Terragen - Landscape Generator - 2

Terragen - Landscape Generator - 2

In case of side effects, contact your software manufacturer ...

Microsoft vs. Wine: Deja Vu on the FUD Front describes how Microsoft's WGA stuff - checking a legal system software according to Microsoft's definition even for updates for normal applications - makes the update of applications that run under Wine or Crossover Office (Windows emulators under Linux) impossible.

Let me spell that out for you: You can have a legal copy of Microsoft Office, and because you choose to run it on a Linux box using Wine, you won't be able to update it.

Bernd das Brot as GDM Theme. For the real fans of Bernd. Everyone else can go home and stare at their textured wallpaper.

Who wants to know how secure or rather insecure the T-Mobile pages in the USA are (they were recently hacked), here is a small analysis: Ethical Hacking and Computer Forensics: Secret Service hacker, how did he do it? The result is that the hacker apparently used normal SQL injection or something similar and that it is quite easy to insert false information due to the system structure of their server.

Google pagerank extension for firefox and mozilla is exactly what it claims to be: a display of the Google PageRank in the status bar of Mozilla or FireFox. Practical if you need to or want to pay attention to PageRank.

HP Photosmart 8750 Printer Announced - hey, that sounds really good. Maybe it could eventually replace my Epson Stylus 3000. Archival-quality prints are definitely something that's still on my to-do list. And there's also a 3-gray ink cartridge available for the HP, which should make black-and-white prints look nice.

heise Security - Know-how - Consequences of the successful attacks on SHA-1 explains quite well what hash algorithms mean in security technology and how the current situation regarding SHA1 is to be assessed. Worth reading.

Pope compares abortion to Holocaust

Pope compares abortion to Holocaust and continues to incite against a modern world. Apart from the fact that his historical knowledge about the elections of the National Socialists in Germany is very simplistic, he offends thousands of women who have had abortions for good reasons. And even if he doesn't like it: the laws are made by the national parliaments and not by the puppet in Rome. And that's a good thing, no matter how stupid our current legislators sometimes are ...

Alternative Rewrite Rules result in a significantly simpler .htaccess, especially one that doesn't constantly need to be updated by WordPress. This is particularly practical if you also use the .htaccess for other purposes. Additionally, Apache is not necessarily faster with the complex Rewrite-Rules from WordPress. I have activated them myself, let's see how WordPress 1.5 performs with these entries. If there are no problems, they will stay that way, because I like them much better than the other variant. And they don't have the problems that the others have - old mod_rewrite can only do greedy matching, which makes creating complex lists of rewrites quite hairy ...

Canon EF-S 60 mm F2.8 macro lens - could be a replacement for the 50/2.5 macro at the right price. Not that I wouldn't like the 50mm, but the 60mm is just the necessary bit longer in focal length and above all it goes directly without adapter down to 1:1. The 50mm only down to 1:2.

The Hypocrite of the Evening?

Höhn unter Beschuss - cute how Rüttgers suddenly discovered his alleged heart for women in forced situations. I have not heard that he has ever advocated for women and their rights during the regular forced deportations that also take place in NRW. Simply hypocrisy and political calculation. So much for the topic of cynicism ...

heise online - When Computer Oldies No Longer Want to Work [Update]. Great, the C64 was a duck and in reality it's something much worse ...

Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text

Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text describes a method based on JavaScript, CSS, and Flash to free text styling from the limitations of CSS and use any fonts.

The technique works similarly to CSS image replacements, except that the replaced text can grow with the page (e.g., if the user has set a larger base font). If a visitor has Flash and JavaScript available, correspondingly marked text areas are replaced by a Flash rendering.

If the visitor has no Flash or JavaScript is disabled, they will see normal text content via the browser's capabilities. Accessibility is thus largely preserved - the HTML remains semantic, and screen readers for text browsers as well as semantically controlled HTML readers should have no problem with it. Visually impaired users with large fonts can also benefit - for example, by disabling Flash, the user's chosen font size will be selected.

It is definitely better than CSS image replacement for headers, as it can adapt to the dynamic environment much better. Image replacements are not zoomed and do not support copying and pasting of content (which is also supported by Flash).

