Archive 27.2.2005 - 4.3.2005

OpenACS

OpenACS is a web application platform that is often overlooked, based on AOLServer and PostgreSQL.

OpenACS also comes with a whole set of ready-made modules - true to its name as Ars Digita Community System, it offers a whole stable of ready-made applications. A complete CMS is also included. And all of this is partly several years old - from times when other CMS projects were still dreaming of being conceived.

The AOLServer is a multithreaded web server that uses TCL as a scripting language, just as Apache is often combined with PHP. However, the AOLServer is very fast and surprisingly resource-efficient. The thing is called that for a good reason: larger parts of AOL run on the server and it originates from there. It's still worth something.

All in all, an exciting old-timer with interesting features and - due to its age - quite good documentation. But also some warts and edges that may seem a bit strange nowadays. One must keep in mind that when ACS was developed, the definition of CMS was only in its infancy.

Software Patents: The Signs Point to Renegotiation in the EU Council

Software patents: The signs point to renegotiation in the EU Council

The Commission's plan to push through the directive as quickly as possible, in accordance with the lobbying efforts of major market giants, is likely to be doomed by the Danes' withdrawal from the Council. Because a majority that could vote to maintain the directive as a top priority would no longer exist in light of the expected follow-up of numerous other countries.

I'll believe it when this circus is really renegotiated.

Tabacco industry bribed scientists - what do you expect from legalized drug dealers? That they are honest? Pfffft ...

Backup with half of the data?

Found on Schockwellenreiter, looked at and immediately dismissed as nonsense: Substance Softwares Phew. Reason:

NOTE: Phew currently doesn't backup the resource portion of files. In short you may find incomplete files on your backups (text clippings for example). This probably won't effect 99% of most peoples data but please check critical files after a backup to make sure.

This doesn't just affect rare files. All applications that use the Carbon API and don't come in bundles or need to store in bundles require the Resource Fork. With this backup software, you can't even back up a whole range of Carbon applications, as their Resource Fork is lost - and that's where the entire program code is stored.

Sorry, folks, but until this problem is fixed, it doesn't make sense to use it. I'll stick with psync and psyncX, which may have a rather primitive interface, but at least a backup to an external drive is not only complete, but even fully bootable. And they're not only free, but also open source.

Repulsive

As Johnny from Spreeblick, I find the behavior of the Union politicians with their great "letter" to the government simply disgusting. When you look at the points listed, it's just hot air and nothing behind it. Talk. In part, it's even talk that has nothing to do with the actual problem - just the same empty phrases from Merkelnix and Stauber thrown together and chewed through again - without any nutritional value.

Researchers generate different X.509 certificates with the same MD5 hash - ouch. This really kills MD5 for signatures.

Kyocera to end camera production

Kyocera to end camera production - so now we have the first confirmation from Kyocera itself. Maybe it will be continued by someone else, but whether the product range will survive is rather questionable - at best the name will be of interest to others.

Great. The company Winkhaus builds locks that use cryptographic methods to verify the authorization of a key and you can crack these with a simple magnet. Security by Stupidity ...

Who believes that small politics works better than big politics, read about Hotel Falckenstein regarding Nr. 1737 and a Veto.

Officially approved data mining of an intelligence service mailing list - cute when the NSA people are analyzed. But also mean to refer them to their regional data protection organization - after 9/11, the word "data protection" is almost as an insult to Americans as the word "liberal".

SCO vs. Linux: SCO demands insight into IBM's construction plans - I would be interested in the medical term that describes what the SCO management team is suffering from

SKYRiX Object Publishing Environment

The SKYRiX Object Publishing Environment is a free variant of a web application framework based on the WebObjects model. Specifically, considering that WebObjects is now migrating from Objective-C to Java, SOPE is very interesting - as it is still entirely Objective-C.

Moreover, it runs not only on OS X, but also on Linux. And of course, I like that it is based on PostgreSQL and not on this glorified index card box ...

Would be a good reason to refresh my somewhat rusty Objective-C skills. However, the documentation is still quite sparse - but you should be able to refer to the WebObjects documentation for many areas.

By the way, for Debian Sarge there is a repository with ready-made packages for SOPE. It is not yet on their homepage, only on the Freshmeat project page for SOPE.

It is, by the way, the basis for OpenGroupware.org - a groupware construction kit (according to the developers themselves). And there is a Live-CD with which you can test the whole monster without having to install much.

Can someone explain to me why I have never seen this project before? Do I have tomatoes on my eyes? Strange ...

A warning to those who want to get started (I just compiled, installed and tested everything): describing the documentation for SOPE itself as non-existent would be flattering.

