This will please the shockwave rider: SVG is enabled by default in Safari Nightlies. The special thing about it: now documents can contain mixed XHTML and SVG tags and be styled with a common CSS - which opens up pretty cool possibilities, as the SVG objects are no longer embedded with OBJECT or EMBED tags, but are an integral part of the document.
Microsoft Germany chief warns of "severe IT skills shortage":
Gallmann had already complained in November that there was a lack of young talent. IT companies would hire graduates from abroad under these circumstances, he said three weeks ago. Now the Microsoft Germany chief has backed up his warning with more figures: Even now, the demand for IT engineers can only be met to 80 percent.
Everyone can complain well, and they are masters at warning. However, most avoid the consequence of training themselves. Large companies that really lack IT professionals can easily remedy this shortage on their own: create training positions. This then has the added advantage that these employees know the company well when they become productive. But perhaps the consequence is not understandable for business graduates.
Instead, companies continue to look for employees in their mid-20s with a degree and 10 years of professional experience even for normal IT jobs. And then they complain that vocational training in Germany takes too long and that skilled workers are too expensive - well, what do you expect if you constantly only want fully qualified graduates?
Can someone please explain to me why Apple implemented AirTunes in such a way that it seems only iTunes can work with it? That's highly stupid. If I already have a way to connect my stereo system to my Mac, I don't want to use it just for iTunes - at least the DVD Player should get the same comfort. Even better would be a general solution - although I would understand if they didn't do that. After all, AirTunes requires streaming digital music - and in a suitable streaming format. But DVDs already produce that natively, so why can't I select an AirTunes device? Rarely stupid.
FireWire not dead, but it's on life support - but the life support is pretty bad. Just checked again: the new iPods (Nano and Video) no longer have FireWire. Which is quite ridiculous, because my Mac Mini doesn't have USB 2 - and I really don't want to copy my music collection with USB 1. What is Apple thinking with such a stupid thing? FireWire can certainly not be replaced by this miserable USB 2. Even new computers will probably only reluctantly include a FireWire port if the machines from Apple are considered suitable for video content. A real shame, because FireWire is a really useful connection technology that also offers good performance reserves for future devices - and unlike USB 2, it doesn't overload the CPU with data shoveling.
appscript - Python as an alternative to AppleScript. Thus, application control via the AppleScript interfaces directly from Python programs.
PEAK has been offering generic functions similar to CLOS for Python for quite some time. I always wanted to play around with it, but for a long time it was just part of PyProtocols, and the installation was a bit tricky. However, since September of this year, it has been decoupled and much easier to install. So I dove right in.
And I must say: wow. What Phillip J. Eby has accomplished is truly fantastic. The integration with Python (works from Python 2.3 - he even invented his own implementation of decorators for Python 2.3) is superb, even if, of course, some things take a bit of getting used to.
A small example:
import dispatch
[dispatch.generic()]
def anton(a,b):
"handle two objects"
[anton.when('isinstance(a,int) and isinstance(b,int)')]
def anton(a,b):
return a+b
[anton.when('isinstance(a,str) and isinstance(b,str)')]
def anton(a,b):
return a+b
[anton.when('isinstance(a,str) and isinstance(b,int)')]
def anton(a,b):
return a*b
[anton.when('isinstance(a,int) and isinstance(b,str)')]
def anton(a,b):
return b*a
[anton.before('True')]
def anton(a,b):
print type(a), type(b)
This small example simply provides a function called 'anton', which executes different code based on the parameter types. The example is of course completely nonsensical, but it shows some important properties of generic functions:
A pretty good article about RuleDispatch (the generic functions package) can be found at Developerworks.
The example, by the way, shows the Python 2.3 syntax for decorators. With Python 2.4, of course, the @ syntax can also be used. One disadvantage should not be kept secret: the definition of generic functions and their methods is not possible interactively - at least not with the Python 2.3 syntax. Unfortunately, you generally have to work with external definitions in files here.
