X.4 Dashboard (Quarter Life Crisis) is a text about the worst usability blunders Apple made in Dashboard. Among other things, it also dissects the Weather Widget. What particularly annoys me about this part: Münster is not to be found. Not as Münster and not as Muenster. We have an airport here, so the data should be available (such tools usually access airport weather data, as it is free and available worldwide) - but nothing of the sort.
Archive 2.5.2005 - 27.5.2005
Apple is sometimes strange too ...
... because you no longer change the standard web browser in the system settings, but in the settings of Safari, I find that quite wild.
Delicious Library - yep, it works! Awesome.
Injunction against Google's Mail Service
This absurd ridiculousness and rip-off is taking on increasingly grotesque proportions - as usual in the field of trademark law, it's enough to find a sufficiently strange judge and you can push through any nonsense. Of course, Google is a big company and the other one is a small outfit. But just take a look at the dates of the registration and the allegedly so endangered offer of the small outfit ...
Google is pretty indifferent to me - and they can probably afford the payment that will eventually be due - but this whole nonsense that arises from ridiculous trademark similarities and constructed trademark endangerments is just a form of occupational therapy and alimony for lawyers and nothing else.
But at least Google is now feeling the effects and not the - even in comparison to the small outfit still weaker - users of Google Mail. I still find it disgusting though.
Addendum: there is an interesting history of the development of word marks at Telepolis.
Another addendum: there is a more detailed report about it in the Netzzeitung. What I find particularly cute: the trademark owner claims that he only wants to be left alone. Of course, that's why he has warned a large number of users who have auctioned Google Mail invites on eBay. Typical action of someone who just wants their peace.
Sick Software ...
... is what Epson writes for the scanners under OS X. When you start the software, at some point - after the software has been successfully loaded - a message appears that it cannot be started. Of course, it works perfectly. And if you leave the software running and do nothing, the CPU load is enormous - always around 80% of the CPU is consumed by the waiting software. But if you then initiate a scan, i.e., the software actually does something, the load drops to 10%.
What kind of idiots does Epson actually employ in programming?
Lower Saxony government weakens the influence of the data protection officer
In Lower Saxony, the goats will soon be gardening. It's certainly more convenient that way, especially these public reports and political proposals from the data protection officer, they are really annoying ...
Another Tiger Loss?
My Photoshop 7 no longer opens the file open dialog - it would rather crash. The file browser works, directly opening files also works, but File Open does not - crash. Strange - has anyone else been able to observe this? I have already reinstalled Photoshop, but it didn't help.
More on Spotlight
I need to urgently deal with the indexing issue, whether you can also include remote indexes or an indexer that indexes a database over the Internet. I would like to have my collected postings from my WordPress blog in my Spotlight index. That would be much more practical than opening a browser extra and searching here. And since I use this as a link dump and note blog anyway, I would finally be able to find the things I wanted to remember.
Performance of the Tiger
I was asked yesterday if I notice any difference in performance: yes and no. Yes, because all the display stuff is noticeably faster - especially browsers get their content displayed much quicker. There is a significant improvement here.
No, because the nice - yet useful - features like Spotlight and FileVault (which weren't available in Jaguar) also consume some of the system performance. Especially more intensive memory operations in my home directory are affected. On the other hand, the features are really useful, so I'm happy to pay the performance price.
So overall, the display is faster and the rest is not slower. Considering that I'm two major releases ahead on the same hardware as before (867 Mhz 12" PowerBook with 640 MB memory), this is a good result. The leap over two Windows versions certainly requires more frequent hardware upgrades to remain enjoyable.
Shoebox looks quite nice - a quite clever photo management with similar organization options through categorization as iView offers. I liked the quite high speed while playing around. However, I have already bought much more photo management tools than I can use, so I am practicing self-restraint here.
Spotlight support in VoodooPad
Just found in the VoodooPad bug database: version 2.1 will support Spotlight. Very good - I'm stuffing quite a bit of junk into my VoodooPad. And then I might actually be able to find it again.
