Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form

Logisim

Logisim could have saved me a lot of DM in my youth, which I spent on TTL chips (after I had previously and in between burned the same TTL chips).

Pure CSS GUI icons (experimental) – Nicolas Gallagher – Blog & Ephemera

Pure CSS GUI icons (experimental) are an excellent example of what you shouldn't do with CSS. Painting with box models is rather unproductive. But somehow it's still fascinating what some people do with their time ...

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang?

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang?. At first, I thought here comes another fringe physicist with crazy ideas or unproven claims. And then I read Roger Penrose in the article. Ooops.

BBC - Earth News - Attack of the rats

BBC - Earth News - Attack of the rats. Why every 50 years in India giant hordes of rats destroy the harvest. All because of the biological clock of bamboo. Fascinating.

WordPress › Support » [Plugin: WP Super Cache] Blank Pages - 500 Error - in Dashboard (sometimes the site too)

WordPress › Support » [[Plugin: WP Super Cache]] Blank Pages - 500 Error - in Dashboard (sometimes the site too). Describes my current problem since I have SuperCache - maybe this is also my solution. Otherwise, SuperCache will just be removed, because before that it actually ran well, just slowly. If it's dark (uh, white) in between, it might be due to my problem and I'm still analyzing.

Long Live the Web: Scientific American

Long Live the Web: Scientific American by Tim Berners-Lee. Why the web is so important to us and why and what we must protect it. Because more and more interest groups are trying to reduce the openness of the web for their purposes, ostensibly often to protect users or rights or other great and positively sounding reasons - but behind it all is simply the grab for power that one wants or fears to lose.

pyfpdf - Project Hosting on Google Code

pyfpdf provides PDF generation without dependencies on other packages. However, it says "ported from PHP" up front. But if that doesn't deter you and you want to produce simple PDF outputs, you might not be so badly served with it.

Processing.js v1.0 Released « Processing.js Blog

Processing.js v1.0 Released and it is still a really nice toy. Now it is almost on par with the big Processing in terms of features.

Is My Blog Working?

Is My Blog Working? This is a question you ask yourself quite often. And the answer is not always as simple as just looking at it - for example, what about caching? This tool provides some information, but there is even more at RedBot and Cacheability. Especially for cache information, the last two are better than the first link.

Bottle

Nice stop motion film with two piles of dirt.

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

Owl Content in new home

The Owl Content is now also running on the new box. It wasn't particularly complicated, the hairiest part was a silly bug in the Feedparser used (a terribly old version, it's quite possible that newer versions have already fixed this) and an incompatibility of the PHP gettext implementation, which is still used by Wordpress 1.5. Otherwise, it actually did pretty much everything needed right away. It may be that some hits are still running on the old system until the nameserver changes have spread around, but that should grow out in the next few days. And quite incidentally, the owl now has much stronger wings. It should be enough for the next 8000 posts.

With certainty: Calls for stricter laws | tagesschau.de

With certainty: Calls for stricter laws | tagesschau.de - already absurd that federal ministers from the Union and FDP clearly oppose state ministers and their populist saber-rattling. Even more absurd that even SPD ministers are calling for something that has been rejected by the Federal Constitutional Court. And as the basis for all this, only claims without evidence and without verifiability. With this, the terrorists have already won, and these prole feeders are making themselves into errand boys. Can we please have them monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution now? Their anti-constitutional stance is clearly documented ...

WordPress » WP Super Cache « WordPress Plugins

WP Super Cache is highly recommended if you use several plugins like I do (and possibly access external services like the Tumblr plugin). Okay, there is a risk that a broken status from Tumblr might be cached in the sidebar, but this will resolve itself after a while. However, the runtime of a fully loaded WordPress is indeed a bit sluggish.

offline_messages at master from jor3l's OSModules - GitHub

offline_messages for OpenSim here in a PHP version. I should take a look at it, actually I should be able to build something in Python from it that I can then use.

wp-Typography • KINGdesk

I've now activated the wp-Typography plugin on my blog for testing. While I haven't seen many good hyphenation algorithms for German before, this one might work reasonably well. It certainly makes sense to prevent widows and orphans. And in the first test, the text already looks very pleasant.

