Home → Archives → by month → September 2002
FTD-Gerücht: Siemens Mobiltelefonsparte an Motorola
Ihr kriegt unsere Mobiltelefonsparte, wir dafür eurer Geschäftsfeld Drahtlose Netze: das hier von der FTD kolportierte Gerüchte könnte in seiner Umsetzung für Siemens als Ganzes betrachtet ja vielleicht noch Sinn machen - mit was aber könnte man Benutzern von Geräten wie dem S45(i) oder dem SL45(i) mehr Freude machen wie fortan zu versuchen, ihnen bedientechnische Katastrophen aus den Motorola-Laboren anzudrehen?
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Good Morning, Monday
Minus 3.8% in the opening minutes. And some company wanted to call itself Monday. Other things happened on Tuesday to prevent that, though.
September was DAX investor's delight: within four weeks, the index lost 25% - more than within any other month for a decade - and 131 Billion Euro in market capitalization - roughly Norway's annual gross domestic product.
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CSS in the Real World
Adrian Holovaty: CSS in the Real World - "Which code would you rather work in when there are four breaking news stories on the wire simultaneously and millions of readers are flooding your site, expecting up-to-the-minute updates?" Via Scott Andrew.
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Pingback vs. Trackback, Autodiscovery in MT 2.5
Ian Hickson: Whitepaper: Pingback vs Trackback "It seems pingback has caused quite a stir in the Web logging and syndication communities! The spec is barely a week old and already I'm seeing pingbacks on sites of people I've never heard of, so implementations are spreading, which is great. It also seems pingback has acted a little like a kick in the backside to the trackback folk, causing them to work on the transparency side of trackback, which is good to see too."
BEN: TRANSPARENCY NOT AN ISSUE, AUTODISCOVERY IN MT 2.5
MT's Ben: "There is nothing inherent in TrackBack that makes it any less transparent to either of the users involved (and conversely, nothing inherent in pingback that makes it more transparent). The transparency is completely a function of the content management system, not of the specification." And: "[Extracting all external links and auto-discover the corresponding TrackBack URLs is a good idea to start out with.] So I've thrown together some code to do this, and we'll be adding it to the 2.5 version of Movable Type (with a setting to turn the auto-discovery on and off). The auto-discovery was easy, since we're already doing that for the threading tool. Nothing in TrackBack itself [had to be changed] to make the process of sending a ping transparent."
PINGBACK? TRACKBACK?
What's the difference between Pingback and Trackback anyway? Phil Ringnalda: "I've avoided saying anything about PingBack until now, since I like and respect the people who've developed it, but it is *not* TrackBack. When you send a TrackBack ping, you are saying 'I responded to this, and I think that your readers would also like to read what I said.' You are leaving a remote comment. When you send a PingBack ping, you are saying 'I linked to you', nothing more. It's a 'show referrers' script that filters out non-weblog referrers, a way to avoid having to click your own links to be sure you send a referrer. It is *not* TrackBack."
As a demonstration what TrackBack can do, I really liked TrackBack at OSCON, aggregating OSCON-related postings by subject: people posted on their own blogs, and notifications of their entry appeared transparently on this site, making it a virtual forum, a place for collected disussion.
GATEWAYS
Ian Hickson's Pingback-Proxy includes a simple trackback-to-pingback proxy that accepts Trackback GET requests and relays them to a pingback server and a simple pingback-to-trackback proxy that accepts pingback
requests and relays them to a trackback server. Of course, putting a Pingback ping into Trackback format doesn't make it a full-featured Trackback ping: "Trackback is a more complex thing."
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XML Transformations with CSS and DOM
Scott Andrew: "My latest article for Apple, XML Transformations with CSS and DOM, looks like an article on using CSS and DOM to create client-side transformations of XML documents without the need for XSLT. But it's actually about how utterly cool Mozilla is."
