USBOverdrive - I need to check this out, it allows you to assign functions to additional keys on USB devices. My Logitech keyboard and mouse have some unused keys, and you don't really want the Logitech Mac software on your computer ...
Archive April 2008
Limp: When You Need More Than Just a Lisp - the proof that VIM is as powerful as Emacs. An integrated Lisp development environment in VIM.
Posturing against Internet censorship - sorry, but you can't really take the prolethikers seriously in light of things like, for example, the blocking orders from Düsseldorf. Because if it were serious, they would first clean up their own dirty doorstep ...
Victorian All-in-One PC - nice mod job.
Planned BKA Law The Lidlization of Law - "The seized computer data should not be reviewed by an independent judge to determine whether they constitute an 'interference with the core area of private life' (and therefore may not be used); instead, this review should be conducted by 'two employees of the Federal Criminal Police Office', 'one of whom has the qualification for judicial office'. Only if these two police officers have doubts should they submit the seized data to the judge for review." - I've been saying it all along, put the federal government under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, because the biggest enemies of the constitution today are sitting in Berlin.
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi - download and read offline. You won't get dumber from it.
RFID System Mifare Classic cracked? - "According to the recently published work of Nicolas Courtois, Karsten Nohl and Sean O'Neil, it is possible to crack the encryption within seconds using PC hardware without having to pre-calculate extensive tables (Rainbow Tables). The security of the algorithm, according to the researchers' conclusion, is 'close to zero'."
BBC - Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - in Flash with illustrations. Nice.
Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org - "From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the 'Infocom Drive' — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made."
Nikon D3 Review - digital cameras are slowly getting to where we want them to be - in terms of features. The price is still beyond good and evil for these powerhouses.
Hourly wages below five euros gross - that's how the upswing and the reduction of unemployment figures work. Next goal: undercutting India and China in hourly wages.
The Flying Meat Wiki: Acorn - nice, there's a wiki with tips, tricks and plugins for Acorn. I like to use Acorn because it's a quick way to change images. And scripting is possible in Python, which is not to be sneezed at.
The Flying Meat Wiki: VoodooPad - There's also a wiki for VoodooPad. And after I saw that you can now script with Python there, I'll probably take a closer look at it. VoodooPad was already quite nice as a desktop wiki in older versions, but the current versions seem to have learned a lot of nice tricks.
AS3 Flash Physics Engine Box2DFlashAS3 2.0.0 - wow. Just wow.
Breaking News for sky afficionados: Apophis risk not increased - because the nonsense (originally - where else - appeared in the Blödzeitung) is now going around the world and I already have American acquaintances writing to me about the "math genius from Germany" and the impending end of the world, here is a link that tells how the whole nonsense came about. Quality journalism, of course.
Infection tool for SQL Server and IIS - interesting story. The attacks are becoming more professional.
Church employers want no minimum wage - plain language: the business model of Caritas and Co. is also based on the uninhibited exploitation of employees. And instead of standing up for themselves, they demand state support, which ultimately means nothing more than subsidization. And this from stores that are already massively subsidized (e.g. through their non-profit status and the resulting tax advantages).
Lighthouse - also does dynamic port forwarding on the router, but with more options to define things and, for example, bind them to certain applications. However, it is not free, but shareware.
NASA Extends Saturn Mission for Another 2 Years - it would be pretty stupid to end it now.
Port Map and TCMPortMapper - a nice little tool that can open ports on routers (provided that the router supports corresponding protocols for remote control). Useful for temporarily making services on your own computer accessible from the internet.
Sleep - Java Scripting Language - if anyone really misses Perl in the Java world, they could check out this project. Linked purely for nostalgic reasons, as I used to rely on Perl for a few years.
The iPhone SDK and free software: not a match - a reason why GPLv3 is good, no matter what some (otherwise quite popular) idiots say. Because exactly this problem - the effective blockade of open source through codesigning - is addressed by the GPLv3.
Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier - it's getting more interesting. Amazon wants to add persistent storage space to EC2 (again paid according to usage).
CHDK in Brief - it begins. Hacks for Canon compact cameras. Sounds quite interesting, not just a toy. In my opinion, camera manufacturers should simply provide this from the outset, it is simply the next logical step. But they probably look too much at "product design" by arbitrarily removing features (as is often done with RAW storage)
Court: Display of Thumbnails in Search Engines Illegal - classic "Hmm" ruling. Meta-tags have long not been so important in search engine optimization and robots.txt should be known to every website creator as basic knowledge. How this all fits into reality is not entirely clear to me. I mean, what about my pages here - they don't have meta-tags. Can I now sue Google?
Latest Advance in Artificial Intelligence: Computer Wins a Game Against a Go Master - "During the Go Tournament in Paris, staged between 22 and 24 March 2008 by the French Go Federation (FFG), the MoGo artificial intelligence (IA) engine developed by INRIA - the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control - running on a Bull NovaScale supercomputer, won a 9x9 game of Go against professional 5th DAN Catalin Taranu. This was the first ever officially sanctioned 'non blitz' victory of a 'machine' over a Go Master."
