Roundabout for jQuery by Fred LeBlanc. Nice effect, even if I'm not sure right now what I would need it for (ok, you could use it to display images, but personally I prefer Lightbox or something similar). It's probably just a gimmick, but sometimes that's quite useful.
Archive 10.5.2011 - 23.5.2011
"Summarizing: The German police, due to a past protest action against the website of an energy company, have paralyzed a democratic party shortly before the elections, hindered the democratic movement of citizens in Spain, and disrupted Anonymous operations against regimes in the Middle East. All in all, #Servergate was thus a very undemocratic day in the history of our friends and helpers." - from the Anonymous statement on Servergate. One may think what one will - the reaction of the police is more than questionable. Here, a trivial reason has probably come a bit too cheaply into the hands of a public prosecutor. The alternative would be blatant incompetence, both in assessing the reason and in assessing the effects. And slowly, the whole thing looks even worse, because there was not even a request for legal assistance from France, but only the announcement of such.
Cloud Foundry - Make it Yours!. Interesting project for building a cloud platform based on Ruby. The source is freely available on Github. CloudFoundry is probably what runs under ActiveState Stackato (where Perl and Python are supported). Such a private cloud can also be quite interesting for your own projects, because you can develop locally at home or on the go, and the deployment to your own root server is simple and easy. At some point, I think I want to set something like this up (currently, every service is set up individually for me, which can be quite annoying in the long run).
AndTidWiki | mgBlog. As a supplement to my TiddlyWiki links, there is of course also an app for Android with which you can run TiddlyWiki on phones and tablets. It is based on the same mobile plugin as the iOS version (logically, since both platforms use WebKit as the core).
Introducing JetBrains dotPeek - dotPeek - Confluence. For those curious about peeking into .NET assemblies (and Mono assemblies too, although the source is often available there anyway).
TiddlySpace/tiddlyspace. And since I find TiddlyWiki interesting right now: this project is a hosting project for TiddlyWikis that can be linked to users there and can be networked with each other - sounds like an interesting platform for collaboration on projects, for example (projects that are not about code - there's GitHub and Bitbucket for that). TiddlySpace is also a direct platform where you can register, or you can simply take their open source project here and host it yourself.
TwMobile. Regarding TiddlyWiki - yes, there is also an app for iOS devices. By the way, it uses Phonegap to create the app. The link at the beginning goes to the user group, but here is also a link directly to the AppStore. Quite interesting because in TiddlyWiki, plugins and similar things are also automatically possible in JavaScript and thus extended access to iPhone hardware becomes possible. At the moment, the integration with Dropbox is still a bit meager: you have to send files back and forth between apps. But since in TiddlyWiki everything is in one HTML file, that's not such a big problem. Enables the same interface for a small desktop wiki on iPad, iPhone, and desktop. And one that also looks quite nice. And additionally enables onboard programming in JavaScript. Sounds like a nice toy!
QuickSilver Network. Hmm, had I already mentioned that? Doesn't matter, it's cool. It's a Smalltalk-like development environment, but with JavaScript as the language and in the web browser instead of in an application. However, it's all still very raw and some things don't quite work (at least in Safari), but somehow still nice. Somehow, I could imagine someone combining it with TiddlyWiki (for persistence) and then making a JavaScript image system like the old Smalltalk systems, but on the web. Would be somehow funny. Pointless, but funny.
Judgment: Sharehosters must check external link collections. It all sounded somehow absurd, my first reaction was "Landgericht Hamburg" - and indeed, it is the LG Hamburg. And it is as absurd as suspected. And in the case of rulings by the LG Hamburg, I don't necessarily believe that the reporters have simply misrepresented them. Hamburg is Germany's Texas.
On TermKit. A pretty cool project for reinventing terminals. In this case, the output is made as HTML and the terminal is not rendered as a simple console but as a browser window. This way, for example, you can make directory lists graphical or output images directly. It also works on things like pipes and the idea of how data is transported between tools, so that they can all work universally with it - JSON is used here. The whole thing makes a well-thought-out impression.
AI art | painting robot | art | expert systems. Something else - a real robot controlled by Lisp (at least for prototyping). So not a virtual robot like Turtle graphics, but real hardware that moves.
xmlisp - eXtreme Media Lisp: Rich media cross-platform programming for 3D (OpenGL) and 2D applications. I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm not sure. Doesn't matter, repetitions aren't unusual, and this is really interesting - a Lisp environment with particularly good support for 2D and 3D data. Has a lot more on the TODO list - the goal is a Lisp environment specifically for game programming and other graphical, interactive programs. A bit like Processing.
