Even North Rhine-Westphalia FDP wants to get rid of Möllemann - well, slowly the noose is tightening. Indictments coming in continuously, everyone wants to get rid of him, but the ultimatum to voluntarily step down probably won't work. Möllemann has already announced that he will fight. We'll see, maybe he'll take one or two others down with him, that certainly wouldn't be bad...
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Fred Miranda tests the EOS-1Ds - another test report from a practitioner. Again, an advocate of the digital faction. Of course, it would be interesting to see a test of the 1Ds from an analog enthusiast, but somehow I haven't found much of that yet.
Found at Imaging Resource News Page.
What if every mail server supported a new feature. An XML-RPC interface with one entry point. It takes one parameter, a user name and returns a struct containing a boolean. The boolean is true if there is such a user on that machine. It's a struct so more info can be returned later. My email program could send a message to the server each piece of mail came from. Hey you got someone with this name, and do they send out spam? If the answer is no, filter it to the bit bucket.
Nice idea, but it's already there. Ok, not "XML-RPC", but there are other formats out there and some are much older. You can use the SMTP VRFY command on many mail servers to verify a user. Problem: since user checking on many machines is very hard work (think about stuff like http://hotmail.com/ or http://gmx.de/ - multi-million-user sites!), so not every host supports it, many hosts don't allow VRFY to not give out too much data (since spammers can use this interface to check addresses for legitimacy, too!) and some only give you an OK on every check (for the same reasons, they just hide better).
So would it solve the problem at hand? No. Spammers would just start to use the very same interface to validate their own email lists and use one picked randomly out of the pool of their addresses as the sender. What would we get? Nothing better than now, only better disguised. You have to take into account that spammers do learn, too. They might be at the bottom of social behaviour on the net, but they are not necessarily stupid.
Maybe I'm missing something or it's too early in the morning, but couldn't we ask the servers if they know about this person sending me the spam. I have a feeling that most of the spam I get comes from made-up people.
Oh, sure they are. They have been for some time now. Spammers are not interested in responses. One of the most important things to note: spammers don't care for email replies. They actually don't care for the recipient at all - all they do is send out mail, that's all. They are paid for that. There might be click-throughs (most of porn spam is to get people to click the links in the mail, that's why most porn spam nowadays is HTML with embedded images). But nobody in that business wants you to return anything to the sender.
So what to do about spam? The currently best practice is to set up a Bayesian mail filter like bmf or any of the like projects. There are some to integrate into mail clients, some to integrate into the mail server. Just watch out for them. I use bmf to filter mail on my server and it works quite well after feeding it several hundred mails and it gets better every round. False positives are down to only 2-3 a day (and mostly administrative stuff that is easily spotted in the spambox) and false negatives are down to 5-7 a day, easily spotted in the prefiltered inbox, too. The vast majority of about 70-80 spam mails per day are filtered out just fine.
Found on Scripting News.
What's wrong with Joshua Allen's coment on yEnc? One simple thing: yEnc tried to solve a problem in a way that is not stable: there are already implemented standards for encoding, but yEnc ignores them all and put's it's own on top of NNTP and Netnews. It ignores all RFCs in existance and reinvents the wheel.
Will this break things? Sure, it already did. Not everybody jumps on the bandwagon to implement yEnc, so people have to use external tools to get at the stuff they want. But since yEnc is implemented in the worst way possible, this won't always work. Take for example a bi-charset-Environment like the Mac OS. You usually use Mac charsets externally, but talk latin1 or other standard charsets on protocol level. So your data get's converted from one charset to the other. Since yEnc doesn't give applications not knowing about yEnc any clue about it's existence, the stuff get's broken.
yEnc makes almost all errors UUENCODE made, but adds several layers of it's own errors on top of it. This is just plain stupid. And that it "works" is no reason - it works to the extent that people using yEnc capable programs can exchange information. But the basic idea of the Internet is to enable as much people to use something as possible. That's why MIME is so complicated, it's idea is to set up markers in adavance to allow programs to know that something problematic is ahead, even if they don't know what it actually is - and hand it over to a helper application.
yEncs stupid idea of body-tags makes this automatic forward-compatible way of handling stuff problematic.
