SCM Integration Scripts - here's how to integrate an external Diff in Mercurial.
Linkblog - 11.4.2008 - 7.5.2008
Telekom-Chef sieht Managerbezüge als angemessen an - another one of those blowhards who talk about the responsibility of managers. Where is the responsibility of Ackermann? Where is that of Esser? Where is that of Sommer? What have their alleged responsibilities actually resulted in?
Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places) - why the lucky stiff (jo, he really calls himself that) is at it again: this time it's a Ruby-to-Python-bytecode compiler. Interesting idea.
vi in javascript - some people just have too much time ...
Announcing Teh - the minimalist blog tool using Google App Engine - and if Google would finally send me my access to GAE, I could even play around with it.
Frag - a 3D first-person-shooter in Haskell.
Magma - Object Database as Open Source for Squeak.
Ready Lisp: Common Lisp for Mac OS X - cool. After the Eclipse version, there is now also the classic Emacs version. Very nice - Eclipse works on my iMac, but it's not really a hit there. And for a nostalgic Lisper like me, old == better.
DAZ Productions Hexagon 2.5 - a 3D subdivision modeler, and it looks quite usable. Above all, it offers export for Second Life Sculpted Prims, including texturing. Maybe I should take a look at it too (normally I use AC3D, which is fixed and well configurable, but it looks rather thin on the side of texture creation, at least for someone with my non-skills)
GreaseKit - User Scripting for all WebKit applications - great. With this, Safari is getting closer to Firefox. With this and PithHelmet, Safari is already quite rounded. However, it would be nice if Apple would officially support plugin interfaces for such tools instead of constantly breaking the functionality of these tools. Even better would be a direct integration into Safari, because the ideas of these two tools are really not that far-fetched ...
Mailplane - wow, I definitely need to check that out. A Webkit-based specialized browser for Google Mail that can handle multiple accounts. I currently use multiple Prism instances for this, but a single program with switching capability would of course be much better. Besides, Prism is nice, but (thanks to Mozilla technology) is simply not a Mac application. And Fluid would be Mac-like, but unfortunately it can only handle one Google Mail account (since it does not separate cookies or KeyChain entries).
New version of VirtualBox also runs under Mac OS X and Solaris (Update) - and offers seamless desktop also for Linux guests. That would almost be interesting and reason to take a look at it. Although Parallels has been working so well for me that there is little "pressure to suffer" for such experiments.
TidBITS Entertainment: Thank You for Not Playing: Microsoft Expires Future Playback of DRM-Protected Music - anyone who still thinks DRM is great can read this. In my opinion, this is simply fraud what Microsoft is doing.
Your personal data just got permanently cached at the US border - isn't it cute how countries that otherwise always emphasize freedoms so much issue the most absurd regulations? Which freedoms are actually being defended when you give them all up?
How do I delete my Facebook account - this is really worth reading. Deactivating does not delete - but deleting is made so difficult by FB, it's beyond ridiculous.
USBOverdrive - I need to check this out, it allows you to assign functions to additional keys on USB devices. My Logitech keyboard and mouse have some unused keys, and you don't really want the Logitech Mac software on your computer ...
Limp: When You Need More Than Just a Lisp - the proof that VIM is as powerful as Emacs. An integrated Lisp development environment in VIM.
Posturing against Internet censorship - sorry, but you can't really take the prolethikers seriously in light of things like, for example, the blocking orders from Düsseldorf. Because if it were serious, they would first clean up their own dirty doorstep ...
Victorian All-in-One PC - nice mod job.
Planned BKA Law The Lidlization of Law - "The seized computer data should not be reviewed by an independent judge to determine whether they constitute an 'interference with the core area of private life' (and therefore may not be used); instead, this review should be conducted by 'two employees of the Federal Criminal Police Office', 'one of whom has the qualification for judicial office'. Only if these two police officers have doubts should they submit the seized data to the judge for review." - I've been saying it all along, put the federal government under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, because the biggest enemies of the constitution today are sitting in Berlin.
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi - download and read offline. You won't get dumber from it.
RFID System Mifare Classic cracked? - "According to the recently published work of Nicolas Courtois, Karsten Nohl and Sean O'Neil, it is possible to crack the encryption within seconds using PC hardware without having to pre-calculate extensive tables (Rainbow Tables). The security of the algorithm, according to the researchers' conclusion, is 'close to zero'."
BBC - Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - in Flash with illustrations. Nice.
Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org - "From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the 'Infocom Drive' — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made."
Nikon D3 Review - digital cameras are slowly getting to where we want them to be - in terms of features. The price is still beyond good and evil for these powerhouses.
Hourly wages below five euros gross - that's how the upswing and the reduction of unemployment figures work. Next goal: undercutting India and China in hourly wages.
The Flying Meat Wiki: Acorn - nice, there's a wiki with tips, tricks and plugins for Acorn. I like to use Acorn because it's a quick way to change images. And scripting is possible in Python, which is not to be sneezed at.
