The SimCam: Film and Digital Camera Simulator is a camera simulation for photography beginners: you can play around with aperture and shutter speed and take virtual photos and then see how the result looks. Relationships such as depth of field, camera shake, correct exposure, film speed, etc. become directly tangible, even without a camera. Fun idea.
Linkblog - 8.3.2005 - 29.3.2005
Terms and conditions for blocking phone numbers published - hmm, funny idea. Let's see how practical this will be.
BBEdit 8.1 brings Subversion support - maybe I should upgrade now, Subversion integration is quite practical.
The Pheed RSS Specification is an extension for RSS that allows you to explicitly include links to photos. Could be interesting for my Fotoblog. However, WordPress has few hooks for manipulating feeds.
SCO Uses Legal Documents from Groklaw and Tuxrocks - wow, great, the advocates of their own intellectual property steal IP from other authors for their websites without citing the source. How embarrassing is that ...
The Time Zone (WP Plugin) is a handy little plugin that uses the time zone in WordPress so that the somewhat silly adjustment of the time difference in the options can be omitted. Found at Perun in the comments.
Alice is now available in version 1.1 - including a Mac OS X port. Unfortunately only via the Unix path, so with X11 interface and without the native code Just-in-Time compiler, but at least you can play with the language on the Mac. As a reminder: Alice is an ML dialect with a strong focus on good support for parallelism.
Basics of Wave Propagation and Antenna Construction - some information about the propagation of longwave, mediumwave, shortwave, and VHF. Reflection on atmospheric layers and wave behavior.
Microsoft on patent raid - and they simply steal ideas from the IETF Working Group on IPv6, which they were once involved in. Also a patent that, under Clements' interpretation - and possibly even that of the BMJ - of the EU Patent Directive draft would also be enforceable here. And this could cause quite a few problems when using IPv6. Of course, due to prior art, one could challenge such a thing - but someone would first have to do that and be able to afford it.
Hackers re-enable PyMusique access to iTMS - Hase und Igel :-)
Kasia did a bit of research (15 minutes on Google) on Dr. William Hammesfahr, who is frequently cited in the US press in connection with the Shiavo case and is allegedly a Nobel Prize candidate, and found: Journalism is a joke. Because the good Dr. seems to claim a lot, but has nothing to show for it. Above all, no Nobel Prize nomination - only a letter from a congressman who suggested the Dr. to the Nobel Prize committee for the Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine. Quality journalism of the highest order.
PythonEggs are like .jar files for Python. Only they are based on ZIP. It's about time that Python applications can be downloaded as a single file with dependency definitions and that the installation of Python applications finally becomes easier.
Sybase stops publishing details of security vulnerabilities - and another manufacturer who doesn't understand security
Ajaxing the Rails - the latest release of Ruby on Rails also offers Ajax support. Here, the actual Ajax part is much more integrated than in other frameworks - could be interesting, as so far Ajax has been rather tricky to use in larger projects.
All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites - Read command!
TidBITS: What You Get Is What You CSS, With Style Master 4.0 - sounds very interesting, a program with which you can edit CSS files and display them directly in connection with various websites. I must take a look at it, because manually tweaking CSS files and experimenting with them can sometimes be quite annoying. Being able to prepare something offline would be quite nice. Update: sorry, but after a first test, the thing has been kicked off the plate. Good idea, slow and unintuitive implementation.
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide - everything you always wanted to know about Bash scripting but were afraid to ask. And a little bit more that you never would have thought to ask. And then there's the stuff you really never wanted to know, but it's in there anyway.
BFI-Banker sentenced to nearly six years in prison - there are also positive news sometimes. A model that I could warm up to. Of course, the prison sentence should be appropriate to the size of the bank: Ackermann could then be locked up until the end of his life
Hastymail is a webmail program that works with very minimal browser requirements and supports an essential feature that is missing in many clients: comment threading.
Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets is a very interesting article about botnets and how they are structured - analyzed with a Honeynet.
Found at photomatt: Nifty Corners are rounded corners that do without images. Optionally directly with HTML and some CSS or CSS and some JavaScript, which rewrites the DOM tree accordingly.
Black hole in the lab - weird.
The Man in Blue > Experiments > widgEditor is a WYSIWYG editor for HTML that replaces textareas in the browser and is written in JavaScript. It has an integrated fallback to normal textareas, so that browsers without JavaScript can still work with normal text. And it produces clean XHTML. And: it actually works properly for me.
Hondo came in second at Milan - San Remo. Wow. He seems to really want it this year.
Image cropping with DHTML and PHP behind it. Could be quite practical in a photo plugin.
