Archive 22.1.2010 - 4.2.2010

collision detection: Molecular secrets of the "iron-plated snail" - iron-plated snails that live in hydrothermal vents 3 kilometers below the ocean surface. Steampunk snails?

mongoengine - Python API for accessing MongoDB with a structure similar to Django ORM.

BookmarksExtension - Mercurial - Mercurial always has surprises in store with its extensions. Bookmarks are nice for quick small maintenance fixes for which you don't want to set up your own repository, but also don't want to use an in-repository branch (because this makes the history overly complex).

Court: E-mail cease and desist letters are admissible - every time a post starts with "The Hamburg Regional Court," I already know there's nonsense again from the technically most incompetent authority among the regional courts. How good that there are still higher instances that don't fall for such nonsense quite as often. The cease and desist lawyers will certainly be pleased that they will soon only need to write to outdated email addresses or wherever - it doesn't matter, it's delivered anyway ...

InfiniDB 1.0.2: Analytical Database Engine for Data Mining - Golem.de - hmm, based on MySQL - I don't know if I should consider this a recommendation or a deterrent. On the other hand, a DB specifically for data mining-like query profiles would sometimes be useful - so I should try it out.

Pollution in 1/8 | RIPE Labs - 1/8 and 27/8 are now normal IP addresses - and there are conflicts with people who specifically used 1/8 for various things because it has been "unallocated" since 1981 ...

Time Capsule Memorial Register - hmm, will I have to list my TimeCapsule there someday? I still have one from the first generation ...

homebrew - GitHub - new package manager for Unix software on OS X. A few interesting approaches, unlike Fink and MacPorts (I usually prefer the latter) it builds on already installed tools and libraries and therefore does not install half the internet if you only need a small tool. However, it currently has almost no support for dependencies, and the selection of packages is still quite narrow. And the result is really just self-compiled tools with a bit of link management around them.

The Definitive Guide to Jython — Jython Book v0.91 documentation - it is what it says on the tin. Refers to Jython 2.5.1 and is also available as (updated with additional content, the open source version of the book is not yet fully updated) dead tree from APress.

CLiki : FirstStepsWithAsdfAndAsdfInstall - since asdf and asdf-install are anything but intuitive, here's a link to a tutorial

HintsForAsdfAndOpenmcl – Clozure CL - and this is how you generally get asdf-install running on Clozure CL.

Alex Payne — On the iPad - "For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home."

Apple buys P.A. Semi chip designer, Intel says wha? - because the other day at the Stammtisch the discussion was whether Apple really designed the A4 in the iPad themselves: in 2008 they bought a chip design foundry whose CEO was one of the StrongArm architects ...

AppScale, an OpenSource GAE implementation - an interesting project that mimics the Google App Engine API as an open source solution for self-hosting.

Clozure CL - not linked for the first time, but the current 1.4 distribution has become really nice by now, there are the first IDE tools (Apropos, Listener, Inspector, Editor) in a usable form and the Cocoa framework and the ObjC bridge are also quite mature. Furthermore, it is one of the fastest starting Lisps for the Mac. Offers nice possibilities to play around with OS X APIs.

Eucalyptus Community - and here is a project that emulates the AWS APIs (EC2, S3, and EBS). Interesting if you build AWS-hosted systems and later want to switch to your own systems. The cloud is quite nice, but you should have an exit strategy in case the provider goes under. Doesn't happen? Tell that to the potential customers of the SUN Cloud solution, which is currently being shredded by Oracle ...

Minimum Wage Ruling: Postal Service Provider PIN Wants to Lower Wages | tagesschau.de - great how the entrepreneurs immediately reach into the pockets of their already poorly paid employees. Somehow, the new swimming pool has to be paid for. Tariff-secured 6.50 in the East and 7.50 in the West? That's not security, that's an insult. For such an hourly rate, the entrepreneur assholes wouldn't even say good morning. So much for the social responsibility of entrepreneurs - the next time Merkel talks about it, remind her how willingly employees are ripped off by these supposedly social employers.

