SAP is garbage - even a garbage company doesn't want it ...
Archive 26.2.2008 - 27.3.2008
Transrapid-Flop: Stoiber surprised - Maget sarcastic - the blather of Stoiber and his ilk and how they complain about the poor industrial location of Germany. As if anything in Germany would depend on a nonsensical project like the magnetic levitation train - apart from the bribes for the politicians, of course.
Spirit may continue to explore Mars - good. It would also be quite stupid to shut it down.
Mars-Roboter Spirit wird stillgelegt? - to shut down one of the most successful space projects of recent times would be highly stupid. But the NASA has experience with stupid decisions ...
South Park Studios - all episodes legally from the creators.
MCL 5.2 has been released as open source - unfortunately probably not running under Rosetta, so nothing for Intel Mac users (which excludes almost everyone who has something modern from Apple). Well, the manufacturing company is probably more or less history, but maybe there will soon be a version that works with Rosetta - or someone ports the OpenMCL Compiler Backend into this version.
After Security Update today: "Bus ... - if you, like me, suddenly get bus-errors with ssh after the update on 18.3, Nicecast has an update for their tools - Instant Highjack is the actual culprit. Install the update from Nicecast and everything seems to run smoothly again.
Banks and the Web
If you want to redefine miserable, you should take a look at banks and their web usage. Has any of the programmers who created this garbage pile received any minimal training? My latest "fun": the practical, low-tech TAN form is being discontinued. Now there's only Smart-TAN via code cards and such stupid devices. Okay, it should actually work - generating session passwords isn't exactly new. But of course, that doesn't work either. Why would it? That would be silly. I mean, honestly, did anyone expect anything different? And of course, my TAN usage is now blocked. Because, it's so incredibly secure when you install technology that doesn't work, and then people are forcibly locked out.
But that's not the reason that bothers me so much. The reason? The bank's notification form. A simple form with a text field in the browser. So far so good. You enter text, which goes directly to the customer advisor. Also good. I mean, that's all I want - write text and that's it. And what happens? I get the great message:
The text is too long. The text may only contain 11 lines with 36 characters each.
Excuse me? Hello? Have you ever seen a text field in a web browser? Is there a column ruler somewhere? Or have you ever heard of flowing text? Should I seriously now manually break my lines to a maximum of 36 characters (which I have to count, as the input field gives me no help) by hand? Have you all lost your minds in the data center?
Oh, and then, after I've formatted and counted (with editor support and cut-and-paste):
This text contains invalid characters. It may only contain digits, letters, umlauts, and an arbitrary and ill-considered selection of special characters.
Parentheses - which you might use when you include a note - no, they are evil and must not be used.
Sorry, but this is a total failure. And no, I don't want to hear anything about your downstream banking system only accepting 11 lines of 36 characters - I don't care as a customer. Giving that as a reason only shows how stupid you are and how little you know about the subject. Sorry, colleagues, but this is pathetic.
iTimeMachine - another way to back up to network drives with Time Machine. Not tried, but it should be able to back up to any (not just Time Capsule and Airport) network drives (even those mounted via SMB).
fscklog: Firmware 7.3.1 fĂĽr 802.11n-AirPort Stationen: Time Machine-Backup mit AirPort Extreme [Update] - finally. Now you can use the pre-Time Capsule parts for backups as well. And you can back up the Time Capsule's drive to an external drive (offline, hopefully). This makes the whole thing even more interesting - because with the Time Capsule, it's just a compact device for automatic backup and the external terabyte drive is used once a week for backing up the Time Capsule. And until the Time Capsule is finally available, my external drive can play Time Capsule for now ... (in my case, only after I created a file ".com.apple.timemachine.supported" in the main folder of a network drive)
Mystery about Saint-Exupéry solved?: "I deeply regret having killed the esteemed author" - the brother of Ivan Rebrov shot down Saint Expéry in the Second World War. And is quite obviously still proud of his "aviation achievements" and probably still thinks war pilots are great. Hmm. Absurd world.
Panda3d full featured open source python 3d engine - hmm. Unfortunately only installers for Linux and Windows. Will this work with OS X? Maybe even embeddable in Nodebox?
This is The End My Friend: Negroponte Says XP on XO in 60 Days - "With the Sugar User Interface, OLPC can claim to have a Constructionist learning methodology, it can claim to be promoting exploration and learning, it can even hope to activate the view source key. But once you put on XP, no matter how much it may be customized to leverage the XO hardware, children will not be taught to "learn learning" as Negroponte promised. They will be taught "ICT skills", a phrase Negroponte himself railed against."
Ur-Scheme: A GPL self-hosting compiler from a subset of R5RS Scheme to fast Linux x86 asm - I like such projects, no matter how pointless they may be.
Building a Codeless Language Module with BBEdit 8.5 and (Ir-) Regular Expressions - interesting, because it shows the more complex features of Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. Could be helpful for own Language-Modules that I might need.
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight (video) - "Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another."
Hacking implanted defibrillators: shockingly easy - "But, more disturbingly, they could also shut off the device's ability to respond to cardiac events. The pinnacle of their hacking was to send the device into test mode, in which a carefully-timed current would trigger an arrhythmic event, something that's normally done under controlled conditions to determine if the device responds successfully. In effect, they hacked the device in a way that could stop a heart."
How Hesse's state chief can continue to govern: Koch forever - the people of Hesse just can't vote. A few more votes against Koch and we would finally be rid of the guy. But no ...
MidiKeys - just a software midi keyboard for the Mac.