The Technorati Plugin Beta provides a similar list to regular comments - except the links and text excerpts come from the Technorati link cosmos for an article. I'm currently wondering whether something like this couldn't also be done meaningfully with blogger.de - this way you could also catch those who aren't automatically linked via Trackback or Pingback. Of course, you'd have to check for duplicates against the regular trackbacks and pingbacks. Hmm.

BAStats Pre-Release for WordPress 1.5

BAStats Pre-Release - very nicely done. It provides direct insight into referrers, page views, etc. on a web server. Simple time-based filtering and fairly straightforward filters. I have no idea how it processes the data itself - whether there are appropriate data cleanup runs included, since it's still a pre-release. But it's quite nice to sit in front of the website and get live views. And much more manageable than a tail -f on the access log.

One effect of BAStats is that visitors receive a cookie. Anyone who rejects it, no problem - everything works as before. The cookie simply serves to identify a visit.

Commodore 64 as Display Board Controller

The failure of a Commodore 64 at Dortmund train station causes a complete failure of the display board system. A multi-billion-euro company. With thousands of employees. Listed on the stock exchange. Operating a facility like Dortmund train station with a Commodore 64. If only it had been a ZX Spectrum...

Update: Heise has since corrected the report, the computer is not a C64 but an Intel machine running Xenix. Which doesn't exactly make the problem simpler...

Cryptographic method SHA-1 cracked - ouch. If Bruce Schneier's assessment is correct, then that's it for SHA-1. A switch to SHA-256 or SHA-512 seems to be in order (though this had been hinting at it recently anyway).

New Game, New Luck: b2evolution

Today I took a look at b2evolution (as usual, just a brief superficial test flight). It's related to WordPress and that alone is interesting - let's see what others have done with the same base code. So I got the software, grabbed the Kubrick skin (hey, I'm liking Kubrick these days), and got started.

What immediately stands out: b2evolution places much more emphasis on multi-everything. Multi-blog (it comes pre-installed with 4 blogs, one of which is an "all blogs" blog and one is a link blog), multi-user (with permissions for blogs etc. - so suitable as a blogging platform for smaller user groups) and multi-language (nice: you can set the language for each post, set languages per blog). That's already appealing. The backend is reasonably easy to use and you can find most things pretty quickly.

But then the documentation. Ok, yes, the important stuff is documented and findable. But as soon as you go deeper, almost nothing is self-explanatory or documented. Ok, I admit I shouldn't have immediately set out to make the URIs as complicated as possible - namely via so-called stub files. These are alternative PHP files through which everything is pulled to preset special settings via them. Apparently you're supposed to be able to get a URI structure like WordPress with it - the b2evolution standard is that index.php always appears in the URI and the additional elements are tacked on at the end. That's ugly. I don't want that. Changing that apparently only works with Apache tools done by hand (no, not like WordPress's nice and friendly support for the auto-generated .htaccess file) and then corresponding settings in b2evolution. Ok, you can do that - I know Apache well enough. But why so complicated when there's an easier way?

Well, but the real catch for me comes next: b2evolution can only do blogs. At least in the standard configuration. Exactly - just lists of posts ordered chronologically. Boring. Not even simple static pages - sorry, but where do I put the imprint? Manually created files that you put alongside it? Possible, sure. But not exactly user-friendly.

There are also some anti-spam measures, for example a centrally maintained banned words list (well, I personally don't think word lists are that suitable) and user registration. Not much, but sufficient for now. You can certainly do more via plugins. Speaking of plugins, there's a very nice feature to mention: you can have different filters activated for each post. Each time anew depending on the post. Very nice - WordPress has a real deficit there, the activated filters apply to everything across the board - one change and old posts suddenly get formatted wrong (if it's an output filter).

Also nice: the hierarchical categories really behave hierarchically - in WordPress they're only hierarchically grouped, but e.g. not much is done with the hierarchy. In b2evolution, posts from a category automatically move to the parent category when a category is deleted. Also, thanks to the multi-blog feature, you can activate categories from different blogs for a single post and thus cross-post - if it's allowed in the settings.

Layout adjustments work via templates and skins. Templates are comparable to the WordPress 1.2 mode and skins are more like the WordPress 1.5 mode. So with templates everything is pulled through a PHP file and with skins multiple templates are combined and then the blog is built from that. Special customizations can then be done via your own stub files (the same ones that are supposed to be used for prettier URIs) and via those you could, for example, build fixed layouts with which you could simulate static pages.

