Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form

Flower Pictures

With the corn poppy, I always imagine it whispering with the wild rose...

European Election - go and vote!

Well - the European Parliament is repeatedly sidelined and outvoted by the Council and Commission. That's crap. Just like the fact that the Union in the Bundesrat massively obstructs legislation in the Bundesrat. Both have their causes in the political systems: the Commission and the EU Council are also - admittedly very indirectly through the national governments and their appointed representatives - democratically legitimized. So far so bad.

But what is crystal clear: poor voter turnout in EU elections won't convince the people who already don't take Europe seriously in national governments that the EU Parliament deserves more attention. And we voters have that in our hands: if voter turnout is correspondingly higher, if voters actually treat the election as such, then eventually even the last office jockey in the government apparatus won't be able to ignore it.

Of course, the fact that Commission members and various councils have distinguished themselves through corruption and incompetence is a problem. But that needs to be fixed where it originates - in the respective countries. Because German representatives in the various bodies were sent by our own government.

So don't vent your frustration about the nonsense of politicians in the various governments on the EU Parliament. On the contrary: that should be an incentive to show that as a citizen you do value the EU Parliament. And the best way to do that is through participation in the election. Better to cast an invalid ballot than not to go, because voter turnout itself is a statement. And a statement that says I don't give a damn will definitely not change anything for the better. At Der Schockwellenreiter there's the original article.

Angler idyll and skyscrapers

Fishing idyll and high-rises

I found the contrast somehow amusing.

Blömkes

Out hunting for flowers again.

House Entrances

Hauseingänge

Strange blossoms architecture produces in some corners of Münster ...

PS/2 and MCA History

PS/2 and MCA History - History of IBM PS/2 Systems

Rebuttal to Ken Brown

Tanenbaum is cool

Here you can find the original article.

iSync is Rubbish

I just wanted to do a sync after several days, and iSync suddenly wants to copy all my appointments from the organizer to my Mac - without me making a single change to any of these appointments on the organizer. That's absolutely ridiculous. And you can't even tell from the message that mentions 132 new objects which objects those actually are and which device they're coming from - at first I suspected the sync was coming from my phone.

Why can't Apple get synchronization right and why do they pester us with this pathetic pile of junk?

Sure, it's nice that you can synchronize all kinds of devices with iSync and even sync multiple devices at once. But that's completely useless if synchronization regularly duplicates and scrambles your data.

QDB: Quote #330261

Oh man ...

Here's the original article.

Reagan and the Soviets

Oh yes, retroactively fulfilled prophecies. What the colleague here "analyzes" with Reagan and Bush and their supposedly perhaps much cleverer approach, others do in the same form: only "analyze" it so that Nostradamus was a clairvoyant ...

Sorry, but just because the Soviet Union collapsed, and Reagan was president at that time, doesn't automatically make the president and his policies the reason for the collapse. You could just as easily claim that Kohl brought about reunification - instead of the more correct analysis that he just happened to be Federal Chancellor at that time.

Someone is always American president or German Chancellor or great guru of Humba-Humba at the time of a major event. And someone will also implement some policy. So what?

Reducing major historical events to only the years before the event ignores the history and the internal development that underlies the whole situation. The changes in the USSR began independently of Reagan and even earlier. It's possible that the Americans' insane arms buildup was one factor - but certainly not the only one, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't even the most important one.

Ultimately, something shimmers through in the argument that has always annoyed me about history class: the reduction of history to the behavior of princes, kings, warriors or other big shots. Sorry, but that's nonsense.

At Ideas and Errors - Excursions through the New World Order there's the original article.

Another Awesome Algorithm Archive

Who is looking for an algorithm could find it in the NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures - the chances are very high given the abundance of algorithms cataloged there.

At Gary Kings unCLog I found the original article.

Berlusconi wants to change the calendar

Here's my favorite Seibel priest ( Masematte for blabbermouth) at it again: he wants to change the calendar so that Christmas and a few other holidays always fall on a weekend, so that lazy workers have to toil more. Yet another idiotic proposal that our March Hare will certainly be happy to pick up ... Here's the original article.

Burningbird » Glory Days: The Parable of the Languages

The Revenge of Programming Languages on XML

Here you can find the original article.

Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel Tips and Tricks

A page with information about the 300D firmware hack and what it can do, as well as many other tips related to the 300D. What actually surprised me a bit about it is the following small box that was on the page:

FACTOID: Did you know your 10D and 300D run DOS? That's right. Embedded in the camera is DataLight's ROM-DOS. In fact, if you use the right tool such as s10sh you can see that inside the camera is an A: and B: drive. On the A: drive reside command.com and autoexec.bat, and most interestingly, camera.exe. DOS? DOS?? Wow. Somehow a bit scary.

Here's the original article.

Ian's Shoelace Site - Slipping Shoelace Knots?

Wow. An entire site about knot techniques that deals specifically with shoelace knots, among other things, and explains why some people can't keep their shoelaces tied while others don't have these problems. I love the Internet!

Here's the original article.

Merkel wants to extend nuclear power plant operating times

Total radiation in Merkelnix's head ...

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

PyPerSyst - Orbtech Wiki

PyPerSyst - Orbtech Wiki - Persistence for Python objects

The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom

Very interesting: a graphical visualization of security events that makes various port scan techniques visually recognizable.

Here's the original article.

Upcoming Qonos Scientific PDA

The company Hydrix (apparently consisting in part of former HP RPN calculator developers) is working on a calculator based on Linux and using open source software for the tasks. Very interesting - it's supposed to come out at the end of this year. Let's see what it actually turns out to be.

Here's the original article.

Adapters: Olympus E-1

For the Olympus E-1, there is now also a set of adapters for various SLR lenses - so there are now two digital options for classic lenses like the Leica R or Contax MM line. The Olympus version is even more robustly and generously designed than the EOS version, since the Olympus system has a significantly shallower flange focal distance and therefore more space remains for adapters. As a result, the adapter for the Olympus system can remain directly on the camera (with the EOS adapter it's better to keep it on the lens). Particularly interesting for people who are simply looking for a digital option for their lenses and don't want to invest in the Olympus system. Here's the original article.

Digital Fine Art Prints - Baryta Print - Iris Giclee Prints

digitale Fine Art Prints - Barytabzug - Iris Giclee Prints - exposure on baryta paper - unfortunately not really cheap

Tax authorities threatened with tax shortfalls due to Mannesmann shares case

This can't possibly be true. A company artificially inflates its stock price to sell itself off, the board members pocket million-euro severance packages for it, the stock price comes back down to earth, and the state — and thus all taxpayers — are supposed to foot the bill?

The whole Vodafone-Mannesmann deal is nothing but one big fraud anyway, and we get to clean up the mess. The very idea of such blatant corruption makes you pretty angry.

Tax justice in Germany has been gone for a long time. And this whole pile of garbage is the best proof of it. It can't be right that companies themselves still profit from this crap, while ordinary taxpayers are constantly hit with higher burdens because the money runs out.

If we're blowing billions up the backsides of companies for stupidity and audacity, it's no wonder money is lacking...

Here's the original article.

Black and White Magazine Wollstein 6/2003

Schwarzweiss-Magazin Wollstein 6/2003 - Permanence of various photographic techniques

Insanely exciting Germany tour stage

I don't know when I last saw such an exciting stage in a tour race. The leader and his 4 pursuers only 20 seconds apart. Several pursuers (especially Jens Voigt and Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano) attack in turns. And Patrick Sinkewitz keeps up with them. A fantastic performance - especially since he had no more helpers. Until the finish with a final sprint against Jens Voigt, he was fully involved and defended his yellow jersey brilliantly. If he keeps the yellow jersey until Leipzig, he owes it definitively to his great performance and not to the weaknesses of his opponents.

Francisco Mancebo drove out the last kilometer on the mountain sovereignly - he's simply a mountain expert.

Jan Ullrich has shown that he still needs to work on his mountain form at the Tour de Suisse to be ready for the Tour de France - on the mountain he's definitely losing far too much time.

BugMeNot.com

A very interesting service - it provides (dummy) login credentials for services that require registration. For example, all those newspaper archives that need logins. If you don't want to enter your data, you simply use BugMeNot. With the bookmarklet, the whole thing is nice and easy. And you can also use the service to link to pages on services that are so heavily restricted.

