Using the .Mac SDK - Objective C (and probably also Python via PyObjC) interface to .Mac.
Archive 21.1.2005 - 27.1.2005
Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search - Web Site Content Copyright Protection - I just wanted to make a note of this. A search engine that searches for plagiarism of websites.
No more direct access to newsgroups at AOL - we could now dream that September comes to an end ...
Bundestag's Legal Committee votes against software patents
Legal Affairs Committee of the Bundestag votes against software patents - will someone in government finally wake up? Or will the Bundestag's position - like the EU Parliament's position before it - be trampled underfoot?
SCO vs. Linux: SCO Finds IBM's Code Demands Unreasonable
SCO vs. Linux: SCO finds IBM's code demands unreasonable. Amusing - crying for code themselves, but unable to hand over their own. And if they would actually be so blocked by the release of their own code - how do they want to sift through the vastly larger amounts of code from IBM? It's remarkable that the SCO people aren't embarrassed about this whole mess...
Constitutional Court Lifts Ban on Tuition Fees
Constitutional Court lifts ban on tuition fees. Welcome to a two-tier society when it comes to education. No, 500 euros per semester is not a socially acceptable fee. But that's the agenda anyway - those at the bottom are not supposed to have a chance to move up. It's all about elite universities and tuition fees creating an elite - the financial elite. And so after all these decades we've drawn a final line under equal educational opportunities - fittingly in the year when international studies confirm that we don't have much to boast about when it comes to equal opportunity in education anyway.
A nation of poets and thinkers? Not at all. A nation of sheep and fools seems more fitting...
WP-Questionnaire Plugin
Ok, I've finished the plugin for Wordpress 1.5. Simple thing - a plugin and a small management page where you can set up various questions. To install you download the plugin and simply copy the files to the locations specified in the readme.txt and activate the plugin. Then you just add a few questions in the management section under Questionnaire and you're done. When commenting, a more or less silly question is asked, which should be satisfied with as short an answer as possible (we don't want to annoy the commenters too much). If the answer is correct, the comment - provided no other anti-spam methods kick in first - is released immediately. If the answer is wrong, the comment goes into moderation and must be approved by the admin.
You can of course also build a secret IQ test for your commenters with this and instead of simple questions put small riddles in there - only those who solve them are allowed to comment immediately.
I've activated the plugin on my site, let's see if it has any effects on the commenting behavior of people here. You can share your opinions here about what you think of such an anti-spam methodology.
A fairly interesting possible attack on any captcha solution can be found incidentally in the comments to Eric Meyer's WP-Gatekeeper: you can simply collect and save the comment forms. Additionally, you need a site where you can use these - for example, a site for free porn videos. There you present the captchas to the users of these sites and take their answers. You then send this answer to the saved form and the comment is done. Of course you can also take countermeasures against this - probably best would be an encoded timecode in the form and rejection of a timecode that's too old, since the answers from the porn viewers probably won't come immediately. Interesting approach, the whole thing.
Update: the plugin still has two bugs. For one, it also catches trackbacks (which of course never have the necessary variables) and it can currently still be circumvented pretty easily if you know what to look for in the form - you just need to solve one captcha and then you can spam other comments by changing the comment ID. The latter is actually a bug in many captcha solutions - you fall for it too easily, forgetting to bind the captchas to some form of serial number or similar so that a form can only be used once in that form...
So I'll be making an update to the plugin in the near future.
Update 2: the problem with trackbacks and pingbacks should now be solved. The problem with replay is still in there. I still need to think about that a bit. My previous solution approaches don't really appeal to me for that.
Update 3: I've now switched it off here again. I haven't gotten any comment spam so far and without a compelling reason, even a simple question to answer is pretty annoying...
Quotes from Karl Valentin in lecture scripts allowed under conditions - one wonders what Valentin himself would have had to say about that...
From my search engine referrers
The really nice thing about my Zeitgeist is that it also shows me the absurd little things. So I would like to let anyone know who searched for naked pictures of Bill Gates that I don't possess any such pictures and don't intend to have them here on the blog. You have to draw the line somewhere.
