PyProtocols - Interface Declarations for Python

Vitamins against cancer: complaint filed

If vitamin supplements are really to be considered serious alternatives for cancer treatment, they should prove themselves in clinical trials. Human experiments outside reproducible experimental parameters, however, are nothing more than quackery.

You quickly see what the so much advertised remedies are really about when you look at the nice flyers on which remedies for athlete's foot, hair loss, asthma and cancer are advertised right next to each other. Very serious stuff...

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Spring is on its way ...

IsaViz Overview - Editor for graphical RDF representations with GraphViz integration

Is it spring now, or what?

Is jetzt Frühling, oder was?

Ok, not very impressive. But at least something like spring. You know, with bursts of big green things and stuff ...

Unrest in Union after Köhler remarks

Lacking neutrality? People, a presidential candidate who speaks out openly and directly in favor of a coalition government before the presidential election and even titles it hopefully a union chancellor, doesn't have a lack of neutrality, they have no neutrality at all. But what else would you expect from Kohl's lapdog ... At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Vino' wins another as Jaksche wraps up Paris-Nice

Jörg Jaksche wins Paris-Nice. And on the podium stands Bobby Julich, another CSC rider. Well that gives Bjarne Riis' team reason for hope!

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

Flights to the USA only as a transparent passenger

Because consuming couscous indicates you're a terrorist. Especially if the sum of your credit card digits adds up to 7.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find den Originalartikel.

myelin: Feed Normalizer

If you have problems reading Atom feeds or broken RSS feeds, you can try Phil Pearson's Feed Normalizer. It can read quite a lot and produces clean RSS 2.0 from it. A very nice tool for a good purpose, especially after that silly solo venture by blogger.com (now at Google).

Here is the original article.

Frenchwoman becomes Georgia's Foreign Minister

And everyone got worked up just because the chancellor had himself represented by the French president in a vote.

You can find the original article at tagesschau online here.

SPD loses approval in NRW

Yeah, great. Mess the whole thing up even more so that we get the Union shark as PM in the next election and NRW gets really run into the ground first.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Goal Reached

People die. Because terrorists kill them. That is horrible, dreadful. Beyond what one can describe. But what is the reaction to it in our society? The path that has been emerging worldwide since the attacks in the USA will certainly be driven further by the attacks in Spain.

Terrorists kill people for their goals - they exercise terror, which is why they are called that. Regardless of how one views their goals, there is a motivation behind the terrorists' actions, something they aim to achieve, something they want to change. We may not like the changes, we certainly don't like the methods. But nonetheless, that is what distinguishes the terrorist from the rampager: the terrorist has some goal in mind - however absurd it may be - with which to justify their actions. But instead of engaging with these problems, politics relies on repression and the dismantling of democracy and the rule of law. Does it really help if entire population groups are suspected preemptively? If anyone who doesn't conform to the norm is immediately viewed as evil or bad? Put under surveillance, wiretapped, recorded, catalogued and numbered? Sure, now come the sayings from the eternal followers who have nothing to hide. Which means that anyone who opposes it obviously has something to hide. And is immediately suspect. Or a sympathizer. Or both. What will come of this? The terrorists will not win. They cannot win - their behavior is not even designed to win, it is only designed to destroy. The original goals that once existed are buried under a mountain of violence. Even if they actually gained more power, their behavior alone would generate so much rejection that reactions would only become more intense. A spiral without end, or rather one with an end that nobody wants to experience.

Does society win? No. Someone who doesn't dare go out on the street for fear of being run over cannot win. He has already lost without ever having fought. And that is how our society behaves: panic takes over, the foundations of our lives are dismantled. Willingly dismantled! Does this make us safer? No. This is only the illusion of security. Every system has its terrorists. If a system becomes repressive enough, the terrorists end up sitting in the government instead...

Do the politicians win? Certainly in the short term. They will certainly gain votes in the first elections if they beat the security drum hard enough. But at what price?

Those who will be pleased are the reactionaries, those who cry out for the strong arm. Those who feign security to gain their own piece of power. Those who volunteer for every position that gives them any influence, because then they are something better. The block wardens. The camp commandants. The small fascists who are just waiting for an opportunity to show others what they can do - because they think they can order the world. All nice and orderly. In rows and columns. Without thinking. And without being even remotely different.

And that is what is truly terrible: all the victims of terrorism, the dead, the wounded. All for nothing. Neither to the benefit of society nor to the benefit of the terrorists. Simply dead.

Already the first vultures are crying out for more controls, more power for the state, fewer rights for citizens. Of course all in the name of security. None of these loudmouths even think once about the people who died - only the number counts, the persons and fates are unimportant. Much more important is to push through their own interests. Now is the time. The dead in Madrid are just as unimportant to these people as those in New York - they are merely arguments.

It's a good time to kill democracy.

The original article can be found at J-O-S-H DOT NET here.

11.03 - 18:17: Imprint

OK, so that's probably the end of positive court rulings again. Here a judge has once again demonstrated real intelligence.

