Esser wants to squeeze 200,000 euros from NRW - Ripping off millions by selling your employees and then suing for damages. Poor, misunderstood manager

Gizmodo : Epson HX-20 Portable Computer - a really nice device. I treated myself to one a while back - as a complement to my two PX-8 computers. Really cute what was in use back then. And playing around with it is simply fun.

Kanther faces penalties - as much as I would welcome it, I won't believe it until the verdict is on the table. And the next courts have ruled. Because somehow the rip-off artists always manage to wriggle out of it anyway ...

The Free Legal Advice for Open-Source Developers is certainly probably only really useful for US American developers - but perhaps something comparable will come to Europe as well.

Microsoft and Macrovision want to close the "analog gap" - great. Just great. Eventually you'll be able to throw the whole garbage out the window because you can't use anything properly anymore without constant regulation. Lots of great ideas for copy protection that are all rubbish anyway and actually don't prevent anything - except completely legal use on some old device or a new one where some garbage collides with other garbage. What a mess.

Found at Schneier on Security: the weakest link. So much for the topic of security.

Solaris 10 is now available for free download - even though I certainly won't be using it in production, it would definitely be worth taking a look at.

Interview with a link spammer | The Register - of course this could be fake, but the guys from The Register claim they conducted an interview here with a blog spammer.

IT Manager's Journal | Bitter struggle to control SCO Group parent company - cool, the SCO management is tearing itself apart in court proceedings

law blog » MONEY BACK FROM JAMBA & CO. - interesting reference and interesting discussion on the question of whether parents have to get money back from Jamba if they demand it - and their children who are not fully legally competent have taken out a subscription with Jamba.

How do you stand it?

Phil Ringnalda recounts his dream about the history of RSS, in which he finds himself in a conversation with early RSS developers discussing the technical choices and philosophical debates that shaped the format.

In the dream, Phil is asked by one of the developers: "How do you stand it?" — referring to the frustrations and complexities that came with RSS adoption and the various competing standards that emerged.

The post reflects on the tensions between simplicity and functionality, and how different visions for what RSS should be led to fragmentation in the ecosystem. Phil uses the dream narrative to explore the human and technical dimensions of this important web technology.

Note: The original source link appears to be from Phil Ringnalda's blog from 2005, discussing RSS history through a dream sequence narrative.

A series of small nice freeware tools for OS X. I particularly like the WordServices and the CalcService (a simple formula evaluator as a service).

US court: Guantanamo tribunals are unlawful | tagesschau.de - interesting. But whether that will impress Bush much?

Bill Gates will das Internet sicherer machen - will he discontinue the entire Windows operating system line and eliminate Internet Explorer?

Camera Bellows and Hoods - Bellows manufacturer that produces replacement bellows. Possibly a solution for my Fujica problem.

Camera Bellows Restoration Trick - Tips on the repair and sealing of camera bellows.

Reprinted Repair Manuals - all kinds of service manuals for all kinds of camera types.

Student must go to prison for one and a half years because of computer worm - but when will the company whose vulnerable garbage software enables these attacks finally be brought to court? They sit there and rake in billions - without being held liable for their product defects. Any automobile manufacturer whose products had such massive security flaws would have been sued into the ground long ago.

fjf's (Cocoa) AbiWord for Mac (MacOSX) - funny, I don't seem to have linked to this yet. AbiWord is really a nice word processor. Certainly a worthwhile alternative to larger packages for occasional writers.

I appreciate your message, but I notice you've provided a link and a brief description in German rather than a blog post body in Markdown format.

The description translates to: "Notify visitors about comment moderation in WordPress."

However, I'm designed to translate blog post bodies in Markdown format. To help you, please provide:

1. The actual Markdown content of the blog post body that needs translation from German to English
2. Not just the title and URL

Once you share the full blog post body, I'll translate it while preserving all Markdown formatting, code blocks, and links as instructed.

Using the .Mac SDK - Objective C (and probably also Python via PyObjC) interface to .Mac.

Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search - Web Site Content Copyright Protection - I just wanted to make a note of this. A search engine that searches for plagiarism of websites.

No more direct access to newsgroups at AOL - we could now dream that September comes to an end ...

