The Naked Mole-Rat: www.kultvieh.de.vu

Not only is the naked mole rat a pretty strange creature - there are also some pretty strange people who have dedicated an entire website to it

Here you can find the original article.

Digital back for Leica cameras

Does anyone have 7000-8000 euros for me (hey, I don't have an R-body and you want optics too)?

At heise online news there's the original article.

Flickr Services - Flickr API documentation

Fortran: 50 Years of go to

And still no end in sight

At heise online news there is the original article.

ITMS Link Maker - Creating HTML links in the iTunes - unfortunately not a real API, but a web wizard

LISA - Intelligent Software Agents for Common Lisp - AI rule system in Common Lisp, similar to CLIPS

Logilab.org - Constraint - Constraint Satisfaction Problem Solver in Python

pirate (python on parrot) - Approaches of a Python Compiler for Parrot

PyLog -- A first order logic library in Python - Sowas wie Prolog in Python

Accusation of Code Theft Against Mambo Project

Mere technical ignorance, or an attempt at rip-off?

At heise online news there's the original article.

Edgewall | Trac - Project tool with web interface - Subversion, Wiki, Timeline, Bug tracking

Ian Bickings Wiki - Interesting wiki in Python and Webware based on reStructuredText

Hama's New High-Current Battery

Nice. My Sony DSC-W12 is powered by 2100mA NiMH batteries - but nobody wants to pay for the original Sony ones. There were two sets of two batteries included, but eventually batteries give up the ghost and then it's practical to have replacements on hand.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Playboys Open Source Mirror

Weird. Playboy (yeah, the magazine with too little money for clothes for their models) also operates servers. And they're run by admins. And they thank the Open Source Community with a mirror of various projects.

The mirror server has a pretty bare-bones design, by the way.

Here's the original article.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

I think I had this one before, but the link is so great that it's worth showing more often. Slides. In color. From 1909 - 1915. Made from photographs taken with three color filters and reconstruction of the color slide from these three black and white negatives. Very beautiful images among them.

Here's the original article.

Elections in Brandenburg and Saxony

A damning indictment of the established parties that the right-wing scum could get so many votes. Certainly one cause should be the absurd equating of the right-wing scum with the PDS - under the title "protest parties". Disgusting.

Just as ridiculous is the silly elevation of the election campaign to federal issues by the Union and the FDP - if you don't have a regional program, you just make polemics your campaign. And you get the bill in the form of NPD and DVU in the state parliament. Because polemics and stupid braggadocio in election campaigns always benefit those whose campaigns can only be built on brown polemics anyway due to lack of concrete programs. From the top candidates, of course, you only heard criticism of the federal government and of course criticism of the PDS and voters regarding the rightward shift in parliament. One has to evaluate one's own defeats first, and then everything is quickly turned around so that one is of course in no way guilty.

isnoop.net gmail invite spooler

Translation

If you're looking for a place to get rid of your gmail invites - there's an automated service for that, bringing together invites and people looking for them.

Here's the original article.

Microsoft's Patent Still Threatens Potential Anti-Spam Standard

That's cool. Software patents are rubbish.

At heise online news there's the original article.

osxAudio.com - Everything about audio on Mac with OS X

The Chancellor's New Ideas

The chancellor says we're all rip-off artists. And finds that absolutely appalling. But ignores the fact that the willingness to take advantage is far greater among entrepreneurs and enterprises. Subsidies are gratefully pocketed, no matter how absurd the project is. Large corporations apply for funding awards because you can still get a few euros and take them. Structural development funds are used by enterprises to move operations from location A to location B - because location B offers lower business taxes or other sweeteners. The fact that jobs at location A then disappear is beside the point. And the employees at location A who then sit on the street as unemployed - all just rip-off artists. And the small and medium-sized businesses at location B - who have little leverage against the dominant player on site and are therefore left out of all decisions, after all the city council needs to keep the newly recruited major corporation - all rip-off artists. Also the mid-sized companies at location B who have fewer customers and thus lower sales due to the many unemployed, all just rip-off artists.

The world is so simple when you look at it through the rose-tinted glasses of neoliberalism. Then it's quite fitting when you have simple solutions and simple causes ready. You then push for mergers in banking, even though this will result in more job losses than the industry is already experiencing anyway.

That his simple solutions are just a dismantling of the welfare state and a transfer of society to corporations, that precisely his reforms have partly given enterprises the leverage for the recent extortions - none of that you see through the rose-tinted glasses.

Here's the original article.

