The Brads – How to Alienate a Fanbase - if anyone needs a short summary of what Adobe stands for.
Archive April 2010
Thoughts on Flash - is of course again dismissed as blah-blah by all Apple opponents, but well - the reasons are compelling. And sorry, but it's really true: Flash stinks.
It's only been a month ...
Just a month ago ...](/media/gerade-mal-ein-monat-ist-das-her/)
Yes, that's in Russia.
django-pagination - I need to take a closer look at this, it looks interesting. Pagination is not really difficult, but it's annoying to build it yourself every time - and Django's built-in tools are not always optimal for this (especially with large amounts of data).
Henry's EuLisp - someone has revived EuLisp and gathered the sources, as well as the specification. At least historically interesting, because EuLisp was one of the standard efforts for a more modern Lisp with quite good object-oriented support. But the implementation itself also has some interesting features.
jcotton - Build animations and graphics with JavaScript and Canvas. Looks quite interesting.
Keychain reports: Access to this object is restricted - because I just had the problem again, and because it really annoys me that this nonsense is still there after so long: never use MobileMe for keychain synchronization. Sometimes it works for a while, but that's deceptive. sooner or later the sync will mess up the keychain and in the worst case you have to reset it completely (or check if you have a functioning keychain in TimeMachine). To Apple: this is really shit.
Large Kirchner Retrospective at the Städel in Frankfurt - well, I must definitely go to Frankfurt in the coming months.
HoudahGeo - Photo Geocoding for Mac - I should definitely check that out. On my last vacation trips, it was a bit of a shame that I didn't have any points on the map. And the idea of simply taking reference photos with the iPhone and using its GPS and timestamp for the subsequent coding of the photos is not a bad one at all.
Markdoc - interesting project, a simple wiki with a special feature: it is not edited via the web, but via a DVCS like Mercurial or Git. So simply normal text editors, Markdown as the format and a DVCS for versioning, rsync for distributing the generated - static! - content to the server and done. And it is written in Python.
Large manufacturer differences in digital camera defects - Golem.de - my decision for Panasonic seems to have been quite reasonable.
This Is Apple's Next iPhone - Iphone 4 - Gizmodo - ok, it's already annoying when you leave an iPhone prototype in a bar ...
Web.de calls Fraunhofer study "Microsoft propaganda" - it could of course also be because web.de and GMX are simply shit. But of course, a conspiracy by Microsoft and the Fraunhofer Institute against web.de and GMX is much more likely ...
XML in Postgres – The Game Changer « Flex and Specs() - I should really take a closer look at the new PostgreSQL features. Especially since the XML support in PostgreSQL brings some of the advantages of document-oriented databases to the relational world, without needing extra middleware.
Archives of the Caml Mailing list: O'Caml for DOS - because I just stumbled upon it again. Wow, 96, that's a long time ago. Why is OCaml always listed as such a modern language? It's already 14 years old ... (and the language on which OCaml is based - Caml Light - is even older)
Federal Environment Agency demands car toll | tagesschau.de - wouldn't it be nice if the media reported correctly, or? In WDR (by the way, one of the ARD affiliated broadcasting stations) the head of the authority had to point out several times in the interview that he and his authority by no means demand anything, but only considered how such a toll - if it were to come - should be designed in a meaningful way. It was not about "toll or not", but rather about "if toll, then how?". And in doing so, an annual vignette or similar flat-rate models were deemed nonsense and only a toll variable according to actual use with recording of the use would be sensible. And the topic of data protection was also addressed and the problems that arise from it. The basic problem is that the revenues from motor vehicle-related taxes and fees only cover part of the costs for federal roads and highways, around 46 billion euros are borne by the general public. And then a facility responsible for environmental issues thinks about how a regulation with a toll could look and how this could be used to distribute road use and cost coverage more fairly and perhaps also to get a bonus for environmental pollution. But normal procedures are not causes for excitement - which is why WDR also stirred up drivers against a previously unpublished study (and by no means a demand) in the morning. That's quality journalism in Germany.
