A project that wants to build an operating system on Python. Launch the Python environment directly from the bootloader and from there on program everything in Python. Funny idea. And why not - Lisp machines were also practical devices, Java machines exist by now, Native Oberon has been around for a long time - a native Python would be exactly the right thing.
I'm certainly in favor of corporal punishment for politicians: but it should only be administered by voters. Otherwise, I've always been of the opinion that Southern Italy begins below Frankfurt and therefore Italian conditions in state parliaments down there are completely normal.
At tagesschau.de - The ARD News you can find the original article.
Nice idea. Instead of making a stupid frenetic video, she simply had herself filmed and donated the money that would have gone into production. And now incorporated into the non-video, showing where all the money is going and putting it in relation to what individual production costs would have been.
And as a nice side benefit, her music is also quite pleasant to listen to.
I can now count myself among them. Really. I just spent 45 minutes searching for an import problem with iMovie - my clips played with sound on the camera, played a sound during import (on the camera as well as - when display off - on PC speakers) and showed normally loud sound in the timeline too (after I set the recording to 16bit - I got that tip from the iMovie FAQ). Well, only when playing back did no sound come out at all.
Eventually I noticed the small icon in the menu bar where the sound waves were stolen from the speaker symbol. After I turned the sound back on, there was also noise coming from the speaker during playback.
Oh man. But at least the MVX 150i from Canon is a really cute little camera with enough features for me. Now I just need to try it out tomorrow in daylight to see what it's like - in the dark it of course has heavy noise in the image.
Not that I needed a camera, but I've always been tempted to make something with my iMovie. And as the guy from the Shockwave always says so nicely: Boys need Toys. You should really start to get scared when I extend my Python Desktop Server with rendering features for video formats.
ETOS Compiler - Erlang-to-Scheme compiler specifically designed for Gambit 4.0
The biting reflexes of so-called democratically and Christian-oriented politicians in Europe and supposedly free America ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there is the original article.
Very nice. Gambit Scheme was one of my favorite playthings many years ago - among other things, I tinkered with it long enough back then until I had a DOS version. One that was even reasonably usable. And the features of 4.0 sound very interesting. Especially the comprehensive Unicode support and the threading system sound very good.
At Rainer Joswig's Lisp News you can find the original article.
Gambit Scheme System - efficient Scheme that generates native code via C compiler
iMovie FAQ - Home - FAQ about iMovie - not much, but at least something
I tried out the emulator for the MIT CADR mentioned in P2879 on a Linux machine. Since it's based on SDL, it needs a direct console or X running directly on the console - it's not network transparent. But otherwise: really excellent. Ok, boot takes forever, but once it has booted, the response time on an approximately 1 GHz Epia is quite acceptable. Optimize the code a bit, get a somewhat more powerful machine and you have a nice historical CADR running. Without having to revive the old hardware. Just beautiful. You get directly into the normal system and have the entire screen for a large listener. With the system menu you can then split the screen into editor windows (with the good old ZWEI) and listener (the Lisp prompts). Mail is included, Telnet and a few more tools for Lisp development. Very nice, the whole thing.
The keyboard emulation is still problematic - you can hardly find special characters. The special characters are oriented towards American keyboards, the normal letters on the other hand to the local keyboard mapping, but not all keys are functional - the umlaut keys of the German keyboard produce breaks, but don't deliver the special characters that actually lie on them and are thus missing.
Besides, the mouse still has serious problems: the area where it can move gets smaller and smaller, so it becomes increasingly difficult to click anywhere.
Otherwise though, really impressive work overall. This could turn into a really nice thing, even if the machine uses not Common Lisp but one of its many predecessors.
If anyone starts it directly from the console without X, don't be alarmed: the special characters are ok. SDL uses AA-Lib internally and thus emulates the graphical elements with characters on the text console. A bit unusual, but quite usable if you don't have X at hand at the moment.
By the way, after startup the machine seems to calculate in the octal system. A (5 6) gives 36 and a (3 4) gives 14. You can probably set the base somewhere for how numbers are displayed. My Symbolics manuals (the Symbolics and the CADR are related) didn't provide anything directly, but I also didn't feel like rummaging through 1 meter of paper.
