Home → Archives → by month → April 2003
New York Bridges
Dave Frieder has been photographing the bridges of New York City for the past 10 years and made his collection available online - including photos of my favourite bridge in Manhattan, the Williamsburg Bridge, and my favourite bridge in NYC metro, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Via Gothamist.com
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Homeland Security is out of control
"Two weeks ago I experienced a very small taste of what hundreds of South Asian immigrants and US citizens of South Asian descent have gone through since 9/11, and what thousands of others have come to fear. I was held, against my will, under the Patriot Act. While I understand the need for some measure of security and precaution in times such as these, the manner in which this detention and interrogation took place raises serious questions about police tactics and the safeguarding of civil liberties in times of war."
What follows is a detailed account of what happened to Jason Halperin, who works with Doctors without Borders in New York City.
"Every American citizen, whether they support the current war or not, should be alarmed by the speed and facility with which these changes to our fundamental rights are taking place. And all of those who thought that these laws would never affect them, who thought that the Patriot Act only applied to the guilty should heed this story as a wake up call. Please learn from my experience. We are all vulnerable so speak out and organize, our fourth amendment rights depend upon it."
Jason Halperin's account
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Boys need Toys: Geoblog, the World as a blog
Geoblog is a real-time Flash visualization of blogworld. Making use of weblogs.com, GeoURL and RSS data, new postings to weblogs (that ping weblogs.com, contain ICMB addresses and have RSS feeds) pop up on a Flash world map as they get published.
"Is it really real-time? Nearly. Weblogs.com updates about once per minute. The geo-blog poller checks about once per minute. And Flash checks in with the server about once per minute. So at worst, it's 3 minutes in the past, at best 1 minute."
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Six Apart Announces New Weblogging Service, Investment, Executives and Board
Blogworld is full of this news, so here just the some quotes and links:
Six Apart Milestone Announcement
Six Apart Ltd. Announces New Weblogging Service, Investment, Executives and Board
Six Apart Ltd. Announces the TypePad Personal Publishing Service
TypePad.com
Ben Hammersley's TypePad preview in The Guardian: Battle of the blog builders
Interesting the list of the new Six Apart players: Joi Ito's Neoteny as lead investor, Barak Berkowitz, co-founder and President of OmniSky/Earthlink and former Logitech Senior Vice Precident as Neoteny's US representative - and Anil Dash as Vice President of Business Development.
Heiko's bet: "The milestone announcement will be the most trackbacked item in weblog history."
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TV-Tip: Michael Moore - The big one
"'Wie kommt es, dass sich die Profite der Gesellschaften ins Unermessliche steigern und gleichzeitig so viele Arbeiter in den USA mit der Angst leben müssen, ihren Arbeitsplatz zu verlieren?' Mit dieser Frage und einer Kamera auf der Schulter suchte Michael Moore amerikanische Unternehmer auf und traktierte sie unerbittlich. Das Aufregende an diesem Film sind die enormen Entertainment-Qualitäten des Regisseurs. Er ist eloquent, witzig, hat einen ganz besonderen Humor und so gelingt es ihm, ein ernstes Thema auf äußerst unterhaltsame Weise zu vermitteln."
Movie Reviews at the official site
Rotten Tomatoes review
Der große Macher (The big one), USA/Großbritannien 1997
Mittwoch, 23.15 - 00.40, WDR TV
IN THE ARCHIVES
2003-03-24: Spread the word: Michael Moore at the Oscars
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Chandler 0.1 is out
"The purpose of releasing version 0.1 Chandler source code is to provide an architectural and technical overview of Chandler, give the community a chance to review a skeletal framework and tentative APIs, and to provide more details about future Chandler plans including a few cool features to give a glimpse of what is possible. In general, this is a chance to show that OSAF is 'for real'.
Release 0.1 is not intended to demonstrate a complete feature set, a final UI, security mechanisms, a final database or schema, or be ready for end-user deployment. [It is intended] for developers to play with. The current user interface is a placeholder."
Good to see Chandler alive. Note that though it says "for Windows XP", it seems to work perfectly well on Windows 2000, too, it just hasn't been tested too extensively on it.