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The most beautiful experiment in physics
ACCORDING TO A POLL OF PHYSICS WORLD READERS:
1 - Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons
2 - Galileo's experiment on falling bodies (1600s)
3 - Millikan's oil-drop experiment (1910s)
4 - Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism (1665-1666)
5 - Young's light-interference experiment (1801)
6 - Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment (1798)
7 - Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference (3rd century BC)
8 - Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes (1600s)
9 - Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus (1911)
10 - Foucault's pendulum (1851)
The accompanying article includes some interesting thoughts on beauty and the experimental process.
PERFORMERS
Though named Young's experiment, it wasn't until 1961, the same year Feynman started his lectures, that someone carried out the winning experiment in real world - Claus Jönsson of Tübingen. "By that time no one was really surprised by the outcome, and the report, like most, was absorbed anonymously into science" - now, it gets revisited, and the Physics World editorial has more on the history of this experiment.
WUMBA-WAMBA-WHAT?
The New York Times goes ahead and delivers enlightenment to the masses: background and details on the ten experiments in plain English, "a bird's-eye view of more than 2,000 years of discovery" (free login required)
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OWASP: Building secure Web Applications
A GUIDE TO BUILDING SECURE WEB APPLICATIONS
"While several good documents are available to help developers write secure code, at the time of this project’s conception there were no open source documents that described the wider technical picture of building appropriate security into web applications. This document sets out to describe technical components, and certain people, process, and management issues that are needed to design, build and maintain a secure web application or web service." - Version 1.1
Read online | Download PDF (983 kB)
APPLICATION SECURITY ATTACK COMPONENTS
Documentation Project: "The aim is definitely not to build the biggest list of problems or describe attacks like Nimda or Code Red; but to document the underlying primary attack components that are used in attacks so people can learn to avoid developing them and others can learn to test for them. Its the dictionary of web application security:" input validation, canonicalization, parameter manipulation, authentication and session management, overflows, cryptographic and informational attacks and countermeasures explained.
Browse online
THE OPEN WEB APPLICATION SECURITY PROJECT
"OWASP is an open source reference point for system architects, developers, vendors, consumers and security professionals involved in Designing, Developing, Deploying and Testing the security of web applications and Web Services. The project is developing software tools and knowledge based documentation that helps people secure web applications and web services.All software and documentation is released under the GNU public licenses."
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Matthew Thomas (mpt): Home is where the Personal Toolthingummy is
"When I first got involved in the Mozilla Project, and realized just how bad Mozilla’s interface design was intended to be, I determined to see it as an opportunity. Okay, I thought. Here is a chance to improve the user experience for hundreds of millions of users, by helping to reverse some of the more egregious design decisions which would otherwise make their way into Netscape Communicator 5.0.
And that’s what happened, except for two minor details: the 'Netscape Communicator 5.0' thing, and the 'hundreds of millions of users' thing. I had not expected to discover, in Netscape’s contributors to Mozilla’s interface and feature set, an inverse relationship between power and cluefulness which determined that future Netscape releases would never be compelling enough for huge numbers of people to install — in the same way that huge numbers of people installed RealPlayer, for example, or even Netscape Communicator."
Read full story
Matthew Thomas? "I’m a 24-year-old Forrest Gump lookalike with two university degrees and a fondness for thinking too much. By day, I work for a pittance at an Internet cafe in Christchurch, New Zealand. By night, I construct grandiose schemes for saving the world." As an interface designer, he maintains a strong love-hate relationship with Mozilla.
OTHER MPT STORIES
In search of the perfectly designed browser, including the top ten usability problems in Internet Explorer
The top ten usability problems in Mozilla
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Dell dives into printer market
"Dell, confirming analyst speculation, said Tuesday it has reached an agreement to work with the Lexington, Ky.-based printer maker to create a line of Dell-branded inkjet and laser printers. The companies will also create a line of Dell-branded printer supplies, such as ink cartridges. All of the new products will be sold directly to customers. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. "It is our intent to have offerings with both (laser and inkjet) technologies," Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn said Tuesday.
Since HP dropped Dell as a partner, HP executives have scoffed at Dell's potential entry into the printer market, saying it won't be able to match HP's research and development prowess or its connection with customers.
