The Joy of Specs

Now the W3C is meddling with Atom by wanting it to become an official W3C spec instead of an IETF draft. I find things like references to how well the Atom group built consensus in the community embarrassing—anyone who followed Atom's development even a little knows that much of this has nothing to do with consensus, but simply with the fact that some people spend more time on it than others and apparently have nothing important to do—and just push through their ideas via relentless siege tactics. The loudest mouths also like to resort to falsifying history and lies just to take a shot at their competitor RSS. Of course, this is answered accordingly by the equally obtuse loudest proponents of RSS. A lovely mud-slinging match with no real value for users.

Anyone who now thinks this exactly reflects the development of HTML back when HTML was still an IETF draft, and believes that the corresponding people deserve nothing more than having their spec end up as a standard at the W3C, has understood the point.

On Workbench you can find the original article.

BBC develops 'alternative' codec | The Register

Very interesting, a new video codec. And the BBC put it under an open source license right from the start!

Here you can find the original article.

Emu48 for Mac OS X

The emulator I use for calculators on the Sony Clie also has relatives for OS X

Here's the original article.

Firewalls and Complexity

Ouch. =F6 reports on a rather silly article in Computerwoche that dreams of magical web validation firewalls ...

At The Wonderful World of Isotopp you can find the original article.

ICRC: Our discretion protects human lives

Exactly.

At Der Rollberg there's the original article.

iSync and Daily Appointments

Is there a valid reason why iSync doesn't synchronize all-day events? My calendar displays the all-day event. PHPCalendar also shows the all-day events. iCal also displays the all-day events correctly as all-day events. But neither my Palm nor my mobile phone are syncing the all-day events. However, the iPod does get them and displays them - albeit with a time of 00:00. I really don't understand what that's supposed to be about...

Rau admonishes elites: "Lost all standards"

They will listen to Brother Johannes just as much as they listen to Chief Silverlock - namely, not at all.

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

More Bluetooth Phones Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks

Now I've got the S55 and what's this? It's also vulnerable to Bluetooth attacks. But at least only Denial-of-Service and not Bluesnarf. The latter would be rather annoying - after all, I use the phone and Bluetooth for remote administration of servers ...

At heise online news there's the original article.

iTunes Cracker: New Name, New Attempt

On to the next round.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

New Phone - New Problems

Now I got a Siemens S55 as a replacement for my Nokia with the broken Bluetooth. The phone can also fetch emails from a POP3 mailbox. Great. Except it doesn't work. I've already tried all the included providers, played around with all possible custom settings, tried the data from T-Mobile and T-Zones, searched and configured and fiddled. The phone alternates depending on the setting between "No response from network" and "POP3 port of the server cannot be reached". Makes perfect sense. Why do these little bastards have to have such a pathetic user interface and an even more pathetic manual? Setting up my Clie to fetch email over GPRS was trivial. Setting up my notebook accordingly was of course also easy. This stupid phone of course not. The smallest piece of junk in the bunch and causes the most trouble.

If anyone thinks as twisted as the phone manufacturers or has already figured out how to set up the S55 so it retrieves from a normal POP3 server via GPRS, please get in touch.

Update - got it working. This damned phone is not capable of telling you that the GPRS connection is not active and therefore doesn't use GPRS but something analog instead, which for reasons beyond my comprehension but completely irrelevant to me doesn't work.

PearPC - About - Emulator for PPC hardware on non-PPC systems

Photographic Solutions, Inc. - New Products - Manufacturer of chip cleaning tools for digital cameras

The Price is Hot

OK, the price is crazy, but if we get music from Simon and Garfunkel again, I think it's worth other people paying for it

At No Retreat, No Surrender there's the original article.

Just posted! Leica Digilux 2 review

Everything you never wanted to know about the Leica Digilux 2 but are now being told anyway

By the way: the excessiveness with which Digital Photography Review tests and describes equipment is fascinating. For many consumer cameras, the DPreview test can easily serve as a manual...

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

At the latest ...

... if someone in the apartment below you in a rental building is dribbling a basketball ...

PyInvoke - interesting RPC mechanism for Python

Rsync Vault Manager - Backup system based on rsync

SCO vs. Linux: Royal Bank of Canada wants to exit

So here's the summary:

• Royal Bank of Canada out
• Baystar Capital in big
• Baystar Capital wants stronger focus on the court proceedings
• more technicians will be laid off
• no more usable support for SCO products
• customers finally jump ship from SCO
• SCO's financial foundation goes down the drain
• IBM tears apart SCO's alleged claims in court
• SCO is history

So what did all this madness accomplish? A traditional name in the Unix world disappears, many programmers are unemployed and many SCO customers are left out in the cold with outdated products and no support. And a few lawyers are making a killing.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Sven J has messed up...

