Archive 17.4.2003 - 28.4.2003

Schemix - A Scheme In The Linux Kernel

Ok. I love Lisp. And I love Scheme as a very elegant, lean Lisp dialect. But a Scheme interpreter integrated in the kernel goes a bit too far even for me

surprised face

Although - that could be a starting point for the OpenSource Lisp machine

I found at Lambda the Ultimate the original article.

Study: Every Second Person Accepts Paid Internet Offerings

And because I bizarrely only know people who all prefer the free (both as in beer and as in speech) web, I'll just keep blogging. For free. And sometimes for nothing either.

Teufelsgrinsen

Here's the original article.

More on the Mini-PC

Hmm. With Linux on it, that would really be cute.

At Gizmodo I found the original article.

Bare Facts

After watching TV reports yesterday about public destruction of Dixie Chicks records, this article came along today at just the right moment. I can only agree with Martie Maguire here: this really is like going back to the time of book burnings. Or back to McCarthy. Well, the land of the free - where you can express any opinion if you're willing to be disadvantaged, to suffer, or even to die for it.

I found the original article at Der Rollberg.

Pharmaceutical wholesalers and doctors suspected of fraud

That's certainly good for the healthcare system. But doctors keep resisting control mechanisms - sometimes you get the suspicion that they're just trying to cover for their colleagues. And you can see that there are plenty of black sheep in cases like this, the heart valve scandal and some other incidents in recent times.

At tagesschau im Internet there is the original article.

Spammers take anti-spam activists to court

Is the tail trying to wag the dog here?

At heise online news there's the original article.

Terry Jones on Tony Blair.

Reposting things from Rollberg is admittedly boring since everyone's already read it anyway, but this comment on Terry Jones is absolutely worth reading!

At Der Rollberg I found the original article.

Chicken McSpam

Well, if McDonalds starts spamming, at least people know what kind of junk they're putting in their mouths. In that sense, the advertising measure fits the product quite well, both have roughly the same nutritional value

Teufelsgrinsen

At Spiegel Online: Netzwelt there's the original article.

Kohl conducted lobbying as Chancellor

Oh no. Are they finally going to get the fat man on the hook? I still can't believe it - unfortunately he's gotten away with everything so far. Even with dubious donation dealings, so what should a bit of lobbying for a media guy do to him ...

At RP Online: Politik you can find the original article.

py-xmlrpc 0.8.8.3

Yep, definitely check whether I shouldn't include this in the build process of the Python Community Server and the Python Desktop Server - they don't have performance problems yet, but it doesn't hurt if things get even faster

I found the original article at Der Schockwellenreiter.

Pyro 3.2

And I should take a look at that too, even though I'm currently missing the application for it (usually XML/RPC or SOAP is enough for me).

At PyPI recent updates there's the original article.

Behrens warns against intellectual Nazis

Oh. Oh wow. Behrens is quick! Well, I think this circumstance has actually been known in the antifa movement for a very long time, but it's good if a politician gets to hear about it too.

Teufelsgrinsen

At WDR.de there's the original article.

GSM/GPRS on an SD card

When will there be drivers for Linux that work on the Zaurus too?

I found the original article at Gizmodo.

Kos on Bush's Iraq Lies

And the next lazy excuse for war being sought ...

At lies.com there's the original article.

Grosse Pointe Blank - good film, but no clue about cameras

So the film is great. But when the protagonist takes a picture of his sweetheart with a Minox B, there shouldn't be a flash and also no sound of a motorized film transport

Teufelsgrinsen

Heise goes east, but please without employees

Well, if the next time a snide comment about dubious personnel decisions at IT companies appears in the Heise ticker, you could always present them with the personnel decisions of their own house ...

surprised face

At dotcomtod you can find the original article.

Luminous Landscape Reviews Fuji S2 Pro

Quite interesting the test. The S2 Pro performs surprisingly well - and that despite being somewhat older. At least if you apply the lifespan standards of Digital SLRs

I found the original article at PhotographyBLOG.

Restart of US Nuclear Weapons Production

Uncool.

I found the original article at Telepolis News.

The world as a blog

Cool! Here's the original article.

White House silent on attacks on gay people

Well. Pretty liberal the whole thing ...

At RP Online: Politik there's the original article.

Just a little self-promotion again

Psst. New beta. Want one?

At PyPI recent updates I found the original article.

OpenBSD in Disgrace

A fine mess: Before the OpenBSD partners even found out about it, the university apparently arranged by phone for the Hyatt to cancel the reservations and pocket the $15,300 paid so far—roughly 80 percent of its total claim—without providing any service in return. Where does something like that happen? Would rather waste the money than help the evil OpenBSD project? In some respects, Americans have only themselves to blame for such actions if anti-Americanism keeps growing stronger.

I found the original article on heise online news.

Roland Koch: Equal Pay for More Work

And I thought the problem of the labor market was the many unemployed people who can't find work because it's being done by many others. But I guess I misunderstood that.

Teufelsgrinsen

I found the original article at RP Online: Politik.

