open still exists under OS X as well. The other two colleagues are now called pbpaste (writes the clipboard to stdout) and pbcopy (copies stdin to the clipboard). And the tools are still just as practical.
At Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp you can find the original article.
Vim (Vi IMproved) for Mac OSX - VI Improved is also available for OS X - with Aqua Interface
I just noticed this today - but it's been around since mid last year. I think it would be an interesting addition to my M equipment - even though I'm actually aiming for maximum compactness. Because a 1.2/35 ultimately delivers more than a 1.0/50 - the shorter focal length allows for longer shutter speeds without camera shake. And the depth of field is greater, making it less critical than with the Noctilux. Besides, with available light, the angle of view of the 50mm is often already too narrow. So the 1.2/35 could be the ideal available light lens.
I'm playing around with photo-moblogging. The image quality from the Clie is pretty poor - but Bluetooth+GPRS is quite practical ... ![130-400-300.jpeg][P1]
OzTeX - The most important TeX implementation for OS X
I remember it very well too. I was sitting at the computer and had the TV on in the background. I was hacking away at something - I think I was on vacation or working from home. Suddenly Jutta came in and said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We briefly discussed what might have happened - possibly an error in the flight control system? Meanwhile, I switched over and watched the images. Shortly after, the second plane crashed into the other tower. It took me a long time to believe what I was seeing. I still had some hope that it was an error in the flight control system, but then the plane hit the Pentagon and after that it became clear that it must have been a terrorist attack. After that, I spent hours trying to find more information, flipping through news channels all day, trying to access websites and looking for where to find news. In between, I called the office and spoke with colleagues - they had only heard about it on the radio up to that point. Dirk Steins has the original article.
RFC 2229 - RFC for the Dict Protocol
PostgreSQL has a bug when optimizing LIKE expressions.
That's how you wander through the RSS reader and stumble over one thing after another, eventually landing on someone you've already discussed the correct functioning of mail/newsreaders (or MausNet frontends) with in the MausNet. Weird. The web is definitely too small.
Shame. Okay, Stollwerck was never really my favorite chocolate - I'm quite spoiled by Cluizel, Valrhona, Dolfin and Domori, everything else is just chocolate garbage to me - but still, somehow it belonged to Cologne. Hopefully the chocolate museum will remain there.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there's the original article.
Looks nice. Maybe I should swap out my private phone for something more current at some point. After all, I still have such an outdated S3 Com for my private plan, so the Nokia is even smaller.
You can find the original article at Engadget.
Rolleiflex T - Information about the Rolleiflex T
I have a Sony Clie PEG TH55 - a nice device that has everything a business PDA needs. So camera, MP3 player and other gadgets. Oh, and of course it can do calendar and stuff too.
What it can't always do though: play my MP3s. I have various MP3s created with different programs. At first I thought only the 192 kbit MP3s from iTunes were causing trouble, so I quickly converted a bunch of songs from my iTunes to 128 kbit MP3s (using Amadeus II - a really cool audio editing program!). Well, the result: Pink Floyd songs work, those were converted from AAC tracks (I ripped them more recently). Emerson, Lake & Palmer doesn't work - those were 192 kbit MP3s before, but were saved as 128 kbit MP3s the same way. With the same software.
Anyway, my iPod is much nicer and more pleasant for music anyway. I had just hoped to get by with just one device in an emergency, but that's only very limited with the Clie. Annoying.
... at least physically. The rest arrives tomorrow.
Nice Crater.
At NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft I found the original article.
That's why there won't be anything new here until then. No, I'm not moblogging. Check out the old stuff, or read some more interesting blogs, I'd rather explore Hamburg instead
While browsing through old software and investigating what became of it, I came across the now free — as in free beer — availability of HyperPad. HyperPad was a programming environment for DOS computers that was heavily inspired by HyperCard. No graphics, but a pretty good recreation of what made HyperCard special — and an almost identical copy of the programming language. Quite amusing for the time, when integrated development environments with GUI builders were still utopias from the workstation market.
Just as the special report on the storming of the school in the North Caucasus is ending, they run an ad break. One advertiser offers CD collections of church hymns with a note about these terrible times to calm Christian souls, another advertiser offers the folk plays of the Theaterstadl on video cassettes.
Does nobody at ARD have even a shred of sense left in their head? Right after images of dead children, the injured, and terror footage, while the question still hangs in the air about how many children may have been killed there, and while the numbers of injured are climbing, an ad block airs? Could it be in worse taste?
Sorry, but I'm normally only used to this kind of tasteless stuff from the private broadcasters—and I find it extremely tasteless there too. But for the publicly-funded ARD, which is also financed by my GEZ contributions, I consider this outrageous.
