Linkblog - 19.1.2007 - 8.2.2007
» Wi-Fi hacking, with a handheld PDA - I hope that soon the WiFi hacking tools will be ported and running on the Maemo platform, so that you can get something like this for less than 3500 US$. I already have the hardware ...
The Pi-Search Page - search for numbers in Pi up to 200 million digits. Has been around for 10 years, this time waster.
Useless Account - get a useless account, change your password, forget it, reset it. Everything for free!
Linux-Vserver on Debian Testing (Etch), the easy way - almost too easy ...
Adium - now 1.0. I should really take another look at it, even though I'm actually satisfied with Psi. But Psi somehow consumes too many resources ...
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide - Color laser printer technology and code decoded. What they embed in an image to enable tracking of prints (you didn't know they do that? Well...)
'Electric Slide' on slippery DMCA slope - his dance fool sends DMCA takedown notices to video sites that allegedly show "his" dance incorrectly. Among others to an employee of LindenLab (the makers of Second Life), because the dance was shown in a machinima. Totally nuts.
Secret online searches are inadmissible - This follows, on the one hand, "from several provisions of search law in favor of the accused" (the BGH counts the right of presence and the calling of witnesses among these), which represent mandatory law and "are not at the disposal of the investigating authorities." The political response to this: Schäuble had already announced that, should the BGH deny the admissibility of online searches based on the current legal situation, corresponding adjustments to the laws would be made.
Schäuble heats up debate on online searches after BGH ruling - As the superior authority of the police, Federal Interior Minister Schäuble demanded the rapid creation of a legal basis for online searches. The Police Union demanded that the new legal regulation also eliminate the obstacles caused by data protection law. - Yes, that really gives you courage. On to the police state.
Slimbox, the ultimate lightweight Lightbox clone - nice JavaScript toy for displaying images in a gallery.
Gothia Gazette - Steampunk galore!
ModWsgi - an Apache module for WSGI applications (WSGI is a python standard for web applications).
Non-Terrorist Embarrassment in Boston - Blinkenlights-Panic.
We need to remove this access barrier before it gets put up. (Incandescent lighting ban in California.) - a point that was new to me, but ultimately makes sense. Fluorescent tubes (including the new energy-saving lamps) flicker. This can cause seizures, irritation, and problems in some people. Here, the affected person is an autistic individual, for whom massive irritation and migraines are the result.
An Iron Curtain is Descending: And Most Americans Don't Know - about the treatment of American political critics by U.S. border police upon exiting to Canada.
Courtney Love does the math - how the music industry squeezes musicians. Read it - music piracy gets a whole new definition there.
King Mojo - Blues. 4 CDs. For download. Groovy.
US urges scientists to block out sun - instead of reducing CO2 emissions, simply reflect part of the sunlight. Another stupid idea of the Christianist mullahs in the US of Absurdity ...
Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before - fascinating!
Yes - in 10 years we may have no bananas - it is a freakish, doped-up, mutant clone which hasn't had sex for thousands of years.
Off to the surveillance state - a chronology.
'Hobbit' human 'is a new species' - Pendulum swinging the other way this time. Well, there will probably be a lot of discussion, but my money is on "own species" and not on "sick individuals of known species".
Legal wrangle puts India's generic drugs at risk - Novartis is trying to influence patent legislation in India to prevent the production of generics. This would affect millions of Africans suffering from AIDS, as the costs for the necessary medicines would suddenly skyrocket. Profit before human lives, that is the motto of the pharmaceutical industry.
Microsoft copies BlueJ, admits it, then patents it - rip off ala Microsoft. That's probably what they call development work and why they think only Microsoft is capable of innovating - funny twisted vocabulary at Microsoft ...
Life Is Complicated - Tim Bray on the OOXML vs. ODF discussion regarding Wikipedia. And he draws a nice comparison to the XML Working Group and how Microsoft reacted to him: "Netscape hired me to represent their interests, and when I announced this, controversy ensued. Which is a nice way of saying that Microsoft went berserk; tried unsuccessfully to get me fired as co-editor, and then launched a vicious, deeply personal extended attack in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there.".
Minimum wages in Europe - except of course in our country, because it's supposed to ruin the economy. And the union's demand is even below many European neighbors.
Music industry: Government wants to turn copyright into a "toothless tiger" - the stupid wailing of the music industry - especially their stupid babble that they represent the interests of the artists, these lying crooks - really gets on my nerves. And has led to the fact that I now only shrug at the possible closure of iTMS (as possibly upcoming in Norway). Thanks to Jamendo.com, Magnatune.com, Garageband.com and other netlabels ...
Willard Wigan :: Micro Sculptor - wow. just that.
Exotic deep-sea shark caught in the net - interesting, this is a living fossil that I didn't know about yet.
frozen waves - wow!
Interview with muslix64, Developer of BackupHDDVD - "With the HD-DVD, I wasn't able to play my movie on my non-HDCP HD monitor. Not being able to play a movie that I have paid for, because some executive in Hollywood decided I cannot, made me mad... After the HD-DVD crack, I realized that things where "unbalanced" by having just one format cracked, so I did Blu-ray too. "
"Münstersche Zeitung": Publisher puts entire editorial staff on furlough - yes yes, the Münster local press. The MZ was at least somewhat usable - at least compared to the Westfälische Zeitung, which only passed on DPA reports and whose local editorial staff was simply terrible. And now the MZ has simply fired the entire local editorial staff, because you don't need such things. The difficult market situation? Well, that was simply the stupidity of management. As everywhere in the field. The arrogance and stupidity of the store is one reason why I never subscribed to the paper - the "better than Westfälische Nachrichten" is just a relative quality statement ...
Reddit.com User Agreement - "You agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication (including your identity and information about you) in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes". Web 2.0, my ass.
Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast - why grep and awk match faster than Perl or Python.
The Text Editor sam - interesting historical document. Some ideas are still brilliant today - the integration of text commands and mouse operation is much better than in many other editors.
The truth about working in the IT industry - just like a prostitute.
Literature and Latte - Scrivener - interesting concept for an editor specifically designed for authors. Convincing features and nice interface.
Pando (tree) - Aspens form colonies through offshoots. Actually logical, many plants do this, only I was not aware of this in trees so far. The collection of aspens under the name Pango is currently considered the largest living organism (and the oldest living organism with over 80,000 years), although it is suspected that there are larger and older colonies.
Bundestag: Eavesdropping devices in MP's office? - only concerns an MP from the Left Party. Will probably fizzle out or be covered up ...
macfuse has received a small enhancement. There are simple installers and two ready-to-use filesystems for easy use: sshfs (with a small connector GUI and command-line tool) and SpotlightFS. The latter offers trivial simple ad-hoc Spotlight searches even on the command line. Genius!
.NET Languages - Programming languages that work under .NET (if it has to be .NET, you can at least take a human-worthy programming language)
News -Anfängerfehler in Mac OS X - I think it's good that the Month-of-Apple-Bugs is running and Mac OS X is being looked at more closely. Because a company that develops its software outside of external control will always make mistakes like the one linked.
Beef roast and rolls - to warn. Aaargh.
identicon - small graphics, generated from recurring identification data. For example, IP addresses. Makes optical recognition of recurring identities much easier, especially with very similar identifications (e.g., something like this would be great for GPG fingerprints or SL UUIDs).
M is for monkey - Mono on Maemo. That would be exciting - with the efforts to also support the Mono GUI classes on Linux and the connection with libSL, you could possibly get Sleek (Text-Mode SL client) to run. And thus have a mobile chat solution for SL.
History since 1945 - brilliantly summarized by Spreeblick.