Making (some) sense out of sensor sizes - because I always look for this from time to time, finally blogged.
Linkblog - 21.8.2008 - 20.9.2008
tms - a very useful command line tool for Leopard, with which you can look very detailed into TimeMachine backups and find out what the hell was actually backed up there. Helpful when you're sitting there again and wondering why the stupid system wants to back up 1.3 GB now (probably it was the system upgrade) ...
Confidentiality, integrity and verifiability - with whom? - "Private service providers are to join forces to form a network of certified citizen portals, which is to be financed either by savings in the economy and administration, for example by eliminating the need to send invoices, or by an "E-Porto". - thanks, but no thanks.
Clozure CL 1.2 released - formerly OpenMCL, the Lisp system based on Macintosh Common Lisp for OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD, has finally been released in a new stable version.
Introducing SquirrelFish Extreme - the JavaScript engine arms race is in full swing. Currently leading: SquirrelFish Extreme - in Safari.
Mario's Bike on Flickr - already old, but still funny: the Flickr photo criticism buffoons criticize an HCB photo, without knowing (and noticing) that it is one. And they complain about blurriness, lack of subject and all sorts of things. Then they are told that it is by HCB - and they still nitpick. Extremely amusing.
Play light-Bot, a free online game on Kongregate - a cute little Flash game where you program a small robot to light up marked floor tiles.
Summer of JavaScriptCore: SquirrelFish Extreme has landed! - and here are the comparison numbers to other JS engines.
Canon EOS 5D Mark II: 21MP and HD movies - thanks, Canon. How the hell am I supposed to decide now with the choice between 5D MKII, D700 and Alpha900? Can't one of the three drastically lower its prices, by about 1000 euros, then it would be easier for me ...
Million blunder: KfW transfer to bankrupt bank Lehman - somehow the bank crash is turning into a blunder crash. I mean, how stupid do you have to be to throw another 300 million at a bankrupt bank? "By accident"? "Technical defect"?
US Intelligence Agencies: Terrorists Could Use Online Role-Playing Games to Plan Attacks - Ongoing summer doldrums debate in the USA? Don't they have a few banks and insurance companies to worry about? The impact of a collapse at AIG would certainly be much greater than these movie horror scenarios that some self-important people come up with. Unfortunately, such theorists with their contrived nonsense are increasingly found here as well. Instead of dealing with real dangers (when will there finally be a speed limit on highways?), more and more absurd proposals on the topic of surveillance are coming up, which will classically protect us from non-existent problems. And money is then spent on such nonsense ...
Throw the guy in jail! - "The Berlin Regional Court today sentenced lawyer Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, known for his cease-and-desist letters, to 14 months in prison without parole." - You can't comment on this any better than it reads! (Unfortunately, not yet final)
I41CX+ - and since it's so nice, also an HP41CX emulator as an iPhone app. Even a very complete implementation with support for modules and built-in printer (so printer simulation). On the iPhone, this is even really practical.
SourceForge.net: X-41 - an HP-41CV Simulator - for OSX. The HP48 and above were of course more modern, but somehow only the HP41 is the real HP pocket calculator ...
Carl Zeiss lenses for Canon SLRs - nice, if Canon now brings a reissue of the 5D with a full-frame chip in the performance class of the Alpha 900 or D700 according to the rumors, it will get really interesting. However, Sony still has the edge because their Zeiss lenses support full AF and not just focus confirmation like with Nikon and Canon.
heise online - 15.09.08 - ITU discusses better traceability of IP addresses - "In the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a procedure is being discussed that can help track IP addresses better. According to a preliminary document published by CNET News from the ITU Working Group 17 (SG 17), 'IP Traceback' is intended to help prevent Denial-of-Service attacks or track down network criminals, but also to make applications on the network more reliable overall. Data protection experts, however, warn of possible misuse. Particular mistrust was apparently aroused by the fact that the first proposal comes from the researcher Tian Huirong, who works at the Chinese Academy for Telecommunication Research (CATR), which is under the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry." - of course in the ITU, which has been accused for some time of increasingly and strongly interfering in internet regulation and standardization. And which has often shown that its mechanisms are anything but open - and thus pretty much contrary to the approach of the IETF. It fits perfectly, like the proverbial ass on the bucket, when a goat is made into a data protection gardener.
Luminous Jewel: Leica Noctilux with World Record Aperture - 8000 Euro. For a few pieces of glass. High-quality glass, of course. And with impressive light intensity (and if they have fixed the soft drawing of the old Noctilux, all the better). But let's be honest - not even specialists need this. "Want" - sure. "Need"? No. They should have given the M8.2 a faster startup time, that little darling costs almost 5000 Euro as well ...
The deep heap: Ghost in the Java virtual machine - very interesting article about JVM performance in terms of memory usage and garbage collection and compaction. Also interesting outside of Java.