A very good discussion of the problems of yenc is at http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/yenc.html - read it, understand it and you know what is wrong with Johns little talk.
I've had a severe cold since Friday - that's why things are quiet here.
Photo album of the world's oldest photo club online - interesting not just for historians. The "Pencils of Light" are the images of the Edinburgh Calotype Club.
Euro not such a "teuro" after all? - then I probably can't do math.
Found at tagesschau online.
Goppel under fire for historical comparison - well, if the CSU were consistent, they would fire their secretary general. After all, they also demanded that Deubler-Gmelin resign because of an alleged comparison (which wasn't even proven, just blown up by the press). But I don't think the CSU will stand by their words one bit ...
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Arrest warrants issued in denture fraud scandal - please also arrest the dentists who participated in this mess. Especially at a time when funds are lacking in health insurance coffers and patients are being asked to pay, I find what came to light here quite appalling. Tough action needs to be taken and the dentists held accountable. That's the only way to get something like this under control - I still shudder when I think of the heart valve scandal...
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Massive oil slick drifting toward Spain - when will we actually learn from these disasters? When will tankers without double hulls be banned? When will finally a stringent control of tankers be introduced, a mandatory TÃœV for ships, regular checks of officers and better monitoring of crews? Such disasters are preventable. But for every meager profit, everything that can be sacrificed is sacrificed. And nature has to bear it. "The authorities hope that the heavy oil will quickly clump in the cold water and not reach the sea surface."
Yes and? Do they believe that solves the problem? Let's just leave the mess lying around on the sea floor, it doesn't bother anyone. Are they completely insane?
Found at tagesschau on the Internet.
Pieper wants to throw out Möllemann - me too.
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Schröder supports EU accession of Turkey - well, great, religiously-conservative oriented forces are winning elections in Turkey, the Kurds are still being flattened with (German-made) tanks and torture is a tried and tested means to an end, as you can read every year in the Amnesty International report. And our government? Wants to help this state into the EU. Anything else?
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
If everything works, this should show up on lifejournal and in my own sysadmins corner and so make my life easier, as I only need to edit one system to replicate posts to several hosts. Footbridge rules.
Anyone who wants to populate multiple weblogs from Radio can do that with the Manila-Blogger-Bridge. But it can only handle Blogger-API and only one category, namely the homepage. However, if you'd like to selectively post one article here and the next one there, you should take a look at Footbridge. Very interesting tool, you can specify for individual categories whether they should be copied to Livejournal, Advogato, or to a Blogger-API system. Separately for each individual category. Very practical.
DR-DOS lives - sometimes they come back. Only - who wants that now? I mean, except perhaps the fans of Pet Sematary and other horror movies ...
Found at heise online news.
Java vs. Python - a fairly well-made comparison between Java and Python. Attempts to address all aspects. Actually, I only have two points of criticism:
Regarding remote methods and distributed programs, it is stated that Python would not provide anything by default. That's not correct, though - it comes with xmlrpclib, a module that makes it very easy to create servers and clients for XML-RPC calls. This is also used internally in the Python Community Server.
As a counterpart to the servlet architecture, only Zope is referenced, not the numerous servlet-like programs available for Python. Medusa is certainly one possible example of a very efficient server environment, but also Python Server Pages or Quixote provide quite a lot in that regard. And there is mod_python - admittedly not as widespread as mod_perl, but that will certainly come.
But overall still a fairly good comparison, and many of the points that make me prefer Python to Java are addressed.
Python JIT - something like that exists? I was quite surprised when I read the previous comparison article that such a project actually exists. It even goes one step further and, in addition to the classic JIT technique, wants to extract even more performance with the help of specialization of the generated code. Something like that has been done quite often in the realm of functional languages, so it's doable. In any case, a project worth keeping an eye on!
Waste in the billions - yeah right, but it's always someone else's fault and never the government's. Regardless of whether it's conservative or social democrat. And anyway, the citizens are supposed to cough up the money. And it's clear that everyone knows better how to do it - except oddly enough, every government so far has been accused of wasting taxpayer money and the Federal Audit Office has virtually never had a good word to say about federal government spending. Well, the solution is obvious: raising VAT so the federal government can waste even more money ... The Federal Audit Office report will certainly go the same way as the PISA study: misunderstood, regurgitated and squandered for meaningless political activism. Results? None. We continue to become stupider and the federal government squanders our tax money. No big deal, in a few generations we'll all be too stupid to even notice ...
