twill: a simple scripting language for Web browsing
twill: a simple scripting language for Web browsing - a Python scriptable Web client. Interesting for automated page requests and for specialized robots. Possibly also for testing web applications.
twill: a simple scripting language for Web browsing - a Python scriptable Web client. Interesting for automated page requests and for specialized robots. Possibly also for testing web applications.
implementing equal rights for homosexuals:
Gay civil servants with a registered partnership do not receive a supplement like married couples. This was decided by the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig. The registered partnership is not a marriage, but an independent marital status, the judges decided. The legislator can favor marriage over other communities in terms of remuneration. This does not violate the principle of equality nor the anti-discrimination prohibition under European law. (Case No.: BVerwG 2 C 43.04).
Rarely have I read such a far-fetched justification. We simply define everything as we please, which saves the state money and to hell with the equal rights of homosexuals. Discrimination does not only occur when one group is treated worse than others, but also when one group is treated better than others. It is absurd that the legislator may favor a heterosexual marriage over a homosexual marriage - and exactly the reason why the registered partnership is not a full equivalent to marriage, even if some politicians claim otherwise.
Former Minister Scholz will discuss German nuclear weapons - hopefully no one else. There are already far too many nuclear weapons in the world, we certainly don't need German atomic bombs. Sometimes you really wonder what kind of idiots are running around in politics. There is no other appropriate response to nuclear threats than total nuclear disarmament. If someone drops atomic bombs on a country, it is completely irrelevant for survival whether the attacked state also has atomic bombs - and no, the threat scenario is complete nonsense if you are not also willing to use these monstrosities. And that's where the madness begins.
Olympus introduces a SLR camera with preview image - either via an auxiliary CCD with AF support or with mirror lock-up via the main CCD. The latter, in my opinion, manufacturers could have installed for a long time - because for macro photography it would be a real blessing if you could get preview images with the normal chip for the first settings.
The title Smallest Earth-like planet discovered is a bit strange. Okay, if you define "Earth-like" as "orbits a sun and is not a gas planet or ice lump," it might fit. But what does such a definition bring then? 5.5 times as large as Earth, the distance to the sun 3 times as far, the sun weaker than Earth's, and the temperature at minus 220 degrees - sorry, that's really not particularly Earth-like ...
If someone wants to check out Second Life:
Second Life needs to connect to ports 443/TCP, 12035/UDP, 12036/UDP, and 13000-13050/UDP. You should configure your firewall to allow outbound traffic on those ports, and related inbound traffic.
Ok, so TCP is fine with NAT firewalls - but apparently it also wants all those UDP ports inbound. And why does a game client need 51 UDP ports in a block? And why so many UDP ports at all? Do game designers ever think about what they're doing? In the case of Second Life, apparently not ...
Linus claims to know again - this time about licenses:
The new license requires that all keys necessary to run the software must be delivered with the software, for example in the case of Trusted Computing systems that may require a signature of the programs. In Torvalds' opinion, the regulation also covers the private keys of Linux developers and he is not willing to publish his private key.
Yeah, sure, if I interpret a license in the most absurd way possible, I might come up with such an outlandish idea with enough idiocy. If he now only proves to me that his private key is necessary to make the kernel runnable (because that's what it's about in the corresponding section of the GPL v3), then I would agree with him. However, it's going to be difficult, because so far I have always been able to run all Linux kernels without ever needing any key.
You can be against the switch to GPL v3 - there is definitely a problem with the license change in the kernel with the extremely many contributions and authors - but the above "reason" is simply ridiculous.
Microsoft gives in to EU in antitrust dispute:
In the antitrust dispute with the EU Commission, the software manufacturer Microsoft has now given in and will disclose the source code of the computer operating system Windows.
Let's wait and see how this disclosure will look. Will every Windows license holder actually be able to view the sources? And will the sources match the system? And which parts of the source will be left out? Will the EU Commission be able to recognize such deceptive packaging?
Opera Mini: Free HTML browser for mobile phones launches worldwide - Golem.de - definitely better than the primitive built-in browsers. However, of course - due to Java - not necessarily the fastest.
