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.
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.
ETOS Compiler - compiles Erlang source to Scheme (Gambit-C).
Greg Haerr's Nano-X Window System Page (previously Microwindows) - minimal windowing system for small hardware. APIs based on X and Win32 (two APIs).
Does anyone have an idea how to prioritize the use of internet connections on the Mac? I don't mean the cable connections that can be edited under network control in the system settings. I mean the modem connections. I have registered my phone for Bluetooth and for USB use. In addition, I have a USB UMTS modem. Now the modem status with the menu still shows the first UMTS connection via Bluetooth as the default. I always have to switch the connection to the modem first and then connect. That's annoying. You should be able to change what it uses as the default dial-up connection ...
Last night's performance of INVINCIBLE SUMMER was disrupted when eighty seven members of a Christian group walked out of the show en masse, and chose to physically attack my work by pouring water on and destroying the original of the show outline.
QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks - Collection of information about browser differences and ways to circumvent them.
Spoon - interesting approach: to create a system based on Squeak with a minimal object system and dynamic loading of additional classes/objects/methods on demand.
TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac - could be quite interesting, a book about TextMate.
the messing link - home of a delicious widget - and another del.icio.us client that lives in the Dashboard and displays a tag cloud.
xmonad 0.1 - X11 window manager written in Haskell with an interesting approach to automatic window layout. Windows do not overlap.
Free Smalltalk Books - as PDFs
Union will den "Schäuble-Katalog" in allen Punkten durchsetzen - allegedly to adjust the legal situation to the threat situation. However, the threat situation has not changed at all, why does something need to be adjusted?
UseTheSource / Published Code Snippets - social source snippet site.
Vista Smalltalk Wiki - I had already seen this before, but there's a reason for the repetition: I only noticed today that Vista Smalltalk is not just a Smalltalk in Flash (ActionScript), but that it contains its own Lisp layer on which it is based. So a Smalltalk in Lisp in ActionScript ...
Blacksburg: Shooter sent manifesto to sender - was voluntarily in psychiatric care (could still buy weapons), was suicidal, wrote violent plays. But first, all possible "experts" have jumped in again and demanded a ban on violent games.
Erlang Cookbook - another cookbook site for Erlang. Nice for first impressions of the language.
NPR : Giant Bats Snatch Birds from Night Sky - Killer bat attack.
Interior Minister Schäuble wants to overturn the principle of presumption of innocence - Wheelchair Rambo in full swing. 24 in the Bundestag. Say goodbye to the rule of law. Particularly cute: Those who characterize his plans for constitutional amendments as an attack on the constitution would be defaming him: "Those who claim the opposite are playing a vile game with me." - ah, so it's about him? And not about preserving what our constitution guarantees us?
Court confirms liability of the Admin-C - good, because the sham entries that are taking place there are highly absurd. And that a lawyer wants to talk his way out of it is quite amusing (one would have expected a lawyer to have a better understanding of the situation).
Kamelia - interesting concept: component programming in Python. Components are operated in parallel via threads and communicate via a simple pipe interface. Similar to the Unix shell, but for high-level objects and within a programming language.
PragDave: Adding Concurrency to Our Erlang Program - second round. Not really practical code - the application can overload the Amazon Webservice and block your own key - but nice as a demo of how to convert sequential code into parallel. Where the hint about pmap as an alternative is not entirely unimportant ...
QuickCheck: An Automatic Testing Tool for Haskell - an interesting approach to automatic testing. The properties of functions are stored directly in the code and the test does not simply test predefined test cases, but runs through the property definitions with randomly generated values.
(The Scheme Way): Erlang or Gambit-C/Termite? A practitioner's perspective - Erlang wins the comparison. Some good points - especially Erlang's infrastructure is simply better and more mature.
"What the fuck is informationelle Selbstbestimmung!?” - PDF from the ASTA of FH Münster.
ChronoSync - file synchronizer, can be used for backup or synchronization of multiple computers. Similar to SuperDuper, but more focused on data synchronization than backup.
CouchDb Project Website - hmm. I haven't seen that before. Replicating, document-oriented database. REST API.
current work - large numbers illustrated as art.
History of the tilde - everything you never wanted to know about the tilde and therefore never thought to ask.
HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web - will naturally be ignored by all the XML proponents again. But it remains a fact: the future of the web will be dominated by HTML for a long time, not by XHTML. And no, delivering broken XHTML with incorrect headers is not a solution, but a problem ...
PragDave: A First Erlang Program - Accessing Amazon Webservices with Erlang. Basic tutorial, expects nothing complex.
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Rails Developer David Heinemeier Hansson’s Response to Alex Payne’s Interview - Mark Pilgrim (top advocate from the Python camp, often stylistically terrible) translates David Heinemeier Hanson (top advocate from the Rails camp, often stylistically terrible) into English - John Gruber Style (who once did this with Macrovision regarding DRM statements)
Why you should be using HTML 4.01 instead of XHTML - more on XHTML vs. HTML