DRM is and remains shit
I've now reinstalled my computer - I wanted to start fresh with the installation so that everything really works smoothly and no remnants from the Jaguar (I skipped Panther) cause any trouble. So I made backups and reformatted and set up the box. Everything went well. Dragged music via drag-and-drop into the iTunes folder, that worked too. Played the first purchased piece - I have to authenticate my computer. Hello? What? I'm using it on exactly the same computer I bought it on, but I have to authenticate myself?
DRM is simply an insult to adult customers.
TBNL - A Toolkit for Dynamic Lisp Websites enables generating dynamic content with Common Lisp. Essentially, it's something like a FastCGI solution for Common Lisp.
Tiger Attack
Here, the Tiger is currently being installed. At the moment, most things still work, but I haven't installed everything that should be working yet. At least, the network is already working.
The Safari of OS X has a stupid bug: you can usually click on a defined label to toggle a checkbox. Only not with Safari. Annoying, that.
Voyager reaches the boundary of the solar system - good journey and greet the aliens for me!
Ann Elisabeth was diligent and identified the Bulgarian twin spammers - who are likely responsible for a large part of blog spam.
Michael Hampton examines what nofollow has really brought: Nofollow revisited. If you're still using the raw version of WordPress: NoNoFollow install and disable nofollow.
And the rip-off continues
The Internet will become subject to fees! - because a PC is the same as a TV or radio. Probably only in the broken minds of politicians, but unfortunately they decide where things are going. And so the GEZ can freely help themselves in the next area and implement their Gestapo methods.
US Department of Justice puts nationwide sex offender registry online - some news just leaves you speechless ...
Elections in NRW
Well, a change in government is quite a normal democratic thing. If the Union had come up with something like a program and statements, they would have had to fight to win - then I could even understand the whole thing. Okay, I still think it's crap, but I could understand how it happened. But to lose to that blowhard Rüttgers - sorry, but you really can't sink any lower. The blowhard hasn't presented a single concept that would actually do any good - cut coal subsidies? Great idea, we don't have enough unemployed people in NRW already. Tuition fees? Great idea, then students who can't afford to study anymore will also be pushed into the job market, and students who have to work for the fees will then fight with one-euro jobbers for the positions. Great future - at least the most populous federal state won't be on the brink of the abyss anymore. At least not after Rüttgers gave it the final push...
And just once - just one single time - I would like to experience a politician being honest after the election. Not that disgusting grin and acting as if you've set a record in the hundred-meter dash - it's about our future, you jerks!
Instead, they will now waffle again, everyone delivers explanations why it has to be this way and is right or wrong - but of course only the voter is to blame, never the politicians. Disgusting. Actually, one should refuse to turn on the TV and watch/read/listen to any news weeks before and after the election - just to not see these smug faces (by the way, it doesn't matter which party, they are all blissfully united on this point) and not to hear their selfish and voter-contemptuous attempts at explanation.
By the way, Müntefering has announced early federal elections in the fall - either he wants to finally give us voters the rest of the grinning faces, or the SPD is doing what it does best again: shirking responsibility. You can then blame everything on the voter again, who didn't understand anything - instead of thinking about your own inhuman politics for once...
Shitty day. I have a bad cold, a bad mood, and Rüttgers wins the election. Rüttgers - the dumbest piece of bread in the Union puddle! Oha. Poor NRW.
Contributions will not decrease again
Survey: Health insurance funds' financial situation worsening again - we're all being fooled. By politicians who promise to lower contribution rates and naturally can't. By funds that are supposed to represent our interests but naturally don't. By doctors who promise cooperation in cost reduction but naturally don't want to give up their income (*). By pharmacists who are supposed to serve as a trusted source for patients but have long since lost that trust.
Of course, the contribution reduction for employers - there's always money for that. Only the patients, they have to pay for all of this again. Funds, doctors, and pharmacists, on the other hand, sit on their vested interests and refuse to contribute even minimally to a reduction that would also affect their income.
