Sachsens Verfassungsgerichtshof kippt in Teilen den "Großen Lauschangriff" and of course the politicians still feel confirmed, the laws just need to be changed - sorry, but I see it differently. The mindset needs to be changed and it's a shame that the constitutional judges are not more explicit about this.
Apache modauthtkt is a framework for Single-Signon in Apache-based solutions across technology boundaries (CGI, mod_perl and whatever else exists). I should take a look at it, could be interesting for me.
Scotty was beamed up for the last time - and this time, no one will likely be able to reconstruct him from the pattern buffer of his transporter. Let's drink a glass of Scotch in his honor.
Found on Telepolis: TP: Enforcement of Controlling and Ranking at All Levels:
If a critical economist had been invited to the congress, he would have probably formulated the Bertelsmann strategy as follows: Democratic decision-making and open discussion are replaced by control procedures from modern business administration. Everything is sweetened with dynamic Anglicisms from marketing babble, but often ideas from the business administration specialty of controlling are hidden behind them. Earlier, one spoke more prosaically of accounting/internal auditing, but meant the same thing: the internal control and monitoring of production processes. This is done by means of cost-benefit analysis, profit and loss accounting, budgeting, profit centers, key figures for everything and anything, etc.
My personal aversion to business administration as, in my opinion, a far too short-sighted vision of the market should be known by now. However, the connection with a rather sanctimonious acting major publishing house makes the whole thing really explosive - because such corporations primarily have their own economic interests and should therefore be kept out of educational policy discussions, especially they are definitely the wrong ones to be involved as advisors in educational policy decision-making. But in the course of the politicians' privatization frenzy, such blunders are repeatedly made - combined with the marketing lies that automatically arise from such companies to consolidate their own route (such as the survey on tuition fees cited in the text, in which the path of free study was simply excluded - and then it was claimed that students were predominantly in favor of tuition fees).
The biggest problem with this close connection to the economy - whether it's Bertelsmann in educational policy or other companies in other areas - is the lack of democratic control. Politicians are still controlled in a rudimentary way, public institutions are forced by the new information law to disclose many areas, but decision-making in private sector institutions is not subject to these controls. If politicians, for example, refer to studies from the economy, one may get to the point - that the decision is based on a study by Institute So-and-So - but one may find out nothing about the structure and actual content of the study. And thus, control by the population is bluntly circumvented.
In my opinion, given the importance of educational policy, every influence of the economy and industry must be excluded. Completely irrelevant what they demand - they have nothing to do with the political design of educational policy. But unfortunately, our politicians repeatedly sell political control to private sector institutes instead of doing the work themselves. And they are selling our future and our sovereignty as a society to the economy.
The Federal Constitutional Court makes a decision on the European Arrest Warrant - and it turns out negatively. The European Arrest Warrant violates the Basic Law. And our government? It calls this a blow to the fight against terrorism and mocks the bureaucratization. Please what? Adhering to the Basic Law is not principle riding and bureaucratization, but a necessity. But this interests Mrs. Zypries just as little as the decision of the Bundestag against the software patent directive - and she immediately announces a legislative initiative that would make the European Arrest Warrant possible again.
I find it disgusting. Incidentally, the suspect has not been convicted in Germany - the deportation/extraction is based solely on a European Arrest Warrant from Spain. And it is not as if it had not been tried to convict him here - it just was not enough what was presented.
So the presumption of innocence is simply circumvented and the Basic Law is dismissed as silly bureaucracy - all in the name of the fight against terrorism.
Who actually protects us from the lunatics in Berlin?
The Jython website doesn't provide much information, but a few days ago, there was a post in the mailing list announcing a new alpha release for Jython 2.2 - and this time (it was already this far back at the end of 2004), it's one that actually works. Many features of the newer Python versions are included, such as generators/iterators. Therefore, it is not identical to Python 2.2, but rather a good step towards Python 2.3 in terms of features. Since the developer works with OS X and develops there, it is relatively easy to install.