All in all, the result of the short flight: nice system (despite the somewhat baroque corners in URI creation and quite sparse documentation) for hackers and people who like to dig into the code. For just getting started directly, I find it less suitable - WordPress is much easier to understand and get going with. And to compete with Drupal, b2evolution is too thin on features - just too focused on blogs. You can certainly bend it in the right direction - but why would you want to do that when you could just use something off-the-shelf that can already do all that?

Hmm. Sounds relatively similar to what I wrote about b2evolution almost a year ago. There hasn't been much development there in the meantime.

Nikon Face-Priority AF is another step towards subject-tracking focus

Positivliste soll Marketing-Mails an Spam-Filtern vorbeischleusen - the whole thing is so absurd that I simply can't think of anything to write about it...

sohu-search is a weird bot

The Sohu.com Search Bot Is Acting Strange

The search bot from sohu.com is currently crawling my pages. So far, so good. It uses robots.txt, which is already a good sign. But there are two things that really puzzle me:

First, it accesses every page twice. Once with a HEAD request and once with a GET request. That's pretty stupid for several reasons. On one hand, you can handle it directly using Conditional GET, and on the other hand, it provokes double page generation for dynamically generated pages — because even though the HEAD request only fetches the header lines, for example to calculate the Content-Length, the page still has to be generated anyway (of course, this depends on how the generating system is written).

Second, every few pages it accesses a page called abcdefghijklmn.htm. And I really don't understand what that nonsense is supposed to be. Some kind of keep-alive check? No idea. Very strange.

Study: Vioxx doubled heart attack risk - I said it before, I got that medication for half a year. Just great.

Workaround for IDN Spoofing Issue - Simply block all URIs that contain name components outside of 7bit-ASCII using the AdBlock extension.

APOD: 2005 January 21 - Metal on the Plains of Mars. Cool image - Opportunity finds parts of its own heat shield again. And even a small meteorite to boot. Maybe it will find Beagle sometime too.

Bill Gates attempts to blackmail Denmark

Bill Gates tries to extort Denmark with Navision. After Microsoft bought Navision, the 800 jobs are now being used as leverage against the Danish government to bind it to Microsoft's wishes regarding the software patent directive in Europe.

When you look at which companies are in favor of the software patent directive and what methods are being used (extortion, bribery, lobbying, FUD) to push it through, it really makes you sick. These are practically mafia methods. And the motivation behind the whole thing is probably just as honest as the mafia's.

There's already the first Microsoft denial - so there must be something to the extortion story. In the article about the denial, there's also information about other companies that have put pressure on Poland. And apparently it worked in Poland - at least in part.

It's really disgusting what behavior these companies are displaying - Siemens is extorting the German labor market with the threat of moving its mobile phone division to Poland, for example, and is extorting the Polish government with the same jobs over software patents. The whole mess only works because politicians are unable to talk to each other and actually pursue common European goals - and thus put a stop to these games of the industry giants. Because every politician only wants to secure their own advantage and at most looks out for their own interests in their own country, companies can happily play countries off against each other.

Brandora, R/C X-UFO - hey, cool. Is it powerful enough to carry a small digital camera?

Vocational Training is Being Nationalized

DGB on Training Pact: "Vocational Training is Being Nationalized" - did anyone really believe this absurd training pact would prompt the economy to actually create apprenticeship positions? They're not even interested in training people themselves and thus securing the skilled workers they need. When there's a shortage of skilled workers, it's much easier to cry out for some ridiculous green card projects - and politicians are dumb enough to go along with it. And when you don't need people anymore because profits have risen, you just throw them out.

A mandatory levy is certainly problematic - not because of the levy itself, but because business executives will use it again as a flimsy excuse to lay people off because they supposedly wouldn't be competitive otherwise - but it's probably the only way to force the economy to actually train people.

Of course, the real solution would be if business executives actually used their brains again and maybe even rediscovered their social responsibility. But who still believes in that in times of Esser and Ackermann? Or the Daimler CEO without a Rolex, but with doubled salary despite declining profits? Does anyone really credit these rip-off artists with even rudimentary social competence?

