I already had this image on hugoesk.de (the site no longer exists), but I converted it with Lightroom. The uploaded image (just click on the image itself, then it appears) is a 90% JPEG from the RAW image with simple post-processing using Lightsource.
Gnash is a GNU project to implement a Flash client under GPL. Very interesting thing - especially interesting will be how the reaction from Adobe will look like. I wouldn't mind a bit of diversity in that area, even if I'm not usually such a Flash fan.
... but it's only half as bad. The new Core Duo Mac is an iMac, not a Mac Mini. Who cares about the power-hungry display with built-in computer, I'm into energy-saving cookie tins. Phew. Dodged a bullet there, I thought my standard problem - I buy something and shortly thereafter it's better, faster or cheaper to get - has struck again.
The MacBook with Core Duo sounds really good, by the way.
... why do I always have the urgent need to try out any GUI editors for websites? I mean, that's highly stupid - I program content management systems. I build portal systems. I earn my damn money with such stuff. And yet - when something like SandVox or iWeb shows up, I want to try it out. Naturally, I then fail because I don't think in a GUI-compatible way and feel stupid.
You would think that by almost 40 years old, I should have realized by now that I have no clue about design and layout and always fail with GUI editors for content. So I could just stop downloading and trying out every piece of junk. But no, what's running in the background? The SandVox download ...
Well, at least I don't have the problem of Karelia, who apparently got run over by the Apple steamroller for the second time with their latest product.
open sword - pixen - found at kniebes.net: Pixel-pushing software. Looks quite nice.
Adobe Lightroom Beta: Digital Photography Review - Adobe's answer to Apple's Aperture? In any case, there's a public beta - so give it a try.
Introducing Sandvox | Karelia Software - A web editor that, for a change, supports not only WYSIWYG editing but also standard compliance, accessibility, and even uploads via SFTP. Sounds like someone did their homework.
I downloaded the public beta of Lightroom from Adobe and tried it out. Wow. I must say, I'm thrilled. This post provides my first impression of this software. Although I can already say upfront: due to the freely accessible beta, every digital SLR owner with a Mac should get this and take it for a test drive.
The most important thing for me: the software is usable even on a Mac Mini - although some actions are a bit slower than one might wish, on the other hand, one must consider that RAW images are edited live.
What I like right away: you can hide window frames and menus, dim the controls, and fully concentrate on the image content. There are also a number of tools that make a very good first impression - I was particularly impressed by the grayscale mixer, with which you can easily adjust the contrast distribution to the different color ranges. Much simpler than with the channel mixer in Photoshop. It's a shame that you can't set the desired mode for the display in the settings - the program always starts with the standard layout.
Nevertheless, the whole program gives the impression in many places that someone has finally dealt with the sometimes quite unpleasant usability of Photoshop. For example, adjusting highlights and shadows is much easier without immediately risking ruining the image result. The histogram is finally worth its name and provides prompt and meaningful information about changes (and it doesn't lie as much as the histogram in Aperture).
The browser for the image collections is quite decent - the features of iView Media Pro are partly more complete, but Lightroom is already much better than using the browser from Photoshop or some other rather simple tool (e.g., the Mac version of ACDSee) to access the images. However, the keyword assignment is still quite meager - you create a new keyword without completion or similar, and then assign it to one or more images by drag-and-drop. iView Media Pro can really offer much more here. In addition, no number of assigned images is displayed next to keywords, although numbers are displayed everywhere else.
The choice is definitely nice when importing images: you can index folders that remain in their old place, or move or copy images to a central image storage (and thus immediately create a backup). And the really nice thing: when transferring to the central storage, you can immediately convert the images to DNG, so you get rid of the manufacturer-specific formats - but without loss of information. And you can mix it all well - you can leave some images on external drives or also move them to the central storage. It's a shame, however, that you can't move the images between the storages via Lightroom - an image that lies somewhere should better stay there, otherwise Lightroom looks stupid.
The speed is not only okay when editing; importing and exporting also takes place at a decent speed. However, you should consider the memory requirements - on a Mac Mini, it makes sense to close other programs to use the memory, which is quite scarce with 1 GB, completely for Lightroom. It will thank you!
Of course, some things are still missing - it is, after all, a beta. What I spontaneously missed: there is no tool with which you could extract sections from the image. But that will certainly come. It would also be very nice if Lightroom got a downsizing/upsizing function with which you could convert images to print formats in a qualitatively usable way. With that, Lightroom could potentially replace iView Media Pro, Raw Developer, and Size Fixer for me.
