OpenMCL Now LLGPLed - hmm, could this be the first sign that someone will take it and build a decent GUI around it to commercialize it? If the price were significantly lower than MCL, that would be interesting to me.
Found at lemonodor.
Onanierende Orang-Utans - what is it with all these orangutans at the moment
Found at Telepolis News.
Easy Things Should Be Easy - the power of high-level libraries.
Gefunden bei PyLog.
Friday 3 January AllegroServe : 3 edits - hmm, has it quietly become OpenMCL-compatible? That would be something worth doing, maybe playing around with OpenMCL again. Perhaps a parallel implementation of PyDS as ClDS? Or at least parts of it?
PyDS is making nice progress, by the way, a simple weblog tool is already there, but rendering and upstreaming are still missing. But the infrastructure is now largely complete. Let's see, once I have rendering and upstreaming done, I could actually take my stuff down from Radio and import it into PyDS.
I could handle news with AmphetaDesk for now and just patch the template so I can post entries to PyDS. That way I could do everything I do today. Just uglier.
Found at CLiki Recent Changes.
"It seems the editors of DigiTimes confused iMac manufacturing with the production of TFT displays from Apple's Studio Display line." - Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link, so I don't need to panic buy. Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.
Deutsche Bahn sues Pro Bahn in court - instead of complaining in court, Deutsche Bahn could simply fix the problems and adapt its pricing system to match its advertising promises ...
Found at tagesschau online.
20 Years of mouse-controlled computers: "Lisa" celebrates its birthday - oh well, I would certainly like to have one for my collection. But they do go for a bit of money on eBay ...
Found at tagesschau on the Internet.
MacBird Open Source Release - well, it's been sitting around for three years and I'm afraid no one will pick up the ball. That's a shame really, because a GUI is what Frontier/Radio is still missing. The web interface isn't always optimal and the built-in editors are usable for the predefined types, but not necessarily always ideal for real applications. OK, Dave lives in the Outliner, but there are people who still want classic applications
Found at Scripting News.
The Cultured Orangutan - interesting, the orangutan apparently has a kind of transmitted culture that can vary by region.
Found at Scientific American.
Two cat photos (scanned from old negatives) from The Witch - Jutta's Photo Albums. Found at The Witch - Jutta's Photo Albums.
Navigation error - someone could have given them a GPS receiver as a Christmas present ... (Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft)
Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.
I'm currently working on a larger Python project that could potentially replace Radio for me. We'll see how it goes. The infrastructure is already in place — I simply borrowed from PyCS and used the same modules. Next, I'll do some fine-tuning on the infrastructure, then comes template integration and themes. After that, I'll create the first tools. I'm curious to see how it turns out, but based on my previous Python projects, I'm actually quite optimistic. Python and all the available libraries are a fairly reliable tool — so I won't end up in the rain halfway through just because some annoying library starts acting up again...
Cyclone 0.4 released - I talked about it with Kai at the regulars' table yesterday, and today I see the update. Ok, Kai said it means typhoon, but I think cyclone is meteorologically close enough (Found at Lambda the Ultimate)
Should I take a look at it? I've been quite happy with "Pyrex" and "Python" so far, but I still need the obligatory new programming language for this year that I want to explore ...
Found at Lambda the Ultimate.
Porn or Web Radio Patent? - ouch. A patent issue like this can have serious consequences, especially for things like the Quicktime Streaming Server (okay, Apple is behind that, they have less of a problem with it) or other open source streaming solutions (Ogg streaming for example). Internet radios would - if this patent goes through on a larger scale - probably only be feasible from the free world, no longer from regions bogged down by patent disputes like the States.
For Industrial Technology & Witchcraft this could potentially be relevant too, after all they want to set up a radiolog soon.
Found at Telepolis News.
CBS Marketwatch: AOL said ready to boost blogging - ouch. Then the weblog infrastructure servers (I'm thinking of weblogs.com, Technorati, Blogstreet, blo.gs, the Blogs ecosystem and all the others) September ... (Found on Scripting News)
Found at Scripting News.
Flat-panel iMac production to be terminated? - hey! They can't discontinue that before I get one! Seriously ...
Found at The Macintosh News Network.
Rürup calls to order - wow, the commission is certainly starting off with full competence. I wonder if anything sensible can come out of it?
Found at tagesschau online.
Den Song could have easily been played on the radio again at Christmas. Oh well, they really don't make proper Christmas songs like that anymore ...
Rürup Commission: Get involved with 900 euros! - I'm hoping this is just half-baked stuff that reporters picked up and published in a way that's not quite but almost completely different from what was intended. Because if that's actually the plan, the whole thing becomes absurd. Then we're moving sooner or later toward American conditions and should already start looking for where we want our slums to be...
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
[
][0] [
][1] Two images from the Botanical Garden Münster from The Witch - Juttas Fotoalben.
Found at The Witch - Juttas Fotoalben.
