Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 released - wow. It took quite a while
Linkblog - 21.4.2005 - 6.6.2005
No attorney's fees for cease and desist letters in multiple representation - not yet the long-awaited breakthrough, but at least a first sign of intelligence. It would also be nice if multiple representation (as practiced, for example, by Walldorf and Stättler in the music industry and with burning programs) were treated similarly. At least where not explicitly representing the rights of specific companies but rather general ones.
Österreichische Gesundheitskarte violates the privacy of the unemployed - just for documentation that political madness also affects foreign politicians. It seems to be a European plague. Shouldn't we finally introduce strict quarantine regulations?
Lawyer as a serial bank robber - can he now defend himself in court and save on legal fees?
At Schockwellenreiter seen: QTAmateur, a simple QuickTime player that can also export - could actually end the constant QTPro buying, because I actually only need very few of the export functions of QT.
FDP will block disclosure of executive compensation - that's where you see who the FDP really represents.
Kodak confirm SLR/n and SLR/c discontinued - after Kodak was one of the first to build digital SLRs, and not even bad ones, it's now probably over. Ok, the SLR/n and SLR/c do make rather bad impressions, compared to current SLR bodies from Canon or Nikon. Earlier Kodaks like the 6xx and 7xx series were really great devices.
Algol 68 Genie - An Algol 68 interpreter. Obercool. Algol 68 is indeed a vintage language, but a fascinating one: the only one where a metalanguage was defined for the definition of the language itself, in which the definition of the language itself is written. The Algol68 Report is still one of the most fascinating programming language standards I know.
There is also a PDF Browser Plugin for Safari. Free for non-commercial use. It displays PDFs directly in the browser instead of launching an external viewer. I haven't tried it yet, though.
PithHelmet is an ad blocker for Safari. Very similar in function to the AdBlocker for Firefox. Very practical, making Safari a quite interesting browser again. In addition, PithHelmet for Safari provides selective JavaScript suppression and similar mechanisms - just like OmniWeb does. However, one or two rules (especially the BadSense rule caught my attention) are a bit aggressive, but you can configure that well.
Safari WebDevAdditions is a developer toolbar for Safari - so display of block-level elements, links, etc. It makes a quite practical impression on me.
Saft is a kitchen-sink extension for Safari. Packed with features. However, it's shareware, and I haven't tried it yet.
Scharping is no longer running for the Bundestag - if the statement came from a politician from whom one could assume that he would actually be elected, it would indeed be interesting. But Scharping?
Agfa-Photo GmbH goes into insolvency - oh man
Basso again! - takes the second stage win in a row at the Giro. Wow. This gives hope for the Tour.
Blechtrommeln machen Lärm and like Heiko, I'll keep banging on my little drum. Even if I'm just one Oskar Matzerat among many.
Digibux - Digital Library Bets on Open Source - cool. Maybe this will finally create an open format for eBooks. So far, many book contents have been distributed as HTML collections (only laboriously searchable with grep) or PDF (more focused on form than content). The software of the digital library, on the other hand, is specifically designed for research and use of the contents. What else comes to mind: how about a Spotlight plugin for the software?
X.4 Dashboard (Quarter Life Crisis) is a text about the worst usability blunders Apple made in Dashboard. Among other things, it also dissects the Weather Widget. What particularly annoys me about this part: Münster is not to be found. Not as Münster and not as Muenster. We have an airport here, so the data should be available (such tools usually access airport weather data, as it is free and available worldwide) - but nothing of the sort.
Delicious Library - yep, it works! Awesome.
Shoebox looks quite nice - a quite clever photo management with similar organization options through categorization as iView offers. I liked the quite high speed while playing around. However, I have already bought much more photo management tools than I can use, so I am practicing self-restraint here.
TBNL - A Toolkit for Dynamic Lisp Websites enables generating dynamic content with Common Lisp. Essentially, it's something like a FastCGI solution for Common Lisp.
Voyager reaches the boundary of the solar system - good journey and greet the aliens for me!
Ann Elisabeth was diligent and identified the Bulgarian twin spammers - who are likely responsible for a large part of blog spam.
Michael Hampton examines what nofollow has really brought: Nofollow revisited. If you're still using the raw version of WordPress: NoNoFollow install and disable nofollow.
US Department of Justice puts nationwide sex offender registry online - some news just leaves you speechless ...
Dive Into Greasemonkey is a free online book by Mark Pilgrim about programming userscripts for Greasemonkey. With these userscripts, you can change websites when they are displayed using JavaScript - for example, cut out firmly integrated advertising blocks, rewrite links with affiliate IDs so that your own is used, simply repair strange HTML so that you can actually do something with the website, or all kinds of other fun things.
