Overview of new features in Apache 2.2 - Apache HTTP Server - what's new in Apache 2.2. Very interesting: the Event MPM. With this, Apache finally reports back at the top of the line for Keep-Alive sessions (previously, Apache had to reserve a worker for each Keep-Alive, which made Apache nearly unusable for streaming with a larger number of clients).
Private satellite channels only encrypted? - the private channels that still proudly call themselves FreeTV - want to charge fees. But - what's the point of private TV channels for the viewer then?
If the private channels want fees, I don't want their stuff - because it's so full of ads nowadays that it's barely bearable even for free.
And it's particularly amusing in light of the discussion that Saban sparked about the fee financing and advertising of public broadcasters...
What’s New in WordPress 2.0? · Asymptomatic - even though I will soon be leaving WordPress, it's always interesting to see what's going on there. Besides, at least the Metaeule will certainly continue to run with WordPress.
Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form - for those who want to get a taste of where my blog is headed. Not quite finished yet, some bugs in my software, a few things waiting for patches in Django, but overall I'm already quite satisfied.
Google Groups : microsoft.public.windowsmedia.drm - the programmer of the Sony Rootkit asks in a newsgroup for free code for his work. Already strange ...
Latest from the most idiotic old men's club in the world. A Cardinal warns against iPods and video cell phones:
Parents should not give devices that can play videos as Christmas presents, says the Bishop of Baltimore. One must protect children from pornography.
Well. One should not publish interviews with priests. Neither at Christmas nor at any other time. One must protect people from too much stupidity ...
Glos insists on the takeover of ProSieben/Sat.1 by Springer:
Federal Minister of Economics Michael Glos is counting on the planned takeover of the television company ProSiebenSat.1 by Axel Springer Verlag to proceed in a normal manner. However, he did not rule out that a so-called ministerial permit might also be discussed in this context. He hopes, however, "that everything will be resolved," said Glos in Munich.
Concerns at the Federal Cartel Office? Screw it, what does the government care ...
A prerequisite for approval is that the restriction of competition is justified by overall economic advantages of a merger or by an overriding public interest in the merger.
Likely, the private coffers of the Minister of Economics are then simply of overriding public interest, or what does he want to base it on? After the CSU supported the Kirch conglomerate in Bavaria far beyond its viability for a long time, is it now Springer's turn? It's already absurd what politicians will stoop to ...
After a referendum in Switzerland: Swiss agriculture remains GMO-free. The government had hoped for a different outcome. Well, in Switzerland there's something similar to democracy. Not here - it would be too much to ask if the stupid voters might spoil the politicians' bribes from the biotech companies ...
Phil Pearson does it again - this time he has reimplemented the community server for Dave Winer's OPML editor in Python (previously he had rebuilt the Radio Community Server, a project I was also briefly involved in). In any case, you can now also publish your OPML editor on your own Linux machine if you have Python and SCGI available there.
JobControl - Django Projects - Trac - a simple job control system for Django, with which you can set up background jobs.
In times of crisis, you can fully rely on the fact that these overpriced energy suppliers can only do one thing: rip people off and exploit monopolies wherever they can. From the news:
Meanwhile, RWE has begun to assess and partially repair the damage. However, the power is expected to remain out in Steinfurt, Laer, Metelen, Horstmar, and Ochtrup until Monday.
How generous of them to finally start assessing the damage. How about at least restoring power to communication facilities? The phone service to Nordwalde still doesn't work - this is not just a total failure of Deutsche Telekom (which also has its share of blame), but also of the power suppliers. And how can it be that the power suppliers are unable to restore power supply in the district town? These are conditions like in the USA - only here no tornado has passed through, but just a slightly heavier snowfall.
Why these idiots and failures constantly think they need to raise prices when they can't even maintain something as basic as power operations, I just don't understand. The whole thing is an absolute failure and a total disgrace for RWE.
... and Münster is plunged into chaos. Buses with delays of 20-30 minutes, 20 kilometers of traffic jams on the highway in the evening that doesn't clear, and people needing to be supplied with blankets, tea, and gasoline by emergency services (where the locals didn't leave a path, so the emergency services had to drive over the fields ...) and no trains heading north at the station, with 50 travelers having to spend the night in the shelter bunker under the station.
It's always fascinating to witness how unprepared the city of Münster and many of its residents are for something as unusual as snow that actually stays for a moment. Suddenly, absolutely nothing works anymore. And people's minds freeze up just as quickly. Bunker - we have a bunch of hotels in Münster. If the train company can't transport their passengers, they should at least have the courage to offer them hotel rooms instead of sticking them in bunkers.
