Brandora, R/C X-UFO - hey, cool. Is it powerful enough to carry a small digital camera?
Linkblog - 1.2.2005 - 15.2.2005
Fischer becomes NRW election campaign issue - Rüttgers must really be at the end of his rope if he has to resort to a federal issue instead of regional topics for his campaign. But well-conducted campaigning has never really been his strength anyway. Not that it would be particularly difficult to find regional issues - after all, the Red-Green government in NRW provides plenty of ammunition for that. Only it seems the Union is just too dumb to exploit it - probably because they themselves have no idea how NRW's problems could be solved. But opening their mouths and screaming to be voted in, that they can do ...
::: heimstatt jochen wegner - FARMER POPPE AND THE GOOGLIFICATION and the dumbing down of professional journalism. Why do they present themselves as something special when in the end they do exactly the same thing as the bloggers? (via Schockwellenreiter)
Internet Explorer 7 beta due out this summer - and apparently only for Windows XP SP2. Great. This means all those heaps of broken Windows systems out there will continue running around with the messed-up IE versions. On the other hand - if you look at how IE has developed, do you even want a new version to spread?
junge welt vom 15.02.2005 - Hungerlohn für Nachhilfe reports on the displacement of normal employment relationships by one-euro jobs. It was to be expected that this measure, too, would not really create jobs, but ultimately destroy jobs. But it is already a mockery that among the first to abuse one-euro jobs is the public sector itself ...
Neohapsis Archives - Full Disclosure List - #0258 - [Full-Disclosure] Advisory: Awstats official workaround flaw - I've now put that part behind password protection and that's the end of exploits. Without proper security measures, you can pretty much forget about awstats.pl - it seems to be a classic Swiss cheese...
phpOpenTracker is a live access analyzer for websites. It can be integrated directly into PHP applications or data can be collected from static websites via web bugs (small invisible graphics). You can use it to learn quite a lot about user behavior on websites. And Asymptomatic is currently working on a WordPress plugin for it, which will allow you to see the corresponding evaluations in the WP backend...
Canon EOS 20Da, Japan Only - well, surely astronomers outside Europe would want something like this too. And I think some infrared photography enthusiasts could be interested in it as well. In any case, I think it's good that some exotic variants of digital cameras exist, even if for me a pure B&W digital SLR without a Bayer filter would be more interesting (Kodak made them once, but unfortunately they've all been discontinued).
Cooperative Linux is a Linux kernel that runs as a normal process within Windows. Weird.
Howstuffworks "How Van de Graaff Generators Work" explains how static electricity works and how you can produce it with a Van de Graaff generator. Cool. Britzel
javascript:xmlhttprequest [JPSPAN] - XMLHttpRequest is what makes Gmail and other highly interactive web applications tick. Integration of JavaScript code with server code through small HTTP requests that then update only parts of the page.
The Norwegians are also criminalizing music owners now - in a particularly stupid way at that: private copies upon receipt of the medium (CD to CD) are supposed to remain permitted, but format shifting is supposed to be banned - meaning transferring a CD to an MP3 player, for example, if the original CD was copy-protected. What a brain-dead idea. (via Schockwellenreiter)
Sigma: 30-mm lens with F1.4 for digital cameras - could be quite interesting for my 10D, the angle of view is nicely close to the normal focal length I prefer, and the light intensity is a clear plus. On the other hand, of course the question remains whether the bokeh of the Sigma lens is typical for Sigma - i.e., poor...
Vytorin Self-Stirring Mug - completely crazy. A mug with a built-in stirrer. What would anyone need such nonsense for? At least the mug doesn't have a USB port ...
Wacom Cintiq 21UX Touch Screen Flat-Panel - awesome. 21-inch display with touch screen and graphics pad functionality. Finally, paint directly on the display with styluses. Does anyone have $2500 to spare for me?
How to determine the geographic location from a dynamic IP address. Ouch. Sure, the ISPs have names for their dynamic dial-in nodes and routers, etc., so the information must be retrievable from that somehow. So much for the idea of being anonymous through dynamic dial-in ...
Jens Voigt dominates at the Mediterranean tour - and demonstrates that we can probably count on great performances from him at the Tour again this year. A fantastic start to the season.
Matching my previous, longer, text: Weblog Tools Collection suffers from Referer Spam DoS. Such birds - that is, referrer spammers going into the thousands in terms of accesses - have (yet?) not shown up in my log analysis.
How to CSS DropShadows erzeugt. I could imagine using that for my photos. But it acts up in IE 5.5 for Mac OS X. Besides, drop shadows are only for wimps and softies anyway.
