Home → Archives → by month → June 2003
cq cq - calling all stations
Azerbaijan, Brunei Darussalam, Antigua and Barbuda, Senegal, Ghana - from these and 120 other countries readers have reached this weblog in the past 6 month according to a reverse DNS lookup with a GeoIP tool. On the airwaves, only some are transmitters, most are reveivers, though you can receive transmissions from more than 200 countries, islands and other entities. With one click weblog publishing on the internet, everyone can be a transmitter - so lets see in what parts of the world such a transmission reaches, and how extremely uneven visitors and traffic are distributed:
cq cq - calling all stations
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Scripting News is down
"Scripting News is taking a break.
Show full entry
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XULmaker 0.5 is out
From the release note: "Version 0.50 has finally been released. It's a major evolution from version 0.40 which was a re-write from the original. In particular, it includes support for the full set of XUL elements, attributes and attribute values [and] includes simultaneous graphic and text views of a XUL Document."
Note that this visual XUL editor comes with a lot of user documentation that might also serve as a good starting point if you want to learn about XUL.
Go and get it
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Goodbye, Transrapid
Wirklich gut gesonnen war die deutsche Politik dem Transrapid ja nie, kein Wunder, gondelte zu Zeiten des Entwicklungsabschlusses doch eine Staatsbahn im Lande herum, die natürlich anderes zu tun hatte als das überkommene Rad-Schiene-System zu überdenken, den status quo zu bewahren und Lieblingsspielzeuge zu hätscheln zum Beispiel.
Über die Jahre haben sich die Parteien dann derart verheddert, daß an ein Referenzprojekt hierzulande kaum noch zu denken war: Die Diskussion um die unsinnige Hamburg-Berlin-Trasse hätte man sich gleich sparen können, und in der vagen Hoffnung, überhaupt noch ein System verkaufen zu können, hat man es dann im Shanghai-Projekt den Chinesen fast hinterhergeworfen, wohl wissend, daß die Chinesen Hochtechnologie eigentlich nur kaufen, um das dahinterstehende Know-How abzuziehen, was ihnen dann im Fall Transrapid auch recht gut gelungen ist - aber fast jegliche Industrie, die Autobauer inclusive, lässt sich derzeit auf solche Deals ein, jede mit ihren Gründen.
Daß das Projekt Transrapid nun aber als Bauernopfer im nordrhein-westfälischen Streit der SPD mit ihrem oft nicht nur latent technik-, verkehrs- und fortschrittsfeindlichen kleinen Koalitionspartner herhalten musste, ist wirklich kein schönes Ende - aber es war ein absehbares. Schade. Goodbye, Transrapid, willkommen in der Realität.
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FeedDemon public beta out, rocks
Click to see full screenshot
The first public beta of Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon is out. Nick is the maker of the TopStyle CSS editor, known for its good usability. And just as TopStyle helped making CSS more popular to not-so-hardcore-techies, FeedDemon might achieve that for news aggregators.
FIRST QUICK LOOK
My first quick look left me with a very good impression, as obviously, usability stands in the focus of Nick's development. If you want to maintain overview over a very large amount of feeds, SharpReader might still be your choice, as FeedDemon does not seem to have list views of all new items in all feeds or in specific categories. But it has loads of fine details like newspaper views (for single views or groups, with selectable time range or flag status), tabbed browsing, Feedster integration, clear divsion of feeds into groups, and at least two outstanding features, Watches and News Bins, that can make reading blogs in the aggregator very pleasant.
FEATURES
Watches are user-defined automatic searches: New news items get scanned for user-define keywords and listed in the respective Watch if one or more keyword appears. So if you just want to see all new items that contain the word "Mozilla", you just have a look at your "Mozilla" Watch instead of having to browse through all items - very handy and time-effective. News Bin are collectors: if you want to keep an item for further reference or processing, you just drag and drop it into a News Bin. "Blog this", or "Project x" would be obvious uses for News Bins.
USER EXPERIENCE
So if I want to keep track of what's going on in the news aggregator world, I set up a list of feeds I want to monitor and a Watch to have those feeds automatically scanned for keywords like "RSS, Aggregator, Feed Reader". Then, I browse through that Watch in list view in the left pane or read it in Newspaper view in the right pane and drag and drop items that are relevant to me from either of the views into my "Aggregators" News Bin, where I can work with them later - and that's what I call a good user experience.
