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?
Linkblog - 28.2.2005 - 16.3.2005
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.
Ancient LAND attack works again in current Windows - wow, Microsoft has a heart for outdated bugs and gives them a new life
Another bug in Linux security extension grsecurity - of course, something like this had to come up just when I'm writing about grsecurity, right?
If you want to authenticate your WordPress against external user databases: the Authentication Plugins Patch extends WordPress with the necessary hooks to secure it, for example, via Apache authentication.
OSER is a project that aims to replace Exchange while keeping Outlook. Although I don't like Outlook as one of the biggest virus and trojan vectors, it is popular in companies because of its good integration of various information services. Switching to an open source server solution can be the first step to gradually replace Outlook with other programs. However, at the moment it is still mainly vaporware - at least if you look at the websites.
The controversial vehicle registration plate patent has been declared invalid - take a good look at this nonsense, we'll probably have to deal with more of this thanks to proles like Clement. And no, we can't be sure that such patents will be deleted.
cyrusharmon.org: More GCC-XML (new and improved -- now with pr0n!) - crazy title, but a brilliant thing: SBCL gets native bindings to the Carbon API. And thus becomes the second Open Source Lisp system with integration into the OS X world (although Cocoa bindings would of course be cooler - but so far in the Open Source area only OpenMCL offers that).
In the Law Blog, it is explained what we can expect due to the blacklist against corruption in NRW.
Sometimes Wikipedia surprises me with things that are actually quite obvious. For example, the very nice descriptions of the Münsterland and of course Münster itself.
WordPress Theme: Gila - looks quite nice, is three-column and has a flexible middle column.
Outrage over statement by JuLi chairman - well, Westerwelle was also once a JuLi Hansel and he also had some dumb remarks - so this guy seems to be the future leader of the FDP in 10 years ...
Tabacco industry bribed scientists - what do you expect from legalized drug dealers? That they are honest? Pfffft ...
Researchers generate different X.509 certificates with the same MD5 hash - ouch. This really kills MD5 for signatures.
Great. The company Winkhaus builds locks that use cryptographic methods to verify the authorization of a key and you can crack these with a simple magnet. Security by Stupidity ...
Who believes that small politics works better than big politics, read about Hotel Falckenstein regarding Nr. 1737 and a Veto.
Officially approved data mining of an intelligence service mailing list - cute when the NSA people are analyzed. But also mean to refer them to their regional data protection organization - after 9/11, the word "data protection" is almost as an insult to Americans as the word "liberal".
SCO vs. Linux: SCO demands insight into IBM's construction plans - I would be interested in the medical term that describes what the SCO management team is suffering from
SOS Children's Villages waiting for donation from Laurenz Meyer - did anyone really believe he meant it? Sorry, but he will only do it if public pressure becomes too great - and he has blocked that through his resignation. If it is pushed through the press, he might still do it - and come up with some flimsy excuse as to why it took so long ...
Stu Nicholls Cutting Edge CSS An amazing CSS puzzle is a small maze game that was implemented using only CSS - no JavaScript. Wow. (found at photomatt)
blo.gs: for sale - oops. The operator of blo.gs wants to sell his entire system (domains, software, database).
Seen at Lummaland: BlogFox: everything just stolen - about a search engine that simply sucks up content from blogg.de and bags it. Not exactly the fine English way ...
Microsoft relies on marketing for «Longhorn» - and stamps it as vaporware and a marketing show even before its existence
PIXELPOST - Small Photoblog Software - looks quite nice, as do the demos. Fun is the small strip calendar in the demo - I think I'll do something like that for WordPress, it takes up significantly less space in the sidebar than the classic calendar. For someone who just wants to photoblog, PixelPost looks quite nice.
I didn't know that the SmartEiffel The GNU Eiffel Compiler now also compiles to Java bytecode. Maybe you could use it on the Mac together with the Java-ObjC bridge to write programs there and play with Eiffel again.
Billing via IP? explains more about the absurd IP-based billing procedure. The whole self-presentation is already confusing enough. The procedure itself is even more confusing. So no wonder that T-Systems hitches itself to this cart - if there are stupid ideas, they always seem to shout "Here!" ... (found at Isotopp)
Back to the Future: The Story of Squeak - how one of the coolest Smalltalk environments came to be.
At concord.antville.org there is a reference to these color photographs from the First World War made by the French army.
And while we're on the subject of marketing lies: does anyone remember SoftRAM95? It's been 9 years now ...
Giant ground drawings discovered in Peru - then we can look forward to a lot of "interpretations" from ufologists again ...
SPD: "No tax relief for foreign top earners" - Koch wants to make it even easier and more lucrative for the Ackermanns of this world to fleece the German economy ...
Found in Lummaland: We will all be fired. Wow, exciting, a filter that blocks employees of a company from accessing weblogs so that no corporate secrets are published and no false image of the company is drawn. Nonsense. But you can make money with such marketing lies.
Blogs! Why Verisign or Jamba Six Apart and Livejournal will be bought - and why Don Alphonso sometimes scares me ...
GeoURL (2.0) - the other GeoURL, meaning the original one, is back. Not entirely original because it's operated by someone else, but it has the same URL and apparently the same database. Essentially, it's the same map and everything. So essentially everything is the same. Also the slow speed. Doesn't matter - geourl.info works just as well and a bit of redundancy never hurt anyone.
Nice Firefox extension: JustBlogIt with a simple right-click. And in the 0.2 version found there, it also works with blogging pages with umlauts in the title. The 0.1 version on the Firefox Extensions page is quite buggy.