Chandler 0.1 Release
Chandler End User Documentation
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Dr. Nina Simone dies at 70
BBC News: "Legendary jazz and blues singer Nina Simone [who's smoky voice soared in civil rights songs and interpretations of gospel, ballads and George Gershwin], has died at the age of 70 at her home in southern France, her agent has announced.
Simone was one of the last divas of jazz, was considered one of the finest songwriters and musicians of her day, and was a staunch supporter of the American black civil rights movement. She was perhaps best known for the famous single My Baby Just Cares For Me, a song which became one of the most popular and most listened to singles in the 20th Century."
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:: in category Music
Quote of the Day
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
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Concorde Retirement Update
NEWS SUMMARY
Financial Times: demand for tickets on the remaining flights is high - the 1,000 discounted BA tickets sold out in hours - more special fares will be made available - BA received "between 20 to 30 serious inquiries" to take one of the aircrafts - Smithsonian Air and Space will almost certainly get one - Heathrow's new Terminal Five will perhaps get one - City of Bristol wants to bring one back to the "Home of Concorde" at Filton - private collectors most certainly won't get one - send-off celebrations planned that include a "tour of Britain" to allow as many people as possible to see the aircraft fly again for the last time
Bristol Evening Post: Richard Branson renewed his controversial bid to take over the entire fleet of seven Concordes - wants to give one to the City of Bristol in case he succeeds, says one should be given to the public in either case - BA said again that the jets would be mothballed in museums rather than sold off to rival airlines - Branson: "This is the beginning of a campaign to make sure that every effort is made to see that one of the greatest engineering innovations in Britain will not disappear unnecessarily."
LET'S BRING HER HOME CAMPAIGN
"The Bristol Evening Post has launched a campaign to bring queen of the skies Concorde home to Bristol. The supersonic jet was designed, built and tested at Filton, where plane giant Airbus is now based, and we are fighting for it to be returned to its historical birthplace. " - Campaign latest news
IN THE ARCHIVES
2003-04-12: The Concorde - soon, the Sound of Silence
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:: in category Aviation, Air and Space
Round Manhole Covers, or: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft
"Why are manhole covers round" is one of the eternal questions in job interviews, and so it seems to be at Microsoft. The desired and politically correct answer to the question is: "Manhole covers are round because round is the only shape that can never fall into the manhole and hurt someone (with the hole of the same shape, but slightly smaller size than the cover)". And the answer is wrong.
Let's ask Mr Feynman:
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Contact, Links Pages Added
In addition to the recently added contact page including an online status indicator, the links page has been revamped and now features a blogrolling.com powered blogroll of most the blogs I read (regularly or from time to time). As the list is quite long, it will be divided into categories at a later point. The blogroll can be subscribed to in RSS and OPML formats.
Also, time to say goodbye to the XB-35 Flying Wing (which, by the way, was a product of Northrop, and not, as advertised, of Boeing). Proceeding from the skies to the grounds, now find a V8 engine of a Bavarian make as the logo of this weblog.
Thanks to vowe for help with the online status indicator.
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Silly Patent of The Week
Above, the Self Spanking Machine. Find loads of other strange, interesting and bizarre patents issued around the world at The Patent of The Week
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Cisco: No Services
Seen at Hardware prOn, "the hottest and most free pr0n site on the net, [with] more than 3800 pictures of computing and networking hardware."
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Bad Joke of The Day: First DoubleClick, now Homeland Security
"Homeland Security Dept. Fills Privacy Post: The former privacy officer of Internet advertising giant DoubleClick will be the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced today. Nuala O'Connor Kelly, 34, will be responsible for vetting proposals or programs that involve collecting and using U.S. citizens' personal information. She currently serves as a Commerce Department attorney."
Washington Post Article
"If you read this story, you'll see a not-terrible assessment of the privacy official in question, who developed a reputation for at least listening to people's concerns when she worked at DoubleClick. But her former company was notorious for corporate tone-deafness on the topic. [...] Do you believe the Bush White House cares a whit for your privacy? Do you believe the agency charged wtih 'Homeland Security' (am I the only one who thinks the name is faintly Stalinist?) will hesitate to violate privacy on a routine basis? The answer is plainly 'no' in each case.
You could put the most ardent privacy advocate in charge of privacy in this government. It would make very little difference."