Especially practical for those annoying demographic-data-collecting and we-spam-your-registration-to-death services.

Is that ethically correct? Sorry, folks, but is the constant asking for shoe size, hair color, and penis length (hey, the penis-enlargement providers have to get their addresses from somewhere) by the various archive services ethically correct?

Here's the original article.

E-MailRelay -- SMTP proxy and store-and-forward MTA

E-MailRelay -- SMTP proxy and store-and-forward MTA - general purpose SMTP proxy with its own spool handling and the ability to integrate external filters

fotoKASTEN - Digital photo development on the Internet - //

fotoKASTEN - Digital photo development on the Internet

Yet another image printing service with an affiliate program

mtaproxy.py - Teergrube utility for SpamBayes

mtaproxy.py - Teergrube utuility for SpamBayes - Tarpit with integrated SpamBayes

RoughingIT - pyblosxom 1.0 Release

PyBlosxom (Blosxom in Python) has been available as a 1.0 release since May 25th - still new enough that it's worth writing about now

Here you can find the original article.

STIM - MouseSite

Everything around human-computer interfaces and their origins such as the mouse, graphical user interfaces, windowing systems. Currently mainly documenting the presentation from 1968, when Doug Engelbart showed in a 90-minute multimedia presentation how to work with a networked computer with a window-oriented interface, hyperlinking and other features. It's quite fascinating what ideas and partially realized implementations already existed so early on. Here you can find the original article.

Stopping spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP)

Stopping spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP) - SMTP proxy with Bayesian filtering, this one is without honeypot

Toll Collect: Toll rate cannot be changed

Are the toll rates hard-wired into the devices? What kind of idiots designed all this crap?

surprised face

I hope it was just some official without a clue speaking again and the thing isn't actually built that stupidly. On the other hand, we're talking about Toll Collect here...

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

Tollef Fog Heen : tech/Debian/2004-03-14-15-55_greylisting

Greylisting with Exim and PostgreSQL

Greylisting is a technique to reduce spam by temporarily rejecting emails from unknown senders. The mail server is then expected to retry sending the email after a short delay. Since most spam is sent by machines that don't retry, this is an effective way to filter out a large portion of spam.

I've implemented greylisting for my mail server using Exim and PostgreSQL. Here's how it works:

How it works

When an email arrives, Exim checks if the combination of sender, recipient, and sending server has been seen before. If not, the email is temporarily rejected with a "try again later" response. If the combination has been seen before and enough time has passed, the email is accepted and the database is updated.

Implementation

The implementation uses a PostgreSQL database to store the greylisting information. A simple table stores the sender, recipient, sending server, and timestamp of the last attempt.

Configuration

To enable greylisting in Exim, you need to add an ACL rule that queries the database and decides whether to accept or reject the email. The rule should be placed in the DATA ACL.

Results

Since I've enabled greylisting on my mail server, the amount of spam has decreased significantly. Most spam never retries, so it's never delivered. Legitimate emails are still delivered, just with a slight delay on the first message from a new sender.

Tollef Fog Heen : Yahoo Breaking SMTP Standards

One of the reasons why I don't like Greylisting. In short, what greylisting is: when a server makes a connection to another server for mail delivery, a triple is formed from the sending host, destination address, and source address, and it is checked whether this combination is known. If not, the combination is noted and the current mail is rejected with a temporary rejection. The theory is that mail servers attempt redeliveries but spambots and virus distributors typically do not. So far, so good. Problems with this approach:

not every mail server responds correctly to temporary rejections. Example: Yahoo. And that's far from the only server that reacts this way.
even with temporary rejections, bounces often occur, which then cause mailing list hosts to unsubscribe you from lists.
a spammer only needs to attempt to send the spam twice in quick succession and the spam gets through. This is minimal effort for spambots — either the user gets one or two spams — but they will get them.
greylisting only works if you have control over all MX servers for your own domain, otherwise spam simply comes in through the other mail servers on which greylisting is not running.
if all MXes use greylisting, delivery attempts of legitimate mail are slowed down, since these normally try the other MXes on temporary rejections and then also fail there. Depending on configuration, you then automatically end up in slower queues or longer waiting times on that server (because three delivery attempts have already failed at three MXes).
Whitelisting (which is mentioned as a solution for some problems) is itself a problem: spam from servers on the whitelist is not detected. But precisely some of the large distribution servers have to be added to the whitelist because they have exactly the problems mentioned (Yahoo is not only a source for many mailing lists, but also for a lot of spam).
Problems with greylisting are typically only noticed indirectly — since it is a largely transparent process and you can really only conclude that there are problems with greylisting from reactions by others.

