LG Hamburg will comprehensive forum liability when using pseudonyms - news from the Hamburg judge-zoo.
Linkblog - 21.1.2008 - 13.2.2008
Zypries threatens imprisonment or fine for storing IP addresses - "According to a now published decision (PDF file) of January 10 (Az. 5 C 314/06), in case of non-compliance, a fine of up to 250,000 euros and, as an alternative, even up to six months imprisonment for Federal Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries (SPD) personally is threatened."
So you’re going to write an iPhone app… - about experiences with the (not yet available) iPhone SDK and software development for the iPhone.
Caecilian - Freakshow Natur ...
In-Depth TimeVault Review: Backing up in Ubuntu is Finally Made Simple!! - when I look at something like this, it's a nice example of a problem in the Open Source community: they understand the features and techniques, but they have no clue about user interface design.
Polaroid says goodbye to instant film - another one bites the dust. Too bad - the black and white pack films in cassettes were always a nice treat for my little thick one. Okay, I eventually switched to the Fuji FP100B because it's just crisper. But that's probably no longer available (or if it is, it's only a matter of time before it disappears). The format is just too exotic. With my low photography output, the compartment in the fridge should last a few more years ...
The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan - "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."
CamlX - GUI shell for Ocaml and Caml Light (wow, that's ages ago, my tinkering with Caml Light - and the DOS port of Ocaml 1.0 ..)
FastCGI Programmer's Guide - Chapter 2, Developing FastCGI Applications in C - and yes, it does make sense from time to time to program your CGIs (or FCGIs) in C.
Tenerife Skunkworks: Parsing text and binary files with Erlang - nice article about one of the mysteries in Erlang: how to handle strings? Lists of characters or binaries? (oh, and everything I've written in the last few days is gone due to a server crash. Hmm. Did I have anything interesting to say?)
Developing an iPhoto export plugin - as the name suggests: how to build iPhoto exporters.
Microsoft prepares to acquire Yahoo - urks. I only use del.icio.us and flickr.com from all the Yahoo clutter - and even those only for my Second Life avatar. But somehow it's probably time to switch.
ScriptExport - very nice. A plugin for iPhoto, with which you can export images via shell scripts (or also Python scripts and whatever else can start the shell). Hmm. With a bit of tool help, I should be able to push snapshots from Second Life to my static server instead of to Flickr.
Programming Nu - mini-Lisp with integration in ObjectiveC on Mac OS X. Sounds quite interesting.
real programmers - use vim, dammit!
Upload with SCP - with Automator. No idea if I already have it, but it could be useful.
9.com patents HTTP-Redirects - once again a nonsense patent that was granted in the USA. And again, a long legal battle will presumably follow before this nonsense is eliminated. Extremely disgusting, but the audacity with which Jeff Bezos likes to stand out with such absurd patents (his One-Click-Buy patent, for example). Of course, the examination at the patent offices is usually worse than bad for Internet patents. But it also takes someone who is so bold to file such garbage as a patent in the first place.
Arc - does anyone remember the fuss Paul Graham made about the 100-year-language? And that he wanted to achieve it with Arc? Well, he has scaled back: Arc is now just a language for exploratory programming. If you look at it, it looks like Common Lisp without the advanced features, with a more compact (but incompatible with other Lisp) syntax and some ready-made libraries to relatively easily put together a web application. Not really particularly exciting. There was already Picolisp for that - and if he is already based on MzScheme, one could simply use that, it has a much larger library and is used by more than just a few grumpy-old-men ... (and the excuse he gives for supporting only ASCII as a character set is simply embarrassing - especially since his underlying infrastructure cleanly supports Unicode ...)
Billions are bubbling at Shell - will anyone ever notice that it's extremely strange when a corporation raises fuel prices "reluctantly due to rising oil prices" but ends up with higher profits from the game? They don't even bother to disguise the scam anymore. Sure, they make their money from oil production - but why do they have to raise gasoline prices along with all the others if not because of price agreements with the other gasoline corporations?
Jython 2.5 - possibly still this year? That would be fantastic. Python is still my preferred language, and the JVM world opens up large amounts of interesting libraries (the interesting ones usually don't come from Sun ...) and interoperability with Java programs, which makes it easier to place Python at work.
Patent on mobile entertainment device with phone - or something like that. The employees at the US Patent Office seem to be suffering from an acute lack of brainpower at the moment. There was already proven prior art for this patent, which was taken into account in the last application but is now being ignored. Well, it doesn't affect the poor, I think the lawyers from Apple will be happy to take care of the gentleman and his patent.
Post-Konkurrenten klagen gegen den Mindestlohn - even more companies whose only business model is the exploitation and ripping off of employees. Heartless scum that just wants to cash in and then presents itself as the great job creators - unfortunately, work that does not secure survival for a full week makes no sense. And indirectly, these companies are only ripping off the state and thus the taxpayer, but they themselves complain about having to pay taxes. Disgusting.
Sigma announces DP1 to be available spring 2008 - I'll believe it when I see it in the store. Although the concept - compact camera with APS-format chip - is quite exciting.
Allegorithmic | MaPZone - algorithmic texture generation. I should check it out, Texturemaker is nice, but sometimes a bit cumbersome and hard to follow which tools to use.
Nokia: Hinweise auf VerstoĂź gegen Auflagen - can someone please explain to me in a coherent way why 60 million in subsidies were paid and a violation of the conditions is only noticed when the whole place causes such a massive stir that even the dumbest prolethician can no longer look the other way? I mean, does no one really check when only a measly 60 million is at stake, or are they just completely stupid in DĂĽsseldorf? 200 to 400 missing jobs should surely be noticed earlier (and anyway, why don't they know how many jobs are actually missing? Should I report my tax debt next time with "oh, around 100-200 euros"?)
