Evolved Virtual Creatures - fascinating. Virtual creatures optimized through genetic algorithms.
Archive 23.4.2007 - 9.5.2007
Lambda Associates Home Page - Qi, a functional language based on Common Lisp. Freely available and runnable on various Lisp implementations.
Linuxtag with patron Wolfgang Schäuble - "As emphasized on the conference organization's website, the patronage by the Federal Ministry of the Interior is a tradition that has been maintained by the Linuxtag for five years. No political evaluation is associated with the patronage." - Sorry, but wouldn't it be time to break with tradition? First the Iron Otto and now Schäuble? Do you want such a patronage? What is the point of a patronage that one explicitly distances oneself from?
Philip Linden's Folly - about the current efforts of Linden Labs to equip Second Life with an ID verification system. Interesting for German citizens in SL: this service provider collects heaps of data pools, links these to obtain as complete views as possible and makes evaluations, data sales, verifications, etc. which is of course nonsense in the context of age verification: simply enter your father's data and that's it. As a security level, complete nonsense. Piquant: their partner in Great Britain is the GB Group with the product URU, which also offers these services and is subject to EU data protection rules - I can't imagine that it is still legal in this context. And that data is also collected from non-British and non-American citizens directly affects our data protection rules. It would be interesting to see how many Europeans and especially Germans are willing to send their passport number to an American service provider to gain extended access to a virtual world. I fear far too many ...
Reset Reloaded - an interesting approach to the CSS default differences of various browsers: simply reset everything cleanly, so that stylesheets can start on a common basis.
US civil rights activists accuse Uri Geller of copyright infringement - because, the spoon bending didn't work out.
Basso admits doping - clear, ok, finally taken the right path. Come clean. But why is he being cheered now? It doesn't change the fact that he doped and lied for a damn long time because he thought he would get away with it. Only when the water is up to his neck, and he is offered a reduced sentence, is he suddenly remorseful. The right way? Yes. Cheering for courage? Ridiculous.
Schäuble: Germany is "one of the safest countries in the world" - that's why we absolutely need to tighten the laws. What nonsense politicians come up with. And how quickly voters forget that.
Schäuble and Zypries want to extend Paragraph 129 StGB to individual perpetrators - the state's rampage continues. And as expected, the Federal Incompetence (some call her Federal Minister of Justice) immediately caves under minimal pressure. Can we still hope for Karlsruhe then?
Online, Adidas and Gumball 3000 - illegal street races. Sponsored. By corporations.
Desktop Factory announces cheap 3D printer - let's see if this or maybe one of the various free Fabber projects comes first. But one thing is certain: since my enthusiasm for 3D construction in SL, I want to have something like this.
impromptu - a Scheme environment explicitly for using AudioUnits. Computer-generated music, with the help of heaps of parentheses.
JSONstore 0.2 - interesting, a mini database for JSON objects. Might be useful for projects with JavaScript on the client side, to give them a simple database.
Police rely on private service providers in hunt for child pornography - interesting, especially in light of Schäuble's demand for expanded surveillance. Then even more will be outsourced in the long run - but where will the security of citizens' privacy remain?
PyInstaller - interesting alternative to py2exe, which can create executable files for both Windows and Linux.
Chanalyzer Software and Wi-Spy Stick - Analyzer for the 2.4 GHz band. Free software available (from the Kismet people) and a beta for the Mac.
The Inventors of Helmut Kohl - Reading Command.
JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3 â„¢ - interesting approach: set up a local WebDAV server with local cache on S3. Data access like on local drives, but automatically saved to S3. Nice for online backups (if the DSL supports it - mine likes to go offline when I put too many packets on the line).
Rampant Layering Violation - why ZFS does not care about the classic filesystem layers, but takes over many functions itself.
Thursday: Biggest. Anti-Spam. Lawsuit. Ever. - $1 billion in damages claimed. Lawsuit against several spammers who have recently collected email addresses, which is a violation of laws in the USA. Could be interesting.
