Archive 21. February 2005

750 votes ...

... about whether Red/Green with the cooperation of the SSW can govern S.-H. for another 4 years. Ouch. You can't really call that a comfortable majority. And somehow, this doesn't make politics in S.-H. any easier to manage ...

Batch Categories 0.9 can batch-process posts into new categories. It's more of a hack than a plugin, but still quite practical under certain circumstances.

Brüderle threatens with anti-Danish resentments

Brüderle criticizes the SSW and demands that they handle their special status responsibly to avoid anti-Danish resentments - hello, still all your cups in the cupboard? What Brüderle is doing here almost borders on blackmail. Do what we want, or we'll bully you could be read into it. Quite stupid. But that's how they are, our Prolethikers ...

All Clear: Mozilla is not disabling Umlaut Domains - although the solution is equivalent to disabling them: the browser simply displays the Punycode notation. So you can enter a Umlaut domain and land on the correct server, but that's it.

Hack a Bike - keep on hacking in a free world! - no idea how old it is, but the text was new to me. How the Berlin rental bikes were hacked. Even Bruce Schneier commented on it.

Image Headlines Plugin for WordPress 1.5 automatically creates image replacements for headers. However, it probably only handles simple images, so you would still need to place invisible text under the H-tag to ensure that search engines don't just take the ALT attribute of the image for the header. And of course, image replacements have a significant drawback: they do not grow when the user changes the base font size.

Get a Spanner in the Works

Now I'm being pelted with wood here. Well, I'm a good-natured person and it does promote the PageRank. How many gigantic bytes of music are stored on your computer?

7GB of music alone and I don't know how many more GB of audio plays. All completely legally ripped or downloaded. Actually, not much... The last CD you bought...

Haindling, "Achtung, Achtung". Which song were you listening to when the call came?

Kraftwerk, "The Model" (yes, unfortunately the English version - last.fm doesn't have the German one). And yes, I'm an old fart. Five songs that mean a lot to me or that I listen to often:

  • Grummel. That's by far not enough to even begin to ... Give me 50 ...

  • Kate Bush, "Babooshka" (my song, and I won't tell you why)

  • Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "Black Moon" (or anything where they rock - piano not needed, but rock must)

  • Pink Floyd, "Money" (because that's all it's about)

  • Steve Miller, "The Joker" (yeah. simple and plain.)

  • Madness, "One Step Beyond" (because I always feel young then)

Who do you throw this stick to (3 people) and why?

  • [Jutta][2], because she writes so little
  • [Christian][3], for the same reason and because he needs links for his blog
  • [ToJe][4], because he is probably the freshest new addition to the Münster blogosphere

OpenPGPComment for WordPress

OpenPGPComment is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display signed comments properly. Users can sign their comments with gpg, and the server then displays these comments without the signature in the post comments, but offers a popup window with the gpg output as a link. Nice idea.

Digitally signed comments are not only useful for associating comments with users - they also offer advantages for the user themselves. Specifically, it is ensured that signed comments have not been subsequently altered by the server operator. A not insignificant advantage, especially in weblogs, where the server owner usually has significantly more options available.

I would have liked to try it out myself, but it requires proc open - and proc open is only available from PHP 4.3 onwards. And in Debian Woody, there is still a PHP 4.1.2 ...

Paranoia, advanced - so I'm not the only one wondering about these slightly crazy measures. The crazy part: the Americans expect such a show from us. At this point, you almost wish the guy would stay away ...

rdiff-backup and duplicity

rdiff-backup and duplicity are very practical backup tools that use the rsync algorithm to efficiently copy over the network and, unlike normal rsync, also store historical versions. rdiff-backup uses a mirror+reverse-delta format and duplicity uses a base-version+forward-delta format. The latest version of librsync, on which both projects are based, should also transport Mac OS X metadata, so it could also be useful for OS X. I have already successfully used rdiff-backup for Linux backups.

Spammers are really quite stupid ...

... someone is struggling with my trackbacks right now. Every hour. Almost exactly at 25 minutes past the hour. With strongly varying IP addresses. The texts are also very different - and non-spammy. But what is the idiot doing? Trackbacking the same link every time. A link that I already put on the bad link list two weeks ago. Somehow not particularly smart, because everything ends up in the trash directly. Ok, otherwise everything would end up in the moderation queue, which wouldn't help him either.

Rabies (Rabies, Lyssa)

Medicine-Worldwide: Rabies (Rabies, Lyssa) describes rabies and its course in humans. And of course, there is a rabies page on Wikipedia.