Wilber loves Apple - since Photoshop Elements keeps crashing on me (and of course, I have no idea what the nonsense is supposed to mean), I've once again dealt with Gimp and Mac. Wilber loves Apple is a very well-made collection of Gimp for Mac, ready for drag-and-drop installation and, in my opinion, much better than the more well-known Gimp.App (for example, Wilber loves Apple finally shows all filters and scripts even when the German interface is set, which Gimp.App does not do).
Linkblog - 7.12.2007 - 9.1.2008
Ruffles for "Existential Threatening" Warning File of the Insurance Industry - and another pot in which data is diligently collected so that some companies can steal themselves from the performance expected of them. And customers are diligently driven into the maw of potential customers with the privatization of parts of old-age provision and health insurance ...
Valued Lessons: Monads in Python (with nice syntax!) - interesting approach using Python 2.5 bidirectional generators.
At a Loss for Words - fascinating. Microsoft just removes support for old file formats from Office 2003 - with a service pack. Great idea. Have fun those who have archived their documents in Word or Excel format ... there are hardly better reasons to switch to open programs like OpenOffice, or?
Backscatterer.org, another antisocial and technically stupid blocklist - idiots at work. Once again, an antisocial and stupid wannabe expert tries to redefine the Internet according to his opinion. This time it's against sender callouts - a technique that helps quite well against spam because addresses can be checked for validity with it. And all with minimal effort for the mail servers - a small sequence of HELO, MAIL FROM and RCPT TO (which would come later in any case with every bounce) and then directly a QUIT - so no mail in the queue, but only a check based on SMTP. The argument that he has to deal with the verifiers in addition to the bounces is nonsense - because if the verify does not come, the bounces come from these failed mails, because not only the senders are in a much larger part garbage, also the recipients (of the mail traffic that we push, only the smallest part is actually valid in terms of emails). Turning off the verification only leads to a greater occurrence of bounces - and they are expensive, because they go into the mail queue, while the verifies do not go there. The argument about loops is also stupid - correct callbacks happen with an empty envelope-from, so the other server knows immediately that it does not need to perform verification (in principle, a bounce delivery is simulated, and loops are also prevented by the empty envelope-from). The purpose of the verification is to answer the question of whether you could send a bounce to the technical sender in case of doubt. If you can't do that, you can't accept a mail if you can't directly guarantee to check all the factors up front. This is a completely legitimate procedure and absolutely conformant with the RFCs. The operators of this list are only surpassed in stupidity by the mail administrators who enter such a list into their server as a blocklist. How stupid do you have to be for that? I know how stupid, because since today I know the first server that does this ...
base2 - a library that smooths out JavaScript differences between browsers.
Dean Edwards: IE7.js version 2.0 (beta) - new version of the brilliant JavaScript library that turns IE into a somewhat compliant browser.
Child pornography: Companies to evaluate hard drives - "In their investigations against child pornography in connection with the nationwide operation 'Heaven,' the Berlin police want to use internet specialists from external companies." - as if it were such a good idea to hand over private data (and every hard drive contains such data) to companies instead of having it examined by officials. What nonsense is this? Of course, the volume of data may overwhelm the officials - but one could have realized that beforehand. Now, however, to ultimately devalue all potential evidence by handing it over to entities outside the investigating authorities is quite a strange action.
Mars collision becomes more likely - just make sure it doesn't fall on top of Spirit or Opportunity!
Scratch Home imagine, program, share - a fun project to introduce children to programming in a graphical way. For my taste, it's too much based on the old Structogram technique, but still quite nice to look at. Additionally, it's nice that a Mac version is also available.
Adobe products communicate via dubious web address - Adobe is just a pigsty. This already started with the forced registration of the Creative Suite.
BGH: Raids against globalization critics were unlawful - it's becoming normal that the state doesn't care about its own laws ...
Django on Jython: Minding the Gap - wow. It's getting closer. And as a side effect, Jython will get closer to current Python. Cool!
