morons.org reports: Kentucky Student Charged with Felony Thoughtcrime - his terrible crime: a short story about a high school overrun by zombies. $5,000 bail due to the severity of the accusation.
Linkblog - 15.2.2005 - 28.2.2005
NZZ Folio: DIN A4. About the origin of the DIN paper formats.
Record labels considering price increase for music downloads - these idiots are only destroying their own industry. But then they cry about how the evil pirates are to blame. They'll probably never get it ...
Software patents: EU Commission officially rejects directive restart and our government remains inactive. It would be so simple: the state governments whose parliaments have issued the recommendation that the directive must not pass in this form, would only have to do what their damn duty is: to follow the wish of their national parliament. Instead, everyone plays the yes-man and hides or lies to themselves a perfect world, while EU democracy is trampled on. And all this for the benefit of multinational corporations and at the expense of the European middle class ...
Sales plan: Deutsche Bahn wants to offload its faulty ICE trains to Austria - ouch. Don't the Austrians have access to German media, or why do they want to be sold this stuff?
ARD-Hörfunk schaltet ARI-Verkehrsfunksystem ab - hey! We don't want to buy a new car radio just because of this ...
IBM to drop Itanium support - nobody wants these Itanium parts. Somehow, this was quite a big flop for Intel. But if this gives the Power architecture a boost, I'm all for it.
PL/I for GCC is an implementation of PL/I as a frontend for GCC. Very interesting, as it is not a precompiler with C output and, unlike earlier projects, does not aim to be only a subset implementation (although, of course, at the moment only a subset is implemented - but it is constantly growing). I admit, I still like the baroque syntax of PL/I, even though it has been many years since I programmed with it.
The LetterHead Theme for WordPress 1.5 is an extremely minimalistic theme - just two columns and text. No images. Could be ideal for people who need a "blank canvas" experience to implement their own design ideas - there's really nothing in Letterhead that could distract you much.
Microsoft restricts Windows XP activation via the Internet - People, get decent operating systems whose manufacturers do not have such absurd notions of ownership. Or take the opportunity to buy a real computer.
The WordPress IP to Country Plugin converts an IP address to a country and provides the country code. For example, you could (no, I haven't implemented this here, so test comments won't help) display the commenter's country based on their IP address (though this would obviously be misleading for Tor users). Also interesting is the reference to the IP-To-Country Database, which appears to be freely available. Useful for your own projects, such as analyzing log file statistics.
Artists of the Brücke in Essen and Münster. In Münster I will definitely go, but Essen is only a regional train ride away and I probably won't miss that either.
US-Ministerium hires adware manufacturer as privacy advisor - gives the saying of the goat made gardener a whole new dimension. Maybe they should also make the KKK chief an advisor for multicultural affairs? The Unabomber a security advisor? Bush president? Oh well, they've already done that ...
BA will Betreuung älterer ostdeutscher Arbeitsloser abgeben - how to create new serfs and at the same time beautify the unemployment statistics ...
Bush in Mainz reports on the restrictions residents in Mainz received during the Bush visit. Welcome to the police state Germany - where even peace symbols in the window are not allowed for flimsy security reasons ...
EU-Parliament decides to end paper driver's licenses - Scoundrels!
Free multidimensional OLAP server for Linux announced - could be interesting if it changes from the status announced to the status implemented.
New iPod models at lower prices - well, I should probably plan a new purchase for March. A small iPod Photo with a camera adapter could be quite nice for on the go ...
Optic Nerve Cameras for the Blind - it does have a bit of CyberPunk, but for the blind, it is of course a real glimmer of hope. Even if certainly not everyone will be enthusiastic about the idea of a plugin interface to their optic nerve, or about having something tinkered with in their head and brain.
The Plugin API for WordPress lists actions and filters defined by WordPress. Currently being filled with content.
I've never understood how T-Online derives the alleged market leadership of Musicload. Probably just a blunt marketing lie with absurdly beautiful calculations like "all T-Online users are Musicload customers by definition, even if they never bought anything or will buy anything..."
Ape can transparently map Python objects in Zope to filesystem objects or PostgreSQL databases. Could be very interesting for work. Can also be used standalone (without Zope).
The Schill Party in Hamburg dissolves - and goodbye. Make sure the door doesn't hit you in the ass on the way out. No need to come back.
Ian Bicking compares FileSystemView vs. LocalFS as alternatives to store Zope objects in the file system.
Leica in financial crisis - oh Shit. Hopefully it works out anyway, or Hermes will shoot after. It would be a shame about Leica.
Microsoft will have invented the inequality command for Basic - and that over a month before April 1st ...
Sony exits the PDA business completely - and that despite having the Clie PEG TH-55, which is pretty much the ultimate Palm OS device ...