RuleDispatch will definitely find a place in my toolbox - the syntax is simple enough, the possibilities, however, are gigantic. As an event system, it surpasses any other system in flexibility, and as a general way of structuring code, it comes very close to CLOS. It's a shame that Django will likely align with PyDispatch - in my opinion, RuleDispatch would fit much better (as many aspects in Django could be written as dispatch on multiple parameter types).
LTK - The Lisp Toolkit - if it should just be a bit of GUI, but not necessarily the big hammer is needed - LTK offers simple bindings for TK in Common Lisp. Works excellently with OpenMCL together, even CLISP likes it.
Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours - A whole book about shell programming. And of course, a pretty good introduction to the various tools that Unix systems provide. Certainly recommended for anyone who, for example, has gotten a root server and now wants to do more with it - but otherwise knows Linux mainly from the GUI.
A multi-ton Moore sculpture stolen
How the Bundestag continues to trample on the decisions from Karlsruhe:
Sharp protests also come from the Humanist Union (HU): "The majority of the Bundestag has once again duped the Federal Constitutional Court," indignant is their deputy federal chairman Fredrik Roggan. The argumentation of the Black-Red coalition is an affront: "First, parliament and government let an entire year pass idly by, in which they could have created a constitutionally compliant regulation, only to then refer to time constraints just before the deadline." It is scandalous that Karlsruhe increasingly has to stop the lawmaker who has gotten out of control. The HU announced that it will file a constitutional complaint against the law and apply for interim legal protection to prevent the regulations on customs powers from taking effect.
It is already highly absurd how meanwhile even the clearly understandable judgments from Karlsruhe apparently do not find their way into the minds of the proletarians. As a result, the restriction of the large-scale eavesdropping has now been reduced to absurdity - one can simply have the customs listen in, instead of the somewhat restricted police ...
Nobody wants GMO food, but Seehofer doesn't care:
There should be no preferential treatment for organic farming under his watch. "Conventional farmers are just as important to me as organic farmers," he said.
Unlike Künast, Seehofer also wants to promote the cultivation of genetically modified plants. These play an increasingly important role worldwide - "this must also be possible in Germany". So far, farmers have been almost prevented from cultivating them by the strict liability rules. He will change the biotechnology law decided by the Red-Green coalition. However, the protection of humans and the environment will remain guaranteed.
Oh really - for him, organic farming and conventional farmers are equally important? Of course, both are screwed with the genetically modified plants. It's getting harder and harder for organic farmers to farm biologically - don't tell me that wind pollinators suddenly aren't anymore, just because they've been genetically modified. And the conventional farmers? They will only be more strongly tied to the corporations that want to bring this crap to market.
Genetically modified plant and seed material is not in the interest of consumers or agriculture. It is solely in the interest of large corporations, which patent this crap and thereby gain even stronger control over the means used. Seehofer is selling out agriculture and consumers - and in doing so, he actually treats all parts equally badly.
However, I don't quite understand why the crackpot then calls himself Minister of Agriculture and Consumer Protection - just call him Corporate Minister, that's closer to the truth.
[GOODIE] Headless Squeak for OS X (Re: Mac VM 3.2.X)](http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2002-April/037668.html) - how to get a headless Squeak (Smalltalk environment without GUI component) running under OS X for server services. Particularly interesting for using Seaside.
Hyper Estraier: a full-text search system for communities - Full-text database with attribute search and some other nice features - as well as bindings for various programming languages
The Xapian Project - another full-text indexer, this one with various advanced features such as stemming for different languages.
The takeover of Kamps by Barilla is part of a major banking scandal in Italy:
Among other things, the top banker is said to have made millions in profits through illegal insider trading on the stock exchange for himself and selected customers. One of the most lucrative of these shady deals is, according to details that have become known today from the investigation files, apparently the takeover of the German large bakery Kamps by the Italian conglomerate Barilla almost four years ago.
Someone really didn't make small rolls here. Pasta and banks go well with the Mafia and other Italian oddities, but a German large bakery? How bourgeois ...
