Linkblog - 27.5.2011 - 23.6.2011

GitHub for Mac. I'm a convinced Bitbucket user because of Mercurial, but this thing looks really good, you could easily switch to git just because of the interface. I'm often a mouse pusher and optics clicker underneath it all.

traits.js - Traits for Javascript. Interesting experiment for JavaScript - Traits offer better composition than classic classes and more structure than JavaScript's prototype-based OO - and here the features of Traits are well mapped to the existing JavaScript features (e.g., objects are mapped via closures). The disadvantage, as with all such language extensions, is that you can usually work with them yourself, but other libraries do not use them and thus the advantage in projects that heavily rely on third-party libraries is rather minimal.

Technical Discovery: Speeding up Python NumPy, Cython, and Weave. Interesting for number crunchers who don't necessarily want to switch to PyPy, but want to stay in the normal CPython world. Provides a quick comparison of NumPy, Weave, and Cython.

Circus Ponies NoteBook for iPad - Take Great Notes. Hmm, Circus Ponies NoteBook is one of the most powerful notebooks (with built-in outliner) on the Mac - but the reviews for the iPad version are not so great. And there is no decent sync - I really wonder why productivity app manufacturers don't just initially integrate the Dropbox library, because without usable sync, the apps are not really usable.

OmniOutliner for iPad. Wow! Why didn't I notice? There's now an OmniOutliner for the iPad! OmniOutliner is my preferred outliner on the Mac, among other things because it can be configured in many ways very similar to the Frontier Outliner (especially splitting a point with a simple Enter is something that surprisingly is not supported directly by many outliners - but essential for me when I want to write texts in the outliner). Unfortunately, only cumbersome iDisk import/export instead of a usable Dropbox sync.

Leos Home Page. Leo is an outliner and data organizer - that's nothing special at first. But this one is written in Python and portable (everywhere there is PyQT, at least in version 4.9, older ones also had Tkinter as a surface library). Can also be used as an IDE for Python.

Brennender Berg – Wikipedia. Highlight of Saarland. Some have Roman settlements, large ports, huge moors or gigantic ship lifts - in Saarland, a mountain has been burning for 250 years. That's something too.

Mozilla Firefox Add-on Builder and SDK - for creating extensions with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. The Builder is a web-based IDE and the SDK provides a whole stack of APIs for programming extensions.

Firmware 04 für Sony NEX Kameras - if you have one of these cameras, go ahead, download and install. The art filters are at best funny (funny in the Hipstamatik sense), but what really rocks is the focus peak. The edges with the strongest contrast are then optically marked in the image, which enables really trouble-free manual focusing. This might not be important for AF lenses - but for those who, like me, want to use manual lenses via adapter, it's simply brilliant. After installation, I already played around with the Zeiss 50mm 1.4, which works really well. It gets really exciting when I then put the NEX-3 behind my Contax macro equipment.

Python/Harmattan - MeeGo wiki. Very interesting in connection with the N9: a complete (and they really mean it - almost all parts of the system are accessible) API for MeeGo in Python. With this, you can program the entire phone completely in Python and also publish the applications created in this way in the Ovi Store (Nokia's variant of the AppStore). Nokia already had something similar with Symbian in the form of Python S60 and the tablets under the predecessor of MeeGo, so good Python support has almost become a tradition with them.

Nokia N9 first hands-on!. Ok, it's a MeeGo phone and after Nokia's cooperation announcement with Microsoft no one really knows where MeeGo (Nokia's Linux-based phone system) will go, but the N9 is absolutely cool. And MeeGo has underneath the Linux system that was developed with the N770/N800/N810 tablets and the N900/N950 phones (N950 is the developer version).

gcc python plugin and static analyser for CPython sources. In a very strange way cool. I mean, seriously: who looks at gcc and thinks spontaneously "oh, there I should embed a Python interpreter"? Yes, I know, the answer is "the author of this plugin". Strange things some people do ...

Dirty lens article. Afraid of scratching the front lens of your camera or worried about a bit of dust or fingerprints? Read the article, check out the example pictures. Or also this article here ("scratches"? I'd rather call that "destroyed"). And next time, just keep taking photos, because often it turns out better than you fear.

