Archive 23.9.2011 - 14.10.2011

Diaspora* Advanced Sharer. Another Diaspora share button, this one is hosted on github (and can therefore also be "cloned" for self-hosting). It offers a selection of pods that you have used - not just a single pod. Therefore interesting for those who are on multiple pods.

Cleaning… – Marco.org. There are still some odd things about iOS 5. Here's the issue with the cache and tmp directories, which are now cleaned up much more aggressively, causing some applications to have to fetch data from the network much more often (or violate Apple's guidelines and store documents in the cache). This mainly affects offline readers, as their content is, by definition, reconstructable and thus belongs in the cache - but it might be removed there, which makes the whole offline reading absurd. Not good.

Bundestrojaner-Artikel-Sammlung - Farlion Inside. Since it's getting a bit confusing, here is a very comprehensive and detailed collection of links on the topic of Bundestrojaner, which, by the way, was also used by the BKA. But of course only in a modified version, which we all believe because they have just lied to us heavily in the denial.

[Service to share on any Diaspora* pod [[Basshero.org]]](http://www.basshero.org/blog/108/service-to-share-on-any-diaspora*-pod). Well blogged, this already looks quite neat. A Share-on-Diaspora button that first asks the user for their home pod and then stores this in a cookie, so that this Share button can really work with all pods. Maybe I could rebuild this into a Wordpress plugin and integrate it into my blog - then everything comes from my own blog, so there are no problems like with the other Share/Like/Tweet buttons (and it doesn't need to be as complicated as with FB, Twitter or Google+).

How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%, Nuxeo Developers Blog. Badly blogged, as we will probably soon play around with apps and the Android simulator is extremely slow - testing with it makes almost no sense, as with Phonegap applications, you could outperform the browser rendering with paper, pencil, and eraser, so slow is the image build-up. With the solution here, you don't have an exact test of an Android device, but at least for the first feeling tests, it should be sufficient, as with Phonegap it is more important that the rendering engine is the same than that the CPU is the same.

A Lesser Photographer - A Manifesto. I'm not big on manifestos, but here someone has simply written down their thoughts on photography and reduced them to 10 essential points. Interesting about this: they drastically reduced their equipment in the process. And in their manifesto, they provide the reasoning behind it. A lot of sensible information compactly summarized—it's definitely worth taking a look. You won't become any less intelligent from it.

State Trojan also in NRW - WDR 2 Der Sender. Just heard a radio report - and again annoyed. If someone lies to you multiple times, why do you believe wild, unverifiable claims? The alleged "configuration" of the Trojan is feasible for the police, but not the development? Haha, very credible. And the configuration as well as the deployment - these are digital traces that are, on the one hand, trivially falsifiable (unless there is a usable cryptographically signed audit) and, on the other hand, not retrievable afterwards. The documents on the cases only contain what the respective official has said. Whether that is true, no data protection officer and no lawyer can find out afterwards - unless the Trojan is found and examined on devices. And that is exactly what happened with the Bavarian Trojan - and the examination by the CCC did not speak of deactivated features, but of active functions. So again, why do parts of the press still believe the claims of the state criminal investigation departments and politicians?

Kodak Said to Weigh Bankruptcy Filing to Clear Path for Selling Patents - Bloomberg. Ouch - that would be tough, among other things for Leica. Because their digital Ms get the digital part from Kodak. And that could also become negative for M8 and M9 users, if there is no replacement electronics available there. I have already been bitten by Kodak once, when my DCS 520 died (and that was only the digital part from Kodak - the analog part from Canon was problem-free).

Ricoh GXR A12 Field Report - just when you think you've made your decision, someone comes along and throws everything up in the air again, and you have to sort it all out from the beginning. Sure, the NEX 5n, which I favor, probably has the better overall features - but the lack of an anti-aliasing filter really appeals to me, as does the fact that microprisms are also used here to optimize imaging with M optics. Well, I'll have to ponder a bit longer. But even after the article, it will probably remain with the NEX system - because with the M8 I already have a compromise camera, the GXR doesn't really deliver much more beyond that - and the technical gimmicks (video and panoramas) are just fun with the NEX. Especially since the linked text suggests that the 5n also has a rather weak AA filter.

