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.
flickrfs - funny FUSE filesystem in Python, which makes Flickr directly accessible via the file system. Might even run on the Mac, there is FUSE too. Might be worth taking a look.
Google is just playing - "«He just wants to play» dog owners often say when their animal obsessively runs towards a stranger, harasses, barks at, jumps on them, and generally restricts their freedom in a highly intrusive manner." - google, the Doberman Pinscher of the Internet.
goosh.org - the unofficial google shell. - nice hack. A shell interface in the web browser for google.
RetroShare: a secure combined file sharing-Chat-IM F2F service - sounds interesting in concept, would be fun to play around with it. Surveillance by the music industry currently carried out in other networks is of course circumvented - or at least massively hindered - via closed P2P networks, since you can explicitly define trust in partners (like in the PGP Web-of-Trust).
RWE to offer customers a pure nuclear power tariff - the power tariff for mental off-road drivers? Or just one of the dumbest PR actions of the year?
Employers threaten lawsuit against wage supplements - I usually leave blogging for the weekend, but that stupid dog from the employers' association is really barking the last nonsense. Yeah, sure, let's best leave the support for Hartz IV recipients and blow all the money up the ass of the fat cats. I hope the nonsensical lawsuit happens and Karlsruhe shows the parasite its place in society ...
Conway's Game of Life in one line of APL - scary. Very scary.
no-racism.net: Press release by the Legal Aid on the wave of repression - "Against twelve people, for whom house searches have taken place, there are arrest warrants. These are justified by the danger of obscuring, as the affected persons have communicated with encrypted emails, as well as the danger of committing the offense, because the affected persons have been active in the animal rights scene for a long time." - currently only in Austria, but we can well imagine when this will also happen in Germany.
Revision3 DOS - "First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the server to track hashes only – to improve performance and stability. That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit." - ein Handlanger der Musik und Filmindustrie legt einen legalen Betreiber eines Torrent-Trackers lahm. Da sieht man schön, mit welchen dreckigen Methoden (z.B. Diensteerschleichung) diese Leute arbeiten. Aus dem Nebensatz "das FBI interessiert sich dafür" entnehme ich mal, dass Anzeige erstattet wurde. Gut.
Best. Image. Ever. - Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.
Cocoa Text System - everything you want to know about the text system configuration under OS X (or don't want to know, but can still read about it)
TP: Victims on the Altar of Uniformity - "By November 1, 2009, all member states were supposed to have fully implemented the 'Directive on Payment Services.' At this point, SEPA direct debits were supposed to become 'binding' across Europe. This transition is problematic, among other things, because banks in Germany have so far refused to set up debit limits. Thus, anyone can debit an arbitrary amount from a current account without presenting a direct debit authorization. Similarly, there is no right for the consumer to limit the amount of direct debits. And neither the EU nor the federal government is currently considering limiting potential SEPA damage by introducing such rights. The consumer can only counter this risk by keeping as little money as possible in the current account and having all overdraft options definitively blocked." - we will be mocked and robbed with this. And why do we still pay the banks money when they anyway shirk responsibility at every corner and end?
Amazon byteflow: Hgshelve - pickled Python data in persistent hashes (shelves, that is), which are versioned with Mercurial. Brilliant stuff.
Yhc/Erlang/Proof of concept - interesting project that translates Haskell to Erlang bytecode (BEAM) and thus enables mixing of Haskell and Erlang code.
Final farewell to voting computers in the Netherlands - Golem.de - "The Dutch Ministry of the Interior announced the final farewell to voting computers on Friday. In the future, citizens in the country will once again cast their votes with pen and paper. The Dutch Council of Ministers was prompted to make this decision after massive security vulnerabilities in the voting computers were proven last year. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) demonstrated in mid-2007 how the ROM memory of a Nedap computer can be replaced with a manipulated ROM within 60 seconds. Researchers and the civil rights initiative "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting computers") had demonstrated further security vulnerabilities." - wouldn't it be great if our politicians would react similarly? However, this is less likely to be expected.
Recently acquired and purchased - my new bike. At the moment I'm still quite wobbly and unsure on it - it definitely handles differently than my old long recumbent (which was a replica of a Radius Peer Gynt). Let's see when I feel safe enough to commute to work with it. Anyway, today on a test ride I still had several mishaps, which wouldn't be such a great idea on narrow bike paths during rush hour among all the other cyclists ...
Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi - "Nicholas' new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn't work. But hey, I guess they'll sell more laptops that way." - about the alleged downfall of OLPC. A good idea, but apparently a poor implementation in key areas such as deployment and actual use as an educational tool.
Consequences of the SSH/SSL weakness - clear words about the impact of the bug. Only 32767 different keys were generated for the machines during the time the defective OpenSSL version was in use (at least since spring 2007, if you were on stable). Ouch.
Debian OpenSSL Predictable PRNG Toys - and here are the matching toys to play with the hole. Generating the 32767 keys for various key architectures.
Questionable Risk Assessment: Is Genetically Modified Feed Dangerous? - "So everything is fine with green genetic engineering? Not at all. Because the safety tests of genetically modified plants are paid for by the very companies that want to make money with genetically modified plants. Is objective risk assessment possible in this way? A rascal who thinks evil of it ..." (it's old and possibly I already had it, but because I just searched for it ...)
Getting Started with Processing.js - what the title says.
Google Doctype - References to all the things that make up Web 2.0 today (HTML, CSS, JS)
Nudibranchs - no, not that kind of nude photos you perverts. Sea slugs. Colorful.
processing.appjet.net - and this basically gives you the typical Processing interface - only in HTML and in the web browser, with Processing.js. Ideal for experimenting.
Some Chrome For Pjs - why the lucky stiff provides a suitable desktop application for Processing.js
The Bla Page - when a language designer can't think of anything for the language's name ...
Debian and OpenSSL: The Aftermath - for anyone who has doubts whether they need to recreate their keys: "However, rather than fix the calls to RAND_add(), the Debian maintainer instead removed the code that added the buffer handed to ssleay rand add() to the pool. This meant that the pool ended up with essentially no entropy. Clearly this was a very bad idea." - yes, "essentially no entropy" when generating keys is a really bad idea. Ouch.
Panorama freedom in danger - great, now they're making photography completely impossible by requiring every little thing to be registered with permission in triplicate and checked with the big boss first. What nonsense? Public space is public space, even if there's some alleged art crap standing around. With the cultural understanding of our prolethicians (who are usually responsible for the "beautification" of public space), these things are mostly just disruptive to photography anyway... (yes, I saw the note about "commercial use" - but since commercial intent is often attributed to blogs, photo bloggers quickly find themselves in a gray area)
Vendors Are Bad For Security - about the "bugfix" in Debian that has made all generated OpenSSL keys more or less unusable since 2006. Thanks for the extra work, you idiots. Funny also the comments in which the OpenSSL developer gets his own rant stuffed back down his throat because the OpenSSL idiots did not deem it necessary to deal with the fix suggested by the Debian developers (except for one who actually signaled thumbs-up). Well. All software sucks.
Wallraff exposes malpractices in bread factory - how to make a lot of noise with small bread rolls ...
Kamelia - a Python framework for, hmm, things. Whatever. Apparently also web applications. And apparently by the BBC. And looks damn interesting.
US officer wants deterrence in cyberspace - cute, these military types, strutting around and talking nonsense.