"Sunday Times": BBC should be broken up

Oh, great, so the dishonest British government now wants to flatten an important organ of free reporting.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Violin loops,Fiddle loops,violin samples - Violin loops for Garageband

The Secret Heart of the Lie Factory

The edifice of lies is wobbling and shaking, and still there are people even outside the US Administration who defend the Iraq War and see it as necessary. Built on lies, a pure power game of the Bush Administration, yet it continues to be defended as necessary again and again. The lies sit very deep in people's heads ...

At Telepolis News (14.02.2004) you can find the original article.

del.icio.us API documentation - An API to access data from del.icio.us (social bookmarking service) and send new bookmarks

macosxhints - More info about remote wake and sleep - More tips on Wake on LAN

macosxhints - Wake a sleeping Mac from the network - Tips for waking a sleeping Mac over the LAN

The Common Lisp Cookbook - Creation of an open book with Common Lisp code snippets

On the "Victims of a Worldwide Religion"

Anyone in Brandenburg/Havel or the surrounding area should probably go see the play.

At Telepolis News (14.02.2004) you can find the original article.

Wake550 Help - Small service utility for waking up other computers from the Mac

GROKLAW - Novell Follows Up

Since SCO hasn't responded, Novell has now denied SCO the right to view Sequent Dynix in any way as a derivative of Unix System 5. Let's see if SCO responds to that, after all the Dynix code is quite an important part in the proceedings against IBM.

Here you can find the original article.

ITmedia PCUPdate: Epson, worldwide first "range finder type digital camera"

I have no idea if this is real, but if it is, then that's incredible: a Bessa R2 retrofitted to digital by Epson!

Here's the original article.

Shot at alternative sparrows with police cannons

Of course, according to Schily, genetic fingerprinting should only be used for serious crimes such as sexual offenses or terrorism. As you can read here, in Hesse (naturally, where else, in Koch's personal swamp) this apparently means property damage with political motivation. In other words: damage to election posters.

At Telepolis News (13.02.2004) you can find the original article.

Why some lawyers lend their names online

In the comments to the previous posting ( P1951) I received a tip to take a look at something:

• as a Windows user, refrain from clicking on any links!
• take a look at the website www.malvorlagen.de, especially with regard to the target audience mentioned (no, I'm not linking to it directly)
• do a Whois query at DENIC on the domain malvorlagen.de and pay special attention to the ADMIN-C entry
• then take a look at what all those links on this supposedly great site for children have in store

Any questions?

By the way, the imprint on the site is not accessible without JavaScript ...

"Domain Kidnapping" is Back

Really cool, the rip-off artists at Verisign want to exploit their special status as root registry again - they've learned nothing from the last debacle. So it looks like wildcard blockers for TLDs will have to be built into the nameservers after all.

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

Television: For They Know Not What They Do

A quality code for public broadcasting corporations? That would be an approach. However, I doubt that it will produce any usable result - the broadcasting corporations are far too entangled with other interests. I increasingly doubt whether the public broadcasting corporations are even serious anymore about their actual mandate - ultimately, they're only chasing ratings. You can see this nicely over and over again in how they squander millions on ridiculous football broadcasting rights.

Moreover, there is no longer any political support for public broadcasting - politicians are only eyeing the money and letting themselves be manipulated by media moguls like Saban or Murdoch and put to work for their power interests.

Of course, it would be nice to end up with an offering comparable to the BBC (curiously, BBC content is apparently being bought primarily by private television stations at the moment and unfortunately only served in ad-interrupted snippets), but I don't believe that will happen in the foreseeable future. And I base this claim on the existence of all these dreadful quiz shows, tralala music programs, public stupefaction events (including silly carnival sessions) and similar aberrations of public entertainment ...

I found the original article at DIE ZEIT: Feuilleton.

Firefox is quite nice, but ...

... I find it somewhat annoying that I can't use bookmarklets anymore that open their own windows. These custom windows end up behind the current window as a matter of principle. Really inconvenient, that.

Gravenreuth Law Firm Issues Cease and Desist to P2P Portal emule.de

Pretty cool, yet another rip-off attempt with an already existing domain. Hopefully the Gravenreuth law firm will fall flat on their face with this.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Konica Minolta Maxxum 7 Digital

Took quite a while for Minolta to enter the DSLR world.

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

Mars Express sends new photos

Beautiful images.

At WDR: Landung auf dem Mars you can find den Originalartikel.

PalmSource dropping Mac support

Bah. Idiots.

At Gizmodo you can find the original article.