Great, NRW is bringing back headnotes:
According to the plans of the North Rhine-Westphalian state government, teachers should evaluate the "work and social behavior" of students, and this should be mandatory for all classes up to and including the tenth grade. Points such as "willingness to learn and perform" and "readiness to take responsibility and independence" should be graded with classic school grades from "very good" to "insufficient." However, characteristics such as "endurance and resilience" and "cooperativeness and team spirit" should also be mentioned in the report card, as well as special school and extracurricular commitment such as voluntary work in youth groups.
So that students are as well-behaved as possible in school. You engage politically, but unfortunately in a different direction than your teachers? Doesn't matter, you'll just get a bad grade in social behavior. What, you won't get a job later because no one wants you? Doesn't matter, there are already hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people, you can just throw you in there. You don't want to engage in church groups or similar because all these groups in your town are just cross fanatics anyway? Doesn't matter, bad grades in extracurricular commitment certainly won't be a problem in job hunting. What, you have problems with your classmates and are excluded by them, for example because they don't like your skin color or nose shape? You're just not cooperative enough and not a team player.
There are good reasons why these dreadful headnotes have been abolished. Social behavior is simply not gradable - even less so than knowledge or performance (here, the concentration on a few key moments in the school year is already a problem - real knowledge is not evaluated, but performance at the time of the exams).
But of course, they are incredibly practical if you want to breed compliant yes-men. "Child, just don't cause any trouble at school, the grade for social behavior can decide your later job" - I can already hear some parents "straightening out" their children. Left-wing youth group? No way, job-threatening. Slip-ups in life? Catastrophe, can only be smoothed out with years of brown-nosing the teacher.
Oh yes, we are getting the best school system in Germany in NRW. The question is just for whom the school system should be the best - probably not for the students.
Let's see how long the ruling against T-Online's data storage will last:
The effect of the Darmstadt ruling may be short-lived. Because the EU Parliament decided in December to log all internet and telephone connections in advance, there will also be a corresponding law in Germany. However, it is questionable whether the so-called data retention is compatible with the Basic Law.
Basic Law? What Basic Law? Does that still matter to any politician? We don't have a constitutionally compliant budget, the customs authority's surveillance activities have been extended despite a contrary ruling, and what else has undermined the Basic Law recently. What is a little data retention in comparison?
With so much audacity from the rights extortionists, one can hardly think of any further comment:
After joint research by the computer magazine c't and the news portal onlinekosten.de, indications suggest that the GVU may have overstepped the bounds of what is permissible in its investigations against copyright infringers. The editorial teams received hints from a GVU-affiliated informant some time ago, which have since been confirmed by a second source. According to these reports, the GVU regularly paid at least one administrator of a central exchange server in the warez scene. In this way, they obtained log files and thus access IP addresses of this so-called "box." In addition, they are said to have contributed hardware to equip the platform.
It's quite amusing when an alleged communications professional lets his envy show so clearly:
Many of you write that I scored an own goal with my email. Okay, maybe one. But how many own goals are you scoring right now by picking up my buzzword "Toilet Walls of the Internet" in part indignantly, in part gleefully, spreading it in the sense of agenda setting? At Technorati.com, the search term was temporarily ranked 3rd!
Well, that's just the way it is - there are also others who can exploit a term. And in the blogs, the toilet wall is simply more popular than the you-are-German-language nonsense.
And about the alleged "apology" - sorry, but that is an apology that you can also read from politicians - meaningless, vague, and the only statement you can derive from it at best is a defiant "but I'm right!" Tja, Marketinghansel. Big mouth up front, but only a sensitive soul and no clue behind it.
First, only signed drivers should be accepted:
What Microsoft markets in its documentation as a security gain and as an indispensable feature for Digital Rights Management (DRM) has a bitter aftertaste: So far, only those who equip themselves with corresponding certificates from Verisign and pay around 500 US dollars per year for this can create such a signature.
But from signed drivers (with which open-source drivers will already have a real problem) to signed applications is not far. And for open source projects, it is usually not so easy to get the money for certificates.
APRESS.COM: Practical Common Lisp - now also available as a free PDF download (go to the Free Download page and download it there).
Bill Clementson's Blog: Update on Termite (A Lisp for Concurrent/Parallel Programming) - Information about Termite, a Scheme based on Gambit-C with the concurrency features of Erlang. Sounds very interesting, check it out when the code is released.
BooCompany - the only legitimate successor to DotComTod.de. Now open to all industries.