Batch Categories 0.9 can batch-process posts into new categories. It's more of a hack than a plugin, but still quite practical under certain circumstances.
All Clear: Mozilla is not disabling Umlaut Domains - although the solution is equivalent to disabling them: the browser simply displays the Punycode notation. So you can enter a Umlaut domain and land on the correct server, but that's it.
Hack a Bike - keep on hacking in a free world! - no idea how old it is, but the text was new to me. How the Berlin rental bikes were hacked. Even Bruce Schneier commented on it.
Image Headlines Plugin for WordPress 1.5 automatically creates image replacements for headers. However, it probably only handles simple images, so you would still need to place invisible text under the H-tag to ensure that search engines don't just take the ALT attribute of the image for the header. And of course, image replacements have a significant drawback: they do not grow when the user changes the base font size.
Paranoia, advanced - so I'm not the only one wondering about these slightly crazy measures. The crazy part: the Americans expect such a show from us. At this point, you almost wish the guy would stay away ...
Apache Rivet - Integrate TCL as an alternative to PHP into Apache and design dynamic pages with it. Fighting fire with fire?
mod_dosevasive is an Apache module that attempts to detect DOS attacks and then can hand them off to other mechanisms to block the attacker. It can, for example, generate firewalling rules that block this attacker. However, you should not run it on an SVN host, as an SVN update may under certain circumstances look like a scripted attack ...
Bernd das Brot as GDM Theme. For the real fans of Bernd. Everyone else can go home and stare at their textured wallpaper.
Who wants to know how secure or rather insecure the T-Mobile pages in the USA are (they were recently hacked), here is a small analysis: Ethical Hacking and Computer Forensics: Secret Service hacker, how did he do it? The result is that the hacker apparently used normal SQL injection or something similar and that it is quite easy to insert false information due to the system structure of their server.
Google pagerank extension for firefox and mozilla is exactly what it claims to be: a display of the Google PageRank in the status bar of Mozilla or FireFox. Practical if you need to or want to pay attention to PageRank.
HP Photosmart 8750 Printer Announced - hey, that sounds really good. Maybe it could eventually replace my Epson Stylus 3000. Archival-quality prints are definitely something that's still on my to-do list. And there's also a 3-gray ink cartridge available for the HP, which should make black-and-white prints look nice.
heise Security - Know-how - Consequences of the successful attacks on SHA-1 explains quite well what hash algorithms mean in security technology and how the current situation regarding SHA1 is to be assessed. Worth reading.
Alternative Rewrite Rules result in a significantly simpler .htaccess, especially one that doesn't constantly need to be updated by WordPress. This is particularly practical if you also use the .htaccess for other purposes. Additionally, Apache is not necessarily faster with the complex Rewrite-Rules from WordPress. I have activated them myself, let's see how WordPress 1.5 performs with these entries. If there are no problems, they will stay that way, because I like them much better than the other variant. And they don't have the problems that the others have - old mod_rewrite can only do greedy matching, which makes creating complex lists of rewrites quite hairy ...
Canon EF-S 60 mm F2.8 macro lens - could be a replacement for the 50/2.5 macro at the right price. Not that I wouldn't like the 50mm, but the 60mm is just the necessary bit longer in focal length and above all it goes directly without adapter down to 1:1. The 50mm only down to 1:2.
heise online - When Computer Oldies No Longer Want to Work [Update]. Great, the C64 was a duck and in reality it's something much worse ...
The Technorati Plugin Beta provides a similar list to regular comments - except the links and text excerpts come from the Technorati link cosmos for an article. I'm currently wondering whether something like this couldn't also be done meaningfully with blogger.de - this way you could also catch those who aren't automatically linked via Trackback or Pingback. Of course, you'd have to check for duplicates against the regular trackbacks and pingbacks. Hmm.
Cryptographic method SHA-1 cracked - ouch. If Bruce Schneier's assessment is correct, then that's it for SHA-1. A switch to SHA-256 or SHA-512 seems to be in order (though this had been hinting at it recently anyway).
Nikon Face-Priority AF is another step towards subject-tracking focus
Positivliste soll Marketing-Mails an Spam-Filtern vorbeischleusen - the whole thing is so absurd that I simply can't think of anything to write about it...
Study: Vioxx doubled heart attack risk - I said it before, I got that medication for half a year. Just great.
Workaround for IDN Spoofing Issue - Simply block all URIs that contain name components outside of 7bit-ASCII using the AdBlock extension.
APOD: 2005 January 21 - Metal on the Plains of Mars. Cool image - Opportunity finds parts of its own heat shield again. And even a small meteorite to boot. Maybe it will find Beagle sometime too.