Google App Engine - wow. Google offers hosted applications based on Python and delivers Django pre-installed. Genius. However, Django is quite crippled, as the entire model part cannot be used (there is no SQL database, only the Google Datastore). Hmm. Maybe it's time to try something new with my blog. It has been running reliably for a long time, it's time to destroy it again ...
Linkblog - 7.3.2008 - 9.4.2008
The new business plan of SCO is already facing rejection in advance - "A trustee in bankruptcy will only be appointed if the company owners are unable to carry out the reorganization or final bankruptcy due to fraud, age, or proven business incompetence." - fits SCO well. Okay, they are not that old yet, but the rest ...
Pydev - Eclipse plugin for Python development. Since I sometimes look at Eclipse for other things and it's no longer terribly slow, this might also become interesting at some point. Although TextWrangler is still unbeatable in comparison in terms of speed.
Pydev Extensions - shareware extension of the Eclipse plugin for Python. Has some interesting features.
ral 4010 bf1773 - Google Search - much more usage, but also not the specification chosen by Deutsche Telekom itself.
ral 4010 C03F7D - Google Search - not many results, I guess they all copied from each other and someone got it from a (poorly designed) Telekom page at some point.
Telekom Farbverwendung - PDF on telekom-cg.com which lists the Telekom color definitions. I only found it there, it looks official. Interesting is the sentence about where the web color comes from: "The hexadecimal value (www) conforms to the global norm and is taken from the 'Websafe Color Library'" - it sounds more like it was selected after visual inspection and is closest to RAL 4010 (which is ultimately a color tone specification rather for print or coating) (sRGB is not that big).
The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection - a posthumous blogger, so to speak ...
Thompson Rivers University Owlcam - yes, an owl camera. A Bubo Virginianus nest, to be precise.
Towers of Hanoi - written only with VIM commands (yes, if you paste VIM commands into a buffer and execute them again, you get something like a - very strange - programming language, based on visual text modification. And yes, someone had too much free time)
Interview: "The banking supervision has failed and is superfluous" - ah yes, because banks neglect their duties of economic risk assessment, banking supervision should be abolished. Because that will make banks think more economically. Please what kind of herb is served to today's professors for morning coffee? With such experts, we should not be surprised about the stupid actions of the prolethicians ...
iTunes now with TV content also in Germany - and the shocking thing for me about it: since Southpark is already freely downloadable, only Spongebob remains potentially interesting. Somehow a bit thin after all the fuss.
Cash patients have to wait longer for specialist appointments - because we have a two-tier healthcare system.
Norway seeks to reverse Open XML vote at ISO - "Reports of the voting process surfaced on Friday at Computerworld Norge. In a translation of the article at Groklaw, participants said that representatives from Microsoft and Statoilhydro on the Standards Norge committee voted for approval of Open XML. But the other members of the committee were opposed because their comments on the specification were not addressed. Yet the overall vote changed from changed from No to Yes."
OOXML: Waiting for the ISO Decision - if Microsoft's garbage heap (sorry, a "standard" with thousands of pages of explanations and thousands of critical notes and corrections and counter-corrections is simply a garbage heap) were to actually become a standard in the "Fast Track" procedure, the entire ISO procedure would have made itself completely ridiculous and it would be time to find a functioning alternative to this farce. If technical standards are now decided solely on the basis of political intrigues and economic interests, and in a way that clearly and unequivocally ignores the established regulations of the ISO ("Fast Track" is not intended for standards that require extensive discussion), then ISO is simply worthless.
Python processing - the threading API built on fork processes. Very interesting because it allows for better utilization of multi-core systems (since processes - unlike threads - do not suffer from the global interpreter lock). However, this naturally comes with the overhead of system processes. Could still be very interesting for e.g. TooFPy.
Turkey: President and Prime Minister must go to court - cute, how the EU is now supporting the nationalists and religion-close (too close?) AKP people. Probably Erdogan seems controllable and usable for their own power games. People just never learn. State and religion must be strictly separated. But as long as this is not implemented in Germany, we should not be surprised by reactions like the one from the EU ...
CCC publishes Schäuble's fingerprint - cool action.
cusp - I'm not a big fan of Eclipse (it just consumes more resources than I'm willing to grant an IDE), but this is quite nice. Namely, an IDE for Lisp that builds on the usual integration tools and thus creates an interactive Lisp environment - but with the typical Eclipse features for the editor and source navigation. Looks good. And apparently there's also a simple installer (which includes the appropriate SBCL) that also supports OS X. Maybe I should download Eclipse again ...
DIN says "Yes" to ISO standardization of OOXML - and if you read through it, that e.g. only "Yes" and "Abstention" were options in the vote, then it is clear who has greased and financed the whole thing. What a disgrace for an institution that thinks so highly of itself.
LispWithCusp - in case anyone wonders why I can warm up to Eclipse and Lisp in combination at all. Yes, the whole thing already looks damn good. Reminds me a bit of the Apple Dylan environment. Someday, current IDEs will catch up to the power of the old tools. Cusp already looks really usable.
TDD Proven Effective! Or is it? - a study on the efficiency of test-driven development is dissected here and examined for its actual content and statistical statements. The result is then less positive for TDD ...
Usability problems with .Mac sync - I can only confirm what Jeffrey Zeldman writes here. Apple's sync tools are simply terrible. I have had the sync of trivial data between my iMac under Leopard and my notebook under Tiger crash multiple times - fortunately, only one is leading, and in an emergency I can simply reset everything. But worse than the sync of simple data (contacts, calendar, etc.) was the sync of the keychain - it took me quite a while to clean up the damage. And the iDisk? Oh man, I only tried to edit 4 OmniOutliner documents on both computers in turn. Result: dreadful. Simply and plainly junk. For documents, I have simply switched back to Mercurial (I use it anyway for my other documents, the outliner files were just a test). It is reliable and stable. Even if it only offers a command line as an interface - for data synchronization, I want stability and not gimmicks. Sync services that crash my data are simply garbage.
