Archive 2.9.2009 - 29.9.2009

Dropbox iPhone App is out - and the application seems pretty well suited to what I would like to do with the Dropbox on the go. Pretty cool.

Insect sushi: creepy crawly cuisine - "However, he admits that not all insects make good cuisine. He also advises anyone trying his cockroach recipes not to think about what they are eating"

jQuery Tools: The missing UI library for the Web « Noupe - interesting lib for simple effects in JavaScript (Tabs, Scrollables, Popups).

lsyncd - could be quite nice for some purposes. Basically a live-rsync - for example, for automatically distributing config files in our production cluster, it might be quite good, as you no longer have to wait for the cronjobs.

Swarm - Concurrency with Scala Continuations - Scala 2.8 sounds increasingly interesting. Portable continuations are essentially type-safe execution states bundled and serialized, so that they can be sent over lines. Highly interesting for creating distributed applications - e.g. saving the session in the browser instead of in the database - but certainly there are also one or two security issues lurking there (serialized objects can also be deserialized and manipulated externally). Exciting to see what could come in that area.

Webber - saw the link on the shockwave. Sounds interesting and looks quite Pythonic.

Welcome To Tahoe-LAFS - an interesting project for truly secure online storage (secure in the sense that "none of the providers can mess with the data or read it").

The Twins and the Blechgang - no, I'm not afraid of anything. They are just from here!

The Utopia Timor (Folding Bike) - and this is also an option, albeit significantly more expensive - but the fully enclosed chain is of course a nice argument. Moreover, you can pull it along behind you like a rolling suitcase.

The Dahon Mµ Folding Bikes 20 Inch - Dahon Mµ XL Light, Mµ P8 Sport, Mµ P24 TR Light, Mµ Uno, Mµ EX - wow, especially the Mµ Ex looks incredibly good and the folding process is convincing. Something like this could be pretty great for my favorite activity - traveling by train to cities and exploring them.

Official Google Blog: Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more - and this is then the worst Picasa-for-Mac release I have seen in a long time. When adding folders, the thing kept crashing and it doesn't even find all the folders in subfolders and completely ignores some, the sorting into the flat folder display is completely incomprehensible and chaotic, and sometimes the thing just quits when you look at it. Sure, the face search is cute (though I rarely photograph people, so it doesn't really help me much), but it consumes resources endlessly during import.

Panasonic Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH Lens Review - hello upcoming Christmas bonus, meet your purpose. Haven't been this excited about a piece of glass in a long time.

Photic sneeze reflex - I knew it existed!

This Rocketship Will Crash - Finding blogs like this by chance makes the internet interesting.

Weird New Ghostshark Found; Male Has Sex Organ on Head - sounds like a headline from the Bild newspaper, but is actually just a very strange fish from an equally strange group of fish species.

CAIR - Content Aware Image Resizer - quite cool technology, all of it!

Diesel: How Python Does Comet - could be interesting for a few projects, looks very Pythonic compared to many other similar projects.

Federal Environment Agency warns about RFID tags in trash - when you think about the resources wasted on this crap, it really makes you sick. Copper is getting more expensive due to wasteful use, and we have nothing better to do than to blow it on trash like RFID tags ...

Neat Graphics with Scala Processin - exactly what you need to play around with Scala, a Processing version in Scala instead of Java, but with the entire graphics API.

Google Releases A Nuke. Apple Won’t Win This Fight. - ok, that's just Techcrunch, and their "quality" isn't even good enough as toilet paper (it's just virtual) - but if Google really has the screenshot of the rejection and publishes it, I could imagine that some people in higher positions at Apple will lose their jobs. As arrogant as Apple behaves in the AppStore, they would deserve to get a slap in the face there.

lionet: Erlang, Yaws, and the deadly Tornado - very interesting comparison, as Erlang is often presented as scalable, but it is not often examined as a whole. Yucan and Misultin mentioned later in the article sound very interesting for some purposes, as scalability through the Erlang runtime becomes even easier - and process communication is simply easier to implement than with isolated Python processes. On the other hand, Python is a known quantity for me, so Tornado will certainly find its way into my toolbox.