Fujifilm FinePix X10. I'm a sucker for well-made retro design, and this one hits all the right notes for me. Although I would probably have trouble justifying the 599 Euro price tag for a 2/3" chip with a fixed 28-112mm equivalent lens and a purely optical tunnel viewfinder. But just the fact that Fuji took the trouble to make a pseudo-leather finish is nice.

Bundestrojaner: The Privates behind the Bundestrojaner | Politics - Frankfurter Rundschau. Jaja, but the BKA has already denied it. It will certainly be funny, especially because even the "normal" media have picked up on this - and even if Merkel and Co. ignore blogs and the like, something like the FAZ really hurts them when they get it read to them by their press sorters.

I usually ignore Techcrunch, but they have this story first (at least I haven't seen it anywhere else):

Now, some company called VS Technologies is suing Twitter, alleging that it infringes on a patent of theirs, entitled “Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people”. For real? For real.

via Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online | TechCrunch.

SuperCollider » About. This is what is used as a basis under the previous project. SuperCollider has its own programming language, so it can also be used for live coding and similar purposes.

Home // Overtone. I'm always excited about sound makers - this is a tool for interactive sound programming and live coding and instrument building (of course digital), and all of it written in Clojure. Maybe for one or the other a reason to take a closer look at Clojure.

Henri Cartier-Bresson | Adam Marelli Photo. An interesting article that examines the geometric basis of HCB photos and thereby makes one aspect of HCB's photography more understandable.

Chaos Computer Club: The German state trojan has been cracked - Current - FAZ. I'm linking to the FAZ. And then to an article where the FAZ uses the CCC as an expert source. But such things happen when your own executive wants to screw over the citizens and just builds constitutionally illegal trojans that are supposed to spy on the citizens. And in the process does things like implementing arbitrarily reloadable (and thus unchecked) code - and then has the whole thing checked for security by verifying an IP address to a redirect server in the USA. Which is just great again. Oh, and you can also deposit data on the computers of the suspects with the software. And of course without any control. No investigator would do that, that would be illegal. About as illegal as the whole trojan. And of course we trust the people who come up with such things, don't we?

Time zones: tz database shut down due to lawsuit. This is probably one of the extra-absurd cases of patent extortion. Time zones are hardly copyrighted by this silly company, and the banal compilation of facts that do not belong to you really does not have a level of creativity that needs to be greatly protected. Patent trolls are annoying.

oryx-editor - Web-based Graphical Business Process Editor. Just looked this up for a colleague and it looks quite interesting - I should take a closer look at what it actually does. This could be quite exciting for some work projects.

Goulash in the Hungarian Style

Juliana had bought pork goulash but had no idea what to do with it - and then I suggested Hungarian goulash. After that, I had to go into the kitchen and cook. Goulash is quite simple, here just as a reminder for myself blogged:

• 300g pork goulash
• 1 onion
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• 1 bell pepper
• 1-2 tomatoes
• 100ml red wine
• 400ml water (colleague suggested using broth instead, gives more flavor)
• Paprika powder (sweet and rose sharp)
• 3 cloves, 3 bay leaves, 4 pimento seeds
• Peppercorns, 1 tsp salt
• Coriander, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, basil (or whatever spices you can think of, but these are relatively classic for it)
• some tomato paste (mainly to balance the currently rather flavorless tomatoes)
• 1/3 cup cream

The preparation is as follows:

1. dice the bell pepper, tomatoes, onion, and garlic cloves (put on separate plates)
2. sauté the onion and garlic cloves in a pot until translucent
3. put the meat in the pot and sear it well
4. add paprika powder (season generously!) to the meat and onions, stir quickly
5. deglaze with red wine
6. fill up with water
7. put the diced bell pepper into the pot
8. put in all the spices (especially cloves, bay leaves, pimento seeds, and peppercorns must simmer with the whole meat and broth, otherwise they do nothing)
9. let everything simmer together for 45 minutes
10. put in the tomatoes, let it simmer for 20 minutes
11. add some tomato paste, simmer for another 10 minutes
12. carefully stir in the cream just before the end

Goes well with pasta or maybe rice (but I prefer pasta). Or just with bread and some vegetables.

virtualenvwrapper 2.10.1 — virtualenvwrapper v2.10.1 documentation. Hmm, I think I've already seen this, but since I now almost exclusively work with virtualenv, I should take another look - this seems to really simplify things (although it seems to assume that all environments are in a main directory, I would probably have to adjust a bit on my side).

