Federal Government's E-Mail Servers Nearly Shut Down
So they can't do that in Berlin either
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Archive 14.5.2004 - 20.5.2004
Cologne, Essen or Münster?
Münster it didn't become. And no, Münster is not a normal case in cultural policy. At least I hope that a disaster case like Münster is not the norm ...
Tillmann's blather can be thrown in the bin anyway - as usual. Pure hypocrisy. The only true statement was "Cultural policy in Münster remains a citizens' movement" - exactly. Citizens, not a politicians' movement. The politicians in Münster at best demonetize cultural institutions and projects - the city council hasn't actually built anything.
At WDR.de there's the original article.
The Screw is Not Loose ...
The screw is not loose ...
Yes, we've had this motif before. But it's not the same screw.
Beautiful on Father's Day, eerie on the weekend
Cool. The boozers have good weather today, but at the weekend during the city festival there's a wet and cold ass? Well, we'll see. But if the city festival falls through, I wouldn't like that at all ...
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
SCO vs. Linux: SCO Demands FSF Disclosure
Speaking of strange again: SCO's behavior probably falls under that term as well. Slowly but surely, SCO seems to be preparing a witch hunt against Free Software.
You can find the original article at heise online news under this link.
Software patent opponents accuse Brussels of dishonesty
So much for our government allegedly being against software patents, as it claimed itself just recently (P2234). It was all just a lie. The original article can be found at heise online news.
From Zero to Linux in 6 Months? Only Through Copied Code.
Somehow the Tocqueville Foundation and their appearance on the topic of Linux seem pretty strange to me...
Well, probably Tanenbaum is right: they simply have no idea what they're writing about.
At heise online news there is the original article.
WordPress Tinkering
Since I'm currently playing around with blog utilities and CMSes, my current WordPress installation has already gotten some content and layout improvements. Of all the alternatives for small sites, I still like it the best. For Drupal (my current favorite for larger sites), I might also find a use case.
Do I have too many domains and sites? Oh well.
Update: since I'm now running this blog with WordPress and the other one had become outdated, I simply shut it down. One less site to maintain...
WordPress Support › Static "like" pages - Discussion about creating pseudo-static pages (e.g. imprint) in WordPress
ASPN : Python Cookbook : Transactionable Objects - oversimplified idea for transactions on objects - not thread-safe, not stable
drupal.org
I'm currently playing around with Drupal a bit. First impression: wow! Extremely powerful, extremely many features. Though possibly too many features. But what I like right away is the very clean interface with quite logical menu structure, and how all extensions automatically hook into these menus. I also like the solution with templates and themes: themes can be divided into templates or stylesheets. This allows you to change the general system, but also just choose variants of a system. The default theme is table-based, but there's another CSS-based one to choose from. I can't really say yet how XHTML compatibility looks. Also good is the support for MySQL and PostgreSQL - I normally prefer the latter. You can also make weblogs with it, as well as static articles, entire books, stories with discussion forums similar to Slashdot or Kuro5hin and much more. However, what stands out right away is that the tools in the individual content areas are somewhat sparse - tools that specifically target weblogs often seem more complete. Specifically things like Trackback, Pingback, update pings or similar have to be installed afterwards or at least reconfigured - the standard only pings drupal.org itself for the distributed login mechanism. Also such elementary things as simple categories (more complex categories - even hierarchical - do exist, but elsewhere) for blog entries require some searching. RSS feeds are automatically created, but on some pages (for example the homepage) they first have to be linked (in user blogs the link is automatic though). Otherwise they are only contained as alternate links, but not necessarily visible to users. Overall, the whole system clearly aims to design and build entire websites with entire groups of users. However, the distributed login mechanism is really cool: users from participating systems can log into other participating systems with user@host and the login is automatically passed to the home system. Login with always the same password, but with distributed authorization. Very nice! Overall, a lot of value is placed on user management - it almost has Zope dimensions with its permission groups and the ability to create symbolic permission groups for individual activities. Less cool are the many missing metadata. There's actually hardly any metadata on content. Author, date, status - but that's more or less it (of course besides title and text, those are self-evident). Content organization is also left to the user - though there are helper tools that make creating navigation easier. However, many metadata topics (such as categories) can apparently be solved using taxonomies - these are groupings of content. The description of this is somewhat unintuitive, the topic is quite complex. Taxonomies are groupings of keywords on a topic. So I don't assign posts to categories, but rather assign keywords to posts and then organize the keywords into categories. While this provides mountains of metadata, it's far more complex than the normal blog categories you're used to.