Georg Bauer on Facebook - yes, I know, data kraken. And they make money with my content anyway. Just like Google. And Flickr. And Xing. And all the other web services. And they are all time wasters too. But it's still a practical super-aggregator for various things I do. And well, you have to be social today to be someone, right?

Online Latin Dictionary - no questions asked. I just needed it right now.

Coryell Auger Sample Trio - heard today at the Hot Jazz Club. Woah. Groovy. Super-groovy.

PubSubHubbub is a Lot Easier Than It Sounds - for about 20 seconds I considered integrating this into my software. Until I realized I couldn't care less when the posts on my blog arrive with someone. I think I'm getting old ...

The Most Useful Rope Knots for the Average Person to Know - exactly what it says on the tin. Practical rope knots and tips on how to tie them and what they're for.

No tethering for first-generation iPhone customers - you can also put it more simply: T-Mobile, a bunch of assholes. Someday, T-Mobile will be as customer-unfriendly as airlines. And that's saying something. My iPhone contract has no exclusion clause regarding tethering - but T-Mobile wants to unilaterally redefine my contract.

Termination at abgeordnetenwatch.de due to NPD - "Democracy is difficult, let's go shopping". Sorry, I am the last person to find the brown filth acceptable in any way, but unfortunately it is still a permitted party. But you may call them Nazis. So please do that, instead of pissing off and retreating into your shell. If the smarter one always gives in, the world will eventually be ruled by idiots.

libdispatch - fast interesting I find the Dispatch Library, but even more interesting are the blocks sources released simultaneously for C (basically something like closures in real programming languages).

FriendFeed's Real-Time Web Framework for Python - actually Facebook's. It's impressively powerful. Could be useful at some point.

Hurtigruten 2009 with the MS Lofoten once again - as promised, here is the better album with larger pictures and without Flash. These are the same pictures as on the other link.

Atomkraft- Beweise für Manipulation in Sachen Gorleben? - yeah, yeah, but of course everything is fine in Gorleben and there is no danger and anyway, why are we all getting so worked up. It's just all corrupt and embellished and lied about. Business as usual.

Car engines to serve as "home power plants" - ok, still fossil fuel, but at least an efficient use of it. As a concept certainly interesting, albeit not entirely without problems.

billy's band-ICM - because I just stumbled upon it and you can never have enough Billy's Band. Click, listen, and be happy.

Hurtigruten 2009 with the MS Lofoten - a small Flash gallery of pictures I took during the trip. Only small image sizes, because it already took hours to upload to MobileMe. MobileMe sucks. I'll probably finish another gallery and put it somewhere else (likely Dropbox again, it's somehow much nicer), also without Flash (that was just a test of the Lightroom gallery stuff) and with larger pictures.

Leica M9 Hands-on Preview: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - well, it does have the full-frame sensor to itself and still has an acceptable size. However, I'm not so sure anymore that full-frame sensors are really the ultimate solution. I mean, realistically speaking: the 35mm format that we so highly praise today was just an emergency format at its inception, not really comparable to the more common roll film and large format cameras of the time. So what is really "full-frame"? Just because Oskar Barnack halved a 70mm film and used it for his compact camera? And whether I would buy a manual focus camera today is rather doubtful - which has less to do with the quality of an M (I have always preferred the split-rangefinder - I still have my M6), but more to do with the performance of my eyes (which are definitely more affected by quality loss over time than my cameras).

Leica X1 and brief hands-on - well, the look is good, but whether this "quick through many automatic functions" really means quick in the sense of an M or just sluggish in the sense of an M8, that remains to be seen. And without sample images, you can't say anything, because after all, it's about the images that come out at the end. A price is not yet revealed, which would probably have a deterrent effect. Let's see what comes in January.