Oh, and in the Steinfurt district, numerous places are without power (20 according to the latest reports). Nordwalde is among them - so my parents and my sister's family are now sitting in the dark and cold. Hopefully, the power will be back there soon. Incidents like these always remind one how dependent we are on the power supply (and how good it is that in Münster the power comes underground - earthquakes are much rarer here than heavy snowfalls).
It looks like Gabriel is the first candidate for ministerial departure:
A criminal complaint has already been filed against Gabriel with the Braunschweig public prosecutor's office. He is accused of concealing an illegal sham activity for VW, perjury, and a breach of the rules of procedure of the Lower Saxony state parliament. Its president, Jürgen Gansäuer, now wants to have Gabriel's secondary activity checked for compliance with the regulations.
Well, the whole story at VW is also quite cute - the top harasser Hartz gets one dent after another (and the Berlin proletarians still don't find it embarrassing to associate the unfair treatment of the unemployed with such a name). And now there are indications that VW sponsored Viagra for the works councils for sex parties. What a pathetic bunch of louts on all sides ...
Everything is fine in Nordwalde, my father was luckily back from the Sauerland very early on Friday and the power was also back on today at 11:00 - only the telephone took its time until 20:00 ...
AirPort Blog - a weblog about AirPort (Apple wireless solution)
Matching the US military's satellite-communicating RFID chips, there's also some brainless news to report from Europe: EU committee approves compromise on telecommunications data retention:
Data protection advocates have rejected the agreements as a "disastrous breach" in telecommunications surveillance and a "massive restriction of fundamental rights." In their opinion, the question of the constitutionality of the bill would also arise in its revised form here in the country.
But the politicians involved in the compromise are celebrating the whole thing as a great success. Well, the constitution doesn't interest anyone here in Germany, especially not the current government - as can be seen from their budget for 2006, which is not in compliance with the constitution ...
Oh, and since we're on the topic of brainless ideas: the music industry demands the same access rights to citizens' dial-up data as those provided for combating terrorism. Another parallel to the brainless consequences of the fight against one's own population in the USA.
DOPE Squad Security - open source WLAN driver for Apple Airport. Designed for use as a passive WLAN scanner.
DragAndDrop - MochiKit - Trac - Drag and drop with MochiKit.
News on holographic storage media:
The discs should initially only allow filling at 20 megabits per second and hold data for at least 50 years after writing.
Please with affordable media prices, then I finally have a usable archiving medium for images ...
How Secure is WEP, Anyway? - an interesting link about the security of WLAN, specifically how easy it is to crack a WLAN with WEP.
Some bugs you chase are really strange. Just take a look at the following Python script:
import re
r = re.compile('^', re.M)
src = '''<html> <head> <title>Logviewer</title> </head> <body> <div> <h1>Titel</h1> </div> <div> {{}}
{% block content %}
{% endblock %}
</div> </body> </html> '''
for match in r.finditer(src):
print match.start()
Looks quite harmless - it just returns the positions of the newlines (yes, I know, you do this differently - the source is not mine). The script has an infinite loop on the last, closing newline under Python 2.3. If you remove it (i.e., paste the """ directly behind the last tag without a line break), the script works. Under Python 2.4, both variants work. And you have to chase after things like that...
Do I really need to emphasize that this little snippet of code was hidden in a larger pile of code, or?
I thought that since my computer is now a MacMini, and I no longer need to carry the computer around with me all the time, I could deactivate FileVault. Unfortunately, that won't work for now, as Mac OS X tells me that I need 4 terabytes of free disk space to deactivate it. I'll have to save up for a while before I can afford that.
I'm not the only one with this problem. Apparently, OS X makes a mistake in its calculation when it seems like there isn't enough disk space (even though my home directory only takes up 31 GB, but I have 44 GB free) when displaying the required additional disk space.
Stephen Walli(Ex-Microsofter) über die zu erwartenden Fallstricke in der letzten Microsoft-Aktion:
It will likely be a royalty free license, because the current patent license around the proprietary specification is royalty free. That patent license, however, couldn't be sublicensed, so an implementer that wanted to license their implementation under the GPL couldn't. Indeed previous examples around the IETF SenderID standard would force users of other implementations to engage in a license with Microsoft which is a rather onerous problem for free and open source licensed software.
Der Hinweis auf die SenderID-Geschichte ist durchaus wichtig: dort hat Microsoft auch ständig davon geredet, das es ein offener Standard sei, aber dabei immer unterschlagen, das deren Verständnis von offenen Standards absolut inkompatibel mit vielen Bereichen der Open Source Entwicklung sind - mit Sicherheit wird Microsoft wieder die GPL blockieren.
