hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

America's Cup: Desaster strikes Team NZ again, Alinghi in 4:0 lead

americascup.yahoo.com: "First signs of drama came on the downwind run as Team New Zealand, driving through the quarter wave of Alinghi, took a lot of water over the bow and down the forward hatch. For most of the second beat, Team New Zealand appeared to struggle to control its sailplan, with much of its mainsail backwinding, on a heavily pre-bent mast. With a squall crossing the course and winds of up to 26 knots up the second beat, Team New Zealand ploughed into three large waves. As the bow buried into the third wave, the rig broke just above the first spreader and the crew went from racing mode to survival mode. For the second time in this Match, Alinghi were left to sail around the course on its own, taking their score to 4-0 and needing just one more win to take the America's Cup to Switzerland."

Yacht online: "Mit dem Bruch wird dieser Cup für die Neuseeländer zur schwarzen Serie. Das Boot scheint tatsächlich nicht für Wind über 20 Knoten zu taugen. Auffällig waren auch zwei Folienschürzen im Achterschiff, die ein improvisiertes Deck bildeten und so verhindern sollten, dass erneut zu viel Wasser, wie in der ersten Wettfahrt, ins Boot kommt. Das klappte auch einigermaßen. Offenbar hat das Team aber schon länger Probleme mit dem Mastdesign. Denn die Neuseeländer gingen von dem von ihnen eingeführten Drei-Salings-Rigg zurück auf vier Salinge, im Training waren bereits zwei Masten gebrochen. Die Zeichen stehen für Alinghi nun also endgültig auf Sieg. Sie können Risiken eingehen und, noch wichtiger, sich auf ihr Boot und ihre Crew verlassen. Denn zum Zeitpunkt des Bruchs lag das Schweizer Boot komfortabel in Führung. [...] In der kommenden Nacht kann Alinghi-Steuermann Russell Coutts, der bereits den Rekord für die meisten gewonnenen, aufeinander folgenden Wettfahrten im Cup hält, auch zu Legende Dennis Conner mit drei aufeinander folgenden Cup-Siegen gleichziehen. Und in der kommenden Nacht kann sich auch entscheiden, ob der Cup nach Europa kommt."

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important-message@paybox.de

Nach dem MBO und der "Unterbrechung" des Paybox-Services werden nun also die Formalien geklärt. Aus einer Mail von heute:

"Lieber paybox-Kunde,

hiermit kündigen wir zum 30. Juni 2003 Ihren Vertrag mit der paybox deutschland AG, da dieser Service von paybox deutschland nicht in der bestehenden Form weitergeführt werden kann. Wir werden uns bemühen, Ihnen in den nächsten Wochen weitere Informationen zu sicheren und bequemen bargeldlosen Zahlungsmöglichkeiten zukommen zu lassen. Insbesondere arbeiten wir daran, Ihnenmit [sic] geeigneten Partnern baldmöglichst wieder einen paybox-Dienst bereitstellen zu können."

Wette, daß das nix wird. Vielleicht gelingt es ihnen ja wenigstens, ihre Technologie an einen der Mobilfunk-Provider zu verhökern.

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Better Living Through Successful Branding - Neulich bei IKEA

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Message In A Bottle

The Message In A Bottle Server in Brighton, UK: "Enter a message here and it will be printed off, put in a bottle and thown from Brigton Pier on the south coast of England." Nifty. Via IT&W.

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Unternehmenskultur II

Ich halte es für gefährlich, als Unternehmen strategische Entscheidungen am Zeitgeist zu orientieren
Dr. Helmut Panke, BMW

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Unternehmenskultur I

Während es früher zum Selbstverständnis des Unternehmers gehörte, Verantwortung für seine Mitarbeiter zu übernehmen, ist heute in Konzernen eine solche Einstellung selten. Es ist gefährlich, Manager zu haben, die insgeheim ihre persönlichen Ziele als vorrangig bewerten.
Reinhard Mohn, Bertelsmann-Patriarch

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Bye-bye, IBM

The IBM hard disk in Kerouac, my main working notebook, is dead. This was my fifth IBM 2.5" disk - and my last. None lived longer than 16 months. Yes, there is a backup strategy. Yes, it worked. No, it didn't make my day.

