Federal Office for Radiation Protection: Caution when handling mobile phones

Yes, and at the same time, the expansion of radio cells for mobile networks and UMTS is being pushed ahead. Very consistent, the whole thing. Because the power of the transmission cells is significantly higher - and for people living directly near these cells then also significantly higher than having 10 mobile phones glued to your head.

But then the interests of the economy have to be protected, which is why transmission cells are still allowed to be mounted directly on residential buildings.

Economic interests and boosting consumption is still far more important than actually protecting people from the negative effects of these interests.

At heise online news there is the original article.

CDU plans reduction of employee rights

Oh yes, what a brave new world. Work, die young and have no rights in between. That's what the CDU imagines its nirvana to be.

The fact that even today small companies can fire employees without any problem (and in practice employment protection is already suspended or very unreliably enforceable there), that even today lower-level jobs are paid less and that even today work hour extensions without wage compensation are commonplace—the Union conveniently ignores all this.

Populism rules.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Contax i4R

Looks like a lighter

At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) you can find the original article.

Rollei Renewed

Though the mini projectors are quite cute - somehow the Rollei medium format camera system around the 6008 appeals to me more. Or perhaps as an anachronism the twin-lens reflex.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Adobe wants to establish a uniform format for digital camera raw data

I can't imagine that will catch on. After all, the special thing about RAW is that it usually (not always - some manufacturers are already playing games with the data here too) contains the raw data from the chips. And those are definitely not always identical. At least with high-end cameras. Just think of things like Foveon or Fuji CCDs.

But I've already experienced firsthand what joys RAW formats can bring with software: for exactly that reason, I still use an old version of iView Multimedia Pro, because the newer versions can no longer import CRW data. Ok, it's the fault of the software manufacturer, who is simply too incompetent to transfer bugfixes from one version to a new version, but it's already a hint at the fun that these wonderful digital negatives bring us. I can also only read my images from the Kodak DCS 520 with Kodak's own software; other software can indeed read Kodak RAWs from newer models, but not the old ones based on TIFF (where Kodak used proprietary TIFF extensions). As soon as the Kodak software no longer runs on my Mac, those digital negatives are worthless there.

So a common format wouldn't be bad at all. Maybe you could make it flexible enough to really represent all variants - TIFF at least offers the technical basis for this with its tag format. Whether all programs can then read all variants, or whether one or another variant will be omitted anyway (and you'll be lost again for that reason), remains to be seen.

At the moment, interestingly, a proprietary format is probably the best choice for archiving digital negatives: the Photoshop PSD format with embedded EktaSpace color space. After all, it can represent the full color space (and a bit more - it was originally intended for archiving scans of slides) and the format has so far been readable by all newer software versions. TIFF with appropriately embedded color space would probably work too - but the layers are not implemented as portably there - not every program reads them the same way. With PSD, you can nicely save some preprocessing of your digital negative that you can always discard later. And PSD can be decoded by far more programs than just Photoshop.

Ok, I'll probably get around to converting all my RAW files to PSD in the next few days.

By the way, what I would really prefer would be if the necessary extensions were made to the PNG format and it could be used. But unfortunately things still look pretty bleak there with software support for the extended features. And to my knowledge, there is still no usable standard for storing editing layers.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Four-Thirds Newcomer: Olympus E-300

Not a watt is the ugly

At heise online news there is the original article.

Massive asteroid flies close past Earth

Missed again...

At Telepolis News (27.09.2004) you can find the original article.

Janus Software - Patch to make Firebird Oracle-compatible

pcp - replicating cluster filesystem

SFTP Chroot Howto - Explanation of how to set up ssh so that sftp runs chrooted

Security vulnerability was known to eBay for a long time

Look, the cause is obvious: the eBay managers are simply incompetent. Otherwise they would have banned and filtered foreign JavaScript long ago. Any dummy adds something like that to his software after a friendly visitor has left behind a JavaScript bomb. But for eBay, that's only a theoretical problem. Yeah, those great experts. The original article is at heise online news with the full story.

Sweet Surprise in Gas and Dust Nebula

Look, the gas clouds are actually just cotton candy at the cosmic fair

At Telepolis News (27.09.2004) you can find the original article.

Ullrich withdraws from world's TT

So then Peschel is finally allowed to take a turn.

