A mini Loch Ness Monster washed up in Parton. And now they're puzzling over what kind of creature it actually is.

liquid design on em/ex basis

From the CSS Zen Garden: a liquid design that is based on em and ex units and therefore grows and shrinks in layout along with a changed font size. That might be a usable basis for my blog, because it's precisely the fact that a fixed design doesn't respond particularly well to font size changes that bothers me about Kubrick.

Now I just need to figure out how to implement it properly. Above all, I'll probably have to incorporate the header graphic quite differently — images just don't scale sensibly with this approach. Let's see if I feel like tinkering with it at some point.

Who is to blame for the brown man?

Who is Responsible for the Brown Man?

If not now, when does the Union want to win back these little sheep that have strayed beyond the right edge of reason and humanity into Nazi filth? Put more objectively: what makes the bourgeois opposition currently so repellent to those disappointed by the government that they would rather follow runaway criminals and those stuck in the past? That is the great political question of our time, far more important than the question of whether parties like the NPD or DVU should be banned or not.

Chief Economist Walter Reads Germans the Riot Act

Chief economist lectures Germans - oh yes, when the henchmen of the money bags complain it's analysis and supposedly constructive criticism. What comes out in the end - which is what matters, as we've all known since Kohl - is just garbage. But what else would you expect from the chief economist of one of the biggest rip-off companies (let's remember: they just planned to lay off a few thousand employees despite record profits - which will surely be great for the economy) anyway.

The poor film industry and the triviality threshold

Film industry mobilizes against "piracy clause" - when I look at all this whining, I lose the desire to watch films anyway. I hardly go to the cinema anymore since there are only megaplexes left, where you feel about as comfortable as in a train station hall. And DVDs - sorry, but what am I supposed to do with films that torture me in my home cinema with 15 minutes of advertising for other film garbage I don't want - and if I wanted it, I would have gotten it long ago anyway.

Instead of actually thinking about how to respond sensibly to modern technology, the film industry prefers to think about how to further cement an outdated business model. And it cries out for help from the state. What a load of nonsense.

Don't reset existing password on request, prevent DoS password reset abuse | drupal.org

Don't reset existing password on request, prevent DoS password reset abuse - well, I noticed exactly this problem too and couldn't believe that someone actually built something like that into a CMS. In Drupal, you can change the password for a user - any user at all. The new password is then sent to that user by email. So you can't gain illegal access through this, unless you can intercept the user's emails (which shouldn't normally be the case). But you can lock out an admin: simply set up a job that resets the admin's password every minute. And then use this forced absence of the admin to completely spam the Drupal site, for example.

That's really an embarrassing oversight. Unfortunately, it's made far too often and far too frequently. So if you operate Drupal, the patch is recommended (be careful, the author submitted two patches, the first one was still buggy). It installed without any problems and at least fixes the admin lockout. Of course, you still get annoying emails in the process.

Firefox - IDN - 0 Info - 0 Transparency

Kai is ranting about Firefox - IDN - 0 Info - 0 Transparency - and he's right with his rant. You're used to this security secrecy from commercial providers, but with open-source projects it annoys me every single time as well. When will people finally understand that only early disclosure gives users a chance to protect themselves? Keeping bugs secret is based on the absurd assumption that you're the first to notice this bug. Which is simply silly: a blackhat who notices this bug will certainly not broadcast it but instead exploit this bug for as long as possible. And so only those benefit from keeping it secret for too long - the ones we shouldn't be helping anyway.

User security needs to be the focus of security considerations - and specifically the informed user who is capable of turning information into meaningful action. The uninformed user doesn't care anyway, they click on everything. But a sysadmin who knows about a problem can at least contribute through educating their own users so that they maybe act more cautiously for a certain period of time. An uninformed sysadmin doesn't even have a trace of a chance to do that.

Gene plant research in Münster

The university has built a greenhouse for research on genetically modified plants. I can't really say I'm particularly thrilled about it being in the neighborhood. Not necessarily because of the greenhouse itself — but where there's a greenhouse, eventually someone wants to conduct field trials.