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Call for Papers: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs
The University of Minnesota Blog Collective issued a Call for Papers, inviting "submissions for a new online edited collection exploring discursive, visual, and other communicative features of weblogs (rhetorical artifact)."
Topics can include, but are not limited to "Social and Psychological Perspectives; Visual Features, including Interface Design and Navigation; Rhetorical and Linguistic Features of Weblog Discourse; Pedagogical Implications; Intellectual Property; Race, Class, and Gender; Intercultural Communication." I wonder if there will be good submissions on Interface Design and Navigation, as this is a topic that still has a long way to go for blogs as internal business and as acedemic tools.
Abstracts have to be sent in via email by midnight, June 30, 2003, papers will be due in November, and results will be published on a weblog accessible to the public.
Via Phil Wolff
Other interesting stories on Phil's blogs:
The Blogcount Estimate: 2.4 to 2.9 million weblogs
LiveJournal is 213th most popular site on the Internet
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35 Hour Week in the East, Chinese traces in the West
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Chinese traces in a former Dortmund steel mill, 2003: "Packing firma (company)" - in the lower left corner, a union sticker saying "Steel Round (Bargaining) 1990: It's our turn now - (We demand) 10% pay rise and the 35 hour week"
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Chinese traces in a former Dortmund steel mill, 2003: "China First"
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Union sticker 2003: "35 hour week: In the East, the sun is rising"
Now that East German workers in the metal/automotive industries are on strike to fight for reduced weekly work times (and risk basically everything that has been reached there so far), the above photos come to my mind. I took them just days ago right here in Dortmund where I live, in the now dismantled Westfalenhütte steel mill, once the city's largest employer. Dismantled? Packing company? The entire plant has been knocked down and shipped to China.
After its closure early in 2001, Chinese steel company Shagang purchased all the facilities shut down by ThyssenKrupp Stahl, read, everything you need to produce hot rolled steel: a sinter plant, blast furnaces and the hot strip mill from the Westfalenhütte and the oxygen furnace steel works from the Phoenix plant. Everything got dismantled, knocked down into handy parts, packed into wooden crates and shipped across the seas to somewhere near Shanghai, where the reinstalled facilities will produce 4 million tons of rolled steel for the domestic market, substituting imports. And now, Shagang hit the jackpot and bought the missing link: the Kaiserstuhl coking plant. Situated right in the center of the Westfalenhütte area, commissioned in 1992 and decommissioned just years later, this 1.5 billion Marks plant is the cherry on the Shagang shopping tour cake.
And in Eastern Germany, workers are on strike because two blockhead union leaders claim that their plants are "now competitive enough" to introduce the 35 hour week that is standard in many industries in the Western part. Mr Düvel and Mr Peters don't make too many friends with their course, even not among workers and workers' councils - no wonder, in an area with 20% unemployment rate where the new automotive plants and their suppliers basically are everything they have.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
The A-list of Hebigs
Jeff Jarvis: "There are a hundred A-lists: one for tech, one for politics, one for sports, one for Cleveland, one for Iran, one just for guys named Hebig, and so on, and so on." Big chuckle - mainly thanks to Martin because we both would have missed that post otherwise.
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Live Blogging, this time the Apple WWDR Keynote
Live Blogging, something that catched the BlogTalk conference quite by surprise and that caused much discussion, is not entirely new, we just see some new forms of it. A form that's not entirely new and that can make great sense is to use blogs to cover events you attend, but other of your company or teams cannot - of course it also works if you report to a general audience.
Valued co-bloggers at Industrial Technology and Witchcraft did this for a while now with Apple Keynotes they monitored via live streams, and they are doing so today, too. Joining them is Volker Weber, who wants to report live from Berlin where he attends a live broadcast from San Francisco. Let's see if he just forwards the facts (by the minute blogging might have its uses in certain cases), or if he sums things up and adds additional insight. Then, live blogging really sets off. With him as a journalist delivering article drafts right from the spot, others working for his magazine back home could polish those drafts and turn them into articles right the same evening.