What effect Dell will have on the printer market isn't immediately clear, analysts said. If Dell can cut prices on ink cartridges, it could force HP to do the same and thus put a big dent in HP's printer-related profit margins. HP counts on so-called printer consumables such as cartridges to help boost its bottom line. In any case, HP isn't taking the Dell threat lightly."
Full CNET.com report
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Maxhütte Sulzbach-Rosenberg: Ofen aus
Das lange Sterben der Maxhütte ist vorbei: mit dem letzten Abstich von Ofen III stellte das Unternehmen heute seine Produktion ein. Nach den Konkursen von 1987 und 1998 bedeutet das das endültige Aus des fast 150-jährigen Betriebs.
Nachdem 1990 die Öfen IV und VI stillgesetzt wurden, lief die Produktion zuletzt nur noch auf dem im gleichen Jahr modernisierten Ofen III, Baujahr 1957 - mit nur 6,3 m Gestelldurchmesser, 714 Kubikmeter Nutzvolumen und 1250 Tonnen Tageserzeugung ein eher kleines Exemplar.
Kritiker bezeichneten die Maxhütte als "Paradebeispiel für verfehlte Wirtschaftspolitik der bayerischen Regierung": über 250 Millionen Euro Steuergelder wurden mit geringer Aussicht auf Erfolg verbrannt, nachdem sich der Freistaat 1987 mit 45% in das Werk einkaufte: das Problem der veralteten Ausrüstung des Werkes wäre lösbar gewesen, das der ungünstigen Verkehrsanbindung durch das Fehlen eines schiffbaren Flusses in der Nähe nicht .
Einer möglichen Rettung des Unternehmens nach dem zweiten Konkurs 1998 durch den Niedersachsen Jürgen Großmann, Georgsmarienhütten-Chef, standen die Interessen der Freilassingers Max Aicher im Weg: Großmann wollte die Maxhütte als zweites Rohstahlwerk für Sonderstähle in seinen Unternehmensverbund einkaufen, als Halter von 44% beharrte Aicher auf finanziellen Altforderungen, die den Deal unattraktiv machten.
Jetzt heißt es für den Freistaat erstmal erneut zahlen: 29 Millionen Euro für eine Auffangsellschaft für 550 der 850 - von ehemals knapp 10.000 - verbliebenen Mitarbeiter, 17 Millionen für die Neuansiedlung von Unternehmen in der Region und 45,5 Millionen für einen Gewerbepark auf dem 60 Hektar großen Werksgelände, das zudem noch dekontaminiert werden muss - ebenfalls auf Landeskosten.
LINKS
industrie-kultur.de: Werksfotos
industrie-kultur.de: Technische Daten Ofen, Cowper, Gasreinigung, Verladung, Transport
Tagesspiegel: Das lange Sterben der Maxhütte ist zu Ende
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The sessions.edu Color Calculator
"The Sessions.edu Color Calculator provides the user with the ability to identify color schemes or harmonies for any design project, by controlling a series of menus and tools. With [this Flash tool], you can identify color harmonies faster than with any color wheel or chart."
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REDISCOVERING WEB ARCHITECTURE FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES
A Paul Prescod essay at REST discuss.
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Wer zuletzt lacht lacht am besten: 11 Sitze Vorsprung
Doris ihren Mann seine Partei stellt weiterhin stärkste Fraktion und Kanzler, aber ein Sieg war es nicht.
In unrelated news: Geschäftsbayerisch zur Völkerverständigung (via Martin Röll):
Der ziagt ned.....:
Der Kunde teilt in dieser Angelegenheit nicht unsere Meinung
Schau ma moi:
Detaillierte Aussagen sind im Moment nicht opportun
Do wensd ma ned glei obhaust:
Mit dieser Sache möchte ich mich im Moment nicht befassen
LINKS
Der Bundeswahlleiter: vorläufiges Endergebnis, Roh- und aggregierte Daten aller Wahlkreise incl. CSV-Download
SPIEGEL Online: "8864 Stimmen Vorsprung für die SPD"
REUTERS: "Nailbiting German election night wrongfoots press"
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Want to know how RIAA.org was hacked?