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America's Cup 2003: Waiting for the Race

0200 GMT, Alinghi vs. Team New Zealand race four still not started. To make waiting easier, German public television ARD (that covers the event live) airs a very impressive and lively feature on the Illbruck team and its victory of the 2001/2002 Volvo Ocean Race. During that race around the world from Southampton to Kiel, German team Illbruck set a new world record: during the 9th leg from Baltimore to La Rochelle, they covered 484 nm within 24 hours. Time to check some sites on this race:

• BBC News in Depth: All the Volvo Ocean Race news that fit to print
• Illbruck Challenge offical site
• Volvo Ocean Race offical site, including a very nice gallery
• Rick Tomlison Photography

Also, the Illbruck is very interesting from an engineer's point of view, just like the America's Cup boats are. Perhaps more on that later.

UPDATE
Todays race is canceled. Team Alinghi wants to sail, Team New Zealand doesn't want to take a chance. Next try on Saturday.

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Should I stay or should I go now?

My Siemens S45 is broken. The error will be fixed under warranty, but still, I think about switching to a newer model. Will it be the elegant S55 plus the nifty Bluetooth headset now, or perhaps the weird looking, technically interesting Symbian SX-1 later? Let's see what new models Siemens will present at CeBIT - the move from S55 to S55i would be early, but appreciated. The next one will be my fifth Siemens cell phone - after one E10D, S10E, S35i, and S45 each.

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Reading News Feeds in Mozilla: NewsMonster Beta 1 is out

I am very excited to see that NewsMonster finally is out as Beta 1 and now also has its own domain newsmonster.org. Will try it out as soon as possible and hope it finally works - earlier versions I tested did not really.

NewsMonster is a very ambitious project by the maker of peerfear.org that integrates feed reading into the Mozilla browser suite, making it even more complete.

"In one sense, NewsMonster is just an RSS aggregator. It allows the user to subscribe to RSS channels and keep track of recent news. NewsMonster also supports advanced aggregation functionality including the extraction of content for PDA support, a "sitefilter" for websites that don't support RSS [scraper], rich images on each channel including favicons, and many other features. All content generation within NewsMonster is provided via XSLT technology. This allows users and developers to modify the way their pages look, customize HTML output, and easily add support for the latest RSS changes and additional modules"

For now, it consists of two parts: a Mozilla component as frontend and a Java component doing the aggregation work itself. In Beta 2, this is to change: author Kevin Burton wants to fully integrate NewsMonster into Mozilla, just like Mail, News or Calendar, and build a three pane UI with native XUL elements - great!

Apart from the basic tasks of aggregating feeds in all flavours (0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, most RSS 1.0 modules supported) and scraping sites, NewsMonster will come with a magnitude of features that will turn it into an "advanced weblog manager", including a reputation system, FOAF support, Semantic Web stuff and more. I am not sure if I need all this. But I want a (ultra-liberal) Feed Reader living inside Mozilla, and it looks like NewsMonster could be the solution of choice.

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PHP: CGI vulnerability in 4.3.0, fixed 4.3.1 released

If you run the PHP 4.3.0 in the CGI SAPI version, update now to 4.3.1. The new release 4.3.1 does not include any other changes, so upgrading from 4.3.0 is safe and painless. 4.3.0 contains a serious security vulnerability. Exploiting it, a remote attacker could trick PHP into executing arbitrary PHP code (if he is is able to inject the code into files accessible by the CGI).

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Vagabonding.com - Best. MT. Blog. Ever.

Vagabonding.com "chronicles the solo, one year, round-the-world journey of Mike Pugh, an optimist from Chicago, USA. Mike has been on the road for 140 days. He's currently in Bodhigaya, India."

The special? He travels with a digital video/photo camera, a notebook and a super-elaborate Movable Type blog to share. It is the old art of keeping a travelogue - back with a vengance, and very 2003.