Magic with Numbers at Retirement Age: Trick 67 - taz.de

Number magic at retirement age: Trick 67 - taz.de - because the intention behind it is simply to cut pensions. None of the prolethicians in Berlin really believe that workers can last until 67. That was never the goal, not even for Münte and the other liars of the SPD.

Moving Status

It's finally happening - the static extraction of my old blog for the archive took several days, but now I have created a complete backup, redirected the nameservers, and in the next few days, everything should be on the static part. I am redirecting some of the links directly, for example, the main feed and the homepage itself. Maybe I will gradually redirect other things to the new blog if I notice it's worth it.

The Meta-Owl is still on the old server, I'm afraid I have to tackle that next and see if it can be made to fly on a new system. And then there are the various photo galleries of my subtenants - at least I have already prepared everything for that, the rest is mainly copying all the files and then a bit of layout adjustment.

It looks like I can shut down the old machine in the near future (maybe even by the end of the month?). The machine has served me well for many years, but it is now a bit outdated. But I will put the last backups aside somewhere, because as I know myself, I will realize shortly after shutting it down that I have stored something somewhere that I urgently need ...

Front-end Editor | scribu

The Front-end Editor is a very useful plugin for Wordpress. You can directly edit many elements in the front end with a double click. Since I usually only notice typos and formatting errors when I look at my blog from the front end, I can edit directly there without going through the admin. It's much faster for me.

Icon Search Engine - Download 300,770 Free Icons, PNG Icons, Web Icons

The Icon Search Engine is probably known to everyone except me, but since I needed an icon again, it was quite practical. I always find it quite strange when icons that are supposedly free suddenly cost money on some sites, so a site with a clear indication of the license and documented origin is quite nice.

F# in MonoDevelop and cross-platform web sites & screencasts | Blog | TomasP.Net

F# in MonoDevelop and cross-platform web sites & screencasts | Blog | TomasP.Net contains a lot of information about F# on Mono for Linux and OSX.

JQTreeTable

JQTreeTable does not use DataTables, but it is still quite interesting as it provides a Finder-like table representation for hierarchical data.

'Super-secret' debugger discovered in AMD CPUs • The Register. Wow. Hardware Backdoor.

''Space Quest'' Lands on the iPad — Courtesy of Safari | Touch Arcade

'Space Quest' Lands on the iPad — Courtesy of Safari | Touch Arcade - eat shit, Adobe. Who still wants Flash?.

jQuery lightBox plugin

jQuery lightBox plugin is very nice. It doesn't use Prototype or Scriptaculous, but simply jQuery - which is very helpful if a site already uses jQuery. And with the jQuery LightBox Plugin for Wordpress you can easily use it for displaying images in your own blog.

Twenty Ten Weaver | Wordpress Weaver

Twenty Ten Weaver is a more flexible child theme for Twenty Ten. However, it overloads some of the PHP files from Twenty Ten, so you depend on whether the developer continues to maintain it. But it can customize a lot of things on its own, which I have currently done with my own theme.

Dynamic Widgets | Qurl

Dynamic Widgets | Qurl is a very practical WordPress plugin that enables dynamic rules for widgets. With this, for example, the "latest articles" can be suppressed on the homepage (since they are all there anyway and that would be redundant) and, for example, my Tumblr photos can also be suppressed on gallery pages (so they don't distract from the actual image content - and, for example, black and white photos don't suddenly become colorful just because of Tumblr).

kbhomes's TextCaptchaBreaker at master - GitHub

kbhomes's TextCaptchaBreaker shows why text CAPTCHAs are basically bananas. They are often too easy to crack and especially automated - and this code shows a very nice implementation of it. My old blog still has text CAPTCHAs and gets along quite well with them, but that's probably due to the low traffic - in the last few weeks, more and more spam comments have been posted there and I'm not sure if they weren't placed by bots.

