blo.gs: for sale - oops. The operator of blo.gs wants to sell his entire system (domains, software, database).
Archive 24.2.2005 - 2.3.2005
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 ...
Court confirms liability of Admin-C
Court confirms liability of Admin-C - which should now be quite bad for the legal advisor, as he is registered as Admin-C for many dialer domains and was somehow involved in that strange warez story ...
For providers, this should now be the last incentive to only enter the domain owner as Admin-C - otherwise things can go terribly wrong.
Kyocera Hamburg at the End?
Jutta just told me this: according to photoscala, Kycera Hamburg has issued termination notices to all employees. There have been rumors about Kyocera's exit from the photo sector for several weeks now. It would be a real shame if the name Contax disappeared from the camera world - I still associate Contax with high-quality equipment with a little extra something special.
For owners of a Contax N1, this is of course particularly bitter: the N-System was only introduced a few years ago and is by no means fully developed - and with the high-tech monsters, service is no longer affordable at every field-forest-and-meadow service center. Even with my RTS III and the vacuum pressure plate, it's difficult to get service if there are any problems with the camera.
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 ...
Well insulated.
I am well insulated. No cold gets in. No heat gets out.
Haindling, "Achtung, Achtung"
Read: Free-range research with clubbing
Read: Open-field research with clubbing to death - for allegedly scientific research purposes, corvids are being killed in Leer to investigate the effects on the population of ground-nesting birds and small game. Yes, the Hannover University of Applied Sciences actually thinks that they need to kill animals in large numbers for this. By the way, the traps not only kill corvids but also severely injure birds of prey when they are caught. One might also think that there are enough corvids around, but a whole series of birds of prey are seriously endangered.
There is no idea so stupid that it couldn't occur to someone and others let themselves be harnessed to such a cart.
The linked post contains further links on the topic, including a petition against this nonsense.
Are Overtime Mandatory?
Wouldn't the Frankfurt ruling conflict with the ruling from the ECJ? So, wouldn't overtime have to be explicitly mentioned as a mandatory component in the contract? Of course, it's only an ECJ ruling, so it's not binding until a corresponding national law exists. But somehow it seems to have already found its way in, if you look at the many references to this topic on Google.
And this also doesn't align with the ruling from Frankfurt. Or perhaps the Süddeutsche has omitted an important detail - because transferring files doesn't sound like an emergency or an extraordinary operational situation to me. And also that the employee would have had an explicit notice about the overtime obligation.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer and therefore probably not suited to follow the strange thought processes of judges and lawyers, but somehow it's been on my mind what the ARD guide says - and that's pretty much the opposite of what the ruling in Frankfurt says according to the Süddeutsche ...
Skidoo Too: Ruthsarian Layouts
Skidoo Too : Ruthsarian Layouts is a rather simple 3-column layout with a flexible middle column. The special feature: the order of the source is such that the middle column comes first. This improves usability for Lynx users because they can immediately access the content and do not have to skip the navigation first. The layout is Public Domain.
He also has another layout on the page that has two flexible columns and only specifies the left column as fixed, same source order.
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 ...
Boat vs. Little Boat
At Google, there are 2,250 entries for "Böötchen" and 6,030 for "Bötchen". We urgently need to do something about the double umlaut. Screw the opinion of the Duden editorial team.
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.
morons.org reports: Kentucky Student Charged with Felony Thoughtcrime - his terrible crime: a short story about a high school overrun by zombies. $5,000 bail due to the severity of the accusation.
NZZ Folio: DIN A4. About the origin of the DIN paper formats.
Record labels considering price increase for music downloads - these idiots are only destroying their own industry. But then they cry about how the evil pirates are to blame. They'll probably never get it ...