Really now. Simply slipping Genschman a CSU party motion, that's really mean.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Oh yes, the UCSD-p system. A beautifully baroque system with oddly obscure system libraries and its statically designed file system, which drove many a user to madness. The editor was nice. And made me receptive to vi. In the first years of my computer science classes, I still had fun with UCSD Pascal - unfortunately, it was then switched to CP/M and first Pascal M and then Turbo Pascal.
At heise online news there is the original article.
Probably none of the kids today know him anymore - the inventor of APL and J. Two of the strangest and most interesting programming languages. His work certainly influenced many programmers and language designers, and in my opinion, he deserves to be seen on the same level as McCarthy (Lisp inventor), Kristen Nygaard (Simula and thus OO inventor) and Alan Kay (Smalltalk father). After Kristen Nygaard, he was the second great figure in language design to pass away.
Someone is already working on the Symbolics emulation. And their approach is extra cool: they OCRed the Lisp sources of the Symbolics microcode from the patent document, converted them, and now they're building an emulator and working their way through the microcode instructions that are missing from the patent. Some people—fortunately—simply have too much free time.
XShelf 1.1.2 for MacOS X - Tool to simulate the old NextStep Shelf (interrupted drag-n-drop actions)
Why should the effectiveness of acupuncture suddenly be better documented than traditional remedies, when only 1000 patients participated and - problematically by principle - no real double-blind test was conducted? Sorry, but the study doesn't really prove very much. Okay, it does provide an indication that the whole thing should be investigated further - but to claim that it is better documented than medication treatment strikes me as somewhat exaggerated.
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Well, one has to wonder what the works council got out of it in return for proceeding this way. Or what interests are behind acting like this - including at the union. Possible fears that colleagues might realize that a bad works council and an inactive union aren't helpful?
Of course, in their arguments they'll certainly claim that they prevented employees from being fired. And they'll probably pat themselves on the back and praise how well and prudently they acted. It's a lie, but it sure sounds good...
At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft there's the original article.
Great. Someone is building an emulator for the MIT CADR Lisp machine. Since many other systems originated from it (including the Symbolics machines), this could be a very interesting starting point for an open Lisp machine emulator - maybe someday I'll be able to run my Genera 8.3 on a free emulator?
At Planet Lisp there is the original article.
The wine has already arrived in autumn. After all, it's the first to change color.
Still one of my favorite tree species. No matter what time of year (even in winter - through the often already formed buds).
Absolutely crazy. Münster is nice and all - but I definitely wouldn't call this provincial dump the most livable city. Seems like some people had rose-tinted glasses on when making their voting decision...
You can find the original article at WDR.de.
Yeah, those nice guided votes. Gives you a warm, democratic feeling in your belly.
At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.
Pyro - About - Python Remote Objects
Of course not. Only March hares and other crazy people believe such things.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find den Originalartikel.
Sharp is now shutting down US distribution after European distribution. Just like Sony already did.
You can find the original article at Gizmodo.
For people who still believe that a firewall could control traffic from inside to outside and back. IP over DNS is not just a pipe dream, but a valid concept with working example code. This way — provided you control a nameserver somewhere outside (which is nowadays possible for anyone with a cheap root server and a domain registration) — you can get through every firewall, as long as name resolution is allowed in the local network — even if the computer in question otherwise has no access to the outside (i.e. can neither send/receive mail nor surf the web — because if it can do that, it already has a trivial channel to the outside).
A good reason why you should implement nameservers on the firewall so that only internal hosts are resolved towards the inside, and resolution of external hosts should only be done on the proxy server. Or why in some areas you might simply need to cut the cable to the outside for security reasons.
Does focal length change perspective? - Another explanation of perspective and focal lengths
Interesting anecdote. Yes, the Bush administration doesn't care about reality and doesn't think to study it - it acts arbitrarily and autocratically without regard for facts. Unfortunately, as the rest of the world studies the wonderful new world that the Bush administration has created through its actions, it becomes clear that the Bush administration has lost touch with reality.
I found the original article at Gibson Blog.
What is "Perspective"? (2) - ... and why telephoto lenses don't compress perspective at all
A Logging System for Python - Logging infrastructure for Python - possibly use in TooFPy?
Ok, so I knew that these critters are unusual for Chinese bird's nests, but I didn't know that they're the only true cave-dwelling birds among birds - and especially the only birds with sonar. Weird.
