Schröder and Eichel want to abolish Day of German Unity
It's too early for Carnival, so they probably mean the Moppelkotze seriously
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Archive 27.10.2004 - 3.11.2004
Update: White House declares Bush as election winner
Observers criticized that electoral procedures in many respects did not meet the best standards practiced worldwide. The USA had one of the most complicated electoral systems. Moreover, they complained that they had less access to the elections than in Kazakhstan, and observers were often not even permitted to get close, but could only position themselves dozens of meters away from polling stations. And the voting computers were less secure than recently in Venezuela. There, inputs were printed out and ballot papers were collected in urns as usual, so they could also be recounted. - United Banana-States of America indeed ...
At Telepolis News (03.11.2004) you can find the original article.
Useful VIM features - Nice little tips about VIM
Airspeed - Trac - Compact template engine with Cheetah-like syntax
ECL v0.9d released
ECL is a pretty nice Common Lisp - relatively fast and with the C compiler you can really get solid code. And the best part: it can be embedded in other programs. Common Lisp might be a bit overkill for a scripting language, but better to go big than small.
At Rainer Joswig's Lisp News you can find the original article.
Planet Planet! - Web-based aggregator in Python
Python ipqueue
Anyone who has always wanted to tinker with the TCP/IP stack in Linux, but doesn't like C and prefers to use Python instead: the linked project offers an elegant solution for that. It allows you to hook Python scripts into Linux's Netfilter. Transparent proxies and similar things can be accomplished with just a few lines of code.
Shrek II
I like DVDs where it's even worth letting the main menu run for a while
But the talent competition after the movie is just absolutely hilarious!
taz 3.11.04 X-Files in the Elbmarsch
In the end, the whole thing became a matter of faith, one that above all had to leave the nuclear-critical public bewildered. The citizens' initiative could only be trusted by those who believed in secret German nuclear tests, a covered-up accident, and numerous manipulated studies. Many things are possible, of course, but that doesn't make them probable. The cause of the leukemia cluster in Lower Saxony's Elbmarsch will probably remain unexplained forever. Yes, yes, all improbable and unproven and all that. But that doesn't make the children who have fallen ill with leukemia healthy and the dead alive again. But it's easier to portray critics as cranks and simply bury one's head in the sand. In a few years the problem will have solved itself biologically anyway, and then no one will care about it anymore.
Data cannon - Hacking biometric systems
Fingerprint scanners outwitted with household items. So much for the security of biometric systems, as Schily wants to have them built into identity cards.
freshmeat.net: Project details for Kernel TCP Virtual Server - Virtual servers (performance or failsafe clusters) based on protocol content directly in the Linux kernel
freshmeat.net: Project details for ProxSMTP - SMTP proxy with hooks for external filters etc.
I© love" You®
More madness around trademark law. Eventually we won't be allowed to say anything because absurd jurisprudence, brazen lawyers and incompetent judges consider this whole nonsense more important than protecting citizens from such rubbish. We can probably just wait for the first websites to be cease-and-desist letters because they have some word sequences in the title tag that some manufacturer has had registered.
At Telepolis News (01.11.2004) you can find the original article.
Linux: In Kernel GUI
Very interesting for control systems and perhaps also PDAs: a GUI system that runs completely in the Linux Kernel and is integrated into it, requiring extremely few resources.
Pasta: text pasting service for del.icio.us - Convert text via copy-and-paste into a website and automatically post to del.icio.us
Polar ice melts faster than expected
On the one hand, the effects are certainly threatening - and whether we can really still turn things around in time (and whether we can even change the outcome at all!) is still completely unclear. On the other hand, it's actually pretty exciting to be living in exactly such a time, when the magnetic pole will probably flip and maybe one of the bigger climate catastrophes is looming. I mean, who experiences something like that? Not just boring civil wars, social upheavals and similar nonsense, but real events with geological consequences?
I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft.
#python discussion of how to implement the Halting Problem
Ouch. Such discussions hurt. Even when you only read them and don't have to take part.
Cease and Desist Letter to Kefk Network by Waldorf Law Firm
Another documentation of how this mysterious law firm in Munich attempts to silence websites through the use of cease-and-desist letters. This is the same case as in P2908. According to kefk.net, the following companies are among the clients represented by Waldorf law firm:
- BMG Records
- Edel Records
- EMI Music
- Sony Music Entertainment
- Universal Music
- Warner Music Group
Everyone is invited to draw their own conclusions.
Unfortunately, the cease-and-desist letter system is so perverse that private individuals can barely defend themselves against it - among other reasons because many legal protection insurance policies specifically exclude this type of proceedings. Ultimately, the very possibility of cease-and-desist letters makes the Internet into the lawless space it supposedly is not - but not for Internet users, but rather for lawyers.
