Acratech, Inc: Precision Machining & Photographic Equipment - Manufacturer and marketer of the Ultimate Ballhead
Archive 31. May 2004
Jan Ullrich in the Tour of Germany
In the time trial, he clearly showed that he really is back to full strength. The fact that Michael Rich took 24 seconds from him in the end is not a big deal - you can afford to lose in a time trial against someone like Michael Rich, the man is simply an exceptional rider. So a really great race overall. But absolutely top-notch was the performance of the Gerolsteiner team: getting 4 riders into the top 8 positions is quite something. Not many people can match that.
However, the ARD should learn to use their microphones properly. That was total chaos at the end.
KODAK PROFESSIONAL READYLOAD Single Sheet Packs and Holder - 4x5 inch single sheet film cartridge system for easy sheet film use
Lycos - web hosting
Great terms they have there: Copyrighted or illegal material may not be stored and may not be offered for download. Under German law, everything someone writes is automatically protected by copyright, if I remember correctly. So I wouldn't be allowed to publish my own content that I write myself if I host it there, since this own content is protected by copyright.
Mark Lentczner's Journal
Ouch. A periodic table of Perl operators. Could it be that someone went a little too far with the definition of possible operators in Perl? Just a tiny bit? The original article is here.
Syndication formats cause of progressive dementia?
Who wants to know what a typical civilized discussion about syndication formats looks like should just follow the link. Surprisingly, Dave Winer behaves very orderly in that thread. The same cannot be said for Mark Pilgrim. Quite amusing - ultimately, what I suspected back then comes to pass: if it's good for nothing else, the Atom format at least makes for a great network psychology experiment. On the technical side: Atom is poorly designed. The louder Pilgrim and his Pilgrim-Fathers-of-Atom-Format shout, the more embarrassing the whole affair becomes. During the discussion about the Atom API, criticism was frequently expressed that PUT and DELETE as HTTP verbs were unusual and often not supported. The comment on that was that these people should just throw their toolkits away if they couldn't handle standard techniques. At the same time, these same people specially invented their own authentication scheme for HTTP just for Atom, which merely reinvents the technique of Digest Auth under a different name and with different syntax - arguing that many toolkits and server technologies don't support Digest Auth. Yes, that's right, the exact same argument was used by Pilgrim and company in two opposite directions. So much for consistency of argumentation.
Another example: there's constant harping on how consistent the Atom format is with respect to tags. Curiously though, while all links in the format are mapped via the Link tag (and specified with corresponding rel attributes), they define three different tags just for date specifications - even though a single Date tag with rel attribute for the type of date would be far more logical in this context.
Also amusing was the discussion about the type of API - many wanted an XMLRPC API, simply because RPC integrates well into programming. What prevailed was the document faction, who prefer an API with REST structure (because documents are natively managed there via GET/POST/PUT/DELETE). Fair enough - I can accept that. But embarrassing was the manner in which various REST proponents tried to argue why XMLRPC wouldn't work. Which is rather silly given the widespread use of XMLRPC for all kinds of purposes. And for someone familiar with RPC-style APIs, the whole discussion was more of a staircase joke than a serious technical discussion. How old is RPC as a programming technique in the Unix environment? 20 years? But of course that's all just imagination...
Well, what can you expect from people who take the fact that Googlegroups and Blogger all forcibly received Atom feeds as the basis for claiming that Atom is already more widespread than RSS today? Now can you understand why it's really no pleasure to deal with content syndication? Only psychopaths and cranks in that field, hardly a mentally normal person to be found. Can someone now explain to me why I programmed my own aggregator for the Python Desktop Server? Here's the original article.
The Contiki Operating System - System for computers with limited memory
Web Development Bookmarklets
Lots of nice bookmarklets (small JavaScript snippets that can be triggered via bookmarks) for web developers. The named anchor one is particularly handy - it makes anchors in text visible so you can link to them. Without this bookmarklet you're left digging through the source code (or possibly CSS hacks). Here's the original article.