You can find the original article at VeloNews: The Journal of Competitive Cycling.

BetterHTMLExport - Extended HTML gallery export for iPhoto

Embedding Gallery Into An Existing Community - How to embed Gallery into other PHP pages

Gallery :: your photos on your website - PHP image gallery

iPhotoToGallery - Plugin for exporting iPhoto to Gallery

Municipal Elections Münster

So the mayoral election unfortunately turned out much as expected. However, Tillmann apparently didn't manage 50 percent, so it looks like we'll be going to the polls again on 10.10. Unfortunately, the mayoral election results don't give me much hope that it will be better then. With the council election it's exciting. Extremely close for Union+FDP. But I fear that won't stop them from continuing their reckless nonsense, even if together they only just scrape over 50 percent. Presumably these nutcases will now bury our tax money under the Ludgeri Circle and destroy the promenade in that area through clear-cutting in the name of upgrading it - as they call it. Fantastic. Particularly annoying: in part this will probably be due to the idiots who didn't vote as a protest against government policy and would normally have voted SPD. No, the municipal election is not the right place to protest federal politics, you blunderers. In municipal elections it's about what happens on your doorstep - and that's exactly where a completely pointless and overpriced parking garage will now probably be built instead of a green space with old trees. Thanks to you too.

However, the district elections for Mitte district are at least encouraging in the results. A strong advantage for Red+Green. That's how I would have preferred it for all of Münster.

Myriad: Gallerie - Yet another extended export for iPhoto - but freeware, and not a plugin

PHP/SWF Charts - PHP tool for creating graphs in Flash format

T-Mobile with new management from 2006

Can only get better.

At Radsport-News.com I found the original article.

Big tours pull from ProTour

The End of the ProTour Before Its Beginning?

At VeloNews: The Journal of Competitive Cycling you can find the original article.

Building OpenMCL from its Source Code

OpenMCL vom Source erstellen (auch für die 0.14-dev)

Serious Security Vulnerability at Ebay

Haven't they fixed that JavaScript hole yet? Pathetic.

At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet there's the original article.

mel-base - Base library for eMail handling in Common Lisp

Schily: More Power for the Federal Government in the Fight Against Terror

Federal authorities would need to have the final say over state authorities, according to the minister. He said this was necessary to act appropriately in combating terrorism. - yeah right, the omnipotence fantasies of a federal interior minister. You can almost imagine Schily drooling at the corner of his mouth while formulating his demands. If you have nothing to show for success and lack competence, then you try it with pure power accumulation. Doesn't help anything, but at least you can then cover up the debacles better.

Wasn't there something about federalism in the Basic Law?

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Bayescl -- cvs-prerelease - Bayesian Filter in Common Lisp

BDR President Sylvia Schenk steps down

Unfortunately, this doesn't solve the BDR's problems - there are other functionary blockheads there, things won't change much. Probably just a sacrificial lamb, the resignation.

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.

Chronicle Mass Pileup in Space

The Universe - a classic bottom-up development?

Here you can find the original article.

CL-PREVALENCE - In-Memory Database and Serialization as well as Deserialization for Lisp

GROKLAW - SCO never compared current sources

Well, that's really embarrassing when you have to admit in court that you haven't actually compared the current sources, but instead rely on an internal study from 1999 - not a bunch of experts constantly combing through the sources. All that time wasted and in the end you had to admit you did nothing. Embarrassing, very embarrassing. But the "we need help" from SCO is really amusing. Sorry folks, but nobody can help you anymore

Also amusing is the fact that Kernel 2.4, which SCO was particularly targeting, was only started in 1999 - and wasn't available until 2001. In 1999, 2.2 had just been released, so SCO could hardly have had access to the 2.4 kernel back then. Yet they claim that precisely 2.4 and 2.6 are problematic - even though according to their own statement they never compared the sources.

Here's the original article.

heise online - IETF's anti-spam working group MARID strikes its sails

Since there is no prospect of consensus and achieving the stated goal -- a standard proposal by August 2004 -- he and the MARID chiefs decided to close the group. - yes, sorry, but if it's not until the end of September that one realizes the deadline in August can no longer be met, then perhaps one should put a calendar on the desk.