Credit agencies in Austria must delete credit data upon request - could we please get this here in Germany as well?
tunneling over ICMP - I've only had DNS so far when I had a hotspot WLAN in front of me, but icmptunnel is also one of the nice tools to get on the network.
Election observers in Hesse - Isotopp collects links, saves me the trouble of collecting them myself. The thing with the voting computer at the party official's home is already great ...
#10919 (incorrect pluralization) - Rails Trac - over penis enhancements in Ruby on Rails
OSXCrypt.org - Truecrypt for MAC(encrypted volumes as open source solution - which can then also be used by other systems)
Federal Fiscal Court: Commuting allowance reduction unconstitutional - the federal legislators are currently collecting unconstitutional things. When will they learn from this and listen to the experts who regularly predict exactly that? And when will Easter fall on Christmas?
I love the Internet. And my genes. - time again to link to the Rebel Market. If the future is social-gen-sharing, and everyone can deduce nonsense from pseudo-scientific collections of data garbage, if future HR managers not only get the sexual preferences and the drunken remarks from the study period willingly served from the net, but also a genetic profile with absurd pseudo-interpretation, then a new boundary of complete stupidity on the net has definitely been crossed. And since it fits so well into the whole discussion, let's just ge-owled. I mean, Stasi 2.0 is nothing compared to what is voluntarily disclosed on the Internet ...
Still no ringtones in Germany - sounds dramatic, but only applies to the iTunes Music Store. You can't buy ringtones. Pretty stupid of Apple. Well, if you save sound files as AAC (e.g. with Amadeus) and then name them .m4r, iTunes sorts them as ringtones. Just wanted to mention that. (And yes, that means I have an iPhone)
OLG Frankfurt: Providers do not have to block content - it's somehow logical. Hopefully, other courts will follow suit.
an offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone - ok, outdated with download to the iPhone, but still: that would really be a reason to have an iPhone (the direct and immediate access to Wikipedia and Google alone would almost be worth it, but also to directly access it locally in cases where nothing else works - nice!)
Breakthrough for CC music - in Denmark. The century in which GEMA will follow suit is not yet known.
Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List - it's things like these that show the alarming extent to which creationist nonsense has taken hold in the USA.
Japan wants to fly paper plane from International Space Station to earth - "the Japan folded paper plane association"
Strasheela - hmm, that would finally be a chance to take a closer look at Mozart and Oz, a software for algorithmic music composition (and no, I have no idea about composition - I just like everything that algorithmically generates something else that either looks good or sounds good ...)
Unshaking and refocusing your photos - a few interesting tools linked, worth checking out.
60,000 Dollar fine for DNS query - even in the USA there are judges who have no idea about the Internet. "used Unix systems" - very bad thing, that. However, we should not be too sure - with our current paranoia levels in Berlin, the use of direct DNS queries can quickly become a terrorist offense ...
"America's best housewife" baffles German digital lifestyle conference - maybe the whole lifestyle blowhards will realize how ridiculous their entire nonsense actually is, when it culminates in the awarding of the ultimate conformism from the USA.
CDU Hessen may have used internal school office data for election advertising - well, of course, the lists of explicit interested parties "all parents' and school parents' representatives, teachers, school staff councils, school principals, students, and student representatives" in this completeness are naturally freely available on the Internet. Of course, Mr. Boddenberg, we believe all of this. But if that is the case, then either an authority in Hesse has a massive hole, or someone else has a massive misunderstanding of data protection. Or they are simply just a liar? Wasn't an accusation, just a question ... (just "owled" because this negligence with internal databases is also how the party of the currently ruling - illegally - works, not the first time this happens. Every burglar covers their tracks better.)
The Carlos Hoax - well done. Of course, it won't change the minds of the esoteric spinners, but at least you can have a good laugh at their expense (and that of the all too willing press).
Three constitutional judges argue over jurisdiction for data retention - for some reason (probably overly optimistic) I hope they are arguing about this because they all want to beat up the prolethikers in Berlin, as attacks have come from that direction more often.
Elephants Evolve Smaller Tusks Due to Poaching - "The largest male African elephants have the largest tusks. These tusks are extremely important in elephant behavior, with the largest tusks usually resulting in more successful intimidation of smaller males or winning fights for female elephants. But when the largest animals are killed, it changes the breeding patterns of the animals. In short, without the largest males for competition, the smaller males with their smaller tusks will breed more successfully, and their offspring will have smaller tusks." (ja, die Galapagos Finken waren wohl eher, aber Elefanten sind auffälliger ... )
Kapitalspritze fĂĽr WestLB - Bankers are already more of a problem than a solution. But when you let a pack of bankers be meddled with by incompetent politicians, you get state banks. And that is more of a billion-dollar hole than a bank operation. It's funny how the federal states resemble each other in this regard.
Mac OS X and DTrace - the great dtrace (and some other debugging techniques) are explicitly prevented by Apple for e.g. iTunes. Probably to avoid getting to unencrypted DRM content. Nevertheless - how pathetic is that? Explicitly crippling system diagnostic tools?
SPD debates measures against Clement - it's nice to see again how the Social Democrats tear each other apart. And that the Union finds the best election helpers in the ranks of the SPD is nothing new. Now, do all those Social Democrats who, during Clement's departure to RWE, said "he is so honest, there is no conflict of interest" reconsider their nonsense from back then? Sorry, okay, I won't put "consider" and "politicians" into an inappropriate context again ...
The Tintypes - interesting portraits with interesting, old-fashioned technique. I like that kind of thing.