HATTLER - because I just heard him at the harbor festival. Brilliant sound. Definitely worth it, absolutely the main act of this year's harbor festival.
Archive 8.4.2009 - 13.6.2009
Kunst-Trifft-Kohl.de :: Sculptures in Allotments - Münster Kinderhaus Culture - if you're in Münster (until September), go and see it. I like such exhibition concepts - public space as exhibition space and integration of life and art. Much more fun than walking around in sterile museum halls.
European elections: Debacle for the SPD - to the SPD's fools: if you ever come up with the innovative idea of actually running a European election campaign for the European elections, you might accidentally get a few votes. But by now, one gets the feeling that you don't even want any votes. Scared of the possible responsibility? Okay, you don't really have much left to lose anyway ...
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation - I actually only know Peter Norvig as a Lisp hacker and Google search guru.
The speed, size and dependability of programming languages - a fascinating analysis of various programming languages based on statistical evaluations of their characteristics and metrics in a benchmark competition. So not a direct analysis of the benchmark and individual performance, but a much more meaningful analysis of the characteristics of the languages derived from the benchmarks.
AK deletes 60 child porn sites in 12 hours - and why can't our Ursula do that?
bobo v0.2 documentation - wow! Bobo is back!
Reading and Writing to Excel Spreadsheets in Python - if you ever have to interface with the devil's tools.
Roland Schulz: SSH ProxyCommand without netcat - very nice hack on how to get over ssh gateways without netcat and without intermediate stops.
The Online Photographer: Sigma DP2 Review - well, the DP-2 is not what I'm looking for either. Maybe that will be the upcoming Olympus.
iSqueak - and here is the development environment with which you can program the iPhone in Smalltalk.
Mobile Wiki Server - cool thing, a Wiki server created in Seaside and Squeak (Smalltalk) that runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch and allows, for example, local editing or remote editing from the desktop. I doubt that a web server on the iPhone really makes much sense, but it's always funny.
Geeking out with Lisp Flavoured Erlang - I really need to finally deal with Lisp Flavoured Erlang.
Nanojit - compact library for native code generation. Used in Tamarin and SpiderMonkey.
pickled-object-database - a simple small object database based on the Pickle API and SQLite. Looks quite interesting, reminds me quite a bit of Wood, a similar object database for Common Lisp.
Whither Eucalyptus? - Apple continues to mess around with the AppStore. Now they are refusing to approve an eBook application because you can (if you explicitly search for it and actively download it) read the Kama Sutra with it. How stupid is that? Shouldn't they maybe give the reviewer, who seems to be so compulsively fixated on the Kama Sutra, a round with the house psychiatrist?
Lamson: Lamson The Python SMTP Server - interesting project, especially if you plan to build on email as an interface.
Gluster - interesting cluster filesystem under free license.
Nimrod Programming Language - interesting Python variant with explicit support for parse trees (and thus macro capabilities at the level of Lisp) but native code compilation.
SCO should be liquidated - will we actually not get any more silly SCO vs. Linux stories in the foreseeable future? Amazing!
Animeeple Software - Animation software with animation market and seemingly good support for Second Life.
Federal incompetence and wobbly dachshund - "In view of the 'numerous violations of intellectual property on the Internet', the minister also wondered whether, for example, stronger regulation of the network is necessary. This will certainly 'occupy politics for the next few years', what will follow from the planned blocks of child pornographic pages 'will follow', she did not completely rule out an expansion to illegal offers of protected works" - oh, first she warned about the evil Zensursula, and now she is already tipping over in exactly the direction she warned about. What was that about the desires that are awakened? They seem to have been awakened in her. As could generally be expected from the prolethicians in Berlin.
Search of forum operator's home unlawful - "The mere fact that third parties may offer links to pirated copies in an internet forum does not yet justify a search of the operator of this forum." - says the Federal Constitutional Court. Which is also logical, forums are usually not operated from home computers, but from servers. But apparently some of the overzealous "law enforcers" still don't understand this ... (and again, why does the Federal Constitutional Court constantly have to protect us from things that should be clear to any half-witted person?)
MonoDevelop on MacOS X - is though Microsoft junk, and the executable programs are called .exe, but at least there are a few interesting programming languages under Mono that you can now also meaningfully try out under OS X.
Murdoch will behind the paywall - well, that's okay, then his trash will be read less. But his whining, "the times of the current Internet are soon over" is really cute. Of course it is - as the term "current" already says. But does the fool really believe that the future Internet will actually develop into his backward understanding of the world?
