Axiotron Modbook - does anyone have 2000 EUR to spare for me? This thing could be pretty awesome with something like Blender for casual sculpting sessions in the comfy chair.
Archive April 2009
Is blender really equal to the competition? - good high-level comparison (so nothing for feature counters) based on the author's personal experiences.
Von der Leyen: Only skilled users can bypass blocks - so everyone except politicians.
Surveillance mania and internet censorship - "If the law comes into force as planned, however, every internet user should carefully consider whether they still want to visit unknown web addresses. If one were to accidentally or provoked by malicious hints to a stop sign, then de facto a house search or worse would threaten. Staudigl also confirmed this: 'Whether and possibly who has committed an offense can regularly only be clarified through the subsequent criminal investigations.'" - because, after all, we live in a democratic legal state, not in a banana republic where the state can assume what it wants without control by the citizen and where citizens then simply feel the full force of the power apparatus due to technical proto-indicators. Or maybe not?
Vioxx maker Merck and Co drew up doctor hit list | The Australian - "AN international drug company made a hit list of doctors who had to be "neutralised" or discredited because they criticised the anti-arthritis drug the pharmaceutical giant produced."
E-Books: Publishers are blocking markets - this stinks. The next arrogant industry that doesn't give a damn about customer wishes. What use is the idiotic geographical limitation of the offer to me as a customer, if, for example, American authors are simply no longer available in the English original in Germany? Libri and Co. only sell the translations as eBooks.
Federal government wants to block internet access with access controls - I'm already looking forward to the first trojan, or the first XSS attack, which will then call up sites from the block list in the background. Or how about HTML emails that refer to images on blocked pages? You can definitely get a lot of suspects that way ...
Lactose intolerance - how lactose intolerance is distributed around the world. (because I just had a discussion about it)
Mothers Ruin Software: Suspicious Package - interesting tool to quickly take a look at installation packages with QuickLook without having to start them.
Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - oops. IBM must be in a bad mood now ...
Mac-Bot-Netz? - not that I would believe the nonsense about the "unassailable MacOS X" that some Apple disciples spread (Hello Apple - could we maybe get more detailed update descriptions beyond "improves compatibility and increases stability"? Thanks!), but would I necessarily believe a store that has always tried to sell strange products to Apple owners and has always tried to spread panic and purchases of its software with more than questionable press releases?
Tax-free Internet shopping may be at an end - compared to the chaos in the USA with taxes, the European tax law is quite simple and transparent ...
tweenbot - some stories are just nice.
Tropo - a hosted telephony system (e.g. for voicemail systems or similar) with API for programming plugins in various scripting languages. There are some things ...
wikileaks-Kram doch etwas anders als ursprünglich behauptet - as it turns out, the problem seems to lie somewhere between the domain owner and the operator. Or with both. Or between the ears of one of the two. Or both. But probably not with DENIC.
Armstrong faces Tour exit - as little as I can stand Armstrong (and as little as I would want to see him at the Tour), the procedure here is simply ridiculous. Would the French proceed in the same way if the rider in question were French? What if, for example, Virenque were planning a comeback and a 20-minute delay occurred during a training control because he quickly went to shower?
Müntefering expects state participation in Opel - isn't it cute how they're hesitating to do exactly what they once railed against?
Preemptive obedience at DENIC - because, the police and surveillance state must be implemented. Think of the children! And protect us from terrorists! How, and incidentally, sensitive documents about sloppiness in voting machines are also blocked? Extremely convenient!
Discount — a C implementation of the Markdown markup language - the title says it all. Looks good, and should be many times faster than the other markdown implementations - which would also make it interesting for live use. And Markdown is many times simpler than Docutils (Restructured Text).
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 - interesting article about scaling with Amazon's Elastic Cloud.
jgm's peg-markdown - and another C-based markdown version.
Books on Board - another store that sells English literature as eBooks and also offers Epub. Even quite current books.
Moleskin page designer - a designer for custom page types for Moleskin notebooks.
Python MQI Interface - pymqi. Version 0.5d - MQSeries and Python. (not that I'm a MQSeries fan, I just might need it for work)
Sup dawg, we heard you like Smalltalk so we put Smalltalk in your Factor so you can send messages while you roll - an implementation of Smalltalk in Factor. Quite extensible and could also bring this nice environment to people who don't know Factor yet (sometimes starting with a known language is easier).
Welcome to Waterstones.com - their eBooks also work perfectly on the Sony Reader, and thus there is also a source with relatively current literature in English for it. Of course, DRMed.