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.
In all cases known to heise online so far, the criminal complaints have been about the offer of a single file. According to the new regulation, these suspects will therefore probably no longer face any criminal consequences in most cases. However, since the public prosecutors are advised to determine the personal details of the suspect in each case, the Karlsruhe law firm will also continue to receive the desired information upon inspection of the files in order to be able to proceed civilly.
Means in German: the public prosecutor does nothing more than request the provider to identify the user - probably a form letter in which only the specific data is entered. The providers still have to look up the data - even if it's just about a trivial file. The users are still identified and entered into the record - and then have trouble with the law firm because of the warning. The law firm continues to make a fortune.
Great solution.
If a procedure is to be closed directly, there is also no reason to determine personal details and play into the hands of the law firm. But here it was not about the citizens, it was only about avoiding work for the public prosecutors.
Camino Bookmarklets - a whole series of bookmarklets specifically (but not only) for Camino.
Current case - Google sued for patent infringement:
One of the two patents with the number 5,425,085 relates to a technique for establishing the cheapest call connection, the other with the number 5,519,769 describes a system for updating a database with call charges to select the cheapest connection. The lawsuit was filed as early as October 2005 and has now come to light through the New York Post newspaper.
Take another look at the proposals for software patents and consider whether you want to encounter such patents in Europe - and what it would mean. Because exactly such things were covered by the draft from the Federal Ministry of Economics (then still Wolfgang Clement).
I really like the Web Developer Toolbar as an extension, but Firefox itself is sometimes quite a mediocre piece of software. For example, Firefox consistently refuses to display the icons for the Web Developer Toolbar on my Mac at home. And this isn't just with the latest version, but across several versions of both Firefox and the toolbar. The toolbar itself works; it appears as a strip and the menu items are there and functional. It's just that the icons absolutely refuse to appear.
And yes, I've already deleted and recreated the profile, hunted down and eliminated all preferences, reinstalled Firefox multiple times, and done all this with various versions. It's quite annoying, especially since there's no error message whatsoever that even hints at what the issue might be.
The fact that this whole situation runs completely problem-free at work on another Mac Mini (with 10.3, but at home, I've had the same problems with 10.2 and now with 10.4) doesn't make it any clearer.
I guess I'll stick with Camino and Safari for now. They may not be as extensible, but they are more deterministic in their behavior ...
Lisp at Light Speed - a really interesting Lisp blog
CamiTools by nadamac - Server-based ad-blocking for Camino, as well as some other nice extensions.
This time it's the advertising blogger who got caught - the father of the advertising goose (who married this pseudo-musician) warns him that he is advertising with the name of his daughter. Somehow it seems to be spreading - first the Bremen Social Court, now the Klums ...
Well, I think this will be a similar shot in the dark for the Klums as it was for the Bremen Social Court - from whom you can find almost only reports about their rather strange action on the first pages of Google. Very sensible, the action - anyone who wants to inform themselves about the Bremen Social Court now gets the right impression.
What the lawyers expect from such actions is clear: they are paid by their clients for this. However, to what extent such nonsensical actions against name mentions are really in the interest of clients - how does this actually fit with the self-image of lawyers? Shouldn't they advise and represent their clients to the best of their ability? And not mess with them?
However, it is worrying that lawyers now seem to be targeting URL components - it's no longer just the domain that seems to bother them, but also the URLs. Which naturally fits quite often with blogs and good CMS - because a good CMS packs the title into the URL so that it has a meaningful name. Could therefore become quite unpleasant if this plague spreads and possibly a court is found that supports this nonsense.
And the legal protection insurance mentioned several times in this context: I don't know if that's a solution - the insurers are currently regularly excluding these areas, for good reason. An insurance only insures something when the income exceeds the risks to such an extent that they play it safe with their profits - don't believe that insurances are fair insurances - even if some call themselves that.
A bit more about the risks can be found in the Weblawg by Sascha Kremer.
NoScript - Whitelist JavaScript blocking for a safer Firefox experience! - what is it? - InformAction - and another extension, this one selectively blocks JavaScript. I wish for something like this for Camino.
Taste for the Web - a nice cartoon about Paul Graham's articles. Yes, his sometimes rather uncle-like style with constant plugs for Yahoo Stores can get on your nerves from time to time.
We hope that the constitutional complaint against unrestricted customs sniffing in Karlsruhe is successful:
The Humanist Union, a journalist from the Berliner Zeitung and a lawyer with procedural authority before the Federal Constitutional Court have filed a lawsuit in Karlsruhe against the controversial Customs Investigation Service Act. The Bundestag had extended the associated powers of the Federal Customs Criminal Office for the preventive monitoring of mail and telecommunications for 18 months in mid-December despite strong objections from the opposition and civil rights organizations with the votes of the grand coalition. It could thus initially come into force again on December 31, 2005. At the same time as the constitutional complaint was filed, the civil rights activists also applied to declare the law unenforceable until a decision by the Federal Constitutional Court.