Two weeks ago the RIAA website was defaced. Even more embarrassing, the crackers installed pirate music files on the site for download. But how? First, they took a look at the floor plan (robots.txt), then they walked straight through the main door: www.riaa.org/admin, the (then) very passwordless site administration module. Full story at theregister.
RELATED ENTRIES
2002-08-31: RIAA against music sharing? Not anymore! They even host MP3 files now.
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WakkaWiki - a new PHP Wiki
"Wakka is a Wiki-esque website toolkit written in PHP. It's small, light-weight, somewhat fast-ish, and easily extensible through plugins that are essentially PHP includes. Great care has been taken to ensure Wakka can either easily integrate other applications or vice versa." And in a first impression, I like WakkaWiki much better than PHPWiki. Could become my Wiki tool of choice pretty soon.
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Laptop und Lebenslügen
"Informationstechnologie ist in Bayern Chefsache. Doch wichtige Projekte, mit denen der Freistaat die Branche fördern will, erweisen sich als Flop.
'Wenn Herr Stoiber sich als Freund des Mittelstandes feiert, kann ich nur bitter lachen', sagt Felder, 'alles macht er mit SAP und Siemens - die Kleinen gehen leer aus.' Felder betreibt eine Unternehmensberatung für E-Commerce in München. Weil er Racheaktionen der Staatsregierung fürchtet, will er seinen richtigen Namen nicht in der Zeitung lesen.
Andere wichtige Player in der quirligen Münchner E-Business-Szene bestätigen Felders Vorwürfe. Und der Staatskanzlei ist die Sache so unangenehm, dass es ihr die Sprache verschlagen hat. Ein Gespräch mit Hans-Joachim Heusler, der auf diesem Feld für Stoiber die Fäden zieht, ist nicht möglich. Stattdessen soll Staatsminister Huber zu den Klagen der Mittelständler Stellung nehmen - schließlich sei 'die Sache ein Politikum'. Huber meldet sich zum verabredeten Interview nicht. In den folgenden zwei Wochen sind seine Pressesprecher nicht einmal mehr ans Telefon zu bekommen.
Kungelei, Mittelstandsfeindlichkeit und Gigantismus werfen Münchner E-Commerce-Unternehmer der Staatsregierung vor. 'Die haben etliche Flops zu verantworten', sagt Dominik von Huebner, der als Rechtsanwalt Unternehmen aus der Informationstechnologie-Branche (IT-Branche) vertritt und selbst die Nutzung des Internets fördert."
Warum sich in Bayern ein einziges Unternehmen fast alle staatlichen Aufträge an Land ziehen kann, wie Mittelständler systematisch abgeblitzt lassen werden, warum die Großprojekte Baynet und VCB floppten, Siemens und SAP aber trotzdem dran kleben und wie die Firma Fast Spieler und Schiedsrichter der bayerischen "Software-Offensive" zugleich sein kann, berichtet die Financial Times Deutschland.
Epilog: "Die Anmaßung der Staatsregierung illustriert ein anderer Geschäftsmann mit einer Anekdote. Als er Stoibers Planer Heusler in dessen Büro besuchte, markierte der auf einer Bayern-Karte mit Fähnchen, welche Branche wo konzentriert werden soll: Callcenter in Nordbayern, Software in München. Als der Unternehmer von Heusler wissen wollte, ob die betroffenen Firmen auch gefragt würden, stieß er auf Unverständnis."
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18 Ways to Take Charge - Fast
"There are few career moments as exciting - and these days, as perilous - as taking over the top job at a company, business unit, or department. But what exactly do you do once you're in charge? This fastcompany.com online guide provides 18 tactics - and case studies - to help you take the reigns running."
