Wilmington - why wander to the Andes, when gigantic ground "drawings" are so close at hand?
Linkblog - 4.5.2007 - 21.5.2007
Amazon kündigt DRM-freie MP3-Downloads an - nice deal for EMI. I think it's about time for the other major labels to stop with the DRM nonsense if they want to keep up. Two huge shop platforms for EMI and good press, that can quickly make the number 3 the number 2 or even better, if download numbers are the primary sales share.
Deutsche Telekom bids farewell to T-Com brand - one builds a brand for a lot of money. Then one crushes it and introduces another brand that again swallows money for advertising measures. At the same time, one wants to pay the service employees less money for more hours. So that one can squander more money on nonsensical marketing measures? The monkey dance that the Telekom is currently performing is simply ridiculous.
Friday 20 - It's about almost everything - why the Deutsche Telekom strike is more than just an attempt to save the company's employees. Much more.
individual-i [de] - linked by the raven, pointed out by the eagle owl and no, I don't have a bird. But simply one of several logos in the top right corner of my site, as a sign that individual rights are more important to me than an exaggerated and unrealistic need for security. And the link collection at the raven should be explored as further information.
JPC - Computer Virtualization in Java - a PC emulator in Java. Strange.
Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? - interesting text about the strengths of vi. Slightly shocking: this was written by people who built a VI emulation for Microsoft Visual Studio.
Support for globalization critic Geißler joins Attac - always good for surprises, the man.
Atze Schröder and Wikipedia - is it clear to the comedian who portrays Atze Schröder that trademarks in the trademark register are publicly accessible? Or does he now want to prohibit Wikipedia from including the link to the Patent and Trademark Office in the article? Or even sue the trademark register?
capsulehotel - strange. very strange.
MarcoPolo - Automatic location switching for Mac OS X - very cool. Uses various rules to decide with which probability you are in a certain network environment and switches accordingly. Can also trigger shell scripts, so you can automate quite a lot with it. Very good for network nomads.
Administrative Court: Honey must be protected from GM maize pollen - a small victory that hopefully won't be undone in higher instances (yes, sometimes I'm a hopeless optimist and dreamer).
Beautiful Soup: We called him Tortoise because he taught us. - not new, but practical: an HTML parser for broken HTML. In Python. (and yes, I need to automate HTML browsing for tests right now)
ISO working group proposes Unicode with "ß" as uppercase letter - funny, never thought about it, a big ß is sometimes necessary. Never knew that there was even a big form of it ...
twill: a simple scripting language for Web browsing - automated web browsing. I think I've mentioned it before, but never mind, things are often repeated.
Apple and Microsoft to be forced to use DRM - completely crazy. If a manufacturer threatens to sue for a market for copy prevention (whose effectiveness is questionable at best).
Flickr → iPhoto - Import Flickr feeds into iPhoto as a photo stream (via a converting detour). Not a bad idea, even if it might blow up your hard drive.
FlickrExport - plugin for iPhoto. Considering moving my pictures from iView to iPhoto - iView is technically superior in terms of features, but what good are features I don't use? Lightroom would also be nice, but it has even more features that I actually never use. iPhoto has the nasty habit of just working ...
Google will create psychological profiles from online games - by now, even the last person should realize that "don't be evil" was just a silly marketing gimmick.
Stig's Inferno by Ty Templeton - a man on his way through hell in search of his pants?
XML Transformation in Scheme - small example of how to play around with PLT Scheme and XML.
Doping-Szene Deutschland: Heile Welt in Magenta - it fits so well, here's the link to an article from 2005 with a good summary about Team Telekom and doping. The doctors are not in the spotlight for the first time.
Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to "forget" - very true. Especially in times of Web 2.0 applications, data collectors, automatic archives, and mass publication of the most private content.
Music industry and Udo Jürgens put pressure on Chancellor - the music industry has never been a pillar of the creative economy - the musicians are. Sometimes. And Udo Jürgens? I wouldn't even want him if someone paid me to have him ...
Conflict at Axel Springer: "WamS" Comment Editor Attacks "Bild" Editor-in-Chief - well, one Springer crow just can't peck out the eye of another. Too bad that the contents are now sufficiently documented in various places. Despite the flip at Welt Online ...