Now think what you could do if you cover events in your field of expertise and report live to your closed (read: paying) audience: while they before had to wait days or weeks for analysis of certain events or had to send their own people, you could provide them with those hours or days of headstart that counts in many industries.
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Knieschuss
manager-magazin.de: "Sie kriminalisieren damit letztendlich Ihre eigene Zielgruppe."
Gerd Gebhardt, Vorsitzender des Bundesverbandes der Phonographischen Wirtschaft: "Wir wollen die Konsumenten nicht kriminalisieren und Jugendliche schon gar nicht. Es geht uns darum, ein Bewusstsein zu schaffen, wann Recht gebrochen wird."
Mehr Gewürge im Manager Magazin-Interview. Via Dienstraum
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More Movable Type Goodness
In no specific order:
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More Mozilla Goodness
Some collected Mozilla Goodness, in no specific order:
THUNDERBIRD
EXTENSIONS GALORE
- The Extension Room is where you can one-stop-shop for all known Mozilla suite, Firebird and Thunderbird XUL extensions
XUL
- Andreas Thaler's XUL Annotations is a growing collection of useful XUL code sniplets to which anyone can - and should - contribute - code repositories are what adds life to a language or a technology
- Topicalla looks like one cool upcoming XUL-based application: "Topicalla is an client application for the Semantic Web. Topicalla allows one to view information using a UI that is generated based on the kind of data available. The user can augment, customize and replace both the data and UI as they see fit." By XULPlanet's Neil Deakin
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WatchBlog - 2004 US Elections News&Opinions
"WatchBlog is a multiple-editor weblog broken up into three major political affiliations, each with its own blog: the Democrats, the Republicans and the Third Party (covering everything outside the two major parties). Posting on a regular basis are editors representing each major party. Stay informed."
WatchBlog.com
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Movable Type Plugin Manager ahead
Now that the testing releases look more and more promising (if you did not take part in beta testing, there is an mailing list archive where you can check back what happened so far), a version targeted at the "general public" might be available within a week. David posted some more apetizers and explains on his weblog how the Plugin Manager works behind the scenes - good work.
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Reboot 6 live -Update-
In this very moment, the Reboot 6 conference takes place in Copenhague. John Gotze and Marc Canter do the live blogging, while live.reboot.dk is the conference's live photolog.
Also, Ben Hammersley posted his paper, A Sporting Gentleman's Guide to the Semantic Web, concerning the newfangled technology known as RDF, with contributions from the floor, and a toast to the Queen
UPDATE I
Cory Doctorow has more images. This look like a very nice and relaxed family meeting :-)
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Cool Hardware Hack of The Day -Update-
Via Anders Jacobsen, Per Arnesen presents
PeltierBeer, a Peltier element based beer cooler
UPDATE
And The Fastet Blog Entry Response Ever AwardTM goes to Nico. Less than one minute after I pinged weblogs.com, a Trillian/ICQ window popped up, saying "Hey, I saw that before yet!". Nico, if you do weird stuff, I'm blogging that ;-)
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BlogTalk Gallery System
Someone on ICQ asked me how I built the BlogTalk gallery pages, if I built them manually, so I added a little about page that nearly took me longer to write than the system it describes ;-)
And that's how it works: you arrange your pictures into groups and series (each group can contain multiple series, in the BlogTalk case, just one does), let run some Photoshop macros for resizing and color/contrast adjustments and dump the result into a folder on your webspace. Add caption and menu images or go for the plain text version. Then, in TextPad or your text editor of choice, you optionally type some arrays that contain the image descriptions and call that a configuration file. Done. What's in between this plaintext file and the gallery pages is no more than 20 lines of PHP.
If you want to add pictures or groups, change descriptions, add additional per-series textboxes, just edit the arrays, done. No special features, no special effects, no Metadata Magic, but it generates valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and makes extensive use of relative links, so you can navigate the galleries with the Mozilla Site Navigation Toolbar, too.