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Employers advised on reforms - that will definitely be super effective. I would like to request the definition of a
And does anyone really believe that a blockhead like Hundt would deviate even an inch from his role as a tool of the C(D/S)U? Why do they even bother talking to him - it's pointless anyway. Hundt will only do anything with an SPD government if forced to. Otherwise, he will obstruct out of principle alone and boycott any attempt - just as he has repeatedly sabotaged every approach to an alliance for work.
But the SPD and the unions are so naively crawling to the cross anew each time. Don't they realize that they only make concessions but get nothing in return? That they are being duped? Or do they know exactly that and don't care, because they stopped caring about the ordinary employee long ago anyway?
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Perhaps we are all already inmates of a total madhouse - a highly interesting interview. Worth reading. Could Robert Kurz perhaps actually be "Wonko the Sensible"?
Found at Telepolis News.
eBay helps tax authorities - ok, people, now it's getting interesting. On eBay, pretty much everything you can imagine gets sold. And of course, the tax office wants its cut too. This could get really amusing - especially for those who have seen eBay as a good platform for buying and selling on a larger scale and who have been claiming it's all just private dealings. They're in for a surprise.
So, who among you has reported your sales correctly?
Found at tagesschau im Internet.
Michael Reichmann from "Luminous Landscape" writes about the Contax N-Digital test that never was and draws his conclusions. And as much as it pains me, I have to agree with him on this.
Threads considered harmfull - a fairly controversial discussion on kuro5hin.org about the dangers of thread programming. In my opinion, a whole range of problems are addressed that arise with threads in programs, and that often the same problems can be solved more simply and efficiently in other ways.
I discovered an example myself not long ago, the Medusa Webserver. It works completely without threading and processes, instead using input dispatching. In doing so, it even implements multiple virtually parallel running servers in a simple and efficient event loop. Medusa is also the basis for Zope. There, however, multiple processes are pre-started and centrally managed. In the Python Community Server, on the other hand, Medusa is contained in its pure form.
Spammer out of Conviction - Aaaaaaargh. Could someone please knock some sense into this guy? With a really big spoon? This can't possibly be true ...
Found at heise online news.
3GB Compact Flash - ok, still quite expensive, but it seems CF is moving forward. For today's digital cameras with huge megapixel counts, exactly the right thing when it reaches affordable price ranges. For my 1.5 megapixel camera, rather total overkill.
I hate broken mail servers and mailfilters going haywire. Today bmf played up on me and trashed some mail. Of course there was bound to be some interesting content in there, but I don't know, since I can't read them. fsck. So bmf is out again. But how to get rid of spam? At least bmf filtered enough of the shit out so I didn't have to wade through them all by hand. Now I have to set up some redirection to only filter stuff that's probably spam to protect important mails. Damn, that's bound to be work.
Here's an example of what comes out of my new scanner and Photoshop 7. The original is a Velvia slide from the Rollei 6008. I mainly post-processed the colors, as after brightening it (to bring out the detail in the tree on the right) the sky had become very washed out. In the original, it's really as vibrant as it appears in this image. I also had to do quite a bit of spot removal, since this is my test slide that has accumulated quite a bit of dust over time. Still, the result turned out pretty nice.
The ''Scheibenwischer'' comes to an end - a shame, one of the last truly great figures of political cabaret is retiring. Ok, he's not the youngest anymore, but unfortunately there's a lack of new talent in the political sphere. Too bad.
Found at tagesschau im Internet.
The Commercialization of Knowledge - yeah great, rosy prospects. Whoever creates something is screwed. Whoever uses something is screwed. Only those who sell and exploit the parts that others also thought of get to skim off the fat profits. That's probably what many managers imagine the future to be like ...
And incidentally, you can also strip the annoying competitor Open Source of its breeding ground (the information). This idea stinks.
Found on heise online news.