Great again are all the content status and content versioning functionalities. All changes are logged. All changes to content are versioned. You can go back to older content and thus, for example, fix errors (or remove garbage from rogue users).
The whole system is extensible, but I suspect (haven't checked it yet, but given the range of functionality it's a likely guess) that creating plugins and filters is more involved than with small solutions like WordPress. But that's in the nature of things.
Another potential disadvantage is the unavailability of a ready-made German translation. While there are other sites working with Drupal in German, apparently no one releases the complete translation tables for download - at least I haven't found anything, neither at drupal.org itself nor on Google.
Where would I classify Drupal? Clearly in the CMS category - that's where systems like Typo3, Mambo Open Source, Plone and similar systems shine. However, it beats discussion-oriented CMSs like Scoop or Squishdot by a mile - as well as simple blog CMSs. For a simple blog system it's clearly overkill. For a complete site it seems very usable.
Python MQI Interface - pymqi. Version 0.5c - MQ Series Interface for Python - interesting in IBM environments
Releases | drupal.org - Download page for Drupal modules
Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation - Interesting text conversion to XHTML for PHP and Perl - similar to reStructured Text
A Slap in the Face for the Chancellor
If I were to slap every politician and official who doesn't suit me, my hand would fall off from pain...
At tagesschau.de - The News from ARD you can find the original article.
EU states agree on software patents [Update]
Once again proof of the stupidity and/or corruption of the EU Commissions and Councils. For how else could one explain such nonsense? There are not many European companies that could have an interest in software patents. But American companies are certainly ready to ram their idiotic patents through Europe and kick competitors out of the market.
There is no macroeconomic need for blocking patents - and that is precisely what software patents are.
That this decision also clearly goes against the decision of the elected representatives of the people - parliament - apparently bothers no one anymore ...
At heise online news there is the original article.
GPs threaten health insurance boycott
Of course such an extortion strategy is entirely in the interest of the patient and health and has nothing to do with rip-off and shirking of responsibility. How could anyone get the idea that in a health system with problems all stakeholders must accept disadvantages. Absurd notion, when it is so clearly obvious that only the patients have drawn the short straw. Whatever you do, don't touch the vested interests ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Nu Cardboard: Kangapy: Components
Another blogging software in Python - seems similar to PyDS
papercut.org - nntp server for the masses - NNTP server with flexible backend - integrable in forum software
Rob Galbraith DPI: Digital Photo Professional, EOS Viewer Utility coming May 20
Well, it's about time that Canon cleaned up their outdated RAW utilities. The previous ones (File Viewer Utility and Image Browser) are terribly slow and rather mediocre in terms of usability. Hopefully the release of the new tools with 10D support will come fairly soon, and hopefully Canon won't forget the OS X platform again...
Shrook 2 - RSS and Atom for Mac OS X - Yet another feed reader for OS X - similar to iTunes
Struck: No Punishment for Wolffsohn
Oh, he apologized? Well then everything is fine. It's not really a problem anyway, he only teaches at the Bundeswehr University of Applied Sciences, where future officers are trained. And after all, they need to be prepared for when Germany defends democracy at the Hindukush or elsewhere sometime ...
At tagesschau.de - The news from ARD you can find the original article.
The X-Files Reruns
Did you know that with the technique of Chinese body control you can influence your testicles to withdraw into your body for protection? - I'm doing that right now! - Mulder in The X-Files. When the show was still good.
b2evolution: Home
b2evolution also makes a good impression on paper. It's surprising how far all these blog programs have come while you're not looking.
In any case, b2evolution makes a very good showing when it comes to antispam and security. And it also seems to have good XHTML support and a plugin architecture. The plugins are divided by purpose (Edit-Plugins and Toolbar-Plugins). I think the somewhat simpler form of plugins in WordPress will be easier for many to understand, but programmers will probably prefer b2evolution.
Personally, the admin environment is a bit too playful for me - though I only looked at it in the online demo. Also, the standard template doesn't look as clean and tidy as WordPress's - I think with the latter you have an easier start to impose your own layout. What's definitely nice is the choice of input parser for posts - I've done something like that in the Python Desktop Server too, precisely because you don't always want to have certain plugins active. Otherwise, it's of course very similar to WordPress - it's also a b2 descendant. WordPress probably has better support for images since it can automatically create thumbnails. Also, b2evolution lacks the metaWeblogAPI. On the other hand, what's nice is the integration of referrers and search engines directly into the blog - similar to the evaluation that the Python Community Server does for me. The usability design of b2evolution seems a bit confusing in places: permalinks to posts are small chain symbols, permalinks to comments are small document symbols. It's also somewhat inconsistent in other places.