Software patents: EU Commission officially rejects directive restart and our government remains inactive. It would be so simple: the state governments whose parliaments have issued the recommendation that the directive must not pass in this form, would only have to do what their damn duty is: to follow the wish of their national parliament. Instead, everyone plays the yes-man and hides or lies to themselves a perfect world, while EU democracy is trampled on. And all this for the benefit of multinational corporations and at the expense of the European middle class ...
speed up WordPress l10n
New php-gettext, speed up WordPress l10n describes two quite simple measures to give WordPress a bit of a boost. Specifically, the gettext support is suboptimal - which affects every user of a non-English WordPress installation. Gettext is used to load the translations. With the mentioned patches, these areas are significantly accelerated, especially noticeable on individual pages (where the number of database accesses is smaller), but also, for example, on my homepage, this has resulted in a measurable acceleration.
State Gene Controllers Promote Genetically Modified Corn
According to Report Mainz state genetic controllers are advertising for genetically modified corn:
According to investigations by the ARD magazine, Buhk also participated in organizing a major event for the German biotech company Phytowelt GmbH in 2004. Buhk had already been warned by the Federal Ministry of Health in 2002 about the "danger of a conflict of interest" and his "official duties."
We recently had the topic of the fox guarding the henhouse ...
Sales plan: Deutsche Bahn wants to offload its faulty ICE trains to Austria - ouch. Don't the Austrians have access to German media, or why do they want to be sold this stuff?
ARD-Hörfunk schaltet ARI-Verkehrsfunksystem ab - hey! We don't want to buy a new car radio just because of this ...
The Union and its Alleged Morality
Merkel: Fischer knows what to do - and when will she learn what she has to do? Namely, just keep her mouth shut? This inflated moral posturing of the Union is simply ridiculous. When has a Union minister ever resigned due to their own misconduct? I mean without the public prosecutor already at the door. None come to mind spontaneously. At most, those who were ousted due to internal Union leadership squabbles - which doesn't really count. This absurd hopping around as if the Union suddenly had a monopoly on morality is simply absurd.
It is particularly absurd when you look at the hounding by Koch in the S.-H. election. That is simply disgusting. With such inflammatory speeches and such a ridiculous understanding of democracy, voters are driven into the arms of the right - after all, they are hardly distinguishable from a Union under people like Koch and his like-minded colleagues ...
One does not gain moral authority by simply claiming it. One might gain it if one refrains from transferring 20 million in black money abroad under the guise of donations from Jewish war victims and then, as compensation, merely ousts a few older politicians who were only in the way of one's own career ...
IBM to drop Itanium support - nobody wants these Itanium parts. Somehow, this was quite a big flop for Intel. But if this gives the Power architecture a boost, I'm all for it.
Municipalities are ripping off the federal government with Hartz IV
And Biedenkopf supports Clement against the municipalities - what do you want to bet that this will quickly be swept under the carpet in the discussion again? Biedenkopf will simply be brought back into line and then it's back to bashing the government. Because apart from verbal attacks, they can't do anything else.
Only one question remains: what about the people? Everyone complains about the politicians and the abuse of the municipalities and the money - but who cares about the people who are now stuck between a rock and a hard place through no fault of their own?
Neither the government nor the opposition make any statements about the people (except for Biedenkopf in a parenthesis). That's all these people are worth to them - a parenthesis and that's it. They are no longer able to work - just a line item in the cost accounting that the municipalities want to offload and the federal government doesn't want.
They are people, you penny-pinchers!
PL/I for GCC is an implementation of PL/I as a frontend for GCC. Very interesting, as it is not a precompiler with C output and, unlike earlier projects, does not aim to be only a subset implementation (although, of course, at the moment only a subset is implemented - but it is constantly growing). I admit, I still like the baroque syntax of PL/I, even though it has been many years since I programmed with it.
Söder? The very bottom of the political barrel.
Red-Green outraged over Söder statements - and rightly so. Söder repeatedly stands out because his statements have little to do with reality (e.g., when claiming that the SPD is to blame for the emerging Nazis), but in this case, he has added an extra layer of stupidity. If left to his own devices, he would probably demand the death penalty...
