Archive January 2008
Ver.di sacks official, NPD is pleased - anyone who wants to know what's wrong in our society should read this. Because a union that wants to fire an engaged anti-fascist - how does that go together with the idea of a union? Our society has such a hatred for the left and flirts so much with the right that you can actually feel sick. And this is not just the case in the new federal states ...
Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work - also the reference to the 40-hour week and Henry Ford. But of course, our proletarians know everything better and therefore advocate the 42-hour week ...
Wilber loves Apple - since Photoshop Elements keeps crashing on me (and of course, I have no idea what the nonsense is supposed to mean), I've once again dealt with Gimp and Mac. Wilber loves Apple is a very well-made collection of Gimp for Mac, ready for drag-and-drop installation and, in my opinion, much better than the more well-known Gimp.App (for example, Wilber loves Apple finally shows all filters and scripts even when the German interface is set, which Gimp.App does not do).
Ruffles for "Existential Threatening" Warning File of the Insurance Industry - and another pot in which data is diligently collected so that some companies can steal themselves from the performance expected of them. And customers are diligently driven into the maw of potential customers with the privatization of parts of old-age provision and health insurance ...
Valued Lessons: Monads in Python (with nice syntax!) - interesting approach using Python 2.5 bidirectional generators.
At a Loss for Words - fascinating. Microsoft just removes support for old file formats from Office 2003 - with a service pack. Great idea. Have fun those who have archived their documents in Word or Excel format ... there are hardly better reasons to switch to open programs like OpenOffice, or?
Backscatterer.org, another antisocial and technically stupid blocklist - idiots at work. Once again, an antisocial and stupid wannabe expert tries to redefine the Internet according to his opinion. This time it's against sender callouts - a technique that helps quite well against spam because addresses can be checked for validity with it. And all with minimal effort for the mail servers - a small sequence of HELO, MAIL FROM and RCPT TO (which would come later in any case with every bounce) and then directly a QUIT - so no mail in the queue, but only a check based on SMTP. The argument that he has to deal with the verifiers in addition to the bounces is nonsense - because if the verify does not come, the bounces come from these failed mails, because not only the senders are in a much larger part garbage, also the recipients (of the mail traffic that we push, only the smallest part is actually valid in terms of emails). Turning off the verification only leads to a greater occurrence of bounces - and they are expensive, because they go into the mail queue, while the verifies do not go there. The argument about loops is also stupid - correct callbacks happen with an empty envelope-from, so the other server knows immediately that it does not need to perform verification (in principle, a bounce delivery is simulated, and loops are also prevented by the empty envelope-from). The purpose of the verification is to answer the question of whether you could send a bounce to the technical sender in case of doubt. If you can't do that, you can't accept a mail if you can't directly guarantee to check all the factors up front. This is a completely legitimate procedure and absolutely conformant with the RFCs. The operators of this list are only surpassed in stupidity by the mail administrators who enter such a list into their server as a blocklist. How stupid do you have to be for that? I know how stupid, because since today I know the first server that does this ...
base2 - a library that smooths out JavaScript differences between browsers.
Dean Edwards: IE7.js version 2.0 (beta) - new version of the brilliant JavaScript library that turns IE into a somewhat compliant browser.
Child pornography: Companies to evaluate hard drives - "In their investigations against child pornography in connection with the nationwide operation 'Heaven,' the Berlin police want to use internet specialists from external companies." - as if it were such a good idea to hand over private data (and every hard drive contains such data) to companies instead of having it examined by officials. What nonsense is this? Of course, the volume of data may overwhelm the officials - but one could have realized that beforehand. Now, however, to ultimately devalue all potential evidence by handing it over to entities outside the investigating authorities is quite a strange action.
Mars collision becomes more likely - just make sure it doesn't fall on top of Spirit or Opportunity!
Scratch Home imagine, program, share - a fun project to introduce children to programming in a graphical way. For my taste, it's too much based on the old Structogram technique, but still quite nice to look at. Additionally, it's nice that a Mac version is also available.
Adobe products communicate via dubious web address - Adobe is just a pigsty. This already started with the forced registration of the Creative Suite.
BGH: Raids against globalization critics were unlawful - it's becoming normal that the state doesn't care about its own laws ...
Django on Jython: Minding the Gap - wow. It's getting closer. And as a side effect, Jython will get closer to current Python. Cool!
HD Monitor Causes DRM Issues with Netflix - Netflix checks the output hardware and if it's too good, it prohibits playing files. And the kicker: if you follow the suggested troubleshooting path, rights for other files seem to be revoked (in the case of the OP then the rights for the movies purchased at Amazon). Great. DRM is garbage - and especially the one so often praised by the film industry, Microsoft's blob.
iCab is back - and uses WebKit. What I always found interesting about iCab were the very powerful filtering options. And of course it's nice that it's a real OS X program (unlike Firefox, which is still too bulky under OS X).
Is Australia building a Great Firewall? - "Youth protection sounds good. But what is presented as youth protection resembles the Great Firewall of China, which is widely criticized in the Western world."
GrabFS: The Screenshot File System - brilliant idea, simply a virtual file system for running applications and a file that represents the current window content. Copy the file and you have a snapshot. Ideal for scripted webcasts, for example.
OLPC Chief Technologist Starts Own Business - "She is starting her own company at the time when the XO will be delivered in large quantities," writes Jepsen on her website. "However, she will continue to provide OLPC with her products at cost price." Jepsen's first OLPC patent application was published on December 13, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. - yes, that's what the typical American charity scam looks like. She could have given the patents to the OLPC project so that it could generate support for the project from potential marketing (or simply use the patents as a guarantee of its own continued existence). But today, only personal profit counts. The fact that many opportunities are only possible through collaboration in a non-profit project, and that she has benefited from this, is certainly easy to ignore ...
Gmail Filesystem - since FUSE now also works with OSX, I should take a look at this again. 6 Gigabytes of external storage might not be such a bad idea after all.
Psychology Today: Dreams: Night School - interesting article about dreams and why we dream at all. The idea is that dreams are a training ground for the brain, where threats are recapitulated and the correct reactions to them are practiced. Dreams as a VR training ground for the real world.