Federal Constitutional Court rules against voting computers - a victory of reason over the penny-pinchers at the ballot box. Yes, it may be true that elections are expensive to conduct. But if we throw the principles of free, democratic and verifiable elections overboard just because a few euros are involved, we might as well do away with the whole state. It's a shame that in recent times, the Constitutional Court has generally had to put a stop to the madness from Berlin. One would actually think that these prolethicians in Berlin, who have to swear an oath to the constitution when they assume their ministerial offices, would actually know the constitution ...
Archive 20.1.2009 - 3.3.2009
git installer für OS X - so you don't have to go through the MacPorts installation ordeal, it's not so impractical.
Alien Skin Software: Bokeh - interesting software for creating bokeh effects. Unfortunately, it's only available as a plugin - I prefer standalone programs.
OMVViewer-light a Secondlife Text Client - could be quite interesting for on-the-go use, if I can't or don't want to start the full interface.
The man who invented the doner kebab has died - well, it's a classic Turkish dish after all - invented in Berlin in 1971.
Adapters: Micro 4/3 - well, I probably won't buy the rather expensive G1 after all (even though it handled nicely at Photokina), but if Olympus comes out with the announced compact Micro-4/3 camera, and the adapter works with it, that would be a real alternative. Especially with the cute little 90mm macro that I have for my M6 ... (though of course the question remains how focusing is supported - if it's only based on the electronic viewfinder image, I can forget it)
Alhazen - because one tends to forget all too easily what scientific achievements were made in times when, in our part of the world, the descendants of Charlemagne were still amusing themselves with their serfs and brawling with their noble friends.
ITU plans to combat cybercrime face resistance - why we definitely do not want any involvement of the ITU in any form. This is the typical megalomania of the old monopolists in the telecommunications industry and their state lackeys. Does anyone believe there would still be chances for independent projects if the ITU were to actually succeed with its idea of mandating the implementation of ITU security protocols? Especially since ITU standards are anything but free (and even patent-infested garbage can establish itself there as a "standard" that can then only be implemented in practice by stores like IBM or similar. The IETF is a chaotic bunch - but due to the quite pragmatic structure ("a standard can become what two interoperable, independent implementations can demonstrate") is much better suited for the Internet and its constantly changing situation.
StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - for the big questions in life, such as whether you should store opened mustard jars in the fridge.
Union wants to have children monitored as well - it's not about countering terrorism, but solely about establishing a surveillance state while no one is looking or the opportunity is good. The goal of a surveillance state is to secure the state as an apparatus, not the citizen. Usually, this becomes "necessary" when the state leaves the framework of the democratic rule of law, or plans to do so.
And now a physics engine for JavaScript... - Holy Cow!
zsync - interesting tool, so to speak one-sided rsync. Server only http, client then with difference transmission - the server side of the protocol is "precompiled" by the tool. Great for update distribution to many downloaders.
A high-level cross-protocol url-grabber - nett. urllib is quite ok for http, but also rather low-level. This, on the other hand, looks quite useful for typical batch programs.
Anonymous(tm) - nice, readable monospace font.
British-French Nuclear Billiards in the Atlantic - err - what? Well, I don't know, but submarines with nuclear warheads and reactor propulsion should probably not ram into each other. British understatement: "Crashing a nuclear submarine is as serious as it gets."
CDU: Opponents of Internet Blocking Promote Child Pornography - sensationalist polemic instead of arguments. And all just to show absurd activism because elections are coming soon. Does anyone seriously believe that the prolethicians in Berlin care about protecting children?
py-amqplib - AMQP Library for Python, seems promising.
Rabbits and warrens - RabbitMQ and Python - a report from reality.
txAMQP: Twisted AMQP in Launchpad - hmm. AMQP and Twisted - this could make the workers even more efficiently attached to a queue.
Using RabbitMQ Beyond Queueing - interesting article that deals with multiple consumers, persistent queues, and similar topics.
zeromq: Fastest. Messaging. Ever. - another AMQP server (besides RabbitMQ, which I already had, and QPID from the Apache project, which tends to lose messages), sounds quite interesting, especially the very low resources it requires. However, there is no persistence in queues.
FragStore - A Fragmenting Asset Store at Adam Frisby - those who want to know what technical problems are behind something like Second Life, here is a blog post about the problems with the asset server of osgrid.org, an experimental grid based on OpenLife (open source reimplementation of the Second Life protocols on the server side).
FractalMaker - nice Flash visualization of fractals.