> look You are in a twisty maze of python build dependencies, all covered with inscrutable error messages. There are exits to: N, S, E, W. What do you do? > python setup.py build A compiler goblin rushes out of one of the passages, scribbles on a wall and runs gibbering down another passage. > help There is no help for you. > n You are in a twisty maze of python build dependencies, all covered with inscrutable error messages. There are exits to: N, S, E, W. What do you do? > get coffee
[ richard's stuff : /python] So (s/coffee/apfelschorle/) fühle ich mich auch manchmal. Meistens aber mit Perl, wenn eine Modulinstallation gleich das ganze Perl selber mit installieren will aufgrund seiner Abhängigkeiten ...
Gefunden bei richard's stuff : /python.
Simply beautiful. The film. And music by Kate Bush. Unfortunately, we haven't heard from her in far too long. A shame.
Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link.
Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.
Pevenage leaves Team Telekom - a shame, his team management was really good, even if the Tour victory only worked out twice. Well, with the whole team in transition, it was perhaps exactly the right time. The main thing is that the magenta train keeps going (and more reliably than the railway)
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
19C3: The Linux Xbox Hack and the Future of Palladium - I'm currently being attacked by perverse thoughts of an X-Box cluster ...
Found at heise online news.
Prominent .de domains: Not paid and blocked - unbelievable. Not that the domains were neglected - given the story, that's no surprise. But the fact that prominent companies actually register their domains through third-level resellers instead of handling it properly themselves through a primary domain provider is really embarrassing. Honestly, anyone who does something that stupid deserves what they get ...
Found at heise online news.
The Raelians - oh yes. Such people are of course absolutely predestined for cloning humans. Completely credible bunch. Sure. (Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link)
Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.
Schröder announces tough course - ok, when will ministerial salaries and parliamentary allowances be cut? When will companies be taxed appropriately again? When will those with assets have their wealth taxed again? What does "we're not doing that" mean? Strange. Oh right, tough only for employees. A very peculiar definition of "everyone".
Found on tagesschau on the Internet.
Schröder or Stoiber: Who has the better website? - wow. That's pretty terrible, what's lurking in the websites of the Chancellor and the candidate. Well, so much for competence with new media...
The Polaroid 600SE is one of my cameras. Tony is always a bit hard to find, so here's a link to his shop. You'll find lots of interesting information about the system from him. And I can only confirm one thing: the Polaroid 600 SE is a great camera. A photo album full of Fuji 100 B really makes an impression...
Criticism of Fischer from within his own ranks - Making wars is modern
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Mehdorn threatens with fair-weather traffic. The railway wants to maintain train service in the future even during extreme weather conditions. With this clarification, the company responded to a threat from railway chief Mehdorn. He had considered in "Focus" to completely stop trains in the future during freezing rain. - could these be the last convulsions of the railway chief? After all, it's quite an unusual situation when a company clarifies statements made by its chief ... Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Photo albums on the OUT e.V. server now automatically create an RSS feed of new images, so these can be subscribed to in a news aggregator like "Radio Userland". This way you can easily keep track of where new photos have been added, even with photo albums.
The XML URL for the RSS feed can also be extended with a second parameter "&count=NN" to select the number of current images. The default is 10, which should be sufficient. I may make some optimizations to the server software later to keep transfers and CPU load from getting too high.
A few image albums can be seen in my list of subscribed news feeds on the right (e.g. Leicaesk, hugo.f-2.org, the drf image critique pages).
Cat jumping - somewhat dark, but still a nice picture from The Witch - Juttas photo albums. You can see the technique in the light arc in the background, she probably moved along. Not so easy to do with a manual focus camera. Found at The Witch - Juttas photo albums.
One of my images made from ropes and pulleys. I like this album somehow, even though the images themselves don't convey much meaning, but rather serve the presentation of form and light play. Not every image has to convey a message...
Matthew Thomas: When good interfaces go crufty. Worth reading. The explicit examples in particular are very interesting. Found via Scripting News.
Found at Scripting News.
Ook!!!. http://bluesorcerer.net/esoteric/ook.html: "Specially for orang-utans an Ook# .NET Compiler v1.0 has been developed. The syntax only contains one word, namely Ook,... - crazy. Funny, but completely crazy ";->" (found via BloQ).
Ook.
Found at BloQ.
Tales for the 1337 - ROTFL. World literature course for c001 hax0r5
Günter Grass drums against Bush - well, the Americans will probably tar and feather him for that. But Grass is right with what he says - Bush is a warmonger. Bush is not interested in a political solution to conflicts, he just wants to impose his stamp and his ideals on the whole world. If necessary, by armed force. But Bush will also have to learn that not the whole world wants to be American according to his example - that doesn't even apply to America itself ...
Found at tagesschau on the Internet.