Holocore / Mac OS X Software / OnDeck - Upload plugin for iView Media for image uploads to commercial image services
OkayRpcProtocol - YAML Implementors Site - RPC mechanism for YAML - interesting for TooFPy?
PyYaml - Trac - YAML parser for Python
SLiP << Projects << very simple website for Scott Sweeney - Shorthand notation for XML - inspired by Python
( Syck ): YAML for Ruby, Python, PHP and OCaml - Yet another YAML parser and emitter - this one focuses on completeness, speed and cross-platform support
Winter time change
What really gets me about this whole thing: these incompetent manufacturers of electronic devices with clocks. The rules have remained unchanged for many years, but even current devices rarely have automatic adjustment. No, you don't need a radio time signal receiver for something like this, a very simple algorithm would suffice. But what do the manufacturers do? If they're being generous, they at least build in a switch for manual adjustment of winter/summer time. Most of them, however, still demand that the customer manually adjust the time themselves. Then there are these ridiculous devices where you can't even set the hours separately, but have to run the whole time forward through 23 hours instead of simply going back one hour.
The manufacturers of overpriced consumer products clearly have never heard of usability...
And mobile phone manufacturers especially get on my nerves—they already get the local time transmitted via cellular networks, but still demand manual time adjustment. Even stupid video recorder manufacturers at least have the option to fetch the time from the video text, but mobile phone manufacturers are fundamentally too incompetent for that.
Oh, and PDA manufacturers whose PDAs don't do automatic time adjustment even though the time zone has to be configured in the device anyway (and therefore the rules for automatic adjustment are unquestionably established) deserve to be pelted with their instruction manuals.
YAML Ain't Markup Language - YAML language description
Backbone - a GNUstep-based desktop environment - Desktop environment for GNUstep
Index of /data/gnustep/ - GNUstep live CD - similar to Knoppix, but a decent desktop
Initiative New Social Market Economy
What's supposed to be new? Sure, the dismantling. And it's supposed to be made palatable to voters. With lies, lobbying, and distortion of reality. Organized nonsense, plain and simple.
I found the original article at Der Rollberg.
Couple could hardly be separated
Yeah, those Dülmen folks have always seemed suspicious to me
BSA Chief: Software Pirates Face Increased Crackdown
Their most popular lie: The software industry suffers billions in damages from software piracy. - No, that's wrong. There is no damage in the billions. They lose potential profits, but it's absolutely not proven that these would actually have been earned in a different scenario. And even the profits that actually didn't materialize are not damage - after all, there's no right to profits and no guarantee of profits. They can fail to materialize for all sorts of reasons. Software is simply not a thing, nothing that you produce and then steal. Software pirate is anyway a silly word: none of those people stand in front of the software crate with a gun or knife and demand it to copy itself...
I find this arrogant attitude of the BSA and thus also of the companies it represents (yes, that also includes IBM and Apple, who otherwise come across rather positively to me) almost as infuriating as the behavior of the music industry. This silly attitude that you have a God-given right to profits in the billions (because that's what they're talking about with their claim!) and the evil copiers are directly stealing them is nothing but silly window dressing.
Sure, a company that develops something and then explicitly can't market that product anymore because of illegal copies is in a tough spot - and then really does have reason to speak of damage. That has happened in the area of computer games (LucasArts never properly marketed two games because copies were already out there before they even hit the market).
But none of the companies organized in the BSA have such a position. On the contrary, the biggest rip-off artists are in there, squeezing every penny out of customers and not always delivering the quality that customers actually want - software updates that conveniently skip a major release because then you can charge money for the update. Buggy software that eats data, where the manufacturer then refuses all liability for these software errors (just like product liability in the software sector is a foreign concept for many companies in general).
Of course, companies have a right to enforce their contracts - software license agreements included. After all, no one is forced to buy this software. But this general criminalization of your own customers, this constant suspicion that they would always cheat anyway and this ongoing victim mentality especially of the software giants pisses me off.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Fuji Discontinues Medium Format Cameras
Orks. Fuji and Bronica exiting the medium format market. Fuji in particular had some really cool cameras on offer - they will leave gaps behind. Where else is there such a compact rangefinder camera for 6x9 format? Or something comparable to the highly flexible 6x8 (ok, the Mamiya 67 comes close - but only 6x7, not 6x8). Too bad.
At PhotographyBLOG there's the original article.
Gibson threatens: "Arnold, I'm waiting!"
Power-obsessed muscleman versus religious nut. As actors, I liked them better ...
At NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft I found the original article.