The Government's Rip-off Aid for Electricity Producers
Large consumers are to be relieved of electricity costs at the expense of private households. And this is not some backbencher demanding this – rather these are demands from the government to a regulatory authority in the energy sector to be established. Great – another piece of evidence that all these wonderful regulations are only about allowing companies to cut themselves the largest possible pieces of the cake at consumers' expense. Politically sanctioned rip-off. An excellent example of Clement-style special democracy.
As the Schockwellenreiter already correctly asks: is it any wonder when the members of parliament are paid by energy suppliers?
First appearance as CDU general - and failed
Debut as CDU General: Kauder shocks Red-Green with Nazi comparison. At least one stops wondering why the JU invites Hohmann as a keynote speaker - the tree simply doesn't fall far from the apple here. The Union has been playing with the right-wing fringe time and again since Kohl.
Protests against the situation in Saxony only exist because a few seats didn't go to their own ultra-rightists there. So no real difference of opinion, but pure turf warfare...
Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper
Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper is a very interesting approach to comment spam: it simply asks one of many pre-configured questions that a human can answer very easily, but a spam bot cannot. Similar forms are already being used in various blogs, but here it's nicely worked out (although in my view it could also be completely realized as a plugin). The basic idea is essentially that of a CAPTCHA - but a textual CAPTCHA. A human can easily answer the question what is 1+1 - a spam bot won't get anywhere with that. Sure, spammers can create databases of questions and answers. But if everyone sets up their own collection of questions, it won't get them far. For comment spam, it should be a very usable solution.
Unfortunately, there's no such simple solution for trackbacks...
Update: since I find the idea somewhat amusing, I'm currently writing a corresponding plugin. So it's possible that my comments might behave a bit strangely tonight.
FDP's Presentation on Education Policy
FDP: "In Germany, the wrong people are having children" - I was also sitting there pretty flabbergasted at the garbage that Bahr spouted. I just hadn't quite figured out how to verbally attack it. Ralf took that off my hands. Go read it.
freshmeat.net: Project details for JRuby - cool, JRuby has now reached Ruby 1.8. A nice alternative in the Java environment to simply program with Ruby. The Jython folks should get a move on and finally make Jython fully Python 2.3 compatible - there's still a lot that needs work there.
heute.de - The Unequal Brothers. A good summary of the blogosphere and its relationship to journalism.
Internet Explorer Still Vulnerable After Patch
Internet Explorer still vulnerable after patch - which is embarrassing enough in itself. But the Heise editorial recommendation:
In principle, ActiveX is always a gateway for malware and should be disabled if necessary. However, some websites will then no longer function correctly.
is somehow peculiar: I've never really noticed ActiveX as a barrier to visiting any websites. Well, I'm a Mac and Linux user - if websites only worked with ActiveX, I would have noticed it, since it's conceptually impossible for me to run it (not even in IE, because of the wrong processor architecture).
Sure, there are a few Microsoft products that rely on ActiveX - but you really can't claim that it's become widespread out there on the web. So I'd say: disable ActiveX at least for the Internet zone. It has no value there. And in the trusted zones - which I already consider a pretty big euphemism for IE - only enable it if it's really necessary (for example, because an intranet solution unfortunately uses ActiveX). Or install a proper browser for surfing the web. That's the better solution anyway ...
Introducing JSON - another object ASCII notation, this one based on JavaScript syntax. Quite interesting - not as fussy about whitespace as YAML and not as verbose in syntax as XML.
JSch for J2ME - no idea if I'd want to use an SSH client on my phone (text input on a phone is more than annoying), but it would be possible with this...
.: json-rpc.org :. - an RPC library based on JSON.
Young Union invites former CDU politician Hohmann
Young Union invites ex-CDU politician Hohmann - and thereby makes itself (yet again) a laughingstock of the nation. How stupid can you actually be to stage such an action as criticism of the party leader? Sure, the Young Union hasn't overtaken the federal party on the far right for the first time - but then the CDU must surely be asked the question of how it actually intends to actively combat strengthening right-wing extremism if it recruits its people from such political newcomers ...
Ringtone hit parade from April - clear case for Wonko...