Yep, Drupal is going to drive me crazy

Clearly. I don't know what it has against me, but it hates me today. Really massively.

I simply copied the kubrick-theme under my own name so I could customize it without changing the Kubrick-theme itself. Funnily enough, it's now not using the phptemplate-engine anymore. Or more precisely: the entry in the system table (type='theme' and then for the page.tpl.php) doesn't point to phptemplate.engine, but to phptemplate - the .engine is missing. When I add it via update, it works exactly once. After that, this entry in the system table gets overwritten and .engine is gone and the template is broken. Of course, Kubrick doesn't do that. And of course, you can't find any information anywhere about where the heck the theme says which template engine should be used - and how this entry in the system table is created. No, simply grepping for phptemplate.engine doesn't help.

Ok, now it's clear to me that the engine creates the entries - at least after I took a closer look at the engine source. It searches for page.tpl.php and when it finds it, it connects it with the phptemplate.engine. But why would the engine enter its own name incorrectly? Especially since it does it correctly with Kubrick. I just unpacked that into the themes directory.

Alright, so let's keep investigating. A grep -r for INSERT in combination with system then finds the function system_obtain_theme_info in the system.module, where these statements are written. But how and where exactly something is done with it there - sorry, but you can't figure that out without longer study. Somehow the description attribute gets filled with a value that ends with .engine for the Kubrick-theme and doesn't for all others. Kubrick references the theme engine exactly and correctly, but an arbitrarily named copy of Kubrick with identical content references a theme engine without .engine in the name and doesn't work. Great. But renaming Kubrick works. Huh?

Ok, next approach. Rename my template to something else and rename Kubrick to my actually desired name. Complete confusion: my template doesn't work, but the now-kubrick-named one that didn't work before doesn't work either. Uh... So I renamed the Kubrick to something else. And tried my temporarily stored one. That works now. Under a name that isn't Kubrick. Huh? Shell game? Should I just rename the themes around until I eventually have a working one under the name I want and then call it done?

So I tried to resolve the shell game. Computers are deterministic machines after all, that should be possible. Ok, both templates (original Kubrick and my Hugo) renamed. To aa and bb. And which one works? The one called bb. Did the whole thing again, just this time swapped the roles. aa becomes bbb and bb becomes aaa. Which one works now? The one called "bbb". When two phptemplate.engine-based themes are installed in the system, only the last one found in the system at the time themes are being searched works. The others break.

So now I first have to figure out what's wrong with the old themes, why they can't be made to work. First approach: make a database dump and grep to see where all my friends show up. While doing that, I found what's up with the mysterious phptemplate without .engine: the corresponding entries contain a chr(0) instead of the period. Ascii-null. MySQL stores it, but PHP cuts it off on access. And for all the old templates, there are all these broken entries. Also, the engine remembered in the phptemplate extra_templates entry in the variable table which themes it had already seen.

Another clean room test: throw out the entries in the system table with type='theme' and description like 'themes/engine/phptemplate%'. Then it knows nothing more about the themes and their names. Then only have my desired template and activate it. And behold, it works right away. Then unpacked Kubrick. And it works. But after that, my own theme doesn't work anymore. As expected - Kubrick comes after hugo alphabetically. Delete Kubrick again and my own theme works again - after appropriate refresh.

So investigate where the heck this is happening and why. It only happens with the phptemplate.engine themes. The xtemplate.engine themes work without problems. Although it turns out they do it despite the bug - it affects them too. Because in system.module in system_theme_data (how I figured that out I'll spare the readers - it was just successive inserting of echo statements to see when and where things break) it gets destroyed in the last step - in the call to system_obtain_theme_info - on the files the description element. And that's what gets saved in the system table to reference the theme engine. Only the last theme of an engine keeps the correct entry, all others are broken.

Hmm. The basename call on line 336 is the only suspect - it basically only delivers the theme engine without the .engine suffix. But it shouldn't change the actual field, so I hadn't paid much attention to it before - the PHP documentation says nothing about side effects of this function. But when I comment out the entry, my theme works and Kubrick too - simultaneously. But the PHP manual says nothing about basename changing the original string.