For installation, as this is not mentioned anywhere explicitly:
java -jar [jython .version.elend.langer.name.jar]
Then a graphical installer appears that installs everything on the disk. Then, in the target directory, enter the following commands additionally:
chmod 755 jython
chmod 755 jythonc
Then the two (jython is the interpreter and jythonc is a compiler) are also callable and you can get started. When starting jython for the first time, a whole series of system packages are activated, so don't be surprised by the many messages from the sys-package-mgr.
For those who don't know Jython: it is a reimplementation of Python on the Java Virtual Machine. This allows all Java libraries to be used very elegantly, and the interactive shell of Jython allows you to play interactively with Java classes. Very nice to quickly try things out. But of course also very nice to have the portability of Java, but not the crazy language.
And it's just fun to do things like this:
Jython 2.2a1 on java1.4.2_07 (JIT: null)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import java.lang
>>> dir(java.lang.Number)
['byteValue', 'doubleValue', 'floatValue', 'intValue', 'longValue', 'shortValue']
>>> import java
>>> dir(java)
['__name__', 'applet', 'awt', 'beans', 'io', 'lang', 'math', 'net', 'nio', 'rmi', 'security', 'sql', 'text', 'util']
>>> ```
The Django programmers start with the tutorials. The first tutorial primarily deals with creating the database model and the basic code for the objects to be managed, and the second tutorial deals with the automatically generated administration interface. Very nice, all of it.
The system is of course strongly focused on content creation and management - but still general enough so that it can also be used for differently structured content. The entire administration is automatically created from the object model and some hints, so it always aligns with the real data in the system. And the default look is also quite appealing.
Server integration is done simply via mod python - so via Apache. Which is also an advantage, as mod python offers very high performance right out of the box. And for more demanding cases, there's the caching in Django. I must say, what I've seen of Django so far, I like it very much.
An important note is missing in the installation instructions: Apache2 is mandatory, and therefore also ModPython in the corresponding version. However, Mac OS X only provides Apache 1.3, and many other servers also only have the 1.3 Apache available, so Django still has a real drawback here.
By the way, if you want to upgrade from Apache to Apache2 on Debian: if mod perl is in use, forget it. The mod perl2 for Apache2 in Debian Sarge is complete garbage - as if the API changes in mod perl2 compared to the old mod perl weren't annoying enough. In principle, you can no longer get Perl modules to run so easily with it.
Update: By the way, there is currently a lot of activity in the Subversion for Django to eliminate the requirement for Apache. A simple development server is already included, so in the future you will no longer need Apache for initial experiments. And you could also set up the deployment on other legs in the long run - for example, FCGI behind lighttpd.
Update 2: The third tutorial is out and deals with the view for the visitor. They have a pretty intense pace right now with Django.
Wow. That was a stage - the top riders clearly showed where the performance level lies. Armstrong and Basso with the best legs, Ullrich very strong and thus also a clear statement to Klöden and Vinokourov, who the captain is. But definitely not strong enough for Armstrong. Whether Basso can crack Armstrong I don't know either - today his helpers were clearly missing, Sastre and Julich just lack that last bit of strength.
But the absolute stars are Gerolsteiner. On the one hand, of course, the still superb placement of Leipheimer, their captain. But the showstopper was Georg Totschnig with his stage win. The first in the Tour for Gerolsteiner ever and also the first stage win in the Tour for Totschnig. I haven't seen a rider and sports director be so happy about a victory in a long time like Totschnig and Holczer. Great performance, big congratulations to both of them for that.
By the way, Gerolsteiner's Typo3 server (yes, Gerolsteiner uses open source) just died - could that perhaps be due to the stage win and the many curious visitors?
Foundations of Python Network Programming is a relatively new book about network programming with Python. It covers all possible aspects of network programming you can think of - quite impressive the first impression. I know most of the things already from somewhere, but so compact in one book it is still nice to read. Together with Dive Into Python I would see the two as the ideal pair to learn Python.
HsShellScript is a Haskell library that allows you to solve typical shell script problems with Haskell. So functions for controlling processes and accessing system information etc. Looks very nice, but unfortunately cannot be compiled on OS X due to missing mntent.h.
mod_haskell has unfortunately not been developed further for years - it offers an integration of Hugs and ghc into the Apache server.
PerlPad is a service for Mac OS X that allows you to execute Perl code in any Cocoa text window and collect the output, or send selected text through a Perl script.