Thinking Forth - now also available as a PDF download. For old Forthers like me, of course a must-download.
Unofficial documentation of iPhoto 6.0 photocasting feeds - Mark Pilgrim tears apart Apple's iPhoto RSS support. It's bad. It's really bad.
I mean, when will they finally realize that notebook users are different from desktop users? For example, the environment of a notebook user constantly changes? That the network configuration is not static but dynamic? And that the web proxy is a dynamic setting - it is highly nonsensical to pack these into program configuration files instead of reading them from environment settings? For my part, it can certainly be a place for this in the configs - but then there should also be a way to override this setting from the environment.
Where this has become particularly noticeable to me recently:
This is especially annoying with Unix applications that are ported to OS X Aqua (e.g. X-Chat Aqua is such a case): with real OS X applications, the network settings are used for proxies and the like, so that these applications then use the correct proxy when the network environment is switched. With ported applications, this access to the network settings is missing - but because they are GUI applications, possible settings from the shell startup scripts are not evaluated. Because these are possibly not active at all in GUI applications. Instead, a special property file is read - which is rarely stupid, because it is static and no shell script. Yes, Apple messed that up.
With programs that are started from the shell, you can easily read the proxy settings using scutil and a few lines of Python and put them into the environment - but with GUI applications and even some CLI programs, you fail with the ignorant developers. Bah. Humbug.
I am sure that the master would be horrified by this kind of homage. Tributes and commemorations would probably be more appropriate actions and provocations on his death day. After all, he preferred to provoke throughout his life rather than listen to flattery. However, I find statements like the following particularly shocking:
Beuys was just a figurehead of the art academy. The times when great artists wanted to provoke are over. Even Beuys would not stand out today with his actions, is painting student Eva-Maria Schmitt (21) convinced.
I do not believe that such "art students" really advance art - there is already enough adapted droning in elevators, we do not need artists for that ...
Yes, as an admin, one should be aware of the legal consequences in case of a breach of trust:
According to a decision of the Labor Court Aachen from August 16, 2005, the unauthorized access to other people's emails by a system administrator justifies his immediate dismissal (Az. 7 Ca 5514/04).
Power (in the sense of access to data that is not accessible to others) always means responsibility. By the way, this has been clear to many sysadmins for a long time. It would be nice if politicians (whose power is often much greater) were also aware of this ...
A list of open-source HTTP proxies written in python - many of them are still active, and potentially quite interesting for mobile use (especially those based on asyncore, due to the low resource usage)
runit - a UNIX init scheme with service supervision - alternative to sysv-init with more possibilities and integrated features like supervise (from the daemontools).
WebCleaner - a filtering HTTP proxy - absolute high-tech, that part. Asyncore, so low resources, built-in JavaScript interpreter against obfuscation and a bunch of other features. Sounds very good on paper.
Feed Icons - Help establish the new standard - free icons for feeds as an alternative to the XML icon from Userland. Inspired by the Mozilla feed icons.
HD Output must be downsampled by the player - if the studio demands this feature. The result: great HD-DVD, but the result on the monitor is far closer to standard DVD quality than to the possible HD quality.
Sorry, but why should I get HD hardware if it doesn't make much difference? Is this whole thing a kamikaze strategy for the HD hardware manufacturers?
Hurring.com: Code: Python: PHP Serialize implemented in Python - Deserialize PHP data in Python. Could be interesting if I want to migrate further sites from PHP to Django and, for example, access Wordpress settings.
Found at Bill Bumgarner:
As it turns out, Sandvox silently installs Smart Crash Report in ~/Library/Input Managers/ when it is launched. As an input manager, SCR is thusly loaded into every Cocoa app launched and subsequently uses various non-supported mechanisms to modify the behavior of said application.
Sandvox installs a hack in the Input Manager - these are libraries that plug into the interface to modify application behavior. They usually overload system functions with their own code. Not a rootkit - they don't hide. But they may destabilize the system. And above all: they affect not just this one program, but all programs that use this mechanism.
Sandvox is off my disk, sorry, but I don't want something like this installed without a big warning sign and without asking. We're not under Windows ...
Ross Barkman's Home Page - Modem scripts for Mac OS and Mac OS X and various mobile phones.