Via What do I know

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Minor site changes

Some small changes have been made to this site, mainly concerning the sidebar - check the Changelog

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TV-Tip: Das Massaker in Afghanistan

Das Massaker in Afghanistan - Haben die Amerikaner zugesehen?
Ein Film von Jamie Doran
WDR TV die story, heute 23:00 - 23:45

"Im November 2001 verschwanden bei Masar-i-Scharif - die Amerikaner hatten das Oberkommando - 3000 von insgesamt 8000 gefangenen Taliban. Die entwaffneten Gotteskrieger sollten von der Festung Kalai Dschangi in das Gefängnis der afghanischen Stadt Scheberghan überführt werden. Viele kamen niemals dort an. Jamie Doran hat Beweise dafür zusammenge-tragen, dass diese Männer ermordet wurden. Ihre Leichen liegen in einem Massengrab in der Wüste bei Dasht Leili. Das zeigt sein Dokumentarfilm.

Bei den Dreharbeiten wurde Doran vom örtlichen Warlordgeneral Dostum und der amerikanischen Armee massiv behindert. Trotz großer Schwierigkeiten gelang es ihm, Zeugen zu finden, die den Weg der 3000 Taliban in den Tod nachzeichnen. Demnach wurden die Gefangenen bei 40 Grad Hitze zu Hunderten in Containern zusammengepfercht - Todesfallen ohne Luftlöcher. Ein afghanischer Soldat sagt im Film aus, wie er den Befehl erhielt, in die verschlossenen Container zu schießen - angeblich um Luftlöcher zu schaffen. Tatsächlich jedoch wurden auf diese Weise wohl Hunderte Männer getötet.

Der anschließende stundenlange Transport durch die glühende Hitze forderte weitere zahlreiche Opfer. Ein Augenzeuge berichtet von ineinander verschlungenen Leichen, die sich in den Containern türmten. Unter Mithilfe von US-Soldaten seien dann die toten Taliban gemeinsam mit ohnmächtigen oder schwerverwundeten Gefangenen auf Lastwagen verladen und in die Wüste von Dasht Leili transportiert worden. Dort wurde ein Massengrab ausgehoben, an dessen Rand diejenigen, die noch lebten erschossen wurden. Anschließend mussten alle Toten verscharrt werden. Auch bei den Erschießungen in der Wüste sollen - so sagen die Zeugen in Dorans Film - amerikanische Soldaten anwesend gewesen sein.

Dorans Recherchen haben Staub aufgewirbelt. Alle befragten Zeugen haben sich bereit erklärt, vor einem Ausschuss der UN auszusagen. Allerdings scheint ihre Sicherheit nicht gewährleistet: Zwei der Männer wurden inzwischen bereits ermordet."

WDR TV die story

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Code Orange

Seen at Joi Ito's Web

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TIMES Europe Threatpoll

Playboys say: Cherchez la femme. Politicians think: Cherchez le pétrole.
Ahmed Saki al-Jamani, Oil-Guru

Oil is too valuable a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs
Henry Kissinger

"Which country really poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? TIME Europe asks for readers' views."

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Nights in White Satin

Nights in white satin
never reaching the end.
Letters I've written
never meaning to send.
Beauty I'd always missed
with these eyes before.
Just what the truth is
I can't say anymore

'Cause I love you,
yes I love you,
oh, how I love you.

Gazing at people
some hand in hand
just what I'm going though
they can't understand.
Some try to tell me
thoughts they cannot defend
just what you want to be
you'll be in the end.

And I love you,
yes I love you,
oh, how I love you.

Nights in white satin
never reaching the end.
Letters I've written
never meaning to send.
Beauty I'd always missed
with these eyes before.
Just what the truth is
I can't say anymore.

Moody Blues

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DELL Inspiron 4000, Wonderbook

If asked for my opinion on Kerouac, my DELL Inspiron 4000, I used to say: components, keyboard, display, modularity, reliability, temperature and noise: all very fine, well worth the money; mechanics: not exactly a revelation, display hinges: poor crap. Now I say: mechanics: fair in general, but though when it counts. Today Kerouac fell out of the trunk of my car and dropped to the ground 1.5 meters away. I feared the worst, put back in the battery, switched it on - it still works like charme. Except for a tiny little spot in the upper right front corner, there even aren't any scratches. Kerouac, Toughbook, Wonderbook.