Regular Expressions in Haskell is an implementation of regular expressions entirely in Haskell.
Web Authoring System Haskell (WASH) is a collection of Haskell libraries (more precisely DSLs - domain specific languages - in Haskell) for programming web applications. It includes CGI-style programming, HTML generation, mail handling, and database drivers for PostgreSQL.
Another web framework for Python, this time with the bold name Django. I am skeptical about yet another web framework - there are already plenty, and I must admit that I have contributed to one or another - but this one offers some interesting approaches.
On the one hand, it addresses similar solutions like Ruby on Rails - but does not mention Ruby on Rails at all. That's already positive; lately, one almost gets the impression that Python programmers are panicking because of ROR and think that everything must only be oriented towards it.
On the other hand, Django offers automatically generated backend pages. This is something I really like and what I find so nice about Zope, for example - you immediately have a way to play with the actual data, even before the actual frontend is ready. Very practical, especially in the initial development phase.
Some of the other ideas are also quite funny - for example, the mapping of URLs to handlers in the Python code via regular expressions. Reminds a bit of mod_rewrite in Apache (where, with such solutions, the question of prioritization of overlapping regular expressions always remains). And an integrated object-relational manager is not bad either, even if you can of course just as well fall back on finished solutions there. And the fact that the developers have already thought about the need for efficient cache systems and then rely on memcached is also nice - many projects die at some point from the load, simply because caching was not thought of in time.
The template language, however, looks a bit unusual and somehow I wonder why there must be almost as many of them as there are web frameworks.
At least that's how it seems when there is an email about No 'smoking gun' in Linux code.
The e-mail, which was sent to SCO Group CEO Darl McBride by a senior vice president at the company, forwards an e-mail from a SCO engineer. In the Aug. 13, 2002, e-mail, engineer Michael Davidson said "At the end, we had found absolutely nothing ie (sic) no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever."
The email has been known for some time but has only now been published - previously it was still under seal as part of the court records. Quite embarrassing for SCO when the sad details gradually come to light. Especially embarrassing: SCO argues with the same consultant who apparently found nothing here but previously claimed there was identical code. Somehow, SCO should get its argumentation in order soon, otherwise the whole lie and extortion won't last in the long run ...
Another solo run by the European Patent Office against all laws:
The European Patent Office (EPO) granted a patent in February 2005 for a method used to select the sex of children born through artificial insemination. The patent holder is the US company XY Inc, USA. This is confirmed by a recent investigation by Greenpeace. According to the patent specification with the number EP 1257 168 B, sperm cells are deep-frozen and separated according to sex chromosomes. The patent covers the technical process and the sperm cells themselves. This places humans on a level with methods used in animal breeding.
It's ridiculous what nonsense the officials at the EPO allow themselves to be drawn into and what idiotic carts they are harnessed to. Thinking doesn't seem to be part of their job description, apparently ...
Great idea from Bavaria (hey, I'm in Munich, so I can also pick up Bavarian topics): Integration of foreign children: Only those who speak German can go to school. The question that arises for me: does the regulation only affect foreign children, or are all children with poor German skills sent back? And if they are sent back - is it ensured that kindergarten places with language promotion courses actually exist? Or are foreign children simply kept out of school to keep everything nicely German?
On average, ten percent of all elementary school students in Bavaria have a non-German mother tongue.
Sorry, but that should be significantly more than 10 percent - because if I listen to what people speak here in Bavaria, it is by no means always German, even if it sounds similar. So how does it look - are dialect-impaired children also sent to language courses, or does it only affect the unpopular foreigners?
There is no idea too stupid that lawyers or politicians couldn't have: Is the robots.txt file suitable as copy protection? a law firm in the USA is now asking, because access to historical data was possible via the Internet Archive, although in newer versions of the website, access was denied to the Internet Archive via robots.txt:
Harding, Earley, Follmer & Frailey, who had previously been involved in a legal dispute with Healthcare Advocates, now accuses Healthcare Advocates of violating the DMCA and the Internet Archive of breach of contract, as they did not, as explained, block access to the historical data. Therefore, Healthcare Advocates also demands compensation from the Internet Archive.