Straight Talk on Event Loops. After his beautiful rant "Node.js is Cancer" Ted Dziuba goes into more detail about what the problem is with pure async-event solutions like node.js. As a programmer of a rather old project in Python - the Toolserver for Python - I can certainly understand this. There are good reasons why I implemented threads integrated into the event loop for parallel processing as needed. This "async is faster and better than threads" is exactly the kind of hype nonsense like "NoSQL is faster and better than SQL" and other pigs that are currently being driven through the village.

Glass cover replacement for Sony NEX LCD screen | Photoclubalpha. Well blogged, this could also be worth it for my NEX 3 - the display now looks rather silly with the rubbed-off anti-glare coating. At least I could remove the no longer particularly well-functioning film - according to reports from other users, the glass underneath alone should also be quite good.

Trip to Norderney

Juliana and I decided to go to Norderney quite spontaneously today - not for long, just a short detour, to dip our feet in the North Sea and eat a shrimp roll, to go on a ship on the sea again, see seals, watch seagulls - all that stuff that only works up there. It was a beautiful day and the weather mostly cooperated. From Münster, it's quite easy to get there by train - and you can book the ship at the same time.

Charity Concert for East Africa Hunger Relief

Today there was a concert by Millima Mabonde (Gospel choir from Nordwalde and Altenberge) and the brass group St. Sebastian from Nienberge. Since my sister sings in the Gospel choir, we were there again. It was a very beautiful concert, lots of fun.

The Olympus 45 1.8 Micro 4/3 Lens Review by Steve Huff. Okay, with Steve you always have to subtract some enthusiasm, but the 45/1.8 really sounds very exciting. The Micro 4/3 system is finally gaining momentum. Some of the latest lenses that have been announced and actually released are very interesting. The same goes for the Olympus 12/2.0 or the Panasonic 14-42 Powered Zoom (yes, yes, powered zoom sounds like a compact camera, but hey, the lens is extremely small and thus ideal for the GF1 for an always-with-you camera with a bit more flexibility than the 20mm). I'm still torn between the Sony E-Mount and the Micro 4/3 system, but in the end, it will come down to the lenses - what good is a system that is better in terms of the sensor if the lens selection is too limited. Sony is definitely releasing new bodies too quickly - and too slowly new lenses.

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done. via Innovation Starvation - Neal Stephenson at World Policy Institute.

My profile on my own Diaspora pod - if anyone is also there, just add gb@pod.rfc1437.de as an aspect. It's running quite smoothly now and therefore it's now so to speak semi-official. Not that there's much going on there yet, but maybe one or the other reader here also hangs out on a Diaspora pod. It's the little details that interest me about Diaspora - of course also the big things like cost efficiency and distributed architecture, but when you see for example that the profile naturally has an RSS feed as standard, that's already nice. Or that Markdown is simply offered as formatting. And since the last iterations, the mobile interface is also quite nice. No app, but at least an iOS adapted surface. And well, the distributed installation - Diaspora is a bit like OpenSim in that way. And that's at least quite interesting as a toy. BTW: personally known readers can write to me for an invite if they want to play around with it. Sorry, no open pod, but I currently have no desire for the automatic hassle that results from public systems.

Clearly identifiable: NATO wants individual signature for every internet user. The next pig that will be driven through the village. Military facilities are not exactly known as birthplaces of democracy, so I'm not surprised to hear such nonsense from that direction. But it will certainly be interesting to observe which politicians and which lobby groups will pick this up. Wouldn't be surprised to see some of the hardliners from Berlin or e.g. the rights extortionists of the music industry. Oh, and it will certainly be funny to see what the "data protectors" will not say about it.

