Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition - available to read online.
Linkblog - 18.5.2008 - 23.6.2008
Ravelry - a knit and crochet community - yep. Knitting and crocheting. As a community. Don't ask me why I find something like this (although, I can actually knit. But it was more of a reaction against all the knitting girls in school ...)
screamyGuy - Random Acts of Programming - interesting projects with Processing.
Telekom eavesdropped on alleged hackers - "According to the report, electronic surveillance of four telephone numbers in Hennef, Rhineland, began in December 1996 under the codename 'Bunny'. Conversation contents were also recorded. A total of nearly 120 calls were reportedly captured." - another reason why such fundamental infrastructure as telecommunications simply does not belong in private hands, as it can be controlled far too little. However, abuse cannot be ruled out even in state-owned companies or agencies, but at least there are rudimentary controls in place.
Aquamacs: Emacs for Mac OS X - now also supports tabs. Hmm. Maybe I should finally get off my ass and make the necessary adjustments and switch. The flexibility of Emacs is unparalleled and Aquamacs now has a really usable - and Mac-like! - interface. (Update: nah, nah, really not. In the moment I used vi to edit the .emacs file, I knew that all the Mac adjustments would be useless)
Old Google Mail domain banned in Germany - click and laugh to death. Absurdistan, thy name is Germany ...
classic investigation still better than mass tests - "However, it was not the mass test that led to the current arrest, but classic investigative work. As the Dresden Public Prosecutor's Office, the Saxon State Criminal Police Office and members of the Heller Investigative Group announced yesterday, Wednesday, investigators had visited the suspect on May 21, 2008, and asked him for a DNA sample because the man had lived near the crime scenes at the time of the crime and had driven a car with a partially recognized license plate."
The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web - steampunk web aus Belgiens 30er Jahre ...
Olympus LS-10 digital recorder - for future reference. Could be interesting (chasing sounds to then edit them and e.g. use them in SL)
Fan Programming Language - sounds quite interesting. And it runs on JVM or CLI. The language makes an interesting impression and a whole range of current concepts are integrated (especially the part about Concurrency sounds interesting).
PLT Scheme Blog - the new version is out now! And one of the nice new features: typed-scheme is integrated.
Squeak on the iPhone! - and Apple seems to agree. Wooot!
Alice.org - I don't know if I already had this, but it is a 3D environment with the goal of learning programming through the creation of interactive 3D objects. Looks quite nice.
AVOX Antares Vocal Toolkit - wow! That's exactly what I've been looking for - live-editing of voices (or batch in audio editing) with various effects. Ideal for my avatar work in SL, to give avatars suitable sounds. Specifically, Mutator and Articulator are interesting (the latter is perfect: it overlays the formative parts of the voice over other sounds and thus lets, for example, the wind speak).
Lunatic Python - bidirectional interface between Lua and Python.
90% of Enviro Skeptic Books Have Think Tank Roots - where do all these reality-denying books come from? Conservative think tanks in the US seem to have a big hand in it. And as the study so nicely puts it: "Thus, the notion that environmental skeptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of 'junk science' lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of skeptics as marginalized 'Davids' battling the powerful 'Goliath' of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as skeptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations."
Algorithmic Botany: Publications - "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" as download!
Cog Blog - fascinating blog of a programmer who is building a new Squeak Smalltalk VM, and writes about the problems of the Blue Book architecture and possible solutions - and he comes from VisualWorks VM development, so he should know what he's talking about. Very interesting to read and the result could also be interesting, as he predicts significant performance gains for his new VM.
Factor: a practical stack language: - why I love following Factor development: the programmers have no qualms about radically redesigning the language and making massive changes to semantics, even shying away from redesigning defining words. This of course makes the use of the language for real purposes a bit hairy, but it's simply thrilling to see how language constructs are juggled and the path to an optimal language is sought. And since they adjust the entire included library every time, the transition pains are not quite as great (and the included library is already absolutely impressive and currently has one of the best Unicode implementations I've seen so far)
Fractured YEARFRAC and Discounted DISC - interesting summary of the disaster called Excel and OOXML. The standard that is not one, because it is not standardized. But Microsoft presents it as a standard, so it fits perfectly into the times when no one knows how to spell "standard" correctly anymore ... (and anyone who does financial calculations with Excel deserves to be slapped and whipped)
TileStack - Your Creative Playground - HyperCard rebuild on the web. Compiles their HyperTalk dialect "Speak" to JavaScript. Interesting idea, could definitely make sense.
"An Exotic Matter" - funny variation on the topic "Singularity".
Anne against the political will - "Thus, the scandal surrounding Anne Will's show ultimately proves two political realities: The Left Party is continuing its successful course as a force of a bourgeois left. And the nerves of some representatives of former people's parties are on edge." - and beautifully shows the panic about the left in Germany.
Introducing Gmail Labs - Google keeps showing how to use the platform meaningfully. For example, now in GoogleMail with optionally activatable prerelease features. That's how I imagine it, with centrally operated software!
Government wants to hand over personal citizen data to the USA - "The Bundestag was not involved in the negotiations and was not informed, complain the Liberals. The federal government had not taken a position on the inquiry of the FDP in the interior committee and even denied the incident." - it's nice how we can rely on our government to betray and sell us, and completely ignore the Bundestag in the process. Especially piquant when it's about data that the federal government and its executing authorities shouldn't even have ...
Toy Scheme interpreter in J - looks like shell-script-meets-line-noise.