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Nokia: Wireless hitchhikers branded as thieves
"Phone maker Nokia has come down strongly against warchalking. It has condemned as theft the placing of chalk symbols on walls and pavements at places where people can use wireless net access. An advisory issued by the handset maker said anyone using bandwidth without the permission of the person paying for it was simply stealing.
ComputerBILD Nokia warned that if too many warchalkers log on together, the whole network inside a company could slow down. It also said that unscrupulous spammers could use a network as a proxy to despatch millions of unwanted e-mail messages with no danger of being traced." - Full story and discussion at BBC News
In an unrelated story, an German proverb says "A cobbler should stick to his last / Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten"
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Creating Applications with Mozilla now Open Source
"The full text of the O'Reilly book Creating Applications With Mozilla is available for free online under the Open Public License at mozdev.org. XUL, XBL, XPCOM, it's all here, baby. If you can wield XML, CSS and JavaScript, you're more than halfway to becoming a Mozilla developer." - via Scott Andrew
In related (not exactly brand new) news, Mozilla 1.2 Alpha is out: "This release has better keyboard navigation including Type Ahead Find which lets you quickly navigate to links, and browse the web without a mouse."
Let's hope that stability comes back with this release. While on my main box, Mozilla 1.0 runs stable as a rock, 1.1, no matter if alpha, beta or final, tends to crash with certain sites and a high number of tabs opened. Not enough, one time it crashed my entire machine, messed up my profile, forgot everything i teached my password manager and - worst - lost the entire e-mail configuration. Physically, the mails files and folder are still there, but Mozilla does not like them any more. I still haven't figured out to make them friends again. Not much delight that it only was the third time at all I saw the W2k blue screen on this machine. Still, however, Mozilla is my browser and mail client of choice.
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Welcome to the Open Source Directory - Update
I'm not sure whether this site is new or not, but considering the relatively small amount of entries so far it might very well be so. The directory focuses on stable applications for productive environments and encourages user feedback and rating.
UPDATE
Geeez, forgot to provide the link before. Should work now.
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Browser-based in-place WYSIWYG XML editors
BITFLUX EDITOR IS NOW OPEN SOURCE
After collecting $50,000, "Bitflux open-sources the fully functional Editor (with tables, lists, picture upload etc.) under the Apache License. The official open-sourcing of the Editor will be at OSCOM 2 in Berkeley. A workshop will take place on September 25, 2002. Nevertheless the Editor is already open-source now." Bitflux Editor as part of the Bitflux CSM requires Mozilla, making it useable on Mac, Windows, Linux and other OS.
WORKING IDEA
Using XSLT and CSS, the XML gets transformed into user presentable HTML, the user edits this HTML in place and WYSIWYG style, and changes made are stored back in the XML. While being able to fully concentrate on authoring content, the user cannot create invalid XML. Browser based in-place WYSIWYG editors like Bitflux make editing XML comparable to using a word processor. They "allow common users to edit complex XML documents without knowing anything about XML, without even realising they are editing XML".
OTHER EDITORS
XOPUS is another popular Mozilla-based open source editor widget, and there are plenty more. University of Bristol's Paul Browning has this directory of similar editor widgets. Most are IE/Win only or commercially licensed though.