From Der Schockwellenreiter:
[Exotic Programming Languages]: Type inference in Icon(
, 192 KB). »The original, interpretiveimplementation of Icon performs rigorous run-time type checking and incurs significant overhead as a result. A new optimizing compiler for Icon, on the other hand, has a type inferencing system that is effective in determining type usage and in eliminating much of the run-time checking that otherwise would be required.« It's a shame that highlights like Icon are now being treated as exotic programming languages. Icon is, after all, the continuation of ideas from Snobol into a programming language with proper syntax. Well, what Icon has suffered from (and still suffers from) is a library that's too simple. While there are modules for every conceivable thing, serious networking libraries, standard protocols, and more advanced features like database connections, GUIs, XML parsers, etc. are unfortunately missing. Icon never got out of the toy stage and the "hack together a quick filter" stage.
The Icon compiler itself is actually old news, it existed back then - and already with type inference. The latter is also old hat; in Lisp compiler construction it's used all the time, and in the realm of functional programming languages (ML, Haskell, OCAML) it's indispensable (though implemented much more elegantly there than in other languages, where type inference can never be complete).
It's a shame, Icon really had the makings of a usable alternative to Perl, Python, and Ruby today.
Found at Der Schockwellenreiter.
Railway rejects criticism of crisis management - exemplary response? Ridiculous. In the morning, supposedly all trains in Münster were ready to run through again, and in Osnabrück our visitor had to wait again, for an indefinite period. Then was rerouted via Hamburg. Apparently nothing was moving around Bremen anymore. But from Münster to Osnabrück is only 25 minutes - why didn't anyone in Münster know beforehand that it would only go as far as Osnabrück? Similar situation in the evening, this bungling by the railway was already somewhat embarrassing.
And best of all: in the traffic information on the railway's websites, the current message still only contains changes due to flooding. The entire black ice situation wasn't reflected anywhere on the websites at a single location.
And the railway's hotline number, where you can reach a contact person for timetable inquiries, complaints, etc., wasn't even put on an answering machine, but instead landed on an error signal after a few rings (like the initial jingle of "no connection to this number").
If they consider that exemplary crisis management, I don't want to see what happens when the railway actually has a real crisis...
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
More and more spam - and maybe stress too - well, I still think the approach outlined in the Plan for Spam is the best way to fight spam. I've been running an installation of bmf for a while now, which I actively train, and both the false positives (genuine mail marked as spam) and false negatives (spam that gets through) are minimal. Combined with a simple whitelisting technique and three inboxes (one for guaranteed non-spam, one for possible spam, and one for guaranteed spam), processing my mailbox is quick enough. And I currently get around 70-80 advertising emails a day...
Found at Telepolis News.
searchebay.py is a small Python script I hacked together that performs searches on eBay, analyzes the results, extracts individual listings, and builds an RSS feed from all the data. This RSS feed can then be used in, for example, MacReporter to monitor eBay auctions without having to constantly search eBay yourself. I find it practical.
The usage is very simple: python searchebay.py +contax +zeiss -ikon -o=contax
would for example search for Contax and Zeiss, filter out all Ikon items, and primarily find Contax lenses by Zeiss.
The result is saved in contax.xml in the public_html subdirectory of the active user's home directory (~/public_html/contax.xml). On Windows, you need to set a HOME environment variable that points to a directory with a public_html subdirectory.
Then run the whole thing regularly on a web server via Crontab or Scheduler and create a corresponding plugin in MacReporter (MacReporter Forge is sufficient for this). Of course, you can also use other RSS-capable news aggregators.
Mac Essentials - especially interesting to me is the link at the very bottom to the Ogg Vorbis components for Quicktime! (Thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft for the link)
Found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.
And for my birthday I got a Manfrotto 681 monopod from Jutta :-)
Freezing rain causes traffic chaos in the north - well, Jutta's relatives were affected too, no trains ran back to Hamburg yesterday evening. So "robber's camp" in the apartment. And this morning to catch the first train to the station. And the poor little mite (Catleya, 2 1/4 years old) had to be torn from sleep after only 5 hours. Whining and sadness for the little soul. Oh well, Christmas is exciting. By the way, it's my birthday today, but that's pretty much lost in all the chaos
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Jacob Nielsen's Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design 2002 is something every web designer should read. Many of the points are absolutely correct. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules, but the way the web constantly makes the exception the rule is definitely the wrong approach. Designers should think again about why a website is created in the first place and keep the primary purpose of the website in mind - many "design pieces" are simply just design-technical masturbation.
Hmm. If all goes well, I'll soon have a 50/1.4 lens to match for the RTS III :-)
Gretag before insolvency? - oh no, that doesn't look good. I'm glad I decided on the Color Spyder, Gretag's product could now face some difficulties in the long term. It's a shame anyway, their calibration systems have a good reputation.
Ex-Federal Minister Krause must go to prison - and another one from the dark corners of the Union? Or just a lone offender? But there are suspiciously many lone offenders in that bunch ...
Found at tagesschau on the Internet.