Archive 10. July 2005

FineTunes I need to remember. MP3s and OGGs without DRM. And the music selection is also somewhat usable at first glance. I need to browse through it ...

Assign JavaScript Actions to CSS Selectors

Cool stuff: Behaviour is a JavaScript library that allows you to bind JavaScript actions to CSS selectors. The advantage: the actions disappear from the HTML code - making it much slimmer. And the actions can be adapted to new requirements at any time by changing the selectors.

In my first applications of Ajax, I stumbled upon exactly this problem: the JavaScript actions clutter the code that has just been painstakingly reduced to semantic HTML. Exactly what used to annoy me about all the table layouts now annoys me about the whole JavaScript thing. A clean separation of code, semantics, and style is exactly what I need. Actually, something like this should be part of the HTML standard.

I definitely need to try this out, because if it's usable in terms of performance, I should take a closer look at a few of the last Ajax actions and change them ...

Jens Voigt in Yellow

I love this. A truly strong stage winner with an outstanding performance. A technically perfect team time trial by Voigt and Moreau. The overall classification has been shaken up and the yellow jersey is with one of my favorite riders (the other one isn't allowed to participate this year). Hey, as far as I'm concerned, Jens Voigt can wear the color for a few more days.

What for Jutta: UnicodeChecker allows for easier navigation in the Unicode character set and finding the corresponding characters by name. Additionally, it provides information about characters (e.g. whether there is a capital/small variant, etc.).

macminicolo Mac Mini colocation - set up your own Mac Mini in a data center. Is there something like this in Germany?

Plash: the Principle of Least Authority shell

Interesting concept: Plash is a shell that inserts a library under programs through which all accesses to the file system are sent. This allows you to control which functions a program is actually allowed to execute. This time, it is not about protecting against user activities, but about protecting the user against activities of the program. Especially when installing programs that you do not know, you can sometimes catch Trojans - Plash helps here by explicitly only enabling the areas of the disk for the program that it actually needs.

For this purpose, all accesses to the file system are internally routed via a own mini-server - the actual program is executed under a freshly allocated user in a own chroot-jail, so it has no chance to do anything outside that is not explicitly allowed.

Very interesting concept, especially for system administrators. Unfortunately (as expected) it does not work with grsecurity - of course, grsecurity is supposed to help prevent some of the tricks used in Plash. In this case, it fails due to the requirement of executable stack.

I am a die-hard S5 fan, but if you prefer simpler HTML structures based on multiple files, then maybe pylize is a solution. With PyLize, slides are generated from a presentation file as individual HTML pages with common styling.

This will surely please the Schockwellenreiter: KSVG2 (and KDOM and KCanvas) has been integrated into WebCore. It's only experimental for now, but it's a start. Maybe SVG will eventually find a useful distribution.