Quotes from Karl Valentin in lecture scripts allowed under conditions - one wonders what Valentin himself would have had to say about that...

freshmeat.net: Project details for JRuby - cool, JRuby has now reached Ruby 1.8. A nice alternative in the Java environment to simply program with Ruby. The Jython folks should get a move on and finally make Jython fully Python 2.3 compatible - there's still a lot that needs work there.

heute.de - The Unequal Brothers. A good summary of the blogosphere and its relationship to journalism.

Introducing JSON - another object ASCII notation, this one based on JavaScript syntax. Quite interesting - not as fussy about whitespace as YAML and not as verbose in syntax as XML.

JSch for J2ME - no idea if I'd want to use an SSH client on my phone (text input on a phone is more than annoying), but it would be possible with this...

.: json-rpc.org :. - an RPC library based on JSON.

Ringtone hit parade from April - clear case for Wonko...

mit dem Link-Kondom rel="nofollow"

ModSecurity - Web Intrusion Detection And Prevention / mod_security is an Apache module that examines requests and decides based on filters whether a request should be allowed through or whether a filter measure (script, log, etc.) should be triggered. Quite interesting, even though I'm generally skeptical about rule-based filtering against attacks - it only finds known or expected attacks. The real danger lies in the unexpected attacks...

Asymptomatic » New "Secret" Project - something like a peer-to-peer network built on standard technologies like HTTP and DNS. DynDNS for mutual discovery, HTTP for file transfer, and RSS and HTML for file lists. Actually a nice idea.

Audioscrobbler :: Development - Last.fm Streaming API - an API to access your last.fm station.

A first Python example in Frontier is now online. Looks very interesting - I wish someone would build binaries now, because I still don't have XCode due to 10.2. And I'd really like to play around with it...

First - important - reactions to the NPD tirades in Saxony.

Subway is a Python implementation of the ideas behind Ruby on Rails. So if you're afraid of hurting yourself on all the sharp and curly brackets in Ruby ...

Microsoft lays off Windows testers and switches to automated tests instead. Tool worship has struck again. A rarely stupid idea, because automated tests only find what is automated. They lack the intuition that people (at least if they are good testers) have. But Microsoft software has never given me the impression of particularly good testing anyway...

The Red Alt - WordPress Index Builder is a practical tool for generating a WordPress 1.5 theme online with just a few clicks. It doesn't generate the entire theme, but rather the templates and CSS. Of course, you still have to create the actual design yourself, but the basic code is already generated for you.

Struck wants to spend billions on arms projects - but local public transport is supposed to have a billion shifted to long-distance transport because there's not enough money for both. What a bunch of nonsense.

Virtualization for desktop processors - particularly interesting for server farms. Of course, this can be done today with various VMWare versions, with User-Mode Linux and a few other projects, but support in the CPU naturally makes such solutions more efficient.

WordPress : Tackling Comment Spam is a fairly comprehensive compilation of various approaches to combat comment spam and trackback spam in WordPress.

Outlook together with Hotmail access for rent - great, so one of the two biggest virus spreaders is spreading even more than it already is.

The headline State ceremony for flood victims in the Bundestag is a classic proof that the German language urgently needs parentheses to define precedence

bigempty.com is a very nice photo blog with a very minimalist design. A nice gimmick: the background color of the footer area is based on the displayed photo - I have no idea if it's calculated automatically, but the idea is nice.

Federal Border Guard will soon be called Federal Police - wasn't there something about a ban on a federal police force for Germany? Anyway, this last line of shame is also falling.

Photos of torturing soldiers in Iraq shock the British - but will they tell their Prime Minister what they think because of it? And more importantly: will Blair finally distance himself from this madness? Or at least learn from it for the future and not participate in the Iran madness that is slowly emerging among the Americans?

Apparently stricter penalties for tailgaters planned - I think that's urgently needed too. I get upset every time we're on the motorway. It's crazy what some people allow themselves behind the wheel... (and no, we're neither chronic left-lane drivers nor slow crawlers)

Secure and anonymous on the Internet with proxies - Guide to using Privoxy and tor. I hadn't linked it here somehow. It's so good, you should read it. You won't become any dumber from it.

LynuxWorks Introduces First User-Mode Linux Software for Apple PowerPC G5 Based on the Linux 2.6 Kernel - this now makes it possible to build logically separated virtual environments under Linux on PPC machines as well.