MilkPack - Edgar Gonçalves. Interesting project that implements a task list that communicates with Remember the Milk on the Internet. The interesting thing about it: it is written in Common Lisp and intensively uses the Objective-C Bridge for OpenMCL.
MichaelMacInnis/oh. A shell in Go. The shell has some interesting features, for example prototype-based object orientation, first-class functions, and explicit channels (which other shells have implicitly behind pipes). Looks quite interesting at first glance.
Javascript PC Emulator - Technical Notes. Yes, a PC emulator. Based on QEmu, so quite mature code. Boots Linux in the browser. Because it can.
Infinite Scroll WordPress Plugin - nice effect, when the end of the page is reached, the next page is automatically loaded and mixed in via JavaScript - so pages are built endlessly until all blog content is there. Facebook and Flickr have been doing this for some time and I somehow find it better than these "older posts" and "newer posts" links. Without JavaScript, the links should still appear, search engines will continue to index everything (although a Google Sitemap helps a lot in this regard), so it shouldn't cause any harm.
Lightroom Developer Center. Since I want to take a closer look at this again soon, maybe I will create my own plugin for easy sync to WordPress after all. And Lua is not such a terrible language.
Recently on Flickr
I have uploaded new pictures to Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented.
Microsoft Small Basic. In a strange way, nostalgic. A Basic in the style of QBasic, but for Silverlight and the browser with libraries for graphics output and similar things. Essentially something like Processing, but .NET instead of JVM and Basic instead of Java.
Pressbox « WordPress Plugins. I wanted to build this myself all the time, but now it's already available. I could take a look at it - with this you can select images from Dropbox and insert them into posts. Since I'm using Dropbox a lot for images, this would be quite practical - but I first have to check if the image is then brought to the WordPress server, or if it remains on Dropbox - I want my media files to be on my own servers.
Expensive healthcare system: Funds expect additional contribution of 70 euros. Funny, how quickly it's all just about how to fleece the insured as much as possible and no longer about temporarily helping a cash-strapped fund. And it's always great how politicians keep saying you just need to switch to a fund without additional contributions. How, when soon all funds will do that? And of course, the employee has to pay for it all. So that the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and pharmacists can still reach powerfully into the pockets of employees tomorrow. And the Prolethicians in Berlin hold the stirrup nicely.
Leistungsschutzrecht: Bundesjustizministerin über eine Abgabenpflicht für Zitate. Once again, the politics helps the internet non-understanders and rights extortionists in companies with a broken business model to make money at the expense of others' work. And incidentally, the right to quote is destroyed. Because does anyone really believe that "commercial" won't quickly become "business-like" and then, through legal hair-splitting, "every blogger"? It's enough to have advertising on your own blog to be considered a commercial provider. And of course, the idea of introducing another collecting society for the nonsense is great, which also wants to be paid well again. At some point, we will probably have to pay the gas suppliers when we want to fart.
ZenphotoPress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to access images and galleries in ZenPhoto from WordPress. Since you can upload entire folders to ZenPhoto via FTP or other methods (e.g., by simply linking the Albums directory to Dropbox), and thus easily get images into galleries, you can also quickly and easily access these images in WordPress. Might be something as a tinkering project, as I'm still looking for simple ways to feed my photo blog from Lightroom.
From Me To You. Fascinating not-quite-photos and not-quite-films. A bit of background information on how these GIFs are made. And another site that does something similar.
Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges. Just a reminder: anyone using something like Dropbox (or any of the other services with similar functionality) should encrypt client-side (on Macs, sparse bundles are suitable), if it's critical or personal content. Because even if a service promises to encrypt everything and no one can read the data, this service can simply lie. Or have a wrong implementation. The deduplication, the folder sharing and the fact that for some versions a public URL is generated for each file - and thus in both cases people get access to files to whom you have not revealed your password - should make it clear that Dropbox must be able to decrypt server-side. Which of course does not make the wrong presentation on their advertising pages any better - yes, it was just omitting information, but with security statements you'd better say a bit more to make it clear what you actually guarantee. If you leave out essential information, you should not be surprised if you (rightfully!) are called a liar. And especially in the USA, something like this could put a company in quite a predicament.
match Technical Services. Or also "Pimp your Leica" - because he delivers some interesting accessories (ocular loupes, thumb holders, silly-looking soft releases) and the practical M-Coder Kit, with which you can apply the coding to the Leica lenses (or also third-party lenses) for automatic recognition on the M8/M8.2/M9 yourself (temporarily, as the color wears off when changing). I'm still considering whether it's worth it - the M-lenses (and the Zeiss lens) that I have are characterized by very slight deviations from the optimum. Both in terms of distortion and vignetting (it has advantages when you waive ultra-brightness), so I haven't felt the need for the corrections from the lens profile yet.