Of course, you can't put the entire television program at half-mast all the time. But the greed for advertising revenue should surely take a back seat to common sense at ARD...
I hope this Microsoft proposal will be firmly rejected. This is absolute nonsense, what Microsoft is imagining here - an anti-spam technology that is patented by Microsoft (or any other company - only Microsoft is particularly suspicious due to its embrace-and-extend practices) simply must not be accepted as an IETF standard.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Taken from an auction description via copy-and-paste. I suspect that despite his disclaimers, he's operating well outside legal boundaries here, especially since it's going to be hard to sell a 5-pin network cable and similar nonsense.
3Com Network and "Hacker Card" for Sale
The unique opportunity here on eBay!
A 3Com 905B – TX Rev. 03-0172 410
The revision with the "error" known in the hacker scene
Which consists of the card having an incorrectly built encoder (H1012).
With this encoder you can make all data stored on the Internet visible
- Break SSL encryptions up to 2000 times over
- Open and close http protocols undetected
- Program and delete htts, httm
- Inject Java programs into network ports undetected
- Online access to servers and computers
- Access to private computers
- Ghost logs on networks
And much more!
For legal reasons, I'm selling the card as a network card
Which is basically what it's intended for anyway.
Without illegal hacker software!
But you can find it on the Internet!
The Netscape cable is inserted into the card on an EEPROM basis.
The cable is 90cm long and has a Netscape 5-pin connector.
Sale as network card with 10/100m/bits
And RJ45 connection.
PCI card!
So dear eBay security team, this is an auction that doesn't violate the guidelines!
I got this card from San Jose (California, USA) and I paid $429 (USD) for it in early March 2004!
I assume no liability for damages caused by the card or its misuse with various programs from the Internet!
!!! Sale as a completely normal network card !!!
Shipping costs are €5.90 with DPD as an insured package!
Since I don't want trouble with the police or the public prosecutor's office, I'm selling the card here as a network card!
If you have any questions, just send an email!
Best regards
The depressing part is the two bids. Okay, it might still be a cheap network card, but honestly, throwing money at such a brazen lunatic is really stupid. But the bidders probably actually believe this garbage...
Wow. Leica is ripping off collectors again. That's fine, they should bleed for their foolishness.
Sorry, but this is really absurd. I can still accept a replica of the prototype. But all the fuss around it sounds more like esotericism than photography. At least this 0-series edition finally has a rudimentary viewfinder - unlike the last version which was just a wire mess with a crosshair.
Somehow I find it fascinating how Leica products range from a digital module for the R9 to the M-system with high-performance optics, to compact cameras and digital compacts (usually a bit overpriced) to such crazy things as gold-lacquered and snakeskin-leather special editions and things like 0-series replicas.
I still prefer to stick with the M-system. Sure, I pay a lot of money for it, but at least I get decent MTF diagrams for my lenses and a really easy-to-use rangefinder camera. If I feel esoteric (and have too much money) I can always buy an MP.
Were they perhaps tired of his hours-long absurd rambling?
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Yeah, Serendingsbums is soooo great and can do soooo much with trackback. Unfortunately it only implements trackback autodiscovery (which is a dumb idea to begin with, which is why the Python Desktop Server naturally doesn't do it) and doesn't even have support for the trackback module in the RSS feed (which would make trackbacking posts from the aggregator easier, if the aggregator evaluates the trackback module - which the Python Desktop Server does, because it makes sense) ...
At Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp you can find the original article.
There are no legitimate applications for dialers - it's all nonsense. The few situations where it might possibly make sense can be solved in other ways. This entire dialer garbage should be completely banned, end of story.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Is there finally an adequate successor to HyperCard? For an old nostalgic like me, that would certainly be something. It would also fit well with my rant about end-user-friendly programming solutions - because HyperCard was something that end users could tinker with endlessly and create their own small solutions without having to complete a computer science degree first.
At The Macintosh News Network there's the original article.
A new voting machine scandal in the USA?
At morons.org headlines you can find the original article.
That's quite a cool reaction. No ranting, no verbal outbursts - just switched citizenship and Italy's left empty-handed.
I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.
Forgotten because I never think about it being there. Yet it is one of the more interesting implementations: free as in free beer, even for commercial purposes. Support costs money (which is fine). Good portability - unfortunately not available on OS/X - when you consider Windows and various Unix systems. And a compiler that generates natively executable programs directly - especially practical for classical application development. Due to the nature of compilation (via a C compiler), integration of external C libraries is also good. So if you can live with the platform limitation, it is certainly a very interesting implementation.
WebHome - Cookbook - s c h e m a t i c s : c o o k b o o k - Cookbook for practical Scheme applications
They have no security concept. After notifying me about the possible creation of new accounts using my credit card data - and thus potential credit card fraud - I have received no confirmation from eBay to this day as to whether the notification is genuine and whether my credit card data was actually used in full.
