Ruins of Babylon irreparably damaged by Iraq War - "But those who visited Babylon after the country's liberation in 2003 report that it is almost impossible to distinguish what are ancient ruins - and what was destroyed by the coalition forces." - the result of the axis of stupidity. What are a few millennia of cultural assets when you can wage a war to distract from domestic political problems and to secure the economic interests of your donors ...
Archive 2.6.2008 - 26.6.2008
Ströbele leaves BND committee temporarily | tagesschau.de - "However, initially Ströbele followed Hanning's statements from the audience. The current Interior Secretary and former President of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) explained in detail that there was no reason to distrust the USA and its intelligence services." - örks. August can play chess, but otherwise I strongly doubt his competence. There are many reasons to distrust American intelligence services, which should have reached him by now.
The Floating Boxes CSS Layout - by the same author as the previous layouts. Also very interesting.
Surveillance mania in Berlin - "I have nothing to hide" is what many of those who fell into the surveillance mania might have said ... (I can't get 1100 urgent suspects together in Berlin - we don't even have that many members of parliament ...)
Unemployment benefits from 2012 only with chip card - Bureaucracy reduction, everything clear. And we are supposed to believe that? The "advantages" are just so far-fetched ...
Front Range Pythoneering: Flipping the 2.5 Bit for Jython - Jython is now at 2.5 level! And definitely a usable alternative, and a much more pleasant way to try out the many Java libraries.
White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail - as long as such behavior prevails in e.g. the USA, nothing will change. And unfortunately, it's not just in the USA, here too, some people define their freedom by the (lack of) speed limit on highways ...
Symbian to become Open Source - Reaction to Google Android and wider use of Linux in mobile devices?
Amazon EC2 Basics For Python Programmers - Tutorial on using EC2 with Python.
Retail theft - "The main reasons for this dilemma, according to retail, are the fact that with increasingly longer store opening hours and at the same time fewer and fewer staff, effective prevention is becoming increasingly difficult." - eh, hello? Turning retail stores into service deserts with (insufficiently trained) staff shortages was indeed the decision of the retail sector. Yes, if you lay off people, cut jobs and extend store opening hours, you don't exactly get something positive out of it. Welcome to reality ... (of course, the solution is already at hand with surveillance and store detectives - probably soon more store detectives than salespeople, which of course makes great sense ...)
Interview: "Öl-Spekulanten sind keine Preistreiber" - "The term 'speculator' is unfortunate. Financial investors enable us to see future expectations in today's prices. They show us that oil is becoming scarce. This way, we can already change our behavior today. Without such future expectations, we might only act from one day to the next." - sure, and burglars only show you weak points in your front door. And if you get shot, that only shows how toxic lead is. Because if we weren't regularly robbed, we might not even know that there are robbers out there. Or what? Who actually makes such talkers into "experts"? According to this windbag, should we now be grateful to the speculators who artificially inflate prices, or what?
More: Systems Programming with PLT Scheme - nice tutorial on how to build a webserver with PLT Scheme.
Nokia buys Plazes - maybe the Nokia 810 will become interesting after all. But Nokia is evil and I am a MacHead, so it will probably stay with the new iPhone ...
Olympus E-420 Review - hmm. Doesn't sound incredibly exciting. On the other hand, it wouldn't be a replacement for my 10D, but a replacement for a compact camera. And from that perspective, it could be interesting again - especially with the 25mm lens. But is the price still justified? Ok, good compact cameras aren't much cheaper and the image quality of 4/3 is still significantly better than that of compacts (especially with today's megapixel craze).
Olympus Zuiko Digital 25mm 1:2.8 Lens Review - örks. The results read much worse than with the camera. I don't know if a poorly corrected 25mm lens can really excite me. Ok, I would have tested it before buying it anyway.
Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition - available to read online.
Ravelry - a knit and crochet community - yep. Knitting and crocheting. As a community. Don't ask me why I find something like this (although, I can actually knit. But it was more of a reaction against all the knitting girls in school ...)
screamyGuy - Random Acts of Programming - interesting projects with Processing.
Telekom eavesdropped on alleged hackers - "According to the report, electronic surveillance of four telephone numbers in Hennef, Rhineland, began in December 1996 under the codename 'Bunny'. Conversation contents were also recorded. A total of nearly 120 calls were reportedly captured." - another reason why such fundamental infrastructure as telecommunications simply does not belong in private hands, as it can be controlled far too little. However, abuse cannot be ruled out even in state-owned companies or agencies, but at least there are rudimentary controls in place.
Aquamacs: Emacs for Mac OS X - now also supports tabs. Hmm. Maybe I should finally get off my ass and make the necessary adjustments and switch. The flexibility of Emacs is unparalleled and Aquamacs now has a really usable - and Mac-like! - interface. (Update: nah, nah, really not. In the moment I used vi to edit the .emacs file, I knew that all the Mac adjustments would be useless)
Old Google Mail domain banned in Germany - click and laugh to death. Absurdistan, thy name is Germany ...
classic investigation still better than mass tests - "However, it was not the mass test that led to the current arrest, but classic investigative work. As the Dresden Public Prosecutor's Office, the Saxon State Criminal Police Office and members of the Heller Investigative Group announced yesterday, Wednesday, investigators had visited the suspect on May 21, 2008, and asked him for a DNA sample because the man had lived near the crime scenes at the time of the crime and had driven a car with a partially recognized license plate."