Publishers file lawsuit against Tagesschau-App. Wow, the guys from the executive floors of the digitally failed publishers are really going off the deep end now. Now, the Tagesschau-App for iOS is allegedly partly to blame for the failure of their absurd and half-baked business models on the internet. How about, for once, publishers move their ass into the digital world and actually participate, instead of constantly complaining? But that would be work, better to whine and try to impose their pathetic remaining ideas on users through legal action. I, for one, find it politically scandalous that these incompetent pseudo-managers always manage to get their way through their lobby with politics and far too often get their way - and we fee-payers have our services cut because all that blows through the publishers' heads is empty wind over barren deserts.

The story of the Gömböc. About strange geometric objects and self-righting turtles. There are so many things in the world ...

LR/Blog – Export directly from Lightroom 2 to your Blog!. I didn't have this for some reason, but now I do. With this, you can export photos directly into the WordPress media library to use them in posts. Could help me in cases where I don't want to take the detour via Flickr.

A What Is Inside A Cat. A very interesting document that describes the implementation of Wraith Scheme in great detail, specifically also the implementation of parallel processes.

SparkleShare - Sharing work made easy. Badly blogged, but this looks quite promising at first glance - a simple Git server is used. Unfortunately, it seems to be based only on SSH Git, not HTTPS, at least I don't see anything about it in the docs - HTTPS would be more universal (even if passwords would then have to be stored). What is still missing is an iOS or Android client (Android is apparently in the works), but OSX is already supported. It seems that the most activity in the open-source alternatives to Dropbox is happening here - but I'm still wondering how the server behaves with massive file additions and deletions - for example, I have the current raw photos of the last few months in my Dropbox. A "raw" Git repository grows very quickly to unimaginable sizes ... (and you probably also have to do regular packs so that changes to DNG files don't blow up the repository). One small detail on the side is still important: SparkleShare uses a public IRC server for synchronization messages - so even with self-hosting, all clients are on this server and exchange their triggers via it. Should be kept in mind, because this would be a classic attack vector (and if the IRC server fails, the self-hosted system also hangs). SparkleShare is open source, so you can certainly also plug in your own IRC server here and simply use your own packages.

Healthcare reform: Dental treatments are set to become expensive. Great idea, to give one of the medical professions with the highest incomes an extra boost. Because, it doesn't matter if you don't have any teeth in your mouth, you can still whistle La Paloma. And soup is much cheaper than solid food anyway.

SONY PRS-505 Firmware-Update + Customizing - MobileRead Forums. Important for the Russification of my old PRS 505 - after that it now works completely in Russian and with Russian eBooks. And it wasn't that complicated after I found it. The Russian menus only appear after you have gone to the Locale settings once. And don't forget the unicode font so that the menus and books can be displayed at all. And generally convert books to LRF, not to ePub - for incomprehensible reasons, ePub still shows garbage when displaying Russian books. Calibre easily converts to LRF.

Bundeswehr-Dozent: Plagiator gives back his doctorate - at least he's not being as silly as the last cases (especially Koch-Mehrin with her "but everyone already knew I copied" defense). But this idea that a revoked doctorate has no effect on a lecturer's career I find quite strange ...

The Postillon explains: What can the National Cyber Defense Center do?. Awesome. Simply awesome. Next, they'll buy a computer... (I doubt it, though, probably its purchase will be canceled for budget reasons)

Honeybees Might Have Emotions | Wired Science. Pessimistic bee is pessimistic!

Skulpt. A Python implementation in JavaScript, client-side. Also in the browser. Nice hint that you shouldn't even try to crash the server, you would only stub your own toe ... (otherwise, this is probably one of the many projects "just because it can be done")

Maxima. Nice book with many examples of how to use Maxima. Since the Schockwellenreiter just wrote about Maxima again and I liked the wxMaxima interface in his post quite a bit (and unlike some other programs, it also looks good on OSX), I will probably play around with it a bit. Especially since it is much slimmer than Sage (even if it of course can do much more, as it integrates many other math packages).

JQuery Form Wizard. Interesting small plugin that processes complex forms through steps - and the routes through the form can depend on the data chosen in a previous step. Additionally, #-hacks are used to make the form steps appear in the history (in this form, this is absolutely fine in my opinion).

josevalim/elixir is a programming language for the Erlang environment and its virtual machine, which integrates into the Erlang environment and has a similar focus as Erlang. However, Elixir provides a Ruby-like syntax and some interesting extensions as well as, of course, interoperability with Erlang code (otherwise it wouldn't make sense, because Erlang is not just the rather strange language, but above all the server structure and the libraries).