In any case, it is a tough competition for Aperture and iView Media Pro - therefore, it is to be expected that there will finally be a bit more movement in the image management specifically for photographers. The only question remains: what will the fun cost when it is available as a product at the end of the year. And how the betas will develop in the meantime.
... if you look at the discussion in the law blog about the registration of "Law Blog" as a trademark for Udo Vetter's weblog. And especially the arguments from Robert Basic and Udo's reactions to them. Robert's argument that it seems a bit odd to register a term that has become quite common in general blogging usage is met by Udo with the argument that it's an English term and therefore not a generic term, and that trademark law doesn't even apply in the English-speaking world. Therefore, he wants to claim "law blog" as a title for legal weblogs for himself.
Sorry, but exactly this argument is constantly brought up by some trademark guys from companies - Microsoft tries to argue that Windows is a general term. The story about the Explorer trademark - same nonsense. If even lawyers who are quite familiar with the internet have such strange ideas, you shouldn't be surprised if other lawyers see a way to make money there.
By the way, I am by no means accusing Udo Vetter of wanting to make money with the trademark - especially since it would only affect his colleagues, and as is known, one crow does not peck out the other's eye - it's just about the very strange argumentation past the criticism. About the total inability of a lawyer to understand exactly where the legally untarnished blogger has a problem.
Lawyers and normal people definitely think differently. And I mean that absolutely not in a positive sense.
American fighter jets block a flight from Canada to Mexico - because a passenger is on the No-Fly List. The Canadian on the list has never been accused of a crime. And the flight had not a single stopover in the USA. And it was only stopped upon reaching the Mexican border. How much more idiotic can it get?
When will other states and their politicians finally realize that America, under the current administration, is anything but a normally functioning country, certainly not one with which to cooperate?
CamiScript - AppleScript Menu for Camino
nadamac CamiScript - Script Repository - useful scripts for Camino, for use in CamiScript
PictureSync » Photo-sharing for Mac OS X - Batch upload of images to various services. Could be quite interesting if you could also define new services - e.g. for my own sites.
Polaris: OpenSolaris for the PowerPC - not that I necessarily want to go there, but definitely interesting for playing around.
I recently came across the film Reality Shock featuring Billy's Band - they provide part of the music for the film. Wow. I'm a fan of music with polka elements and find the accordion a beautiful instrument, absolutely brilliant music for me.
And anyone who wants to complain now: just listen to it. There are really nice things in there. But how to order their CDs if you don't speak Russian is a real mystery to me ...
And yes, I know, rock-polka isn't quite right - it's all sorts of things, some remind me very much of Tom Waits, some are quite rock, others remind me of French chansons. I like it anyway.
Loading a ZX Spectrum from an iPod - someone actually added .tzx support to iPod Linux, so you can now use the iPod as a mass storage device for the ZX Spectrum.
From the third best Scheme in the world - Gambit Scheme System - there is a new beta for version 4.0. Particularly interesting about Gambit-C is - besides the high performance of the code - the truly brilliant threading implementation. Normal Scheme continuations are used and then a dispatcher is placed on top. As a result, threads under Gambit-C hardly need any memory (on a 2G machine you can easily run over a million threads) and resources (and yes, the switching with a million threads is also quite decent). As a result, Gambit-C is the absolute number 1 for massive multithreading on single-processor systems - and web servers love many threads.
And before anyone asks: the best Scheme is of course PLT Scheme (Dr. Scheme) and the second best is Chicken Scheme - because Chicken Scheme still has the most impressive library of included code after PLT Scheme. Gambit-C could learn a lot here and include more libraries, because libraries are what really make the language usable. At the moment, it is still quite bleak for Gambit-C.
By the way, the license issue is finally resolved: you can now choose between LGPL and Apache license for Gambit-C, which should really make all license discussions obsolete.
Soon, it will be possible to determine from a distance of 10 meters without the owner's knowledge that he has erectile dysfunction - or thinks he does. Great idea, let's make all diseases remotely diagnosable via RFID, set up a few doctors in street cafes and they will be helped.
According to US media, Pfizer's RFID application does not even allow the distribution path of the pills from the manufacturer to the pharmacies and wholesalers to be tracked correctly.
Oh, well that's good. If total surveillance has not yet occurred, then it's not so bad. With some sentences from professional journalists, one wonders if they even think about what they are reporting on ...