Transterpreter - compact runtime for a massively parallel runtime that runs on all kinds of systems. Even Lego Mindstorms. For OSX and Windows there is an IDE. Unfortunately, the OS X version cannot also load programs onto the Brick. The whole thing is programmed in Occam-Pi
ardour - check out what it can do and how it works.
ext3cow - versioning file system. Interesting approach for revision-proof data storage.
Frag - 3D First-Person-Shooter in Haskell. Go figure.
GLASS: Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Seaside and Smalltalk - Gemstone/S as a free version (free beer) and with Seaside a nice API set up to comfortably develop web applications in Smalltalk. Sounds good!
Haskell vs. Erlang in a sample project - detailed post about Haskell and Erlang in a project with quite specific requirements (binary protocol, a lot of threads). Interesting insights into the strengths of Erlang.
Manually Adding DNS-SD Service Discovery Records to an Existing Name Server - an interesting way to manually get server entries in Bonjour. Could be used, for example, for network-wide centrally maintained bookmarks on sites, or for the various Linux-bound services.
F-Script - new version of the Cocoa-Scripting language.
Caution is the mother of the porcelain box - "For not many, but for him, I put my hand close to the fire. His attitude is impeccable, since he has been with us," said Holczer.
fantasy mounts-Custom Creature Taxidermy-Gaffs - Roadkill, Frankenstein-Art.
Faster Page Loads With Image Concatenation - interesting idea, combine small images and show only sections via CSS. Dramatically reduces image requests.
Mark Jenkins: Street Installations - funny ideas.
AllegroGraph - interesting product, an RDF Triple Store. The whole thing is based on an elaborate Common Lisp system. And the platform is also available for OS X. If you are willing to pay the irrationally high prices of Franz Inc.
Earth 2.0: ESO researchers discover the most Earth-like exoplanet to date - 0-40 degrees temperature and possibly water-covered. People, start waving vigorously, if this is transmitted at the speed of light, the aliens will see it in 20 years.
Innenministerium: Online-Durchsuchungen längst Usus - because, of course, an official instruction is more important than the constitution.
Introducing Dashcode - comes with Leopard. Yummy. Building Dashboard applets in an IDE. I'm always up for such toys, simply because it's a way to playfully deal with programming - the more easy ways to applications there are, the better.
Israel's 'modesty buses' draw fire - Discrimination against women by a religious minority. And the argument may now escalate over a seat in a bus - hopefully with a similar outcome to the argument over a seat in the USA.
Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today - interessante JavaScript Patterns.
The Carina Nebula: Star Birth in the Extreme - Anniversary Image
Vendetta Online - digging through their news there and finding out that their server side is created in Lisp and Erlang. Originally Lisp, which is slowly being migrated to Erlang (due to Erlang's suitability for parallel and distributed systems). Cool. And there's a Mac OS X version of their game client too!
Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business - "There must be some sort of business model that enables this company to make money, but I'll be damned if I know what it is," Day said.
Fingerprints from passports should not be stored - it would be better not to take fingerprints at all. Especially since the actual benefit of fingerprints in passports is more than questionable if nobody uses this system anyway. Just a reminder: passports are used for identification abroad, and there nobody will be able to do anything with the stored data, due to lack of appropriate devices. So the only possible use is the check upon return to Germany.
JavaScriptTemplates - Templates directly in JavaScript. Could be interesting for web applications - no HTML generation on the server, but on the client. Reducing the server to the functional minimum.
major labels: the problem with music - how major labels screw over musicians.
tercio - webapp framework for Erlang with a focus on the specialties of Erlang/OTP.
The Deep - fascinating images.
The Side Effects of Truth - how the FDA wants to silence scientists within its own ranks when they want to ban a drug afterwards. In this case, the scientist who first warned about VIOXX.
The universe is a string-net liquid - about Herbertsmithite and noodle soups. Fascinating.
Delibar - interesting del.icio.us client that lives in the menu bar.