Every legal system unfortunately either has holes like a sieve or degenerates into a police state (those who think differently: keyword Gödel, just inform yourself). The attempt to mediate between these two extremes is the task of the legislative power of the state - which lies with the Bundestag. The Union does not have to make constructive proposals for change known through foaming-at-the-mouth hatemongers in the press, but should bring them forward there. Söder's remarks are pure populism and are definitely not intended to solve any existing problem or even define it more closely.
It is horrifying when a child is killed, and every child killed is one child too many - this is undisputed and not up for discussion. However, one cannot instrumentalize the death of a child to push through one's ideas - because reducing child abuse and sexual offenses against children to this one case ignores the much larger number of cases in which the perpetrators had absolutely not been previously convicted or noticed in any way. Where the perpetrators are not some known offenders, but someone from the child's immediate family environment.
Söder's outburst is not only far beyond the mark and absolutely devoid of understanding, it is also a dangerous simplification of the problem.
Moderate trackbacks in general
For WordPress, there is a plugin that automatically sets trackbacks to moderated. However, this plugin uses additional database accesses (sets the moderation flag after the creation of the trackback), which is rather annoying for trackback spammers - every additional database access increases the system load. Therefore, I wrote my own version of it, which does not require any additional database accesses. The source is available here.
Koch doesn't understand democracy again
Koch: CSU should not act as referee - the Union fools still haven't understood how democracy works. No, the Union did not win the election - if they had, they would have the majority and the discussion would be pointless.
In any case, the Union representatives completely disqualify themselves as democratic representatives with their disgusting ranting against the SSW. Well, at least Koch is known to write forewords to right-wing trash, so it's no surprise that he is stirring up trouble against the Danish minority.
We also have to put up with the NPD in Saxony - which Koch has not taken such loud offense to as the behavior of the SSW at the moment or the existence of the PDS on various occasions.
The LetterHead Theme for WordPress 1.5 is an extremely minimalistic theme - just two columns and text. No images. Could be ideal for people who need a "blank canvas" experience to implement their own design ideas - there's really nothing in Letterhead that could distract you much.
IMPOSSIBLE - supposedly ...
IMPOSSIBLE The LawBlog finds it remarkable that the Mainz police broke into an apartment to remove a banner reading "Not welcome, Mr. Bush". Well, the problem is, if we had the liberal state of law he speaks of, this would really be impossible. But we have a neo-liberal mess - and neo-liberal is as similar to liberal as National Socialist is to socialism ...
Computer Parts Returns Documented
On www.dau-alarm.de service cases of returned computer parts are documented photographically. Very funny - although probably not for the person who had to handle the service cases.
Disclaimer Madness ...
I'm just a legal layman, but I'm sure that such a disclaimer is legally quite ineffective:
The author of this page is not responsible for the way in which the information provided here is used. Files and everything else on this page are intended only for private use and should therefore not be downloaded or read. If you are in any way associated with the government, anti-piracy groups, or other similar groups, access to the files and reading the HTML pages is prohibited. All objects on this page are private property and are therefore not intended to be read. In principle, it is forbidden to enter this page. If you enter this page nevertheless, you are violating the "Code 431.322.12 of the Internet Privacy Act", which was enacted by Bill Clinton in 1995. This means you cannot take legal action against the persons who manage these files! If you continue, you agree to these terms!!!
This will certainly impress the courts greatly. And it will definitely help against cease and desist letters.
Künast: The directive will pass through the Council next Monday
Künast: The directive will pass through the Council next Monday - at least according to a letter sent to the FFII. What madness - several national parliaments and the European Parliament have spoken out against the software patent directive, and yet the point is again on the agenda as a top priority - which would be confirmed only formally without substantive discussion.
I don't quite understand why, on the one hand, the EU Council keeps trying to push through such nonsense instead of finally bringing the whole thing back to the European Parliament for a new proposal - but I could still explain that with corruption (it wouldn't be new if the EU bodies were once again engaged in serious horse-trading).