All in all, greylisting only has an advantage temporarily: because it is rarely widespread, it is currently not taken into account by spambots. But taking it into account is trivial and would automatically happen with wider adoption. Thus greylisting is doomed to become ineffective if it spreads further.

Of course, many of the problems can be fixed. But ultimately, this is just as much an attempt to plug the holes in a sieve with paper as using rule-based spam filters against spam. Statistical spam filtering (Bayesian filter) is still the best available solution.

Here's the original article.

Gallery :: your photos on your website

Gallery :: your photos on your website - Interesting software for photo albums on the web

Girls are Evil - Mathematical Proof

Teufelsgrinsen

Here you can find the original article.

Omikron Basic 8.0 runs natively on Mac OS X

Yet another zombie that's still alive. When I read through the Features, tears of joy come to my eyes. Those were the days when you could program in Basic on home computers. The world was so much simpler then ... At The Macintosh News Network you can find the original article.

Photo Organizer

Photo Organizer - Feature-rich web photo album with a rather stylish default look

SCO vs. Linux: Mission impossible

First SCO stands up and says there are millions of stolen lines of code. And that they can name them. Then they demand sources. They get them. Search through them for ages and find nothing. Hello? Why do they even have to search if the locations are supposedly known? And why don't they notice that the JFS for Linux is based on the OS/2 JFS? That's even stated in the documentation - if they search the sources, why don't they read it at the same time? But probably that's exactly the problem: if you don't read text, you can search through it forever without ever finding anything.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Silverlab Partner Program

Silverlab Partnerprogramm - Photo print service with financial participation of the photographer

Symantec Chief: Windows is not less secure than Linux

Sure, quite clearly. Windows is the easier target to hit, which is why it's not inherently less secure than Linux. And of course the security problems are due to attachment clickers - funny only that considerably more server attacks against Windows are possible, all of which have nothing to do with attachments. And all this despite the fact that with servers, Linux and Apache are definitely the train rolling through the whole city, while IIS - alongside IE and Outlook, the security hole par excellence - rather only runs in the seedier suburbs ... At heise online news there's the original article.

United States Patent: 6,727,830

What a load of rubbish: clicking an application button once is the standard function, holding it for at least one second is a secondary function, and double-clicking an application button is then a tertiary function.

And for such banality, the US Patent Office grants Microsoft a patent. And we're just introducing those oh-so-meaningful and innovative software patents in the EU. Thanks, Ms. Zypries, for letting us deal with such brilliant innovative solutions and such meaningful patents in the future.

Here's the original article.

EditThisPagePHP

EditThisPagePHP - Edit pages online in PHP - Alternative for situations where a real CMS is too large and a wiki or weblog is too rigid in structure

SCO vs. Linux: Investor Baystar exits

Final beginning of the preliminary end?

At heise online news there's the original article.

SF Author Bradbury: "Michael Moore is a terrible person" - Culture - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Bradbury certainly had a bit of a dark side. Instead of being pleased that someone like Moore was basing a film title on one of his book titles, he complained that he should have been asked. What more does he want? Should thermometer manufacturers with Fahrenheit scales also ask him for permission? Rarely a more foolish man than Bradbury...

Here's the original article.

Vellum: a weblogging system in Python

Vellum: a weblogging system in Python - Nice little weblogging system in Python

Adventure Earth - To Hell

Just stumbled upon it while flipping through channels. Absolutely well done! And interesting - the giant Andean vulture with an 8-meter wingspan (extinct) was just as new to me as the fact that New World vultures (including the condor) are related to storks and not to birds of prey, like Old World vultures are.

Here's the original article.