It is already quite absurd how the federal government - and the Bundestag through its approval - simply ignores the demands from Karlsruhe. One really starts to wonder what the point of a Basic Law is if any gathering of prolethikers can just trample over it ...
Web Developer Extension - blogged about a thousand times, but only here as a reminder: the new Webdeveloper-Toolbar for FireFox 1.5. Essential for every web developer.
In any case, if the quote in the article about the Research Center for Computer Security at the University of Passau is correctly reproduced:
For this, the Passau scientists have developed test methods that are supposed to detect security vulnerabilities. "The system works very precisely and does not produce false alarms," said Professor Gregor Snelting. "Our analysis method is more complex than standard testing methods, but we guarantee that no security hole will escape us."
Yes, of course. Guaranteed to find all security holes. Logical. Halting problem with programs? Doesn't matter. Software still runs on classic processors, and thus has a completely unsecured layer? Doesn't matter. Of course, we find all security holes.
Nonsense. Such ridiculous claims only disqualify the person who makes them - let's hope that it was just a journalist who heard what he wanted to hear. Or that it was just a dumb assistant who was asked ...
Re: Web application design: the REST of the story - a very interesting discussion of two currently dominant architectural styles for web applications: REST and Continuations.
Send official mail to Shopblogger - the Social Court of Bremen thinks you are not allowed to have websites with "Social Court of Bremen" in the title. There is more information at LawBlog.
One thing is clear - as long as civil servants at courts can waste time with such nonsense, they cannot expect anyone to take their "we are overloaded" seriously.
LGT: Lightweight Game Toolkit for Python - particularly interesting are the NanoThreads (coroutines for Python), the EventNet (enhanced event programming) and Gherkin (an alternative to Pickle/Marshal). There is now an enhanced successor to NanoThreads and EventNet called FibraNet (which is independent of LGT).
Dave Winer released newsRiver.root - his aggregator for the OPML Editor. And what happened again - as so often with him? The character set support is complete garbage. The thing can only correctly read feeds with iso-8859-1, utf-8 feeds get broken special characters. I would really be interested to know if he will ever understand the purpose of character sets like utf-8, or if he will ever give his software a proper basis to support more than just the system character set.
Apart from that, his OPML Editor still forces me to start MSIE - sorry, but that is really ridiculous. And of course there is no easy place to change that - presumably I can change it if I change a setting somewhere in the depths of the Frontier database, which will then possibly be overwritten by the next update ...
And after some searching I found it: in opml.root you have to look for system.verbs.builtins.webBrowser and change the two scripts getDefaultBrowser and launch. In getDefaultBrowser the default is set to MSIE for Carbon, which must be changed to sfri. And in launch you have to add sfri as a valid selection. And yes, the next update in the region will flatten that again ...
SIXTUS.NET - Blog | Dad, where do all these spam comments actually come from? Well, my child, they come from Lindlar, from Sebastian Foss - cute, when a supplier for spam software is then found to be based in Germany. However, this does not surprise me - we also have the dialer scammers.
TP: Not yet tapped to the fullest - 38% of those surveyed agree with the ideas of Intelligent Design. In Germany. On to the Middle Ages ...
Webstemmer - HTML-Grabber that extracts the actual core text from websites based on the layout.
I've already drummed up some support for the RAW Developer from Iridient Digital - back then it was still version 1.2. The new version has definitely become much more rounded and I really like it during my first tests. And even if it's not the fastest converter - it's definitely one of the most powerful. Together with a good image browser like iView Media Pro, it's definitely a more cost-effective and resource-saving alternative to Aperture.
Archaeologist: "Osthoff's work is of immense importance" - but why is she then put under so much pressure? Possibly this is the reason:
There is a financially powerful lobby behind this, which makes money from looted goods from illegal excavations and openly threatens the loss of German jobs if the laws become stricter.
Archaeology is just not in vogue, so you can't motivate anyone - so go for it. Does someone say that the Red Cross should stay away from Iraq? Does anyone demand that other aid organizations withdraw? No. Susanne Osthoff has - in addition to her commitment against looting and thus the destruction of invaluable archaeological finds - also provided humanitarian aid. She knows her risk - which she is willing to take. In Germany, it is too easy for politicians to distance themselves from this. No one will cause a scandal because of a crazy archaeologist ...
Further information on the topic (and a series of links) can be found at sagichdoch.
Schünemann demands ankle bracelets for Islamists - and receives applause from Bavaria. The electronic muzzle demanded by Mc-Pomms Innenseppel, on the other hand, I have long advocated for prolethics. At least Timm noticed that there must be a legally binding conviction before the forced ankle bracelet. Remarkable that a prolethic even notices something like that ...
Glos advocates for more income - because then people would have more money to spend and thus boost domestic demand. Which is why, of course, employers are demanding more work without wage compensation. It's quite amusing when even a Union politician finally understands after many years how consumption works, but the employers' representatives prove that stinginess knows no reason.
