Linkblog - 7.10.2008 - 6.11.2008

WPA allegedly crackable in less than 15 minutes - Holy Cow!

SPD rebels make Ypsilanti fail - because, Koch as Prime Minister is so much better than being tolerated by the Left. After the nonsense in Schleswig-Holstein, I actually thought the SPD would be rudimentarily capable of learning from such debacles, but the stupidity and ignorance of some prolethicians are simply boundless. Class strategy, this way you can keep spouting nonsense and always just pretend to be seriously interested in taking responsibility someday. And meanwhile, a documented right-winger can laugh into his corrupt fist.

Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? - 11,000 years old. Wow.

NASA - MESSENGER Teleconference: More 'Hidden' Territory on Mercury Revealed - I am a big fan of these robotic and orbital missions. And the Mercury flybys already bring a lot of interesting images.

Otto the octopus wrecks havoc - Hermit crabs juggle and spit out lamps. New Olympic discipline and Otto gets the gold medal.

pysmell - Name completion for Python code as a small external tool that can be integrated into vim. Sounds quite interesting.

Tom Otterness - Making the Sculpture - my favorite artist for metal sculptures tells how his sculptures come to life.

JSSpeccy: A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript - ok, we can make the Internet, I've seen it all now ...

Richter: Wahlcomputer insecure - "Several judges criticized on Tuesday during the oral hearing of the court in Karlsruhe that with the current systems neither the correct storage of the votes cast nor their counting can be controlled." - what is so hard to understand that Prolethikers still argue against it?

Zed on the banking crisis - "My problem with any bailout is that I’m not getting anything in return. I mean, I’d trade my tax money for bailing out a few banks if maybe I saw some CEOs get put to the guillotine. I am actually not joking about that. I think the quickest way to get the bailout approved is to drag the leadership of every bank in the country into a large stadium and begin beheading them on national TV. Then threaten to stop the beheadings if every American doesn’t donate fifteen-thousand dollars by Monday." - I love his style!

Poladroid project : the easiest and funniest Polaroid Image Maker - check it out. I love Polaroid.

Bundestag's election inspector calls voting computers secure - why are our politicians always struck by particularly great stupidity? Isn't Hansel even able to read current press, where even in the USA states are backpedaling on the topic of voting computers, where the manufacturers of these devices had to take such massive image losses that one even changed its name? Not to mention all the incidents in Europe and the good coverage of the topic by the CCC? Are only dumb idiots getting jobs in the government? Shouldn't the protection of one of the most important democratic means - for the politicians: I'm talking about elections, not about the allowances - be particularly worthy of protection and in case of concrete indications of insecurity, rather play it safe and go with paper+pen?

CouchDB Implementation - those who want to know how CouchDB stores documents, how all access paths are structured, and what technology is behind it, can read the article here.

Critical security vulnerability: Microsoft warns of worms - "Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003 are particularly affected by this error. Microsoft classifies the issue as critical here. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are also affected, but Microsoft classifies the issue as important here because users must authenticate themselves first. Even users who are already using a pre-beta version of Windows 7 are advised to install the update." - so basically everyone.

Kidding (not) - "But, where the rubber meets the road (or more to the point where the ink hits the paper), in medium sized prints it's been almost impossible for experienced photographers who I've shown these comparison prints to to tell the difference. Scary." - und was war der Vergleich? Canon G10 (500 US$) gegen Hasselblad H2 (40000 US$) mit Ausdrucken auf A3.

Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby - Ruby is not exactly my favorite language, but this sounds very interesting. Ruby on the Objective-C runtime with syntax extensions, so that it integrates directly into the Mac world. Certainly very interesting as a way to play with the Objective-C frameworks.

John Nack on Adobe: The DNG Profile Editor: What's it all about? - a very interesting short article about the DNG 1.2 Profile Standard, which Adobe is currently developing. The Profile Editor in conjunction with a standard color card sounds like it could be a practical tool for the photo bag - small cards don't take up much space and reduce the color noise in the later processing of the images of a session.

Ackermann warns against enemies of the market economy - this big-headed talk - meanwhile, the current great market economy only consists of a collection of "give me too, give me too" shouters after state grants. What does this have to do with the market economy? In a real market economy, idiots like Ackermann would now mercilessly economically perish from their documented incompetence. Only because, amusingly, the CDU has become the pioneer of socially tinged state subsidies for stupid bankers, they are saved from ruin.

VirusTotal - Free online virus and malware scanner - because I often searched there when I needed a second or third opinion.

freeSSHd - ssh daemon for Windows. Currently, I'm using Unison from the Asus, not the other way around, but it could be quite interesting for later.

Jeffrey’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom Plugin - because I'm looking at the latest version of Lightroom again. Picasa is great on the go because it uses so few resources, but for the desktop, maybe another software would simply be more powerful.

Jeffrey’s “Export to PicasaWeb” Lightroom Plugin - and Picasa works too.

PresetsHeaven - presets for Lightroom. Since Lightroom is currently fascinating me greatly (hey, they save the processing parameters in the DNG files on request, so I can edit on two computers very simply and sync with Unison - and yes, Lightroom runs quite well on the small Asus Eee-PC 901!), I'll blog the link. There are some very charming presets to download.

WinMerge - Merge program for Windows. Should I integrate it into Mercurial so that something sensible can happen when conflicts arise during merges.

picasa2flickr - flickr upload plugin for picasa - works great with Picasa3. This gives me a compact workflow for my little Digi and the Asus. Yes, I know, Google is evil, Yahoo is evil and the chip of my Digi is noisy.

Software Tools in Haskell - simple and simple command-line programs in Haskell. Finally a tutorial that uses simple and simple, but complete programs and not just code snippets as a basis.