Packet Garden - a nice graphical toy that generates virtual landscapes from network traffic data. And there's also the Python source code, so you can learn about network programming and Python at the same time.
Hg-Git Mercurial Plugin - interesting for various reasons, not least the fact that Mercurial runs significantly better on Windows than Git.
New Survey Suggests Modern Humans Originated in Southwest Africa - "Dr. Tishkoff’s team has also calculated the exit point from which a small human group — maybe a single tribal band of 150 people — left Africa some 50,000 years ago and populated the rest of the world. The region is near the midpoint of the African coast of the Red Sea."
Axiotron Modbook - does anyone have 2000 EUR to spare for me? This thing could be pretty awesome with something like Blender for casual sculpting sessions in the comfy chair.
Is blender really equal to the competition? - good high-level comparison (so nothing for feature counters) based on the author's personal experiences.
Von der Leyen: Only skilled users can bypass blocks - so everyone except politicians.
Surveillance mania and internet censorship - "If the law comes into force as planned, however, every internet user should carefully consider whether they still want to visit unknown web addresses. If one were to accidentally or provoked by malicious hints to a stop sign, then de facto a house search or worse would threaten. Staudigl also confirmed this: 'Whether and possibly who has committed an offense can regularly only be clarified through the subsequent criminal investigations.'" - because, after all, we live in a democratic legal state, not in a banana republic where the state can assume what it wants without control by the citizen and where citizens then simply feel the full force of the power apparatus due to technical proto-indicators. Or maybe not?
Vioxx maker Merck and Co drew up doctor hit list | The Australian - "AN international drug company made a hit list of doctors who had to be "neutralised" or discredited because they criticised the anti-arthritis drug the pharmaceutical giant produced."
E-Books: Publishers are blocking markets - this stinks. The next arrogant industry that doesn't give a damn about customer wishes. What use is the idiotic geographical limitation of the offer to me as a customer, if, for example, American authors are simply no longer available in the English original in Germany? Libri and Co. only sell the translations as eBooks.
Federal government wants to block internet access with access controls - I'm already looking forward to the first trojan, or the first XSS attack, which will then call up sites from the block list in the background. Or how about HTML emails that refer to images on blocked pages? You can definitely get a lot of suspects that way ...
Lactose intolerance - how lactose intolerance is distributed around the world. (because I just had a discussion about it)
Mothers Ruin Software: Suspicious Package - interesting tool to quickly take a look at installation packages with QuickLook without having to start them.
Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - oops. IBM must be in a bad mood now ...
Mac-Bot-Netz? - not that I would believe the nonsense about the "unassailable MacOS X" that some Apple disciples spread (Hello Apple - could we maybe get more detailed update descriptions beyond "improves compatibility and increases stability"? Thanks!), but would I necessarily believe a store that has always tried to sell strange products to Apple owners and has always tried to spread panic and purchases of its software with more than questionable press releases?
Tax-free Internet shopping may be at an end - compared to the chaos in the USA with taxes, the European tax law is quite simple and transparent ...
tweenbot - some stories are just nice.
Tropo - a hosted telephony system (e.g. for voicemail systems or similar) with API for programming plugins in various scripting languages. There are some things ...
wikileaks-Kram doch etwas anders als ursprünglich behauptet - as it turns out, the problem seems to lie somewhere between the domain owner and the operator. Or with both. Or between the ears of one of the two. Or both. But probably not with DENIC.
Armstrong faces Tour exit - as little as I can stand Armstrong (and as little as I would want to see him at the Tour), the procedure here is simply ridiculous. Would the French proceed in the same way if the rider in question were French? What if, for example, Virenque were planning a comeback and a 20-minute delay occurred during a training control because he quickly went to shower?
Müntefering expects state participation in Opel - isn't it cute how they're hesitating to do exactly what they once railed against?
Preemptive obedience at DENIC - because, the police and surveillance state must be implemented. Think of the children! And protect us from terrorists! How, and incidentally, sensitive documents about sloppiness in voting machines are also blocked? Extremely convenient!
Discount — a C implementation of the Markdown markup language - the title says it all. Looks good, and should be many times faster than the other markdown implementations - which would also make it interesting for live use. And Markdown is many times simpler than Docutils (Restructured Text).
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 - interesting article about scaling with Amazon's Elastic Cloud.