Weekend Grid Outages - SL now uses Django internally (last paragraph)! Not the only interesting point, a few nice insider information regarding the service design. As with all such projects, apparently a grown chaos of poorly scalable approaches.
Archive 20.11.2008 - 20.1.2009
how to find mac os x application specifier for preferences - since I only have 600 pixels in height on my EeePC, but some dialogs are larger (and you need to get to the things at the bottom): there is help. Mac OS X is already a fine system.
Kim Keever - very interesting photographic technique based on dioramas. Beautiful images.
The Impossible Project - hmm. New Polaroid - this could be fun. Unfortunately only integral film, not pack film, which I would be much more interested in (since I have a pretty awesome pack film camera with my 660SE).
Bubble, bubble toil and trouble: Juice Analytics - Bubble Charts with Nodebox (which means Python). Very nice - and I am an absolute Nodebox fan. For me a very nice prototyping environment. With very useful libraries.
OS X on the EeePC - works. The linked snap shows my EeeBook with NetNewswire in the foreground, notes and a shell (where software is currently being installed with MacPorts) in the background. EeePC: 350 Euro. RunCore 64 GB SSD (fast!!): 199 US$. 2GB memory upgrade: 25 US$ (and I'll also replace the WiFi card so I can use the native drivers, so another 30 Euro). Finally Windows-free: priceless.
Dark Roasted Blend: Weird "Walking" Frogfish - evolution had clearly had one too many.
eee Mac journey: EEE Boot: Installing OSX on an EEE PC 901 or 1000 with an original Apple Install Disk v1.09 - ok, I think I'll buy a USB DVD drive today or tomorrow. OS X on the little fat one? I have to see this!
English Russia » Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses - nuclear. lighthouse. ouch.
RunCore 256GB Pro III Hyper Speed 2.5" SATA Solid State Drive - sorry, I'm drooling on my keyboard while reading the specs. Does anyone have a cloth? This could be the dream for my MBP. An entire edge larger than the built-in drive, and definitely faster. And quieter. And with less power consumption.
The Secret of the Missing Books - and another DRM debacle, this time eBooks.
iUI Introduction Wiki Page. - great if you want to quickly visualize simple data so that it is practically accessible on the iPhone. The overhead for simple pages is very low and due to the strong JavaScript orientation, the data volumes are also very compact - which gives very good response times on the iPhone.
PyCha - no idea if I already had this, but used it for the first time today, a small and fine Python library that builds on Cairo and generates simple charts. Many annoying standard items are handled very nicely automatically and the results also look good!
Jörg Schieb - iTunes verzichtet auf Kopierschutz - and hopefully buries the DRM nonsense in the industry. With two major portals - iTunes and Amazon - without DRM, the topic should hopefully be settled. But that Apple, as usual, immediately torches the iTunes servers and cuts off the purchase option, suddenly no longer offered, is quite ridiculous. Don't they expect their users to actually want to use these update offers?
Monsters - isometric monster tilesets! Yay! (found on the shockwave)
pure-lang - not that we need more programming languages, but this one builds on LLVM as a backend, which opens up very interesting possibilities (especially in terms of performance).
The RLTiles - and even more isometric tilesets for monsters etc. (also found on the Shockwave)
Vx32: Lightweight, User-level Sandboxing on the x86 - interesting concept based on processor virtualization.
Cython: C-Extensions for Python - successor to PyRex, a Python-like language for creating native code extensions for Python.
Mobile Django Admin Patches - Shifting Bits by Patrick Altman - use Django Admin via iPhone. Nice feature.
DigitalSpace Traveler : Traveler - early virtual world with voice integration.
Improve Your Photo Booth With 90 Free Effects - pointless, but funny. The video effects also work with iChat video chats.
Raw Photo Processor (RPP) - sounds very interesting, I should check it out. Normally I am satisfied with Lightroom - and thus Adobe Camera Raw - but for some images one could invest a bit more energy and time and then this could be quite interesting.
uninformation.org: Arbeitswelt 2.0, or: The Dot-Com Death is Back! - just read it, just follow the links, just think about whether you shouldn't pay more attention to more solidity as an employee in the world of work.
ngPlant - Open Source plant modeling package - this one is for Blender. Looks very nice, but will I be able to get it to fly?
Tree making - with ngplant. Looks very interesting.
Yorik's blender greenhouse - lots of Blender models of plants. Also a good starting point if you need 2D alpha textures (like I do for SL).
Arbaro - tree generation for povray - can also generate .obj files. Could be quite useful for me, because I always need my own plant textures from time to time (and I can have them rendered by povray)
AUST TOMTREE - PovRay Macro Package for Trees (required by Pov-Tree)
MacMegaPov Index - good mac version of PovRay with small GUI for the parameters.
POV-Ray: Documentation - together with Arbaro, this gives me really nice trees and bushes!
POV-Tree - another tree generator. Free as in free beer. Also in Java. More focused on pure trees with fixed presets, not as algorithmically oriented as the previous one.
SuperColdMilk - tons of ac3d plugins.
Creating sculpties with Albatross3D - Exporter for Second Life Sculptmaps from Albatross3D.
Albatross3D - 3D modeler for Windows, Linux, and BeOS (no Mac). And free as in free beer. Although I'll probably stick with AC3D on the little Asus.
2,700-year-old marijuana found in Chinese tomb - Bill und Ted hatten doch ne Zeitmaschine?
IronClad - allows the use of CPython C extensions under IronPython.
Python-Ogre | High performance gaming and graphics library for Python - is becoming more and more complete and contains everything to build 3D games. I could also take a look at it.
Tutorial: Introduction to the Adobe Flex SDK - nice, especially since I'm still looking for a good introduction for Whirled, and the tutorial covers exactly the interesting part - how to connect media files with events.
VPython - had I already mentioned this? A small module for easy creation and manipulation (and display) of 3D objects.
C o r e P y : Synthetic Programming in Python - Generate machine code from Python for various processors. Potentially interesting for the places where you need maximum control and performance and Psyco and PyRex are not sufficient.
Rands In Repose: Dumbing Down the Cloud - interesting post about what Dropbox gets right. Dropbox is also one of the few cloud services that I really find useful and that will probably replace my iDisk syncing in the long run (simply because it's junk and doesn't work reliably).
Continue: Web Applications in PLT Scheme - and since I can't refer to Scheme without referring to the best Scheme environment of all time, here's a link to a tutorial on programming web applications with PLT Scheme.
JazzScheme - interesting "new" (not really, already 12 years old, but soon to be open source) Scheme environment. Unfortunately only X11 under OSX so far. But the GUI screenshots look very interesting.
Mankind's new best friend? - Rats against landmines and TB!
Molotov Alva - Movies completely created in Second Life - with an interesting story and by someone who knows how to make movies. Already from 2007, but still good (and yes, I once met Molotov Alva inworld).
arRsync - an Rsync GUI for Mac OS X - Title says it all. Addendum: the programmer was probably on drugs. You can't enter ssh servers or anything, only paths. What the hell is rsync good for local paths? The advantage of rsync is especially on network connections ... (oh, and no documentation and no status, unless you sacrifice an email address for "information about the new release")
duplicity - hmm. Could potentially be interesting to back up my server when I shut down the second one next month and instead back up to S3, for example.
IT-Gipfel: Vertrauenswürdige De-Mail von Innenministerium und Telekom - so the company that wants to put a trojan on every PC and the company that decided arbitrarily and unilaterally to tap phones that interest them, want to build a "trusted" email platform together. Did I get that right?