Funds then do great things like the family doctor model and the in-house pharmacy model - but it doesn't help if the doctors simply refuse to participate (which happens here in Münster quite often). Correct billing of the practice fee is also rarely experienced - if a prescription is simply picked up, without the doctor providing even a bit of service (except for his signature), if the medication has been taken for years - doesn't matter, the practice fee is quickly taken again.
Quality control of doctors? No show - they refuse, that would be too much influence for the patient. So they continue to hide behind the allegedly free choice of doctor - which has long since become laughable only through the emigration of specialists from the associations of statutory health insurance physicians. In some specialties, as a statutory health insurance patient, you only have a chance in the hospital to meet a really qualified doctor - outside you only find quacks ...
At the same time, more and more politicians and functionaries of the various associations are talking about patients taking more responsibility and having to bear more of the costs. Of course, we are supposed to trust the doctors in consultation. We are supposed to trust the pharmacists in choosing the drug manufacturer. We are supposed to trust the funds in billing. How are we supposed to take on more responsibility in such a situation that is based on trust without control? What does taking responsibility mean in this context at all - it's not about responsibility, it's solely about cost shifting. And risk shifting: What, your complaints have worsened because you stopped the treatment too early because of the costs? Your own fault, why do you do such a thing. If patients are asked to take more responsibility, they must also be given the means to do so in the form of possibilities of influence and controls. Otherwise, these are just empty phrases.
Doctors receive preferential treatment from the pharmaceutical industry and then obediently prescribe their results - it's so conveniently practical and comfortable and you benefit from it. The funds sit there and deal more with their own bureaucracy and their own security than with keeping an eye on the doctors and ensuring that this very connection to the pharmaceutical industry does not get out of hand. The pharmacists fight for the preservation of their privileges and go against any alternative form of drug supply and argue with their consulting services - which, however, de facto often no longer exist, if in a pharmacy only one or two trained pharmacists work, the rest are at best better drugstore clerks ... (and the main turnover in pharmacies is made with care products, gummy bears and all kinds of obscure nonsense - hey, why should one trust people who offer homeopathic nonsense and "advise"?)
And the pharmaceutical industry? They are the laughing fifth in the background. Decent profit margins, of course, reduce jobs, because the margins have to increase. In principle, monopolies through absurd patent policy (I recall the nitrogen patent from Linde - which fortunately was overturned) and an increasingly opaque approval bureaucracy. Of course, medicines must be tested before approval - but what the current tests really bring, one has seen in various cases recently (Lipobay, Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors - just to name two cases).
What is needed is a much more radical restructuring of the health system, a restructuring designed to enable the patient to actually take responsibility, because he is given the information he needs for this and because he is given advisory facilities that support him in this.
Separation of the billing system and the control function in the funds - the control function is not sufficiently exercised by them anyway, it belongs to independent institutions financed by mandatory contributions from those involved in the health system (doctors, pharmacists, pharmaceutical industry and proportionally health insurance contributions).
The billing procedures should be handled by independent accounting offices for patients and doctors, which should only finance themselves through their billing services - this is already common practice in the economy, where billing services are outsourced to separate companies that are then financed by shares in the cost savings of the parties involved.
More transparency in the pharmaceutical industry - research results must be released if a company wants to obtain approval for medicines. Many research institutions are partly state-financed anyway or are close to universities through their state affiliation. A transparent testing guideline for medicines must be introduced - one that scientists and physicians can understand and in which these people are involved, so that problems can be detected earlier - and cannot be concealed by the company (as was the case with Vioxx).
At the same time, effective cost control for medicines must be introduced - the justifications with research costs are not sufficient here, the whole thing must be traceable. If you add up the alleged research costs of the pharmaceutical industry from various medicines, you eventually reach the point where the gross domestic product is generated alone in the research institutions of the pharmaceutical industry. Here, there must be much greater transparency in order to effectively prevent price gouging for medicines.