Otherwise, the whole procedure is an absolute debacle. I agree with the voices that the prevention of discussion about patent problems is a reason for the debacle. Patent claims on IETF algorithms should be cleared up early - because especially with such important infrastructure decisions, one must not hand over the reins to corporations that can then exploit it. And anyone who believes that Microsoft wouldn't have used such leverage to hinder the GPL is someone who puts on their pants with pliers...

And yes, it is a serious problem that there will now be no IETF proposal for the foreseeable future. Because this opens the door wide for Microsoft's unilateral action. Let's hope that spam prevention doesn't become the crowbar with which Microsoft cracks open the server market on the Internet.

Here is the original article.

Intel against 'Inside' websites

And the brand squabble continues. However, claiming the word inside as a trademark is already pretty audacious. At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet you can find the original article.

Lispix Table of Contents - Image processing system in Common Lisp

MetaOCaml Homepage

A very cool project: OCaml - already one of the most beautiful functional programming languages - is being extended with multistage programming. In principle, this is comparable to macros from Common Lisp or Scheme - but of course defined in a functionally clean way. Through multistage programming, OCaml now allows the creation of mini-languages for specific problem domains and code generation in these mini-languages - without the whole thing becoming inefficient due to execution overhead. However, I haven't yet looked into whether it comes anywhere close to the power of Common Lisp macros.

Here's the original article.

Persistent Lisp OBjects - Persistent Lisp Objects - current version, client-server architecture

Pg: a Common Lisp interface to PostgreSQL - PostGreSQL client entirely in Common Lisp

Projects at Common-Lisp.net - Yet another bunch of more projects in Common Lisp

py2app builds its first .app

Bob Ippolito has developed a tool for the simple creation of Python-based OS X applications to the point where it compiles its first Python application. The advantage of his method: no compiler is needed and you work entirely in Python - for small tools certainly useful, since the development environment is often simply overkill for that purpose.

Here is the original article.

Sam Ruby: Copy and Paste

A nice and detailed explanation of meta tags with character set specifications, the HTTP Content-Type header with character set specification, and what browsers do with it. I always say it: the web is a technical garbage heap that just happens to work amazingly well despite that.

The original article can be found here.

SZOn - "Sammlung Cremer" goes to Münster

The painting "Monochrome bleu" by Yves Klein and the "Cremer Collection" with more than 180 works of Nouveau Réalisme and the Fluxus movement will now be on view in Münster. - so if you're looking for a reason to visit Münster, this stuff is hanging in the Landesmuseum

Here's the original article.

VIPS image processing library home page - Open Source Image Processing - an alternative to the usual suspects (Gimp, ImageMagick etc.)

AllegroServe - a Web Application Server - Homepage of the original AllegroServe web server - with documentation that is also relevant for Portable AllegroServe

Bavaria Abolishes Free Learning Materials

Another step towards denying or making education more difficult for those with little money. Because whoever has little money will think twice about whether to send their children to a gymnasium - paying 3 years more in book fees hurts.

Education is far too important to be prevented through cost-cutting measures. When you then look at what money is squandered on in Bavaria and how funds are lost through dubious dealings, something like this makes you even angrier.

But that was already clear from the discussion about elite universities: today elites are defined only by how much money the parents have.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Clean Corpus - Cleaning the Popfile (from 0.20) corpus to remove unnecessarily recorded words

Common Lisp Hypermedia Server (CL-HTTP) - the classic Common Lisp HTTP server

Common Lisp Opensource Center - diverse Allegro Open Source Projects - e.g. an FTP and an NFS server

Fall Hamilton: Vuelta B Test Positive

Sounds somehow like a career end.

At Radsport-News.com I found the original article.

Jenoptik Announces 22 Megapixel Eyelike eMotion²² Digital Back

Weird. Jenoptik is actually rather known for extremely cheap digital cameras that are preferably marketed through Aldi and similar retail chains. I associate high-end digital backs for medium format cameras much less with Jenoptik. But at least they love extremes

At PhotographyBLOG there's the original article.

Lisp news from Rainer Joswig

Very interesting. Unfortunately still no RSS feed, but I found quite a bit on it that wasn't on Planet Lisp or my other Lisp sources. For example, the fact that Loom is now open source (back then I had to put in considerable effort to get a license - though it was free). When I read through all this Lisp stuff, I'm really itching to do more with it. I just have no idea where I'm going to find the time...

Update: a friendly spirit dropped a link to the RSS feed in the comments

Here's the original article.