So I wrote a small test script that just makes a basename call. Ugh. Yes, that's it - basename changes the original string, and it puts a chr(0) in place of the period. And behold, there's a bug report from 2002 about it - yes, I'm running an old PHP 4.1.2 version, since Debian Stable. The bug report has a workable solution for my problem - just put the variable in "" and work with string interpolation. And behold, problem solved. And make a note to remember: in 4.1.2 basename breaks the source variable.

And a programmer spends debugging time on crap like this (I mean the bug, not Drupal)

I could have learned a decent job. Whisky barrel keeper at Jack Daniels, for example...

Some projects want to drive me insane

or at least that's what one could think. Today's program: Drupal 4.5.2. Nice package, I especially like it because there's now also Kubrick as a theme for Drupal and because it's quite powerful while still being reasonably manageable. But every time I deal with it again after a longer break, I fall into the same pitfalls: for example, enabling translations. It's great that translations exist. But when there's not even the slightest hint on the website about what you need to do, you end up feeling pretty stupid. Ok, yes, you just have to activate the locale.module. But where on earth is that documented? In the x-th hierarchy of the administration menu. Equally annoying: a database connection for PostgreSQL is included. Unfortunately, it's only usable from PHP 4.3 onwards - older versions aren't supported, even though Drupal runs from 4.1. After I've edited everything to use the old function names, it still doesn't work: apparently a default value was missing for the uid column in the sessions table. After I set that, PHP hung when accessing the site. Ok, fine, use MySQL instead (but I don't like MySQL...). Alright, now I'm in, I also have Kubrick as the layout and German translations. Ok, part of the system in German - but there are tons of missing strings. So I know what I'll be doing again soon. Great. Just as great as the default value for the file directory, which is simply "files". Which doesn't work if you want to allow users to upload images, because then "files" and "pictures" get concatenated without a /. And no, the / can't be before "pictures", it has to be after "files". And that with Kubrick the menu in the right column obviously has to be selected as "links" when activating blocks - I probably don't need to mention that separately. And the fact that the manual is anything but up to date - sorry, but that's just ridiculous. It still talks about directory structures in places that don't even exist anymore. No, the settings aren't in sites/default/settings.php - they're in includes/conf.php.

Ugh. This is such a nice project. And the whole system is really powerful and stable. But the documentation is really a joke. Sometimes I get the feeling that people aren't documenting Drupal at all, but something else entirely.

Still, it's nice, so I won't complain too loudly. Others don't really do much better either. Still - it could be so nice if the reference to the online manual would actually help instead of confuse...

Rat der EU ignoriert Forderung des Parlaments - well, that was almost to be expected. Why bother with democracy, it only slows things down anyway ...

Spreeblick: Sweety Records

Spreeblick explains the music industry to us: Sweety Records

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.

Hartz IV Urban Legend

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Media Matters (Hot Jobs) describes how a hypothetical consideration from TAZ and a report about a brothel operator who cannot find prostitutes for his brothel (and is not allowed to search for them through the employment office, because it refuses to advertise such jobs) then becomes factual reporting in the English-language press, in which it is then claimed that women who refuse jobs as prostitutes would lose their unemployment benefits.

So much for professional journalism

Although I would certainly hope that our supposedly great legislators don't subsequently turn this newspaper hoax into truth...

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.

New phishing attack possible in many web browsers

Read on golem: New Phishing Attack Possible in Many Web Browsers. Great. Once again, a sloppily implemented solution and a sloppy standard. The whole umlaut domain stuff is nonsense anyway, and you have to wonder why it was implemented in the first place - the mere fact that this garbage only works for websites and IDNs can't be meaningfully used for anything else should have made anyone realize what a ridiculous idea it is. And now it's also a phishing hole.

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.

Clement for raising the retirement age

Clement for raising the retirement age - great idea. First they crank up the weekly working hours. Then the working lifetime. And then we're back where we once were: workers exit the stage in a socially acceptable manner before reaching retirement age. And suddenly the pension insurance is doing better again.