But why the national governments are acting against the opinion of their own parliaments (in Germany, this was a decision of all factions in the Bundestag!) and against the opinion of their own European deputies (in the European Parliament, the rejection also had a large majority) is incomprehensible.
I can only speculate about the motivation of the other national parliaments of the EU. But I want to know the motivation of the Federal Minister of Justice responsible according to the letter from the Künast office and the federal government she represents - it is simply absolutely incomprehensible to me how action is being taken here completely against the will of one's own parliament.
Fax to the BMJ has been sent. You should do the same. 01888 580 9525
Microsoft restricts Windows XP activation via the Internet - People, get decent operating systems whose manufacturers do not have such absurd notions of ownership. Or take the opportunity to buy a real computer.
R-Archive - Discussion Forums Cease and Desist
R-Archiv - Discussion Forums Cease and Desist Notice - is this now a hoax, or what? Heise is sending a cease and desist notice to the Baron for violating forum rules? Or is there another Munich lawyer they are in a dispute with? This must simply be a hoax ...
The background to this is actually probably true - Heise has indeed blocked the Baron's forum access. So there might be something to the story. It would be quite crazy.
What you find in your comments ...
Comment spammers on the loose:
Hello dear community!
I am not a community. I may write in the pluralis majestatis, but we only do that by accident. Honestly.
I have been operating the BlahFasel auction platform BlahFasel.Blubb for a short time and am therefore addressing you, as I am interested in your opinion about my auction platform BlahFasel.Blubb. I look forward to your suggestions and hopefully constructive criticism.
Of course. You write a comment with a link and email address on an auction platform and include the name of that pile of junk X times - and all this just because you are interested in opinions. No, this is of course not supposed to be any advertising at all. How silly of us to feel that way ...
By the way, let me say this much, „BlahFasel.Blubb“ is an auction platform for BlahFasel and Blubb. However, I would like to emphasize that we do not think highly of „cheap BlahFasel“ and therefore the best Blubb does not automatically win at BlahFasel.Blubb. We are of the opinion that good BlahFasel has its price and therefore the seller (provider of the BlahFasel) determines the auction winner himself.
Huh? This is not an auction platform, this is a scam. An auction has a defined process - bids are placed and the best (depending on the orientation, the lowest or highest) bid wins. Anything else is not an auction platform - whether for BlahFasel or Blubb. At best, this could pass as a tender platform - but even there, there are formal rules that contain a bit more than "The seller determines the winner" ...
So that you can get an overview of BlahFasel.Blubb, you will find our press release in the "News" section on the right side of the page. Here, the functionality of BlahFasel.Blubb is described.
Of course, there - in press releases - everyone immediately expects the description of the functionality of the pile of junk. Completely logical. And under Imprint do you have cooking recipes?
I look forward to your opinion!!!
Opinion? Simple: lousy blog spammers (I found identical comments via search engine in other blogs), the posting that was commented on was chosen to be quite tasteless and, based on the description, I have filed the whole thing under "unsavory offers". Ergo? Plonk
The WordPress IP to Country Plugin converts an IP address to a country and provides the country code. For example, you could (no, I haven't implemented this here, so test comments won't help) display the commenter's country based on their IP address (though this would obviously be misleading for Tor users). Also interesting is the reference to the IP-To-Country Database, which appears to be freely available. Useful for your own projects, such as analyzing log file statistics.
BA is said to have favored Accenture in online job exchange
BA allegedly favored Accenture in online job portal - does this still surprise anyone? The botched work on this thing knows no bounds. And now it's botched work and favoritism - which was to be expected with such a poor result.
What always makes me angry about this: if you yourself are active in the industry, you only wonder about the exorbitant prices that are charged for such deals - and how poor the performance is that is delivered. But you yourself have to invest three hours of documentation work for every hour you work to get your money, because with smaller deals, cheap is great.