MIDI Bagpipe Roundup
MIDI Bagpipe Roundup - if anyone still wants to give me a pointless and overpriced gift: I'd love one of these electronic bagpipes. If only to drive the neighbors crazy.
mit dem Link-Kondom rel="nofollow"
ModSecurity - Web Intrusion Detection And Prevention / mod_security is an Apache module that examines requests and decides based on filters whether a request should be allowed through or whether a filter measure (script, log, etc.) should be triggered. Quite interesting, even though I'm generally skeptical about rule-based filtering against attacks - it only finds known or expected attacks. The real danger lies in the unexpected attacks...
MT-Blacklist -> Hijacked comments.cgi
MT-Blacklist -> Hijacked comments.cgi - anyone using Moveable Type should disable the comment script. The email verification that checks whether the sender address input doesn't contain junk is broken - which allows you to sneak in additional recipient addresses by separating them from the actual sender address with a line feed. And with that you can happily use MT to spam other people.
A real beginner mistake - the email validation is done with a regex that doesn't match the end of the string and uses dotall - so it only goes up to a possible line feed and ignores everything after it. Really stupid.
Vole Monogamy
Hotel Falckenstein: Wühlmaus-Monogamie - a highly recommended comment on the state of gender equality. And on secret paternity tests. And on voles.
Asymptomatic » New "Secret" Project - something like a peer-to-peer network built on standard technologies like HTTP and DNS. DynDNS for mutual discovery, HTTP for file transfer, and RSS and HTML for file lists. Actually a nice idea.
DNA debate: Müntefering stands behind Schily
DNA debate: Müntefering backs Schily and only incompetence personified (some call her the Federal Minister of Justice, yes, the very one who took away our right to private copying and wants to impose stupid software patents on us) stands against it. That's really alarming...
First Winter Images
First Winter Pictures - 1
Not particularly impressive what winter has managed so far this year, but this morning there was actually some white powder snow on the ground.
First Winter Pictures - 2
IT&W Reconstructs Mac Video
IT&W reconstructs Mac video - I would link directly, but their server got hammered...
RSS 1.1 and Postal's Law
The RSS 1.1: RDF Site Summary (DRAFT) contains a passage that I only noticed today ( through this posting). This fits well with the topic of developer arrogance. Because here again a developer has easily strayed from the path of reason. Of course, it's important that a standard is cleanly defined and that producers of formats adhere to these standards. It's also okay to require that a consumer of this format checks it and provides messages when deviations occur (though few users can make sense of their aggregator's messages anyway). But it's completely unrealistic to believe that aggregator users are satisfied when their aggregator just spits out an error message and no content. That's just as stupid as the same approach with XHTML - where some browsers actually implement it and don't go into Quirks Mode for broken XHTML, but simply deliver the XML parser error. Sorry, but that's complete nonsense. Every communication protocol has two ends - the producer and the consumer. And Postal's Law - be conservative in what you produce and liberal in what you accept - is simply the most sensible way to approach such communication protocols that transport content intended for humans. Requiring that consumer applications not display existing content due to format errors is simply unrealistic.
Public Prosecutor will not investigate NPD
State prosecutors will not investigate the NPD.
What the NPD wants is not parliamentary democracy, but an ethnic-oriented leadership state with clear parallels to the Nazi regime of the 'Third Reich'.
Rainer Stock, Saxon Constitutional Protection President, from: "Leipziger Volkszeitung"
Thinking Forth
Thinking Forth is now available online. My first Forth book - it really fascinated me with the language back then. Especially because it was much more suitable for the computers that were accessible to me at the time than most other programming languages.
Audioscrobbler :: Development - Last.fm Streaming API - an API to access your last.fm station.
Build me money making website please
Rent A Coder - Build me money making website please - let me quote:
I would like someone to build me a good website that will make me around $1000 a week or more. The website should be useful and not have any popups. I would like you to design the whole entire website. The content as well. Would like the website to have a lot of traffic as well.
Sorry, but if I could build a website that brings in $1000 per week - then I'd just sell it to some idiot like that. Makes sense. Sure. And pigs can fly.
(Found at Paul Tomblin)
A first Python example in Frontier is now online. Looks very interesting - I wish someone would build binaries now, because I still don't have XCode due to 10.2. And I'd really like to play around with it...