HD Monitor Causes DRM Issues with Netflix - Netflix checks the output hardware and if it's too good, it prohibits playing files. And the kicker: if you follow the suggested troubleshooting path, rights for other files seem to be revoked (in the case of the OP then the rights for the movies purchased at Amazon). Great. DRM is garbage - and especially the one so often praised by the film industry, Microsoft's blob.
iCab is back - and uses WebKit. What I always found interesting about iCab were the very powerful filtering options. And of course it's nice that it's a real OS X program (unlike Firefox, which is still too bulky under OS X).
Is Australia building a Great Firewall? - "Youth protection sounds good. But what is presented as youth protection resembles the Great Firewall of China, which is widely criticized in the Western world."
GrabFS: The Screenshot File System - brilliant idea, simply a virtual file system for running applications and a file that represents the current window content. Copy the file and you have a snapshot. Ideal for scripted webcasts, for example.
OLPC Chief Technologist Starts Own Business - "She is starting her own company at the time when the XO will be delivered in large quantities," writes Jepsen on her website. "However, she will continue to provide OLPC with her products at cost price." Jepsen's first OLPC patent application was published on December 13, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. - yes, that's what the typical American charity scam looks like. She could have given the patents to the OLPC project so that it could generate support for the project from potential marketing (or simply use the patents as a guarantee of its own continued existence). But today, only personal profit counts. The fact that many opportunities are only possible through collaboration in a non-profit project, and that she has benefited from this, is certainly easy to ignore ...
Gmail Filesystem - since FUSE now also works with OSX, I should take a look at this again. 6 Gigabytes of external storage might not be such a bad idea after all.
Psychology Today: Dreams: Night School - interesting article about dreams and why we dream at all. The idea is that dreams are a training ground for the brain, where threats are recapitulated and the correct reactions to them are practiced. Dreams as a VR training ground for the real world.
Varnish - programmable reverse-Proxy for HTTP. Could be interesting for some projects - although I usually use Apache with ProxyPass to have a uniform layer (with optional caching) to the outside.
Australia to enforce a "rating system" on web, track users - Australia has now completely gone off the deep end. Age verification for 15+ content - so could the Internet be turned into an unsupervised children's playground. I mean, okay, Australia is a continent, but it has some island mentality somewhere. But that's really completely crazy.
David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars - a very interesting article by one of my favorite musicians, the former lead singer of the Talking Heads. Worth reading because he not only lists all the contract models that currently exist, but also names specific musicians and breaks them down with examples and calculations.
More on widgets: When one e-mail is enough to break a system. - JavaScript widgets (e.g. Mac Dashboard, or Google Desktop or Yahoo Widgets) have the same security issues as regular websites. And presumably, people pay even less attention to programming with widgets than with websites. We are probably heading towards a new wave of exploits ...
Samba Team Receives Microsoft Protocol Docs - well, it works.
Surfing for 61.98 euros per hour - ouch. What some people come up with to relieve others of their money is really awful.
A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US - because Icelandic women are, of course, terribly dangerous terrorists.
Harvey Wasserman on New Ohio Voting Report: "The 2004 Election Was Stolen… Finally We Have Irrefutable Confirmation" - after California, Ohio is now the second state to publish its own investigations into electronic voting machines, describing them as massively problematic. Incidentally, comparable systems were allowed for the state elections in Hesse. Because they are so easy to manipulate?
Creative Commons will bypass EU database protection rights - new versions specifically for Germany and EU law.
New setback for music industry's cease-and-desist lawyer - "In his judgment, Judge Schulz criticizes the fact that the Rasch law firm did not notice the transposition of numbers in the correspondence with the public prosecutor's office. He also read the riot act to the latter: The transfer of the personal data behind the IP address to the lawyer had been unlawful. The Code of Criminal Procedure would not allow such a transfer of personal information by the prosecutors."
Colds - Alcohol - Medicine and Health - "But drinking 8 to 14 glasses of wine per week, particularly red wine, was linked to as much as a 60 percent reduction in the risk of developing a cold. The scientists suspected this had something to do with the antioxidant properties of wine." - I guess I should start a red wine stockpile ... (currently battling another typical annoying cold)
Run Python Script - Automator Action. Unfortunately only from 10.5, so I have to wait.
SPD interior politician announces approval for online searches - the dishonest Social Democrats don't even bother to set up their dominoes before knocking them over themselves.
