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.
Linkblog - 24.3.2009 - 15.5.2009
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.
jgm's peg-markdown - and another C-based markdown version.
Books on Board - another store that sells English literature as eBooks and also offers Epub. Even quite current books.
Moleskin page designer - a designer for custom page types for Moleskin notebooks.
Python MQI Interface - pymqi. Version 0.5d - MQSeries and Python. (not that I'm a MQSeries fan, I just might need it for work)
Sup dawg, we heard you like Smalltalk so we put Smalltalk in your Factor so you can send messages while you roll - an implementation of Smalltalk in Factor. Quite extensible and could also bring this nice environment to people who don't know Factor yet (sometimes starting with a known language is easier).
Welcome to Waterstones.com - their eBooks also work perfectly on the Sony Reader, and thus there is also a source with relatively current literature in English for it. Of course, DRMed.
An Experimental MacRuby - MacRuby will switch to LLVM as a virtual machine, moving away from the standard Ruby VM. Very interesting, as it promises significantly higher performance.
Head-shaking stimulus from Karlsruhe (only Regional Court) - so indirectly Google also becomes criminally liable because they also refer to Wikileaks. And thus everyone who refers to Google as well. And in general, everything is criminal. Probably another case of stupidly vague laws and judges overwhelmed by new technologies.
Telekom will iPhones Skype-frei halten - of course. Naturally. It's only because the voice quality could be worse than in the T-Mobile network. Logical. I mean, everyone immediately believes that Deutsche Telekom only doesn't accept VoIP and IM for the iPhone because of the quality. Users must be protected from the terrible quality! How stupid do they think we are at Deutsche Telekom?
Getting the most out of a 1024x600 screen - three posts with good tips on how to free up more screen space on small computers. Especially interesting are the configuration options for the Dock (you can actually make it a bit less annoying!) and the menu bar (auto-hide depending on the application) as well as the screen scale factor already used by me (also application-dependent).
Sweden's police: Child porn filters are not very effective - will the prolethicians and populists in Berlin now pick up this statement as quickly as they used the Swedish block list as a model example for their silly censorship action?
BKA witness lies (badly) about forged files - at annalist. Go read.
Review of 3D Engines for the iPhone - interesting overview of available game engines for the iPhone.
Somethings to rejoice about - about the changes in Erlang 13A. Especially very nice: finally real Unicode support in Erlang.
Intuos4 - Wacom drawing tablets with new pen technology - hey, it looks like I want to update my graphics tablet.
KeyCue - find, remember, and learn menu shortcuts - not uncool. Just hold down a modifier and it shows a list of hotkeys. Practical if you don't know all the hotkeys yet and want to learn them (because the keyboard is indeed faster than mouse around).
wikileaks und die Sperrlisten - was obvious, right? Does anyone really believe it's only about blocking child pornographic content? Wikileaks will probably soon appear on the block list as well, just like other undesirable sources on the net.