Polaroid launches new Polaroid material

This is almost even more amazing than the announcement of the digital Leica M: Polaroid is bringing a new format for Polaroid film to the market that is specifically designed for medium format cameras. Old film backs can be adapted, or you can also get new film backs. Also included is the ingenious positive-negative material again (here as 85 film), with which you can simultaneously produce a positive and a negative using the instant image process.

Here's the original article.

The Omni Group - Applications - OmniWeb - Beta

Hey, the Omniweb beta is really great. Ok, there are still issues, but it's a beta after all. But the new user interface is really slick. And the implementation of tabs in Omniweb is pretty cool - I could get used to this browser, even though I'm actually a Safari fan. By the way, the feature that lets you open a textarea in its own window is really nice when, like me, you edit your weblog through the web browser. Finally, better editing options than with these boring textarea peepholes...

Here's the original article.

Behavior Engineering - BE - AiS

Well, I don't know if I'm a tech heretic now, but I'd say that at a price of 3500 euros for a Volksbot, widespread adoption will be significantly difficult.

Here's the original article.

The Enemy of the Whole World

Just so you notice: some newspapers could learn a thing or two from the way Zeit does it. It's already pretty remarkable that under the official Zeit label, journalists and editors maintain weblogs.

And the fact that they can actually write is of course also a pretty nice thing.

At Beruf Terrorist The Enemy of all the World there's the original article.

GROKLAW - Novell still mixed up in it

Ok, that should have given SCO some heartburn: Novell is giving SCO an ultimatum to drop its interpretation of the restrictions on Sequent code (Dynix - one of the Unix derivatives that SCO views as problematic in its lawsuit against IBM, since code from it allegedly made its way into Linux). Novell's key argument is that the protection clause only applies to the original AT&T code and not to code that was newly added in Sequent. That of course directly undermines one of SCO's arguments. SCO's case is getting shakier and shakier.

Here's the original article.

Cabinet paves way for gene-modified food

And once again reason and common sense have to take a backseat to the purely monetary interests of large corporations (and not even necessarily domestic ones). To hell with the will of the citizens, the only thing that matters is the sound of cash registers ringing for con artists and fraudsters, no matter what kind of crap they're selling.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

European Capital of Culture 2010: "Münster makes it"

Sorry, folks, but Münster is just provincial. The State Museum for Archaeology is gone, the theater is provincial, the city's cultural funding can only be described as non-existent, and otherwise there's really nothing here about being a cultural capital. The application is ridiculous. Big talk and grand speeches, but nothing but hot air.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

OpenMCL 0.14.1 - now with Cocoa Bridge!

Finally, I've been waiting eagerly for this. OpenMCL now has a Cocoa bridge. This allows you to use Objective-C frameworks from Common Lisp. The advantage: virtually the entire OS X API (at least the part that came new with OS X) is now potentially available for Common Lisp. Integration with other Objective-C programs is also much easier. And there's finally a chance to develop a usable GUI via OpenMCL. There's also already documentation on Cocoa programming under OpenMCL. Here's the original article.

Workbench: Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Google appears to be in the process of removing support for RSS feeds from Blogger or at least restricting their use to users who have had an RSS feed for a longer time. New blogs will probably only be set up with Atom. What's the problem with that? Well, Atom is still only a 0.3 version - it's still in flux, still being discussed, and the format is far from complete. Why does a company jump on such a bandwagon, especially why does a company do this when they already have functioning infrastructure for RSS? One can really assume that Google (or rather the Blogger team) is trying to use their market position here to strengthen Atom against RSS.

Of course, this is particularly ridiculous from the perspective that there are currently significantly more RSS readers than Atom readers. Blogger's behavior is more than just impolite toward the existing community.

Here's the original article.

CLORB - a Common Lisp ORB

You've probably heard of Corba Bindings for Common Lisp. But here there's a whole Corba Implementation in Common Lisp.

The original article is here.

Development Of Leica's Digital 'M' To Take About 2 Years

This is gradually starting to sound quite concrete. Until 2006, I still have some time to save up

Here's the original article.

The Power is Us

Well, all these attempts by industry to dictate what we're allowed to do with our computers according to their ideas are a constant annoyance. If it were up to the industry, we'd soon have to get permission from various manufacturers for any application use, and free software development would be banned anyway. It's already absurd that some people invest hundreds or thousands of euros in a device over which they're supposed to have only very limited control...

You can find the original article at J-O-S-H DOT NET - DIARY here.