Abgesehen davon, ich find es schon ziemlich armselig, wenn Microsoft sich schlicht weigert ODF zu implementieren und meint einen eigenen Pseudo-Standard ihres Krams machen zu müssen - zumal man ja genau weiss, wie sich Microsoft dann zu solchen Standards verhält. Die werden dann wieder in den passenden Stellen erweitert und schon ists vorbei mit dem freien Zugriff.
Strong move: according to Georg Greve, a closing statement of a WSIS working group in Austria was changed at the request of Microsoft. Instead of a sentence about the success of free software, there was suddenly a never-before-seen sentence about the advantages of DRM. This is how an unwanted voice is simply silenced - and then it is claimed that everything is fine ...
The pope's hunt for gays continues:
The Vatican does not want to see active gays and people who support the homosexual movement in priestly offices. There is only an exception if the persons concerned have overcome their inclinations for at least three years, as emerges from a document that the Catholic news agency Adista published on the Internet yesterday.
Exactly. Overcome homosexual inclinations. Yes, of course. Actually, one should sue Bildzeitung for its "We are Pope" headline for defamation ...
Web Development Bookmarklets - various bookmarklets that are very helpful for web development.
Closures python,scheme,ruby - a good explanation of the somewhat faulty lookups for lexical variables in Python (at least when an assignment is involved in an inner scope).
Transfer of air passenger data is unlawful says the EU Advocate General:
The Advocate General at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Philippe Léger, recommends that the agreement between the EU and the USA on the transfer of air passenger data should be annulled.
It's strange when data protection has to be saved by the ECJ because it is simply thrown overboard in Germany out of overzealous obedience ...
... that a 20" Cinema Display is quite a fine thing? You can literally get lost on the screen ...
Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera - I only understand half of it, but even that sounds really good. A camera that doesn't just capture pixels but layers of pixels - and then the focus point can be set afterwards via software. The site has some examples. For macro photography, the technology would be absolutely amazing ...
Linux on an Apple Powerbook G4 - even more about the Powerbook and Linux, here you'll also find decent keyboard layouts.
Routes 1.0 Released - this is the Python version of the URL routes from Ruby-on-Rails. Very interesting, I must sit down at some point and see if I can't build this into Django as an alternative URL dispatcher.
"The Whitespace Thing" for OCaml - Indentation as a syntax element (ala Python and Haskell) for OCaml. Interesting. Although OCaml already has minimal syntax overhead, so I don't really think it's necessary.
Ubuntu on the PowerBook G4 (powerbook5,6) describes some of the problems you have with Ubuntu on PowerBooks - for me as a reference when I switch my notebook.
Ok, since my Mac Mini is working hard and everything is functioning as it should, I took the opportunity to install Ubuntu on my Powerbook. I wanted to finally check out how well something like this works today - back in the day, notebooks were quite an adventure with Linux.
Overall, everything looks very good - just like the first impression from the Live DVD. Everything starts properly, the components are mostly well recognized, and the settings are mostly sensible - especially the simple installation (for a test drive, I like to use the DAU mode, just to see how well the people understand their job) leaves a well-set-up desktop system.
Unfortunately, I have a notebook. And not just any notebook, but a Powerbook.
Well, the software itself runs. The desktop is nicely set up, and the selection of software is very useful - even all the notebook features are mostly installed. What was missing?
Well, let's start with the simplest thing: a Powerbook has a fixed keyboard layout - the keys are labeled. I'm not planning to rub off the labeling and repaint it to match a PC. Why don't the Torfnasen provide a Powerbook keyboard layout? I did find something on the net, but to implement it, some major efforts are needed (either applying a not fully functional patch or adjusting the X start process - neither of which are particularly DAU-friendly). Why isn't something like this included with the system? After all, anyone who has seen a Mac keyboard up close knows that it's really not identical to PC keyboards. This is further complicated by the fact that there are quite a few Mac keyboard layouts included - but they only make sense with old ADB keyboards, as they have completely different keyboard codes.
Next up: power management. A lot of software is installed, most of which comes without useful documentation. That's fine - in theory, everything should just be set up. And for the most part, it is set up: when I close my display and open it again, the daemon.log properly records that pbbuttonsd was able to execute the appropriate script.
It would just be nice if the script actually did something...
People, power management is not just a nice-to-have feature for a notebook; it's essential. And everything necessary for it is actually present. Please include it and use it. The Ubuntu installation looks as if the part that would execute the actions was simply left out. And I haven't found out on the fly in which package this might be hidden.