Weblog Hosting

Also http://muensterland.org/ is also completely official and costs nothing - at least with the numeric user ID instead of a fancy name.

At Der Schockwellenreiter I found the original article.

Greens: Ballot should cut through red tape

That would also be the last bit of individuality for the Greens gone. Great achievement, becoming a boring normal party in such a short time. Now they might as well dissolve themselves, because there's already an FDP

Teufelsgrinsen

I found the original article at RP Online: Politik.

Politics with casualty figures?

Well, that's also something that always amazes me: people really seem to believe that a war ends with the last shot. Unfortunately, that's just not true - the direct consequences of the war in its aftermath are part of it, as is the destabilization of the country that lost. And the fact that critical situations currently prevail in Iraq and that it's anything but stable should really be clear to everyone...

At Hexentanz you can find the original article.

Spain wants to crack down heavily on anti-war protests

Could someone please throw Spain out of the EU? Such a restriction on the right to demonstrate, in my opinion, massively violates the Western understanding of society and democracy that the EU likes to invoke so often.

I found the original article on RP Online: Politik.

Children Taken from Couple Over Breast-Feeding Photo

American Hysteria: Children of a Peruvian Couple Were Taken Away and the Parents Subjected to Various Tests and Psychological Treatment After Photos Were Found Showing the Mother Breastfeeding One of Her Sons. The Proceedings for Child Pornography and Abuse Were Dismissed, but the Children Still Haven't Been Returned to Their Parents.

So much for the topic of freedom in the USA.

What did I expect from a country where in some states oral sex is still criminalized, even if it's a married couple in their own home – missionary position by law. Here is a list of where the sodomy laws in the USA are still active and where it's slowly changing.

I found the original article at lies.com.

Jan Ullrich wins around Cologne

Well, that's really a top performance. Excellent. And probably not expected in this form.

amazed face

And Danilo Hondo grabbed second place, not bad either - even though Danilo's teammates could have put a bit more work into closing the gap to Jan Ullrich, especially since they were basically right at the sponsor's doorstep.

Jazz singer Nina Simone is dead

Too bad. :-(

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

The Gravenreuth Report

A Gravenreuth Report. Wow. Everything collected that is worth knowing about the Freiherr's lawyer. All his sins nicely listed and documented.

I found the original article at delta-c Weblog.

The Un-CD and the Positioning of the Economy

Very interesting interview. Given the position of the spokesperson for the phonogram associations (one can probably assume that in his function he represents the opinion of the member companies), you can really only shake your head at so much arrogance

Here you can find the original article.

Jutta Ditfurth's Series on the Greens

A – admittedly very subjective, but also very interesting – settlement of accounts with the Greens by Jutta Ditfurt. For me, the Greens were never really my party – I couldn't really warm up to either the nature-loving eco-enthusiasts wearing wool socks or the church festival-goers and gospel singers, and certainly not to the eco-fascists. But in the past, the Greens were at least entertaining – today they're just a boring and power-hungry normal party. A witty and entertaining experiment ruined with the lazy excuses of the Realists. A shame really ...

I found the original article at delta-c Weblog.

No Sex!

Great. On the way into the Big Brother era, the US is now introducing newspeak for scientists, at least if they still want to receive research funding. Everyone can imagine for themselves what this could mean for the freedoms of, for example, homosexuals in the USA in the future. Bush will probably also regard AIDS as God's punishment for homosexuality.

I found the original article at Telepolis News.

Fagan threatens railway with billion-euro demand

Why does a disgusting taste always remain in my mouth when I read these vexatious lawsuits from American lawyers? Certainly, it is justified to demand compensation for the relatives of the victims - there are German courts for that to handle. But the Americans' demands again lose all sense of proportion and really only give rise to the suspicion also expressed by the railway: that the lawyers only want to profit from the suffering of others.

This does not serve the matter itself - namely ensuring compliance with safety regulations and improving the operational safety of the railway so that such catastrophes cannot occur again. And the dead will not come back to life from excessive demands either ...

You can find the original article at tagesschau im Internet - here.

Researchers discover ancient DNA

Will this work better than with the mosquitoes in amber? I don't know, frozen mammoth urine doesn't exactly sound like a trustworthy basis ";-]"

At Spiegel Online: Wissenschaft you can find the original article.

Mac OS X and Darwinports

With DarwinPorts, there is an environment available for installing Unix programs from source, similar to the BSD Ports structure.

What is it? With DarwinPorts you can very easily install Unix software directly from the sources without having to laboriously fetch and patch the sources first. That's the idea.

Basically a very convenient installation structure similar to Debian packages, only based on source. In this respect DarwinPorts is very similar to Fink. So why do you need DarwinPorts? I was initially quite enthusiastic because I assumed it would be the real Ports environment (similar to how GNU-Darwin for example uses the Ports from FreeBSD and thus already has a huge set of programs ready to compile - significantly more than Fink) from BSD. Nothing doing - it's its own development. And not even more software in it than Fink. And even better: the make install crashes for me with a bus error in pkg_mkindex.tcl

To be honest: we don't need ten different installation systems for Mac OS X, we need one that really runs smoothly and works. And so I'd rather stick with Fink, which works flawlessly and by now already has a somewhat fuller list of supported packages.