Factor Example Server

Chris Double has set up a Factor server that anyone can play around with. Factor is interesting because it has a development environment completely built on web browsers with inspectors, browsers, and editors - so you can change everything via a web browser, including the running code of the server. However, it's not like Zope - so a CMS interface. Instead, they are rather Smalltalk-oriented tools, that is, low-level programming tools. Very nice overall. The language also strikes a chord with me: a mixture of Joy, Lisp, and Forth. Given my affinity for Lisp and Forth, it's clear that I have to engage with something like this. At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.

I/O on Symbian Nokia Mobile Phones

Chris Double has also implemented IO for Nokia phones running Symbian. The whole thing is currently functional on the 7610. Very interesting — IO is a language that draws heavily from Smalltalk, NewtonScript, Lisp, Self, and other languages, borrowing interesting ideas from everywhere. It's a language with prototype-based object orientation and various ideas from functional programming. The language is quite interesting even without a mobile phone. At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.

Schily: Constitutional Court is to blame for NPD's success

Oh yes, everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else. And if necessary, one points fingers at the constitutional court - despite the fact that the constitutional protection authorities themselves made a mess of things, and one should perhaps rather point fingers at the interior ministries of the states (and the federal government). But no matter where one points, nobody gets the idea that the lousy own politics (and I mean both government and opposition) are to blame for the fact that the dimwits let themselves be impressed by the brown trash. The result won't be nice for any of us, but since politicians lack any insight into their own mistakes, it won't get better, but rather worse. Very great, Mr. Schily.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

The GBBopen Project - Blackboard software that also runs under OpenMCL

Warez Raid: FTPWelt Users Must Expect Legal Proceedings

Yesterday, Heise reported: "It remains unclear whether the customer database of the warez provider should be examined more closely. Legal experts hardly expect that users who downloaded something and paid for it will face criminal charges." and according to Tagesspiegel: "The authorities could probably identify the names of the 45,000 customers using the payment transaction lists stored in the computer system. According to reports, however, users need not fear prosecution. The sheer number of proceedings would likely overwhelm the courts. For now, it is sufficient for the GVU and the film companies organized there to dismantle the distribution structures." Well. That didn't work out - but seriously, I hardly believe that anyone considered ftpwelt as an official download portal with legal content. The original article can be found on heise online news here.

Zeiss Ikon camera with M mount by Cosina?

Following this thread, there's supposedly going to be a new Bessa R3A soon. With M-mount. And Zeiss is also building the G lenses for M-mount. If so, that would be amazing - the Hologon could look very nice on my M6. Also interesting is the image of the camera on the Zeiss server. Here's the original article.

Bernhard Syndikus in custody?

So the smiley I'd need for my big grin right now, I don't have in my repertoire: The Munich law firm Gravenreuth & Syndikus, which in the past drew attention primarily through cease-and-desist letters, was also searched. One of the lawyers, Bernhard Syndikus, was taken into custody due to suspicion of obstruction of justice and flight risk.

Update: the Tagesspiegel has more information.

I found the original article at Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp.

British House of Commons bans fox hunting

If you look at the rioting and the storming of the House of Commons, the Brits are crazy. But we already knew that beforehand.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

GOO

Goo is also a very interesting Lisp dialect. Strongly influenced by Dylan and with a very compact syntax. However, the stuff doesn't compile on Jaguar - has anyone managed to get it working and have a few patches ready? I didn't find anything on the web.

Here's the original article.

TNPI - Homemade (Do It Yourself) .mac using mod_dav and Apache - How to simulate a .MAC account with a private machine and still be able to access Apple's pages

Aktuelle Gesetze - Legal texts online

Aquarium - Web Framework for Python - also under mod_python. Worth noting.

Digital Enlarger for Photo Paper

Oops. 10000 Euros is hefty. But somehow still cool, the idea - and actually absolutely obvious. Just build a mini-projector into the enlarger head, done. So to speak. Although nothing for chemistry refusers like me

At heise online news there's the original article.

::jamesoff:: » Check RBL for WordPress 0.1 - Check comment accesses against RBLs - possibly interesting to filter spam access from the start?

Lawyers demand free laws for everyone

Yes. And indeed in a form that people can find reasonable. Whoever has tried to find certain legal texts will have been quite surprised - plenty of strange servers scattered wildly across the world, sometimes paid, sometimes free - and no one can say whether the text is really currently correct and valid in that form. Something like that belongs on a central server of the Federal Government with appropriate current maintenance of the content. It's not that hard to set up something like that.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there's the original article.

