AdBlock for Safari - with Safari 5 you can now block ads. In this case, a Chrome extension has been ported to Safari - apparently they are quite similar (both are based on JS + HTML5 as technology).
Archive 5.5.2010 - 9.6.2010
In the eye of the law — Der Freitag - yeah, yeah, the state would never create unauthorized data collections, the state simply legalizes the nonsense it produces.
Racket Released - PLT Scheme has a new name and a new release. And is still the coolest Scheme environment.
Internettelefonie: iPhone: Telekom threatens Skype users - WirtschaftsWoche - oh yes, our great telecommunications companies. Totally customer-oriented.
HDR Test
HDR Test
Just a simple test with HDRTist, a free software for the Mac for HDR photography. Individual images were 7 JPG images in 2/3 aperture steps, taken handheld with the Panasonic GF1. What stands out: HDRTist aligns the images correctly but keeps the edge in the image file (clearly visible at the bottom and left). You should therefore crop again after the HDR processing (and due to the inevitable position changes in handheld series recordings, plan for some edge in the recording). Surprisingly, the tone mapping is very natural and in small comparisons the combination and tone mapping are much more pleasing than with commercial alternatives that I have tested.
HDRtist "HDR Software will never be the same" - Ohanaware - the software I used for the HDR test. No adjustment options beyond simple calculation strengths for the individual images. But the result pleases me and looks quite natural.
kenkeiter's ryfi - blogged for later. A Ruby server that can work with EyeFi cards and enables you to do more with photos than just store them. With this, you could build automatic syncs to your own cloud or other fun stuff.
Creaceed - Hydra - I should check this out, as it has several tone-mapping algorithms and supports pixel mapping/morphing, so you don't necessarily have to work with a tripod (though of course you have to make compromises then). Additionally, it is available as a Lightroom plugin.
HDR PhotoStudio: HDR photo software, HDR merge & editing, BEF plug-in, realistic HDR imaging - and another software that focuses on correct color representation and not this silly pseudo-HDR look.
Plac: Parsing the Command Line the Easy Way - interesting library for parsing parameters for Python tools. Much more compact than other libraries. Parameters are automatically derived from defined functions using inspect.
Python Package Index : Baker 1.1 - and yet another alternative of a more declarative command line parser.
Aeracode :: On Django And Migrations - South core libraries may move to the Django core in the near future (possibly targeting Django 1.4). I approve. Having the basis for migrations already in the Django core would not only be helpful for migrations but also for projects that require higher dynamics in the data models - my current hack with sqldiff and some self-made code is just that: a hack. It's probably time to take a closer look at South (so far only briefly looked at it, but what I've seen I liked) and consider whether I should already now put my hack on a more powerful basis.
Mamiya announces RZ33 medium format camera - well, if I had 18,000 US dollars to burn, that would certainly be a charming way to do it. Mamiya's medium format optics are of the highest quality and the RZ series is a very solid system. Okay, the RB has even more charm, but packing so much digital technology into a mechanical device is only Leica. There have been digital backs that can be attached to the RZ for quite some time, but a completely integrated system is of course even more beautiful. Interesting that Mamiya, in times when medium format is moving more towards smaller systems (their own 6x4.5 system, Pentax with its announced digital system, Hasselblad with the Fuji cooperation H1), is once again building one of the really big ones. Great. Even if I won't have 18,000 US dollars to burn in the near to medium (and probably even distant) future ...
Oppugn.us: Where The Rants Go - Zed Shaw on Flash. Fuck, yeah.
HackageDB: berp-0.0.1 - someone is programming a Python 3 compiler and interpreter in Haskell. At least intellectually quite interesting.
Köhler resignation: Disbelief and regret - it's typical of him to resign because he is offended by the public reaction to his statements, and not because his public statement was at least grossly misleading or simply off the mark.