Apple - iPad - Technical specifications and accessories for iPad. - two months in which the tech "experts" can write their fingers off.

denkspuren: Factor @ Heilbronn University - someone has used Factor as a programming language in university courses and seems quite impressed. I myself also like Factor - in a way, the Factor-IDE gives off that old Lisp machine vibe and the language is just nicely compact. However, I often notice that when I play around with it, I end up spending a lot of time finding the right abstractions - there are just mountains of included code and while the documentation is good, there's a bit of a lack of tutorials on how to use the code. Best practices and cookbooks would be in demand. Factor is still fun, though.

Mainz: Brüderle no longer a state party congress delegate - funny, the FDP. Accidentally not electing a federal minister as a state delegate anymore. Oops, and he's gone. I believe something like this can really only happen to the FDP.

django-extensions - very useful tools for Django that plug into the manage. For example, a diff for SQL.

Introducing Bibble 5 - don't forget the old acquaintances. Bibble 5 is also available in a Linux version and Bibble 5 also has Asset Management (which LightZone lacks). Major disadvantage of Bibble: they refuse to implement DNG with, in my opinion, rather silly arguments ("we don't want to work with Adobe-converted files and explain why the results look different from those from original RAW"). This leads to cameras with direct DNG output (Ricoh, Leica) not being supported and my converted old formats from the Kodak DCS 520, which has not been available for many years, also not being supported. Quite stupid, because otherwise it is quite close to Lightroom in structure.

kbarni's bibble plugins - Plugins - various plugins for Bibble, some of which are free. If I actually get involved with Bibble, this would certainly also be an important point.

LightZone « lightcrafts - stumbled upon it by chance, nice image editing software for RAW photos. Written in Java, therefore available on all platforms (Windows, MacOS X and Linux). No usable software for managing the image archive included - this has to be realized externally - but images are edited non-destructively, results saved in JPG files (including the stack of applied tools). All in all, it looks quite nice and could be an alternative to LightRoom if I find a usable image archive software for Linux (at least a more usable one than I have so far - unfortunately, Picasa does not support Panasonic-RAW in the Linux version).

Scala 2.8.0 Beta 1 | The Scala Programming Language - Scala is also getting ready for the next release. The extensions and changes sound quite good - and the impact on existing sources seems to be low.

Carl Bildt: Tear Down Digital Walls - the fact that Sweden is often cited as a model in Germany for successful internet filtering and the fact that the US is exerting massive pressure to make online gambling inaccessible to Americans, well, let's just leave that aside for now. It's much easier to talk about authoritarian governments and sweep one's own internet censorship efforts under the rug. Therefore, the German government with its current censorship affinity will probably not feel addressed either.

fastutil - sometimes certainly quite practical, Collections for Java that are based on primitive types and implement these Collections in a space- and performance-efficient manner. So for example something like an array of bytes. Or a map of strings to booleans. The library has over 1000 such combinations ready ...

Have you seen the old men | Spreeblick - Worth reading on how our society and politics deal with poverty.

Christopher Blizzard · HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web - more about the licensing issues with H264

IronPython in Action: Front Page - didn't even notice, there is already a book about IronPython, the version of Python that runs in Microsoft's .NET environment. Could be interesting for some company projects, especially since there have already been initial successes of Django on IronPython as early as 2008 ...

Censorship in the name of youth protection: Statement on the Interstate Treaty on Youth Media Protection - Working Group against Internet Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) - and once again, politics is turning the screw and assuming that well-meant equals well-done. What is in the pipeline would be a found feeding ground for informers and warning lawyers, but would have nothing to do with youth protection at all.

All nuclear power plants are apparently supposed to stay online for now - and the haggling and lying continues. Because, the energy monopolists with their billion-dollar profits must be given even more money - and under no circumstances can they be burdened with the decommissioning of reactors built at the taxpayers' expense, because then they would actually have to invest some of their own money for the first time! Where would we end up!

annalist - "We will block" - "On the 'freedom of opinion' of the Nazis: I do not see an ideology that not only disregards human rights but openly contradicts them as an 'opinion' that is protected by human rights. Nazi ideology is not an opinion but a crime." - but our legal state sees it differently, of course, and that's why the party headquarters of the Left in Saxony are searched and deputies and minor poster hangers are arrested. Because, it's clear, of course, that ideologies that dehumanize people must naturally be tolerated, but the expression of opinion against such brown filth is naturally not covered by the constitution. After all, they are the really bad left-wing extremists!