NodeBox | Superfolia - wow. Simply wow. I really need to engage more with Nodebox and not just use it as a practical desktop calculator.
Why is 37signals so arrogant? - "Now, I have always admired 37signals. Nice website, intelligent articles. But I've tried their products and although they have admirable qualities, they have never quite met my needs: Close is not good enough. After reading the article, I understand why: the developers are arrogant and completely unsympathetic to the people who use their products."
Fluid - Free Site Specific Browser for Mac OS X Leopard - damn, more and more features that make me think about upgrading to Leopard. This would be nice - I use many web apps and dedicated mini browsers for them would be quite cool. Also, the integration of user scripting and the Dock and Growl integration are interesting.
Prism - is something similar to Fluid, but for more systems (based on Mozilla technology)
The Limits of Knowledge We Against Greed - in memory of Joseph Weizenbaum the link to his last published article. Hopefully his hard-earned knowledge will be preserved and not swept aside in the technological frenzy.
iPhone Developer Program Details - it's getting exciting. Starting in the summer, the first tools. And the freeware programmers can get into the Developer Program relatively cheaply and also use the iTunes Store platform for distribution.
Seaside development with GNU Smalltalk - very nice. GNU Smalltalk is simply one of the better batch Smalltalk variants. The others are just GUI-free images, GNU Smalltalk is far better geared towards text mode from the start. And for a dynamic web server, it is simply the better environment. Combined with the quite powerful web-based tools from Seaside, this could become a really nice environment in the long run.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Happy now, bitches? - "In the list of the dead up above I forgot to mention Palm and Adobe. They are both also dead. So dead, in fact, that I forgot to mention them." - Fake Steve ist klasse.
Materialized Views in PostgreSQL - interesting alternative to denormalization (or a technique for organized denormalization that doesn't trample the relational model too much, as the logical view remains the clean normalized form, but automatic performance-optimized denormalizations occur)
The RIPE analyzes the Youtube-Hijacking - interesting to read.
Programming Nu - had I already seen that? It's something like F-Script, but with Lisp-like syntax instead of Smalltalk-like syntax.
BKA Chief completely off the rails - "Above all, there should be no further speculation in public about the possible technology of the so-called federal trojan, explained the top policeman to Spiegel Online." - what does this guy think he is, that he wants to forbid the population from thinking and discussing?
PyGUI - I'm usually a wxPython programmer, but one should always look over the fence. And the fence here looks quite usable, at first glance.
vimperator - ok, I've seen something like this before, an extension that transforms Firefox into VI operation, but this one seems to go a few steps further than others. Strange.
Abramowitz and Stegun: Handbook of Mathematical Functions - certainly interesting for all number crunchers. And since it's online, sometimes faster than a dead-tree version.
Changes - graphical diff and merge. Looks very nice and can be integrated into various tools and version controls. Could be a usable alternative to the rather stiff XCode FileMerge. Also works via SFTP on remote servers. And the scripting language is F-Script, how cool is that? Unfortunately, it only runs from Leopard onwards.
Flying Meat: Acorn - an image editor previously unknown to me, which offers some interesting features, especially text layers (which I miss in some other tools, simply packing texts as bitmaps onto a layer is really not the same). I should take a look at it. No, Gimp is not really always the answer to the question "image editing?".
iMaginator - a tool that builds on Core Image. Comes with a whole set of Image Units that you might be able to use in Acorn as well (it can handle Image Units). Sounds quite interesting for some of the problems I keep encountering in image editing.
Special report: Fixing short iPhone battery life - I need to take a closer look at this, as I have the impression that the battery life of my iPhone is suboptimal. The WLAN part sounds particularly interesting - perhaps I can simply turn off WLAN, since I have an EDGE flat rate anyway.
vi & TextMate together at last - well. vi operation for Textmate. What I have learned, however, generally from all these projects (also those for Emacs): nothing is like vi, except vi (ok, I prefer of course vim, some comfort must be there). And shockingly, vi is still one of the easiest editors for me to use ...
ANT (ant is not TeX) - an interesting approach to tackle the topic of text layout. Syntax very similar to TeX, but different internals and some nice features.
Karlsruhe leaves little room for covert online searches - "Moreover, the highest German court has established a new fundamental right to the 'guarantee of confidentiality and integrity' of information technology systems." - now it's a matter of waiting and seeing how our prolethicians will try to hollow this out again. Bavaria has already been making a lot of noise and wants to continue. NRW will surely try to fiddle with something and whether Schräuble will backtrack is more than questionable. Nevertheless, thanks to Karlsruhe.
abyssoft teleport - didn't I already have this? Control two Macs with one keyboard and mouse. With GUI.
FSClass 3.0 - allows extending Objective-C classes and creating new classes in F-Script without having to directly access Objective-C. If someone would build a decent class browser around it, with which you can interactively create methods instead of having to go through files, then OSX would almost be something like a Smalltalk system.
Learn F-Script in 20 Minutes...and Have Fun Playing with Core Image - nice tutorial for F-Script. Interactively explore the OSX API through image experiments.
LEGO Universe: 'LEGO Star Wars Multiplied By A Million' - wow. A Lego-MMO!
Mathomatic - small command line program for symbolic manipulation of equations. Very practical, you can solve an equation for various variables with a few characters - great for everyday mathematics.
Murphy's Law Strikes Again: AS7007 - what Pakistan did with Youtube, it has already happened in a much more severe way. In 1997.
Rope, a python refactoring library ... - not looked at in detail, but saved for later. Could definitely become interesting.