FramerD is an object database (ok, a Framestore - but it's something similar) with an integrated DB server, CGI interface, and Scheme scripting language. Ideal for building knowledge databases, as FramerD is optimized for the pointer-heavy structures involved. But also very exciting, as you get a Scheme with server and ODB. I definitely have to play with it, especially since it should also compile on OS X (though it doesn't work for me right now). And it is licensed under GPL. And for the snake charmers among the monkey programmers, there is also an experimental Python library for accessing FramerD...
Found at Tim Pritlove: Lehmanns has a new releases blog with descriptions: New at Lehmanns. Nice. It's my favorite bookstore anyway (even though I mainly deal with their mail order department and occasionally with stands at trade fairs).
Fire department cuts up wrong car - ok, the owner was also quite stupid: car parked without a license plate on a fire station lot next to a row of junk cars. But it will probably be paid for by the insurance, so luck in misfortune ...
CamlServ is a web server in OCaml. I haven't looked at it in detail yet, but it could be interesting - OCaml is a language of the ML family (or the ML-like languages) with various very interesting extensions (e.g. a powerful object system). Unfortunately, the project does not seem to be very active anymore - last release from 2003 ...
Quartus Forth 2.0.0 is the new version of native-code Forth for the Palm platform. I've played around with it (and its predecessor PilotForth) for a long time - I'm just an old Forth fan.
yadis: yet another distributed identity system is a specification for a distributed identity system. Let's take a closer look.
Key theft on Hyperthreading systems - cool. I mean, sure, shit, it's a security hole. But that's really cool. Using Hyperthreading and cache timing to steal data from the second pseudo-processor right from under its nose - you have to come up with something like that first.
Sparkline PHP Graphing Library provides small, compact graphics that fit well into text - ideal for example to better visualize trend data.
Apple users in parliaments complain about discrimination - I can well imagine the nonsense of the responsible IT people. Of course, for network security, you clearly rely on Microsoft products ...
Firefox gets SVG support - finally a first independent SVG implementation and above all a broad platform for this format.
KDE developers annoyed with Apple - because they once again don't understand how to work in a team and send patches to an upstream project. Collaboration between companies and open source projects is still problematic - companies simply have a completely different agenda than the OS project.
First Trojan for Mac OS X spotted - if there aren't any, do you write your own? Just a guess - the information at Sophos about the alleged Trojan is very thin. No information about the spread and no specific information about the removal of the Trojan, no detailed information about detecting the Trojan (port or similar) and no information about the installed files. Sorry, but this all doesn't sound very credible ...
Softwarepatents: Industry lobbying with stacked cards? - if you already think you need to play with false cards, you should be more careful not to get caught ...
AquaMacs is an Emacs build for OS X (unfortunately only from 10.3 onwards) that aligns more closely with the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines. Those who appreciate the high configurability of Emacs but not the rather sick interface and key binding for Mac users might want to check this out.
The .emacs File by Bill Clementson. Shows very nicely why one should actually consider using Emacs. Particularly interesting for Common Lisp users is his customizing for Slime for integrating various Common Lisps.
Those who only occasionally work with PostgreSQL, so to speak, want to use it as a desktop database: PostgreSQLX is a compilation of the PostgreSQL server that can be easily started and stopped as a Mac application. Ideal for developers. Then also the PGAccess interface and you can do without something like Microsoft Access. Of course, all of this only from 10.3 (it's about time 10.4 comes out and I'm up to date at home again).
SPE-OSX comes from the same stable as AquaMacs and is a compilation of Stanis Python Editor - a very comprehensive IDE for Python. Also only available from 10.3.
sproutliner is a fun web application with which you can edit an outline over the web. Naturally heavily based on Ajax.
Borland open sources JBuilder - wow. I didn't see that coming - it's basically a surrender. Can Borland stay afloat without JBuilder?
The WordPress Versioning Plugin allows versioning of entries - i.e. articles and pages. This way, you can revert to an old version if necessary.
NASA Is Said to Loosen Risk Standards for Shuttle - the remaining shuttles must eventually be scrapped ...
Cunning ants build traps together and operate them jointly to catch larger insects. Nature never ceases to amaze.
Practical Common Lisp is a new book about Common Lisp with many practical examples. Finally, a Common Lisp book that doesn't just delve into rather theoretical examples but addresses practical topics such as spam filters, web servers, HTML generation, ID3 tags, and other stuff. The book content is available to read online.