Doing the GNUstep two-step

Doing the GNUstep two-step is an older report about the GNUStep Live CD. I'm linking it only because it describes a problem that has also annoyed me: the CD doesn't boot. Which is pretty stupid for a live CD. And no, the argument that it doesn't boot on some old computers doesn't hold up — the computer having the problem here is just one year old.

The GNUStep Live CD developers really should tackle and solve this problem — because if all kinds of Knoppix variants boot on a computer, and even the Gnoppix CD boots — then there's no reason why the GNUStep CD shouldn't boot. And no, floppies are not an alternative — the computer has no floppy drive. It's just too new for that...

If I ever want to take a look at web-based project management, dotproject - Open Source Project and Task Management Software looks quite usable.

GeoURL is back

GeoURL has been revived - or rather, a new GeoURL service has been built. Simply go there, register your own site, and then integrate a link like my nearby link. And suddenly we can see who's in the vicinity again. The whole thing is still somewhat spartan, but it's enough to find neighbors (greetings over to Paderborn and groetjes naar Enschede!).

By the way, to help my rusty Dutch (I can read it relatively fluently, but write it only extremely haltingly), the German-Dutch dictionary at pauker.at was helpful.

Update: cool, no sooner do you post about it than other neighbors resurface. And what do I discover: Gedankenschnipsel is now also running on WordPress.

Optimization Surprises

In dirtSimple.org: Optimization Surprises, Phillip J. Eby writes about optimizations he made to his implementation of generic functions in Python. I find it fascinating whenever he writes about this project, because generic functions are well-known to me from Common Lisp. However, what's equally fascinating is how he squeezes out half microseconds of performance.

In his case, it actually makes a lot of sense, since it's about central machinery that gets called constantly with generic functions. Minimal performance improvements make a huge difference in tight loops.

Also very interesting is what he discovers about Python's internal mechanisms and what effects, for example, simply the existence of closures in a function has on processes.

Exciting. Absolutely exciting.

Oralux: Linux for the Blind

Since we're on the topic of live CDs: Oralux is a live CD with a Debian-based distribution that is specifically designed for people with visual impairments. It asks very early for a speech interface and is overall designed so that you can control it by voice.

Spongebob promoted homosexuality?

In a new attempt at the title of the most ridiculous homophobic organization in the USA, Focus on the Family is taking aim at SpongeBob SquarePants. Yes, that's right, that little yellow sponge with his somewhat dim-witted friend Patrick the starfish. Oh man. What kind of crazy people are these, if their expert at detecting homosexuality finds SpongeBob suspicious. Ok, it's stupid enough to begin with that they think they need an expert at detecting homosexuality. Somehow this American paranoia about gay people would be directly funny if homosexuals in the USA weren't suffering so much because of it. Well, in the land of free speech you can apparently be a Nazi without punishment, but gay - no, that's supposedly evil.

Bloglines sold to Ask Jeeves

Bloglines has been sold to Ask Jeeves - so how do you see this now in terms of using your feed in Bloglines? Is that still just as okay as before? Or is there a difference now that suddenly bigger money is flowing?

Bookmarklets and Firefox

Since I temporarily rebuilt my environment and removed CodeTek Virtual Desktop, I was able to play around with Firefox a bit (which is incompatible with the CodeTek part and causes quite a bit of trouble when you use it with it). I noticed something strange: when I use the WordPress bookmarklet to blog a page, the little window always gets put in the background. Kind of annoying - you have to move the large website out of the way to get to it. Has anyone else seen something like this and maybe knows a solution?

For now I'm back to Camino as my browser. It's the same renderer anyway.

Pentagon 'News' Websites

The Pentagon pays news websites on the internet with slightly biased reporting. Objective: to improve the image of American politics. Even CNN is already reporting on this. And no, this is not funny - quite the opposite.

Pentagon officials say the goal is to counter "misinformation" about the United States in overseas media. - sure, we all believe that, they just want to correct false information. And certainly not spread their own lies. We would never suspect anything like that.