Future - nothing but a big fun | tagesschau.de - "Anyone who predicts the future for money or makes contact with the deceased must inform their customers beforehand that their services are 'solely for entertainment purposes and have not been experimentally proven so far'." - it would be good if this also applied to the various forecasting institutes!
ruby-processing - also interesting, a connection of the Processing Graphic API with JRuby. You can write your Processing sketches with Ruby.
The Lew Language - simple programming environments are spreading. First Processing (Java derivative), then Nodebox (Python), then Shoes (Ruby), then Processing.js (JavaScript) and now Lew (Lua). They all have in common that they offer a very simple, exploratory introduction to programming - basically what home computers with the integrated Basic offered back then, only now with decent programming languages.
PLT Scheme version 4.0 is Coming Soon - the best Scheme system in the world will soon have a new version with many new features and some background changes. Sounds very promising.
Cold plate by candlelight - "In the report of the Enquête Commission of the NRW state parliament on the effects of long-term sharply rising energy prices, the governing parties CDU and FDP recommend in their majority vote that low-income individuals should forgo heating in the winter: 'In the short term, tenants … can react by lowering the room temperature, by forgoing full heating of individual rooms, etc.' " - this is what our proletarians understand by social legislation.
Dive Into Greasemonkey - no idea if I already had it, but it was very helpful just now.
django-ae-utils - two interesting tools for Google AppEngine. One provides sessions based on the Google Store, the other a user management independent of Google Accounts.
flickrfs - funny FUSE filesystem in Python, which makes Flickr directly accessible via the file system. Might even run on the Mac, there is FUSE too. Might be worth taking a look.
Google is just playing - "«He just wants to play» dog owners often say when their animal obsessively runs towards a stranger, harasses, barks at, jumps on them, and generally restricts their freedom in a highly intrusive manner." - google, the Doberman Pinscher of the Internet.
goosh.org - the unofficial google shell. - nice hack. A shell interface in the web browser for google.
RetroShare: a secure combined file sharing-Chat-IM F2F service - sounds interesting in concept, would be fun to play around with it. Surveillance by the music industry currently carried out in other networks is of course circumvented - or at least massively hindered - via closed P2P networks, since you can explicitly define trust in partners (like in the PGP Web-of-Trust).
RWE to offer customers a pure nuclear power tariff - the power tariff for mental off-road drivers? Or just one of the dumbest PR actions of the year?
Employers threaten lawsuit against wage supplements - I usually leave blogging for the weekend, but that stupid dog from the employers' association is really barking the last nonsense. Yeah, sure, let's best leave the support for Hartz IV recipients and blow all the money up the ass of the fat cats. I hope the nonsensical lawsuit happens and Karlsruhe shows the parasite its place in society ...
Conway's Game of Life in one line of APL - scary. Very scary.
no-racism.net: Press release by the Legal Aid on the wave of repression - "Against twelve people, for whom house searches have taken place, there are arrest warrants. These are justified by the danger of obscuring, as the affected persons have communicated with encrypted emails, as well as the danger of committing the offense, because the affected persons have been active in the animal rights scene for a long time." - currently only in Austria, but we can well imagine when this will also happen in Germany.
Revision3 DOS - "First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the server to track hashes only – to improve performance and stability. That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit." - ein Handlanger der Musik und Filmindustrie legt einen legalen Betreiber eines Torrent-Trackers lahm. Da sieht man schön, mit welchen dreckigen Methoden (z.B. Diensteerschleichung) diese Leute arbeiten. Aus dem Nebensatz "das FBI interessiert sich dafür" entnehme ich mal, dass Anzeige erstattet wurde. Gut.
Best. Image. Ever. - Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.
Cocoa Text System - everything you want to know about the text system configuration under OS X (or don't want to know, but can still read about it)
impromptu - new version of the squeaking Scheme for the Mac.
TP: Victims on the Altar of Uniformity - "By November 1, 2009, all member states were supposed to have fully implemented the 'Directive on Payment Services.' At this point, SEPA direct debits were supposed to become 'binding' across Europe. This transition is problematic, among other things, because banks in Germany have so far refused to set up debit limits. Thus, anyone can debit an arbitrary amount from a current account without presenting a direct debit authorization. Similarly, there is no right for the consumer to limit the amount of direct debits. And neither the EU nor the federal government is currently considering limiting potential SEPA damage by introducing such rights. The consumer can only counter this risk by keeping as little money as possible in the current account and having all overdraft options definitively blocked." - we will be mocked and robbed with this. And why do we still pay the banks money when they anyway shirk responsibility at every corner and end?
Amazon byteflow: Hgshelve - pickled Python data in persistent hashes (shelves, that is), which are versioned with Mercurial. Brilliant stuff.
Yhc/Erlang/Proof of concept - interesting project that translates Haskell to Erlang bytecode (BEAM) and thus enables mixing of Haskell and Erlang code.
Final farewell to voting computers in the Netherlands - Golem.de - "The Dutch Ministry of the Interior announced the final farewell to voting computers on Friday. In the future, citizens in the country will once again cast their votes with pen and paper. The Dutch Council of Ministers was prompted to make this decision after massive security vulnerabilities in the voting computers were proven last year. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) demonstrated in mid-2007 how the ROM memory of a Nedap computer can be replaced with a manipulated ROM within 60 seconds. Researchers and the civil rights initiative "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting computers") had demonstrated further security vulnerabilities." - wouldn't it be great if our politicians would react similarly? However, this is less likely to be expected.