Data Protection Officers: Social Plugins Not Permissible in Germany - Golem.de. Great, with this, almost all external linking will go down the drain. Loading JavaScript libraries via a delivery network? Forbidden. Displaying YouTube videos? Forbidden. Displaying Flickr slideshows? Forbidden. The fact that such an absurd perspective leads the entire internet ad absurdum will surely please rather than concern the political level. At least the part that already stands out due to regular misunderstanding. Sometimes I have the feeling that the current group of "data protection officers" are only moles for hardliners in the parties who would like to regulate everything to death. Because only a dumb and quiet citizen is a good citizen. This has nothing to do with real protection of our data - because these "data protection officers" do not take action against the transmission of flight data or intra-European account movements to foreign intelligence services. Nor do they take action against nationwide central databases that are being built through the introduction of the central tax number or the electronic patient card (or in the future through a toll for private cars that will surely come at some point) - there is only half-hearted, weak-kneed "protest". There is nothing to be heard about the threat of fines. Who believes that the "data protection officers" would bravely throw themselves in front of the lions in the internet to protect our data, also believes that lemon folders would fold lemons.

dust is a JavaScript template library used in Kanso. Functionally very similar to Django Templates, though with slightly modified syntax.

Kanso Framework. That sounds very interesting - a framework for programming JavaScript CouchApps. So applications that are written in JavaScript and run entirely from a CouchDB installation. The server only needs to provide a CouchDB instance and that's it in terms of requirements - and since CouchDB comes with replication by default, you can easily scale up or implement fault tolerance - simply form a cluster of several CouchDB instances. Equally interesting are replications of the production database to another pot, such as a private developer machine or various other scenarios that are possible with CouchDB. Since the whole thing is based on CommonJS as the language base, JavaScript is not quite as bad as if it were used raw.

StatsModels: Statistics in Python — statsmodels v0.3.0 documentation. Not my focus at the moment, but with this module you can examine numbers for their statistical model.

pandas: powerful Python data analysis toolkit — pandas v0.4.1 documentation. I think I haven't had this before, but it's quite interesting for number crunchers and list comparers: a quite powerful toolkit for analyzing large datasets, especially with handling missing data and aligning data on a common basis. Overall, not entirely uninteresting for a project at work where I frequently deal with larger datasets from external sources.

websites - How do I suppress the address bar in mobile Safari? - Apple - Stack Exchange. Bookmarked because I just want to remember this - it's quite practical for web applications if the silly address bar is not there (at least if you work with Single-Page-Applications that do most of the work on the client)

"Algorithm" is Not a Four-Letter Word. Algorithms and their diversity and why programmers should deal with them (keyword: mental bench press) using the example of algorithms for generating labyrinths.

trunkdesk - Mac desktop companion for Trunk Notes - Google Project Hosting. Since I keep playing around with desktop wikis and generally have the problem that I also want to access data on the go - and not just for viewing, but also for making changes, and with comparable features and not just limited (which unfortunately rules out VoodooPad because the iOS version only supports plain text versions and these are not rendered properly on the desktop, but are also only displayed in plain text there), this could be interesting - it's a simple desktop client for TrunkNotes. Basically, I'm doing this right now with VimWiki, but I wouldn't mind having somewhat more complete support for TrunkNotes features on the desktop.

Firewire Attacks Against Mac OS Lion FileVault 2 Encryption » frameloss. Apple must have made a huge mistake here. Because via Firewire DMA, one can access the password for full-disk encryption stored in main memory. Even if you have disabled auto-login and there is actually no reason to have the password in memory. Ouch.

Face off: Facebook claims personal data is "intellectual property" | G! - gutjahr's blog. And the fun continues - now Facebook claims they can't meet the legally required deadline of 40 days and anyway, the data is Facebook's intellectual property. Quite amusing - but interesting is the hint that the data protection authority in Ireland is actively working on it, so it could indeed give Facebook a slap in the face. I think the whole thing about the alleged workload for Facebook is just an excuse - if you do it right, it's just a tool that collects and prepares a user's data from all the pots.

psycopg2-ctypes - GitHub. If you're playing around with PyPy and need a database driver, this could help - it's the classic psycopg2, but in a version that is based on ctypes and can therefore be efficiently integrated into PyPy.

django-tastypie - GitHub. This sounds very interesting as an alternative to django-piston - for example, it automatically provides all CRUD features via different APIs without any programming. This is particularly interesting for projects that are more focused on web apps (and where larger parts of the code run locally in the client in JavaScript).

coleifer/flask-peewee - GitHub. Interesting small project that works with Flask and Peewee and makes a somewhat more complete stack for Python web programming out of it. Also provides an admin interface, like Django - for this wtforms is used. Flask itself uses Jinja2 and Werkzeug underneath - this brings in good debugging tools and powerful templating, for example. By the way, PyCharm in the upcoming version 2 will also support Jinja2 at the same level as Django Templates (template debugging with breakpoints and stepping in the template!).