Conclusion? If I can draw one at all from this mini-test, I'd say that for me, b2evolution implements just one small checkbox, switch, or option too many for most features. Therefore, I would personally lean more towards WordPress - I can imagine the code is somewhat simpler in structure and therefore custom hacks can be integrated more easily.
In terms of function, however, b2evolution clearly wins on points. Whoever prefers lots of features and likes to draw from a full well, or who wants to venture beyond normal blogs more strongly into the CMS area, will certainly be thrilled with b2evolution.
What I don't understand with either b2evolution or WordPress: neither of the two projects implements stories. That is, article formats that are not fixed to the calendar. Sure, you can realize that with a category or with a separate blog (with b2evolution's multiblogs functionality certainly much easier than the category hack needed for WordPress), but I find it impractical that you have to go to such lengths just for an imprint...
Computation Streaming in Python - Interesting alternative technique to threads - particularly interesting for Medusa
entrian.com - goto for Python - goto for Python - GOTO and COMEFROM for Python
EU approves sale of genetically modified corn
And so the will of the citizens is trampled underfoot. And for what? Why do we need genetically modified canned corn? Who - apart from the manufacturer - benefits from its existence? And how much did they pay the members of the EU Commission for it? Because I can't explain this nonsense any other way than through corruption. And we're already used to corruption from the EU Commission...
I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft.
EU Commission releases flight passenger data for USA
And here we go again with the Commission's gross mischief...
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Exchange loses emails
Mail loss is not a standard feature of mail servers? You'd think someone would have to explain that to Microsoft – they won't figure it out on their own ...
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Open Source release of Frontier?
Interesting for people still working with Frontier: the kernel is likely to become open source. As a result, this could mean that some of the uglier problems (e.g. the terribly poor performance under OS X) could be solved. After all, Frontier is still pretty cool in many corners even today (the OO database with outliner basis, for example, is something that doesn't exist in this form elsewhere - even if some people grumble that you don't actually need this particular combination).
At Second p0st you'll find the original article.
PyOne - one-liner helper for Python - Helper tool for Python one-liners - great for admins and shell use
SourceForge: pyawk - AWK-like language based on Python
WordPress Wiki - Comment Moderation Plugin - Comment confirmation via email - could be interesting for TIMMY
WordPress Wiki - WP Plugins - WordPress Plugins for the new 1.2 Plugin Interface
Freedom 0 [dive into mark]
I don't often agree with Mark Pilgrim, but here - it's about free software in the broader sense and Moveable Type's price changes in the narrower sense - he hits the nail on the head.
Freshly Squeezed Software - PulpFiction - Advanced News Reader/Aggregator for Mac OS X - Interesting desktop aggregator for OS X
Longhorn goes to pieces | CNET News.com
Advanced search features that Gates has termed the "Holy Grail" of Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, won't be fully in place until 2009, Bob Muglia, the senior vice president in charge of Windows server development, told CNET News.com. - I find that frankly embarrassing what Microsoft is currently doing. Who cares about an operating system whose interesting features are supposed to come sometime in 2009 or so? In IT, that's an eternity. The whole thing Microsoft is pulling off really reminds me strongly of Apple before they bought NeXT.
Metakit stats/verify utility - Analysis tool for Metakit databases
Beware Mac OS X Trojan AppleScript applet
Cool. An AppleScript applet that has an icon that looks like a Microsoft installer. Absolutely horrifyingly terrible trojan. That's so trojan-like. I get genuinely scary anxiety thinking that I might accidentally deliberately download that thing, and despite having no Microsoft applications, feel immediately compelled by the icon to double-click it, only to be completely taken aback when my home directory gets deleted. People, if I hit myself on the head with a hammer, it hurts. That's pretty stupid of me, but the hammer still isn't a trojan. Even if someone writes chocolate on it... And no, completely doesn't fit well here either. I just wanted to use it once... At welcome to macscripter.net | applescript and script resource you can find the original article.
The Secret Hollywood Film Studio
Perverse - Soldiers positioned 2.5 km away from the explosion to get them used to atomic explosions. The military's ideas back then were quite stupid, even for that time's rather low level of knowledge about nuclear power.
At Telepolis News (14.05.2004) you can find the original article.