Dan Gillmor, SilliconValley E-Journal
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Quote of the Day
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
Sir Winston Churchill
via Elegant Hack
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:: in category Quotes
Still going strong
After playing with the Enjoying Sidebar for a couple of weeks now, I just decided to make it a permanent feature of this site.
It's not just to have a place where to put some of the interesting stuff I come across while on the Internet. It also helps to make the main blog less cluttered, with a clearer focus on own writings, and less link-dumps in between.
So some changes to the site have to be made: more width will be allowed for the sidebar (150px is fine for a few items, but not for larger lists), and an Enjoying RSS/XML feed will (finally) be set up. Stay tuned.
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Thunderbird, Firebird, Camino
Mozillazine, fresh from the Lame Branding By Uninspired Minds Department: "After months of discussion and further months of legal investigation, we're finally comfortable moving forward with new names. The new name for the Phoenix browser is 'Firebird'. The documentation and product strings will be updated soon. In addition to securing Firebird, we've also got the OK from those contributing legal resources to use the name 'Thunderbird' for a mail client. Hopefully this will be the end of naming legal issues for a while."
The third car name after Thunderbird for the mail client and Camino for the OS X Cocoa/Gecko browser. Gentlemen, please note that the name Firebird is already taken by another Open Source project, the Firebird Relational Database.
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MySQL Conference Talks On-Line
Jeremy Zawodny has put online his papers of this year's MySQL Users Conference:
- Managing MySQL Replication (HTML and
PDF)
- MySQL Optimization (HTML and PDF)
For more papers and tools, have a look at Jeremy's MySQL stuff page. Also, there are picture galleries of the conference online.
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Boys need Toys: The Concorde - soon, The Sound of Silence
The Concorde supersonic jet, the ultimate Boy's Toy this side of military aviation, is finally set for retirement. At the end of October, both Air France and British Airways will cease to operate the 2.2 mach bird. I'd love to write more about this, but as time does not permit, just some links to other sites:
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:: in category Aviation, Air and Space
Boys need Toys, this Weekend: 24 Heures Moto, Le Mans
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Thanks
Returning to my desk after a day away from the computer, it comes quite as a surprise to see how many of you sent mails with contributions to the Feed Reader Diretory (that both The Shifted Librarian and Dave Winer mentioned today) - thanks a lot.
I will answer all your mail and use your feedback to update the Directory. But please be patient, as due to my current schedule, your reply might take a day or two.
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Introducing Sharpreader
... and a variety of other new or updated Feed Reader / News Aggregators to the
RSS Feed Reader Directory
In this update: Sharpreader for Windows, Amphetadesk and Radio extensions, Plucker and JPlug as a solution for Palm OS, RSS to e-mail converters, and more.
Is there still something missing from the list? Why not send an e-mail!
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Still going strong
The Enjoying sidebar is still going strong, with loads of new entries today. Recommended: A Day In The Life Of BBCi Search, IA Summit 2003 Presentations, and for your visual pleasure, the Happy Virus Magazine
For prior Enjoying Sidebar entries, check the Enjoying Archives
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Soul legend Edwin Starr dies at 61
"Soul legend Edwin Starr has died Thursday at the age of 61, after having what is thought to have been a heart attack. [...] His biggest hit was the protest song War, which asked 'what is it good for?', in 1970. [...] Away from singing he also presented a BBC Radio 2 series about the civil rights movement, which was nominated for a prestigious Sony Award."
BBC News: Edwin Starr dies
BBC News: Edwin Starr - Your tributes
The Super Seventies: War
Edwinstarr.info - the offical website
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:: in category Music
No, I don't want to ask the audience
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Minotaur (Thunderbird), the Mozilla standalone Mail Client
The User Agent String
The Preferences
As Blogzilla points out, the first public build of Minotaur (Thunderbird), the Mozilla standalone Mail Client, is available for download. Minotaur is intended to live side by side with Phoenix, the Mozilla standalone browser. The current build, dated March 20 and made available to the public March 28, is based on Mozilla 1.3.