ScriptAculoUs - MochiKit - Trac - a port of the script.aculo.us effects to MochiKit. Finally, drag and drop and other effects with the significantly better technical MochiKit base.
What happens when Sinar develops a flexible camera system. Okay, they really know what flexible means at Sinar - but one could almost think that they overdid it a bit with the Sinar M.
I'd like to play with something like that, but I think I don't want to know the price for a complete system with AF mirror adapter, a lens, and digital back.
The idea itself is not that new - I've already heard people in d.r.f. pondering over flatbed scanners behind GF cameras. But unlike some of them, this person not only carried out the project but also brought it almost to perfection (as far as the image result is concerned). Very interesting effects through the mixing of the scanner movement and object movement. And the digital camera also has a gigantic resolution.
The US Department of Justice wants to access user search queries from Google (and other search engines). Of course, initially only to combat child pornography (how often will this be used as an excuse to dismantle privacy?). Those who think they have to agree with this: afterwards, research on child pornography (and, for example, the search for source material for the research - I mean reports about child pornography, not images or films) will also be suspicious. Because with search engine queries, you have the same problem as with email connections and IP connection data: there are gigantic amounts of data, and the search can only take place automatically, making the probability of hits more than questionable.
Those who have ever watched their spam filter struggle to distinguish spam from ham can roughly imagine how promising any search and qualification algorithms can be that only have these mutilated data from the search queries at their disposal ...
Here's how the Bundeswehr, the BND, and the Foreign Office are handling the secret Bundeswehr report on the abduction of six people to Guantanamo:
Despite the facts and a transcript of the report, which has now been handed over to the Ministry of Defense, the official conclusion is that there is no conclusive evidence of the incident and the hints contained in the secret document in question.
The report itself is gone. Allegedly deleted because no long-term archiving was planned (yes, of course, I believe that immediately - it certainly wasn't like that during my time in the Bundeswehr, when every document was filed and archived, that's just my imagination). And of course, no one knows anything about it. And the embarrassing evidence - such as the confession of the author of the report and photos on the computer that belong to the report - are simply ignored.
What is absolutely not funny about this: six people are sitting in Guantanamo - without conclusive evidence. But no one cares, no one is advocating for them. These people were abducted with the knowledge of the Bundeswehr. No one cares about that either. All that matters is keeping one's own record clean.
Monitor: Vorwürfe gegen Ratiopharm - In case anyone is wondering where all the money for the healthcare system goes ...
The ad guys behind this stupid DBD campaign are sulking - at least one of them is complaining in a round-robin email about the unwashed bloggers, the annoying journalists and the stupid colleagues. His mother taught him that one should thank people for gifts and he thinks DBD is a great gift. My mother taught me not to give people useless junk. And in the case of broad disagreement with my opinion, to consider whether maybe the rest of humanity might be right. My mother is smarter than his mother ...
The next photo manufacturer leaves the industry: Konica Minolta gives up traditional camera and film business:
How much and which individual parts of the camera business go to Sony and at what price, the company did not announce in detail, in any case Sony is to continue the business with digital SLR cameras from Konica Minolta. According to Konica Minolta, Sony wants to develop further digital SLRs with which users of the Maxxum/Dynax lens system can continue to use the lenses.
Too bad. The digital Minoltas were actually a comeback - and the Dynax 7D was quite an interesting camera. But soon it will probably be a Sony 7D. Ok, Sony can certainly do photography, but still it's a shame about the name Minolta, somehow it belonged to photography for me (even if I myself was never a Minoltheke).
The Wikipedia.de is currently shut down:
According to an article from Wikinews, which also belongs to Wikimedia, the reason is that the parents of the deceased computer hacker Tron from Berlin did not want the full name of their son to be published in a Wikipedia article, not just his pseudonym. However, this is still the case, even after the interim injunction.
As much as I understand that they do not want this - it is a bit late for that. Because the name is not only found on Wikipedia, it is scattered all over the net. Moreover - whether they like it or not - he is a person of contemporary history. After all, there is even a whole film about him.
The blocking of the entire German Wikipedia domain as ordered by the court is then already quite strange - because the German Wikipedia is just a redirect page.
In some way, this is once again another proof of why you cannot operate websites in Germany - here, almost fundamentally, cannons are used to shoot sparrows. However, the consequences of the whole action are not considered - because the fact that the redirect page is no longer allowed to be operated does not mean that the page is now offline. And the only result is that his civilian name becomes even more widely known.