Credit card numbers can be automatically generated and then used - only through combination with address and name does a potential misuse result. Preventive blocking based on a non-detailed report would make credit cards pretty unusable.
Although I have meanwhile fulfilled all the strange requirements from these support trolls, there is no confirmation and no information about what eBay is now doing in this case. It would also be far too easy if they actually provided support.
The simplest thing would have been to just answer my question with "no, our data shows no multiple use of your data" or "yes, we have account registrations that use your complete data" or something similar. But no, instead you have to jump through a pile of pointless hoops and in the end you simply don't get an answer anymore. Really great.
Update: today I finally got a terse response (filled with technical incompetence about supposedly non-falsifiable header lines that point to some identities in emails - nonsense, the only non-falsifiable headers are server forwards, that says nothing about identity), stating that there are no irregularities and no double use of my credit card. Where exactly the emails came from that informed me about this double use (and where the non-falsifiable headers clearly mentioned eBay servers), they didn't tell me. Although they previously wanted to know exactly in several emails from me which headers these emails had so they could verify their authenticity.
In summary: a lot of blabber, a lot of delay, but in the end the whole thing leaves at best a feeling of confusion and technical incompetence at eBay. Given that they also operate one of the larger internet payment services with PayPal...
At heise online news there's the original article.
Apache 2.0 module mod_macro - Macros for Apache configuration
Carvware Software - Make useful use of game controllers and multi-button mice under OS X
Wow. So much incompetence from two involved providers is pretty heavy.
At heise online news there's the original article.
I had laboriously worked my way down to 4 invites (despite a temporary top-up from Google), and now I have 6 again. Who wants one, who hasn't had one yet? If so, please use the email form.
At Telepolis News (31.08.2004) you can find the original article.
Typical case of over-engineering: instead of simply transmitting the time when regularly logging into the radio cell (whereby the cells are of course centrally fed via time servers from an atomic clock), people are thinking about a mini atomic clock. Completely crazy.
I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft.
Cool. PLT-Scheme (that's MzScheme as the language, MrEd as the GUI library, and DrScheme as the IDE) has gotten an automated package system that allows extensions to be installed from the network. Something like CPAN for Perl, just in Scheme. MzScheme is becoming increasingly interesting as a scripting alternative.
At Planet Lisp there's the original article.
Project Schematics - Diverse Scheme code for MzScheme, including database drivers, wiki, PDF writer ...
It's quite absurd when an employee of a company whose only product is so-called social network software gets fired - because she runs a blog.
That's nice that it's here now. But I think it's a bit much that it only runs from 10.3 onwards. So count me out.
spgsql - PostgreSQL driver written entirely in Scheme
Elephant sounds interesting - a database for Lisp objects based on Sleepycat-DB. Would be another possible building block for a Lisp rewrite of PyDS or similar projects where you need a directly embedded database.
At Planet Lisp there's the original article.
But according to Wolfgang and Federal Gerd, everything is just fine. How far removed they are from reality is no longer even measurable...
The frightening thing about it is that this bunch in the opposition doesn't think it's nearly enough yet, what's being destroyed. So we can look forward to another round of china-smashing after the next election. Until the unemployed and welfare recipients, the asylum seekers and others that our elitist politicians deem not full members of society are where this elite wants them: right down in the dirt at the bottom.
At Pepilog - Berlinerin klagt in Karlsruhe gegen Hartz there's the original article.
Io - nice little prototype-based object-oriented programming language
What can we learn from this? In a kickboxing match between Jesus and Jobs, Steve would win. -
At Gizmodo you can find the original article.
Funny. With all the complaining about unjustified measurements and speed cameras, I'm missing a crucial tip on how to avoid tickets while driving: simply follow the traffic signs. Sure, signs get changed, traffic management gets changed, and some signs aren't necessary. So what? Just stick to the posted speed limit and you're done. Honestly, I can't see any problem there. The only people who have problems are those who violate the speed limit. Why one then has to discuss the rationale behind the limit (possibly even with the police officer who's already annoyed and is writing you a ticket) is beyond me.
But freedom for Germans is apparently defined by speeding on the motorway. Social laws can be dismantled, taxes raised (except petrol tax, of course), civil rights curtailed — all irrelevant, as long as there's no speed limit of 130 on the motorway.
At Telepolis News (30.08.2004) there's the original article.
Sounds quite nice and finally looks like a camera again and not like a spaceship - but I'm afraid the camera will have the same problems as other Sony cameras with high resolutions.
At PhotographyBLOG you can find the original article.