Variochromat Homepage. Because I had forgotten about the place again and was looking for where the heck I had the digital exposure on baryta paper done back then. The result was actually quite good, especially considering that I sent a JPG from a compact camera (from the Ricoh GRD II, even an unprocessed one - I'm not afraid of anything!).
The Best Street Photographer You've Never Heard Of - everyone interested in street photography should check this out. Also feel free to browse through the links in the article.
City Walk Again
Same day as the city harbor, just a bit earlier and in black and white. Also made with the M8 and the C-Biogon 2.8/35.
Around the City Harbor
Just went for a walk with the M8 in the evening and took some pictures at the harbor in the late twilight.
Writing Plugins for gedit 3 with Python. It looks like Gnome 3 actually gets a quite generic interface for Python scripting. PyGTK was already there, but that's just a GUI library. Now, work is being done on GObject and Friends, making many more elements accessible. By the way, gedit is a quite nice graphical editor that can certainly be considered an alternative to BBEdit or TextWrangler, which are popular under OSX.
Python Interpreter by Noam Gat -- Unity Asset Store. And this is more for my private tinkering: a plugin that integrates an interactive Python shell into Unity3D. Somehow, Unity3D always fascinates me when I see it. Especially since the entry is now free (unfortunately, the jump to Pro - which offers some essential tools like a profiler or support for external versioning - is quite steep).
micromongo — micromongo v0.1 documentation. Also check out micromongo, it provides a minimal ORM for MongoDB servers. However, I would have to check if django-nosql already supports MongoDB by now, then I wouldn't have to use a different ORM syntax - although micromongo is really quite lean and is based only on pymongo, so for example nice for small web services, because you don't have to install a bunch of modules.
execnet v1.0.9 documentation. I should also check this out, it's basically a library for distributing functions across a network of instances - not a full map/reduce or similar, more like a better RPC. Specifically interesting to use, for example, a normal cpython front with a compute backend based on PyPy (or vice versa, to give a PyPy server a numpy+scipy backend in CPython for data analysis).
Read the Docs. I didn't know this one yet - a web service where you can read various documentations through a uniform interface. And host your documentations for projects. And also directly different versions of documentations for projects.
"When you choose an eventually consistent data store you're prioritizing availability and partition tolerance over consistency, but this doesn't mean your application has to be inconsistent. What it does mean is that you have to move your conflict resolution from writes to reads." via Mochi Labs - statebox, an eventually consistent data model for Erlang (and Riak). Also interesting outside of Erlang, as the problem is of a more general nature - data models for transactional databases cannot simply be transferred to an eventually consistent database like Riak (or Cassandra). The reason lies in the fact that conflicts only become apparent later when reading, as they are still "on the way" beforehand.
pmundkur/odisco. An implementation of Map/Reduce according to the Disco Worker model in Objective Caml. There's already something like this for Python. If I ever want to play around with OCaml again.
Thoughts on Data Privacy, Loss of Control, and Other Things
From the Spackeria, from tin foil hats and from loss of control - The wonderful world of Isotopp. Worthwhile consideration of data protection, data traces, the inevitable accumulation of data volumes and the inevitability of the accessibility and evaluation of this data.
I myself am always sitting between the chairs of the tin foil hats and Spackeria - on the one hand, I want data avoidance and have my problems with the data collection mania in some places, on the other hand, I am close to technology and enthusiastic about it and am therefore automatically collected in many data pots. And I am absolutely aware of how much can be found out about me online if someone puts it all together.
I see, just like Isotopp presents it in the article, a massive (probably inevitable) failure of legal data protection - but I myself see a certain differentiation between data that arises in the voluntary context of the use of technical services (even if the user may not directly notice these data) and data that are collected in the state context.
The state sets up data silos only under the negative aspect - a state-created database is always designed under the aspect of general suspicion. The state does not collect the data of persons involved in visa procedures in order to provide them with targeted information and services related to visa procedures - the sole purpose is law enforcement. However, this automatically suspects all persons involved in visa procedures of terrorism and other crimes - because otherwise one would not need to record their data. The executive of the state hates the disorderly citizens and deeply distrusts them, therefore they must be controlled.