Ebooks again - on the one hand, after moving and dealing with hundreds of collected books, I have a certain positive feeling about an eBook reader where only memory cards need to be stacked. On the other hand: probably there will be regional restrictions and similar nonsense again, and I have no desire for that. I just want to read the originals when they are available much earlier (or simply because I often want to avoid the often appalling translations). And how does it look with the availability of English-language titles in German stores? Let's see how this develops in reality ...

Report: Digital police radio reaches only 3 KBit/s - insert roaring laughter - People, even GPRS is faster, and that wouldn't have required expensive new development. What kind of idiots are sitting at the decision-making tables? And which providers are so brazenly stupid to pull off such a stunt with taxpayer money? I mean, it takes two to tango - the dumb politicians and senior officials who let themselves be fooled - but also the company from the "free market" that has no qualms about ripping off the state for money for junk.

The Schräuble again - "The State Security of the GDR had several hundred thousand employees, made people spy on each other, and created an 'atmosphere of fear.'" - doesn't even know what he's complaining about, it fits ... (okay, there's still some catching up to do in terms of denouncing, but we'll manage that). The biggest alarmist is the wheelchair user himself, who, without any real verifiable facts, invents all sorts of threat scenarios and then solves them by hollowing out the Basic Law. And thus poses a far greater danger to the constitution than the terrorists who were recently arrested in such an advertising-effective manner (and then released again due to a lack of anything concrete).

SAP will sparen - tjaja, does anyone remember the whining of the business administration students at SAP, how terrible the interference of the union would be and that it would be impossible for a few troublemakers to push through a works council election, because SAP is so great and a works council would be so stupid and all that blahblah?

Also Kohl tested positive - Holy Cow! I'm starting to feel sorry for Holczer. How cycling can become a sporting event again after the recent pharmacy parade is becoming increasingly unclear to me. If even sympathizers like Holczer, who is not from the "old stable" but rather a newcomer, is being completely taken advantage of by his riders, what is left? And how can cycling motivate sponsors like Gerolsteiner - who have always worked with the rather "nice" image of the Holczer team and have not built up a performance pressure like Festina - to stay involved? Ultimately, cyclists are destroying their own livelihood.

Government supports banks with up to 400 billion euros - Money for social benefits? Forget it, we need to have a balanced budget! Money for incompetent bankers? Of course, how many hundred billion shall it be?

Buzzaire - Metered Dose Caffeine Inhaler - well, that's pretty crazy: a caffeine inhaler. I guess when you use it, any warranty on your body is void ...

Downloading Hugs - I just have to play with Haskell again (and fail again with this quirky language ...). And there is a quite nice Windows version of the "small" interpreter Hugs - might be something for my Eee-PC.

ECMAScript 4 - Progress - those who want to know why ECMAScript will again be dumber in the next version than it could be, can take a look at which points are all rejected by Apple ...

IM Functionality On Twitter Suspended Indefinitely - somehow Twitter is reducing itself to irrelevance. First, SMS is turned off for almost all relevant regions of the world (except in this strange bilingual North American area and in the largest banana union in the world - oh yes, and also in India), now IM is finally going down the drain at Twitter. What remains? A rather meager web application that you have to painstakingly poll on the go if you want to see what's going on.

.:: NOTEPAD++ ::. - since I'm still setting up my Asus, I've blogged about it - could this be an alternative to Textwrangler on the Mac?

Overclock Your Body With Geek Cuisine - Alternatives to coffee. Although my Nespresso makes such good espresso that I tend to rely on it for my regular caffeine supply.

Shapeways | passionate about creating - 3D print-on-demand. Could be interesting.

Slipstream - Intuition + Money - An Aha Moment - interesting development in silicon wafers. If the 100-fold performance can also be implemented in real products, that would be fantastic news for solar cell-based solar energy.

T-Mobile Board Calls Own Corporation a Mess - "At Vodafone, former Federal Family Minister Renate Schmidt is to serve as an ombudswoman to improve customer data protection and compliance with regulations. The SPD member of parliament will be available as a contact person for employees at Germany's second-largest mobile network operator starting in November if they are confronted with legally or ethically questionable matters or even suspect violations of the law," the company announced in Düsseldorf." - huh? Politician as an ethical advisor? Goat? Gardener?

The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products - no comment.

the world's most bad-ass grotesques and gargoyles - since my character in SL is usually a gargoyle, a very fitting link.

Why 42 ? - for reference.

MyDigitalSSD - and that's where you'll find the cool SSDs for the Asus. Up to 64GB and all as SLC (which is significantly faster than MLC, making the D: drive on the Little Fat one much faster - C: is already designed as SLC).

SSD expansion to 32 or 64 GB - yeah, I know, a 32G SLC SSD costs just as much as the Eee PC and that's completely crazy. Yes, ok, I got it. I'll bookmark the link here anyway for future use. Who knows, maybe I'll still be overcome by the urge.

eeebuntu - available with Netbook Remix and classic Gnome. Should also have quite comprehensive drivers for the hardware.

Ubuntu Eee - one of the many Ubuntu-based EEE PC distributions. This one sounds very complete and uses the new Netbook Remix interface. According to forum comments, it also runs smoothly with all versions and has full drivers installed.

UMTS USB Sticks: with Xandros (Linux) OVERVIEW - and as I can see here, things still look pretty bad for my UMTS stick under Linux (I have the black thing from TMO), so I'll probably have to continue using Windows for now.

Abbyy FotoReader: OCR with the digital camera - not a bad idea at all. And could even be quite useful in combination with little-fatty (my Asus 901) and my upcoming digicam (which has a special document mode).