libdispatch - fast interesting I find the Dispatch Library, but even more interesting are the blocks sources released simultaneously for C (basically something like closures in real programming languages).
Archive 2.8.2009 - 11.9.2009
FriendFeed's Real-Time Web Framework for Python - actually Facebook's. It's impressively powerful. Could be useful at some point.
Hurtigruten 2009 with the MS Lofoten once again - as promised, here is the better album with larger pictures and without Flash. These are the same pictures as on the other link.
Atomkraft- Beweise für Manipulation in Sachen Gorleben? - yeah, yeah, but of course everything is fine in Gorleben and there is no danger and anyway, why are we all getting so worked up. It's just all corrupt and embellished and lied about. Business as usual.
Car engines to serve as "home power plants" - ok, still fossil fuel, but at least an efficient use of it. As a concept certainly interesting, albeit not entirely without problems.
billy's band-ICM - because I just stumbled upon it and you can never have enough Billy's Band. Click, listen, and be happy.
Hurtigruten 2009 with the MS Lofoten - a small Flash gallery of pictures I took during the trip. Only small image sizes, because it already took hours to upload to MobileMe. MobileMe sucks. I'll probably finish another gallery and put it somewhere else (likely Dropbox again, it's somehow much nicer), also without Flash (that was just a test of the Lightroom gallery stuff) and with larger pictures.
Leica M9 Hands-on Preview: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - well, it does have the full-frame sensor to itself and still has an acceptable size. However, I'm not so sure anymore that full-frame sensors are really the ultimate solution. I mean, realistically speaking: the 35mm format that we so highly praise today was just an emergency format at its inception, not really comparable to the more common roll film and large format cameras of the time. So what is really "full-frame"? Just because Oskar Barnack halved a 70mm film and used it for his compact camera? And whether I would buy a manual focus camera today is rather doubtful - which has less to do with the quality of an M (I have always preferred the split-rangefinder - I still have my M6), but more to do with the performance of my eyes (which are definitely more affected by quality loss over time than my cameras).
Leica X1 and brief hands-on - well, the look is good, but whether this "quick through many automatic functions" really means quick in the sense of an M or just sluggish in the sense of an M8, that remains to be seen. And without sample images, you can't say anything, because after all, it's about the images that come out at the end. A price is not yet revealed, which would probably have a deterrent effect. Let's see what comes in January.
Pressflow makes Drupal scale - hmm, a fork of Drupal with a special focus on scalability. Unfortunately, there is a restriction to MySQL - I would have preferred PostgreSQL. But the approach of building a fork with a special focus on scalability is commendable. Although Drupal itself could also achieve this (and aims to do so from version 7 onwards).
Varnish - had I already heard of that? No idea, doesn't matter, sounds very interesting. A reverse proxy with powerful configuration and edge side includes (with which you can mix things at the proxy level). This could be very interesting at work - we mostly use non-caching Apache for such purposes, varnish could solve a lot for which we always have to build wild mod perl or mod python hacks or dive into Apache configuration orgies.
Mythryl - interesting fork of SML/NJ for practical use under Linux 32bit.
Foldy - bicycling.com - simply great. Should I get a folding bike?
Leaked! Leica M9 - Leica is going digital again, a bit. The rumored specs sound good, but the M8 didn't have the problem of the cropped sensor, but the problem of the sensor in general, and the slow handling (startup times of 2 seconds on an M-Leica? Hello? Really?). Oh, and the problem of the purchase resistance of 4500 Euros ... (the X1 sounds like it might be something, but the price will surely be unrealistically high there as well). Sorry, Leica, too late. I think, with the Panasonic Micro-4/3 I have much more fun for much less money. And that they can do it, the GH1 has proven to me in Norway deployment.
Google App Engine Blog: App Engine SDK 1.2.5 released for Python and Java, now with XMPP support - that's interesting, XMPP in App Engine. With that, you should be able to build a lot of nice tools. Gradually, the external connectivity of AppEngine is becoming quite usable.
Phone Amego Help - an interesting little tool that allows you to make and answer/reject phone calls on your mobile via Bluetooth on your computer. Okay, I belong to the "nobody calls me" class of iPhone users (I hardly use it for anything other than the internet), so it's probably not very interesting for me.
Post cuts 560 jobs due to Arcandor insolvency - this clearly shows that something is seriously wrong in our economic world. Companies and CEOs claim entrepreneurial risk for themselves - but in reality, it is now 100% borne by the employees. A large company like the Post loses a major customer and immediately jobs are cut as a result. Instead of finding new deployment opportunities and new customers for the Post, the risk of contract negotiations between Arcandor and Post is shifted onto the employees. However, they do not receive a single cent more on their paycheck for the risk they bear. What exactly do people like ex-Post CEO Zumwinkel use to justify their high salaries? This certainly has nothing to do with a social market economy.
Booting Windows XP From An External Drive - oh man, this is really crap what Windows offers. I would like to move the 20G partition for Bootcamp to an external drive since I hardly ever use XP anyway. But it's almost easier to give the MBP a larger drive than to jump through these silly hoops to get XP on a USB drive ...
Panasonic DMC-GF1 Hands on Preview - "we got our hands on what Panasonic hopes will be the camera to convince those put off by the limitations of the Olympus E-P1." - if this is really it, it would be a hit. Because the E-P1 was already close, just too slow. And the AF was too bad. And the fact that there should be an optional EVF is good - I still find cameras best at the eye.
