Deutsche Bahn raises ticket prices by 3.9 percent - particularly cute the "service surcharge": anyone stupid enough to join the 5 km long queue in front of the only one of 10 open counters at the station, after 2 hours of waiting behind a stinking fellow human with flatulence finally gets a bad-tempered railway employee, whom he then has to explain laboriously where he wants to go - and then gets the most expensive fare selected in a targeted manner, well, now he has to pay a service surcharge for this preferential treatment. So that the railway can be dumped on the stock exchange.
Archive 16.7.2008 - 29.8.2008
Dealing with Resident Registration Data: The Shadow Registration Offices - how was that, Mr. Schäuble? "The data is safe in the hands of the state"? And of course, anyone who thinks differently is just a paranoid?
Aus für Gerolsteiner - too bad, it was one of the more interesting teams and the way Holczer ran the show made this racing stable very likable.
Canon EOS 50D - if this comes out now, the 40D should soon be sold off. I should pay more attention, because the 40D would be a great upgrade for my rather old 10D ...
Gears for Safari - it's about time. Hopefully it will also appear in Fluid soon - because that would actually be the most exciting (to turn web applications into classic offline applications).
Redhat perl. What a tragedy. - those who use Redhat: compile Perl yourself. Redhat seems to have a really big problem here.
Annals of the Patently Absurd - Microsoft gets a patent on PageUp and PageDown? And someone still claims that software patents have any justification other than amusement and funding for patent lawyers?
Factor: a practical stack language: New optimizer - very interesting description of the new optimizer in Factor. An advantage of the language: the main programmer documents very well in blog posts how he works on the system and what motivation is behind the changes. Always exciting to read. And the language is just nice.
Google: "No Trespassing" signs won't stop Street View - anyone who still believes that all these "social networks" have anything to do with social or nice can read the arrogant comments from Google in that article. "There is no complete privacy" - and that is immediately interpreted as "ignore no entry".
Jennifer Daniel Dot Com Was Taken - hmm. Strange. But somehow interesting.
Rabbiter - interesting project based on RabbitMQ that could provide the basis for Twitter services. Everything in Erlang and massively designed for scalability.
Techdirt: Diebold/Premier Actually Admits Its Machines Are Faulty! And That It Lied About Antivirus Software... - and this will surely be ignored here in Germany. Or will someone finally wake up?
The Transterpreter - haven't had a Lego link in a while. Transterpreter provides an Occam environment that can run on a Lego RCX brick.
Index of /namespace/OmniOutliner - DTDs for the OmniOutliner XML format.
Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store has launched - normal block devices for Amazon EC2.
Free Critical Mass Modula-3 (CM3) - actively supported Modula-3.
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: Bad TV - good discussion (i.e. refutation) of the moon landing was fake spinners.
CPU Rings, Privilege, and Protection - good overview article.
Drinking fruit juice 'may stop medication working' - hmm, Mizolastin is not listed there, but the pharmacy already gave me information about grapefruit juice. Somehow silly, maybe I should drink my usual morning orange juice in the evening from now on ...
The Associated Press: States throw out costly electronic voting machines - only here do we still believe the manufacturers' lies more than the experts. There are no unhackable computers. As already in XKCD: "anti-virus programs on voting machines? You are doing it wrong."
The Great Consumer Crash of 2009 - ouch. This reads like a script for a horror movie. And since we in Germany are usually a few years behind the U.S. in all stupid ideas, something similar will certainly hit us here as well (and some of the developments described there can also be observed here - such as living off the credit line).
BeagleBoard.org - nice small ARM-based computer with quite impressive performance. Could almost tempt me to play around with it.
Everything You Need to Know About USB 3.0, Plus First Spliced Cable Photos - 10x faster and therefore 9x more power - and then the laptop is 20x faster all ...
tunnelblick - graphical OpenVPN client for OS X with all necessary binaries and tools. Could be really useful for me.
We're running out of IPv4 addresses. Time for IPv6. Really. - oops. it's getting tight now.
Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes - loads of practical scripts for iTunes.
Django on Jython: It's here! - awesome! This makes Java as a platform more interesting to me again - the progress in Jython in the last few months has been gigantic.
Advertising and Privacy – Google Privacy Center - important link, opt-out from the Doubleclick cookie mess. No idea if it's realistic, or just fake - but if the latter, that will surely come out sooner or later.
Edge Cases are the Root of all Evil - how edge cases are used in arguments to kill ideas. Interesting perspective - and have already often observed this in IT discussions.