Links are being criminalized
Why an admin can no longer work on Wikipedia. And what extortion methods are being used to delete topics, just because some industrial interests are behind them - no matter how absurd and ridiculous the accusations are. Simply flex financial muscles and the matter is settled for these bullies. Completely regardless of how citizens' rights are trampled underfoot.
I found the netbib weblog and the original article.
Music Industry Against Radio Recording
And more griping from rights administrators and customer extortionists. Yeah right, private radio recordings are responsible for the fact that this concentrated incompetence in the management offices of music conglomerates can't afford the latest Mercedes every year anymore. Lack of competence and company activities completely out of touch with the market are of course never to blame for their decline. Nor the fact that they were simply so stupid and ignored the Internet as a platform for so long - even today the actual music corporations contribute nothing or very little of their own, but manage at best to latch onto others (and even then they still complain).
These clowns will probably only be satisfied when someone wipes their ass for them and they get paid for it. And even then you probably have to bring your own toilet paper...
At netbib weblog you can find the original article.
Not enough soldiers? So what, where's the Photoshop?
In this country, you simply grab a couple of 1-euro workers and put them in spare uniforms
At Telepolis News (29.10.2004) you can find the original article.
project: darkwave
Label that distributes music by Nickie Jaine and Black Tape for a Blue Girl, among others. I find Nickie Jaine's voice absolutely impressive. There you can also find a whole range of songs as MP3s for download and many audio samples. And it's not one of the major labels with their copy paranoia.
And no, this is not my usual music. Every now and then you have to listen to something new.
SanDisk's budget 2GB Secure Digital card
Crazy. 2 GB for 200 dollars. Under 200 euros. Back in the day you were happy if you had a hard drive that worked — today you've got tiny plastic postage stamps with that kind of capacity. Even crazier: today's megapixel monsters actually make these cards necessary ...
At Engadget you can find the original article.
SLIME: The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs - Embed Common Lisp systems in Emacs
The Security of Checks and Balances
The discrepancy between theoretical and actual separation of powers. Not only in the USA, but here in Germany too, the executive is once again trying to seize all power and push the judiciary and legislature to the margins. A development that should alarm anyone who believes in democratic systems. This makes the small victories for democracy all the more important — such as, for example, Parliament's rejection of the European Commission. Unfortunately, in situations like those we're currently being presented with by governments (I can barely stand to hear the drivel about "we are at war with terrorists" anymore — that's complete nonsense; people who say such things have no idea what war really is or have repressed it if they once knew), the other branches of power are often harnessed to the government's cause. An independent Bundestag that also contradicts the government, even when the government belongs to the leading faction, is just as important as constitutional courts that keep politicians in check. Otherwise we'll get 1984, albeit with a delay, but still just as Orwell once imagined it ...
You can find the original article at Schneier on Security here.
58,000 ballots missing in Florida
United Banana-States of America
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
iDrum - The Drum Machine for Mac OS X - Drum kit for GarageBand (and also standalone)
Opel Crisis: Competition with Sweden over the Vectra
Doesn't it get a bit tight when so many people crawl up to the GM managers? I find it disgusting how there's haggling going on and countries are played off against each other. But that's how it works today - first you do nothing when industry gets bought away, then you do even less when everything gets stripped down, and afterwards people try to play everything against each other just to squeeze out the last drop. The blessing of this so-called great globalization.
I found this at tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD and the original article.
TuneFinder X
Cool. You enter a melody and the program delivers the song. Problem: I might be able to hum a song, but a) it won't sound anything like the original and b) I still can't input the notes of the melody into a keyboard from that. I could also whistle the melody, but then Jutta always complains ... Here's the original article.
Mediation Committee: Mail Order Customers Should Bear Return Shipping Costs
Because it's annoying for shippers when customers exercise their rights, these are simply being cut back.
You can find the original article on heise online news.
Website operator warned for hardware notification
Now it's even forbidden to report on the existence of devices, if it's up to the lawyers of a mysterious design patent holder.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Barroso wants to reshape Commission
Actually, he could send half the team home. But it will probably just be a minor cosmetic adjustment.
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
iDive 1.1 - Video clip management similar to iView Media Pro, but specifically for video
OpenPsion - Linux for Psion Computers - Linux on Psion Series 5 and Netbook
OpenZaurus 3.5.1 is released! :: OpenZaurus ::
A new version of OpenZaurus - the alternative to the Sharp ROM - is out. And now available in three variants. Without GUI (interesting for those who use the Zaurus as a small mobile control computer and don't need a GUI), an Opie version (the familiar environment that also comes with the Sharp ROM in an older version) and a GPE version. The latter is particularly cool because it's based on an X server and can therefore run normal X programs.