What bothers me about this, though: now they've caught the stupid guy who produced Sasser. Ok, he's getting what he deserves - rightly so. But who's finally going to do something about Microsoft and their criminal neglect of security? Who's going to hold the real culprit responsible - the one whose crappy software makes all these worm waves possible in the first place?

At Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp you'll find the original article.

TimeCopy Conduit - Synchronize time and date (as well as time zone and daylight saving time/standard time) on the Palm from the Mac desktop

Calculate More Beautifully

Yes! Thanks for the link. Exactly what I need. The RPN for the Palm is nice, but I'm used to better things.

Update: I've installed it now. All I can say is: Wow. With three exclamation marks. The emulator is really fast and - because it uses original ROMs - perfect. And the ability to use all three calculators independently is genius. You basically have three calculators with you.

I've dug out my HP48 manual again.

At Der Schockwellenreiter there's the original article.

Suse Live CD open to network attacks

Suse seems to have interpreted the "open" in OpenSSH a bit differently

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Calerga - SysQuake - Mathematics software for OS 9 and OS X

You outdated visitor of our homepage!

Wow. That's quite a way to address visitors: instead of providing alternative representations that would pique the visitor's curiosity about the missing content and motivate them to install the required plugin, you're insulted for being backward. Quite a strategy. Of course, something like this could only happen on pages like those of Hamburg Medial School.

If media designers of the future are being trained there, we're in for a lot of arrogant bunglers...

I found this at netbib weblog where I came across the original article.

LispMe Homepage - Lisp for the Palm - also for Palm OS 5

Schröder Pressures Banks to Merge

Another mindless call to sell out.

You can find the original article at tagesschau.de - The News of the ARD here.

There are marks at the base of my PowerBook's display screen

Ouch. The PowerBooks are built so flat in some cases that the key caps may press against the display in the area of the PowerBook's hinge and leave pressure marks there. The designers of this thing probably also wear pants that are too tight and shoes that are too small.

At Apple Computer Top PowerBook Knowledge Base Documents you can find the original article.

Business rejects training pact

And Clement keeps spouting off that the economy would manage it on a voluntary basis. While in North Rhine-Westphalia the number of training applications is rising, but the supply of apprenticeships is dropping dramatically. And what's the result? Youth unemployment. Just great. And then the business bosses whine about the poor state of training at Germany as a business location. Lying scumbags.

Companies that don't train even though they could are deliberately destroying the future of young people out of egoism and arrogance. Young people who can't defend themselves because politicians would rather crawl up the arses of business bosses than show some backbone for those who should be our future.

That's one way to destroy the future. Completely deliberate, completely systematic and without any real economic reason.

It takes on extremely idiotic features with the Union, by the way: on the one hand they whine that the population is ageing and not enough children are coming along, on the other hand they're naturally massively against offering the existing children and young people a future. And immigration laws – which could also lead to a supply of young people, for example – they naturally want to block those too.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there's the original article.

A.L.Digital : The Bunker : Press - More info about the Bluetooth hack

Art of B/W #005 @Digital Outback Photo

An interesting article about B&W conversion. Here, multiple layers are used to create the B&W image, with the normal color image retained in the base layer. All conversion components are designed as separate layers and can therefore be adjusted at any time later. Certainly a quite interesting technique, especially since you don't need any additional plugins.

Here's the original article.

Boyz need Toyz: Sony Clie PEG TH55

I've had a Son since yesterday as a PDA. Very nice. MP3 player, camera, image viewer, document viewer, Bluetooth, WLAN, voice recorder, Memory Stick slot - everything you could wish for. And the battery life on this device is finally decent - not like the high-end Palms that need to be charged daily because they barely get through the day on standby... With The Missing Sync you can synchronize the device beautifully under Mac OS X and with Apple's iSync Palm Conduit you can link iCal and the Sony together via Bluetooth. Very nice. Especially since I've connected my iCal to several company calendars with a little homemade tool and can thus pull my work appointments from the Exchange server via my iCal to my Sony - and that without having to be at the office. Now I just need to figure out how to elegantly connect the Sony's camera to my blog - via GPRS of course (surfing already works, I would just need a MetaWeblogAPI client for Palm OS 5 that can also handle media). Then I could do mobile photoblogging.