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control - 2012 Elections - Salon.com. Hmm - where would these devices be used? Are there already any deployments of these machines in Europe?

Poor Mans IDE Plugin PMIP - Google Project Hosting. If you've been inspired by a post about PyCharm as a Python IDE and now want to expand the IDE as well - with this plugin you can build relatively simple scripts with Ruby and don't always have to pull out the full IntelliJ SDK.

Python for Facebook - Welcome. Since Facebook discontinued support for the Python SDK last summer and also emptied the entire bug tracker, Python developers for Facebook apps have gathered elsewhere - this is one of those places. However, there are probably still one or two other places on the net where people collect patches and fixes.

StartSSL and Nginx. StartSSL is a very good way to obtain SSL certificates for a web server that are actually accepted by browsers. However, these are issued by intermediate certificates that are often missing in browsers - for this, you have to deliver these with the server. With Nginx, this is a bit more complicated because there is no separate setting for it - you have to copy the certificates together for it to work. This is all explained in the linked blog post.

Launchpad-Control | chaosspace.de. Poorly blogged, because the Launchpad's auto-layout sometimes annoys me and a bit more control would be good. With this, you can at least influence the Launchpad a bit, filter out icons, etc.

Piroshki like Grandma's

The first time I made them with my mother-in-law - I made the dough, she seasoned the ground meat and shaped the piroshki. This time I had to do everything myself. The structure is actually quite simple.

You start with a classic yeast dough. For this, I put the following together in a mixing bowl and knead it thoroughly:

• 500g flour
• 200ml milk (room temperature)
• 2 packets of dry yeast
• 125g margarine (warm)
• 80g sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Knead everything thoroughly and let it rise in a warm place for 30 minutes - it should clearly increase in volume. I usually use the oven preheated to 50 degrees with a damp towel over the dough bowl, which provides exactly the right humid-warm climate. Tip: first mix the dry yeast into the flour, then add the other ingredients. This prevents yeast lumps and results in a more even dough. Instead of two packets of dry yeast, you can also use a cube of fresh yeast.

The filling is also not complicated, simply mix 500g minced meat with two bricks (chopped finely) and pepper, salt and other spices to taste. That's it for the filling.

Then knead the risen dough again by hand and form small balls - about the size of table tennis balls. Roll them out with a rolling pin to slightly larger than coaster size. Then place the minced meat on the dough rounds and form crescents (fold together). Seal the edges well. That was the complicated part, finding the right size for the dough balls, the right thickness when rolling out, and the right amount of minced meat as filling. This was still a bit rough this time, we just need to practice more. Since we had some dough left at the end of the minced meat, we filled the rest with jam. Tip: choose a jam with a strong flavor. Oh, and really press the edges together well - even with the sweet piroshki, a few opened up during baking.

Place all piroshki on a baking tray with parchment paper, brush with a beaten egg and bake in the oven at 180 degrees. With the quantity above, it will be two trays: bake the two trays for 20 minutes, then swap the positions of the two trays and bake for another 15 minutes. With only one baking tray, 30 minutes should be enough - just check, when the dough is nicely brown, it's done. This makes a large bowl full.

facebook/python-sdk - GitHub. Also important, the official Python SDK for Facebook Open Graph applications. With this, you can access all the things directly from Python - so also completely without Django (if you want that).

Django Facebook 2.0 – Integrating Facebook. Since it's interesting at the moment (yes, yes, I know, everything is G+, but one should act counter-cyclically), here's a link to a Django library with which you can build Open Graph apps for Facebook. Could be interesting again, especially with the new Facebook Timeline. And G+? Well, as long as they only provide meager cut-rate APIs, it's simply uninteresting for tinkerers.

Photosmith - the iPad mobile companion for Adobe Lightroom | Latest news, challenges, and progress from the developers.. I should check this out, as it allows you to sync images from the iPad to Lightroom and with the upcoming new plugin, even set up a bidirectional sync via a Publish Service in Lightroom, so that you can keep your image collections up to date on both devices. Very interesting for on the go (Camera Connection Kit) and for presentations to the family, where you can e.g. immediately indicate with tags or color markings what prints the family wants. Although it remains to be seen what will become of Adobe Carousel - it is said to offer similar features.