Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because someone asked - ouch. Very poor show, Apple.
Linkblog - 23.6.2008 - 8.7.2008
Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format - not entirely uninteresting.
PostgreSQL Gets Religion About Replication - looks like replication is the next big thing for PostgreSQL. Would be great, as this is still a rather shaky corner in my favorite database.
Court Ruling Will Expose Viewing Habits of YouTube Users - if anyone thinks that only in this country courts make strange decisions regarding the disclosure of private data, take a look at this. Have you watched videos on YouTube? If so, Viacom will now have to be freshly served this information by Google, unless Google finds a way to convince the court of the absurdity of it. Great, isn't it? Just like that, all access data on YouTube handed over to a company in the music industry that is by no means acting selflessly and is, of course, extremely interested in this data.
Drobo - doesn't sound uncool, that thing. Data redundancy at array level when using heterogeneous disk configurations, that's already nice. Classic arrays often have the problem that only equal disk sizes are used (larger disks then have unused free space), which is why increasing the capacity forces you to replace all disks. Something like the Drobo is of course much more flexible, and behind the Time Capsule it would also be a quite practical device. And the price is not really shockingly high - considering what you get for it.
Google Talk for the iPhone - great. Now I can finally access my Google Talk from the iPhone. Although this will hopefully be fixed soon via the App Store with Adium for the iPhone - but since T-Mobile prohibits IM, they might get the stupid idea to block the Google Talk ports - but the web access to Google Talk will still remain. I wish Google had included this earlier, I've been missing something like this for a long time ...
German Federal Cartel Office raids coffee producers nationwide - is this now a classic breakfast cartel, or was it rather a coffee-and-cake cartel?
Phone Smart - Cellphone Termination Fees Seem to Be on the Way Out - "These new policies look a lot like a gift to anyone who wants to jump to a new carrier. Before the policy changes at Verizon and T-Mobile, customers who wanted to cancel their contracts faced penalties of $175 for Verizon and $200 for T-Mobile." - only in Germany, you can be slapped with a fine of up to 270 EUR if you want to switch an iPhone contract after 6 months because you want the new iPhone (with a new contract with the same provider!). T-Mobile Germany is therefore even more customer-unfriendly than the same store in the USA. Great performance!
Python Underscore Methods - nice overview of all magic methods on one page.
Steinbrück: Harsh Words Against Child Benefit Increase - the contempt that politicians show for citizens with such statements is shocking.
Watermelon Found to Have a Viagra effect - will there be watermelon spam next?
New law says computer repair guys in Texas must also be licensed private investigators!!! - they're crazy, those Texans. Analysis of damage caused by Trojans or viruses would thus only be allowed for licensed investigators - regardless of whether they know anything about computers. But not for service technicians. This is so stupid, you just have to wait until it's implemented here as well (does anyone remember the approach of only allowing electricians to install computer systems, which the chambers of commerce had at one point?)
T-Mobile Abzocker - it was clear that T-Mobile would charge for something that is even available at AT&T under better conditions. Customer service in Germany is still treated as small and listed on the back of the contract under "excluded services" (and before someone wants to praise Vodafone - the store would behave no better in the same situation). Oh, and for those who don't understand the problem: the old iPhone was not subsidized by T-Mobile, but the revenues had to be shared. T-Mobile is therefore being bought out by customers from Apple for contracts that are unfavorable for T-Mobile ...
Nikon D700 Hands-on Preview - ok, that thing just sounds great. That should directly motivate Canon to re-release the somewhat outdated 5D. It's great that full-frame sensors are finally being used more widely. A bit of competition between Nikon and Canon can only do the prices good (they are still ridiculously high). But I will never understand the ridiculous 95% viewfinder - in the film area, it came from the typical crop of slides and prints - but with digital, it's rather silly ...
Cocoa on the web: 280 North, Objective-J, and Cappuccino - wow, someone has implemented Objective-C as a preprocessor and runtime in JavaScript and then ported Cocoa to JavaScript.