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Phil Wolff: Blogging the Backslash
What started as a PowerPoint presentation in Vienna, now keeps growing and has it's own weblog: Phil Wolff's Don't Blog - Blogging the Backlash
"What happens when blogging becomes mainstream? What bad things will we face? Other technologies experienced a public backlash after a hype cycle. This blog attempts to chronicle that coming backlash."
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Quote of the day: There is no cat
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Albert Einstein, explaining radio
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:: in category Quotes
BlogTalk Photos - The Weblog Conference in Pictures
If you want to leave comments on the photos, please use this weblog entry
hebig.org/blogtalk :: The Vienna conference in pictures
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Heute vor 50 Jahren: Volksaufstand in der DDR -Update-
Panzer der Roten Armee in der Leipziger Straße (Klick = Großansicht)
Alleine in Ost-Berlin kamen 600 Panzer zum Einsatz
Flucht vom Potsdamer Platz, als scharf geschossen wird (Klick = Großansicht)
Am 17. Juni 1953 brach sich der Unmut der Ostdeutschen über die Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen in der DDR Bahn: Hunderttausende erhoben sich zu einem Arbeiteraufstand, die Rote Armee schlug ihn nieder. "Er war die erste Massenerhebung im Machtbereich der Sowjetunion überhaupt und eines der Schlüsselereignisse, die den Gang der deutsch-deutschen Geschichte bis zur Einheit im Sommer 1990 maßgeblich mitbestimmt haben."
Die Lunte für den Aufstand legten die Moskauer Führung indes selbst: Nach massiver Förderung der Schwerindustrie und Kollektivierung der Landwirtschaft stand die DDR-Wirtschaft am Rande des Ruins, dem Berija und Malenkow nach dem Tode Stalins durch wirtschaftliche und politische Liberalisierung entgegenwirken wollten - in der am 11. Juni agekündigten Kehrtwende blieben die Arbeiter jedoch außen vor. Es wurden massive Lohnkürzungen verhängt, am 15. Juni begannen Streiks, die zwei Tage später in einen Generalstreik mündeten: als Reaktion rollten Sowjet-Panzer direkt aus dem Sommermanöver ins ganze Land, ab 13 Uhr galt auf Weisung von Hochkommisar Semjonow fast flächendeckend Ausnahmezustand und Kriegsrecht. Die Machtfrage war geklärt, die DDR etabliert, das Regime fortan endgültig nicht ohne Moskauer Macht überlebensfähig.
Ausgewählte aktuelle Quellen:
Ausgewählte ständige Quellen:
UPDATE IN ENGLISH: GDR WORKERS' UPRISING 1953
Papa Scott has a good piece on the date that the powers in both East and West would have rather forgotten and points to other good resources in English in his Quick Links.
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Better living through successful branding
Via IT+W
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Presenting: The Hellacopters - By The Grace of God
The hebig.org CD of the month: The Hellacopters, By The Grace of God, 2002
Fast, melodic, inspired 70ies Rock'n'Roll That Sounds Fresh And YoungTM, best consumed during a feelgood summer highway cruise. Thirteen songs sparkling in diversity and creativity, no lenghts, repetitions, slowdowns or real fillers found. A rock piano so good it reminds you more than just a bit of the E Steet Band. A tour de force that shows how overrated The Hives and most of those other The-bands are. If there is something wrong with it, it has no rough edges, and it won't be your thing it you want the Dirty Punk Hellacopters back: a classic rock radio might play it right between Lynryd Skynyrd and Journey, though it never sounds dated. If you want fresh and fun Rock'n'Roll for the summer, go for it.
Hellacopters Offcial Site
Hellacopter posters at gigposter.com
Motorhorst Plattentest (German language)
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:: in category Music
First, the pretzel
Now, this. And there will be more not known to public. What's next? A Darwin Award? Takes a genius to get one, too.
Seen at vowe and IT+W
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Nico Lumma just makes my day: Springsteen live - in my living room -Update-
Nico Lumma just makes my day. He knew I wanted to see Springsteen live in Hamburg today, he knew I could not go there. And as he is in the stadium right now, he just called me with his mobile phone and currently provides me with Springsteen live in my living room - more than two hours so far. Songs heard include Lonesome Day, You can look (but you better not touch), Out in the Street, 10th Avenue Freeze Out, Hungry Heart, My City of Ruins, Dancing in the Dark, Racing in the Street, Badlands and Born to Run both in full-force-flavour - and No Surrender, which sent shivers down my spine.