HTC Desire wont be getting an official Gingerbread update. Of course, Android is so great, but device manufacturers ruin it with their useless extensions and deliver devices with too little equipment, so that new system releases stay out. If I really switch to Android, it will probably only be one that is directly supplied by Google, then at least I don't have to deal with such nonsense like Sense (or be blocked from new system releases by its forced installation). Yes, I know, I can root and rom - but that's just as much of a non-argument for me as jailbreak on iOS devices.

Tumult Hype. Interesting - I had actually expected this much earlier, a tool for creating animated presentations using only HTML5 and JavaScript. Essentially what Macromedia Director or Asymmetrix Toolbox used to be.

Interactive Console for the C Programming Language - Google Project Hosting. Sounds interesting if you want to play around with Low-Level-APIs and sometimes want to interactively crash your system.

Asciiflow - ASCII Flow Diagram Tool. Diagram. In ASCII art. With an interactive environment in JavaScript. In the web browser.

Florian (Author) thinks I might be interested in burrahobbit and he's right: persistent data structures (i.e., functional persistence) in Python, with time behavior comparable to normal data structures. So far, he has dictionaries and sets.

Cloud9 meets Bitbucket - Cloud9 IDEs Posterous. That's nice, because Mercurial is my preferred versioning tool and Cloud9 can now directly support it - and thus also access Bitbucket projects. It's getting more and more interesting.

Metaverse Ink Blog» Blog Archive » The 4,096 “bug”. Why OpenSim operators should set up their grids with region coordinates below (4096,4096) - the higher coordinates simply cause too many problems and it doesn't look like these problems can be easily and compatibly fixed. Since region coordinates are internal to the grid, it shouldn't be a problem if multiple grids lie in the same coordinate ranges.

Why aren't you using git-flow? - Jeff Kreeftmeijer. Sounds like a few sensible tools that make git a bit easier to use for standard cases. Of course, you can manage everything on your own, but why did you buy a computer in the first place ...

Comparison to Python | Cobra - just blogged for completeness, as the language has some interesting ideas. Specifically, I would like the contracts as explicit syntax, Python only allows similar things in a roundabout way. However, the language is otherwise just one of the many niche languages. And honestly, Python is more than just the indentation - what about the very sophisticated metaprotocol of Python in the various niche languages? PyPy in combination with Rpython and the new ctypes for pypy is much more interesting.

Clack - Web Application Environment for Common Lisp. This finally looks really nice and lean - most Common Lisp web frameworks are just too big, too complicated. This looks much more pragmatic, a simple routing, a lean request and a function that reacts to it. One could play around with that, installation is trivial thanks to Quicklisp (I'm so glad that Quicklisp exists now, the asdf-install hassle was really annoying). In its approach, it reminds me a bit of Turbogear for Python - various existing libraries are bundled with Clack, so to speak a lean web best practices. There is already an application framework that also runs in the minimal environment, Caveman.

Polycode. Looks like something like Processing for C++ and Lua - so it's actually a C++ library for creative projects (2D/3D), but at the same time there is a Lua-based scripting layer with which you can program directly with the same APIs. Sounds a bit similar to Cinder, except that there is no scripting solution included, but only a C++ library.

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide. And since it fits so well, here is the link to a book on CouchDB for online reading. It is also available online in German (and of course in English. And also in French). However, the German version seems to be incomplete - you keep encountering English pages.

Simple JavaScript Applications with CouchDB - CouchApp.org. Interesting approach: entire applications are implemented in HTML+CSS+JavaScript and stored directly in the CouchDB, also persist their data in the CouchDB. Reminds me a bit of Frontier, only here CouchDB and JavaScript are used instead of the Frontier Roots and UserScript. The big advantage: if the application actually gets by with the elements used, you get the easy scalability so to speak for free - because CouchDB can be easily scaled by starting multiple instances. Maybe it becomes clearer what it means in this tutorial.