Fossil: Fossil Home Page - the author of SQLite, my preferred tool for everything that needs to store data locally, has also built his own distributed version control system (Ã la Mercurial or Git). And it comes with an integrated, distributed wiki and an integrated, distributed bug tracking system. Of course, the whole thing is based on SQLite as the backend for storing the data and has some interesting properties. Definitely worth a look, especially since its installation is nearly perfect: just copy a ready-made executable into the path, that's it. Yep, version control, wiki, bug tracking, CGI for web interface - all in a single executable. It's also compact. Impressive.
ikiwiki - and since I'm currently into bare-bones projects again: ikiwiki might be quite interesting, it calls itself a "Wiki Compiler". Essentially just a bunch of wiki pages in text files, managed with a versioning system and a tool that automatically produces static HTML. Plus a number of plugins with which you can make various extensions (among other things, it allows Markdown and also reStructured Text as wiki languages and has blogging plugins).
Bug 560738 – No Mac-style keyboard shortcuts - woah. Since November 2008, there has been an open bug in Tomboy (note-taking program for Linux, Windows, and Mac) that the Cmd+Anything hotkeys on the Mac all do not work (or sometimes at least limited for cut/copy/paste) ... somehow one might get the impression that Tomboy is not really widespread on the Mac ...
daemon 1.0 - the first of the usual suspects for Unix daemons with Python.
pyquery: a jquery-like library for python - definitely check it out, because this is something that has been bothering me for a long time, the libraries for accessing XML data in Python are somewhat primitive. And I really like jQuery, I find its access patterns simply extremely practical.
python-daemon 1.5.5 - and the second of the usual suspects (this one is almost official, at least it is oriented towards a PEP) for writing Unix daemons with Python.
Spring Python - no idea what it's worth, I haven't used Spring under Java so far (well, I hardly ever use Java anyway, at most the JVM occasionally), but you read a lot of positive comments about Spring. Here someone has transferred the ideas to Python - there's even a book about it. I don't know, however, whether a framework for a bondage-and-discipline language translates so well to a highly dynamic language like Python. But you could take a look at it in a quiet hour.
Turkmenbashi 1.0.0 - a library to write Unix daemons. Brings a few more features than the other usual suspects (daemon and python-daemon).
MY WORLD IS A LITTLE DARKER… - I don't often write obituaries here, but well, with Martin Gardner, a hero of my childhood has passed away. His mathematical games and puzzles were for me what new Batman or Spiderman comics were for other kids. Discovering an unknown issue of Spektrum in the city library with puzzles by him, or finding one of his books, was always a highlight.
Whack’em - if you get the chance to hear them: do it! That's super-groovy sound.
Federal Court of Justice: Green light for software patents - shit. Then we can probably soon bury the German software SMEs. Innovation has never come from the corners of the big stables, but they are the ones who are most likely to push through the patent procedures for their half-baked and only reheated broth. And the patent office will then drown and no longer keep up with the flood, just like in the USA - which will then again harm the actually innovative companies because their - legitimate - patent applications will take even longer.
Landis admits doping - when I read such confessions, I automatically wonder if the athlete wants to write a book. But the reaction from the UCI chief is quite amusing - the reputation of his sports association is completely ruined, and this is partly due to the very strange approach of the UCI against doping. And of course also because it seems that the entire cycling sport is just a rolling pharmacy. The fact that he now complains that an athlete has come clean is a clear sign of how seriously the UCI takes the fight against doping.
RFC1437 on the Road: Archive - hey, Tumblr has a new archive format, and I find it nice. In the last few months, Tumblr has proven to be a really fun photo blogging solution for me, especially because it allows title-free posts. Having to come up with a title for each photo has kept me from posting many times.
Waveboard – Google Wave Client for iPhone and Mac - I actually don't do anything with Google Wave, simply because so far (despite account) no opportunity has arisen, but the apps here - both for OS X desktops and iPhone (and I suspect in the long run also iPad) look quite nice.
AKW-Laufzeiten sollen ohne Bundesrat verlängert werden - wasn't that the Bundesgrüßaugust who was outraged just recently that the Constitutional Court is constantly being called upon? Did he really mean that nonsense seriously?
Clojure - datatypes - what I like about Clojure: pragmatic and compact solutions for typical programming problems. Clojure 1.2 will introduce the possibility of having better descriptions of data structures with functionalities defined on them. And not some monstrous construction like CLOS or other Lisp-OO extensions, but rather lean constructs that also fit well with the host environments (JVM and CLR). Looks quite interesting. The downside of all the changes in Clojure: books become outdated faster than they can be printed ...
Deutsche Bank fined for banned bets - but Uncle Ackermann said the Deutsche Bank had nothing to do with the financial crisis! He wouldn't have lied, would he!