Tip: a WebObjects application is so to speak a small web server in itself - you simply start it and attach Apache to it using the mod_ngobjweb module to this small mini-server, and then you can access the elements of the application. It is not immediately obvious for someone who does not know WebObjects ...

SOS Children's Villages waiting for donation from Laurenz Meyer - did anyone really believe he meant it? Sorry, but he will only do it if public pressure becomes too great - and he has blocked that through his resignation. If it is pushed through the press, he might still do it - and come up with some flimsy excuse as to why it took so long ...

Stu Nicholls Cutting Edge CSS An amazing CSS puzzle is a small maze game that was implemented using only CSS - no JavaScript. Wow. (found at photomatt)

TB Quickmove and QuickFile

TB Quickmove 0.0.5a is a Thunderbird extension with which you can assign hotkeys and context menu entries to frequently used target folders to quickly move messages there without having to use drag-and-drop.

QuickFile is another extension that does the same thing.

I'll check both of them out, it's exactly what I need (found via photomatt)

Update: Unfortunately, after trying them out, it turned out that both are not usable under OS X. With TB Quickmove, you cannot select the hotkeys - the OK button doesn't work. And with Quickfile, you can select the hotkey, but it doesn't work - apart from the fact that the modifiers don't fit for OS X (what is Accel, what is Meta under OS X?). That's a shame.

Aranha server monitor

The freshmeat.net: Aranha server monitor sounds exactly like what I programmed under Servermonitoring. However, I don't use XML-RPC, but SOAP. And I didn't provide it with a XUL interface, but a web interface. And I don't use Perl, but Python. Strange.

Mine has been running in the company for ages and faithfully performs its duty in monitoring our server zoo.

blo.gs: for sale - oops. The operator of blo.gs wants to sell his entire system (domains, software, database).

Seen at Lummaland: BlogFox: everything just stolen - about a search engine that simply sucks up content from blogg.de and bags it. Not exactly the fine English way ...

Court confirms liability of Admin-C

Court confirms liability of Admin-C - which should now be quite bad for the legal advisor, as he is registered as Admin-C for many dialer domains and was somehow involved in that strange warez story ...

For providers, this should now be the last incentive to only enter the domain owner as Admin-C - otherwise things can go terribly wrong.

Kyocera Hamburg at the End?

Jutta just told me this: according to photoscala, Kycera Hamburg has issued termination notices to all employees. There have been rumors about Kyocera's exit from the photo sector for several weeks now. It would be a real shame if the name Contax disappeared from the camera world - I still associate Contax with high-quality equipment with a little extra something special.

For owners of a Contax N1, this is of course particularly bitter: the N-System was only introduced a few years ago and is by no means fully developed - and with the high-tech monsters, service is no longer affordable at every field-forest-and-meadow service center. Even with my RTS III and the vacuum pressure plate, it's difficult to get service if there are any problems with the camera.

Microsoft relies on marketing for «Longhorn» - and stamps it as vaporware and a marketing show even before its existence

PIXELPOST - Small Photoblog Software - looks quite nice, as do the demos. Fun is the small strip calendar in the demo - I think I'll do something like that for WordPress, it takes up significantly less space in the sidebar than the classic calendar. For someone who just wants to photoblog, PixelPost looks quite nice.

I didn't know that the SmartEiffel The GNU Eiffel Compiler now also compiles to Java bytecode. Maybe you could use it on the Mac together with the Java-ObjC bridge to write programs there and play with Eiffel again.

Billing via IP? explains more about the absurd IP-based billing procedure. The whole self-presentation is already confusing enough. The procedure itself is even more confusing. So no wonder that T-Systems hitches itself to this cart - if there are stupid ideas, they always seem to shout "Here!" ... (found at Isotopp)

Back to the Future: The Story of Squeak - how one of the coolest Smalltalk environments came to be.

At concord.antville.org there is a reference to these color photographs from the First World War made by the French army.

And while we're on the subject of marketing lies: does anyone remember SoftRAM95? It's been 9 years now ...

Frostküttel

Frostküttel

Giant ground drawings discovered in Peru - then we can look forward to a lot of "interpretations" from ufologists again ...

Well insulated.

I am well insulated. No cold gets in. No heat gets out.

Haindling, "Achtung, Achtung"

Read: Free-range research with clubbing

Read: Open-field research with clubbing to death - for allegedly scientific research purposes, corvids are being killed in Leer to investigate the effects on the population of ground-nesting birds and small game. Yes, the Hannover University of Applied Sciences actually thinks that they need to kill animals in large numbers for this. By the way, the traps not only kill corvids but also severely injure birds of prey when they are caught. One might also think that there are enough corvids around, but a whole series of birds of prey are seriously endangered.