And the pharmacists? Sorry, but they simply have to think about what role they still have. This would include that they take their consulting services seriously again and concentrate on what their task would be: the application advice for medicines and the advice on the use of non-prescription medicines. However, a specialist saleswoman with a drugstore education cannot provide this. Justifying one's own existence with a sales monopoly for medicines is certainly not enough. And reading the package leaflet is not enough either.
(*) Here, of course, doctors in hospitals are excluded - their job is then pretty much the last in the health industry and decent working hours cannot be spoken of for them.
Write blog books, but not understand RSS
That's the summary of Don's complaint about RSS readers. Sorry, but at this point, it's really getting on my nerves (Don isn't the first, just the loudest on this topic): if you provide an RSS feed, you have to accept at least one thing: that people will use it. If you're so cheap and don't offer a full-text feed, but at the same time are too lazy to write an excerpt for an article, then you can't complain that people judge you after the first few sentences - you only give them the first few sentences to see.
No, it's ridiculous to expect everyone to only read blogs in their original form on the website. Yes, this means, for example, that the layout of blogs is lost because you can't see it in the RSS reader. Yes, that's definitely a good thing - especially with various far-right blogs or blogs with stupid color choices with insufficient contrast between text and background.
If a user with an RSS reader doesn't manage to entice me to read an article (if it's not fully included in the feed, then also on the website) with their entries, they've done something wrong with their RSS feed. Period.
Insulting users with RSS readers is a rarely stupid action for someone who always claims to understand blogs in discussions and always mocks other bloggers - be it because of their tech obsession, their arrogance, or whatever else displeases the gentleman ...
Dive Into Greasemonkey is a free online book by Mark Pilgrim about programming userscripts for Greasemonkey. With these userscripts, you can change websites when they are displayed using JavaScript - for example, cut out firmly integrated advertising blocks, rewrite links with affiliate IDs so that your own is used, simply repair strange HTML so that you can actually do something with the website, or all kinds of other fun things.
FramerD is an object database (ok, a Framestore - but it's something similar) with an integrated DB server, CGI interface, and Scheme scripting language. Ideal for building knowledge databases, as FramerD is optimized for the pointer-heavy structures involved. But also very exciting, as you get a Scheme with server and ODB. I definitely have to play with it, especially since it should also compile on OS X (though it doesn't work for me right now). And it is licensed under GPL. And for the snake charmers among the monkey programmers, there is also an experimental Python library for accessing FramerD...
Found at Tim Pritlove: Lehmanns has a new releases blog with descriptions: New at Lehmanns. Nice. It's my favorite bookstore anyway (even though I mainly deal with their mail order department and occasionally with stands at trade fairs).
Jubel-Äum or something
Chaoswind hit a round number here: this is the 1000th comment on this blog. I mean, I'm already surprised that I have made over 4600 posts here myself, but that people write comments here and that there are even 1000 of them (ok, I wrote part of them), I find that even more astonishing.
Paypal sends phishing emails
Paypal sends phishing emails - they just don't get it. I'm annoyed by eBay's, PayPal's, and the whole pack of banks' quite stupid attitude towards phishing anyway - why don't they finally use signed emails? The whole issue would be very easy to resolve: an email from eBay that is not signed with the correct key: into the trash.
But the fact that PayPal is so stupid as to send phishing emails itself - or emails that look just like the usual phishing attacks - is really quite stupid.
Ackermann on the Capitalism Debate
Embarrassing Ackermann finds the criticism and debate of capitalism. Presumably because he holds one of the honorable seats in the target area. The planned massive job cuts despite profits, on the other hand, are of course not embarrassing but completely justified. Says Ackermann. He is just not ashamed of anything ...
Das Keyboard - UberGeeks Only
Das Keyboard is a keyboard completely without labeling. Actually ideal - my keyboard layouts never match the labels anyway (since I use ergonomic PC keyboards on a Mac). Too bad they don't have an ergonomic version ...