Koch insists on cuts in the education sector - quite amusing, first the states demand more independence in education policy and then it's too expensive for them. Will someone ever tell the Union clowns that the NRW-CDU has particularly failed in education policy in the last election?
Köhler criticizes the litigiousness of German politicians - has the Federal August ever noticed how often such lawsuits have been successful recently? How does this fit with the alleged constitutional conformity that he attributes to majority decisions? The fact is that some of the biggest active enemies of the constitution are currently sitting in the Bundestag. To see this, one only has to read the reasons given by the Federal Constitutional Court in some of its recent decisions.
Rubinius : Use Rubyâ„¢ - I'm not a big Ruby fan, but Rubinius (Ruby-in-mostly-Ruby) has been released as version 1.0. And the various projects to bring Ruby to a mostly Ruby-based platform with LLVM underneath still make me envious. I would love to have something like that for Python ... (yes, I know Unladen Swallow and PyPy - but both are still miles away from a serious version, unfortunately)
Street View: Google eavesdropped on open WLANs - that's exactly the problem with Streetview. Not in the pure photos. But in the entire program - the integration of various things in a large-scale scan. The combination with all the databases that Google already has. The merging of various information sources, purely from the geek's perspective as "wow, hey, look at all the stuff we've got, now let's just pull out everything we can". Or put another way: just imagine, the cars didn't belong to Google, but to the state. And the program, the databases and the information gathering frenzy wasn't a company in America, but our state. Would the accumulation of information and data then appeal to you as much as Streetview? If it were the state, at least there would be the appearance of democratic control over this gigantic database.
alienscience's leiningen-war - interesting plugin for Leiningen, the build tool in and for Clojure. Provides commands that quickly and easily generate .war files, which can be used for deployment to the Google App Engine, for example.
hiredman's lein-gae - Documentation is practically non-existent, but it only provides a simple command that prepares the war structure for a Google AppEngine project and adjusts the project.clj. Another way to build Clojure programs for the AppEngine.
Licenser's lein-search - and a small plugin that brings the search for modules and their versions to the (Leiningen) command line.
sethtrain's beget - alternatively to leiningen-war, you could also use this base project and simply adapt it. The Google AppEngine Tools are also fetched as a dependency here.
NRW has voted - State Election 2010 - so if you want to make me happy in Düsseldorf: whether red-green or red-red-green, just make sure that Rüttgers' face appears in the news only with the caption "former Prime Minister of NRW," okay? Leave any black-green games to others and grand coalitions are just totally out of fashion at the moment.
Mac OS X on netbooks | myMacNetbook.com - everything about Hackintoshs. Since Apple still doesn't deliver a decent subnotebook with a matte display, and my little Asus has a somewhat small display, keep an eye on it.
Bishop Walter Mixa: Mixa suspected of sexual abuse - were the biggest critics of the elephants once elephants themselves?
Family addition: Neanderthals related to humans - that explains a lot. For example, the conservatives.
Dow Falls in High-Speed Drop - WSJ.com - "Several market watchers said they heard a major firm may have accidentally released an errant program, where a trader accidentally placed an order to sell $16 billion, instead of $16 million, worth of e-minis, the futures contracts tied to equity indexes." - holy cow ...
What iPads Did To My Family - Chuck's Blog - doesn't really need much commentary. In the whole discussion about the iPad, many people forget that creative work with a computer doesn't necessarily mean programming. Whether we programmers like it or not, the devices that prevail are determined by the users - and we are only a small part of them. And the restrictions that Apple imposes on its iPhone and iPad devices primarily affect programmers and much less the users. Is that problematic? Maybe. However, I can't see the downfall of Western culture, which some people proclaim, in a device that makes computing more accessible.
Ceph: A Linux petabyte-scale distributed file system - too bad we don't need a distributed cluster file system in the company anymore because of the big NetApp - this sounds really interesting and looks like it actually addresses the weaknesses of previous solutions.
Marak's JSLINQ at master - GitHub - a nice small JavaScript library that offers a query language for JSON data. It is oriented towards Microsoft's LINQ, but currently only has simple queries implemented. Nevertheless, it might be quite interesting to make JavaScript code more flexible and readable when working with larger amounts of JSON data.