Path ... where is my application's home dir? - How to find the user path in Windows
syslog.py - Syslog Client in Python
[Web-SIG] Draft of server/gateway base class now available - Webserver Gateway Interface Referenz Implementation
I don't often link to commercial software, but I'll make an exception here. The reason: the software - a pretty nice image management and processing application - now runs identically on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. For Linux, you can even choose between RPM and DEB package formats. And as a Debian user, I naturally like that sort of thing. The only thing missing now would be for them to learn that Debian, like RPMs, make sense not just for Intel processors, and to also produce a PowerPC version of it - then you could manage images on Linux-powered Macs as well.
Update: after I installed the test version, I have to say the program looks very promising. However, the current version still seems a bit rushed - at least in the OS X version there are one or two problems. Dialog boxes (particularly noticeable with all floating toolboxes) occasionally have disabled dialog elements, even though they can normally be clicked. The main window sometimes just won't minimize or collapse to the title bar (WindowShade). The Preferences dialog hung when I moved the mouse around a bit over the tooltips of the options. The (switchable) docking check for tools makes the response very sluggish and jerky.
However, I was immediately impressed by the proper support for Canon's RAW formats and the good integration of image edits - every change is visible live, even with .CRW files. And the changes are only saved as .bib files, the original files remain untouched. The background conversion works quite well too, although there's a small pause when a batch conversion starts, but after that you can browse through the images quickly again.
I only tried the Pro version because Work-Queues (consolidation of images from various folders) and multithreading would be important for me - my images are organized on disk chronologically and roughly thematically, but to compile a gallery or arrange a printing job, for example, I need to consolidate various image sources. And without multithreading you have to wait for the conversions - which can definitely be annoying.
Bibble might actually be a useful complement to iView Media Pro. Because with the latter, image editing is rather meager and primitive (especially the possibilities for influencing CRW files), but on the other hand, searching in large image collections is brilliantly well solved. Both iView Media (you might even be able to skip the Pro version) and Bibble can access the same directory tree without any problems, and this way you can use the strengths of both programs. The use of Photoshop could then definitely be dispensed with in one or another case, because really it would then only be needed for possible effects or special sharpening.
Compared to Canon's own software, Bibble wins by a mile in any case. It seems faster and is much more powerful. And the image results can easily be compared.
Sometimes Microsoft produces something nice. Ok, it's Microsoft Research - if anything intelligent is produced there at all, then it's there. But it's pretty cool to be able to use an OCaml-like language in .NET.
Not that I would use .NET anywhere
At Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog there's the original article.
Matt Mullenweg is really having fun with Windows: an automatic security update just rebooted his computer and ate a few hours of his work. Somehow I understand why I prefer Apple's method much more, which just tells me that something is available instead of automatically pushing it to disk. Above all, it's absolutely stupid that an automatic update bypasses all application dialogs for saving open files. But all the Windows advocates will now surely provide a thousand reasons why this was all the user's fault. By the way, Matt is no novice or anything like that - he's the programmer of WordPress and normally you can assume he has a reasonable level of computer competence. If even he has his system eat his data just like that, then this feature probably isn't that easy or obvious to disable or document. Here's the original article.
And so the extortion of workers and the lies about the location's weaknesses continue - squeezing out whatever can be squeezed and a bit more. Until it doesn't work anymore - and then it will be too late, because then it will crash. This madness should better come to an end before it shows results that we will all regret.
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Hmm. Due to lack of knowledge about energy policy. 6. Sit down.
At Megawatt: The Last Latent Appliance Fetishist there's the original article.
Of course, journalists are not competition for me
I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Internet.
Sounds like one source that only existed initially really exaggerated things. The information trickling in now sounds more like someone recreated a banal layout and the first one sued against it.
Good. We're rid of a troll. Hopefully he won't be forgotten as quickly as Lafontaine in the end. On the other hand - if the Mad Hatter of the Union pisses in the soup just like Lafontaine did for the SPD, then it could still get fun ... At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Sounds kind of interesting - a language built on SQL orientation and working with relational operators and set data types.
And yes, I'm back from Munich.
At Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog you can find the original article.
Freely following the motto: don't believe any news report you haven't faked yourself?
At heise online news you can find the original article.