Its About The Hashbangs. Blogged because it is a pretty good description of what is wrong with these #! in addresses. The part after the # is only client-side, the server never sees it - any form of server-side redirection and server-side routing is completely out of the question. Also, server-side access controls are largely out of the question, the server only sees the main page. For single-page applications like TiddlyWiki, this is all fine - everything is already in one file and it is the declared purpose of these applications to be structured this way. For websites like Twitter or even news sites like those of Gawker Media, it is simply absurd. Twitter can perhaps guarantee due to its banal structure that the URLs to tweets also work with #! in the long run, in that a corresponding JavaScript part remains in the homepage forever (which is already pretty silly), but news sites will sooner or later simply drop the old #! URLs - and thus produce massive link rot.

Function Reference/site url. I need to go through this more carefully, because if a site is supposed to run in parallel under http and https, then there must no longer be any absolute references, everything must be routed via these functions. A few plugins (jQuery Lightbox and Infinite Scroll) also cause problems here, so bug reports will probably be necessary.

Shedding Bikes: Github's Favorite Joke. Why social networks in combination with code and geeks quickly become asocial networks. One reason why I also keep my distance from Github - I have an account there to set favorites and make bug reports, but I prefer to host my projects on Bitbucket. And even then, I'm very glad that Mercurial (as well as Git) as a distributed version system allows me to switch to other systems or switch to self-hosted sites (Rhodecode would be useful to install in the long run). Update: Github reacts and finally builds in blocking.

SSL and Cookies in WordPress 2.6 « Ryan Boren. Although originally written for WordPress 2.6, it is still valid. I had to do a bit of hacking, as my WordPress server is not directly connected to the network, but behind a firewall (iptables with DNAT helped), but now I have properly secured admin cookies and am better protected against WLAN sniffers at public hotspots. The WordPress idea is really nice - not 100% security, as with my login cookie comments can still be posted under my name, but at least the administration is protected. However, it conflicts with the Safer Cookies Plugin, which I previously used to at least pin my cookies to the IP. Additionally, there is a patch that has gone through 3.1 and enables securing the login cookie as well.

cloud9 is the software behind Cloud9ide.com - an IDE that runs entirely in the browser and is programmed in JavaScript based on Node.js. An interesting project, the current version also offers an offline mode, so you can easily work on projects on your server via the browser and then continue working locally in the offline case (on the train or in WLAN-sparse hotels in Swabia) and later resynchronize. I myself am IDE-incompatible, but programming in the browser has fascinated me for many years, simply because you can access your projects from anywhere, even without having your own computer with you. If I ever want to take a closer look, someone has written an installation guide for Ubuntu. Support for iOS devices is also in the works - so this could also be a nice way to access your own projects via iPad while on the go.

Hackers broke into Lockheed Martin. Holy cow, worst case scenario. Who bets that now cybersecurity laws in the USA will be tightened, after attacks on companies in the defense industry can presumably be portrayed as a matter of national security?

Spring cleaning for some of our APIs - The official Google Code blog. Good example of why cloud services are simply a bad idea as a basis for projects that have any significance beyond "playing around". The provider of these cloud services and APIs can simply shut them down at any time - and Google once again shows how to piss off a large number of developers with such actions. I can only quote from one of the comments: Why should we ever use any API from Google again?

IPhone PPTP VPN – GRE Protocol Issues | it-fabrik blog. Argh. That's exactly where my experiments failed - the VPN doesn't work over Edge - and it's probably because Telekom filters GRE (verified via a WLAN connection and then everything works fine). Why do these stupid mobile providers mess around in the network, they should just provide a connection and that's it. Now I have to manually turn on the VPN in WLAN environments that I don't trust, just because the Telekom people think I shouldn't be able to establish VPN connections over their sacred network. You're supposed to be able to do this via another APN that assigns public IPs and doesn't have a NAT box in between, but whether it's then billed as a flat rate with the tariff, of course, no one can say. I hate mobile providers and their protectionist behavior and their chaotic network structure.

clj-android. And while I'm at it, a framework for Clojure and Android. Although it all seems a bit raw (for example, it requires a fork of Clojure to work around some issues with Dalvik). And just for playing around with Clojure on the go, the Clojure REPL might be interesting.

scalaforandroid - Scala for Android. And for completeness, a project for creating Android applications with Scala. Scala does require a large runtime library of its own, but scalaforandroid uses a tree shaker (Proguard) that only transfers the used classes of the library during packaging, keeping the volume small.