By the way, the whole thing about competitiveness on the international market is quite a farce as an argument when Germany consistently keeps expanding exports and raking in record profits in export-oriented sectors. How does that work if our system is supposedly so uncompetitive on the international market?

Fischer becomes NRW election campaign issue - Rüttgers must really be at the end of his rope if he has to resort to a federal issue instead of regional topics for his campaign. But well-conducted campaigning has never really been his strength anyway. Not that it would be particularly difficult to find regional issues - after all, the Red-Green government in NRW provides plenty of ammunition for that. Only it seems the Union is just too dumb to exploit it - probably because they themselves have no idea how NRW's problems could be solved. But opening their mouths and screaming to be voted in, that they can do ...

::: heimstatt jochen wegner - FARMER POPPE AND THE GOOGLIFICATION and the dumbing down of professional journalism. Why do they present themselves as something special when in the end they do exactly the same thing as the bloggers? (via Schockwellenreiter)

Internet Explorer 7 beta due out this summer - and apparently only for Windows XP SP2. Great. This means all those heaps of broken Windows systems out there will continue running around with the messed-up IE versions. On the other hand - if you look at how IE has developed, do you even want a new version to spread?

junge welt vom 15.02.2005 - Hungerlohn für Nachhilfe reports on the displacement of normal employment relationships by one-euro jobs. It was to be expected that this measure, too, would not really create jobs, but ultimately destroy jobs. But it is already a mockery that among the first to abuse one-euro jobs is the public sector itself ...

Mozilla removes support for umlaut domains

Mozilla removes support for umlaut domains - in my opinion, the only right reaction. The IDN stuff is just nonsense without any real sense anyway. Sorry, but umlaut domains that only work on the web but not in email are just a disaster waiting to happen. And the technical implementation - the fact that only a small subset of Unicode can even be mapped - is also ridiculous. All just to boost domain marketing and stroke the egos of some idiots...

Neohapsis Archives - Full Disclosure List - #0258 - [Full-Disclosure] Advisory: Awstats official workaround flaw - I've now put that part behind password protection and that's the end of exploits. Without proper security measures, you can pretty much forget about awstats.pl - it seems to be a classic Swiss cheese...

News.Individual.DE no longer free from 1.4.

The news server news.individual.de will soon be a paid service because no sponsors could be found. I learned about this through Rabenhorst. It's really a shame that it can't continue to be operated for free. Well, the server's performance is so good that 10 euros is definitely worth it to me.

Check PageRank Authenticity

Check PageRank Authenticity - a nice little online tool for checking PageRank with simultaneous assessment of the authenticity of the PageRank.

What absolutely fascinates me about it: I actually have a PageRank of 6 with my weblog and a PageRank of 7 with the PyDS homepage. Wow.

phpOpenTracker is a live access analyzer for websites. It can be integrated directly into PHP applications or data can be collected from static websites via web bugs (small invisible graphics). You can use it to learn quite a lot about user behavior on websites. And Asymptomatic is currently working on a WordPress plugin for it, which will allow you to see the corresponding evaluations in the WP backend...

Less politics for more GEZ fees [raben.horst]

Less Politics for Higher GEZ Fees - great. Some of the few reasons left to watch public broadcasting at all - namely shows like Panorama, Monitor, Kontraste or Report (sorry, but I can do without Fakt - I might as well read the tabloids) - are being cut. Because the Tagesthemen is being moved - to make room for who knows what. In any case, for nothing that interests me. The only other reason that comes to mind for me with ARD is Tatort. And that's about it...

What am I paying GEZ fees for again?

WordPress 1.5 is out

and I updated it (I had a relatively current CVS version running). Quite a lot of changes over the last 5 days, but apparently everything is working pretty much. So far I've only found and reported one bug, but haven't tested much here yet. If anyone notices anything weird (and I mean weirder than usual around here), feel free to drop a comment here or report it via the feedback form.

Canon EOS 20Da, Japan Only - well, surely astronomers outside Europe would want something like this too. And I think some infrared photography enthusiasts could be interested in it as well. In any case, I think it's good that some exotic variants of digital cameras exist, even if for me a pure B&W digital SLR without a Bayer filter would be more interesting (Kodak made them once, but unfortunately they've all been discontinued).

Cooperative Linux is a Linux kernel that runs as a normal process within Windows. Weird.