A private economic pile of data has a much more banal goal - market economic exploitation. This is, as crazy as it may sound to some, much more preferable to me. Google will not use the data to negatively interpret my political beliefs and put me on a no-fly list because I criticize the state - they just want to show me better-placed advertising. In a certain way, one can rely on the reduced field of vision of capitalists, it is much more positively influenced than that of politicians. Data sets are potential businesses - not potential attackers.
For this reason, I find the current activity of various state data protection officers in the private economic or even directly private sector (warning blogs for the use of Google Analytics) laughable to embarrassing, if the same data protection officers do not stand up to projects like those that are coming up in the Interior Ministry or other state authorities.
How can a data protection officer expect to be taken seriously if he loudly complains about the location data falling off the iPhone and rails against Apple, but at the same time does not make any attempts to stop this crazy EU commissioner who has plans for EU-wide, suspicionless data retention that would violate our Basic Law (just as the data retention already failed in Karlsruhe that was spied out in Berlin)?
Reinteract might be interesting for all number crunchers and graphics players, provided they don't get pimples from Python: an implementation of worksheets as you know them from Mathematica and Sage, but as a direct Python application based on PyGTK. You can hack in and execute Python source code, edit older source code afterward, and your output in the worksheet will be automatically updated. Downloads are also available for OSX. Unfortunately, PyGTK is not a 1st-class citizen of the Mac environment - it just looks awful with the half-defective controls, and the usability is unfortunately not really OSX-like. Someone could port this to Cocoa.
A successful Git branching model » nvie.com. Not entirely uninteresting article about distributed version control and branching/merging. Ok, it specifically addresses git and its commands, but the overviews and considerations apply to many points equally to Mercurial and in the deviations the problems are similar enough that the article remains worth reading.
counterclockwise - Counterclockwise is an Eclipse plugin helping developers write Clojure code. And if you already have Eclipse installed, a Clojure plugin might not be uninteresting either, so you can get your daily dose of parentheses.
Typesafe Stack is a distribution of Scala (2.9.0) and Akka (1.1, an actor framework for Scala with various tools for programming distributed solutions in Scala) for easy installation. Additionally, it points to sbt and Scala IDE for Eclipse (use the beta version 2, as this is completely new and the 1.x versions do not work with Scala 2.9.0 and are not particularly good) as supplements. Installers are available for Windows, OSX, and Linux (you can of course install them yourself on all platforms, but some people prefer normal installation paths). And if you want, you can buy support there - and the company belongs to Odersky, the Scala inventor and JVM languages guru. Actually, Odersky could also include his book on Scala programming as PDF (in the first edition, this is also free).
LLVM Project Blog: What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #1/3. Not only what undefined behavior is in language standards, but also the motivation behind it and what it means for compiler manufacturers.
Controls again at the German-Danish border - great achievement for a founding member of the EU just to satisfy right-wing populist idiots to destroy the Schengen area..
"In the current terms of service, Twitpic reserves the right to reuse the images that users publish via the service." - and even commercially, and TwitPic has already secured the partner with WENN. via Twitter-Bilder: Verwirrung um Twitpic - Golem.de. This is therefore another service that is better not to use, as of course the creator of the images does not receive any money for the use.
RaptorDB sounds quite interesting, a classic Key/Value-Store for .NET that is based on MurMurHash and is especially designed for performance and storage stability. Could be quite useful for one purpose or another, especially since it also works cleanly with threading.
App Engine Go Overview. Honestly, I would find it more exciting if Google would move away from outdated Python 2.5. But well, instead of Python 2.7 or a JVM language, you can now program the AppEngine with Go. At the same time, however, prices and conditions have changed, so it would probably be better to first check whether it is worth it at all. Because you can also use Go just as well on your own root server ...
Metaowl is life!. Wow, just realized that on June 16th, it's the 6th birthday of the Meta Owl! By now, almost 8700 posts have been collected. And in the meantime, the automatic caching of the posts has paid off, because one or the other blog (for example, my old muensterland.org address has been gone for a while) has disappeared, but the content (at least the texts) is still accessible. The whole thing has even survived several server moves unscathed.
Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Skype for Nearly $8 Billion - WSJ.com. Ugh. Skype is already quite a mess (unfortunately a necessary mess for me), but if Microsoft now "improves" it, it's going to be quite funny ...
The Ark In Space: Manul – the Cat that Time Forgot. An early type of cat, essentially unchanged for millions of years. So something like a living fossil in plush.