Inets 2.5.5 - Webserver in Erlang
Is Rails a DSL? What is a DSL, and is it possible in Python? - Domain Specific Languages - a quite useful description and examination of the situation in Python and Ruby.
The Flensburg Regional Court strengthens the position of providers against surveillance demands - but how long will this last, given the activities of the EU and our federal justice incompetence?
"Under no legal aspect" can an access provider be required to "store any data or information," the court from the far north makes clear.
Linux Daemon Writing HOWTO - how to write a daemon under Linux (general information)
Yaws - another web server in Erlang - this one is HTTP 1.1 compatible and contains approaches for web development
Python Cheese Shop : python-fastcgi 1.0 - FastCGI implementation based on the OpenMarket FastCGI C library and therefore significantly faster than pure Python solutions.
Python OpenID 1.0.1 Released — OpenID Enabled - OpenID client and server in Python. I should check it out, could be quite interesting for comment functions.
I can only agree with Petra Tursky-Hartmann - the way this nonsense was pushed through is terrible. Really terrible. Pure activism without any real meaning - but you feel so terribly safe when everything is properly recorded and archived. The whole data waste doesn't provide any information - on the contrary, it will cause trouble. But who cares if citizens soon get into trouble because viruses or spam with forged sender addresses are sent to random addresses, and then a citizen of Arab origin is considered a terrorism suspect. It doesn't matter, it doesn't affect good German citizens.
And we are still allowed to drive faster than 130 on the highway. We are free.
Addendum: At XS4ALL there is a nice Lifecounter, which counts how many CDs are necessary for storing the email log data since September 2005 ...
and then give us even more advertising junk:
"For the European Commission, improved control by the end consumer means that we need fewer legal regulations," emphasized media commissioner Viviane Reding. "Therefore, the core of our proposal for a new, modernized TV directive is a fundamental deregulation of audiovisual rules."
For the population, improved control of the elected officials through strong blows with sticks and kicks to the soft parts means that we get fewer brainless legislative proposals. Therefore, the core of my proposal for a more efficient design of European politics is the introduction of corporal punishment for members of the European Commission.
Hacking the jProject - The Daily WTF - ouch. An order system where each order is stored in its own table in the SQL Server. Great idea.
How-To Guide for Descriptors - a very good explanation of how properties work in Python and what the magic methods get, set, and del are all about (and how getattribute plays into this).
Jacobian.org : Django performance tips - Jacob, one of the Django Core-Devs, writes about performance tuning for Django applications. Strongly aligns with my experiences.
What would actually happen if the GNOME developers went to the Linux Kernel Mainling list and announced that they recommend users to use FreeBSD because the chroot model of Linux is pathetic, and the kernel APIs are a mess anyway, and Linux still doesn't have really good filesystem notifications, and the development of Linux simply doesn't take GUI requirements into account enough. Therefore, they would suggest users to use FreeBSD, because the Linux kernel programmers are all idiots anyway.
What would Linus' reaction look like?
pgpool page - interesting connection proxy for PostgreSQL with connection pooling and database failover.
Zypries will Dateitauschbörsen bekämpfen:
The Minister of Justice wants to help protect copyright and trademarks better. On the Internet, this primarily affects file-sharing networks.
Disclosure of names. Fixed compensation claims. Right to demand bank and business records. But she doesn't talk about how all this mess should be controlled so that it is not further abused, does she, the Federal Incompetence.
His latest move: FDP will not form a coalition with the Greens at the federal level
"The Greens are a political opponent and not a strategic partner," said Westerwelle after the board meeting. Furthermore, it is not the FDP's task to lead the Greens out of their insignificance, said the FDP leader. However, Westerwelle does not see the "collegial parliamentary work" with the Greens endangered by the renunciation of the coalition option.
So, two things are really impressive about this:
What kind of stuff is he smoking, anyway?
