Sync trigger with Applescript ... - the path of the command line tool to trigger a sync is mentioned in the last comment. Very nice to build your own backup system, e.g. using Unison and iDisk.
Archive August 2008
Deutsche Bahn raises ticket prices by 3.9 percent - particularly cute the "service surcharge": anyone stupid enough to join the 5 km long queue in front of the only one of 10 open counters at the station, after 2 hours of waiting behind a stinking fellow human with flatulence finally gets a bad-tempered railway employee, whom he then has to explain laboriously where he wants to go - and then gets the most expensive fare selected in a targeted manner, well, now he has to pay a service surcharge for this preferential treatment. So that the railway can be dumped on the stock exchange.
Dealing with Resident Registration Data: The Shadow Registration Offices - how was that, Mr. Schäuble? "The data is safe in the hands of the state"? And of course, anyone who thinks differently is just a paranoid?
Aus für Gerolsteiner - too bad, it was one of the more interesting teams and the way Holczer ran the show made this racing stable very likable.
Canon EOS 50D - if this comes out now, the 40D should soon be sold off. I should pay more attention, because the 40D would be a great upgrade for my rather old 10D ...
Gears for Safari - it's about time. Hopefully it will also appear in Fluid soon - because that would actually be the most exciting (to turn web applications into classic offline applications).
Redhat perl. What a tragedy. - those who use Redhat: compile Perl yourself. Redhat seems to have a really big problem here.
Annals of the Patently Absurd - Microsoft gets a patent on PageUp and PageDown? And someone still claims that software patents have any justification other than amusement and funding for patent lawyers?
Factor: a practical stack language: New optimizer - very interesting description of the new optimizer in Factor. An advantage of the language: the main programmer documents very well in blog posts how he works on the system and what motivation is behind the changes. Always exciting to read. And the language is just nice.
Google: "No Trespassing" signs won't stop Street View - anyone who still believes that all these "social networks" have anything to do with social or nice can read the arrogant comments from Google in that article. "There is no complete privacy" - and that is immediately interpreted as "ignore no entry".
Jennifer Daniel Dot Com Was Taken - hmm. Strange. But somehow interesting.
Rabbiter - interesting project based on RabbitMQ that could provide the basis for Twitter services. Everything in Erlang and massively designed for scalability.
Techdirt: Diebold/Premier Actually Admits Its Machines Are Faulty! And That It Lied About Antivirus Software... - and this will surely be ignored here in Germany. Or will someone finally wake up?
The Transterpreter - haven't had a Lego link in a while. Transterpreter provides an Occam environment that can run on a Lego RCX brick.
Index of /namespace/OmniOutliner - DTDs for the OmniOutliner XML format.
Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store has launched - normal block devices for Amazon EC2.
Free Critical Mass Modula-3 (CM3) - actively supported Modula-3.
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: Bad TV - good discussion (i.e. refutation) of the moon landing was fake spinners.
CPU Rings, Privilege, and Protection - good overview article.
Drinking fruit juice 'may stop medication working' - hmm, Mizolastin is not listed there, but the pharmacy already gave me information about grapefruit juice. Somehow silly, maybe I should drink my usual morning orange juice in the evening from now on ...
The Associated Press: States throw out costly electronic voting machines - only here do we still believe the manufacturers' lies more than the experts. There are no unhackable computers. As already in XKCD: "anti-virus programs on voting machines? You are doing it wrong."
The Great Consumer Crash of 2009 - ouch. This reads like a script for a horror movie. And since we in Germany are usually a few years behind the U.S. in all stupid ideas, something similar will certainly hit us here as well (and some of the developments described there can also be observed here - such as living off the credit line).
BeagleBoard.org - nice small ARM-based computer with quite impressive performance. Could almost tempt me to play around with it.
Everything You Need to Know About USB 3.0, Plus First Spliced Cable Photos - 10x faster and therefore 9x more power - and then the laptop is 20x faster all ...
tunnelblick - graphical OpenVPN client for OS X with all necessary binaries and tools. Could be really useful for me.
We're running out of IPv4 addresses. Time for IPv6. Really. - oops. it's getting tight now.
Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes - loads of practical scripts for iTunes.
Django on Jython: It's here! - awesome! This makes Java as a platform more interesting to me again - the progress in Jython in the last few months has been gigantic.
Advertising and Privacy – Google Privacy Center - important link, opt-out from the Doubleclick cookie mess. No idea if it's realistic, or just fake - but if the latter, that will surely come out sooner or later.
Edge Cases are the Root of all Evil - how edge cases are used in arguments to kill ideas. Interesting perspective - and have already often observed this in IT discussions.
Network Advertising Initiative - and a whole list of opt-outs for other ad networks.
Pentagon will apparently ignore Guantanamo acquittals - do we need more evidence that the USA has long left the rule of law behind? When will politics in Europe finally wake up and seriously stand up against this madness? If another state - for example, China - did something like this to opponents, the USA would be the first to shout "violation of international law." Of course, now all the US sycophants can scream "anti-Americanism" again - but seriously, can one still be pro-USA when observing this madness?