Then there's Bluetooth. The system recognizes all sorts of things, and something is being done with someone - but how, what, and where you can now do something with Bluetooth, that's not really clear. Hey guys, Bluetooth is really not ultra-new anymore, and for Linux, there's been something for quite some time - how about at least some rudimentary tools that show the status?
WLAN still doesn't work - but that's not Ubuntu's fault, it's the stupid manufacturer of the cards. 3D acceleration of the graphics also doesn't work, which is why the desktop is a bit sluggish than it should be - same reason as with WLAN. It's really a shame that hardware manufacturers put extra obstacles in the way of a free operating system.
Minor annoyances: the trackpad is set to be ridiculously sensitive - almost unusable for people with motor problems. More conservative settings would be much more sensible. And Gnome is still quite wasteful with screen space - hey, my notebook only has 1024x768, I can't just add pixels!
All in all, Ubuntu confirms its good suitability as a desktop system - because the installed system itself is really useful. But notebooks are still the last adventure for the toughest.
And my notebook? Well, I'll probably just go back to Tiger.
Dejavu - Trac - another Object-Relational-Mapper for Python. Sounds quite interesting in some points.
About the Super Performance of the Mars Rover:
The dramatic landing, during which the 180-kilogram vehicle crashed into the Martian rubble wrapped in airbags, is celebrating its anniversary these days, as a Martian year, i.e. 687 Earth days, has passed since then. To everyone's surprise, the Mars rovers are still functioning.
Really great what these little boxes are doing there. Let's hope for another Martian year. And please, a few more from the model series on a few other planets and moons, if you please?
BGH ruling breaks dialer resale chain:
The "average informed and understanding telephone and internet user" is "not aware of the service chain between the network operator and the value-added service provider". Therefore, the "call to the value-added service cannot be interpreted as the user's intention to conclude a contract with the number administrator". The provider is "from the customer's perspective an agent of a third party".
Very good. This will finally make it more difficult for the dialer mafia to operate their money-making machines. It's about time. Yes, I understand that the intermediaries are not necessarily involved with the dialer scammers - but they have at least tacitly accepted that such businesses are conducted through them. And the constant hide-and-seek game of the dialer operators behind shell companies was really absurd.
Democracy powered by Microsoft has come to an end:
The cooperation between Infratest dimap and Microsoft in ARD election broadcasts has ended, reported the leading North German Broadcasting on Monday.
About time. The ARD's dance around the issue had become simply ridiculous. No corporate advertising belongs in election broadcasts. Period.
First the Leopard II tanks to Turkey, now submarines to Israel - and then also with financing a part of the production by Germany itself. Quite a big action.
And no, what bothers me is not the word "Israel" - there could be any other country. What bothers me - besides the general fact of arms production and arms exports - is the part where Germany itself bears a third of the production costs ...
Well, Intel messed up again: Hyperthreading hurts server performance, say developers - what was the reason again why Apple relies on Intel processors? Better performance? Pfft.
Richard Stallman Gets in Trouble with UN Security for Wearing a Tin-Foil Hat - well, not a tin-foil hat, rather an ID card wrapped in aluminum foil. Due to RFID.
Hey, wasn't that just Sly Stallone?
(And to be quite honest: the Bond rip-off at the beginning of the movie is just plain awesome)
... the fearmongering of the agitators against data protection and privacy, when the secrecy of telecommunications threatens to be taken seriously.
People who write longer articles about their blog design.
Chancellors can commit perjury and maintain secret accounts, getting away with a mere threatening finger-wagging. But football fraud is severely punished in Germany.
Hibernate on your non-brandnew Mac - works on many old PowerBooks, except on the 12" 867Mhz PowerBook. Guess which one I have ...
PHP is increasingly becoming a security dump:
Not always does disabling register_globals in PHP increase security. Sometimes this opens up a vulnerability. This is also the case with the Content Management System Mambo, which, according to a posting on the security mailing list Full Disclosure, contains a vulnerability that allows attackers to execute their own code on the server.
This is certainly due to the fact that there is hardly any language - apart perhaps from Perl - that carries as much cruft as PHP. The result shows itself again and again in esoteric problems that even catch people who should be prepared for such things based on their experience.
The whole thing is really just a millimeter - more precisely, the centers of the two upper lines are one millimeter apart. The lower line is on the half millimeter. The blur is completely normal with the shallow depth of field that you have at such extreme magnification scales - 12x magnification relative to the camera chip of the EOS 10D.