'Stoned wallabies make crop circles' - and with this headline we're heading into the weekend.
Archive 27.4.2009 - 26.6.2009
Why are There 60 Minutes in an Hour? - the Sumerians and Babylonians and Egyptians are to blame!
Window damage on Atlantis threatens six month delay to STS-129 - this must be the deepest analysis of a loose screw I have ever seen ...
Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment - relevant for Django, because the developer Simon Willison is one of the Djangonauts and built the whole thing with Django. Great job!
Second edition of Practical Django Projects - because I will need it for the company as well. And it is based on Django 1.1!
Pharo Open Source Smalltalk - a project to make Squeak look a bit more professional. It looks good, and if they go beyond pure aesthetics (and e.g. build bridges to native libraries), this could become very interesting.
scala.xml - how to mangle XML with Scala (quite interesting, Scala can directly embed XML in the source)
Erik Naggum, 1965-2009 RIP - it's strange to read an obituary for a Usenet poster and be touched by it - even if you never met the person yourself, only occasionally exchanged emails or news postings with them, and often shook your head at a thread in which he was involved. He was always uncomfortable. Nevertheless (or perhaps precisely because of that), he often and strongly shaped comp.lang.lisp. And sometimes he provoked thought.
software - xml - s-exp vs XML - and since it fits so well, one of his master postings about markup languages and their comparison to lisp S-Exprs. "If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape."
Futurebox, lightbox without the JavaScript - I need to check this out, it could be quite fun in my blog. Even if, of course, various browsers without CSS3 support can't do anything with it. So what?
scalala - silly name, but interesting content: Matlab-like math library. In this area, a statically typed language offers advantages, as you won't accidentally put elephants into the orange press.
scouchdb - Scala interface to CouchDB (direct object persistence via JSON).
NIK Complete Collection - now fully compatible with Lightroom 2. I could finally take a closer look, some of the tools would be very interesting for me.
Subdomain-Patent null and void - one of the most ridiculous patents finally gone. This should never have been granted.
New investor saves SCO from liquidation - Zombies!
Olympus E-P1 'Digital Pen' Officially Announced - looks really nice. I'm looking forward to the first tests - and to see what the price will be in Germany.
Olympus E-P1 Hands-on Preview - at least a preview.
httplib2 - a much more complete implementation of an HTTP client in Python. Also supports modern features (i.e., the things that have been developed in the last 10 years ...)
Mal Sondock has passed away - this brings back memories. Wednesday evenings.
HATTLER - because I just heard him at the harbor festival. Brilliant sound. Definitely worth it, absolutely the main act of this year's harbor festival.
Kunst-Trifft-Kohl.de :: Sculptures in Allotments - Münster Kinderhaus Culture - if you're in Münster (until September), go and see it. I like such exhibition concepts - public space as exhibition space and integration of life and art. Much more fun than walking around in sterile museum halls.
European elections: Debacle for the SPD - to the SPD's fools: if you ever come up with the innovative idea of actually running a European election campaign for the European elections, you might accidentally get a few votes. But by now, one gets the feeling that you don't even want any votes. Scared of the possible responsibility? Okay, you don't really have much left to lose anyway ...
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation - I actually only know Peter Norvig as a Lisp hacker and Google search guru.
The speed, size and dependability of programming languages - a fascinating analysis of various programming languages based on statistical evaluations of their characteristics and metrics in a benchmark competition. So not a direct analysis of the benchmark and individual performance, but a much more meaningful analysis of the characteristics of the languages derived from the benchmarks.
AK deletes 60 child porn sites in 12 hours - and why can't our Ursula do that?
bobo v0.2 documentation - wow! Bobo is back!
Reading and Writing to Excel Spreadsheets in Python - if you ever have to interface with the devil's tools.
Roland Schulz: SSH ProxyCommand without netcat - very nice hack on how to get over ssh gateways without netcat and without intermediate stops.