I found the original article at Der Schockwellenreiter.

Send spam back?

To the remarks by Jutta, I'd like to add just my perspective as a system administrator. Because in addition to the problem of the data volume that accumulates (and which many still pay for based on data volume), there's another problem: bounces on bounces. The result of "contaminated" address lists is that many emails bounce. Those that bounce to forged but real user addresses land in that user's mailbox and annoy them. The others that cannot be delivered usually end up as corresponding system bounces in the mailbox of the system administrator of one of the involved mail servers.

I'm quite directly affected on several systems where I'm admin - the result is often unreadable bounce mail folders because so much flows in that you don't really want to wade through it to search for real problems. As a result, system problems that lead to mail delivery issues are often only noticed when users complain - nobody looks at the mess of bounce mail before that, just as little as the error reports of the mail server.

So if you like your system administrators (or simply want your mail to be handled properly), then think about them too when you carry out such anti-spam actions.

At Hexentanz there's the original article.

Stoiber praises Schröder

If Schröder were actually a Social Democrat, that should give him pause to think. But as things stand now, that won't bother him much further ...

At RP Online: Politik you can find the original article.

Dream Over: No US Funds for OpenBSD

I would have been surprised if it had actually worked - Theo is not exactly the most accommodating and cooperative person, and conflicts with the idea of "whoever is not with us is against us" were pretty much inevitable. Still, it's a shame that the Americans let themselves be guided by ideology and nationalism once again, instead of simply implementing what is actually a good idea. After all, work on OpenBSD benefits the entire open source community - just think of OpenSSH.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Biblis A shut down due to safety concerns

Have they been quietly shrinking in recent years, or why hasn't anyone noticed this before?

surprised face

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

The Rollberg ...

With this whole server shared apartment story, I keep wondering if the servers regularly argue about who's supposed to do the backup, or who's doing the filesystem check, and why the edge server is already responsible for content delivery again, even though the other servers do much less ...

Devilish grin

At das Netzbuch - ralles Weblog there's the original article.

Unpaid advertising through linking or "How to successfully bring a commercial weblog server...

Jutta settles accounts with the hype surrounding 20six in the media and other blogs (some of which also do so indirectly through constantly repeated links). What strikes me about the whole story is this claim that 20six (or other similarly structured systems) would be a community - but is it really?

The term community is gladly used in an inflationary way as soon as someone has a great idea and benefits from the — sometimes voluntary and free — services of others. Sure, for the operator it's marketing (and nobody will be too explicit about the true core, that they live off and profit from the voluntary work of their users — that would be economic suicide). Can you simply declare a community into existence, like the chancellor declares a state of emergency?

Why do users accept being co-opted like this? Without having the true freedoms of a community? Herd mentality? Is subordination cool? Or is learning how to do it yourself (or how to properly participate with others) simply too tedious and too much work?

Is it simply more convenient to go to a server where the operator exploits your own work, but in return proudly holds up the community sign to the outside world, without having to do anything for it yourself?

I'd find it boring if I didn't get to experience all the problems and frustrations of doing things yourself. When I have the choice between taking something ready-made or building it myself, I choose the build-it-myself route. Maybe I'm just perverted ...

At Hexentanz, there's the original article.

Oil or Culture

I don't see much difference between the Afghan Taliban, who shot up the Buddha statues with anti-tank weapons, and the US administration, who deemed the oil ministry important enough to protect but allowed the National Museum and National Library to be ransacked and destroyed. And the fact that the Americans are confirming the prejudice about their cultural barbarism here is no consolation either.

I found the original article on Telepolis News.

Technical stuff from Rollberg

I'm curious to see how SQLite performs there. I've looked at it several times myself and have been searching for a project to use it in. There are also Python bindings for SQLite (even on the Zaurus - I think that's where it will first be used for me).

At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

US experts to search for weapons of mass destruction

The Americans will make sure they find weapons of mass destruction. If they can't find them based on their sales receipts, they'll just bring some themselves

Teufelsgrinsen

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Dentist develops drill for Mars probe

And when Mars has brushed its teeth properly, it means here too: Mom, he didn't drill at all!

Teufelsgrinsen

At Astronomische Kleinigkeiten you can find the original article.

Heise wins against spammers

Strike! At heise online news you can find the original article.

Interesting Programming Language: Goo

Goo is a compact and simple programming language from the Lisp family with complete object orientation and some nice technical features (for example, dynamic compilation of Goo code into native code with the help of a C compiler). In some ways, Goo seems to be an alternative to Paul Graham's Arc - Goo with a focus on object orientation, Arc with a focus on functional programming. I should take a look at it sometime, could definitely be interesting.

Here's the original article.

SPD-Left warns of government failure

Great arguments from the Chancellor. The Left is simply suffering from a loss of touch with reality. Sure: on the A7 a wrong-way driver comes towards you. - One? Hundreds!

Teufelsgrinsen

At RP Online: Politik you can find the original article.