Catholics don't find the BBC funny at all

But even now there are considerable protests against the comic, which according to its own advertising is about "office politics in the workplace, where this workplace is the Vatican and the boss is the Pope". He is supposedly depicted as abundantly childish and scatterbrained, the workplace, the Catholic Church, as corrupt and the cardinals as sinister. - and where is the satire in that? That's bitter earnest!

I found the original article at Der Schockwellenreiter.

NETZEITUNG SPACE: ISS Crew Spots UFO

Russian experts believe, according to a report from the Interfax news agency, that it is possible that insulation material or a fastening tape has come loose from the space station. - so are the rumors true that the ISS is only held together by duct tape?

Here's the original article.

Palm OS in Two Versions

Now that's quite interesting - an open source version of Palm OS. Could do the system a lot of good. If only the new Palms weren't such power-hungry devices...

At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.

PycURL Home Page - Python Wrapper for libcurl

shwebyhshandler.py - Handler for Medusa that supports gzip transfer encoding

Worry-Free Package for iPod Upgraders

A few sources for iPod batteries and battery replacements in Germany.

At MacGuardians you can find the original article.

Leica To Develop Digital "M" Camera - Source

Here are a few interesting rumors again:

• a digital camera with fixed focal length. Something like a digital CM?
• a digital M. The problems with the small distance between sensor and lens exit plane and the resulting issues from the flat light incidence on the sensor are supposed to be solved by a microlens array over the sensor.
• not so nice: job cuts. Something like that never sounds quite right.

The first is interesting for everyone who finds the previous digital Leicas either too un-Leica (D-Lux) or too bulky (Digilux 1 and 2).

But the second is absolutely stunning: a digital M.

I think this is something many people have been waiting for. And I think I know what I want to save up for now! Well, okay, first comes the Macro-M, but a digital camera that handles like an M and where I can use my M lenses, that would still be a dream.

Here's the original article.

RFC 1864 (rfc1864) - The Content-MD5 Header Field - Securing content against loss using MD5

What Shame

I'm not ashamed. So! After all, I partly programmed the software for the comments myself!

At das Netzbuch you can find the original article.

GROKLAW - SCO vs IBM, 0:1?

Ok, I think this is one of those situations that can best be described as shit hits fan.

In a nutshell: IBM has established in court that SCO has not met the requirements. Apparently only 17 files from SCO were named and even then only a few lines that were allegedly copied unlawfully from Unix. So definitely not the thousands of lines that SCO had announced so loudly. Furthermore, it looks as though SCO would be dropping the part about IBM's violation of trade secrets and the copyright business is probably also slowly falling apart.

And IBM apparently shows no signs of letting go. I think IBM's lawyers now want to bury SCO for good.

Here's the original article.

PLT Spy - Python in Scheme

Wow. A Python implementation in Scheme. Ok, the standard library is still missing (and that's really what makes Python so interesting), but anyway, it would then be the fourth Python environment (one for Java, one for .NET and of course the original CPython environment).

I found the original article at Lambda the Ultimate.

0700 phone numbers in imprint warned

What a load of crap. The Wettbewerbszentrale (yes, exactly, those guys back then - P1512 - also sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Under Construction Club) is making a fool of itself again with such a ridiculous cease-and-desist letter. You can find the original article on heise online news - here it is.

Music industry raids Kazaa

Apparently, a court in Australia has given the music industry permission to search several companies in the ISP sector (Akaai, NTT Australia, Telstra Corp and NTT Australia IP, as well as the Kazaa operator and three universities) and seize documents. What an absurd situation: granting police powers to an industry (albeit apparently limited to this one situation).

At algorhythm there's the original article.

Opposition sees government at the end

Clear. The political vultures are spouting their intellectual drivel. Was to be expected.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find den Originalartikel.

RFC 2445 - vCalendar - Definition of the vCalendar format

Schröder Steps Down as SPD Chairman

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

SCO vs. Linux: Copyright Lawsuit Against IBM

If the court approves this expansion of SCO's lawsuit, it would have a delaying effect of several months. - and SCO will continue to scream unproven claims into the world.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Toolserver Framework for Python

If you want to set up a SOAP web service in Python and don't want to use a monster server like twisted, but instead prefer a small, lean web server based on Medusa (though with dynamic multithreading!), you can check out my linked project. Nothing groundbreaking, but quite useful as an all-rounder. UPDATE: the stable version is now 0.2.0 and includes XML-RPC support in addition to SOAP. Version 0.3.0 is now in CVS, which adds support for implementing REST APIs.

Here's the original article.