Fire department cuts up wrong car - ok, the owner was also quite stupid: car parked without a license plate on a fire station lot next to a row of junk cars. But it will probably be paid for by the insurance, so luck in misfortune ...
CamlServ is a web server in OCaml. I haven't looked at it in detail yet, but it could be interesting - OCaml is a language of the ML family (or the ML-like languages) with various very interesting extensions (e.g. a powerful object system). Unfortunately, the project does not seem to be very active anymore - last release from 2003 ...
Quartus Forth 2.0.0 is the new version of native-code Forth for the Palm platform. I've played around with it (and its predecessor PilotForth) for a long time - I'm just an old Forth fan.
yadis: yet another distributed identity system is a specification for a distributed identity system. Let's take a closer look.
End of a Potato Variety: Soon No More Linda
From as early as January, but since I'm currently cooking potatoes, it reminded me again: The End of a Potato Variety: Soon No More Linda. About the attempt by the previous patent holder to restrict the availability of the potato variety Linda to avoid competition - a good example of what patents and free market really mean: ultimately only monopolistic tendencies and monopolistic consolidations.
Does anyone really believe that potatoes and algorithms are so different that such activities will not occur in the IT industry when implementing software patents? Who is the winner in such a situation - the customer for whom a potato variety disappears, the small farmer or greengrocer who can no longer supply a well-known product to their customers, or the large corporation that holds the patent? Actually, the patent would have expired, actually, real competition could now begin. Actually ...
By the way, the loss of the potato variety Linda is more than annoying - it was one of the few varieties I like and that also survived Jutta ...
Free Pascal 2.0 is out
Free Pascal is a Turbo Pascal and Delphi compatible Pascal compiler. The new version supports significantly more CPUs and platforms - including Mac OS X. And for Panther there is also an XCode integration. Finally, a Pascal that works for the Mac. Not that I would do much with it today - but somehow Pascal was a part of my programming history (after all, I took care of the Gateway software Erwinsgate for the MausNet, which was written in Turbo Pascal, for a long time).
May seems to be the month of vintage languages for me.
Software patents in real application
Who wants to see the full horror of software patents in real application: search for the patents DE69901832 (German patent) or EP1081612 (European patent) in the patent database (unfortunately, there are no permanent links to patents in this patent database - why not? Stupid software).
A truly great invention: the identification of a session in a web application is not transported in the path part of a URI, in a cookie, or a URI parameter, but in the hostname (wildcard A-record makes it possible). A patent has been granted for something like this - although there are supposedly no pure software patents in Germany. Where exactly is the definition of technicity in this patent? The connection to a tangible device? This is a pure algorithm patent.
If you read through the description and claims, you get the chills: in the description, it is written that extracting the encoding from the path part would be complex and require a lot of computing power - probably this is supposed to be the reason for patentability, so to speak, more efficient access to information. And in the claim, nothing else is described than the use of HTTP/1.1 virtual hosts in combination with a wildcard A-record (or many A-record entries that point to the same IP), so that the session can be extracted from the hostname (which is sent as a header). A truly great intellectual achievement - presumably the entire creative height of it lies in the formulation of the patent application, but certainly not in the actual algorithm or the encoding ...
The patent office simply patents any nonsense that is submitted. There seems to be no control at all - anyone who wants to do something against a patent must first laboriously apply for and enforce the deletion of the patent. If the patentability of algorithms is further facilitated, we will find even more such absurdities. Because if the patent office is already overwhelmed today to carry out these basic checks on general patentability, it will certainly get worse with the new regulation. And this is supposed to bring economic growth? Probably only for patent lawyers ...
Found in the dead-tree version of the current Linux Magazine on page 102.
about brain farts
Various business associations also suffer from swollen heads: Working on Whit Monday again. We are supposed to work more so they can fleece us more. The fact that in reality German public holidays are not actually that many compared to the rest of Europe (among other things through clever solutions in Belgium, where public holidays that fall on Sundays are made up on the following weekday) is completely irrelevant. The fact that this year and last year there were significantly fewer public holidays due to employer-friendly dates is also irrelevant. The fact that, for example, last year was no better despite having significantly fewer public holidays than previous years is completely irrelevant.