Amazing - amid all the praise there is just this small paragraph on the not entirely unproblematic topic of Harrer and National Socialism:
Harrer's past during the Nazi dictatorship became a topic at the end of the 1990s. According to media reports, he had to admit that he had been a member of the NSDAP and the SS. He later evaluated this as a mistake. In 2002, his autobiography "Mein Leben" was published.
Otherwise, only praise and cheering. What is the fact that he was in the SS (into which one certainly does not accidentally stumble - apart from the fact that he was also previously in the SA, which was also not really a purely passive organization of the Nazis) against the mountain ascents and the cuddling with the friendly smiling absolutist from Tibet.
The blindness of the media on certain topics is really shocking. Riefenstahl is also constantly admired for her "art" ...
... the German government is tightening immigration law:
According to the plans, spouses should only receive a residence permit from the age of 21 to "protect young foreigners from forced marriages". Residence permits are explicitly prohibited in case of sham marriages. The German government wants to counter abuse "particularly for illegal purposes such as forced prostitution" in this way.
From personal experience, I can say that the interpretation of the authorities is much more concrete. A sham marriage is simply assumed - in an attempt to get rid of the annoying foreigner. Even direct biological children from the marriage are not automatically considered proof of a genuine marriage. But of course, it's not about deporting annoying foreigners, it's only about limiting sham marriages and forced marriages.
The changes in tax law are not about giving those who already have a lot even more, but only about promoting tax honesty. And the Hartz IV changes with the attached impudence towards the unemployed are not about harassing and bullying those who already have nothing, but only about motivating long-term unemployed people.
Of course. And pigs can fly.
Wondering how high the interests of the Senate are that should be preserved in the gradual sale of Hochbahn and the port to the railway:
According to the report, the paper sets the goal of "pursuing the achievement of a majority in stages while safeguarding the interests of the Senate."
Well, apart from the "turbulences":
The negotiations between the Senate and the railway are still ongoing, accompanied by severe turbulences. Not only did the federal government speak out in favor of keeping the headquarters of the railway in Berlin. Also, the employees and numerous economic representatives recently positioned themselves against a change of the main seat of the railway from the Spree to the Elbe. However, this is exactly what Beust's plan envisages, in return for the participation of the railway in HHLA and Hochbahn. The HHLA employees fear the loss of around 300 jobs.
Hey, not only are the Berlin employees being sold, but also those of Hochbahn and the port. And all this for the relocation of the railway administration to HH - which is of course strategically important for the labor market. Screw the jobs in Berlin, as long as HH gets some. For that, we'll easily sell the others.
At the beginning, I still thought that with the right SPD in Hamburg, it couldn't get much worse with a Union Senate. I admit, that was an exaggerated optimism on my part. It keeps getting worse/stupider/incompetent.
Recipients of unemployment benefits must prove their need - because the mere fact that they may have paid into the system once and are now unemployed is not sufficient.
The State Secretary in the Bavarian Ministry of Social Affairs, JĂĽrgen Heike, supported Clever's initiative. "Those who want benefits from the state should prove that they are entitled to them," Heike said in "Focus". This would have the side effect that obtaining payments through false statements would constitute fraud. "These people can then be sentenced to repay the money and pay a fine," he said. Those who have no money must "expect to serve a prison sentence".
Exactly. Throw them in jail. Or put them on the pillory, as the Bild newspaper likes to suggest from time to time. What kind of perverse society are we supposed to live in?
How is a recipient of unemployment benefits supposed to pay for the lawyer they will soon need to assert their claims?
AES (Rijndael) Encryption Test in JavaScript - AES Encryption in JavaScript
One would think that SCO would eventually understand the signs of the times - but that is not the case.
What does a state do that gives itself an Information Freedom Act (the name is already laughable) according to which it grants citizens rights to inspect files? It hides behind fees.
Even before the consultation on the Information Freedom Act, it was already clear that authorities would be able to charge fees of up to 500 euros for satisfying the citizens' interest. However, a clause has now surprised, according to which even the inspection of files directly at an office should result in fees between 15 and 500 euros.
Because that's the easiest way, at least you can still make money from the curious and annoying citizens. A general obligation to publish and store in publicly accessible digital archives would have been much too sensible, but this is much more German.
JavaScript Encryption Library - Blowfish Encryption in JavaScript
OpenPGP Message Encryption in JavaScript - AES and RSA and some support libraries in JavaScript - enables creating PGP-encrypted texts.
Pangasius - Friday's Fish.
PuTTY for Symbian OS - ssh client for Symbian devices - also Nokia stuff.
Rijndael in JavaScript - AES in JavaScript again, this time specifically designed for compatibility with older browsers as well.