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Der Pickelhauben-Pazifist

"Noch nie in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik ist eine so richtige und so wichtige Grundposition so schlecht vertreten worden wie das deutsche Nein zum Irak-Krieg. Noch nie hatte eine Bundesregierung in einer zwischen ihr und der Opposition so umstrittenen Frage so viel Rückhalt in der Bevölkerung. Und noch nie hat eine Regierung aus viel Rückhalt so wenig gemacht. Diese Regierung ist ein mitleiderregend schlechter Anwalt einer guten Sache.

Die Union dagegen präsentiert sich als guter Anwalt einer schlechten Sache: Sie gibt den gefährlichen US-Kriegsplänen den Anstrich des Gebotenen und schadet mit berlusconischer Liebedienerei den verzweifelten Bemühungen, einen Krieg noch zu vermeiden. Aber das fällt wenig ins Gewicht, weil die Bundesregierung ihrem Anliegen selbst am meisten schadet. Schröder betreibt seine Friedenspolitik so grobklotzig wie ein vom Militarismus bekehrter Kaiser Wilhelm. Er ist ein Pickelhauben-Pazifist. Wilhelm II. hat erst nach seiner Absetzung Holz gehackt; Schröder macht das Kleinholz schon während seiner Amtszeit – und wirft es seinem Außenminister vor die Füße."

Leitartikel der Süddeutschen Zeitung

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Datuns Revisited

I introduced them before, but The Datsuns are still great to get you going on a Monday morning - just the finest in loud and dirty Rock'n'Roll. Find more posters at Gigposters.com.

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The Monday Early Morning News Roundup

TOOLS

• "POPFile is an email classification tool with a Naive Bayes classifier, a POP3 proxy and a web interface. It runs on most platforms and with most email clients."

READING

• The Scobleizer Weblog: "I was talking with someone who works closely with Microsoft on a variety of initiaties and he said "Microsoft wants to help webloggers and others build strong communities like Slashdot around their products. OK, I've started a few communities around Microsoft products (Train Simulator, NetMeeting, and .NET) and I've noticed that Microsoft-centric communities aren't getting strong for a few reasons." Read why and don't miss the comments.
• Open Source in the Belgian Armed Forces
• builer.com: Tame these 10 types of techies

BLOGGING

• I wonder what's so special about this old entry on the Google API. During the last two weeks it received several hundred of hits, just like the Deltron Video Disk posting. No wonder, it is the second (or third, depending on how you count) Google hit for this product, just behind the Deltron company site.

LIVING

• "In the continuing quest to find more potent and interesting ways to mess with [his] brain, Ben Hammersley comes up with something new, "as puzzlingly good as being slapped across the face by Monica Bellucci." Well, it's just chocolate plus coffee plus chili powder.
• Soap blogs: Advocadocouch - considerable Scope of the Imagination. By Benedicta who is addicted to a pair of sexy pants.

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We at Sun don't like Java either

From InternalMemos.com: "While the Java language provides many advantages over C and C++, its implementation on Solaris presents barriers to the delivery of reliable applications. These barriers prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun. [...] This document details the difficulties that keep our Solaris Java implementation from being practical for the development of common software applications. It represents a consensus of several senior engineers within Sun Microsystems. [...] We would generally prefer to deploy our applications in Java but the implementation provided for Solaris is inadequate to the task of producing supportable and reliable products."

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Berlinale 2003

Sollte ein Leser oder eine Leserin meines Blogs Zugang zum Pressebereich von berlinale.de - und damit zu den hochauflösenden Versionen der Filmfotos - haben, würde ich mich über eine Mail freuen - Ruhm und Ehre sind das Mindeste, was winkt ;-)

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The Folly of Conditional CSS

Site owners, if your agency or in-house team is sniffing browsers to send them different CSS files, they’re wasting your money and laying the groundwork for compatibility problems that will bite you down the road.
Jeffrey Zeldman

Meanwhile, Microsoft is a friend of browser-specific Style Sheets: it seems that at MSN, Opera 7 is served a style sheet that is broken on purpose. Users will attritbute the broken rendering result to Opera and use Internet Explorer instead again, as "it's a Microsoft site anyway". It is no surprise that MSN does it. It is just a surprise that they didn't do it before.

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Boys need Toys: ViewSonic VP2290b

Viewsonic VP2290b, most sexy screen resolution ever: 3840 x 2400 pixels, 22.2 inches, 204 pixels per inch. There is no replacement for displacement screen resolution and pixel density.