Word This - Google Chrome Extension Gallery

Word This - Google Chrome Extension Gallery is very helpful, as Chrome is so stupidly designed that bookmarklets run in the same security context as the current website. This means you have to allow a website to run JavaScript if you want to use a bookmarklet like Wordpress's "Press This". With this extension, blogging moves to its own icon and out of the bookmarks bar.

JLOUIS Ramblings: On Erlang, State and Crashes

JLOUIS Ramblings: On Erlang, State and Crashes explains well what the "in case of error, crash" mantra of Erlang is really about - namely the construction of an application as layers of supervisor processes and error handlers. The essential part is the structure of the application - just crashing is not enough, the architecture must also be prepared for it.

atomo

atomo - very interesting language, very flexible and compact. I stumbled upon it because someone built a Mongrel2 Adapter for it. What is interesting about atomo for me is that it is yet another new language with prototype-based object orientation. Something that is tried far too rarely (other languages in this area are Slate, Self, Io, Newtonscript and JavaScript).

Also interesting: atomo is embedded in Haskell and thus provides a dynamic scripting language for Haskell environments and of course a good integration into the Haskell world. There was something similar with one of the first Perl6 prototypes, which was also built in Haskell (Pugs).

WordPress › WPtouch « WordPress Plugins

WordPress › WPtouch « WordPress Plugins - no idea if I want something like that. Could be quite interesting though, after all I have such a touch device myself. On the other hand, Mobile Safari also displays normal websites well. Moreover, there is still a problem: the nginx cache knows nothing about it and would potentially cache the wrong pages. In any case, I'm not sure that these mobile extensions get along well with caches.

Minister of Labor: Those who block seats should pay for police intervention | tagesschau.de

Unionsminister: Sitzblockierer sollen Polizei-Einsatz bezahlen | tagesschau.de - which would also help to control the annoying demonstrators, because hey, it's simple: demonstrators in general or even strikers cause costs and then you can get them from them and then people will think twice about whether they go out on the street!

The erosion of democracy has always worked quite well through the wallet.

Autumn

Just pictures from autumn. These are still from Papenburg, so a few weeks old. By now, it looks a bit gloomier.

Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme | aaron.jorb.inaaron.jorb.in

Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme | aaron.jorb.inaaron.jorb.in. I need to take a closer look at this to customize my site a bit more without having to do everything myself. Update: it works. My current layout is set up as a child theme for Twenty Ten.

WordPress › WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator « WordPress Plugins

WordPress › WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator « WordPress Plugins. I use it on my box to speed up my WordPress. WordPress itself runs in a KVM with a standard stack and an Nginx in front as a cache. Does it hold up?

Bitrot reloaded

It's time to start over and rebuild. This is an attempt to work with WordPress again. After my own software was rendered obsolete by years of not updating the requirements under the blog, this time there's standard off-the-shelf software. Let's see how it goes.

rfc1437 | Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form

rfc1437 | Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form - Strong trends towards "throw away with archive and start over" with slight options for "throw away, static archive and maybe shovel a part into the new platform if I find the time". The link shows where I'm currently playing around. Wordpress with a few small plugins and an nginx caching front.

Bitrot

Got me too. My old blog software probably won't be able to survive unchanged. Old Python version (2.3), old (very old) Django (0.91), old PsycoPG driver (1.0), old PostgreSQL (7.4) and all of that on an old Debian (a wild mix of various versions with backports and custom programs and several failed upgrade attempts). Argh.

Well, I'm still torn between "rewriting" and "throwing away". The latter has the charm that I won't have to carry all that junk around anymore. And honestly, nothing particularly interesting ever happened on my blog anyway. Maybe I can set up a wget mirror beforehand and dump the whole thing somewhere statically, as an archive.