I found the original article at ab::gebloggt.

A Busy Developers Guide to WSDL 1.1 - Very compact introduction to the minimal WSDL elements

Affrus 1.0

Wow. That's another one that flew past me. A graphical development environment for Perl. Really graphical, with a graphical debugger, editor, source navigation and everything that goes with it. Pretty impressive. Such a shame that I switched from Perl to Python as my primary programming language some time ago...

Oh, and after I took a quick look at the demo: I think just about everything is right there! The interface starts right up with a graphical shell where you can quickly hack Perl scripts and play around. The graphical debugger is right there attached to it too - if you're into debuggers and stepping through code and looking at variables, you'll be thrilled here.

Actually, there's only one thing I'm missing there: a browser for the Perl modules and the Perl module path and especially the Perl documentation in the modules. Ok, it has some support: if you open the context menu on a module name in a use statement, you can view the documentation in the terminal. And you can load the module into the environment. And jump to directly exported names. But the documentation is only displayed in the terminal or alternatively in the browser. Ok, that's significantly better than nothing, but somehow an integrated documentation browser would really make the whole thing perfect.

In any case, a great environment with a lot of convenience for Perl programmers. Did I mention that I wish something like this existed for Python?

Here's the original article.

Eizell-Dogma refuted

Fascinating. I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Science.

Epson R-D1 Digital Rangefinder Camera

Wow!

If Epson manages to bring this to market at the right time and at an acceptable price, then Leica will have a hard time with the Digital-M. All that's missing now is some output from the device to judge the image quality. If they really do use the chip that's also in the Nikons, then the whole thing could be really interesting.

Hopefully sample images and pricing will come soon.

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

Eudora Spyware

Eudora apparently sends the IP address of the computer in the URL for Google searches from within the mail program in the latest Windows version. This raises the question of what URL might be included if, for example, Eudora is operated behind a firewall - and suddenly internal information is sent out.

Apart from that: what's the point? The public IP address of the accessing computer is recognizable to the web server anyway. Somehow it all seems a bit strange.

Well, I was never really convinced by Eudora. The user interface is simply poor. And somehow the program always gave the impression of being half-finished. As if someone had started but lost the thread halfway through.

At Disobey Nonsense Network you can find the original article.

Generic SOAP Client - Generic SOAP client with WSDL support for testing

Hookworms against allergies

Just saw on WDR: a scientist trying to find a remedy against hookworms - a widespread parasite - in Africa accidentally infected himself. And suddenly his hay fever was gone. Strange world.

While researching this, I found the linked article from Netzeitung from 2001.

Here's the original article.

lython - lisp for python - Lisp Frontend for Python

Microsoft classifies Outlook vulnerability as critical

8 months to recognize that a hole is critical after receiving a description of the hole and its effects? Respect!

At heise online news you can find the original article.

New Large Donation from Möllemann Emerges

The Misery Never Ends

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Paul Nevai's PaulComputing (www.paulcomputing.com) - Powerful editor for Palm OS

RUS-CERT warns against Mozilla

No, open source is not necessarily connected with security. And Mozilla is a big pile of source. And in some respects more of a heap of garbage than a heap of gold ...

At heise online news there is the original article.

What tools I use

Just a list of additional tools I've installed on my Mac

Just a list of the additional tools I've installed on my Mac. Of course this isn't complete - I have quite a bit more installed. But each of the following small tools does a very specific job that's important to me. And it does this job efficiently, simply and reliably. Without any fuss or problems. And they look good doing it.

• ASM: the classic application switcher that sits in the menu and allows quick switching between applications. Brilliant for Mac old-timers - and I find it much more pleasant than the Dock for this purpose. It doesn't jitter around
• WindowShade: offers several alternatives to minimizing to the Dock. I think the transparency feature is particularly great - quickly take a look at a window underneath the current window. Or convert the window into a thumbnail that stays on the desktop. The third variant is title minimization.
• LaunchPad: a brilliant combination of graphical and command-line oriented application launcher. I often prefer a simple text interface. LaunchPad is essentially a form of command completion like shells offer, just graphical.
• Brightness Control: a lifesaver for users of calibrated monitors. With those, you really shouldn't fiddle with brightness and contrast, since they're part of the calibration. This tool allows you to adjust brightness independently of the hardware setting. Unfortunately there's a small bug with the screensaver engaging, but otherwise just great.
• Codetek Virtual Desktop: virtual desktops like they're common in the X11 world. I simply got used to it - I put a subject area with windows on each desktop. This allows easier switching between tasks, since the window layout doesn't get changed by newly started programs - on each desktop the window is in front again that was in front last time.
• Geektool: exactly what you'd expect it to be. A tool that delivers everything for the geek heart. Have logfiles written directly to the background. Or display web addresses on the desktop live. I like it when I can see my logfiles - for example, many problems with GUI applications become much more understandable that way.
• MenuMeters: with this you can put small icons in the menu bar that provide information about CPU load or disk access, or memory usage. Ideal for quickly and easily staying informed about the system state.