Kodak 35 Rangefinder

Such an ugly camera design that not even a mother could love it

Here's the original article.

Konica Minolta Announces Dynax 7D DSLR

So Minolta has finally managed it. Ok, they were already where others only got to in recent years, and they were even gone again, but a current digital SLR suits them quite well, doesn't it?

At PhotographyBLOG you can find the original article.

Kryptonite Evolution 2000 U-Lock hacked by a Bic pen

The pen is mightier than the sword.

At Engadget you can find the original article.

lemonodor: Lisp for the Mindstorm

Way cool: a Lisp that runs directly on the Mindstorm RCX. Not via the PC, but an autonomous Lisp system with actuators and sensors. Unfortunately the RCX has somewhat limited memory, but still - that's pretty neat.

At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.

MrEd Designer - GUI builder for PLT Scheme

The Robinson House | RSS and Delta Encoding

Delta Encoding for RSS - as a WP hack. Possibly also implement at PyCS?

Carbon Cannibal: Breaking it down for the hard drive

And once again, someone is ripping a CF hard drive out of an MP3 player. This time it's the Rio Carbon. This one is also cheaper than typical 4 or 5 GB CF hard drives - and inside the Carbon is a Seagate with 5 GB of storage. As usual with such instructions: don't try this at home. As the author so nicely puts it: In fact, you will probably end up with $249 worth of useless junk. - if you do try it anyway, you can report back Here's the original article.

Cayman Update

Bill on what Ivan left behind from Grand Cayman.

At Bill Bumgarner you can find the original article.

elephant - simple object database for Common Lisp

newLisp: A better Lisp/Scheme Fusion...

Noted, I need to take a closer look at that. I've been pondering for quite a while what I should move on to after Python - Scheme would be an alternative, but after my longer time with Python, it somehow feels too verbose to me.

Somehow a not entirely unimportant factor that the Lisp community likes to ignore: names shouldn't be too long, otherwise you'll wear out your fingers typing. Sure, with macros you can make things more compact, but that's not what macros are for. A language with a script orientation should help you formulate your program quickly. In scsh, for example, that's far from the case.

However, when I look at the language definition, the whole thing is a bit strange. Many areas feel somewhat unfinished and un-lispy. Some of the concepts (e.g., exception handling) are rather primitive. Also, the foundation on heavily side-effect-oriented programming (due to symbols being used as hooks for everything and anything) is inelegant. And last but not least, the death blow: dynamic scoping. While cushioned by lexical namespace assignments, still: dynamic scoping is almost always more reason for trouble than joy.

Other aspects, however, are quite appealing, especially the very lean language scope and the few but efficient basic data types.

The syntax should become somewhat more logical - for example, marking all destructive functions with !, marking all property checks with ? - that's compact to write and easy to remember. For instance, the choice of set-nth for the non-destructive and nth-set for the destructive variant of changing the nth element of a data structure isn't really memorable and begs for confusion.

All in all, a clever idea, but probably less of a grand slam than it's made out to be. More in the class of Emacs Lisp - script Lisp, but a bit hacky.

At Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog there's the original article.

paranoidfish.org/projects/webkit2png - Command line tool that saves web pages as PNG

Weaknesses in the MIME Standard

Oh Kinners, those Heise guys don't really know much either. Yes, the standard doesn't define every impossible case. So what? RFCs never do either. It's not necessary either - just because a standard doesn't define every possible situation down to the last detail, that doesn't mean programmers can throw their brains away and just build in whatever causes trouble. It's not the standard that's defective or has weaknesses - it's the implementations in the programs. A standard might not be complete - but that would mean that functionality in relation to the content of the standard is not sufficiently defined. But not that everything that's not part of the standard is not sufficiently defined. Or something like that.

At heise online news there's the original article.

SCO vs. Linux: More Time and More Lines for SCO

I'll translate the German text to English while preserving the Markdown structure and links:

We'll translate it: we found nothing, but we still want to continue extorting the economy and therefore need another six-month extension. We won't find anything by then either, but until then we'll certainly write black figures through the extortions and can then afford the debacle. Oh yes, and the IBM witnesses have deaf ears - the colleague here also says so, who admittedly has nothing to do with the whole mess, but we couldn't find a competent witness. At heise online news there's the original article.

Dispute over private copying and information rights escalates

Above all, the BVDW is missing its own investigative powers for exploiters and producers in the form of information requests against Internet providers for easy access to user data. - yes sure, let's just give rights holders police powers. They're out of their minds.

At heise online news there's the original article.

USA: Attack weapons legal again from today

The Americans are crazy.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.