Armin Maiwald turns 70 - and I'd like to congratulate him, the co-inventor of the show with the mouse!

Facebook Gives Harman His Name Back, Apologizes - looks like they actually did the right thing this time ...

High-Level Virtual Machine (HLVM) - interesting project for a virtual machine. Written in OCaml.

michaelv.org - looks like Windows 3.1 and has a series of classic Windows programs. But everything is tinkered in JavaScript. Yes, there is a DOS prompt. And a web browser. And all sorts of other things. Just click around.

Trellis - Library for event-driven programming in Python. The idea is to formulate rules instead of handcrafted callbacks that are applied to objects and automatically executed when corresponding changes occur. The system ensures a clean separation of these events, so that no deadlocks occur.

Closure Compiler - actually more of a JavaScript optimizer than a compiler - it removes unnecessary parts, compacts the code, cleans up some slow things and replaces them with more efficient variants and also provides some static tests on the JavaScript code. Once blogged about for company projects.

django-history-tables - could be interesting for a project at the company, there is also the requirement for a history of data changes.

EZ430-Chronos - Texas Instruments Embedded Processors Wiki - technical details about the portable embedded system from TI.

Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International - well, Facebook fails again with high-grade nonsense and user mockery. I'm just curious when my RFC1437 vanity URL thing will disappear ... (I only use Facebook as a super-aggregator for my various outposts and even then only rather incidentally - I have the gigantic amount of a total of 2 friends!)

How to create offline webapps on the iPhone - terrible page layout, but interesting documentation on how to build web applications for the iPhone that work offline thanks to the HTML5 Application Cache. After I thought for a moment about whether I should buy such a TI watch, and got annoyed that it doesn't exist as a pocket watch version, I was able to think clearly again and remembered my iPhone ... (sometimes the obvious is too obvious)

Inheritance Patterns in JavaScript - interesting article about which class and inheritance strategy to prefer in JavaScript. Mainly interesting for JavaScript framework hackers, as for the others, a technique will usually have been chosen by the frameworks.

Syntensity - looks interesting, something like an open-source counterpart to Unity 3D. Currently no Mac client, but with open source the chances are quite high that something will come.

TI hits home run with Chronos sportswatch wireless dev kit - that's interesting. A wristwatch to hack - wireless, accelerometer, pressure and altitude sensors, LCD display, temperature sensor, and a developer kit and tools (hardware tools in this case). And also affordable (50 dollars for the watch!). So if you want to tinker with a small embedded system and always have it with you, why not take a wristwatch?

Well, I'm Back: Video, Freedom And Mozilla - why Firefox does not include support for H264. I personally think it would be better to use the technically available codecs of the installed system and leave it up to the user which codecs they want to have. I do understand Mozilla's argumentative position on this matter, but I think it could be rather negative for the spread of Firefox in this case - or in the long run could lead to a fork of Firefox and Firefox+OS codecs. His arguments about "pushes software freedom issues from the browser to the platform" are, in my opinion, nonsense - because he himself writes about the Flash video fallback, which requires a non-free Flash plugin ...

A Postfunctional Language - recently there have been more discussions about whether Scala is really a functional language. Here are the statements on this topic from the creator of Scala himself, Martin Odersky.

Export ban for useless 'bomb detector' - useless, dowsing rods against bombs. That really brings so much - and they only now realize that these things don't have batteries? I mean, what do the people who bought this junk and paid millions for it have in their heads? Water? You test bomb detectors to see if they really work in practice and only then buy the large batch.

Giant Knife 16999 Wenger Swiss Army Knife - umm. So something like a Swiss officer's two-handed sword or so ...