The Online Photographer: Sigma DP2 Review - well, the DP-2 is not what I'm looking for either. Maybe that will be the upcoming Olympus.
iSqueak - and here is the development environment with which you can program the iPhone in Smalltalk.
Mobile Wiki Server - cool thing, a Wiki server created in Seaside and Squeak (Smalltalk) that runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch and allows, for example, local editing or remote editing from the desktop. I doubt that a web server on the iPhone really makes much sense, but it's always funny.
Geeking out with Lisp Flavoured Erlang - I really need to finally deal with Lisp Flavoured Erlang.
Nanojit - compact library for native code generation. Used in Tamarin and SpiderMonkey.
pickled-object-database - a simple small object database based on the Pickle API and SQLite. Looks quite interesting, reminds me quite a bit of Wood, a similar object database for Common Lisp.
Whither Eucalyptus? - Apple continues to mess around with the AppStore. Now they are refusing to approve an eBook application because you can (if you explicitly search for it and actively download it) read the Kama Sutra with it. How stupid is that? Shouldn't they maybe give the reviewer, who seems to be so compulsively fixated on the Kama Sutra, a round with the house psychiatrist?
Lamson: Lamson The Python SMTP Server - interesting project, especially if you plan to build on email as an interface.
Gluster - interesting cluster filesystem under free license.
Nimrod Programming Language - interesting Python variant with explicit support for parse trees (and thus macro capabilities at the level of Lisp) but native code compilation.
SCO should be liquidated - will we actually not get any more silly SCO vs. Linux stories in the foreseeable future? Amazing!
Animeeple Software - Animation software with animation market and seemingly good support for Second Life.
Federal incompetence and wobbly dachshund - "In view of the 'numerous violations of intellectual property on the Internet', the minister also wondered whether, for example, stronger regulation of the network is necessary. This will certainly 'occupy politics for the next few years', what will follow from the planned blocks of child pornographic pages 'will follow', she did not completely rule out an expansion to illegal offers of protected works" - oh, first she warned about the evil Zensursula, and now she is already tipping over in exactly the direction she warned about. What was that about the desires that are awakened? They seem to have been awakened in her. As could generally be expected from the prolethicians in Berlin.
Search of forum operator's home unlawful - "The mere fact that third parties may offer links to pirated copies in an internet forum does not yet justify a search of the operator of this forum." - says the Federal Constitutional Court. Which is also logical, forums are usually not operated from home computers, but from servers. But apparently some of the overzealous "law enforcers" still don't understand this ... (and again, why does the Federal Constitutional Court constantly have to protect us from things that should be clear to any half-witted person?)
MonoDevelop on MacOS X - is though Microsoft junk, and the executable programs are called .exe, but at least there are a few interesting programming languages under Mono that you can now also meaningfully try out under OS X.
Murdoch will behind the paywall - well, that's okay, then his trash will be read less. But his whining, "the times of the current Internet are soon over" is really cute. Of course it is - as the term "current" already says. But does the fool really believe that the future Internet will actually develop into his backward understanding of the world?
Packet Garden - a nice graphical toy that generates virtual landscapes from network traffic data. And there's also the Python source code, so you can learn about network programming and Python at the same time.
Hg-Git Mercurial Plugin - interesting for various reasons, not least the fact that Mercurial runs significantly better on Windows than Git.
New Survey Suggests Modern Humans Originated in Southwest Africa - "Dr. Tishkoff’s team has also calculated the exit point from which a small human group — maybe a single tribal band of 150 people — left Africa some 50,000 years ago and populated the rest of the world. The region is near the midpoint of the African coast of the Red Sea."
Axiotron Modbook - does anyone have 2000 EUR to spare for me? This thing could be pretty awesome with something like Blender for casual sculpting sessions in the comfy chair.
Is blender really equal to the competition? - good high-level comparison (so nothing for feature counters) based on the author's personal experiences.