News from the energy policy chicken coop - Nuclear power yes, but not in NRW. Or maybe yes. In any case, the decision of the federal government applies. But maybe not. And anyway - let's swap nuclear power plants for fuel cells. Or maybe the other way around? Doesn't matter, let's just keep talking, maybe no one will notice that we have no idea.
Concentrated incompetence. Don't worry, they will surely ruin NRW. It would be a laugh if we couldn't completely bankrupt ourselves among the federal states.
Again something from the land of the free and the stupid. James Moore is on the No-Fly-List. He is one of the authors of the book "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential". And he is not allowed to fly.
From his phone call with the responsible hotline in Washington:
"I'm sorry, sir," she said. "There seems to be a problem. You've been placed on the No Fly Watch List."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm afraid there isn't much more that I can tell you," she explained. "It's just the list that's maintained by TSA to check for people who might have terrorist connections."
"You're serious?"
"I'm afraid so, sir. Here's an 800 number in Washington. You need to call them before I can clear you for the flight."
Exasperated, I dialed the number from my cell, determined to clear up what I was sure was a clerical error. The woman who answered offered me no more information than the ticket agent.
"Mam, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List."
"I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir," she explained after taking down my social security and Texas driver's license numbers.
"What can you tell me?"
"All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."
"Well, let me get this straight then," I said. "Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first two notes of the national anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me."
"I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."
"Oh, wait," I said. "One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"
Well. Or it is like suggested in the comments - it is his hat.
Apart from his humor which he has kept, he also has a small nugget of information for us:
I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000.
80,000 people are on the American No-Fly-List - which is then given to other countries to prevent these people from flying there as well. Without control of this list, without a judge, without conviction, simply based on an arbitrary entry. And I have the suspicion that everyone is obediently cowering and participating in this madness ...
twofish/javascript - TwoFish Encryption in JavaScript
code.enthought.com - Enthought Tool Suite - sounds like an interesting GUI library that builds on WxPython and enables even more comfortable application development. Particularly interesting is the use of the "Traits" concept for the automatic creation of interfaces.
morons.org - Anti-Gay Preacher Arrested for Soliciting Sex from Male Undercover Cop - the biggest critics of the elephants, are themselves ...
/my/cssQuery/ - the IE7 author (not the one from Microsoft, but the compatibility hacker) has split out his CSS Query Engine as a standalone program. A very powerful way to find parts of documents using CSS selectors in JavaScript.
Live From CES: Lego Mindstorms NXT - Gizmodo - wow. I actually wanted to hold back on Lego purchases, especially since I don't have time for them anyway, but this sounds really too good:
The new NXT “brick” is a 32-bit microprocessor that can be programmed using a PC or, for the first time, a Mac. It’s Bluetooth enabled, which makes the instructions you plug into the LabView software easy to transfer to your bot, and even control it from a PDA or mobile phone. It’s got three servo motors with inbuilt rotation sensors for precise speed control (one of the demo units on display walked quite fluidly). An ultrasonic sensor lets the robot see, it will recognize sound patterns and tones, the light detector is sensitive to both color and intensity variations, and there is a touch sensor to let the bot feel its way around as well.
This definitely sounds like a must-have factor in the range of 100%
New metrology regulations: Less gasoline for the same money?:
As "Kontraste" reports, measuring devices for the dispensing of heating oil and fuel are to be calibrated to larger tolerances from October onwards. As a result, fuel pumps may in future dispense up to one percent less fuel than displayed. Previously, only 0.2 percent was allowed. The background to the EU directive is that every manufacturer should be allowed to freely sell their fuel pumps in every EU country - even if they work very inaccurately.
Sometimes even shaking your head doesn't help with the nonsense that is being served up in the EU ...
Dave Winer I mean, with his newsRiver.root:
When the aggregator reads a feed it sets the referer for the request to http://www.newsriver.org/, a new site with a place-holder message for people who are unfamiliar with the aggregator. This address will appear in the referer logs for feeds that are read by users of this aggregator.
And again he spammed the referer, instead of adhering to the standard of putting the URL for the aggregator in the User-Agent header. No, not all hits from aggregators come from their pages, this is utter nonsense that he already perpetrated with the Radio Userland aggregator. And back then he showed himself to be forgetful when it was tried to explain it to him.
Why are programmers, especially in the field of web technologies and related topics, so incapable of looking at specifications? And simply adhering to what makes sense? The HTTP specification is not that complicated that one couldn't at least adhere to it rudimentarily ...