Jutta is currently creating a list of various Contax cameras with descriptions and details on http://www.contax-users.de/kameras.xml (to the extent she can based on brochures or manuals). If you have a Contax camera, you can contribute material there.
A timeline of Michael Jackson's face - definitely recommended for anyone thinking about having their appearance surgically enhanced. Wow, the man looks like a living corpse now...
Rau urges parties to be honest - well, Brother Johannes, I'm afraid that's in vain. People who have been lying and cheating for decades won't suddenly become honest because of a call for integrity...
And what else besides blocking politics should come from the opposition? Some are busy explaining why a Bavarian as top candidate is a good idea despite electoral losses, and others are trying to pin all the blame on Möllemann.
Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Anybody think radio acts slower and slower as time goes on? My last post took 60 seconds to get a reply from the server. What's the point of having the server on the desktop if it takes longer than a typical remote server to answer? [ Mathieu's Radio Weblog]
Since I noticed exactly that today, I followed the tip and compacted my database. To do this, simply go to the Radio menu, into the Utilities submenu, and call Compact Databases. After confirming, Radio rattled away for a while and my databases shrank from 24 MB to 3.3 MB. After that it's faster. You should run this point regularly (once or twice a week?) so that Radio doesn't get too slow. To be safe, you should make copies of the database files beforehand, in case something goes wrong during compression and Radio still runs.
Found at Garth Kidd: Deadly Bloody Serious about Radio UserLand.
Möllemann under money laundering suspicion - and so Möllemann's downward spiral continues. You could almost start placing bets on whether he'll make it or not. I'm betting he won't. Who wants to take the other side?
Found at tagesschau im Internet.
Bundestag passes higher pension contributions - why do you even vote for that bunch if they can't come up with anything better than reaching into the same people's pockets the way the others would too? The "Social" part in the SPD's name is by now just as much of a farce as the "Christian" in CDU/CSU. Well, there are supposedly still people who believe the FDP is liberal and the Greens care about environmental protection. Politics stinks. In the end, those who have already been skimming money off the top can set even more aside and we pay the bill. All lies. Found at tagesschau on the internet.
Stupid spammers. Three days ago I planted spam trap addresses in HTML comments on my pages here at muensterland.org. Very obvious spam trap address and in an HTML comment. These addresses are only on the web, nowhere else. Never used and nothing that could be connected through combination with other address parts. And what happens today? The first spammers are spamming the addresses. Ugh.
So if you really want to know why you're getting spam on your addresses: check out which websites your email address appears on. The chances that that's the reason are quite high. Even if it only shows up as author information in an HTML comment...
Well, websites on muensterland.org are spam-safe, another argument for a site here :-)
I'm doing an interesting project to backup a Radio installation into the cloud. - Yeah! Go for it!
That's exactly what we need. Data backup of client systems on the server in a form that can be synchronized and kept consistent across multiple clients. Then I can finally manage my weblog with Radio from the office, and most importantly, you can help users when a disaster strikes them. A feature that simplifies life for users.
Of course, the system operator would then need to provide disk space and backup to tape, but usually a server operator is much better equipped to do this than the average user, who often doesn't even have adequate backup facilities for their home system.
Found at Scripting News.
Macintosh Common Lisp 5.0b - despite its hefty price and what I consider to be the rather questionable way that recent subscribers were strung along with updates to classic versions for as long as possible until even the last of the free updates ran out and thus everyone has to pay the hefty prices, it's still one of the best Common Lisp implementations I know of.
Well, I'll refrain from the upgrade anyway and continue to rely on Open MCL - a free implementation of Common Lisp that is based on an older MCL version. What Gary Byers is doing there is really impressive and eventually there will be a GUI there too.
Found at VersionTracker.com - Mac OS X.
Does that "Are you on?" advertising from eon annoy you too? I find it just completely ridiculous. And they have no idea about web design either – on Chimera (a Mozilla-based OS X browser) you just see an empty red page.
I mean, sure, some web designers assume certain browser features, but we're talking about a damn advertising campaign here! Who's dumb enough to set up an advertising campaign so that someone gets absolutely no information just because they suppress advertising popups on the web? You can't be that stupid...