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The Function of Man

The function of man is to live, not to exist
Jack London

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Cacheability Engine and How to Control Web Caches

Cacheability Engine: "This service allows you to check Web pages to see how caches will handle them. [It] will look at a URL (and optionally any images or objects associated with it), giving both specific cache-related data about it, and a general commentary on how cacheable the object is." It can be used via a web form, via bookmarklets or as a local installation. The site has a summary on How to use it and how to interpret the results and a detailed Web Caching Tutorial including sections on How (and how not) to Control Caches and Implementation Notes for Cache Control in Perl, PHP and other server-side languages. Link found at Russell Beattie.

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Quanten-Hall-Effekt, Klitzing-Konstante und Moderne Zeiten

Heute vor 23 Jahren entdeckte der deutsche Physiker Klaus von Klitzing in einem Experiment den quantisierten oder Quanten-Hall-Effekt (Klitzing-Effekt). In Wiederholung des bekannten Hall-Effekt-Experiments mit besonders genauen Meßgeräten stellte er fest, daß der Widerstand bei bestimmten Magnetfeldstärken sprunghaft seinen Wert ändert, um dann bis zum nächsten Sprung konstant auf einem Plateau zu verharren. In der Folge entdeckte er neben dem Planckschen Wirkungsquantum h und der Elektronenladung e eine neue Naturkonstante als Grundmaß für den elektrischen Widerstand: h/e², 25812,8 Ohm oder ganzzahlige Bruchteile davon, seit 1990 in der Maßeinheit Klitzing angegeben und 1985 für einen Nobelpreis der Physik für Bahnbrechendes für die Bestimmung des elektrischen Widerstandes gut.

Der Deutsche Horst Störmer und die beiden US-Amerikaner Robert Laughlin und Daniel Tsui setzten Klitzings Forschung fort und entdeckten 1982 den bruchteilquantisierten oder fraktionierten Hall-Effekts, für den sie 1998 gemeinsam ebenfalls einen Nobelpreis der Physik erhielten.

Unter Verwendung deutliche stärkere Magnetfelder und deutlich niedrigere Temperaturen als von Klitzing sie einsetzte, fanden sie neue, noch höhere Widerstandsplateaus, die von Klitzing mit seinem Aufbau nicht entdecken konnte. Das Besondere: die Höhe der Plateaus ließ sich nicht durch ein mathematisches Gesetz mit ganzzahligen Vielfachen beschrieben. Sie beruhen vielmehr darauf, daß sich Elektronen unter ganz bestimmten Konditionen einer Kollektivierung nicht mehr widersetzen und zu einer "Quantenflüssigkeit" kondensieren, die ganz neue Eigenschaften aufweist, so z.B. nur noch Bruchteile einer Elektronen-Ladung besitzen kann. Gebrochenzahlige Ladungen konnten später auf direktem Wege experimentell nachgewiesen werden, was Störmers, Laughlins und Tsuis Entdeckung bestätigte.

EBENFALLS HEUTE

1914 - William Burrows geboren, später in den Dunstkreis von Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg und Jack Kerouac geraten

1936 - "Moderne Zeiten" uraufgeführt. Seinerzeit in Deutschland und Italien naheliegenderweise verboten

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Pretty in Scarlet

GUANO APES - PRETTY IN SCARLET
Gepflegter Rock, gepflegte Unterhaltung, fast schon Lounge-fähig, Lied des Tages. Nichts wirklich neues, vielleicht auch etwas kurz, trotzdem schön. Und ab auf die Heavy Rotation.

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Reading

• Boxes and Arrows: Using Site Evaluations to Communicate with Clients - "Over the last few years and umpteen site evaluations, I've developed some templates I customize as needed. I will describe these templates, when and why I use them, how I present the assessments, and will discuss some specific cases where site assessments have helped me convey my arguments to clients."
• oreillynet: A Closer Look at the Palm Tungsten - "This is one of the most exciting offerings I've seen from Palm in quite a while. [It] is an attractive, compact, capable multimedia PDA that should delight both the business professional and the techno hobbyist."
• And from the Other Blogs I Sometimes Read Department: vsbabu.org

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1959: The Day the Music dies

"Jiles P. Richardson, Charles Holley, Richard Valenzuela and Roger A. Peterson, pilot of the plane were killed in the crash of a chartered [Beechcraft Bonanza] airplane when it fell within minutes of takeoff from the Mason City Airport," the coroner's report said. "The three passengers were members of a troupe of entertainers", better known as Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. And each year, people re-read Bob Dearborn's American Pie Special, first aired in 1972.

