Coalition to soften plans against data misuse - because, one must continue to support the address freeloaders so that their absurd business model (selling addresses and then flooding mailboxes with trash that nobody needs) continues to work.
Linkblog - 16.2.2009 - 24.3.2009
OLG Hamburg restricts forum liability - well, if a few more judgments of the LG Hamburg are overturned, the nonsense might soon stop that cease-and-desist letters particularly like to go there ...
One Laptop Battery Later And I'm A Django Fan - Zed Shaw guckt sich Django an. Und mag es.
Government wants to accelerate the expansion of online searches - of course, the lying pack in Berlin doesn't stick to what they themselves have said. Why bother. And constitutional concerns? Then the crazy wheelchair user will complain again about the Federal Constitutional Court for interfering. Meanwhile, the Federal Constitutional Court has been the only thing protecting us from the Berlin proletarians for quite some time.
Pig farming next to state guests - fits perfectly. One pig farming facility next to the other!
Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google - ok, basically what Gutenberg already does, but hey, I'm not complaining if I have even more books to choose from!
The iPhone can soon also do «Copy and Paste» - hey, cool, Apple is finally catching up with its own technology from the early 80s! (I'm an iPhone user and fan, but the missing copy-paste was really too silly even for me). Why, however, should multimedia messaging only be possible with the new iPhone? Well, never mind, somehow nobody really uses that nonsense anyway, right? Email is much more practical with the iPhone. And Spotlight on the iPhone could be quite nice - at least if it is designed to be expandable like on OS X.
RapidMiner - Data mining in open source. Seems quite interesting, might become interesting at some point. In Java, so it should also run on OS X.
Baen Books Science Fiction & Fantasy - another eBook dealer that doesn't have much DRM and offers books, for example, as HTML. Fictionwise has a wider selection, but Baen is specialized in science fiction and fantasy.
Calibre - free software for managing eBooks and synchronizing with the PRS-505. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Update: this thing is great! By far better than the included Sony software - and together with Adobe Digital Editions, you can easily buy your books from Thalia and transfer them to the device without any problems. Due to the DRM on books from regular sources, you need to use Adobe Digital Editions for reading (and probably for downloading as well), but otherwise you can fully use Calibre as a replacement for the somewhat cumbersome Sony software.
Sony Reader PRS-505 - LatheWiki - tons of links about the PRS-505, including how to patch the firmware yourself and links to programs with which you can manage the PRS-505 on systems other than Windows.
Bug #317781 - Comment #45 - very interesting analysis of the data loss problem with ext4. Summary: crap applications and libraries. Unfortunately, it also affects parts like sqlite (though only performance) and unfortunately larger parts of Gnome and KDE, which is why kludges are now being introduced in ext4 to work around them.
.epub eBooks Tutorial - how to produce ePub files with free software.
Feedbooks: Food for the mind - free eBooks in ePub format (can be used with the Sony Reader)
Fictionwise eBooks - and this is my favorite eBook dealer at the moment, delivers various formats and offers useful search functions also by format. Also there are the LRF files best suited for the Sony. Nice: there are also quite current titles and with their software you can also read the books on the iPhone. Unfortunately, many publishers are being difficult, so for example you can only get the books by Neal Stephenson in DRM-crippled formats, none of which are compatible with the Sony.
macvim - Google Code - another VIM version for Mac, but one with better support for various Mac techniques. And better integration (e.g., many standard keys are supported). In addition, it is based on the current version.
:: Munseys : A Bangsian Fantasy - and another site with tons of free eBooks - here you'll also find ePub and lrf formats (the latter often works better with the Sony than the ePub format, at least if it's not explicitly made for its small screen).
[John J Marley Letters](http://www.imherhusband.talktalk.net/letters homepage.html) - for lovers of the bizarre. Always read the answers to the letters too!
Broadcast time restrictions for erotic content - if I shook my head as much as I would have to with such crazy things, I would have whiplash now ...
Admits own investigations into child pornography scene - "Tauss justifies his own activities as an investigator by claiming that as the responsible expert politician in the Bundestag, he was authorized to conduct such research. He could not trust the Federal Criminal Police Office as the responsible authority, as the BKA also uses the issue of child pornography to push through new competencies and responsibilities for surveillance politically." - the whole thing sounds so absurd, it could well be true ... (on the other hand, it is of course also a very convenient explanation)
OpenDocument, diff, and revision-control - a few ideas on how to work with .odt and versioning. I might be able to use this for VoodooPad as well. However, I not only want to diff, but also merge - in order to sync cleanly between multiple machines. But as it looks, my best chances might be in git - my Mercurial integration works, but I have to limit VoodooPad quite a bit in features (all pages must be plain text at the moment). Or I build even more tools around Mercurial to automatically convert the RTF pages. None of this is really optimal - actually, it would suffice if I could sync cleanly with a lighttpd-based webdav, because MobileMe is just incredibly slow.
Putting Schäuble under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution - because quite obviously he is rather opposed to the constitution (and the separation of powers laid down therein).
Enzyme behind cancer spread found - this could be a real breakthrough in cancer treatment!
The START Natural Language Question Answering System - just because it's cool. Even though it made me pause when it correctly answered the question about Albert Einstein's place of birth, but with a reference to the source "Internet Movie Database" ...
What happened to Hot Standby? - real native synchronization is coming with PostgreSQL 8.5! There are already existing solutions, but native is of course easier for administration. And should finally shorten the silly discussions with the MySQL disciples.
wmd - The Wysiwym Markdown Editor - brilliant. Markdown preview with JavaScript. A great thing for browser interfaces, as Markdown allows for much better reuse of text content than if it were direct HTML.
Portrait of an Artist as an Avatar - Filthy Fluno - three of his pictures hang in my living room. One of them is a picture of me. Without Second Life, I probably would never have heard of him - with Second Life, he (along with a whole range of other artists) has ended up on my friends list. But of course, Second Life is just hype and nonsense, as all the experts are so fond of telling us. How many artists do they actually know personally? How many have they watched paint over the internet? How many have they partied with, where people from all over the world participated? I mean parties where they were personally greeted and they actually knew most of the participants a little ...
Scripting Drawer für Acorn - my favorite image editor is Acorn - because it's so small, fast and sleek. Plus, I can program it in Python. And with this plugin, the windows get a Scripting Drawer à la Nodebox - with which you can then run the Python code directly, without always having to navigate through the filter menu. Nice!
Stainless for OS X Leopard - interesting project: a multi-process browser for OSX. Essentially similar to Google Chrome (each tab is its own process), but further in that each process can have a local cookie storage and separate auth sessions. So for example, you can be logged into multiple Google Mail accounts in the same browser in multiple tabs, without any problems.
Leica ceases R-series production - a shame. It was the only digital SLR with manual focus - somehow a nice, obscure dinosaur. It probably lay in the shelf like lead ... The casual way, in which the demonstrator at the fair back then, in response to my question about dust on the sensor (due to the very open construction), simply pulled a microfiber cloth from his pocket and cleaned the fully coated protective glass in front of the sensor with it - that had a bit of a macho touch ...
Nik Software, Inc. - will soon also support Lightroom (Viveza is leading the way). Great - this will make some tasks even easier with Lightroom.
long battery life - in my opinion a much more rewarding goal for the next time. Especially for notebooks. And 12 hours - that already doesn't sound bad (even if it is of course only the case without a hard drive).
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 ...
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.