Spammers in Preparation

For a good reason, here's some information and a warning: if you find comments in your blog right now with content like "I agree with you," you may be receiving a visit from a spammer. The spammers have figured out that in some blogs (especially newer WordPress versions) you need to have one approved comment before you can then use that address to post further comments—which of course are then just spam. So: even though it's nice when someone agrees with you, in this case you could be approving a Trojan horse comment.

Stoiber: Red/Green responsible for NPD's success

Stoiber claims Red/Green is responsible for the NPD's success - of course their success is certainly not due to the constant right-wing flirtation of the Union parties and the FDP. No, it's absolutely absurd to believe that voters who constantly read verbal attacks on foreigners from the opposition and are repeatedly drilled with how terrible the many immigrants are might eventually vote one level further to the right.

In times when Chancellor Kohl held fiery speeches against foreigners, there were also firebombs against asylum seeker homes.

Of course, unemployment and the general economic situation of these people is a significant factor - but that is not insignificantly determined by the Union-governed states. How many initiatives were blocked in the Bundesrat because they didn't go far enough for the Union parties? I cannot see where the CSU's anti-foreigner agitation and the constant demands for even more welfare cuts by the CDU and FDP are supposed to contain any perspectives that should motivate NPD voters to vote for a different party.

Sorry, but all the major parties can claim the NPD's successes - they botched them together. The naivety of Müntefering is just ridiculous - of course the voters are the cause of the NPD's success. But the major parties lay the groundwork just as much as the rest of society. To claim anything else would mean that daily politics are not part of society and social development - and that is highly absurd.

And sorry, but platitudes like those from our Federal President don't help either - if what happened in Saxony was really a wake-up call, where are the awakened politicians? Are they hiding under the bed in fear now? Where is the factual engagement, where is the categorical rejection - when NPD politicians repeatedly receive sympathetic votes in Saxony? When a minister-president of a certain Hesse writes forewords to ultra-right books? When Union politicians themselves give fiery speeches or support party members who repeatedly make blatantly antisemitic statements?

The loss of reality of some politicians is reaching frightening proportions. People, you are part of society - and your actions determine the direction of society like the actions of no other population group. And as part of society, you are part of the problem.

Tagging at blogg.de

blogg.de now also does tagging - and after I asked, now in the same way as Technorati. So with the category tag in the RSS feed if one is present there. Since I've always used categories like tags on my blog anyway, that's extremely practical - my posts end up in the right section on blogg.de. Nice. By the way, in my opinion that's also the smarter alternative to the easily set up group blogs as they should be implemented via Topicexchange - simply a central ping service and corresponding entries in the RSS feed.

And Again Brand Madness

The Hermenschauer was asked to remove an article that references this article on Feuerwehr.de. The article discusses a company that holds a combined word and image trademark for "First Responder" and is attempting to take action against simple mentions of the word portion in domains and online presences. This is despite the fact that, according to the description on Feuerwehr.de, they have already been rejected by courts for this and there is a clear ruling that their trademark is only valid in combination.

To me, this looks very much like an attempt at censorship. Though I don't understand the reasoning behind it—the trademark holder apparently set up or is trying to set up an online magazine around the topic. But something like that can hardly work if you first antagonize the people who actually deal with the subject matter. Who would be interested in such an online magazine if they had previously received a cease-and-desist letter from them?

Certainly, the partly privately-run fire department websites are potential competitors—but that's just how it is on the internet, you're not alone there. And lawyers don't help with that either.

US music industry accused deceased of file sharing

US music industry accuses deceased of file sharing - they must have taken advice from Kanther. But I do find it quite nice of the music industry that they now want to possibly drop the lawsuit. You have to be persistent - even dead women over 70 shouldn't get away with file sharing without a computer...

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

Outrage over Deutsche Bank

Outrage over Deutsche Bank - well, now they're all outraged again, the politicians. And in the next round they'll demand relief for business at the expense of workers, because the wonderful economy would invest all that money - as you can see so clearly with Deutsche Bank.