Transmission continues. Nico, thanks! :-)
UPDATE 1
Bruce speaking to the audience now - in German. Great.
UPDATE 2, 23:20:
The concerts ends after three hours. No The River. Will hear that now. Live. Los Angeles Coliseum, September 9, 1985 ;-)
UPDATE 3, JUNE 13:
The Hamburg concert set list is now available at brucespringsteen.net, and the discussion started. And Papa Scott points to a concert review in the Hamburger Abendblatt - turns out that Hungry Heart was with Wolfgang Niedecken. In Berlin, they played together before.
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Ich bin pleite! Ein Selbsterfahrungsbericht von Anne Koark
"Anne Koark ist Britin, lebt seit 18 Jahren in Deutschland, ist alleinerziehende Mutter von zwei Kindern, Unternehmerin und - pleite. Über das Tabu des Scheiterns in Deutschland und über ihre Erfahrungen mit Freunden, Mitarbeitern, Kunden und Insolvenzverwaltern berichtet sie sehr offen in ChangeX - Lesenswert"
Via Mehrzweckbeutel
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Charles Bukowski: On this computer, well things seem to take on a freshness and an excitement
Click to enlarge
From above letter to a friend, February 2, 1991:
"On this computer, well things seem to take on a freshness and an excitement. I'm at the thing almost every night. It may sound over-dramatic to say it but it feels like a rebirth. In a month this baby has pumped out dozens of poems and a couple of pieces of prose. The convenience is unbelievable. Everything gets easier, the words light up and dance. What a toy, what a lark! It makes me think, what could follow the computer? This things even corrects my spelling, has a word finder, a dictionary and a realm of hidden matter that I have yet to discover. I had no idea this would be so refreshing...
I still have a bad typing touch but I've always had that. No matter."
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:: in category Quotes
Sunburn: If June worked lighter on me, I would not complain
First, I was unable to attend the Weblog Business Strategies Conference in Boston, though through Martin Röll, I've had the opportunity to take part as a co-panelist (did I mention that I love Boston?).
Now, it'll be three in a row: I will also miss Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band live in Hamburg tomorrow, and the London Blogger Meeting this weekend. Taking part: Anders Jacobsen, Martin Röll, Ralf "The Cartoonist" Zeigermann, and possibly Seyed Razavi, Julian Harris, Gary Turner and others (public invitation follows). Why? Because silly enough, as we spent a day at the beach in the Netherlands, we slept in and I burned my lower legs and feet badly. As they are ridiculously swollen, I can hardly walk properly, let alone drive a car. Doc says things will be OK within a week.
As a little compensation, I found scans of several hundred Charles Bukowski letters and manuscripts of on the net, covering February 1964 through September 1992. I will post some of them here.
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Stand up and be counted
Phil Wolff, maker of A Klog Apart, BlogTalk speaker and a guy you should not miss to talk with if you meet him somewhere, presents blogcount.com:
"Are you one of the blogosphere's cartographers? A surveyor, census taker, geographer? If you have results, I'll report them at Blogcount.com. We try to answer those months' old questions: How many people are blogging? Where? Why? With what? How many blogs are there? How are they connected? Who's doing the research? From Poland to Paris to Portugal, our scouts are sailing the blogosphere's seven seas. Join us."
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Web StandardsTwo Interviews
Two new interviews out there: A List Apart, having finshed radio silence, interviews Anil Dash about Typepad, "what may be the first standards-compliant web publishing tool for the rest of us." And Meet The Makers interviews Zeldman "about designing with web standards and the book of the same name. The interview makes the business case for adopting standards, and discusses how designers and developers can persuade clients and managers to hop on board."
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Creating XPCOM Components
Creating XPCOM Components, Doug Turner's and Ian Oeschger's new book, is now available for download as PDF and HTML under the Open Publication License.
"Creating XPCOM Components is about Gecko and about creating XPCOM components for Gecko-based applications. The book is principally a long tutorial that describes the steps you take to make your C++ code into a component that can be used in Gecko, but it also discusses all of the tools, techniques, and technologies that make up XPCOM."