SAP is garbage - even a garbage company doesn't want it ...
Transrapid-Flop: Stoiber surprised - Maget sarcastic - the blather of Stoiber and his ilk and how they complain about the poor industrial location of Germany. As if anything in Germany would depend on a nonsensical project like the magnetic levitation train - apart from the bribes for the politicians, of course.
Spirit may continue to explore Mars - good. It would also be quite stupid to shut it down.
Mars-Roboter Spirit wird stillgelegt? - to shut down one of the most successful space projects of recent times would be highly stupid. But the NASA has experience with stupid decisions ...
South Park Studios - all episodes legally from the creators.
MCL 5.2 has been released as open source - unfortunately probably not running under Rosetta, so nothing for Intel Mac users (which excludes almost everyone who has something modern from Apple). Well, the manufacturing company is probably more or less history, but maybe there will soon be a version that works with Rosetta - or someone ports the OpenMCL Compiler Backend into this version.
After Security Update today: "Bus ... - if you, like me, suddenly get bus-errors with ssh after the update on 18.3, Nicecast has an update for their tools - Instant Highjack is the actual culprit. Install the update from Nicecast and everything seems to run smoothly again.
iTimeMachine - another way to back up to network drives with Time Machine. Not tried, but it should be able to back up to any (not just Time Capsule and Airport) network drives (even those mounted via SMB).
fscklog: Firmware 7.3.1 für 802.11n-AirPort Stationen: Time Machine-Backup mit AirPort Extreme [Update] - finally. Now you can use the pre-Time Capsule parts for backups as well. And you can back up the Time Capsule's drive to an external drive (offline, hopefully). This makes the whole thing even more interesting - because with the Time Capsule, it's just a compact device for automatic backup and the external terabyte drive is used once a week for backing up the Time Capsule. And until the Time Capsule is finally available, my external drive can play Time Capsule for now ... (in my case, only after I created a file ".com.apple.timemachine.supported" in the main folder of a network drive)
Mystery about Saint-Exupéry solved?: "I deeply regret having killed the esteemed author" - the brother of Ivan Rebrov shot down Saint Expéry in the Second World War. And is quite obviously still proud of his "aviation achievements" and probably still thinks war pilots are great. Hmm. Absurd world.
Panda3d full featured open source python 3d engine - hmm. Unfortunately only installers for Linux and Windows. Will this work with OS X? Maybe even embeddable in Nodebox?
This is The End My Friend: Negroponte Says XP on XO in 60 Days - "With the Sugar User Interface, OLPC can claim to have a Constructionist learning methodology, it can claim to be promoting exploration and learning, it can even hope to activate the view source key. But once you put on XP, no matter how much it may be customized to leverage the XO hardware, children will not be taught to "learn learning" as Negroponte promised. They will be taught "ICT skills", a phrase Negroponte himself railed against."
Ur-Scheme: A GPL self-hosting compiler from a subset of R5RS Scheme to fast Linux x86 asm - I like such projects, no matter how pointless they may be.
Building a Codeless Language Module with BBEdit 8.5 and (Ir-) Regular Expressions - interesting, because it shows the more complex features of Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. Could be helpful for own Language-Modules that I might need.
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight (video) - "Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another."
Hacking implanted defibrillators: shockingly easy - "But, more disturbingly, they could also shut off the device's ability to respond to cardiac events. The pinnacle of their hacking was to send the device into test mode, in which a carefully-timed current would trigger an arrhythmic event, something that's normally done under controlled conditions to determine if the device responds successfully. In effect, they hacked the device in a way that could stop a heart."
How Hesse's state chief can continue to govern: Koch forever - the people of Hesse just can't vote. A few more votes against Koch and we would finally be rid of the guy. But no ...
MidiKeys - just a software midi keyboard for the Mac.
NodeBox | Superfolia - wow. Simply wow. I really need to engage more with Nodebox and not just use it as a practical desktop calculator.
Why is 37signals so arrogant? - "Now, I have always admired 37signals. Nice website, intelligent articles. But I've tried their products and although they have admirable qualities, they have never quite met my needs: Close is not good enough. After reading the article, I understand why: the developers are arrogant and completely unsympathetic to the people who use their products."
Fluid - Free Site Specific Browser for Mac OS X Leopard - damn, more and more features that make me think about upgrading to Leopard. This would be nice - I use many web apps and dedicated mini browsers for them would be quite cool. Also, the integration of user scripting and the Dock and Growl integration are interesting.
Prism - is something similar to Fluid, but for more systems (based on Mozilla technology)
The Limits of Knowledge We Against Greed - in memory of Joseph Weizenbaum the link to his last published article. Hopefully his hard-earned knowledge will be preserved and not swept aside in the technological frenzy.
iPhone Developer Program Details - it's getting exciting. Starting in the summer, the first tools. And the freeware programmers can get into the Developer Program relatively cheaply and also use the iTunes Store platform for distribution.
Seaside development with GNU Smalltalk - very nice. GNU Smalltalk is simply one of the better batch Smalltalk variants. The others are just GUI-free images, GNU Smalltalk is far better geared towards text mode from the start. And for a dynamic web server, it is simply the better environment. Combined with the quite powerful web-based tools from Seaside, this could become a really nice environment in the long run.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Happy now, bitches? - "In the list of the dead up above I forgot to mention Palm and Adobe. They are both also dead. So dead, in fact, that I forgot to mention them." - Fake Steve ist klasse.