How mentally deranged do you have to be to publicly call for a mass lawsuit against Wikipedia (see the report at netbib), and then explicitly list making money as the goal? To stand up as if Wikipedia were an evil corporation that needs to be sued into the ground? And then not even have the guts to put their pathetic name next to it, so you can directly see what kind of sausages are behind it?
Stealing and modifying the Wikipedia logo to use it for their own site wasn't even too embarrassing for them.
I feel a bit weird about this: I rip audio drama CDs where the tracks are not numbered sequentially, but are just titles. After ripping, I put the titles into a fixed playlist so that they are in the correct order there. When I look at the order, it's all mixed up. So far, I can't recognize any meaningful pattern that could be the basis for this. Of course, this is extremely annoying, especially with audio dramas - since many audio dramas do not have the explicit order in their booklet, I sometimes have to sort them together laboriously myself.
With the Otherland CDs, it was nice: those who did the CDDB data entry had numbered all the small pieces sequentially. Now with "Wachen! Wachen!" I have to sort all 5 CDs again - fortunately, the titles on the pieces are identical to those in the booklet, so I can do this manually.
But it's really quite stupid that I have to do this - because why do I have a computer? Why can't iTunes just leave the order of the tracks as they come in?
Guardian Unlimited Special reports How planespotters turned into the scourge of the CIA - Article in the Guardian about how the CIA was "caught" by plane spotters (and possibly continues to be caught).
And the DRM nonsense continues
EFF member Cory Doctorow warns that the widespread use of CPCM would mean the end of free software. The requirement to make the system robust against any modification is incompatible with FOSS concepts. Furthermore, national copyright policy could be easily circumvented by CPCM, as US cultural exporters dictate the political rules. The EFF wants to prevent the standard at all costs. "This is," according to Doctorow's opinion, "no specification that can be used for good purposes, period."
If you read through the description of the whole thing, someone is ultimately demanding total control over any form of computer or media device - ultimately over any device that could even come close to media content. Complete madness, the whole thing. The frightening thing about it: with the brainless prolethicians like we have running around in Berlin and in Europe in general, it is almost to be feared that such nonsense will prevail and the freedoms will simply be traded for dying industries with bloated and outdated business models to cover up their management errors.
And will anyone get upset about it? Oh well. You can still drive faster than 130 on the highway, we are free ...
There is currently a lot of activity in the area of Microformats - the idea behind it: to store information blocks not in XML, but in predefined HTML. CSS classes are then used to define what a single format is. Logically, there are problems with colliding styles - what a surprise. I myself am always amazed at how much energy developers can spend on stupid ideas.
We once had HTML that not only dealt with semantics but also with layout. And that produced the all-time favorite FONT-TAG orgies on HTML pages. Over time, most people have come to the realization that separating semantics and layout makes sense - semantics as a basis for marking up content, layout in the CSS files, and as a connection between these, the IDs and classes on tags. Additionally, with DIV and SPAN "anonymous" tags without predefined semantics (except "this is a block of text" and "this is an inline stretch of text" - where this meaning can be easily overloaded), for things that don't work with the normal semantic markup (which is mainly due to the rather stupid idea of HTML that there are markings for headings, but no markings for sections of text to which these headings would belong).
What do Microformats do now? Well, the same stupid idea of misusing something - namely in this case the connecting pieces between semantics and layout mentioned above. Microformats give these a meaning - for example, a DIV with a class 'description' would then be the description of a review - read the details in the hReview reference. Sorry, but this must inevitably lead to conflicts - have the idiots never heard of namespaces? The Microformats explicitly address XHTML - and that has exactly the purpose of embedding namespaces. And if you think you have to implement such a stupid idea - couldn't you at least be smart enough to give the parts more cryptic but unambiguous classes?
As I said, it's amazing how much energy goes into such stupid ideas that are doomed to create more problems than solutions.
Deadlock - interesting article about deadlocks in systems and about zombie processes, signal handling, etc.
Would actually hacking the security system for securing the one-way deposit be a terrorist act?