Agata Report is something like Crystal Reports, but for Linux and Open Source. Could be quite practical at times, especially since it can also generate reports that can easily run on a web server.
Basic rights without reason or ground - how citizens' basic rights are trampled on in the name of security.
Gmail invitations: First interim injunction - please notify Wonko the knowledgeable.
Honestly? Just scrap the ProTour and its silly jersey again. It's just marketing hype and nobody will miss it.
US Senate approves oil drilling in Alaska and once again sacrifices reason at the altar of the oil industry. Well, if a state even wages wars for oil (sorry, but apart from Blair, nobody believes in weapons of mass destruction anymore), you shouldn't be surprised that environmental protection is even less valuable to them.
Found in the young world: Bayerns Blinde sollen gefälligst zu Hause bleiben. As a blind person, you probably feel really well taken care of with a health insurance like that ...
Those who want to play with XMLHTTPRequest and Common Lisp should check out CLiki : cl-ajax, which provides the necessary framework for easily integrating Common Lisp functions into web applications based on Araneida.
I have never understood what the fact that a Java applet has a signature has to do with trustworthiness and why it should then have extended rights. In my opinion, the whole concept of signed applets with extended rights is a dumb idea - even if the user is specifically pointed out what this means (the extended rights) - on the basis of which facts should he decide whether he trusts the applet?
Naked Objects are not indecency and impropriety, but simply the idea of exposing your objects in Smalltalk directly to the world - each object thus has its own mini-GUI so to speak. As a result, users work directly with the actual objects and many problems of GUI frameworks are eliminated - there is no longer a need to explicitly mediate between GUI and object, the objects do this themselves.
O2 warns oxygen fillers - yeah, of course. What a blatant nonsense ...
And for those who don't like or can't use Lisp, perhaps SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP can help, which supports not only PHP but also Io, Lua, Perl, Python, and Ruby.
SCO OpenServer 6 with a lot of Open Source - yes, this also means Open Source: that companies like SCO are allowed to use it. It's also fine: when SCO customers have first switched to all the Open Source applications and platforms, the switch to Linux will be much easier for them.
Usable XMLHttpRequest in Practice is an interesting little article that explains the use of XMLHttpRequest using an example and discusses usability aspects.
iTunes 4.7.1 quietly brings sharing restrictions - nice one, now Apple even DRMs self-ripped songs
ParenScript is a compiler that converts Lisp to JavaScript. Certainly a pretty brilliant thing for Lisp-based web servers and application frameworks, because the programmer can work in his familiar language tools. Clientside Lisp by detours, so to speak ...
Employers propose immediate program - one could also call it an "exploitation program". The industry dog has tasted blood ...
Debian plans to reduce the number of architectures - I don't know if that's such a great idea. The many architectures were one of the pro-arguments for Debian. Of course, exotic architectures can cause problems - especially when they simply can't keep up during the recompile orgies that are due for a release (I'm thinking of the 68K architecture here). Nevertheless, it's a shame if this aspect of Debian is weakened.
In the Firefox Help: Tips & Tricks I found the tip on how to block advertising images and videos with a user CSS. Certainly old news for most, but new to me. Nice, because for example Camino doesn't have a proper ad blocker like Firefox (yes, I'm back to Camino again ...).
Brand name "Milka" wins against Mrs. Milka - and thus joins the current series of nonsense.
WP: Gravatar Signup [ Tempus Fugit | TxFx.net ] is a small plugin that allows users to sign up for a Gravatar directly from the comment form, making it as easy as possible for people without a Gravatar to get started (and thus spreading Gravatars). Fun idea.
Borderline Chaos is a rather nice WordPress theme - I like the strong colors and the quite simple layout. Might be an idea to build on ... (yes, yes, someday I'll do more than just talk about layouts)
Schmidt threatens health insurers over high contribution rates - of course, the health insurers and the profiteers in the executive suite who quickly approved a salary increase for themselves will certainly be very impressed by the threat. Apart from the fact that even I would burst into hysterical laughter if the Proletarians in Berlin came at me with morality ...
Hedgehog is a nice little Lisp compiler and bytecode interpreter with a special focus on low resource consumption. Unfortunately, interactivity and debugging suffer as a result: no tracebacks and no REPL, just running scripts and searching for the breakpoint in the pseudo-assembler source via grep. It would be nice if the language could offer these interactive features as an option - you can then leave them out in small boxes.
In Rechte auf dem Weg in die Mitte the political scientist Chloé Lachauer discusses in an interview the reasons for right-wing extremism and what to make of the wild accusations of politicians.