Not only does someone misunderstand the function of robots.txt - it is not copy protection, but merely a hint for robots as to whether they are allowed to scrape the data or not - they are also extremely bold. The Internet Archive provides its service for free - but you can sue for breach of contract and demand compensation.
This is somehow pretty stupid. The ideas of such tech failures are always amusing ...
(and yes, there is also internet access in Munich)
Because a whole series of riders really impressed me with their performance. For example, today it's of course Vinokourov, but especially the performance of Jörg Jaksche - nobody in Armstrong's immediate surroundings expected that. Also, CSC's placement with three top riders right at the front - Basso, Sastre, and Julich - is great. But what's really nice is the good position of Botero and Moreau - both have definitely found their old form again. And Vinokourov's victory might compensate him for his weakness yesterday.
It's a bit of a shame that I only followed the stage with occasional glances at the ticker. But I'm here to work, so I don't want to complain too loudly.
Addendum: However, it does make me sad that Jens Voigt was taken out of the race for a 42-second time excess - in my opinion, the race management could have turned a blind eye there. On the other hand, he apparently had bronchitis, so it might not be so detrimental to his health if he doesn't continue. Whether he would have given up voluntarily is rather questionable given his attacking will.
Well, not really. There aren't any mountains directly in Munich. So, the Hofbräuhaus is probably calling. Or rather, the colleagues. In any case, I'm away for two days. Don't break everything here ...
Has the transfer of the .net registrar to VeriSign gone through, given how ICANN is under VeriSign's thumb:
VeriSign can raise the prices of .net addresses at will starting January 1, 2007. Additionally, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) secured them an automatic extension of the term after six years.
Anyone who still believes that no money changed hands, I'd be happy to sell them a washing machine with a rubber band drive ...
Anyway, Microsoft now classifies these differently:
According to this, since the update at the end of March, the program recommends ignoring various Claria products classified as moderately dangerous, as well as those from the spyware mills WhenU and 180solutions.
Sorry, but background programs that display news are fundamentally unacceptable, and I don't care in the slightest about the velvet-glove arguments the manufacturers of this junk come up with.
Sorry, but a manufacturer of operating system software that does not suggest uninstalling such trash in an anti-spyware check is simply not credible.
Well, not being able to distinguish between IP addresses and domains, but demanding unrestricted access to WHOIS database contents. Great strategy. It's highly foolish: I can't, for the life of me, imagine a situation where the domain owner is really the interesting piece of information. On the contrary, it's almost always about IP addresses - and these are assigned to the registries and then to the providers, but these assignments are public. The assignments after that - i.e., how the providers allocate the addresses further - are not in any public-access WHOIS databases, but are stored with the providers. Let's think through a few cases:
Illegal upload or download of protected works: To clarify such cases, you need the user's IP address and the assignment over time - because these are often dynamic addresses. The information can only be provided by the dial-up provider in whose area the IP is located. This assignment to the provider is publicly queryable via WHOIS, but everything else can only be obtained from the provider.
Illegally operated server: The domain under which it runs is initially irrelevant - more interesting is the IP of the host on which the stuff is located. True, the domain may provide clues about co-responsible parties, but the interesting part is the IP - because you can get the hoster for the system through it, and they have records of who they provided this server to. Moreover, only the hoster can have access logs for this server, through which, for example, it could be determined which IP made the upload - and then we're back to the first case.
Email with insults, threats, or other prohibited content: Here, the domain probably helps very little - more interesting is the IP of the servers on which the emails were packaged and delivered. Because through access logs, you can get the IP of the delivering or retrieving system and then, with the first point, get back to the user.
Sorry, but I really don't see any reason why domain data should be public or why law enforcement agencies need urgent access to the data - sure, trademark lawyers would like that, but I don't think this is about facilitating access for trademark lawyers...
To me, the whole thing sounds like another case of demands being made without a real concrete need. Just as surveillance measures without good reason are repeatedly made public - and then the investigative authorities are once again in the line of fire. It would be nice if, with all these demands from the authorities, there were concrete reasons why this demand is being made, so that one could think about real solutions to their problems - after all, the refusal to provide data is not about hindering the investigative authorities, but about ensuring data protection.