The main thing is to open your mouth and make some noise ...
Unlikely positive
The Süddeutsche explains how relative frequencies can provoke false conclusions and how the presentation of statistical results and the choice of reference size influence decisions (and obscure truths).
Found via Plazeboalarm, which describes itself as a watchblog against quackery. If the links continue to be this good, it will definitely be quite interesting ...
OpenCOBOL - a COBOL compiler
OpenCOBOL is a Cobol compiler that compiles Cobol to C and then lets gcc loose on it. Yes, I confess, 10 years of my professional career were wasted on Cobol.
Key theft on Hyperthreading systems - cool. I mean, sure, shit, it's a security hole. But that's really cool. Using Hyperthreading and cache timing to steal data from the second pseudo-processor right from under its nose - you have to come up with something like that first.
Bill Gates Brain Fart
Bill Gates: The iPod doesn't stand a chance. The internet is unimportant. Nobody needs Java. 640 KB is enough for every user. Windows is the safest operating system. The PowerPC chip is unimportant. Users want Bob, the social interface. Unix doesn't matter.
The man has a real problem
Ping TopicExchange from WordPress
Phillip Pearson has written a WP-plugin that simplifies simple pinging of TopicExchange. TopicExchange is essentially just a list of trackback targets with its own wiki for each trackback target. The idea is to provide a simple group blogging function that users can access through their own blogs.
XDS Modula-2 / Oberon-2 Compiler
The XDS Compiler is a whole family of extremely good compilers for Modula-2 and Oberon-2. I know them from my DOS days, I worked a lot with them - they used to be purely commercial, now they are freeware (but not Free Software or Open Source - Free as in Free Beer, not Free Speech). There are native compilers for Windows and Linux 86 and - my personal favorite - XDS/C Compiler, which compiles Modula-2 and Oberon-2 into surprisingly readable C. Unfortunately, the XDS/C Compiler is only available for Windows and Linux 86 - an OS X version would be nice, but is unfortunately not available.
Police State Hesse
»Guilty as charged« are two left-wing activists. Never mind that one was slapped by the mayor of Giessen - the mayor's word is simply taken at face value. Never mind if the police seem to be lying when they talk about attacks by one of the two activists - police officers can't lie, so they must have told the truth. And all the counter-witnesses are simply not credible. It's great when the judiciary, as an allegedly independent pillar of our constitution, meekly falls in line behind (or in front of?) the executive. It seems that beating down protests and sending protesters to prison through court proceedings is back in fashion ...
Problems with the Newsfeed in WordPress
WordPress 1.5 has issues with the newsfeed - the date gets smashed there. Perun's blog has a bit more info on it and also a solution right away. In wp-rss.php there is the same problem with the mysql2date call, but only one call. Well, you can fix it right away.
Back in Town
So, back home again - despite horrendous traffic on the train this weekend. No idea why, but at every station hordes of people got on - all carriages were bursting at the seams. Fortunately, we had a reservation ...
When I've gotten through the mountain of things to do, I'll certainly put a few pictures online.
Pictures from Flensburg
The promised pictures I have put on my picture gallery (meanwhile - 2007 - out). In any case, a small selection of the pictures - the whole 208 I did not want to inflict on you.
Update: I have put a selection of the pictures (not all 200 - but over a hundred) on viele-bunte-bilder.de (also since 2007 out). There you can also watch a slideshow in the browser.
Since both are out, you can't see anything anymore. Maybe I will put it somewhere else sometime. Or maybe not.
Schily will Anti-Terror-Gesetze unbegrenzt verlängern
Schily will Anti-Terror-Gesetze unbegrenzt verlängern
Sparkline PHP Graphing Library provides small, compact graphics that fit well into text - ideal for example to better visualize trend data.