First impression: for a 0.1 alpha, it runs remarkably smooth. It handles my mails (several hundred MB) as fast as the Mozilla suite and has roughly the same memory footprint (Minotaur: 37 MB, Mozilla Mail alone: 38 MB). The User Interface, still based on XUL, seems to be faster than the notoriously slow Mozilla UI, the Preferences panel has been simplified, and there are some clever Securicy and Privacy features (plus, of course, the "show HTML mails as Plain Text" function).
During an inital test of just some minutes, I came across no major flaws. It works with the Classic skin only and each time sets your Mozilla suite skin to Classic - but that's by design, as for now, it shares the existing Mozilla Profile.
This of course makes test driving Minotaur easy: just close your Mozilla Mail, open Minotaur, and done you are. For safety, I backed up my Mozilla Profile folder first, and it can be assumed that using Minotaur and Mozilla Mail simultaneously can really mess things up. I didn't try out yet if extensions like the Mnenhy Customer Header Lists are supported at this point.
Yet in this early stage, Minotaur looks like a big step in the right direction, especially for those who use Phoenix as browser and Mozilla as mail client (like I do). Splitting up the Mozilla suite into standalone application has been a must, and some demanded it for a year now. With the Mozilla Organization intended to focus on the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE) and with the proposed changes to module ownership and the review process, we can hope for fast progress soon.
Minotaur project site
Minotaur FTP download
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Which side of the road do they drive on?
If you walk the streets of England, some questions always come back: Why do they drive on the left side, while we on the continent drive on the right side? What in history led to this situation? Where else do they drive "on the other side"? travel-library.com has some answers.
Via ? (I lost the source information, sorry. Did I find this link in your weblog? Send me a mail.)
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Mozilla suite to be replaced by standalone browser, mail client
"In the most radical change to the Mozilla project since the late 1998 decision to rewrite much of the code, mozilla.org [yesterday] announced a major new roadmap proposal that will see Phoenix and Thunderbird (also known as Minotaur) becoming the focus of future development. According to the roadmap, 1.4 is likely to be the last milestone of the traditional Mozilla suite and the 1.4 branch will replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path."
Mozillazine: Major Roadmap Update Centers Around Phoenix, Thunderbird
"[We] will propose a new application architecture based on the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE), which can be shared between separate application processes [and make Phoenix its standalone default browser]. Summary rationale: Phoenix is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong 'add-on' extension mechanism. [...] Gecko stalwarts are leading an effort to fix those layout architecture bugs and design flaws that cannot be treated by patching symptoms. Those bugs stand in the way of major improvements in maintainability, footprint, performance, and extensibility."
Mozilla Roadmap
"The minds behind the Mozilla Web browser this week announced a major shift in strategy, one that focuses more on quality than quantity. [...] Since the release of Mozilla 1.0, in June 2002, the browser has been plagued with conflicting hacker troubles and bug fix after bug fix after bug fix. The browser is also getting bogged down by tons of applications requested by each segment of the Mozilla community, which can make load-in times slower. Because of that, Eich and Hyatt say they are calling for Mozilla's departure of its traditional 'Swiss army knife' approach. [...] The wakeup call may have been the launch of the Safari Web browser by Apple Computer. The Macintosh-based platform rooted on the KDE Project's KHTML code is reportedly winning converts even in its beta stage."
Internetnews.com: Mozilla Proposes Shift to Phoenix
"Well, it's about frigging time."
Matthew Thomas
IN RELATED NEWS
:: Mozilla 1.4 alpha is out
:: Irate Scotsman: I thought we'd discussed this...
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http://homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp?record=235270
Brent Simmon of inessential.com, Stefan Rubner of whocares.de and others noticed an interesting referer in their log files:
http://homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp?record=xxxxxx.
Some argue this might be for real, others say that's just someone playing around with a referer spoofer. At this point it is not clear who is right (what was the user agent string?). But it's not just that is looks overly cheap. Also, the Department of Homeland Security (an almost literal translation of former GDR's Staatssicherheitsdienst) is not a FBI branch, but another White House Office.
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Welcome to London, UK
Click picture to enlarge
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Welcome to Brighton, UK
Click picture to enlarge
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Back on the Chaingang
As pilot and crew of this site have returned from London and Brighton, UK, transmissions on this frequency will resume shortly. Stand by for some brand new adventures in online booking and buying. It can work super-smooth - but some company still don't get it.
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