TOR-Server threatened with shutdown due to data retention - presumably, in the long run, we will have to rely on TOR servers in democratic and free states to be able to go online without being snooped on. But just as likely, the use of TOR servers will eventually be banned.
129a: Lesereise behind bars - "The Schrader case also raises questions and initially offers two possible interpretations: Either the accusation of political justice is correct or the investigators have botched things in an incredible way. If an alleged guerrilla can travel in and out of the country for years - what does that say about the protection against real terrorists?"
Amazon Web Services: SimpleDB - interesting service by Amazon, databases for structured and unstructured data via REST and SOAP. With the typical Amazon payment model for web services. Also interesting is the rumor that it was implemented with Erlang.
heise online - Extended police surveillance powers demanded - "The SPD interior expert Dieter WiefelspĂĽtz spoke out against the proposal of the CDU politician and warned in the newspaper against 'constantly calling hysterically for new laws'" - what do you want to bet that the Special Democrats, when push comes to shove, will flip again like dominoes? They make a lot of noise, but act? Hypocritical posturing, nothing more.
Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope - "According to Williams (1949), the machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube. The only “shielding” between your feet and the tube was a one mm thick aluminum filter. Some units allowed the operator to select one of three different intensities: the highest intensity for men, the middle one for women and the lowest for children."
Experts confirm link between nuclear power plants and cancer - "The number of cancer cases among children growing up near nuclear power plants is significantly higher than among their peers in the rest of the country. A corresponding study, which the Federal Office for Radiation Protection had commissioned, has now also been confirmed by an independent expert panel." - will the usual "think of the children" screamers now also open their mouths? Or do they limit themselves to wanting to censor the internet? The whole discussion is quite cute - has it ever occurred to any of the "we need to research and discuss this further" representatives that the study is not based on some abstract statistics, but on very concrete diseases and deaths of children?
Nokia: Ogg formats in the HTML standard? Not with us! - OGG is disparaged as a proprietary format and patent concerns are expressed (although there has not been a single patent attack on OGG formats to date). But at the same time, H.264 and AAC are seen as unproblematic, even though these formats are definitely patent-encumbered and far more proprietary than anything Ogg-related. Stupid position from Nokia.
Skype on OS2007HE umm... working... - I still have the 770 and the 800. Hmm. I'm not sure if I want to buy the 810 (already available in the Nokia Shop for Germany), 459 Euros is not exactly cheap ...
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters - a very nice book that I'm currently reading. Steampunk, mad scientists, adventures, sex, drugs, no rock-and-roll (hey, that didn't exist in the early Victorian era!) and lots of suspense. And the website for the book isn't uncool either. Oh, and linked are also online games related to the book and two of the main characters.
Foren-Haftung: LG Hamburg insists on prior review - every time one is happy about a few positive judgments or comments from Karlsruhe or the BGH, one can be sure that the court least competent regarding the internet (at least among those who feel they must comment on internet issues) will speak up again. How this fits with current case law, in my opinion, the court itself cannot convincingly explain. I don't mind - I am a) not a friend of comments at all (sorry, but if you have something to say, you can run your own blog, which is really simple enough today) and b) in my opinion, all the spammers are reason enough to restrict comments. With forum systems like Heise or similar, this is of course completely different.
Criminalization of parallel imports still controversial - sounds cumbersome. But it means nothing else than that the opinion of the EU Parliament should be ignored again. Parallel imports mean, for example, buying music abroad because it's cheaper there. And that is of course a thorn in the side of the rip-off merchants. Because the free movement of the market in the EU can and may not apply to something as important as music or films. Where would we end up there. After all, we also have to give up our rights to the stuff. There will probably be rain again soon - the arguments of the prolethicians and rip-off merchants are particularly flat at the moment ...
New version of Ready Lisp for Mac OS X available - anyone who wants to test Common Lisp in a typical work environment, this package makes it typically easy on a Mac. Simply download a DMG, put the bundle in the Applications folder and off you go. The package includes AquaMacs, Slime, and SBCL, which is quite decent. Unfortunately, it's only for 10.5 - so not usable for me.
You have the right to remain silent - because they write more and better than I do, go read it there.