The Flying Meat Wiki: VoodooPad - There's also a wiki for VoodooPad. And after I saw that you can now script with Python there, I'll probably take a closer look at it. VoodooPad was already quite nice as a desktop wiki in older versions, but the current versions seem to have learned a lot of nice tricks.
AS3 Flash Physics Engine Box2DFlashAS3 2.0.0 - wow. Just wow.
Breaking News for sky afficionados: Apophis risk not increased - because the nonsense (originally - where else - appeared in the Blödzeitung) is now going around the world and I already have American acquaintances writing to me about the "math genius from Germany" and the impending end of the world, here is a link that tells how the whole nonsense came about. Quality journalism, of course.
Infection tool for SQL Server and IIS - interesting story. The attacks are becoming more professional.
Church employers want no minimum wage - plain language: the business model of Caritas and Co. is also based on the uninhibited exploitation of employees. And instead of standing up for themselves, they demand state support, which ultimately means nothing more than subsidization. And this from stores that are already massively subsidized (e.g. through their non-profit status and the resulting tax advantages).
Lighthouse - also does dynamic port forwarding on the router, but with more options to define things and, for example, bind them to certain applications. However, it is not free, but shareware.
NASA Extends Saturn Mission for Another 2 Years - it would be pretty stupid to end it now.
Port Map and TCMPortMapper - a nice little tool that can open ports on routers (provided that the router supports corresponding protocols for remote control). Useful for temporarily making services on your own computer accessible from the internet.
Sleep - Java Scripting Language - if anyone really misses Perl in the Java world, they could check out this project. Linked purely for nostalgic reasons, as I used to rely on Perl for a few years.
The iPhone SDK and free software: not a match - a reason why GPLv3 is good, no matter what some (otherwise quite popular) idiots say. Because exactly this problem - the effective blockade of open source through codesigning - is addressed by the GPLv3.
Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier - it's getting more interesting. Amazon wants to add persistent storage space to EC2 (again paid according to usage).
CHDK in Brief - it begins. Hacks for Canon compact cameras. Sounds quite interesting, not just a toy. In my opinion, camera manufacturers should simply provide this from the outset, it is simply the next logical step. But they probably look too much at "product design" by arbitrarily removing features (as is often done with RAW storage)
Court: Display of Thumbnails in Search Engines Illegal - classic "Hmm" ruling. Meta-tags have long not been so important in search engine optimization and robots.txt should be known to every website creator as basic knowledge. How this all fits into reality is not entirely clear to me. I mean, what about my pages here - they don't have meta-tags. Can I now sue Google?
Latest Advance in Artificial Intelligence: Computer Wins a Game Against a Go Master - "During the Go Tournament in Paris, staged between 22 and 24 March 2008 by the French Go Federation (FFG), the MoGo artificial intelligence (IA) engine developed by INRIA - the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control - running on a Bull NovaScale supercomputer, won a 9x9 game of Go against professional 5th DAN Catalin Taranu. This was the first ever officially sanctioned 'non blitz' victory of a 'machine' over a Go Master."
SeasideXUL - an interesting project that directly generates XUL interfaces from Seaside (the Smalltalk web application server) and allows the creation of applications with native interfaces. Very interesting, as here a web server technology is used for local applications (and yes, this sounds damn similar to AIR, only with Smalltalk and XUL instead of JavaScript/ActionScript and HTML/Flash)
ARD and ZDF: Back to the Middle Ages? - because it is slowly becoming apparent that the ridiculous business models of private broadcasters do not work, one draws the logical conclusion in Germany and destroys the added value created by fees. Because it is known to be much better when advertising junk and trash television is subsidized (because that's what it is - just banal indirect subsidization). One could of course also take a look at what the BBC does, for example, and orient oneself accordingly, and demand from public broadcasting (and exert pressure through the control bodies) to produce meaningful content from the fees, which might then be published under meaningful licenses (have you heard of CC?) and directly benefit the citizens (for whom the state is actually supposed to be there, not for the ridiculous scammers from the private broadcasting corner). But that would be a sensible approach. And presumably fewer bribes would be paid or something like that ...
Digging into Factor’s compiler - very nice overview of how the Factor compiler works. I'm having more and more fun with Factor, I think I'll play around with it a bit more.
Filesharing becomes more dangerous - or not - as usual, botched construction. Because the federal prolethicians just can't do anything really right. Except then go ahead and further erode the rights of citizens - that they can do really well.
GitHub - "Secure Git hosting and collaborative development". Looks quite nice and git is, alongside Mercurial, one of the more interesting new version control systems.
Google App Engine for developers - nice overview of the features and the people behind the App Engine.
Network Solutions: Not Just Thieves and Hijackers, Now Using Tactics That Can Get Your Site Banned From Google - oh wow. Network Solutions set up a wildcard A-record for unused subdomains on domains using their DNS, and put ads on them. Someone registers a name to connect it with their business, uses Network Solutions' service for operating the name server, and then is simply screwed over by their service provider.
Strange TCP-networking problems with Mac OS X 10.4 and Solaris 10 - obscure TCP parameters you might want to tweak to possibly boost OS X's sluggish networking.
Unicode 5.1 contains ß as a capital letter - because, it's important.