The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web - steampunk web aus Belgiens 30er Jahre ...
Olympus LS-10 digital recorder - for future reference. Could be interesting (chasing sounds to then edit them and e.g. use them in SL)
Fan Programming Language - sounds quite interesting. And it runs on JVM or CLI. The language makes an interesting impression and a whole range of current concepts are integrated (especially the part about Concurrency sounds interesting).
PLT Scheme Blog - the new version is out now! And one of the nice new features: typed-scheme is integrated.
Squeak on the iPhone! - and Apple seems to agree. Wooot!
Alice.org - I don't know if I already had this, but it is a 3D environment with the goal of learning programming through the creation of interactive 3D objects. Looks quite nice.
AVOX Antares Vocal Toolkit - wow! That's exactly what I've been looking for - live-editing of voices (or batch in audio editing) with various effects. Ideal for my avatar work in SL, to give avatars suitable sounds. Specifically, Mutator and Articulator are interesting (the latter is perfect: it overlays the formative parts of the voice over other sounds and thus lets, for example, the wind speak).
Lunatic Python - bidirectional interface between Lua and Python.
90% of Enviro Skeptic Books Have Think Tank Roots - where do all these reality-denying books come from? Conservative think tanks in the US seem to have a big hand in it. And as the study so nicely puts it: "Thus, the notion that environmental skeptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of 'junk science' lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of skeptics as marginalized 'Davids' battling the powerful 'Goliath' of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as skeptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations."
Algorithmic Botany: Publications - "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" as download!
Cog Blog - fascinating blog of a programmer who is building a new Squeak Smalltalk VM, and writes about the problems of the Blue Book architecture and possible solutions - and he comes from VisualWorks VM development, so he should know what he's talking about. Very interesting to read and the result could also be interesting, as he predicts significant performance gains for his new VM.
Factor: a practical stack language: - why I love following Factor development: the programmers have no qualms about radically redesigning the language and making massive changes to semantics, even shying away from redesigning defining words. This of course makes the use of the language for real purposes a bit hairy, but it's simply thrilling to see how language constructs are juggled and the path to an optimal language is sought. And since they adjust the entire included library every time, the transition pains are not quite as great (and the included library is already absolutely impressive and currently has one of the best Unicode implementations I've seen so far)
Fractured YEARFRAC and Discounted DISC - interesting summary of the disaster called Excel and OOXML. The standard that is not one, because it is not standardized. But Microsoft presents it as a standard, so it fits perfectly into the times when no one knows how to spell "standard" correctly anymore ... (and anyone who does financial calculations with Excel deserves to be slapped and whipped)
TileStack - Your Creative Playground - HyperCard rebuild on the web. Compiles their HyperTalk dialect "Speak" to JavaScript. Interesting idea, could definitely make sense.
"An Exotic Matter" - funny variation on the topic "Singularity".
Anne against the political will - "Thus, the scandal surrounding Anne Will's show ultimately proves two political realities: The Left Party is continuing its successful course as a force of a bourgeois left. And the nerves of some representatives of former people's parties are on edge." - and beautifully shows the panic about the left in Germany.
Introducing Gmail Labs - Google keeps showing how to use the platform meaningfully. For example, now in GoogleMail with optionally activatable prerelease features. That's how I imagine it, with centrally operated software!
Government wants to hand over personal citizen data to the USA - "The Bundestag was not involved in the negotiations and was not informed, complain the Liberals. The federal government had not taken a position on the inquiry of the FDP in the interior committee and even denied the incident." - it's nice how we can rely on our government to betray and sell us, and completely ignore the Bundestag in the process. Especially piquant when it's about data that the federal government and its executing authorities shouldn't even have ...
Toy Scheme interpreter in J - looks like shell-script-meets-line-noise.
Future - nothing but a big fun | tagesschau.de - "Anyone who predicts the future for money or makes contact with the deceased must inform their customers beforehand that their services are 'solely for entertainment purposes and have not been experimentally proven so far'." - it would be good if this also applied to the various forecasting institutes!
ruby-processing - also interesting, a connection of the Processing Graphic API with JRuby. You can write your Processing sketches with Ruby.
The Lew Language - simple programming environments are spreading. First Processing (Java derivative), then Nodebox (Python), then Shoes (Ruby), then Processing.js (JavaScript) and now Lew (Lua). They all have in common that they offer a very simple, exploratory introduction to programming - basically what home computers with the integrated Basic offered back then, only now with decent programming languages.
PLT Scheme version 4.0 is Coming Soon - the best Scheme system in the world will soon have a new version with many new features and some background changes. Sounds very promising.
Cold plate by candlelight - "In the report of the Enquête Commission of the NRW state parliament on the effects of long-term sharply rising energy prices, the governing parties CDU and FDP recommend in their majority vote that low-income individuals should forgo heating in the winter: 'In the short term, tenants … can react by lowering the room temperature, by forgoing full heating of individual rooms, etc.' " - this is what our proletarians understand by social legislation.
Dive Into Greasemonkey - no idea if I already had it, but it was very helpful just now.
django-ae-utils - two interesting tools for Google AppEngine. One provides sessions based on the Google Store, the other a user management independent of Google Accounts.