Also today in History:

1966 - Race to the moon: Soviet Luna 9 achieves the first lunar soft landing
1935 - Hugo Junkers dies at 76
1486 - Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden, aka Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of movable type (not Movable Type ;-), dies

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Blogging News - Update -

MOVABLE TYPE

• TRACKBACKS AND COMMENTS IN ONE LIST
  Adam Kalsey's SimpleComments Plugin merges (local) comments and Trackback pings (remote comments) into one list. "Movable Type makes a distinction between entry comments and TrackBacks that seems artificial, and it made more sense to me to have TrackBack ping data appear within the comments portion of a Movable Type site. [...] Best of all, you don’t need to learn new MT tags in order to do this." Via Ben Hammersley
• BLOGGING VIA EMAIL, SECURELY
  Alex at Slackerbit.ch has a new script available for blogging by email securely with GnuPG and Movable Type: "It only posts entries that have a good GnuPG signature, and even then only if the fingerprint of the key used to sign is allowed to post. By adding custom headers to the mail, you can even set the category of the entry and ping TrackBack URLs.The script takes the value of the X-MT-Category header, and if that matches the name of an existing category, this is set as the primary category for that entry.And pinging TrackBack URLs happens via the X-MT-Ping header. This header can appear multiple times, and each URL gets pinged." This Perl script requires the GnuPG, MIME::Parser, Mail::Header and MIME:QuotedPrint CPAN modules. Via Ben Hammersley

RSS

• TRACKING RSS READERSHIP
  Bill Kearney proposes a very simple method to track whether the links being referred to your website are coming from your RSS file or just from another webpage: just add a "?rss" to your entry URLs in your RSS feeds and have your logfile analyzer filter your logfiles for that parameter. Having that "?rss" added to the URLs is very easy when the feed is produced from template (like in MT). And if you use a homegrown logfile analyzer, why not add a report like "This week, there are 87 links to entry #838, 60 of which coming from your RSS feed and 27 from these web sites: ..."? Sounds nice.

BLOGGING TOOLS

• BLOJSOM - BLOXOM GONE JAVA
  Blojsom is "a lightweight blog package written in Java that is inspired by blosxom. blojsom aims to retain the simplicity in design of its Perl-based "relative" while adding user flexibility in areas such as the flavor and templating mechanism." The javai18n blog has more details.

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The Boss Loves Microsoft: Where does that leave Lotus?

Must see session slides by IBM's Ed Brill (PDF file, 1.2 MB). Via Vowe.

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ifrOSS: Open Source Lizenz-Sammlung

Das Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software (ifrOSS) in München hat eine Liste insgesamt 137 bekannter Open Source-Lizenzen zusammengestellt. Die Lizenzen "werden nach ihren lizenzrechtlichen Charakteristika in Lizenzen ohne Copyleft-Effekt, Lizenzen mit strengem Copyleft-Effekt, Lizenzen mit beschränktem Copyleft-Effekt, Lizenzen mit Wahlmöglichkeiten und Lizenzen mit Sonderrechten eingeteilt." Außerdem werden Open Content Lizenzen, die sich nicht auf Software beschränken, aufgeführt.

ifrOSS Lizenz-Center | ifrOSS Homepage

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Boys need toys: The Transparent iBook

Case-modding, seriously: Kodawarisan from Japan built molds from his iBook casing and cast transparent new ones. The manufacturing process, first home style and then: pro style.