NNDB Mapper: Tracking the entire world - interesting mapping tool that builds a "social network" of people of public interest based on publications, reports, and rumors and displays it graphically. Perfect fodder for conspiracy theorists!
Strange practice at mobile phone contract trading portal - "For example, a bank statement must be provided to prove the liquidity of the new customer." - eh, hello? Bank statements contain much more than just statements about liquidity. What a stupid idea is that? And probably the users will do the nonsense and obediently present their regular bookings to some stranger ...
Study: Smoking ban in England prevents 40,000 deaths - only here the downfall of the West is still predicted by the smoking ban.
Wee Westerns - Tabletop Western Photography. Fun!
WikidBASE - interesting mix of wiki and structured database. Found at Schockwellenreiter.
Data trading with the FBI - and this is how we are sold and traded. And the fact that perhaps one or the other state still has rudimentary data protection regulations that prohibit such trading does not interest anyone either.
ICANN and IANA Defacements - the domains of the domain authority temporarily stolen. Ouch.
Graphite - sounds very interesting, a package for visualizing time series data. Basically what RRDTool would have wanted to become if it were big. Possibly a good alternative to Munin in our monitoring. And it is Python code.
iPhone 3G: T-Mobile promises unlimited VPN usage - T-Mobile's argumentative wavering is simply ridiculous and proves that the company has no clue about a) what customers expect today and b) what the iPhone actually represents and offers. But fortunately, c) also applies - T-Mobile is simply too stupid to effectively prohibit or restrict anything. Nevertheless, with their behavior, they would easily become the laughing stock of the industry if the competitors were not even more stupid and ridiculous.
AVG is a pig of a software - because it makes background accesses to search results during search queries, in order to set its own silly malware scanners on them, before the user even decides whether to visit one of the links. And it blows up the web traffic - and then also disguises these accesses as normal user accesses - fake weblogs, distorted access statistics, web traffic up - and all just for the sale of some digital snake oil ...
Chuck Moore's Wonderful colorForth Programming Language and Operating System - "Rather than a string of 8-bit characters, colorForth interprets pre-parsed words. A word starts with 4 bits that indicate its color and function - text, number, etc. Then 28 bits of left-justified, Huffman-coded characters, averaging 5.2 bits each. Numbers are stored in binary. Each word occupies 1 or more 32-bit memory locations." - ok, und die 2GB Hauptspeicher sitzen da und langweilen sich, weil der Programmierer sich Gedanken über Huffman-codierung von Befehlswörtern gemacht hat, um auch noch das letzte Bit zu sparen. Schon ein ziemlicher Anachronismus - aber ein sympathischer.
Keylogger in JavaScript with IE up to version 8beta - ouch. That hurts. And I wonder again why one has to install such essential functions as NoScript via extension even with Firefox. Such things belong as basic tools directly into every browser. And no, the simple on/off for JavaScript, which is offered, is no alternative - in times of Ajax interfaces you need JavaScript again and again.
"You can't handle nuclear waste like this" - but nuclear power is just so great and disposal is no problem at all, as is often mentioned in the CO2 debate. Will we humans ever learn to learn from our mistakes?
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Forth - "I think it behooves new programmers to sample all the languages available. Forth is the only one that's fun. The satisfaction of finding a neat representation cannot be equaled in Fortran, C or even Lisp. (And mentioning those languages surely dates me). Try it, you'll like it."
Amphibious Robot Snake (Video) - heh. Fun!
It's L-i-n-u-x, that is an Operating System - ouch. You can't make this up, only reality can bring this.
OmniFocus for iPhone and iPod touch - cool. Combining the iPhone OS's Location Services with a GTD application. Obvious idea, but you still have to come up with it first. Additionally, there will be a sync between Mac and iPhone for OmniFocus - that makes the software quite interesting - especially of course if it is based on elements and possibly even can synchronize several OmniFocus instances? The latter probably not, but one can still hope.
