Atomkraft- Beweise für Manipulation in Sachen Gorleben? - yeah, yeah, but of course everything is fine in Gorleben and there is no danger and anyway, why are we all getting so worked up. It's just all corrupt and embellished and lied about. Business as usual.
Archive 9. September 2009
Car engines to serve as "home power plants" - ok, still fossil fuel, but at least an efficient use of it. As a concept certainly interesting, albeit not entirely without problems.
billy's band-ICM - because I just stumbled upon it and you can never have enough Billy's Band. Click, listen, and be happy.
Hurtigruten 2009 with the MS Lofoten - a small Flash gallery of pictures I took during the trip. Only small image sizes, because it already took hours to upload to MobileMe. MobileMe sucks. I'll probably finish another gallery and put it somewhere else (likely Dropbox again, it's somehow much nicer), also without Flash (that was just a test of the Lightroom gallery stuff) and with larger pictures.
Leica M9 Hands-on Preview: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - well, it does have the full-frame sensor to itself and still has an acceptable size. However, I'm not so sure anymore that full-frame sensors are really the ultimate solution. I mean, realistically speaking: the 35mm format that we so highly praise today was just an emergency format at its inception, not really comparable to the more common roll film and large format cameras of the time. So what is really "full-frame"? Just because Oskar Barnack halved a 70mm film and used it for his compact camera? And whether I would buy a manual focus camera today is rather doubtful - which has less to do with the quality of an M (I have always preferred the split-rangefinder - I still have my M6), but more to do with the performance of my eyes (which are definitely more affected by quality loss over time than my cameras).
Leica X1 and brief hands-on - well, the look is good, but whether this "quick through many automatic functions" really means quick in the sense of an M or just sluggish in the sense of an M8, that remains to be seen. And without sample images, you can't say anything, because after all, it's about the images that come out at the end. A price is not yet revealed, which would probably have a deterrent effect. Let's see what comes in January.
Pressflow makes Drupal scale - hmm, a fork of Drupal with a special focus on scalability. Unfortunately, there is a restriction to MySQL - I would have preferred PostgreSQL. But the approach of building a fork with a special focus on scalability is commendable. Although Drupal itself could also achieve this (and aims to do so from version 7 onwards).
Varnish - had I already heard of that? No idea, doesn't matter, sounds very interesting. A reverse proxy with powerful configuration and edge side includes (with which you can mix things at the proxy level). This could be very interesting at work - we mostly use non-caching Apache for such purposes, varnish could solve a lot for which we always have to build wild mod perl or mod python hacks or dive into Apache configuration orgies.