Rewriting also has a lot of charm, but converting thousands of old entries (over 4000 articles and over 4000 links, plus almost 200 images) from 8 years (first entry on November 3, 2002) doesn't sound like fun. And probably thousands of the links are outdated and obsolete anyway.

No idea what I'm going to do, maybe I'll try to bring the Metaeule to the new box first, where I only have the problem that PHP4 is no longer in the Ubuntu repository for 10.04 and I therefore have to force the owl to PHP5 (and that with code based on Wordpress 1.5 - I must really be crazy).

Or I try to install an old Debian with the packages used at that time - the box doesn't run in the front, but behind other machines, so the hacking risk is rather low at that point. The Metaeule of course also has a few thousand posts in the archive (only 8291, that's almost nothing), but if I can keep the old software running (some security patches have been added over time, so it can actually continue to potter along), I don't necessarily have to tackle it.

Somehow, the internet was also such a really bad idea ...

Questions and Answers about the Health Reform | tagesschau.de

Questions and Answers about the Health Reform | tagesschau.de - I find it quite astonishing that the politicians in Berlin still have to engage in "hard negotiations" to decide how much the contributors can be fleeced. The fact that the negotiations no longer discuss savings on doctors' fees, hospital costs, and drug prices is, however, not surprising. The pretended saber-rattling by the Federal Health Administrator is just a show for the media.

Kilim

Kilim - stumbled upon this while browsing the Orc documentation, a microthread library for Java.

Orc Language

Orc Language - haven't read any of this yet, but it looks quite interesting. The core is Cor, a functional language without side effects, and on top of that Orc, which is used to orchestrate services in distributed systems. All of this in a quite appealing, compact syntax on the JVM. Could definitely take a look at it as an alternative to Scala and Clojure, with Java being integrated as an external service, thus allowing quite simple construction of distributed systems where parts are implemented in Java. Reminds me in many points strongly of the ideas of Erlang (generally assume a distributed system, but still keep parts local for performance reasons), but I find the syntax much more pleasant. And with the JVM a much more widespread VM than Erlang's BEAM.

Twisted Orchestration Language in Launchpad

Twisted Orchestration Language in Launchpad - and someone has ported the Orc combinators to Python, using Twisted. However, I personally find Twisted rather disgusting to program, but to each their own ...

Fat Cat Software - iPhoto Library Manager

Fat Cat Software - iPhoto Library Manager - since I was stupid enough to create a photo book on a different Mac than usual (well, the usual one was always busy), I guess I have to check this out to see if I can merge my books onto a single machine. It's a shame that Apple doesn't offer any merge function in iPhoto. With a notebook and a desktop, you quickly end up with separate libraries. If Lightroom supported book printing, I would have left iPhoto long ago. It's all a bit unsatisfactory.

Interactive Fabrication » Beautiful Modeler

Interactive Fabrication » Beautiful Modeler - wow, that is exceptionally cool.

The V4Z80P – A Z80 Based Laptop @ Retroleum

The V4Z80P – A Z80 Based Laptop @ Retroleum - someone not only builds their own computer with their own system, but it's also a laptop. Or something similar, at least.

Tornado Web Server Documentation

Tornado Web Server Documentation - I should really take a closer look at Tornado. I just built a web service for a side project using web.py, which was surprisingly simple (and dirty). Tornado is based on a very similar concept, throws in Django-like templates, and also offers a good asynchronous server and support for asynchronous sockets and HTTP requests. Could be a good alternative for web services that require few resources.

Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs

Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs - and Oracle begins to try to cash in on Java. If it works, Java could soon be in a similar situation to .NET: the free implementations lag behind the scope of the commercial ones. What this means for alternative languages on the JVM remains to be seen - but it will certainly cause some problems. However, the JVM world is large enough and equipped with sufficient alternatives, and Oracle is not Microsoft. Therefore, this could all just be a storm in a teacup and at most affect the typical Oracle victims.