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On Information Architecture
"Although they share a common 'X,' 'taxonomies' and 'sexy' are two words that aren’t often seen together in public. So when 'taxonomies' become a common part of everyday conversation, it’s a sure sign that an organization is ready for a deeper look into information architecture." - Louis Rosenfeld
MSWEB: AN ENTERPRISE INTRANET
At boxes and arrows, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville take an information architect's look at MSWeb, the Microsoft Intranet (3,100,000+ pages, 50,000 authors in 74 countries, 8,000+ separate sites): "We understand that you probably don’t have the same resources at your disposal as does Microsoft’s team. But we think everyone can learn from their efforts; what they’re doing today is what most intranets will be doing in three to five years." Part I | Part II
SEARCH SYSTEMS
Free sample chapter of O'Reilly - Information Architecture for the WWW, 2nd Edition August 2002. 46 pages covering Does your Site need Search?, Basic Search System Anatomy, Choosing What to Search, Search Algorithms (don't expect details here), Presenting Results, and Desigining the Search Interface. PDF download
INTERVIEWS
boxes and arrow interviews:
The Indie life: Talking with Louis Rosenfeld | Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville
RELATED ENTRIES
2002-09-15 Currently Reading - Search Interface Standards
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Unser Tip für's Wochenende
LE MANS CLASSIC
La rétrospective des 24 Heures du Mans
21. - 22. September in Le Mans
55 Jahre 24 Stunden von Le Mans werden gebührlich gefeiert: Fahrzeuge aus der Zeit vom ersten Rennen 1923 bis zur Porsche 917/Gulf Mirage-Ära 1975 treten nicht nur auf dem Circuit Bugatti, sondern auf der großen, 13,8 km langen Strecke in fünf Klassen gegeneinander an. Zwecks Schonung der historischen Automobile werden sie pro Stunde etwa 35 Minuten bewegt werden, 24 Stunden lang, aufgeteilt in vier Rennen, zwei bei Tag und zwei bei Nacht.
Gemeldet sind über 300 Original-Fahrzeuge aus allen Jahren. Besonders Fahrzeuge aus den Anfangsjahren sind verhältnismäßig gut vertreten. Am Steuer werden u.a. Nick Mason, Bobby Rahal (auf Porsche 917) und Ray Bellm zu sehen sein. Eintritt: €40 für das Gesamtprogramm an beiden Tagen. Vorher die Briefwahl nicht vergessen ;-)
LINKS
Offical website: lemansclassic.com
mogsport.net: The 1939 Morgan 4-4 at Le Mans Classic 2002
mogsport:net: Grid details
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The Morning News
THE ODYSSEY
"Polyphemus's one eye is a single point of failure; when Odysseus pokes it out, he is much less able to defend himself. Polyphemus's alarm is ignored because Odysseus said his name was Nobody, so he winds up shouting that nobody is trying to kill him (you'd think the other Cyclopes would come see what's going on, but maybe Polyphemus shouts random stupid things all the time, like an [Intrusion Detection System]). Polyphemus finally has to let the sheep out to graze - it's a mission-critical function - and Odysseus and his men then escape by masquerading as legitimate traffic (sheep)." - the September issue of Bruce Schneier's Cypto-Gram Newsletter is out
IF YOU'RE GOOD, DON'T WORRY: 12 REASONS
"The glory days of the programmer are growing dim. The days of the software engineer are just beginning" - Bill Carlson in The Joel on Software Forum on "why mid and upper level developers needn't worry long term."
BREAKFAST ENTERTAINMENT: HACKING LAS VEGAS
wired.com re-read: Hacking Las Vegas - The Inside Story of the MIT Blackjack Team's conquest of the casinos, adopted from Ben Bezrich's book "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six Mit Students Who Took Vegas for Millions" to be released October 1
STUDENTENJOBS IN ALLER WELT, HEUTE: DÄNEMARK
UniSPIEGEL: "Jede ordentliche Samenbank liegt in der Nähe einer Uni"
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FTD-Wahlempfehlung: journalistisches Desaster
"Über 1300 Leserbriefe, Faxe und Mails erhielt die Financial Times Deutschland nach ihrer Wahlempfehlung für die Union. Die meisten ärgerten sich über den Tabubruch der rosaroten Wirtschaftszeitung. Doch auf der Leserbrief-Seite der FTD kamen die Kritiker kaum zu Wort. Die Auswahl steht im krassen Gegensatz zum Tenor der Zuschriften. 'Über 90 Prozent der Leser haben sich über die Aktion beklagt', sagt ein FTD-Redakteur. Die Auswahl der Leserbriefe auf der Sonderseite grenze an Manipulation.
'Dass sie dem Leser die Kompetenz absprechen, sich aus all den Ausführungen eine eigene Meinung zu bilden, finde ich erschreckend', lautet eine der wenigen kritischen Bemerkungen, die die FTS zugelassen hat. Ein Leser bittet die FTD, den Leser mit subjektiven, emotionalen Äußerungen zu verschonen: 'Wenn Sie meinen, in verkürzter Art und Weise die gesamte deutsche Politik darstellen zu können, dann überschätzen sie sich gewaltig.'