Of course, there are still small utilities with simple programming capabilities. Or scripting languages that are easy to learn and use - for example, Python. But that's not really a solution for these tinkerers. What was once the omnipresent Basic for hobby tinkerers, or for example the - admittedly problematic - language in dBase, is missing today. Hardly any programming environment that doesn't come with an object-oriented approach. Hardly any solution approaches that don't try to be a general development environment for complete programs right away.
There are still some nice exceptions - FileMaker on the Mac still tries to appeal to the hobby hacker. But it's still true: the simple entry points are becoming fewer.
Even AppleScript on the Mac has become so complex and bloated in the meantime that it's hardly possible for a newcomer to just get started with it. Some corners of AppleScript are obscure and complicated even for old programming veterans like me. And of course, while there are many great integration possibilities for all these scripting languages, the documentation for precisely these parts is downright terrible.
To stick with the AppleScript example: while there are application dictionaries that document an application's AppleScript capabilities, nearly all the descriptions I've read in them have assumed that the user already has complete and extensive knowledge of AppleScript and AppleScript structures (what are objects in AppleScript, how do you work with containers, etc.). Although these dictionaries could serve as a starting point for the hobby programmer, their creators (professional programmers in software companies) design them in such a way that often even they themselves can make sense of them.
It's similar in the Linux world. TCL was once the standard scripting language for simple entry with simple structure, an almost primitive extension interface, and the ability for even non-programmers to quickly arrive at solutions. Today, TCL in the standard distribution (which is then nicely called "Batteries Included" - only unfortunately the understandable instructions are missing) already consists of mountains of packages, many of which deal with metaŃŹĐ·Ń‹age aspects (e.g., incrTCL and the widget libraries built on it and on TK - good grief, in just this brief mention of the content there are more incomprehensible words for a beginner than filler words), which a beginner will never understand.
And I don't need to go into the dismal situation under Windows with the scripting host and the OLE Automation interfaces (or whatever they're called these days) - anyone who has experienced a version change of an application and had to completely rewrite their entire solution due to a total change in the scripting model of, say, Access, knows what I'm talking about.
Ultimately, we (we == professional programmers) are taking a piece of freedom away from end users - the freedom to tinker around and yes, also the freedom to shoot themselves in the foot. And I think that precisely in the world of free software, programmers should start spending some thoughts on this again. It's nice that almost every larger program embeds some scripting language. But what's not so nice is that hardly any of these embeddings have decent documentation of their capabilities, and only the most primitive examples and complete solutions for very complex applications are available as starting points for learning. Hobby programmers in particular learn most easily by reading existing tools. And yes, I'm not exactly a good example myself, because the Python Desktop Server has a number of extensibilities that are also intended for end users - but I also wrote far too little documentation for it. Somehow a shame, because that's how many projects become incestuous affairs, because the actual end users are left out. No, I don't have a real solution - because especially with free projects, documentation creation is often an annoying and unpopular part of the project and is therefore treated like a stepchild. Besides, most programmers aren't able to create generally understandable documentation anyway. But maybe that's also an opportunity for projects that try to increase activity in large open source community projects that have had lower participation so far. debian-women comes to mind spontaneously (since Jutta is currently working on it). Because greater participation by women would certainly also be helpful for documentation and information that doesn't necessarily require a fully trained master hacker. After all, not everyone has the desire to spend their entire life learning new APIs and tools ... Here's the original article.
Wow, someone was really enthusiastic about landscape photography there: >Since most people have pretty bad taste, they easily mistake the cutesy postcards for good photography, especially if they are displayed as large, impeccably sharp prints. Hence the success of photographers like Alain Briot, Michael Reichmann, and Ken Rockwell. Their photography is pure Socialist Realism, only not as honest about its program -- relentlessly upbeat, eager to please, depicting the world not as it is, but as it surely should be ... and utterly devoid of power to evoke anything but the most trite and saccharine-sweet of emotions.
I must admit, though, that I do have a fondness for the postcard motifs he criticizes so harshly. I produce some of them myself for my own pleasure. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that — though one should keep it within limits (Velvia can sometimes really be too much of a good thing). However, for several years now I've mostly been shooting black and white film, because for me the interplay of light in landscapes is often the most interesting part — and that tends to get lost in color images. For me, color images have always had more of a documentary character.
By the way, the article is still worth reading (or perhaps especially because of this): it examines the context of a photograph and the possibilities of photography in a very interesting way. Photography rarely stands alone — there's always something accompanying it, even if it's just the title.
Yeah, those crazy advertisers who want to sell every bit of crap are really annoying. Sometimes so stupid that it's actually funny. But this lottery stuff really gets to me - especially when there's a threat at the end: you'll have this invitation in your mailbox tomorrow. NO THANKS! I don't play the lottery, I don't want any advertising for citizen rip-offs. das Netzbuch has the original article.