All that is missing is that a block like Büssow is demanded for the entire Wikipedia. And enforced. Because we are in Germany.
Clear statement from Zeiss - now with the ZF system. Cosina takes on the role of Kyocera - including the production of Zeiss lenses. And parallel to ZF, there will also be ZS - M42 lenses. However, the use of M42 lenses on Canon EOS cameras is quite boring, as there is no aperture function. With ZF, the full status of manual Nikon lenses should hopefully be supported.
Hmm. I think I need to take a look at the D200 with a manual lens to see if it's possible to achieve usable focusing. With the EOS, it simply doesn't work - at least not with the 10D or 20D, as these do not allow changing the focusing screens and the AF indicator does not work with lenses connected via adapter. On the tiny focusing screens of the AF-digitals, you can't focus by focusing screen at all - completely unusable for critical situations, where focusing estimation by scale is still more precise ...
Actually, this would be exactly my dream system - a solid, robust camera with decent focusing aid, something around 8 MP in the chip and in front of it the Zeiss lenses that I like very much.
Katz Eye Focusing Screen for the Canon 10D @ KatzEyeOptics.com - Replacement focusing screen for the EOS 10D with split-image indicator and microprisms and - optionally - composition lines. Fished from my comments - thanks, Wolf. The focusing screens are also available for other camera types. Unfortunately, the AF point illuminations no longer work with the EOS, so suboptimal for mixed use.
RapidWeaver has been around for a while, but I hadn't seen it until now. Quite a funny idea: essentially a GUI editor for websites, not just individual pages. There are pre-made templates for various purposes (blogs, photo albums, etc.) and integrated, specialized editors for these elements. With a plugin API to program your own page types. But absolutely not WYSIWYG, just an integrated preview.
The HTML source - this is now my second great homepage tonight - looks somewhat okay. At least more than just DIV tags are used. However, the strange HEAD with all the LINK tags does irritate me a bit. But the result is already usable.
The templates themselves are not as slick as those from Sandvox - they seem a bit homespun and somewhat clunky (e.g., the font selection in the body text on my example page looks a bit ugly - I can't quite pinpoint what bothers me, but the Sandvox page just looks better).
What I don't like: only FTP and .Mac for publishing. SFTP is really not entirely new; this should be supported. Otherwise, it is most comparable to my good old PyDS for me - specialized editors for each content type with automatic rendering to HTML and automatic uploading to the server.
Oh, and the program handles 39 images in a photo album without any disasters, doesn't consume the computer's memory and small children to achieve the result.
The Wirthians and Oberonistas. Run, no, sprint and get the PDF version of Project Oberon. Hey, I know it's not exactly state-of-the-art anymore and some aspects of the Oberon system were simply silly (especially its reasoning for non-overlapping windows in the windowing system), but nevertheless the book is absolutely worth reading. And the presented system still has a lot of charm, even if it has largely disappeared into obscurity.
Sandvox - the new GUI editor for websites, which was just introduced as a beta by Karelia - is really nice in concept. It offers an overall view of the website - and that is on the components of the website. Nicely structured, so that you can easily make changes to pages. The whole thing is also really easy to use - with nice wizards and good integration with iLife. Publishing is not only to .Mac, like with iWeb, but for example via SFTP to a normal server.
And Sandvox sucks hamsters through straws.
Sorry, but you can't put it any nicer. The thing is a complete and total catastrophe in the present second beta. I didn't give it many tasks - I didn't get that far. I created a homepage, a page with a single image, and a photo album. None of that is particularly difficult. The photo album was given 39 images - directly taken from iPhoto. That's not complicated, one would think.
But the software just sucks up 1.5 GB of memory because of these images and reduces a Mac Mini to a crawling snail. With every click in the navigation in the software, you wait for 10 or 15 minutes until the selected page appears. The created file with the site is by the way only 280 KB in size - why it then occupies so much memory, I don't even want to know ...
Additionally, it does offer nice publishing to servers - with a comfortable wizard for setup and checking. But this stupid wizard provides no meaningful information during the check and already gets a timeout with a simple SFTP connection - and that is on a server where I am already logged in via SSH in a terminal window in parallel.