Concerted action against freely accessible sheet music and song lyrics
MPA President Lauren Keiser expressed extreme annoyance to the BBC about the allegedly illegal sites with guitar licks and sheet music templates and would prefer to see their operators behind bars. Basically, music is subject to copyright not only as a concrete performance, but also in any printed notation.
Soon you'll end up in jail if you accidentally fart to the beat of "All My Ducks" ...
UCI's response to the Grand Tours' ranking idea of the three major tours:
"As the only actor in this reform who does not want to defend or promote its own economic interests, the UCI will never share such a superfluous and dangerous vision that harms the development of cycling," said an official statement. The introduction or amendment of the regulations is solely the responsibility of the international federation.
You can already see how the UCI troops are forming to infiltrate the offices of the three major tour organizations and arrest the ringleaders. After that, there will be a penal camp for recalcitrant tour organizers who do not want to submit to the UCI. Maybe they will also get support from 'Mad Eye' Serlet?
The US of A, Land of the Free and the Stupid, is once again playing the top bully:
Even experienced summit participants from Western Europe are shocked behind the scenes by the boorish behavior of the American chief negotiators, who act here like John Bolton at the UN, and "hide their academic education well."
I am shocked at most by the naivety of politicians who are so surprised by America's behavior - as if the current reports do not speak a very clear language that the current US administration does not give a damn about the wishes of others and that international law does not have a particularly important status for them. Why should they behave differently at the climate summit?
Even more shocking, however, is how Merkel is constantly talking about how relations with the USA need to be improved - I would be happy about that, but please only with a next, possibly rational administration that is accessible to arguments. The current one is not coalition-capable, to use a term that is often used here for something as harmless as the PDS ... (fear of pale-red marked Ossies, but want to be with something like Bush - I call that shocking)
A rather ugly - but still useful - monkeypatch:
# monkey-patch for auth.users
from django.models.auth import User
def user_pre_save(self):
if not self.password.startswith('sha1$'):
self.set_password(self.password)
User._pre_save = user_pre_save
Put this into your model file (or somewhere else that is loaded early on) and you will be able to set passwords in the admin by entering clear text passwords. If the password starts with 'sha1$', it is seen as already encrypted and nothing happens. If it doesn't start with that string, it is converted using the standard Django function for password encryption.
No, this isn't something that should go into core - it's far too ugly for that. But at least it allows you to set passwords through the admin, without requiring the user to calculate the actual password hash.
Sony caught in another DRM snafu
Stop me if you've heard this one before. A record label uses DRM to sort of keep its customers from copying the music. It turns out that the software poses a threat to the user's PC. So the label issues a patch... which opens up another security hole. If you guessed that the label in question is Sony, you'd be correct. If you guessed that I'm recapping last month's rootkit debacle, you'd be wrong.
Oh well. Rarely so stupid at Sony. Will they ever learn?
Oh, and the fact that I probably won't get an Aibo offered now is, to be honest, pretty irrelevant to me.
Frequently used: SystemExit. A Python exception that many people don't know. The special thing about this exception: it is not an error. It also does not occur unexpectedly. It is simply triggered by sys.exit. The idea behind this is that you can insert an end processing in the dynamic flow (e.g. some file cleanups), without linking into global exit processing (with all the problems that entails).
The problem is that many programs and libraries install a global exception handler. One that catches every error and sends it nicely formatted by mail, logs it somewhere or something similar. I do this all the time. It also works great - except when you actually want to initiate an early end in your program. Then nothing works anymore - because you get corresponding errors for a non-error.
This becomes particularly critical in connection with multiple processes. If you start a process during operation, you also want to terminate it without executing any subsequent code. You can best see this in an example program:
import signal
import os
try:
pid = os.fork()
if pid:
print "Elternprozess", os.getpid()
else:
print "Kindprozess", os.getpid()
sys.exit(0)
except:
print 'Fehler aufgetreten in Prozess', os.getpid()
print "Das darf nur der Elternprozess ausführen", os.getpid()
This code simply has a global error handler that catches errors in a rather unspecific way. Within the code, a parallel process is started with fork. However, since SystemExit is treated like all other exceptions, the child process is not terminated correctly - a process copies the entire state of the parent process, including return addresses, open error handling, files, database connections and so on.