Die Chefredaktion der FTD hatte der Redaktion zwar von vornherein klargemacht, dass der Wahlempfehlung kein basisdemokratisches Verfahren vorausgehen würde. Die Wahlempfehlung zugunsten der Union hatte in der Redaktion dennoch großen Unmut ausgelöst: 'Bei einer Abstimmung in der Redaktion hätte die Union nach der PDS das schlechteste Ergebnis erzielt', sagte ein Redakteur gegenüber SPIEGEL ONLINE."
SPIEGEL Online Artikel
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European Union Researches the Benefits of Open Source Software
Andy Oram reports on the possible implications of the recent "Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study", or FLOSS, that explored the reasons behind the widespread use of, and support for, free and open source software: "The burning question many people bring to this survey - whether friend or foe - is: Why would organizations choose to use free software? [...] Price is not the issue. [...] Overwhelmingly, the highest ranking reasons for using free software center on quality."
oreillynet.com article | FLOSS final report download
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Scott Andrew is back in Town
Scott Andrew is back in town, posting on DOM/CSS, DHTML, browsers and W3C standards. And how did you spend your summer vacation, Scott?
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High Tech Martyr
From a (non-fake) resume:
- helped deliver a project 2 months late and $149,000 over budget
- created custom reports to accurately display the level of failure
- generated colorful charts and graphs to compare this failed project with more successful projects of the past
- used multiple sofware packages to incorrectly track progress
- accpeted full responsibilty to save Top level management the embarrassment of failure
Via
Krzysztof Kowalczyk
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Quick Guide to Monitor Calibration
Sure your TFT display (or your CRT) gets all those colors right? Check the Bryce Alive Quick Guide to Monitor Calibration, also available in PDF format.
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Die Chefredaktion hat gewählt - FTD als Wahlhelfer?
"Mit einem Rezept aus Amerika will sich die Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) am Montag in den Wahlkampf einmischen: Am Montag will sie in ihrem Leitartikel eine Wahlempfehlung aussprechen. Dem Vernehmen nach fällt die Wahl der FTD auf Edmund Stoiber. Dies soll im Rahmen einer längeren Analyse ohne Autoren-Nennung im Namen der ganzen Redaktion geschehen - sofern nicht am Sonntag das Projekt Wahlempfehlung wieder platzt: Denn das gefällte Votum hat die Redaktion entzweit.
Die Belegschaft der Zeitung war tief gespalten, die Chefredaktion bestimmte schließlich das Votum. 'Der übergroße Teil der Politikredaktion', der alle Konzepte und Akteure von Berufs wegen gründlich kennt, für Schröder votierte, zum Teil mit deutlicher Neigung die Grünen als Motor der Koalition hervorzuheben."
SPIEGEL Online Artikel
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Web Services: DWG/DXF to SVG converter
Suite 75 put online a demo of a dwg2svg web service accepting AutoCAD DWG/DXF files and returning them in SVG format. Didn't waste too much time on the front end, though. Via Tim Knip. Consider it a technology demonstration, nothing to send your sensitive data to.
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FUN: SPEECH SYNTHESIZER
The University of Edinburgh Centre for Speech Technology Research developed The Festival Speech Synthesis System, "an extensible multi-lingual speech synthesis system" available for free download. Compiled with cygwin, it also runs on Windows boxes (howto).
Check Caregie Mellon's festvox.org for demos with your own text. While "voice us2 (American male)" sounds more like a Finnish male, voices "rab (British male)" and "es (Spanish male)" deliver results that could be worse, given that the current Festival release is 14 month old (textos en español disponibles aquí o aquí).
