profile Editor: What's it all about? - a very interesting short article about the DNG 1.2 Profile Standard, which Adobe is currently developing. The Profile Editor in conjunction with a standard color card sounds like it could be a practical tool for the photo bag - small cards don't take up much space and reduce the color noise in the later processing of the images of a session.
Ackermann warns against enemies of the market economy - this big-headed talk - meanwhile, the current great market economy only consists of a collection of "give me too, give me too" shouters after state grants. What does this have to do with the market economy? In a real market economy, idiots like Ackermann would now mercilessly economically perish from their documented incompetence. Only because, amusingly, the CDU has become the pioneer of socially tinged state subsidies for stupid bankers, they are saved from ruin.
VirusTotal - Free online virus and malware scanner - because I often searched there when I needed a second or third opinion.
freeSSHd - ssh daemon for Windows. Currently, I'm using Unison from the Asus, not the other way around, but it could be quite interesting for later.
Jeffrey’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom Plugin - because I'm looking at the latest version of Lightroom again. Picasa is great on the go because it uses so few resources, but for the desktop, maybe another software would simply be more powerful.
Jeffrey’s “Export to PicasaWeb” Lightroom Plugin - and Picasa works too.
PresetsHeaven - presets for Lightroom. Since Lightroom is currently fascinating me greatly (hey, they save the processing parameters in the DNG files on request, so I can edit on two computers very simply and sync with Unison - and yes, Lightroom runs quite well on the small Asus Eee-PC 901!), I'll blog the link. There are some very charming presets to download.
WinMerge - Merge program for Windows. Should I integrate it into Mercurial so that something sensible can happen when conflicts arise during merges.
picasa2flickr - flickr upload plugin for picasa - works great with Picasa3. This gives me a compact workflow for my little Digi and the Asus. Yes, I know, Google is evil, Yahoo is evil and the chip of my Digi is noisy.