This is of course fatal - because here sys.exit is caught. So there is an error message for the quite normal sys.exit(0) call. And even worse: since SystemExit is not treated separately, it continues normally afterwards - and the child process runs into code for the parent process. Code runs double, which can have critical results under certain circumstances.
If you can fully control the entire software stack, the solution is simple:
import signal
import os
try:
pid = os.fork()
if pid:
print "Elternprozess", os.getpid()
else:
print "Kindprozess", os.getpid()
sys.exit(0)
except SystemExit:
raise
except:
print 'Fehler aufgetreten in Prozess', os.getpid()
print "Das darf nur der Elternprozess ausführen", os.getpid()
This simply re-raises the SystemExit - i.e. triggers it again - without making a message. In most cases, Python's standard handling will then kick in and convert the SystemExit into a normal termination.
But what to do if you have several stacked variants of the wrong error handling? I had something like this with Django and FLUP (the FCGI/SCGI server for Python). In Django I changed it, then the error hit in FLUP. What do you do then?
The solution is a bit more brutal:
import signal
import os
try:
pid = os.fork()
if pid:
print "Elternprozess", os.getpid()
else:
print "Kindprozess", os.getpid()
os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGTERM)
except:
print 'Fehler aufgetreten in Prozess', os.getpid()
print "Das darf nur der Elternprozess ausführen", os.getpid()
Ultimately, the process simply commits suicide - it sends itself a SIGTERM, i.e. a termination signal. The same one you would normally send from the shell. However, you must then ensure that any necessary post-cleanups are either already done, or then run in a SIGKILL handling routine - otherwise you may have problems (e.g. database transactions should already be committed).
With this solution, you also have to be careful that no open resources block the process - otherwise you may produce zombie processes. Often it is better for such multiprocessing to start a management process much earlier in the system - outside the error handling chain - and then use it to start processing processes. However, this then has the disadvantage that processes started in this way do not inherit the environment of the parent process. Therefore, you usually have to make more preparations to perform the desired actions. Incidentally, Apache pursues a similar approach - there the processes are created from a very early basic state, so that they come as resource-free as possible.
Vampire - An extension of mod_python that makes it more developer-friendly. For example, it can also perform automatic code reloading.
Is she alive? At least there are rumors about it. However, sentences like this one make me a bit irritated:
Leiter des Dharma-Projekts soll Bertrand 'Mad Eye' Serlet sein, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering bei Apple, der auch schon an der Entwicklung von iCal und iSync beteiligt gewesen sein soll.
I mean, come on, what kind of names are these? Mafia? Mercenaries? Lost Wild West figures?
Apple Aperture Review - or: Beware of Version 1.0 | The Voice of the Free World - found in my comments (originally on the old site) a scathing review of Apple Aperture. The article is in German and very interesting, as it is written from the perspective of a regular user.
... to find a website about erectile dysfunction medications, penis enlargement, and all that junk that's offered in spam, which has a seemingly correct German imprint with address, VAT ID, and all that. Ouch. Did the operator read a bit too much spam?
Even more shocking when such a website is then apparently promoted by the owner in blogs by entering it as a homepage in comment functions. Double ouch.
Learning Seaside - cool demo of what can be done with Seaside (Smalltalk web framework) and AJAX. Essentially a database interface with a freely configurable database model - something like Google Base, only cooler.
So, I have just completed the switch: on the old address, only the big redirector is running now, which pushes everything here. In the process, all the old redirects from the time before WordPress have also been eliminated. It's incredible how many still want to collect old RSS feeds from the PyDS era. Never mind, they are finally gone now, the WordPress stuff is largely redirected, and otherwise, pure Python is working here again.