«Longhorn» only for super-PCs

Well, then Microsoft will just have to hope that the 4-6 GHz processors they're envisioning come soon. Or they could finally start learning how to program decently. New OS X releases, meanwhile, got faster rather than slower from release to release.

At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet you can find the original article.

Security Corporation - Nokia 6310i

And now guess which phone I have ...

Here you can find the original article.

smittyware.com - upIRC - IRC Client for Palm OS® - IRC Client for Palm OS

:: t e k t o n i c a ::

Looks like a nice and complete blogging software for Palm OS 5 devices. It even supports media uploads via MetaWeblogAPI - though I would first have to teach that to PyDS and Wordpress before I could use it. But oh well, I have way too few projects on my plate anyway.

Here's the original article.

Vagablog - Blogging for Palm Devices

And yet another blogging software. This one also looks quite usable. It could also take care of my rather neglected Livejournal. However, it cannot upload images, that would have to be done via email beforehand.

Here you can find the original article.

What becomes of formerly interesting websites

Previously the source for Security Exploits. Today you can find information about warts and how to have them removed ... Here's the original article.

I'm back

After an unintended break thanks to a disk crash on my Hetzner server, I'm back now. And looking back, I have to say that Hetzner's support went well. I only have standard support, so support is only available during the specified service hours. Both days (on Monday because of the system setup on a new disk and on Tuesday because of the server restart due to a hang) they responded immediately in the morning. When I pointed out further disk errors (or rather CRC errors), they also responded immediately and rebuilt the system - apparently their disks are usually in swap frames, which also explains how they were able to install a new disk for me so quickly.

Well, let's see how long it lasts this time. In any case, I was able to test my crash recovery and have to say it works surprisingly well. Okay, there were a few minor issues of course, but it's all manageable. Only http://muensterland.org/ suffered, as the server's database file had to be rolled back one day since the most recent file didn't work. Well, manageable problems...

It's getting worse

Conscience examination for Lower Saxony hat-wearing women. All of course in the name of combating terrorism.

At Telepolis News (01.05.2004) you can find the original article.

Hondo Didn't Quite Have His Legs After All

Tough - Hondo ran out of steam in the final meters, Krohn passes him. Too bad for Danilo Hondo, especially after already crossing the finish line on the wrong side of Zabel in Cologne. Still, a great performance to lead for such a long time. Not everyone can do that.

Zabel overthought the tactics and Kummer started the chase race far too late. Annoying, because it was already visible earlier in the race. Well, nothing you can do about it - if they'd attacked earlier, they might have run out of breath and it wouldn't have worked anyway. One thing is clear: racing around the Henninger Tower is and remains an exciting event.

Dell goes crazy

Cool. Dell keeps data from computer buyers on record. That's okay. But the fact that this data can then be retrieved unprotected over the web using the identification numbers on the device - and even for people who just guess the numbers - isn't that a bit exaggerated when it comes to helpful data protection? Can you make sense of it?

At The wonderful world of Isotopp you can find the original article.

EU Council approves new regulations to protect intellectual property

Great, now the blatant rip-off by the music and film industry is also being opened wide in Europe. The lobbyists have prevailed and the will of the people is being trampled on. The voter simply still has the worst lobby in Europe.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

PyLinda - Tuplespaces in Python - this time a fairly complete version

Around the Henninger Tower: Zabel wants to stop Rebel

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he makes it.

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

Accessfs: permission filesystem for linux - virtual filesystem for managing capabilities and port bindings

Ear Monitors (R) brand by Future Sonics, Inc. - High-end in-ear monitors with sound isolation

Hybrid RAW Conversion

An interesting approach: take linear RAW images and create a black and white image from them, using it to gather detail and brightness information and, for example, determine sharpness. Then create a second image that adopts the color values - in this image, for example, apply noise reduction and similar mechanisms. After that, combine these two images - take the brightness (and thus the contrasts) from the black and white image and merge the color values from the black and white image. As a result, you get an image with good sharpness and good color, but fewer artifacts from the respective optimization steps (since each optimization is only applied to the elements that can handle these optimization steps without creating problems).

Here is the original article.

Leak in Soyuz Helium Tank

The team has a satellite phone with them to get help. Calling home I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Science.

Calls of Love from the Depths

Screaming Fish - I'm always amazed at what nature still has up its sleeve ...

At NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft you can find the original article.

rssh - restricted shell for scp/sftp - Another shell for ssh that only allows certain commands