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Möllemann ist tot
FTD: Jürgen Möllemann ist bei einem Fallschirmsprung ums Leben gekommen, nachdem seine parlamentarische Immunität aufgehoben wurde und seine Wohn- und Geschäftsräume durchsucht wurden. Gegen ihn wurde wegen Verstoßes gegen das Parteiengesetz, Betrugs und Untreue ermittelt. Die Staatsanwaltschaft vermutet Selbstmord.
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Dowhill now with API
Sometimes, I really love the web - like now. Two days ago, I mentioned Leonard Richardson's Downhill, a script that finds the shortest path between two weblog URLs, and added "This thing needs an API ;-)"
Leonard, yesterday: "Your Wish Is My Suggestion: hebig.org said Downhill should have an API. Well, now it does. It doubles as a weblog ecosystem API, since I couldn't find one anywhere."
Great work, Leonard, thanks :-)
In case you get funny results with Downhill, note that it uses data collected by The Blogging Ecosystem. I am not sure if this data is up to date. For this blog, it still lists "Main blog" as title, though it was changed to "hebig.org/blog" at least half a year ago.
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Haystack PIM preliminary release available
A preliminary release of Haystack, MIT's "uinversal information client" is available for download. As a very ambitious project, it relies heavily on RDF and Semantic Web ideas. Possibly kind of overkill for single person personal use, it looks very interesting for organizations and teams. If you are interested in Clevercactus or Mitch Karpor's Chandler, Haystack is something to have a look at.
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Kalam: Why we need Open Source
The most unfortunate thing is that India still seems to believe in proprietary solutions. Further spread of IT, which is influencing the daily life of individuals, will have a devastating effect on the lives of society due to any small shift in the business practice involving these proprietary solutions. It is precisely for these reasons open source software needs to be built which will be cost effective for the entire society.
Abdul Kalam, President of India
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:: in category Quotes
Salam Pax is real - he worked for me
Peter Maass: "How do I know Baghdad's famous blogger exists? He worked for me. [...] Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter. [...] That working alongside - no, employing - a star of the World Wide Web and being blissfully unaware of it is a lesson about the murkiness of today's Iraq, a netherland of obscurity in which you cannot know who was a Baathist and who was not, or whether the man in the middle of the street with a gun is going to shoot you or not, or whether the country is spiraling out of control or just having teething problems before becoming a normal nation. [...] From his own collection, [he brought] the soundtrack from Pulp Fiction—the best music imaginable for driving around anarchic Baghdad."
Peter Maass in Slate Magazine: So let me tell you about my life with Salam Pax
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China blocks the Yangtze
Washington Post: "River Halted by Dam That Will Bring Power, or Untold Destruction - China halted the flow of the Yangtze River today and began filling what will be the world's biggest reservoir as part of a controversial $24 billion wager to generate clean energy and stop the deluges that have swept across central China for centuries. Engineers blocked 19 of the 22 sluice gates on the Three Gorges Dam, located in the central province of Hubei. The water level began rising from 330 feet and will hit 445 feet in two weeks, ultimately reaching 577 feet when the dam, China's most formidable engineering feat since the construction of the Great Wall, is completed in 2009. Limited power generation is scheduled to begin in August.
Show full entry
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Mars Express: First European voyage to Mars to start in 2 hours from now
The British led Beagle 2 Mars Lander
"[Today] at 19:45 Central European Summer Time (CEST), 17.45 UT ESA's Mars Express will be launched by a Soyuz launcher from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.Mars Express has been designed to perform the most thorough exploration ever of the Red Planet, not only searching for water, but also understanding the 'behaviour' of the planet as a whole. In maybe the most ambitious aim of all, Mars Express is the only mission in more than 25 years that dares to search for life. Mars Express will reach its target by the end of December 2003, after a trip of just over six months. Six days before injection into its final orbit, Mars Express will eject the lander, Beagle 2. The Mars Express orbiter will observe the planet and its atmosphere from a near-polar orbit, and will remain in operation for at least a whole Martian year (687 Earth days). Beagle 2 will land in an equatorial region that was probably flooded in the past, and where traces of life may have been preserved."