What to expect when updating MySQL 4.0 to 4.1. Okay, database version upgrades are never easy and can always cause problems.
WordPress Localization describes how to create your own translations for WordPress.
Answering machines accept collect calls. Quick check of my answering machine greeting...
Tough times for Kofi Annan - through smear campaigns and denials from conservative NGOs in the United States. But others are also throwing mud around industriously.
wp-style-switcher is a simple CSS switcher for WordPress that works without JavaScript or similar.
China: Executions for social peace? - will certainly not greatly dampen our industrial chancellor's enthusiasm for the large Chinese market ...
A mini Loch Ness Monster washed up in Parton. And now they're puzzling over what kind of creature it actually is.
Rat der EU ignoriert Forderung des Parlaments - well, that was almost to be expected. Why bother with democracy, it only slows things down anyway ...
In "On the GPL" Isotopp writes about the GPL and what is actually in it and how one can understand it. A pretty good explanation, I think. Should be recommended reading for anyone who believes the nonsense that Microsoft, SCO and some others spread about the GPL.
Microsoft receives patent on coordinates in URLs - what utter nonsense. Yet another proof that patents on algorithms are simply rubbish and at best serve to rip people off for money, but certainly not the innovation drive that defenders like to cite over and over again.
Smog could promote allergies. Great. In the city my allergy is being promoted and in the country I'm suffering from hay fever.
The MBROLA PROJECT HOMEPAGE - the MBROLA project provides a free phoneme synthesizer. Phonemes in, speech out. It is based on diphone databases, which are available for a wide range of languages. The project page also contains links to text-to-speech projects that build on MBROLA.
If I ever want to take a look at web-based project management, dotproject - Open Source Project and Task Management Software looks quite usable.
Another death in Georgian government - and although I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, I'm starting to find this suspicious. Okay, one death is coincidence. Two deaths from the government could maybe still be coincidence. But if a third person dies now, I won't believe in coincidence anymore.
Bill Gates commits to interoperability and makes the insightful observation that open source leads to too many similar solutions, which is why interoperability needs to be tested more and that's a problem. Translation: Bill Moppelkotze thinks open source is annoying because it nibbles away at his monopoly
Cosmic near miss in 24 years - so if it does hit us in 2037, we could manage to be wiped out before the Unix epoch overflow gets us
NZZ Online archive no longer freely available - and with that, the NZZ is no longer present on the Internet. What the heck is online availability supposed to accomplish if it's only available on the day of print publication? Ridiculous nonsense from those oh-so-professional media outlets, who are once again revealing themselves as complete amateurs on the Internet …
Rumsfeld thinks the US troops have killed an insufficient number of Sunnis - isn't it nice to have such simple worldviews? Evil Sunnis, good Shiites. That's how simple it is for Rumsfeld. Stupid politician. That's how simple it is for me.
fallback-reboot is a small daemon that locks itself into memory (so it cannot be swapped out) and then waits for a password on a port. When the password arrives, the machine is rebooted without any security precautions or disk sync. Interesting as a last resort when the machine still responds to pings and similar, but you can't get a shell prompt anymore.
Gigablast is a search engine that offers some interesting features. And most importantly, the search results are available as an RSS feed.
Suddenly and unexpectedly: 25 minutes with Bush - Hawks among themselves.
Software Patent Directive: EU Parliament calls for restart of proceedings - whether that will particularly impress the Commission now? Last time they simply ignored the opinion of Parliament anyway.
Zope.org - FileStorageBackup is a description of many useful tips on how to handle ZODB database files. Specifically replication, backup, repair - basically everything that will bite you in the ass sooner or later when running larger Zope systems.
Mannesmann trial: The acquittal must be enough– so even if it were only symbolic, I'd think it good if he himself had to forfeit the 10,000 euros that were awarded to him in the first instance. Of course, it would be even nicer if the Federal Court of Justice then ruled on breach of fiduciary duty after all, but I'm probably hoping in vain for that …
Microsoft: Error in Buffer-Overflow Protection is Not a Vulnerability - sure. Bill Gates wants to make the net more secure. So a bug is simply not declared as a security vulnerability. Never mind that you can catch a Trojan or virus on Windows faster than you can say boo - and that this one can use exactly this hole to knock down the whole nice security system. What nonsense again...
If it really comes to pass that Scharping runs as BDR president I can only quote the red rascals: folks, try to vote for goat
Auch Affen zahlen für schöne Frauen - and next the spammers will send their spam to the zoos
eAccelerator is another PHP accelerator. It is based on the Turck mmCache source, but is actively being developed.