One Man, One Long List, No More Web Ads - what surprises me about this discussion on "ad blockers threaten the business model of websites that rely on advertising" is that no one questions this pathetic and dumb business idea. It's quite simple: if you run a business and don't make profits, the business idea is simply useless. Find another one. Ad blockers threaten your income? Well, then it's probably time to return to honest work, isn't it?
Perfect multi-column CSS liquid layouts - iPhone compatible - wow. This looks very promising, especially the point "no browser hacks".
Ruins of Babylon irreparably damaged by Iraq War - "But those who visited Babylon after the country's liberation in 2003 report that it is almost impossible to distinguish what are ancient ruins - and what was destroyed by the coalition forces." - the result of the axis of stupidity. What are a few millennia of cultural assets when you can wage a war to distract from domestic political problems and to secure the economic interests of your donors ...
Ströbele leaves BND committee temporarily | tagesschau.de - "However, initially Ströbele followed Hanning's statements from the audience. The current Interior Secretary and former President of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) explained in detail that there was no reason to distrust the USA and its intelligence services." - örks. August can play chess, but otherwise I strongly doubt his competence. There are many reasons to distrust American intelligence services, which should have reached him by now.
The Floating Boxes CSS Layout - by the same author as the previous layouts. Also very interesting.
Surveillance mania in Berlin - "I have nothing to hide" is what many of those who fell into the surveillance mania might have said ... (I can't get 1100 urgent suspects together in Berlin - we don't even have that many members of parliament ...)
Unemployment benefits from 2012 only with chip card - Bureaucracy reduction, everything clear. And we are supposed to believe that? The "advantages" are just so far-fetched ...
Front Range Pythoneering: Flipping the 2.5 Bit for Jython - Jython is now at 2.5 level! And definitely a usable alternative, and a much more pleasant way to try out the many Java libraries.
White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail - as long as such behavior prevails in e.g. the USA, nothing will change. And unfortunately, it's not just in the USA, here too, some people define their freedom by the (lack of) speed limit on highways ...
Symbian to become Open Source - Reaction to Google Android and wider use of Linux in mobile devices?
Amazon EC2 Basics For Python Programmers - Tutorial on using EC2 with Python.
Retail theft - "The main reasons for this dilemma, according to retail, are the fact that with increasingly longer store opening hours and at the same time fewer and fewer staff, effective prevention is becoming increasingly difficult." - eh, hello? Turning retail stores into service deserts with (insufficiently trained) staff shortages was indeed the decision of the retail sector. Yes, if you lay off people, cut jobs and extend store opening hours, you don't exactly get something positive out of it. Welcome to reality ... (of course, the solution is already at hand with surveillance and store detectives - probably soon more store detectives than salespeople, which of course makes great sense ...)
Interview: "Öl-Spekulanten sind keine Preistreiber" - "The term 'speculator' is unfortunate. Financial investors enable us to see future expectations in today's prices. They show us that oil is becoming scarce. This way, we can already change our behavior today. Without such future expectations, we might only act from one day to the next." - sure, and burglars only show you weak points in your front door. And if you get shot, that only shows how toxic lead is. Because if we weren't regularly robbed, we might not even know that there are robbers out there. Or what? Who actually makes such talkers into "experts"? According to this windbag, should we now be grateful to the speculators who artificially inflate prices, or what?
More: Systems Programming with PLT Scheme - nice tutorial on how to build a webserver with PLT Scheme.
Nokia buys Plazes - maybe the Nokia 810 will become interesting after all. But Nokia is evil and I am a MacHead, so it will probably stay with the new iPhone ...
Olympus E-420 Review - hmm. Doesn't sound incredibly exciting. On the other hand, it wouldn't be a replacement for my 10D, but a replacement for a compact camera. And from that perspective, it could be interesting again - especially with the 25mm lens. But is the price still justified? Ok, good compact cameras aren't much cheaper and the image quality of 4/3 is still significantly better than that of compacts (especially with today's megapixel craze).
Olympus Zuiko Digital 25mm 1:2.8 Lens Review - örks. The results read much worse than with the camera. I don't know if a poorly corrected 25mm lens can really excite me. Ok, I would have tested it before buying it anyway.