SeasideXUL - an interesting project that directly generates XUL interfaces from Seaside (the Smalltalk web application server) and allows the creation of applications with native interfaces. Very interesting, as here a web server technology is used for local applications (and yes, this sounds damn similar to AIR, only with Smalltalk and XUL instead of JavaScript/ActionScript and HTML/Flash)
ARD and ZDF: Back to the Middle Ages? - because it is slowly becoming apparent that the ridiculous business models of private broadcasters do not work, one draws the logical conclusion in Germany and destroys the added value created by fees. Because it is known to be much better when advertising junk and trash television is subsidized (because that's what it is - just banal indirect subsidization). One could of course also take a look at what the BBC does, for example, and orient oneself accordingly, and demand from public broadcasting (and exert pressure through the control bodies) to produce meaningful content from the fees, which might then be published under meaningful licenses (have you heard of CC?) and directly benefit the citizens (for whom the state is actually supposed to be there, not for the ridiculous scammers from the private broadcasting corner). But that would be a sensible approach. And presumably fewer bribes would be paid or something like that ...
Digging into Factor’s compiler - very nice overview of how the Factor compiler works. I'm having more and more fun with Factor, I think I'll play around with it a bit more.
Filesharing becomes more dangerous - or not - as usual, botched construction. Because the federal prolethicians just can't do anything really right. Except then go ahead and further erode the rights of citizens - that they can do really well.
GitHub - "Secure Git hosting and collaborative development". Looks quite nice and git is, alongside Mercurial, one of the more interesting new version control systems.
Google App Engine for developers - nice overview of the features and the people behind the App Engine.
Network Solutions: Not Just Thieves and Hijackers, Now Using Tactics That Can Get Your Site Banned From Google - oh wow. Network Solutions set up a wildcard A-record for unused subdomains on domains using their DNS, and put ads on them. Someone registers a name to connect it with their business, uses Network Solutions' service for operating the name server, and then is simply screwed over by their service provider.
Strange TCP-networking problems with Mac OS X 10.4 and Solaris 10 - obscure TCP parameters you might want to tweak to possibly boost OS X's sluggish networking.
Unicode 5.1 contains ß as a capital letter - because, it's important.
Google App Engine - wow. Google offers hosted applications based on Python and delivers Django pre-installed. Genius. However, Django is quite crippled, as the entire model part cannot be used (there is no SQL database, only the Google Datastore). Hmm. Maybe it's time to try something new with my blog. It has been running reliably for a long time, it's time to destroy it again ...
The new business plan of SCO is already facing rejection in advance - "A trustee in bankruptcy will only be appointed if the company owners are unable to carry out the reorganization or final bankruptcy due to fraud, age, or proven business incompetence." - fits SCO well. Okay, they are not that old yet, but the rest ...
Magenta
Magenta
At the top, the #ED008C Magenta used by engadget. On the right, the RAL 4010 used by Telekom with the web code #E20074. At the bottom, the Magenta sometimes referred to as RAL 4010 with #BF1773, and on the left, the also used #C03F7D specification (e.g., Wikipedia). And now there is a dispute about this. According to www.telekom-cg.de, the specification RAL 4010 with "telemagenta" and the implementation on RGB with #E20074 is registered.
Pydev - Eclipse plugin for Python development. Since I sometimes look at Eclipse for other things and it's no longer terribly slow, this might also become interesting at some point. Although TextWrangler is still unbeatable in comparison in terms of speed.
Pydev Extensions - shareware extension of the Eclipse plugin for Python. Has some interesting features.
ral 4010 bf1773 - Google Search - much more usage, but also not the specification chosen by Deutsche Telekom itself.
ral 4010 C03F7D - Google Search - not many results, I guess they all copied from each other and someone got it from a (poorly designed) Telekom page at some point.
Telekom Farbverwendung - PDF on telekom-cg.com which lists the Telekom color definitions. I only found it there, it looks official. Interesting is the sentence about where the web color comes from: "The hexadecimal value (www) conforms to the global norm and is taken from the 'Websafe Color Library'" - it sounds more like it was selected after visual inspection and is closest to RAL 4010 (which is ultimately a color tone specification rather for print or coating) (sRGB is not that big).
The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection - a posthumous blogger, so to speak ...
Thompson Rivers University Owlcam - yes, an owl camera. A Bubo Virginianus nest, to be precise.
Towers of Hanoi - written only with VIM commands (yes, if you paste VIM commands into a buffer and execute them again, you get something like a - very strange - programming language, based on visual text modification. And yes, someone had too much free time)
Interview: "The banking supervision has failed and is superfluous" - ah yes, because banks neglect their duties of economic risk assessment, banking supervision should be abolished. Because that will make banks think more economically. Please what kind of herb is served to today's professors for morning coffee? With such experts, we should not be surprised about the stupid actions of the prolethicians ...
iTunes now with TV content also in Germany - and the shocking thing for me about it: since Southpark is already freely downloadable, only Spongebob remains potentially interesting. Somehow a bit thin after all the fuss.
Cash patients have to wait longer for specialist appointments - because we have a two-tier healthcare system.