First - important - reactions to the NPD tirades in Saxony.
heise online - High fine for student organization due to hyperlinks
High fine for student organization over hyperlinks - so students get used to societal censorship early on. Besides, it's really annoying when these students indulge in the luxury of having a political opinion. And so one learns very early that you only have to accept elected representatives and their actions when it suits you.
But silencing the victims of educational institutions has a tradition - school expulsions for expressing one's own political opinion I still remember from my school days (not from my school - we were fortunate to have a principal with a brain who actually used it).
The fact that in this case the lawsuit also comes from a fellow student who doesn't like the political opinions expressed by the AStA - and that the reaction is a lawsuit instead of a discussion - fits the picture perfectly. After all, the formation of one's own political opinion and engagement with general political topics only distracts from being bred into a specialized idiot in the education factory...
Subway is a Python implementation of the ideas behind Ruby on Rails. So if you're afraid of hurting yourself on all the sharp and curly brackets in Ruby ...
WordPress and rel="nofollow"
On the WordPress hackers list, as expected, there's a heated discussion about rel="nofollow". The trigger: Matt has built rel="nofollow" into WordPress. Part of it is a filter that could be easily disabled. But another part is hardcoded directly into the code (for example, every author link in comments is permanently tagged with rel="nofollow"). And Matt doesn't want to build in an option, but rather force everyone, so to speak, to implement this feature.
What really bothers me about the whole thing is the absurd reasoning. Sorry, but what happens to links in my system is something essential for me as a site operator — nobody tells me what to do there. Okay, fine, I can patch my software — but the attitude toward users on this point is pretty shitty.
The ct and the Trojan Horse
You look at the front cover in the current ct and what do you see? A woman at a computer, an email with a nice Trojan horse on it. And she wants to open the gift right away by double-clicking. And with what? With good reason - because the graphic designer conveniently gave the woman a Claris Emailer Outlook Express on Mac OS Classic instead of Windows. Tsetsetse, the professional trade press, they simply did poor research
(With which I join the ranks of spiteful and unnecessary "It wouldn't have happened with Mac OS X" commentators)
MDR.DE: NPD refuses minute of silence for Nazi and war victims
NPD refuses minute of silence for NS and war victims - how much longer do we have to put up with this right-wing filth in the Saxon state parliament? Can't this farce please be ended as soon as possible? Given such absurd behavior, I find it incomprehensible how the other parties can accept this and apparently even partially support it. I'm thinking of occasions where NPD representatives have actually received votes from other parties).
Microsoft lays off Windows testers and switches to automated tests instead. Tool worship has struck again. A rarely stupid idea, because automated tests only find what is automated. They lack the intuition that people (at least if they are good testers) have. But Microsoft software has never given me the impression of particularly good testing anyway...
nofollow no do
Shockwave Rider doesn't particularly like rel="nofollow" and it's come up in various other blogs too. The open letter from the S9Y developers to Google on the subject is also interesting.
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it either - simply because it's the wrong approach. You can't repair a broken system by telling curious people to look away. Comment spammers won't be deterred one bit by the whole thing.
I can only agree with Phil Ringnalda that rel="nofollow" is something like the monster disclaimer of people on the web. Ultimately just as strange as the link distancing that many have on their websites - if you're distancing yourself, why link at all? If you're generally distancing yourself from your commenters, why have a comment function in the first place?
In any case, I won't be using rel="nofollow" - at least not by means of a large bucket that pours over everything just because it's a comment or trackback. Comment spam is addressed differently. If necessary, by putting everything in a moderation queue that then has to be cleared of spam using appropriate means - the same techniques used for email spam apply here. That's a far more worthwhile field of activity.
The Red Alt - WordPress Index Builder is a practical tool for generating a WordPress 1.5 theme online with just a few clicks. It doesn't generate the entire theme, but rather the templates and CSS. Of course, you still have to create the actual design yourself, but the basic code is already generated for you.
Struck wants to spend billions on arms projects - but local public transport is supposed to have a billion shifted to long-distance transport because there's not enough money for both. What a bunch of nonsense.
Virtualization for desktop processors - particularly interesting for server farms. Of course, this can be done today with various VMWare versions, with User-Mode Linux and a few other projects, but support in the CPU naturally makes such solutions more efficient.