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Herr v. Puttkamer gedenkt zu verreisen

70 Jahre war es her am Donnerstag, und in keinem Weblog auch nur ein Wort. DIE ZEIT hilft aus:

"Genau vor 70 Jahren, am 30. Januar 1933, ernannte Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg Adolf Hitler zum Reichskanzler – der Weg in Diktatur und Krieg und Völkermord war frei. Man hat viele Gründe für das Scheitern der Weimarer Republik genannt. Oft werden der Versailler Vertrag und die Wirtschaftskrise samt der hohen Arbeitslosigkeit dafür verantwortlich gemacht. Doch entscheidend war etwas anderes. Zu viele Deutsche wollten keine Demokratie; vor allem die konservativen Eliten verfolgten den neuen Staat mit unerbittlichem Hass. Die Erinnerungen Ferdinand Friedensburgs an seinen 'Dienstantritt in Ostpreußen' 1921, die wir hier leicht gekürzt abdrucken, berichten davon – ein eindrucksvolles Dokument, nicht ohne bitter-groteske Komik."

Zeiläufte: Herr v. Puttkamer gedenkt zu verreisen oder: Warum die Republik von Weimar keine Chance hatte

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Awasu Feed Reader

Awasu is a combined feed reader and scraper for Windows that can easily be extended by plugins in Python and other languages. Awasu has been added to my (still incomplete) feed readers list.

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Most beautiful timestamps - Update -

I nearly missed this yesterday:

There was another very beautiful one last year: 20.02.2002 20:02

UPDATE

Vowe adds another one from 2002: 02.02.02 02:02:02 - nice :-)

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Today in History

1943 - Last German troops surrender at Stalingrad

1990 - De Klerk dismantles apartheid in South Africa

1979 - Sid Vicious dies

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STS-107 Columbia Crew

Specialists Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark, pilot William "Willie" McCool, commander Rick Husband, mission specialist David Brown, payload specialist Ilan Ramon and payload commander Michael Anderson (left to right)

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NASA mission STS-107: On landing approach, hull dismantled, Columbia lost - Update -

Today, NASA Human Space Flight lost the Space Shuttle "Columbia" over North Central Texas while on approach for a landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Apparently, the thermal shield consisting of ceramic tiles failed and in consequence, the hull disintegrated. All seven crew, including the first Israeli and the first Indian astronauts ever, will be pronounced dead. This happend just days after the 17th anniversary of the "Challenger" explosion (mission 51-L).

A space flight includes two critial phases. The first, after lift-off. Rockets and boosters accelerate the ship from zero to about 8000 meters per second, with a critical moment when traversing Mach 1. During that phase, "Challenger" was lost. The second, when re-entering the earth atmosphere. Then, using braking rockets negative acceleration in the magnitude of serveral g is applied to slow down the vehicle from said 8000 meters per second to about 83 meters per second (300 kilometers per hour) touchdown speed. This happens about 20 minutes before landing.

During that phase, due to the extreme forces air resistance causes the nose and the wing tips to heat up to more than 2500 degrees Celsius. Flames build up and cover the entire front of the vehicle. Ceramic tiles designed to withstand temperatures of more than 3000 degrees Celsius are applied to the outer structure and the wings to protect the ship from damages. Under normal conditions, several tiles crack or fall off, and after each mission, the heat shield receives maintenance.

As "Columbia" was the oldest Space Shuttle, it can be assumed that fatigue combined with a shield damage discovered on launch 16 days ago but considered minimal led to a failure of the thermal shield. In this case, the heat can work on the structure, weaken it until a hole builds. Latest when the hole reaches the pressurized cabin, the hull breaks up and the ship falls to pieces. This might take no longer than 10 to 30 seconds in total. The resulting unprotected pieces start to anneal and while travelling to earth surface, a part of the matter dies down. This mechanism is sometimes used to discard thermally unprotected and unmanned space vehicles like satellites. In such a controlled crash, satellites normally die down entirely before reaching earth surface.

Update

Failure of the thermal shield of course is only one possible cause, likely and easy to assume. Other possible causes include aerodynamic effects caused by rolling at a wrong angle (descend is without power, and "piloting the shuttle on reentry as like trying to fly a brick with wings") and the left wing separating from the hull as at ascent, this wing was struck by debris from the external tank insulation, another damage considered minimal. Data analysis will unveil what mostly likely has happened, and until then, of course, media will demonstrate once more how scientifically unbiased most of their staff is. Links via IT+W.

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Today in History

1979: After 14 years in exile, Ayatollah Khomeini makes a triumphant return to Iran

1976: Werner Karl Heisenberg dies in Munich at 74

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