I would be in favor of extending the naturalization test for Muslims to politicians in general:
One question, for example, is: "How do you feel about the statement that a woman should obey her husband and that he is allowed to beat her if she is not obedient?" Another one: "Imagine your adult son comes to you and tells you he is homosexual and would like to live with another man. How do you react?" However, there is no passing score for the test. According to the Interior Ministry, the overall impression from the conversation is decisive.
When it comes to questions about homosexuality and the role of women, presumably quite a few Union politicians would fail, right?
Sometimes you really wonder how politicians manage to implement every absurd and ridiculous idea and then still find it to be a great idea. I mean, at some point the reptilian brain must crawl out of the politician's ears in desperation at the evolutionary regression and strangle him ...
Codeville - and yet another version control system, this one is written in Python and specifically addresses the problem of merge algorithms.
Crossroads 0.23 - Load-Balancer for TCP. With load-based switching and availability.
Once again, a current crisis is being used as an excuse for stupid remarks:
Söder called for consequences from the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine. Possibly, the Russian gas company Gazprom will one day also blackmail Germany.
I mean - everyone has now realized that there is not even any intention of blackmailing Europe. Not even the action against Ukraine is - from a capitalist perspective - unusual, after all Gazprom is only demanding the world market price for gas from Ukraine. Shouldn't the Union politicians now quickly perk up and applaud? But when they are on the receiving end of capitalism, they scream and squeal like stuck pigs.
Instead of drawing sensible conclusions and, for example, strengthening renewable and locally producible energy sources, they are calling for nuclear power. But what would that cause? A stronger bondage and blackmailability of German society by the people who already repeatedly attract attention through blackmail: the energy companies. Who make a fortune at the expense of society, but still increase prices. Who pocket millions from the state for the construction of their facilities, but then complain that everything is so expensive and therefore the citizen should pay again. But of course, jobs must be cut at the same time, because one wants to make record profits again next year.
In addition, it makes us more dependent on foreign sources for the fuel rods and the reprocessing and disposal - and creates massive problems through the still unsolved problem of final storage (and no, selling the problem to others will not bring us anything in the long run).
Regardless of the consequences for the environment and health - the decision for nuclear power is purely economically a complete nonsense. Apart from the fact that you can operate gas heating systems very poorly with electricity, the whole fuss in the context of gas deliveries from Russia should only be considered as stupid populist propaganda.
After reading about the RFID Zapper on Bruce Schneier's blog - what actually happens if the chip is defective? Do you get a free replacement? Do you have to pay for the passport again? Do passports have to be accepted even without a functioning chip - since they are still identification documents?
Chips can also break down without any problems in normal ways - even without the application of EMP or microwave.
monotone: distributed version control - by now Monotone is quite mature. Main advantage: it is distributed as a single executable. And the content-based addressing also sounds very interesting.
xmledit - A filetype plugin to help edit XML, HTML, and SGML documents : vim online - nice plugin for VIM (more precisely a macro package) to better edit XML files with tag completion and automatic closing and jumping between block start and end.
cucumber2: an object-relational mapping system for Python and PostgreSQL - another ORM for Python. Special feature here: PostgreSQL table inheritance is used to make the transitions between objects and classes easier. However, it is also not portable to other databases.
News agency spread hoax - and the frightening thing about it: nobody really notices. Ok, sure, with Google one could have researched the name and then realized that it's not real. But what's really frightening is that in the current times, it doesn't seem unusual at all when someone screams for more torture - we're already throwing everything overboard that makes up our democracy, so a little torture doesn't stand out anymore. So I'll save myself the snide comments about the quality of journalism, but rather wonder what kind of society we live in when we almost expect such demands for torture ...
Sorry, but this ice rink story is quite dubious:
According to Mayor Wolfgang Heitmeier, the city had the snow load on the hall measured as late as Monday noon. The limit value for the hall roof was not exceeded in this case. An ice hockey training session scheduled for 4:30 PM was nevertheless canceled. Today, Tuesday, the snow was supposed to be shoveled off the roof.
If the training was indeed canceled, there must have been specific concerns. If these concerns existed - why wasn't the hall simply closed? Somehow, it sounds like someone didn't think very far ahead. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes; some mistakes you just don't want to make.
WAP, Internet & Multimedia Messaging (MMS) Settings Network Providers Germany - Telefon-Treff - Settings for GPRS for various mobile networks. However, the user must use web/web - otherwise it doesn't work from my PDA. What still doesn't work is MidSSH directly on the phone.