From 2005: Abitur after twelve years

So that children can get into unemployment even faster. And be properly burned out beforehand.

You can find the original article at WDR.de.

The Dialer Scammers Continue

English Translation

If you visit malvorlagen.de again (no, I still don't link such sites, and you still shouldn't click on links there!), you'll see a shameful disclaimer at the bottom of the page stating that this offer is unsuitable for persons under 18 years of age (why then the direct address to children in the web design?) and that costs of 29.95 euros per call from Germany would be incurred. Particularly brazen about this: the upper limit that RegTP has set for dialers with flat-rate billing. Are these signs of a legitimate business operation? A website that targets over 18-year-old children looking for coloring pages for 30 euros? And requires a dialer for that? It's absolutely a mystery to me why something like this is still legal. On one hand, the entire page is still clearly geared toward children (and children certainly won't pay much attention to the sentence at the bottom), on the other hand, a dialer at 30 euros per call for coloring pages is definitely not something that can be considered a normal payment system - no matter how absurd some lawyers argue about it (who even register themselves by name as the admin-C of such domains). The whole thing is simply revolting. Fortunately, the Federal Court of Justice has now at least put a stop to this, so that such nonsense can no longer be collected directly by the telecommunications provider. (P2025). The addition with the price is new - probably due to the cease-and-desist letter that was sent to the domain owner by the Berlin Consumer Centre. Unfortunately, it's likely that children will still fall for it in its current form.

Oracle ...

Q: Why do I get an "ORA-01400: Cannot insert NULL into column name" when inserting a blank string?

A: This is a known Oracle issue. When inserting or updating a value for a varchar2, if you try to insert an empty string (""), Oracle interprets the value as NULL. If there is a NOT NULL restriction on the column in which you are inserting the value, the database throws the ORA-01400 error.

Moppelkotze

Telekom CEO Ricke: Staff will continue to be reduced

Manager: back in the black, rake in atypical industry profits, but of course continue laying off employees. And then whine that all the unemployed people you just created yourself are a burden on you. Wonder why nobody in the domestic market wants to buy your overpriced products anymore and then complain that Germany as a business location is unproductive and too expensive. And never take responsibility for your own actions.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Textile chain Boecker is bankrupt

Oops. Not only did I not know that there was a chain behind it, I also didn't know they had problems.

At WDR.de there is the original article.

Divmod.Org :: Home :: Projects :: Quotient - Python messaging server based on Twisted

Digilux 2 Review - Part 1

First part of a planned three-part series on the Leica Digilux 2. What's interesting is the good rating of image quality when using RAW. This was one of the main criticisms of the Digilux 1.

What strikes me as negative from the first impression, of course, is again the electronic viewfinder and especially the lack of write buffer for RAW images, so that even with a fast card you have to wait 6 seconds between two shots. In my opinion, this is no longer up to date; many cameras have reasonably sized write buffers for RAW as well. However, even more compact digital cameras don't have a RAW mode at all...

All in all, the first impression sounds quite positive.

Here's the original article.

Emmanuel Renieris's Software Page - Python interface to agraph from GraphViz

Counterfeiters in the Wild Domain West

And the cease and desist letter madness continues. Now with umlauts. Äbmähnwähnsinn!

At Telepolis News (08.03.2004) you can find the original article.

FDP must hold European party conference again

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

gnutellavision: intro - Radial layout of graphs

Graphviz - Graph editor

MacNQC - Lego Compiler for OS X and Classic OS

mfGraph Library Homepage - Windows Python module for reading GraphViz Dot files

My blogging space - a meme

OK, so if this is a meme (I always thought a meme would be neuter, but never mind, it's beside the point), then of course I have to participate too. On the left a Mac, on the right a Mac, in the middle stands a TV. I'm glad I didn't get the rest of the 20 computers in my room in the picture...

At das Netzbuch you can find the original article.

Parser-SIG - SIG on Parser Generation for Python - Liste von Parser Generatoren für Python

Hamburg Central Station North, U2

Hamburg Hauptbahnhof Nord, U2

U-Bahn station Hamburg Hauptbahnhof Nord, U2.

My Bloggingspace

My Bloggingspace

Well, here's where Hugo blogs ...

pyparsing -- a class library for text processing in Python - Interessante Klassenbibliothek für Parser in Python

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Specification - Vector graphics on the web - Specification

TAMS Home Page - Text analysis on OS X - produces GraphViz output

WAVE 3.0 - Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator - Useful accessibility tester

Worms switches from Sendmail to Microsoft Exchange

Driving out the devil with Beelzebub. And why? Because an MTA doesn't support file sharing and calendar management? Oh man, with such qualified IT management, you can only wish the city of Worms good luck ...

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Groundbreaking Ruling: Federal Court of Justice Ends Dialer Madness - Networld - SPIEGEL ONLINE

And here we go again with something sensible. Hey, the BGH is really on a roll at the moment

Here's the original article.