Network Advertising Initiative - and a whole list of opt-outs for other ad networks.
Pentagon will apparently ignore Guantanamo acquittals - do we need more evidence that the USA has long left the rule of law behind? When will politics in Europe finally wake up and seriously stand up against this madness? If another state - for example, China - did something like this to opponents, the USA would be the first to shout "violation of international law." Of course, now all the US sycophants can scream "anti-Americanism" again - but seriously, can one still be pro-USA when observing this madness?
Cabinet decision: High penalties for illegal telephone advertising - will Unitymedia be impressed? They make unauthorized calls, they also suppress caller IDs. All signs are there.
No broadcasting fee for PC in law firm - "Moreover, the fundamental right to freedom of information ensures that one can inform oneself unhindered from generally accessible sources. The introduction of a broadcasting fee for an internet PC would create a state access barrier that has nothing to do with the information sources and contradicts the principle of proportionality." - whether the judgment can be upheld? After all, the general possibility of reception is the sole decisive criterion according to the argument of the GEZ. (by the way, I pay broadcasting fees for my Mac - but there is also a DVB-T receiver in it, which is even used once a year for the Tour de France)
Federal Audit Office criticizes work of job centers - and surprisingly finds exactly what everyone with common sense has already said: that 1-euro jobs bring nothing and that reorganizing from poor counseling at the employment office does not automatically make for good counseling at the job center ... but will our politicians learn from this? No, certainly not.
Here We Go Again: Yahoo! Music Throws Away the DRM Keys - one would think that Yahoo should have paid more attention than Microsoft when they tried the same stunt (Microsoft has meanwhile extended this a bit, which doesn't really improve the situation). Yahoo is increasingly presenting itself as the fools of the Internet. And music buyers will hopefully finally wake up and understand what DRM actually means - withdrawal of the rights to dispose of purchased goods.
The Death of Google's Patents? - "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc." - Only in the Banana Republic do the paid prolethicians still clamor for the introduction of software patents, because we just need them. And how does their argument "we need them, otherwise we look stupid compared to the USA" look now that the US Patent Office itself says: "Software patents are a mess"?
Erlang GS Explorations - Organized by Doug Edmunds - interesting collection of graphics functions from Erlang.
Drivers in the EPO trap - "After an agreement between the World Anti-Doping Agency WADA and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, this molecule was incorporated into the third generation of the blood doping agent Erythropoietin (EPO), which can be detected in doping controls." - smart!
Method and apparatus for creation and maintenance of database structure - a patent. On lists. In a database. From 2005. And now someone explain to me where the great innovation lies, and why we so desperately need software patents. Don't we already have enough trolls under the bridges, do we also need this shit? (and yes, the company that has this great patent is now suing web companies that store lists for users in databases)
Methods for tying knots in ropes - because I thought, just search for "tie your shoelaces". No shoelaces found right away, but a patent for knots. In ropes. So there are also crazy patents outside of software ...
Objective Caml Plugin for Xcode - unfortunately not yet with support for Intel CPUs.
Tetris - in sed ... (I can't think of anything else to say)
Park Place - A recreation of the Amazon S3 API, but hosted on your own machine. In Ruby. Perhaps not entirely uninteresting after the recent 7-hour outage - for example, you could run a mirror of the data at Amazon on your own box and, in the event of longer outages, switch to your own copy within your own software to at least remain rudimentarily functional during S3 outages. Or even build your own server structure based on this and turn your back on S3.
Wikipedia Webservice - Convert Geo-Coordinates to Wikipedia Articles. Hmm, that would be a nice DIY project, search for Wikipedia at the local point on the iPhone and display it. I've already done some DIY projects on the iPhone.
Cyclists face infertility and impotence - I knew it all along, it's a good idea to ride a recumbent bike!
Bushido wins in court against three retirees - it would actually be quite nice if the courts could agree on something for once. Because this is just getting ridiculous. Quite apart from that: who actually wants this acoustic noise pollution?
"That's pressure tactics" - I've also had contact with the cold acquisition of Unity Media (or call centers commissioned by them - I don't care who spouts the nonsense, one pays the other for the "performance"). Particularly amusing: I never had a contract with them (but presumably my landlord - but he can't agree to advertising calls on my behalf), the caller claimed the opposite, of course, quite brazenly. And after my instruction that their action is illegal, as I never had a contract with them and therefore could never agree to telephone advertising, she simply hung up. They are, after all, extremely "serious" companies ...