Terror-Webseiten: Europol sucht Terroristen im Netz - "According to the Interior Ministry, the German EU Council Presidency also aims to extend Europol's competencies to all forms of cross-border serious crime. This would allow offenses such as the dissemination of child pornography or activities by hooligans to be pursued even more effectively."
A MacFUSE-Based Process File System for Mac OS X - quite nice. Very nice. procfs and its many variants are extremely practical for shell scripts that want to check something quickly. Good to have something like this as an option for OS X as well.
Alligator Eggs! - by far the strangest explanation of the Lambda Calculus I have ever seen.
Erlang For The Practical Man - quick and dirty tutorial for a practical application (convert a POP3 mailbox to an RSS feed).
Drowning in a flood of data - “You can't prevent anything with such measures” - yes, another Spreeblick link. But really - read it. The interview is brilliant. "By the way: have you ever thought about the fact that one special aspect of suicide bombers is that they are rarely repeat offenders?"
Evolved Virtual Creatures - fascinating. Virtual creatures optimized through genetic algorithms.
Lambda Associates Home Page - Qi, a functional language based on Common Lisp. Freely available and runnable on various Lisp implementations.
Linuxtag with patron Wolfgang Schäuble - "As emphasized on the conference organization's website, the patronage by the Federal Ministry of the Interior is a tradition that has been maintained by the Linuxtag for five years. No political evaluation is associated with the patronage." - Sorry, but wouldn't it be time to break with tradition? First the Iron Otto and now Schäuble? Do you want such a patronage? What is the point of a patronage that one explicitly distances oneself from?
Philip Linden's Folly - about the current efforts of Linden Labs to equip Second Life with an ID verification system. Interesting for German citizens in SL: this service provider collects heaps of data pools, links these to obtain as complete views as possible and makes evaluations, data sales, verifications, etc. which is of course nonsense in the context of age verification: simply enter your father's data and that's it. As a security level, complete nonsense. Piquant: their partner in Great Britain is the GB Group with the product URU, which also offers these services and is subject to EU data protection rules - I can't imagine that it is still legal in this context. And that data is also collected from non-British and non-American citizens directly affects our data protection rules. It would be interesting to see how many Europeans and especially Germans are willing to send their passport number to an American service provider to gain extended access to a virtual world. I fear far too many ...
Reset Reloaded - an interesting approach to the CSS default differences of various browsers: simply reset everything cleanly, so that stylesheets can start on a common basis.
US civil rights activists accuse Uri Geller of copyright infringement - because, the spoon bending didn't work out.
Basso admits doping - clear, ok, finally taken the right path. Come clean. But why is he being cheered now? It doesn't change the fact that he doped and lied for a damn long time because he thought he would get away with it. Only when the water is up to his neck, and he is offered a reduced sentence, is he suddenly remorseful. The right way? Yes. Cheering for courage? Ridiculous.
Schäuble: Germany is "one of the safest countries in the world" - that's why we absolutely need to tighten the laws. What nonsense politicians come up with. And how quickly voters forget that.
Schäuble and Zypries want to extend Paragraph 129 StGB to individual perpetrators - the state's rampage continues. And as expected, the Federal Incompetence (some call her Federal Minister of Justice) immediately caves under minimal pressure. Can we still hope for Karlsruhe then?
Online, Adidas and Gumball 3000 - illegal street races. Sponsored. By corporations.
Desktop Factory announces cheap 3D printer - let's see if this or maybe one of the various free Fabber projects comes first. But one thing is certain: since my enthusiasm for 3D construction in SL, I want to have something like this.
impromptu - a Scheme environment explicitly for using AudioUnits. Computer-generated music, with the help of heaps of parentheses.
JSONstore 0.2 - interesting, a mini database for JSON objects. Might be useful for projects with JavaScript on the client side, to give them a simple database.
Police rely on private service providers in hunt for child pornography - interesting, especially in light of Schäuble's demand for expanded surveillance. Then even more will be outsourced in the long run - but where will the security of citizens' privacy remain?
PyInstaller - interesting alternative to py2exe, which can create executable files for both Windows and Linux.
Chanalyzer Software and Wi-Spy Stick - Analyzer for the 2.4 GHz band. Free software available (from the Kismet people) and a beta for the Mac.
The Inventors of Helmut Kohl - Reading Command.