It would be nice if politicians had even rudimentary learning ability and understood that they're simply being screwed by business right now. Large corporations have no interest in investing and stabilizing the economy when they can just squeeze society instead. You can see it in Ackermann's behavior in the Esser trial, you can see it in Deutsche Bank's conduct, you can see it in GM's extortion of Opel locations in Germany, in the fat salary increase of the global Daimler failure, and in Siemens' approach in the mobile phone division.

Corporations have no interest in their own market - they'll simply abandon it if necessary. Only short-term improvements to shareholder value matter - so the manager can reward himself with fat raises and nice severance packages because of his supposedly brilliant success. If the whole thing goes down the drain - doesn't matter. Quickly sell off the company to a foreign corporation and disappear. Even the dumbest manager always finds a job somewhere.

Entrepreneurial risk is now only borne by smaller medium-sized enterprises, where the boss still notices when his company goes down the drain. But they're just as naive as politicians and crawl up to the industry bigwigs instead of standing up for themselves.

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 …

Trackback Thinking

A Whole Lotta Nothing: No one can have nice things! - Matt is disabling trackbacks on his site. Interesting is his observation that a few test trackbacks came through first, and only after these were still there 8 hours later did the big wave arrive. This aligns with the experiences of others - the spambots are probably still semi-automated at the moment.

At Phil Ringnalda there are more thoughts on trackbacks and whether they're even relevant anymore - and whether the way they're usually used even makes sense. His main point is the fact that many trackbacks are rather pointless - they simply point to a post that ultimately just contains a classic "me too" and points back to the origin. He would prefer context-based pings - you've written something on a topic that's being discussed elsewhere? A manual trackback to that post connects these two sites. This topic-based trackbacking was also the main idea behind the Internet Topic Exchange - basically just a trackback address and an attached wiki. It got off the ground to some extent, but it never really caught on widely. Similarly, LazyWeb - a post with a problem, a trackback to LazyWeb and maybe someone finds a solution - never really took off. Okay, it's running, but you would have expected more response.

These connections are exactly the sort of thing that's not so easy to do with Pingback - Pingback is based on bidirectional linking, whereas trackback would be interesting in these examples precisely because of its decoupling from actual links.

On the other hand, I constantly see poker spam on TopicExchange topics - and with that, such a system eventually just dies, unless enough gardeners are found to pull out the weeds.

That's enough from the self-referential techno-babble corner for now.

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.

First Fallout of rel="nofollow"

Rogers Cadenhead made some comments about Wikipedia marking all external links with rel="nofollow". I find it particularly unfortunate that Wikipedia typically only links to external sources that actually have subject matter quality - or at least are considered to have such quality by the Wikipedia author. Precisely a link monster like Wikipedia has improved the positioning of other pages through its links - which surely would have been particularly helpful for information websites about obscure topics. After all, who else would link to them?

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.

Pledge association names?

BVB pledges rights to club name - and I wonder who's more stupid: the football club that pledges its name, or the insurer who's dumb enough to accept something so pointless as collateral...

Completely crazy: the sherry enema

Woman Kills Husband with Sherry Enema. Yep, that means exactly what it says: an enema with sherry. On an alcoholic — because he couldn't swallow.

When you read something like this, you understand why Americans need all these nice warning labels on products. A clear case for Wonko.

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.

AOL aims to secure surfing with new Netscape browser

AOL aims to secure surfing with new Netscape browser - wobei es wohl weniger um securing als insecuring geht: Netscape 8 will identify sites known to be trusted, such as banks, online services and online stores, with a green check mark. These sites by default will be displayed using the IE rendering engine, with most browser technologies enabled to maximize compatibility. The trusted sites list will come from organizations such as Truste, sources said. . Was für eine grossartige Idee. Irgendjemand ausserhalb meines Rechners definiert eine Liste von Sites auf denen das Viren- und Trojanerloch automatisch aktiviert wird. Super Idee. Ganz toll. Ich bin ja auch sowas von scharf darauf jemand anderen bestimmen zu lassen welche Rendering-Engine benutzt wird.

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 …