I had actually sworn off horror, but at the end of the year, it catches up with you: a competition of banality and nonsense among the federal officials. The federal Horsti has already let off his stack - as usual poorly intoned and so flatly delivered that even the most eager neoliberal should have fallen asleep in their chair. And what does Merkelnix come up with as a response to this? Actually manages to surpass Horsti in banality and nonsense? Perhaps even more sluggishly delivered, so that one can barely muster enough energy to switch channels?
It will always come out eventually - but they all complained in Germany that the strict guidelines were bad for research, that others - for example Korea - were much further ahead and not hindered by silly regulations, and that we would all endanger the research location Germany.
And it was only about who lies better.
Schneier on Security: Internet Explorer Sucks
MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. [...] This underestimates the risk, because it doesn't count vulnerabilities known to the bad guys but not publicly disclosed (and it's foolish to think that such things don't exist). So the "98% unsafe" figure for MSIE is generous, and the situation might be even worse.
Autsch. 7 Tage ohne veröffentlichtes Loch mit passendem Exploit. Und Leute benutzen diesen Müllhaufen immer noch ...
And while we're on the topic of Speculoos (which also fits the season): Leica wants to build a Digital M. There have been rumors and considerations for a long time, but this is quite concrete in the LFI. Sounds very good - a digital M-body would definitely be something I would find exciting. However, I will probably find the price of a digital M less exciting, so I should just keep buying film until I have saved enough from the film material to cover the price of a digital M, which would probably take a few centuries.
Soon there will probably really be Zeiss lenses for Nikon - the images certainly don't look like fakes. Okay, on January 18th we will know for sure, but it already looks very likely that Nikon will become the new Contax. Maybe there will also be optics with Canon adapters in the long run. On the other hand, I am very satisfied with my Canon macros and at least in that area I have nothing to complain about. Nevertheless, some of the Zeiss lenses on a digital camera would of course be quite nice - especially if they are well integrated (the adapter solutions for Canon are unfortunately only suboptimal).
simple_json 1.0 - Alternative to json.py with fewer quirks (therefore with a sociopath as a programmer - but you can't have everything. In this case, functional code is more important than friendly tone).
Just in time for the Christmas season, one of the small Strelitzias has bloomed - actually a bit early, Jutta had expected this in two years. And due to the poor lighting conditions, the individual flowers have faded quite quickly. It's still beautiful, though.
Altruistic impulses of the retail sector
Changes are mainly to be expected due to the planned increase in value-added tax as of January 1, 2007. "Anyone who only raises prices at the turn of the year is to blame themselves," said Rolf Pangels from the BAG retail association to the news agency AP. It is important to create enough leeway in the calculation beforehand, so that one can say on January 1, 2007, that one is keeping prices stable. The spokesman for the German Retail Federation, Hubertus Pellengahr, said that a price increase at this date "would not be accepted by consumers."
Exactly. The wonderfully selfless retail sector is raising prices in anticipation of the tax increase only for us consumers, because we wouldn't accept it otherwise. We are so to speak forcing our money onto the retail sector, we are compelling the poor, misunderstood retail sector to raise prices. We should be ashamed.
Clear signs of dissolution at SCO. Not only are they almost bankrupt:
Without new capital, as shown by the financial figures now presented, the SCO Group would be threatened with bankruptcy.
They are also betting on the dead horse Unix-on-Handhelds:
SCO CEO Darl McBride expressed optimism when presenting the figures. Business would improve again because the focus is on the further development of Unix. McBride's greatest hopes lie in the new technology that SCO has outlined under the name "Me Inc." and which should soon be market-ready. In the conference call on the quarterly figures, McBride described Me Inc. as a Unix-based technology platform for handhelds and digital lifestyle products.
With this strategy, many manufacturers have already left the market - the handheld market itself is massively threatened by smartphones and what remains of the market is dominated by established players who will certainly be very enthusiastic about an SCO desperately looking for a market there. The market is absolutely promising for newcomers, as the various burst dreams of recent times show.
Dispute over cuts in the scientific sector:
On Thursday (22.12.05), SPD parliamentary group leader Hannelore Kraft criticizes that the state subsidies for the science center are to be reduced and will be reduced to zero within four to five years starting in 2006. The consequence would be the complete end for these institutes, as they need state funding to be able to raise third-party funds in the first place. Kraft considers this development "fatal". Contrary to the announcements, the black-yellow coalition is saving on important future areas.
Did anyone really expect anything different? The black-yellow government is simply consistently continuing what the SPD started before - the run-down of NRW. Without rhyme or reason, things are being done wildly, regardless of the cost. The main thing is to be in power and be able to do a lot of damage. In a few years, others will be in power anyway, so why should Prolethikers care about the future? It's only about securing a good position in the economy for the time after the government ...