Tim Knip has a Speaking Blog employing Festival and went miles for it: "I wrote a little WebService using Visual Studio .NET which starts up Festival and converts an incoming string to a WAV-sound file. After that I use LAME to convert WAV to MP3 (Flash can only load mp3's)." And a Flash MX Plugin is what you need to get this feature running. Consider it a technology demonstration, not a screen reader replacement.
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Britischer Professor will Kindern Ortungs-Chips implantieren
"Der britische Kybernetik-Professor Kevin Warwick will einem elfjährigen Mädchen in Kürze einen Mikrochip unter die Haut pflanzen, dessen Signale per Mobiltelefon-Netz eine Ortung des Kindes ermöglichen sollen. Nach Angaben der britischen Times will Warwick die Einpflanzung zum Kostenpunkt von 20 Pfund (32 Euro) bei mindestens sechs weiteren Kindern vornehmen. Deren Eltern seien nach der Ermordung der beiden zehnjährigen Mädchen Holly Wells und Jessica Chapman im August in Cambridgeshire um die Sicherheit ihrer Kinder besorgt."
heise newsticker
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SSL-chain also broken in Outlook, signed email in Outlook essentially meaningless
Digital signatures can easily be forged and therefore can't be trusted in Outlook because of the same certificate chaining issue plaguing Internet Explorer:
"Outlook's S/MIME implementation is vulnerable to the certificate chain spoofing attack, despite Microsoft's claim that IE is the only affected application. The vulnerability allows anyone to forge the digital signature on an email that is to be viewed with Outlook. No warnings are given, no dialogs are shown. As it stands, there is virtually no difference between signed and unsigned email in Outlook. Unless carefully inspected, signed email in Outlook is essentially meaningless. This also applies to any signed email received over the past 5+ years." SecurityFocus Posting by Mike Benham.
"Briefly, an attacker would sign an untrusted cert with a trusted, intermediate one. Of course, just because the cert doing the signing is trusted, that's no reason why its offspring should be. Unfortunately, neither IE nor Outlook check basic constraints, and for this reason the end user is never warned that the certificate chain is questionable." TheRegister report
Earlier, Mike Benham discovered the certificate chaining issue in various SSL implementation and now he "encourages everyone to send Bill Gates an email from himself". Microsoft is the only company that has not fixed the SSL bug yet. Opera Software and the KDE/Konquerer team reacted within day, while Microsoft tries to whitewash the affair saying that the bug is harmless, despite of a handy exploit available (see below). Mozilla is not effected.
Details on the Microsoft SSL vulnerability can be found here and here. In new version 0.4, Mike Benhams sslsniff exploit, "a simple tool that will allow for undetected hijacking of IE SSL sessions, even on a switched network (Man In The Middle attack)" now comes with a valid CA-signed certificate and key.
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Transrapid in China: die Kuh schlachten, nicht melken
"Die hohe Politik Chinas hat wieder eine neue Methode entdeckt, um dem Transrapid-Konsortium die Daumenschrauben anzulegen. Jetzt sind die Deutschen angeblich bereit, ihre letzten technologischen Geheimnisse preiszugeben. [...] Das Konsortium sei mittlerweile allem Anschein nach bereit, den Chinesen einen vollständigen Zugang zum technischen Know-how der Magnetschnellbahn zu verschaffen, schreibt das [Handelsblatt] unter Berufung auf den örtlichen ThyssenKrupp-Manager Hartmut Heine."
SPIEGEL online Artikel
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Presenting: The White Stripes
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:: in category Music
NetBeans 3.4 released, O'Reilly book for download
NetBeans 3.4 is released. NetBeans is a full featured Open Source Java IDE and application framework. With syntax highlighting and code completion for Java, XML, HTML, CSS, JSP it might be used for non-Java projects, too. The XML Project adds support for working with XML, DTD and CSS documents in NetBeans.
NetBeans - the Definitive Guide is the working title of the upcoming O'Reilly book "NetBeans in a Nutshell", and the final draft including all chapters and appendices, glossary, and example downloads is available in HTML and PDF formats for free download.
RELATED ENTRIES
August 17, 2002: Web Authoring - JSPs: A Total Waste of Time?
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