FineTunes I need to remember. MP3s and OGGs without DRM. And the music selection is also somewhat usable at first glance. I need to browse through it ...
Cool stuff: Behaviour is a JavaScript library that allows you to bind JavaScript actions to CSS selectors. The advantage: the actions disappear from the HTML code - making it much slimmer. And the actions can be adapted to new requirements at any time by changing the selectors.
In my first applications of Ajax, I stumbled upon exactly this problem: the JavaScript actions clutter the code that has just been painstakingly reduced to semantic HTML. Exactly what used to annoy me about all the table layouts now annoys me about the whole JavaScript thing. A clean separation of code, semantics, and style is exactly what I need. Actually, something like this should be part of the HTML standard.
I definitely need to try this out, because if it's usable in terms of performance, I should take a closer look at a few of the last Ajax actions and change them ...
I love this. A truly strong stage winner with an outstanding performance. A technically perfect team time trial by Voigt and Moreau. The overall classification has been shaken up and the yellow jersey is with one of my favorite riders (the other one isn't allowed to participate this year). Hey, as far as I'm concerned, Jens Voigt can wear the color for a few more days.
What for Jutta: UnicodeChecker allows for easier navigation in the Unicode character set and finding the corresponding characters by name. Additionally, it provides information about characters (e.g. whether there is a capital/small variant, etc.).
macminicolo Mac Mini colocation - set up your own Mac Mini in a data center. Is there something like this in Germany?
Interesting concept: Plash is a shell that inserts a library under programs through which all accesses to the file system are sent. This allows you to control which functions a program is actually allowed to execute. This time, it is not about protecting against user activities, but about protecting the user against activities of the program. Especially when installing programs that you do not know, you can sometimes catch Trojans - Plash helps here by explicitly only enabling the areas of the disk for the program that it actually needs.
For this purpose, all accesses to the file system are internally routed via a own mini-server - the actual program is executed under a freshly allocated user in a own chroot-jail, so it has no chance to do anything outside that is not explicitly allowed.
Very interesting concept, especially for system administrators. Unfortunately (as expected) it does not work with grsecurity - of course, grsecurity is supposed to help prevent some of the tricks used in Plash. In this case, it fails due to the requirement of executable stack.
I am a die-hard S5 fan, but if you prefer simpler HTML structures based on multiple files, then maybe pylize is a solution. With PyLize, slides are generated from a presentation file as individual HTML pages with common styling.
This will surely please the Schockwellenreiter: KSVG2 (and KDOM and KCanvas) has been integrated into WebCore. It's only experimental for now, but it's a start. Maybe SVG will eventually find a useful distribution.
Boot KNOPPIX from an USB Memory Stick - maybe an alternative to spblinux, especially with the c't-Knoppix variant?
Not yet seen in other media, so here's a link to the New York Times: Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution - New York Times:
The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."
Well. The Catholic Church wants to go against Darwin and his teachings again? Instead of blunt creationism, now the embellished Intelligent Design? What is not compatible is reality and the Catholic Church ...
Keith Devens - Weblog: I hate PHP - August 13, 2003 - he also doesn't like PHP
Kid is a rather interesting Python library that implements a template engine with a focus on well-formed XML. The result is similar to Zope Page Templates - so an attribute language for XML with Python integration. And it's also fast: an XML template on my machine achieves around 70 hits/sec.
http://n3dst4.com/articles/phpannoyances/ - he doesn't like PHP either.
SPB-Linux is a very small Linux that can be booted from a USB flash drive and enhanced with various extensions (X, Mozilla, XFCE Desktop). It should also be relatively easy to extend with various system administration tools.
Spyce is a Python web framework with damn good performance: a simple page with a template behind it delivers over 90 hits per second on my machine (Spyce integrated into Apache via mod_python, memory cache). Take that, PHP!
Spyced: Why PHP sucks - a rather good analysis of what is rather annoying about PHP.
Why PHP sucks - and yet another person who doesn't like PHP.
For those who don't feel comfortable with English as a language for introductory literature, there is an online German-language Haskell course to work through. It looks quite decent - although I find that a bit little is explained.