Panasonic Leica 45mm F2.8 Macro lens with OIS - okay, that sounds like it should eventually end up in my camera bag! A really cute macro lens would be something nice on the GH1.
Panasonic unveils DMC-GF1 Micro four-thirds camera - and my bet on buying the GH1 seems to be paying off. This could be the perfect second body, with the 20mm pancake for in the jacket pocket. I think I'll have a Canon setup to sell sometime next year ...
Set newer portable Macs' sleep mode - because I've looked it up again and again. My MBP strangely doesn't go into Deep Sleep, as far as I can tell - when the battery is empty, the RAM is gone, even though I'm in Mode 3. Hmm. I could just as well switch to Mode 0, delete the Sleep Image, and use the 2 GB for something else ...
The Dropbox Blog - iPhone Sneak Peek! - the best (ok, I think it's the best) online storage is getting even better with an upcoming iPhone app that allows you to quickly and easily access your data (and keep favorites for offline use). Exactly what I need, as I now use Dropbox constantly for all kinds of data transfers between computers.
RFC1437 on the Road: Archive - back in the country and the link has a few pictures from Norway (everything between August 19 and August 30 inclusive)
MS Lofoten - I will be on the ship from August 19 to 31 off the Norwegian coast. No updates. No internet (well, only emergency internet with extremely expensive mobile data roaming). In return, plenty of scenery and such.
"Arctic Sea" spotted off the coast of the Cape Verde Islands - the whole story is getting more and more confusing. There's definitely a movie in this!
django-jython - because I might be able to use it for a company project.
Python Library for Google Sets - I have no idea what I would want to do with it, but somehow it's cool.
Apple brings MacBook Pro 15" with matte display - oh, they must have accidentally found one of their usability experts in the basement again?
Artangel | SEIZURE - blue. Lots of it.
Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB - interesting comparison between two of the more well-known document-oriented databases.
Chief of the Chancellor's Office demands "traffic rules on the Internet" - given the ongoing cease and desist madness on the Internet and the censorship efforts that have been going on for years (yes, not just since Zensursula, this has been happening in NRW for much longer), it is really hard for me to understand how the prolethicians in Berlin can still seriously claim that the Internet is "free" or even a "lawless space".
Braunschweiger Flashmob becomes a political issue - what kind of flashmob? It wasn't one even when no one knew - flashmobs with a notice period of several days? What? Has anyone ever thought about why the part "flash" is in the word flashmob? Do lightning strikes now announce themselves a week in advance and apply for the right to strike?
taz cancels Athletics World Championships - the modern German triathlon: surveillance, data collection, blocking.
WAZ welcomes Springer's push for paid content - well, if all the trash papers disappear behind the paywall, the internet will at least be a bit cleaner.
Zypries: Web blocks cannot be activated on a contractual basis - political summer theater. As if Zypries had any problems trampling our fundamental rights. The fact that the populism show was started by the Union without any value at all does not suit her.
Panasonic GF1 is leaked - new compact Micro Four Thirds camera - 1001 Noisy Cameras - yes, that sounds already pretty good. Let's see when details come out and how it performs in the test - if Panasonic transfers the experiences and techniques from the GH1/G1 there, it will be very interesting.
iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple - "The list of omitted words includes some which have utterly non-objectionable senses: ass, snatch, pussy, cock, and even screw. (Ass and cock appear throughout the King James Bible.)" - according to Apple, there can be no male chickens and screws are also evil. And donkeys too (yes, "ass" is a word for donkey). Because, dictionaries with bad words have to be censored and put under the 17+ rating! Where would we end up if children actually used dictionaries! Unthinkable! Somehow, Apple is increasingly showing itself to be completely incapable of running something like the App Store. They want to force you to buy another phone instead of the iPhone.
gitit - actually a quite simple idea: a wiki that is based directly on a version control system and works only with text formats. By using Git or Darcs, distributed collaboration on a shared wiki becomes possible. Or staging of content. Or many other things that only become possible through real version control.
Human Dominos - interesting project, human photo dominoes. I am one of them!
MongoDB - keep an eye on this one, of the NoSQL databases this is one of the more interesting.
NoSQL: If Only It Was That Easy - interesting overview of existing NoSQL storages from the perspective of scaling.
PawelPacana/MercurialBackend/Configuration - MoinMoin - and apparently there is a Mercurial backend for MoinMoin, which makes sense as both are written in Python. That would be interesting, MoinMoin is already quite interesting on its own and Mercurial is my favorite version control software.
up and running with cassandra - and an article about a second quite interesting NoSQL database. In this case, particularly interesting is the high and simple scalability.
ADC—Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby - nice little tutorial for the new Ruby version from Apple.
FRANK BUCHWALD Maschinenleuchten - beautiful lamps. Unfortunately, there are no prices on them (or fortunately - I would probably fall off my chair ...)
Human Powered Monorail Racetrack - crazy
MacRuby » Home - hadn't I seen that before? Never mind. Ruby implementation based on the Objective-C runtime. It already looks very good (see also the previous tutorial) and it's definitely more fun than Objective-C.
Von der Leyen wants to tackle right-wing content on the net - nonsense from Berlin. The opponents of the ineffective Trivial Blockade have indeed recipes against child pornography on the internet, as Alwar Freude has proven with his "Now let's write to the providers and take sites offline". But concrete activities are not compatible with the populism program of a learning-resistant incompetence (some call it also Federal Minister).