Pressflow makes Drupal scale - hmm, a fork of Drupal with a special focus on scalability. Unfortunately, there is a restriction to MySQL - I would have preferred PostgreSQL. But the approach of building a fork with a special focus on scalability is commendable. Although Drupal itself could also achieve this (and aims to do so from version 7 onwards).

Varnish - had I already heard of that? No idea, doesn't matter, sounds very interesting. A reverse proxy with powerful configuration and edge side includes (with which you can mix things at the proxy level). This could be very interesting at work - we mostly use non-caching Apache for such purposes, varnish could solve a lot for which we always have to build wild mod perl or mod python hacks or dive into Apache configuration orgies.

Mythryl - interesting fork of SML/NJ for practical use under Linux 32bit.

Foldy - bicycling.com - simply great. Should I get a folding bike?

Leaked! Leica M9 - Leica is going digital again, a bit. The rumored specs sound good, but the M8 didn't have the problem of the cropped sensor, but the problem of the sensor in general, and the slow handling (startup times of 2 seconds on an M-Leica? Hello? Really?). Oh, and the problem of the purchase resistance of 4500 Euros ... (the X1 sounds like it might be something, but the price will surely be unrealistically high there as well). Sorry, Leica, too late. I think, with the Panasonic Micro-4/3 I have much more fun for much less money. And that they can do it, the GH1 has proven to me in Norway deployment.

Google App Engine Blog: App Engine SDK 1.2.5 released for Python and Java, now with XMPP support - that's interesting, XMPP in App Engine. With that, you should be able to build a lot of nice tools. Gradually, the external connectivity of AppEngine is becoming quite usable.

Phone Amego Help - an interesting little tool that allows you to make and answer/reject phone calls on your mobile via Bluetooth on your computer. Okay, I belong to the "nobody calls me" class of iPhone users (I hardly use it for anything other than the internet), so it's probably not very interesting for me.

Post cuts 560 jobs due to Arcandor insolvency - this clearly shows that something is seriously wrong in our economic world. Companies and CEOs claim entrepreneurial risk for themselves - but in reality, it is now 100% borne by the employees. A large company like the Post loses a major customer and immediately jobs are cut as a result. Instead of finding new deployment opportunities and new customers for the Post, the risk of contract negotiations between Arcandor and Post is shifted onto the employees. However, they do not receive a single cent more on their paycheck for the risk they bear. What exactly do people like ex-Post CEO Zumwinkel use to justify their high salaries? This certainly has nothing to do with a social market economy.

Booting Windows XP From An External Drive - oh man, this is really crap what Windows offers. I would like to move the 20G partition for Bootcamp to an external drive since I hardly ever use XP anyway. But it's almost easier to give the MBP a larger drive than to jump through these silly hoops to get XP on a USB drive ...

Panasonic DMC-GF1 Hands on Preview - "we got our hands on what Panasonic hopes will be the camera to convince those put off by the limitations of the Olympus E-P1." - if this is really it, it would be a hit. Because the E-P1 was already close, just too slow. And the AF was too bad. And the fact that there should be an optional EVF is good - I still find cameras best at the eye.

Panasonic Leica 45mm F2.8 Macro lens with OIS - okay, that sounds like it should eventually end up in my camera bag! A really cute macro lens would be something nice on the GH1.

Panasonic unveils DMC-GF1 Micro four-thirds camera - and my bet on buying the GH1 seems to be paying off. This could be the perfect second body, with the 20mm pancake for in the jacket pocket. I think I'll have a Canon setup to sell sometime next year ...

Set newer portable Macs' sleep mode - because I've looked it up again and again. My MBP strangely doesn't go into Deep Sleep, as far as I can tell - when the battery is empty, the RAM is gone, even though I'm in Mode 3. Hmm. I could just as well switch to Mode 0, delete the Sleep Image, and use the 2 GB for something else ...