Dropbox - Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy. - interesting file sync service - the client is written in Python (though closed source in the delivery). Initially, I was a bit annoyed because it doesn't say which systems it works on - and my work Mac on which I'm currently testing it is still on 10.3.9. And yes, it actually works. Ok, if it even supports 10.3.9, you can ignore system version specifications ... (although, I've heard there are still 10.2 users)
Prototype based programming in python - nice example of how to do prototype-based OO in Python as well.
Armstrong returns - even if no one wants him. Why send a doping zombie back into the race? He's certainly not credible anymore.
Bund buys back Bundesdruckerei - and why did the complete idiots in Berlin take 8 years to have these security concerns? What was all this nonsense for - apart from pumping huge profits into the coffers of Apax, who got their purchase price back with the refinancing?
EU allows Bayer to import genetically modified soybeans - great, they can't be grown, but of course the stuff can be used as food. What nonsense ...
Ex-BND Chief: Plans for covert online searches unconstitutional - it's nice that he says that. But he is the former BND chief after all. Would he have said the same thing during his active time? Probably not. The wolf becomes a sheep more easily when he can only eat oatmeal.
Cappuccino Web Framework - something like Cocoa for the web with JavaScript (more precisely Objective-J, a language based on JavaScript)
Disco - Map/Reduce with server in Erlang and API in Python.
Django 1.0 released! - it took a long time, but that can certainly be beneficial for the quality. And here it is. Congratulations!
ThinkGeek :: Luxeed Dynamic Pixel LED Keyboard - not bad either, but only Windows and not ergonomic.
ThinkGeek :: Optimus Maximus Keyboard - does anyone have 1600 dollars for me? Well, it's not available in an ergonomic form anyway.
Copyright infringement: Courts set low threshold for information claim against providers - "If other courts follow this extremely broad interpretation of 'commercial scale', it is to be expected that the civil courts will then be confronted with the same flood of applications that law enforcement agencies are currently confronted with." - well, that was to be expected. So once again, only hope remains for Karlsruhe and a somewhat more reasonable basic decision.
OpenCOBOL - an open-source COBOL compiler - and apparently one that is actively maintained.
Sync trigger with Applescript ... - the path of the command line tool to trigger a sync is mentioned in the last comment. Very nice to build your own backup system, e.g. using Unison and iDisk.
Deutsche Bahn raises ticket prices by 3.9 percent - particularly cute the "service surcharge": anyone stupid enough to join the 5 km long queue in front of the only one of 10 open counters at the station, after 2 hours of waiting behind a stinking fellow human with flatulence finally gets a bad-tempered railway employee, whom he then has to explain laboriously where he wants to go - and then gets the most expensive fare selected in a targeted manner, well, now he has to pay a service surcharge for this preferential treatment. So that the railway can be dumped on the stock exchange.
Dealing with Resident Registration Data: The Shadow Registration Offices - how was that, Mr. Schäuble? "The data is safe in the hands of the state"? And of course, anyone who thinks differently is just a paranoid?
Aus für Gerolsteiner - too bad, it was one of the more interesting teams and the way Holczer ran the show made this racing stable very likable.
Canon EOS 50D - if this comes out now, the 40D should soon be sold off. I should pay more attention, because the 40D would be a great upgrade for my rather old 10D ...
Gears for Safari - it's about time. Hopefully it will also appear in Fluid soon - because that would actually be the most exciting (to turn web applications into classic offline applications).
Redhat perl. What a tragedy. - those who use Redhat: compile Perl yourself. Redhat seems to have a really big problem here.
Annals of the Patently Absurd - Microsoft gets a patent on PageUp and PageDown? And someone still claims that software patents have any justification other than amusement and funding for patent lawyers?
Factor: a practical stack language: New optimizer - very interesting description of the new optimizer in Factor. An advantage of the language: the main programmer documents very well in blog posts how he works on the system and what motivation is behind the changes. Always exciting to read. And the language is just nice.
Google: "No Trespassing" signs won't stop Street View - anyone who still believes that all these "social networks" have anything to do with social or nice can read the arrogant comments from Google in that article. "There is no complete privacy" - and that is immediately interpreted as "ignore no entry".
Jennifer Daniel Dot Com Was Taken - hmm. Strange. But somehow interesting.
Rabbiter - interesting project based on RabbitMQ that could provide the basis for Twitter services. Everything in Erlang and massively designed for scalability.
Techdirt: Diebold/Premier Actually Admits Its Machines Are Faulty! And That It Lied About Antivirus Software... - and this will surely be ignored here in Germany. Or will someone finally wake up?
The Transterpreter - haven't had a Lego link in a while. Transterpreter provides an Occam environment that can run on a Lego RCX brick.
Index of /namespace/OmniOutliner - DTDs for the OmniOutliner XML format.
Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store has launched - normal block devices for Amazon EC2.
Free Critical Mass Modula-3 (CM3) - actively supported Modula-3.