The Oarfish - A Creature Of Legend - wow. I didn't know that one yet.
Unix Lovers to Party Like It's 1234567890 - tonight at 0:31 (plus a few seconds) it's time!
Schäuble hacked (Update) - well, PHP applications are not inherently secure just because the Federal Minister of the Interior says so. However, he still claims this for electronic ID cards, mass data collection, and similar nonsense ...
Demo scripts for gnuplot CVS version - gnuplot can now output to HTML Canvas! And thus super-simple embedding of plots in web pages!
Gravenreuth must be imprisoned - "Including an additional penalty, Gravenreuth was sentenced to a total prison term of 14 months. The Berlin Regional Court did not suspend the sentence on probation, as "the defendant [...] cannot be given a sufficiently reliable positive legal and social prognosis," according to the court in September 2008." - and now it is final. I think I will open a bottle of sherry this evening in honor of the verdict!
Linzer Auxiliary Bishop claims homosexuality is curable - Holocaust denier and homophobe. These are the people the Pope wants to surround himself with. Any questions?
ExpanDrive: Ridiculously simple SFTP and FTP drive access on your Mac - also worth a look, after all I have tons of stuff lying around on SFTP servers. And while the Cyberduck is nice, I would actually prefer to use the Finder - at least, if the result is usable.
Instant color schemes for your Mac with ColorSchemer Studio OSX - and since I always use the same boring color combinations in SL, something like this might be useful.
Intaglio — Macintosh Drawing & Illustration - looks good, I should check it out. Specifically, the ability to use texts as paths could be interesting for me
VectorDesigner - and another graphics software that I should take a look at. Vector graphics would also solve some of the text problems (for SL I sometimes need text on paths and text as paths, which is rather cumbersome to do with Acorn).
Moving Forth: Part 1 - makes one nostalgic when reading the descriptions of old CPUs and still knowing the registers by name.
Wolfram Mathematica Home Edition - woooohooooo!! Wolfram finally sees the light! Ok, after clicking on the store, not available for your region. WTF?
NodeBox 2 - mean. Pictures and movies, but no test download! They can't do that to me, something like that!
US-Hacker copies RFID badges unnoticed - but our prolethicians, and above all the federal interior minister, claimed that such things would only be science fiction nonsense. And anyone who is against the RFID chips in the badges is simply a paranoid person. Why doesn't the bunch in Berlin even bother anymore when they try to screw us around?
Nokia pushes through surveillance rights for emails - we buy ourselves a government. The model will certainly soon be adopted in Germany by various large employers (Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Telekom anyone?).
Filter Forge - wow, they have a Mac beta! And it works in Photoshop Elements (though only on Windows - on OS X apparently only the big packages. Damn). Hmm, I think that would be something to test - because seamless textures is the only reason why I still need Windows, even if it's only in an emulation.
Imagelys Picture Styles - yet another generator for tileable textures. This one is free, so I should at least take a look. Unfortunately, it's only for Windows again. Somehow, there's nothing decent for Mac in this area.
LÖVE - Free 2D Game Engine - in Lua. And it's available for Mac as a Universal Binary. Screenshots look quite nice.
Online Backup: Multi-Platform, Multi-Computer | SpiderOak, Inc. - sounds like DropBox. Funny enough, also in Python (though only the server, with DropBox it's also the client). Also interesting: they publish a number of OpenSource components that they have written. Particularly the transaction-secured file system based on SQLite looks interesting.
Patterns in Python - and why many patterns are trivial with Python.
Darwin/x86 Boot Loader - interesting details on how PS2 devices are (no longer) supported under OSX. Could this serve as a starting point for elantech drivers for the Eee-PC? Somehow I want and need to get rid of the stupid touch-click.
How To Migrate from Parallels to VirtualBox - might be a good idea, as VirtualBox is free - and should also run on my Asus. And yes, it's completely crazy to have virtualization running on a netbook. But OS X also runs on mine.
New in JavaScript 1.7 - because one often forgets that JavaScript can be a quite nice language. Especially the newer versions have learned interesting features.
Data Mining with R: learning by case studies - I should check this out, I have a few data sources that could use more intensive mining.
Op-Ed Contributor - The One-State Solution - by Qaddafi. Yep, that Qaddafi. And yes, it actually makes sense.
XBinary: Extended Binary Format Support for Mac OS X - looks quite interesting.
TimeMachine fails backup - InsanelyMac Forum - there are tips on how to get Time Machine to fly. At least it works with an eee-PC that has an Airport card (the Ralink drivers are said to conflict with the patch).