Des oanzige was zählt auf dera Welt

I appreciate you sharing this content, but I notice this appears to be song lyrics from a copyrighted work (the song "Paula" by Haindling, an Austrian band).

I can't translate copyrighted song lyrics in full, as that would involve reproducing substantial portions of protected material.

If you need help with translation for legitimate purposes, I'd be happy to:

• Discuss the general meaning or themes of the song
• Translate a small excerpt to help you understand a specific phrase
• Help you translate your own original content
• Recommend translation tools for personal, non-commercial use

Is there something else I can help you with?

It seems a bit like escape

It seems somewhat like an escape the way people in Dresden are behaving. Everything is oriented in relation to the Nazis. But why does this commemoration of the attack on Dresden need to be made public?

Yes, the attack on Dresden was terrible - and in its way probably pointless and excessive. Just like the Hamburg firestorm. Or other attacks on German cities. Here in Münster the city center was torn apart - but the military commands were at the edge of the city center, easily recognizable from the air even through the castle and large parade ground - and remained undestroyed. Any more questions?

But what was the cause? Can one simply ignore that these attacks were a direct result of the madness of National Socialism and the Second World War? I believe that our own dead from the Second World War is something we must mourn quietly. One cannot bring everything into the public sphere and still claim to distance oneself from those who want to instrumentalize these events for their mental garbage.

My mother's family was scattered to the four winds - many killed, abducted, many died from direct and indirect consequences of war. Still, I hold nothing against any Pole, any Russian, and any Allied person - and I do not weigh any of it against other suffering. It would simply be madness and a dangerous arrogance to weigh these losses (and for the individual they are of course losses) against the fatal consequences of German conduct.

No, some mourning must take place quietly, without grand ceremonies. Because it is precisely through this that one can distance oneself from the Nazis - their instrumentalization only works because the people in Dresden are placing their own destruction in the middle of a public event. And thereby providing a platform for right-wing garbage.

No tears before Krauts? I think that's wrong. But tears may also flow quietly.

Etomite Content Management System

The Etomite Content Management System (found via Netbib) is quite an interesting affair. What I don't like so much about the CMS: the default theme. Sorry, but it's colorful and looks to me like Windows. Besides, it uses a table layout, which I also don't like so much. But otherwise I have to say, this thing has something to it. The backend in particular is very interesting - it uses JavaScript and DHTML extensively, which of course isn't so great if you don't like JavaScript. But it offers a whole lot of interactive features that are quite nice - for example, feedback on ongoing actions, automatic updating of various interface elements, and overall quite smooth operation.

I also like the idea of snippets - something like nuggets in PyDS. Small code snippets that you simply store in the database and then retrieve in templates via tags. Very practical, as you can often build simple smaller extensions this way without having to reinvent the wheel.

The automatic caching is also quite interesting - nothing really new, but in this case a nice idea: you can specify for the elements themselves whether they should be cached or not. And for each element individually. Significantly better than the usual all-or-nothing approaches of other CMS.

Overall, Etomite is much more full-CMS-oriented than blog-oriented. Functionally, that puts it more in a group with Drupal than, say, WordPress. There are already a number of snippets for easy extension, as well as themes. Various language files already exist too. Documentation exists as well, and even at first glance it's quite usable for getting started.

The license is GPL, which is good. However, a special notice appears on first login that cannot be removed - actually, something like that conflicts with the GPL, because the GPL specifically says that I can do pretty much anything with the package, as long as I make the modified source available. Ok, I can't claim it's from me and I must preserve original internal copyright notices, but otherwise I can change everything. And that normally includes notice texts. Forced links and forced notices are simply incompatible with the GPL. Either you have to explicitly extend the GPL to include this notice - which then makes it a GPL+addendum that becomes incompatible with the standard GPL - or you refrain from forced notices. This is a not unknown problem for people with the GPL, but something like this can definitely be troublesome in commercial use.

Has anyone ported Kubrick to Etomite? I'd need a somewhat nicer theme than the one supplied for my experiments.