I saved myself the trouble of realizing publishing in any other way (e.g. in a local directory and then subsequent copying to the server) in view of the horrendous memory and CPU load. That's why there are also no statements about the generated HTML.
Sorry, I understand that Karelia wanted to get the beta out quickly - especially in view of the iWeb announcement. But then maybe you should write that the software is completely unusable on a Mac Mini. Not even Aperture is such a resource hog ...
Even though the FDP is in opposition - when it comes to copyrights they are just as supportive of the music industry as the current government:
Hans-Joachim Otto, media expert of the FDP parliamentary group, sees in a cultural flat rate a "disregard for copyright". "Whoever wants to effectively legalize the mass production of illegal copies on the Internet through a lump sum payment has not understood the principles of European copyright and disregards the necessity of effective protection of creative achievements," reads a statement from the FDP parliamentary group. The FDP supports all efforts that serve to further strengthen copyright in the digital context and to promote respect for intellectual property.
The position of the FDP as an alleged freedom party is also quite logical: rather criminalize all users, patronize and nag them, than force an industry that is managed to ruin to deal with realities. For the FDP, freedom is only the freedom of companies, not of citizens.

Isn't it great how the church beautifully helps to dispose of annoying works councils? Really fascinating method. After all, churches have nothing in common with a democratic society. And in the end, they are even democracy-hostile in their structure. I find the approach of the hospital management particularly exciting:
A week later, the manager explained to the staff that the hospital was now evangelical. The released works council members were instructed to return to their old workplaces. When Altenschmidt and Tobias Michel, who was also released, did not comply, a warning followed. Last Friday, the locks of the works council office were changed. However, the files of the employees' representatives, which contained partly confidential information, could be brought to safety beforehand, according to Altenschmidt.
Certainly, the church itself will then present the whole thing again in a great way, because after all, one has gained a bit more influence - no matter how absurd the designation as "church carrier" is. After all, most of the money still comes from public funds. You can also see this nicely in Münster, where far too many schools and kindergartens have an allegedly church carrier - but the financial main burden still lies with the city.
For me, the church with this absurd church law - according to which employees and especially also employee representatives must be in the church and disputes between employee representation and management can only be represented before the equally absurd church jurisdiction - is simply unconstitutional.
What does our Basic Law, Article 3, Paragraph 3, say?
No one may be disadvantaged or favored because of their gender, their descent, their race, their language, their homeland and origin, their beliefs, their religious or political views. No one may be disadvantaged because of their disability.
Apparently, this does not apply to churches. And for hospital managers who quickly give the hospital to the church just to get rid of the works council.
Well, of course, I couldn't leave it alone, so I struggled with the extremely slow part and replaced the 39-image album with a 6-image album. Still slow, but at least tolerable enough that I managed to publish locally and then manually transfer the files.
What stands out: the HTML code is actually quite usable. Without a stylesheet, the necessary skips over the navigation and the sidebar are included, and more tags than just DIVs are actually used. However, it also becomes apparent that there are extremely many DIVs with many classes inside - in principle, almost everything is divided. There aren't many P-tags and other logical structures (okay, I haven't written much text, but still, I would at least expect individual paragraphs). It looks better than the HTML from iWeb.
A number of bugs have also been noticed - but it is a beta after all, I don't see that as critically as the exorbitant memory usage. By the way, I deliberately only took one of the predefined stylesheets and didn't change much. I also created a movie page, but somehow the most important thing seems to be missing - the embedding of the movie. In any case, it offered my movie from iMovie but did not adopt it. Well, at least you are spared my silly babbling.
You're making stupid ads - and you don't even ask all participants if they really want to participate. And you take action against critics with the trademark law. You're just a PR disaster ...
If a software generates such HTML code, then it is definitely crap. And I don't particularly care if it comes from Apple. This is an absolute low blow to everyone who deals with semantic markup and everyone who deals with accessibility. Similar to the PhotoCasting debacle, Apple once again shows that they unfortunately tend to be "outside nice, inside crap" every now and then.
And quite honestly - not only is the code a catastrophe, but also the generated URLs - has anyone at Apple ever heard of human-friendly URLs? Oh, what am I asking, they don't even know RSS Enclosures ...
More about iWeb's HTML can be read at Todd Dominey.