Who like me prefers to dig through sources to learn languages, here are a few larger Haskell projects to choose from:
Helium is a Haskell subset compiler specifically developed for teaching. It provides more detailed error messages and further analyzes sources to make these messages possible. However, it is really only a subset of Haskell - and since type classes are missing, a quite important part is missing. But to get a taste of functional programming, it is quite useful.
As textbooks, The Craft of Functional Programming and The Haskell School of Expression are recommended. I ordered both - my Haskell knowledge is more than primitive and hopelessly outdated (if that is even possible with a relatively young language like Haskell).
For example, if I want to install ghc (a Haskell compiler), but it first wants to install Perl 5.8. As if I didn't already have a quite usable Perl 5.8.6 on the disk under Tiger, no, the DarwinPorts want their own versions of it. And then, depending on the path setting, I have either the Apple-Perl or the one from DarwinPorts active. Quite stupid - I think there should be pseudo-packages in the DarwinPorts that then refer to the pre-installed versions from Apple.
This causes problems especially when I also install packages manually. Because then sometimes the Perl accessible via the path is used - and with active DarwinPorts, that is the one there. But this is absolutely not the desired effect - after all, the Perl in this case only got in because the port for ghc has a build-dependency. But I don't want to use the DarwinPorts Perl at all ...
For the same reason, I find all the Python and Ruby modules in DarwinPorts unusable: they automatically pull in a new installation of Python and Ruby and do not use the pre-installed version. Rarely stupid ...
As a result, you can only use DarwinPorts on an OS X box for well-isolated tools - which is a bit of a shame, because the idea and the implementation itself are pretty great. Only too little consideration is given to the already installed stuff.
By the way, I installed ghc simply via the binary package from haskell.org. It says there that it is for 10.3, but it also works with 10.4 - at least what I do with it. And it saves me from having to build all that stuff.
One of the more complex topics in Haskell are the Monads - a way to simulate things like side effects and sequentiality in a purely functional language with lazy evaluation - simply because you sometimes want the output before the input, for example when querying data from the user, or when you want to save a state that is called again later. The tutorial helps to understand the concept of Monads.
Bomb series in London: Explosions in several subway stations and buses have plunged London into chaos on Thursday. Apparently three explosions in subway stations and three explosions in double-decker buses. The suspicion of terrorist attacks is of course close at hand - after all, the G8 summit is in England.
Shiira Project is an interesting web browser for the Mac that is based on WebKit. What makes Shiira special (apart from minor things like a more Cocoa-like layout instead of the tin box shape of Safari) is the ability to display all tabs loaded in a window in an overview of shrunk pages using a hotkey - similar to Exposé. Very stylish, I could also like this function in Safari ...
In addition, Shiia supports cUrl as an alternative to the WebKit downloader - but unfortunately the browser still has some strange properties, for example, the login to WordPress blogs does not always work with it and sometimes old data is displayed. Even with normal authentication it doesn't always work - I then get an error message instead of the browser asking for the password. However, everything looks quite neat with the WebKit downloader.
Since I have a rather small screen (usually set to 1024x768, as the notebook also has this size and I thus have 100 Hz on the display) this will probably not be my standard browser - the sidebar for bookmarks and history is simply impractical on small screens. I would therefore prefer a display of this information in the main page à la Safari or Camino.
Colleague found a pretty brilliant tool: SSL Explorer, a small https-server that together with a Java applet in the browser implements a VPN. Specifically, when the applet starts (which must be confirmed, as the applet requires additional capabilities), tunnel connections are established over https, and various applications are then integrated over these connections. For example, you can establish a VNC connection to an internal server with a click on a link, browse the local Windows network via web forms, transfer files, or access Linux servers behind the firewall via SSH. And the whole thing works with a simple Java-capable web browser - I tested it with Safari, for example, and it works flawlessly. Completely without additional client software to be installed. Ideal for roaming users who don't always have their own device with them.
Oh, and the whole thing is also under the GPL.
No idea how good this really is, but the Hardened-PHP project already sounds quite nice. Due to the high prevalence of PHP for web applications, it is a central point of entry for servers. Should put this on my ToDo list.