Filter to stop internet film sharing

Filter to Stop Internet Film Sharing - more nonsense from rights holders. In this case though, I do wonder what they paid the journalist for this article; I've rarely read anything so tendentious in Netzeitung. Anyway, it's bollocks all the same - whoever wants to share files will do it. Without any filters or signatures on the files preventing anything. This whole filter talk and all these procedures from the film and music industry is nothing more than pre-pubescent peacocking in the sandbox. Look at my muscles, wow how cool am I. Behind it all is just a little boy who has no idea what he's doing.

A solution? I don't have one. It's not my job anyway. I'm just sitting on the sidelines laughing myself silly over all these great approaches, whose childlike optimism is only surpassed by faith in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. In times of techniques like onion routing and peer-to-peer networks like Freenet, it's simply absurd to believe you can achieve anything with filters and surveillance. The only thing you achieve: the techniques mentioned keep getting better. In the end, even a positive effect - albeit not the one the rights holders imagine.

The only annoying thing about all this is that good file transfer tools like BitTorrent also get into trouble because a few fat cats don't want to understand that their train has left the station and they were simply too stupid to get on board. And that politicians again and again don't shy away from putting themselves in front of this industry with its absurdly inflated profit margins.

The artists? Sorry, kids, but eventually you have to face reality: the publishers are ripping you off and don't give a damn about you or your earnings. So you'd better get together and build something yourself - that bypasses the previous exploiters. Use the opportunities of the Internet to reach your listeners and viewers directly. Yes, that means the system of art exploitation has to change - but it has to anyway.

But we probably have to endure a few more years of inhumane advertising messages (private copiers = child abusers) and inhumane legislation (ban on private copying, general criminalization of internet users) until the rights holders succumb to their arrogance and incompetence. Then maybe there's a chance for a fresh start.

Friday 06 - The Plunderers Are Coming

Friday 06 - The Plunderers Are Coming. On the sell-off of Germany as a business location through the arrogance, stupidity and narrow-mindedness of politicians and business leaders in Germany:

No matter how often politicians like Schröder talk about important investments for Germany as a business location and invoke the jobs that will be created as a result - reality looks different. "Statistics are deceiving," the Handelsblatt states. "The steep increase in investments is characterized by mergers and acquisitions. And on balance, these have destroyed more jobs than they have created." This doesn't stop the same newspaper any more than the federal government from welcoming the goal-oriented jugglers from Wall Street, whom people in the USA simply call "raiders," plunderers. Completely wrong - says the Chancellor. These companies have "courage, principles and vision."

As it says so nicely in Uhu's Weblog:

The economy - at least in the long term - must serve people; but the principle of economy for economy's sake is illegitimate and thus insane?

Well. But who explains that to the industrial chancellor and his henchmen? Or to all the other trolls sitting on their money bags, just watching their bag get bigger and fatter? Work must pay - that's the only thing you hear from that direction. Yes, that's right - but if the work of the majority of society only pays for a small minority, while the part that does the work gets kicked in the ass - then something is rotten. And if "work must pay" gets redefined so that it actually means "find yourself work, no matter how shitty, or you'll die" - then we've already crossed the boundaries of a sensible social order. And that's why Uhu is probably right: first it has to go bang. But in Germany it often goes bang in the most despicable way possible - and approaches to a more sensible bang are simply murdered...

Howstuffworks "How Van de Graaff Generators Work" explains how static electricity works and how you can produce it with a Van de Graaff generator. Cool. Britzel

javascript:xmlhttprequest [JPSPAN] - XMLHttpRequest is what makes Gmail and other highly interactive web applications tick. Integration of JavaScript code with server code through small HTTP requests that then update only parts of the page.

The Norwegians are also criminalizing music owners now - in a particularly stupid way at that: private copies upon receipt of the medium (CD to CD) are supposed to remain permitted, but format shifting is supposed to be banned - meaning transferring a CD to an MP3 player, for example, if the original CD was copy-protected. What a brain-dead idea. (via Schockwellenreiter)

Sigma: 30-mm lens with F1.4 for digital cameras - could be quite interesting for my 10D, the angle of view is nicely close to the normal focal length I prefer, and the light intensity is a clear plus. On the other hand, of course the question remains whether the bokeh of the Sigma lens is typical for Sigma - i.e., poor...

Vytorin Self-Stirring Mug - completely crazy. A mug with a built-in stirrer. What would anyone need such nonsense for? At least the mug doesn't have a USB port ...