There is no idea so stupid that it couldn't occur to someone and others let themselves be harnessed to such a cart.

The linked post contains further links on the topic, including a petition against this nonsense.

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

Are Overtime Mandatory?

Wouldn't the Frankfurt ruling conflict with the ruling from the ECJ? So, wouldn't overtime have to be explicitly mentioned as a mandatory component in the contract? Of course, it's only an ECJ ruling, so it's not binding until a corresponding national law exists. But somehow it seems to have already found its way in, if you look at the many references to this topic on Google.

And this also doesn't align with the ruling from Frankfurt. Or perhaps the Süddeutsche has omitted an important detail - because transferring files doesn't sound like an emergency or an extraordinary operational situation to me. And also that the employee would have had an explicit notice about the overtime obligation.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer and therefore probably not suited to follow the strange thought processes of judges and lawyers, but somehow it's been on my mind what the ARD guide says - and that's pretty much the opposite of what the ruling in Frankfurt says according to the Süddeutsche ...

Skidoo Too: Ruthsarian Layouts

Skidoo Too : Ruthsarian Layouts is a rather simple 3-column layout with a flexible middle column. The special feature: the order of the source is such that the middle column comes first. This improves usability for Lynx users because they can immediately access the content and do not have to skip the navigation first. The layout is Public Domain.

He also has another layout on the page that has two flexible columns and only specifies the left column as fixed, same source order.

SPD: "No tax relief for foreign top earners" - Koch wants to make it even easier and more lucrative for the Ackermanns of this world to fleece the German economy ...

Found in Lummaland: We will all be fired. Wow, exciting, a filter that blocks employees of a company from accessing weblogs so that no corporate secrets are published and no false image of the company is drawn. Nonsense. But you can make money with such marketing lies.

Blogs! Why Verisign or Jamba Six Apart and Livejournal will be bought - and why Don Alphonso sometimes scares me ...

Boat vs. Little Boat

At Google, there are 2,250 entries for "Böötchen" and 6,030 for "Bötchen". We urgently need to do something about the double umlaut. Screw the opinion of the Duden editorial team.

GeoURL (2.0) - the other GeoURL, meaning the original one, is back. Not entirely original because it's operated by someone else, but it has the same URL and apparently the same database. Essentially, it's the same map and everything. So essentially everything is the same. Also the slow speed. Doesn't matter - geourl.info works just as well and a bit of redundancy never hurt anyone.

Nice Firefox extension: JustBlogIt with a simple right-click. And in the 0.2 version found there, it also works with blogging pages with umlauts in the title. The 0.1 version on the Firefox Extensions page is quite buggy.

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.

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 ...

speed up WordPress l10n

New php-gettext, speed up WordPress l10n describes two quite simple measures to give WordPress a bit of a boost. Specifically, the gettext support is suboptimal - which affects every user of a non-English WordPress installation. Gettext is used to load the translations. With the mentioned patches, these areas are significantly accelerated, especially noticeable on individual pages (where the number of database accesses is smaller), but also, for example, on my homepage, this has resulted in a measurable acceleration.

State Gene Controllers Promote Genetically Modified Corn

According to Report Mainz state genetic controllers are advertising for genetically modified corn:

According to investigations by the ARD magazine, Buhk also participated in organizing a major event for the German biotech company Phytowelt GmbH in 2004. Buhk had already been warned by the Federal Ministry of Health in 2002 about the "danger of a conflict of interest" and his "official duties."

We recently had the topic of the fox guarding the henhouse ...

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 ...

The Union and its Alleged Morality

Merkel: Fischer knows what to do - and when will she learn what she has to do? Namely, just keep her mouth shut? This inflated moral posturing of the Union is simply ridiculous. When has a Union minister ever resigned due to their own misconduct? I mean without the public prosecutor already at the door. None come to mind spontaneously. At most, those who were ousted due to internal Union leadership squabbles - which doesn't really count. This absurd hopping around as if the Union suddenly had a monopoly on morality is simply absurd.

It is particularly absurd when you look at the hounding by Koch in the S.-H. election. That is simply disgusting. With such inflammatory speeches and such a ridiculous understanding of democracy, voters are driven into the arms of the right - after all, they are hardly distinguishable from a Union under people like Koch and his like-minded colleagues ...

One does not gain moral authority by simply claiming it. One might gain it if one refrains from transferring 20 million in black money abroad under the guise of donations from Jewish war victims and then, as compensation, merely ousts a few older politicians who were only in the way of one's own career ...

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.