A bit of exploration with Radio Userland and its translation capabilities uncovered quite a bit of information. Of course, nothing is really properly documented — you have to search and dig. Google is definitely your friend... First, you need to set up a database as described at http://frontier.userland.com/localizationGuestDatabases. All the translation work happens in this database. If it's located directly in the tools subfolder of Radio Userland, it will be activated with every startup. Second, you need to create your own new property. To do this, jump to user.prefs using Apple-J (Ctrl-J on Windows). There, create a new scalar of type String (Table menu, then New Scalar and select String). The name is language. This string is set to the value german and then activates the German translation from the guest database in the web interface. If you want documentation for the previous paragraph, you'll only find it indirectly. A search on http://radio.userland.com/ for localization at least revealed that the function radio.string.getLocalizedString takes the language version into account (or rather, the message — it was already older — stated that you need to patch this function so that it takes it into account). If you look at the function (simply jump to radio.string.getLocalizedString using Apple-J or Ctrl-J on Windows), you can see that it takes user.prefs.language into account. For hackers, Radio is a paradise because the entire script source code is there and you can just start hacking. You can rummage through everything and investigate. Stick your nose in everywhere and change just about anything. For end users, however, something as essential as activating a subsequently installed translation database should really be made a bit easier |;-)|.
A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language - If you're in the spirit of the Pragmatic Programmers and want to learn a new programming language again, and are willing to take on something truly new and unusual, this is the right place. K can be considered a mixture of Mumps (the K-Tree reminds me strongly of it), APL, J, and functional languages. Wild, unreadable, extraordinary. Unfortunately, there is no native Mac OS-X version available, only Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Found at kuro5hin.org.
The Cluetrain
Manifest - as a communications enthusiast, I can only say one thing about it: ACK.
For those who find the other version somewhat stiff in its wording, here's a somewhat freer but more fluently written version of the Cluetrain Manifesto. It's also worth checking out the main website, as there's plenty more material there (comments, etc.). And yes, the manifesto hits the mark. Even if many company executives, marketing directors, and business school graduates won't like it.
Book recommendation: The Pragmatic Programmer. A very interesting book that deals with the philosophy of programming, but pursues an approach that deviates significantly from the classical method. You could consider it a pragmatic approach to Extreme Programming. Many ideas have resonated with my own way of working - you can tell the authors are actually programmers who have been in the job for years. Many ideas can also be directly transferred to open-source projects, even if commercial interests are not pursued there. It's less about tools and languages (although the Pragmatic Programmers recommend on their website - and I can only reinforce this recommendation - learning a new programming language each year), but much more about the mindset behind successful and intellectually demanding software development. Software development should be fun again and lead to a successful conclusion. As a counterpoint, you could see "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick P. Brooks. In this book it becomes clear why, for example, there's no point in accelerating a delayed project by adding more staff. And many other misconceptions of classical project management are illustrated using IBM's OS/360 project. While OS/360 is only of historical interest today, the problems in large projects are the same as they were back then.
Corruption suspicions against Möllemann continue to mount - wow, Möllemann really wants to outdo Kohl and catch up to Strauss. Ok, Hunzinger as a source is about as reliable as Möllemann was as economics minister, but still, this is slowly shaping up to be a real political disaster for Möllemann and maybe the prosecution authorities will finally get one of the players after all.
Clement and Merz at Odds over Hartz Concept. "In the debate over labor market reform, an initial discussion between Economics Minister Clement and Union economic expert Merz brought no compromise. While Clement offered a special session of the Bundestag for further consultation, Merz called an agreement unlikely." Clear. First they make loud noises saying they want to work constructively, but when it comes to constructive work they just build walls. What else would you expect from the opposition - so far they've never shown any form of constructive work competence. Actually, they haven't shown competence anywhere except in getting 30 million to Liechtenstein ... (why wasn't Kanther held accountable for that anyway? So much for coming to terms with the past ...) Found at tagesschau online.
People taking their notebook out of the network to go on a journey and not only taking their notebook but their cabling adapter and terminator for the 10base2 network with them should expect network troubles. And please don't blame them on the firewall ...
German bugfix for Photoshop 7 ready - could have happened faster. After all, the English fix has been out for several weeks ...
Found at heise online news.