Daring Fireball: New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone Compiler - well, of course Apple has the right to set the terms themselves. And I have the right to find iPhone programming completely uninteresting now - sorry, but I'm not going to deal with such low-level programming languages anymore.
django-ajax-filtered-fields - I need to take a closer look at this, it could be quite interesting in the Admin for larger amounts of sentences in relations.
My experience with using MongoDB for great science. - NoSQL is, after all, in many cases a playground for people who want to try out how databases actually work. With many of these projects, I already wonder what possessed them when they built it. I'd rather rely on solid and proven tools like PostgreSQL and SQLite. And if a NoSQL database, then better one that has been in productive use in larger installations for a longer time. Cassandra comes to mind, for example.
Ars Technica reviews the iPad - a very comprehensive review of the iPad, should answer all the questions that are currently circulating.
CSU: Refusal to block the internet violates agreements - Golem.de - "Content that is banned must be removed so that it is no longer accessible to anyone. Users could bypass blocks within a few minutes. Those who insist on this have no idea about modern technologies, according to the minister. 'And furthermore, we do not want such a blocking infrastructure to be set up because it inherently poses the risk that it is not only used for such content, but can theoretically also be used for other purposes,' said Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger."
twitter's gizzard - could become interesting, a framework for distributing and replicating data across various backends. Gizzard deals exclusively with sharding and replication, the datastore itself is treated separately, making it interesting for various scenarios.
Writing a non-relational Django backend - Django nonrel / NoSQL blog - All buttons pressed - I'm not a big fan of NoSQL (in my opinion, many NoSQL approaches reflect a lack of understanding of relational databases rather than actual shortcomings or weaknesses of relational databases), but if you're going to use NoSQL, I'd prefer to do it through the Django ORM, which I quite like. And here's how you can build a Django ORM wrapper for NoSQL databases with relatively little effort.
IBM breaks OSS patent promise, targets mainframe emulator - was to be expected, but still a nasty story. IBM is IBM - and IBM is only its own friend. Large companies first look at their own wallet, then at others. And Hercules allows some things that so far only low-end mainframes have achieved. That's where the fun and the cuddly course end for IBM.
Perfection kills » What’s wrong with extending the DOM - because I keep discussing with colleagues why JQuery is better than Prototype: Prototype heavily uses the extension of prototypes, while JQuery hangs almost everything on its own JQuery object and is therefore much more cooperative in interaction with other JavaScript.
Oracle Announces Latest Release of Oracle® Berkeley DB - Berkeley DB now has a SQL API based on SQLite. Source code compatibility with SQLite, so programmers can switch if they prefer the much more unstable and vulnerable storage of Berkeley DB and like to repair their databases. Sorry, Oracle, but that's ridiculous. BDB is only interesting for those who have to work with it by force - anyone who wants to switch to BDB today must be crazy. If I'm already programming against the SQLite API, I'd rather use the right tool right away. Yes, of course, SQLite has some bottlenecks when you want to access it in parallel with multiple processes. But I'll let Oracle in on a little secret here: SQLite has such a tolerant SQL parser because you can then write source code whose SQL works seamlessly with both SQLite and PostgreSQL. So if you hit the limits of SQLite - just switch to PostgreSQL and you're good to go.
Elixirgraphics - and here you'll find nice themes for RapidWeaver. I particularly like Lime, Factory, and Nimbus. Sprout is also quite nice. And yes, I know, no free themes - but hey, good design is a lot of work.
seyDesign Professional RapidWeaver themes - even more RapidWeaver themes and a few open source versions - with these I could also take a closer look at the innards of such a theme.
YourHead Software - I'm still considering whether to get their plugins for RapidWeaver. I managed to get RapidWeaver quite cheaply from the last MacHeist and the first experiments are really nice. And all the YourHead plugins are based on JavaScript instead of Flash, which could be good for static websites. Additionally, their internal data format is simply folders full of XML files, so you could also do something with tools.