ESA Mars Express Mission Details (English)
DLR Mars Express Mission Details (German)
ESA Live Webcast of Launch, starting 19:15 CET (English)
DLR Live Webcast of the DLR event in Berlin-Adlershof, 18:45 - 22:30 (German)
N24 TV coverage in German, starting 19:45 CET
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:: in category Aviation, Air and Space
Game Neverending: Know Your War Profiteers Card Deck
Days after the Deck of Weasels, now say hello to another deck: "The War Profiteers Card Deck exposes some of the real war criminals in the US’s endless War of Terror. This is no Sunday bridge club. These are individuals and institutions that stack the deck against democracy in the rigged game of global power. Exposing their place in the house of cards illuminates the links among corporations, institutions, and government officials that profit from endless war."
Warprofiteers.com
Print your own: Whole deck in PDF format, 1 MB
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Canon Powershot G3
A friend of mine recently bought a Canon Powershot G3 digitial camera, and though I had only little time to play around with it, my first impression was very good. It does certainly not come with the smallest body, but with a number of smart features that nearly make it a semi-professional solution.
Compared to my own Canon Powershot S40, it gets many important things right: with 1100 mAh capacity, it has a large battery that should allow for a decent lifespan. The S40 comes with much smaller 570 mAh batteries that basically require you to carry the charger around most of the times, even if you own more than one battery. It not only has a lense that deserves to be called lense, but it also is fast and for a camera of that size, it has a decent zoom range. The S40 lense is fine for its class, but it has its limitations. Finally, the G3 has a good secondary display and a primary TFT that can be rotated. The S40 display is fixed, so that camera does not give you the additional freedoms that movable displays have. Don't get me wrong: in its class, the S40 is an excellent offer, and the very small, but not too leightweight body is a strong plus. But if you want to spend a bit more and if you like full-size bodies, the G3 seems to be a very good choice.
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Presenting: Live - Birds of Pray
Finally, the new Live album is out. "Birds of Pray" is not a masterpiece, but far better than the disasterous "V". Though they did not get entirely rid of shallow ripples and pathetic, kitschy lyrics, and though they sometimes even use most uninspired linear fade outs, it has its strong moments. If you like Live, go for it. If you don't know this band yet, better go for 1994's "Throwing Copper", perhaps one of the best rock albums ever made.
LINKS
Friends of Live - Offical site
Friends of Live - Birds of Pray lyrics
Fans of Live - Fan site
LIVE PERFORMANCES
June 20-22, Live plays at the Southside Festival in Tuttlingen, Germany, along with an interesting selection of other bands, including The Datsuns, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man, Goldfrapp, Massive Attack, Apocalyptica, Therapy, Radiohead, The Hellacopters, Moloko, Coldplay, Guano Apes, and more. July 1, Live, Coldplay and Supergrass will play at the Fields of Rock Festival in the Goffertpark Nijmegen. The offical site lists some more tour dates, mostly supporting Bon Jovi.
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:: in category Music
Addiction
Sometimes I just wake up in the middle of the night and say "I gotta blog."
Robert Scobble
And talking of addiction, Leonard Richardson built a script that finds the shortest path between two weblog URLs. This thing needs an API ;-)
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The Future of IE, Mozilla: Other Voices
In an unsorted list, some other voices on the Microsoft/AOL-deal and the future of Internet Explorer and Mozilla:
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Slippery Questions
Very surprising, it took quite a while until blogworld started to blog about the Microsoft/AOL-deal and Microsoft's announcement to stop development of the existing Internet Explorer in favour of forcing people to switch to Longhorn/Palladium in the foreseeable future (and also surprising, many media reports did not see a connection between those two events).
It's not just that for peanuts, AOL brought itself into a position that is likely to become very unfavourable if they don't play very smart (except they've decided to be cheap and become a Redmond lackey; with one possible exception, the deal won't make them too many friends anyway). It's not just that Microsoft uses the settlement of an anti-trust lawsuit (sic!) to forge a trust-like alliance much greater, stable and possibly powerful than what we've seen before - a bold move from an entrepreneurial point of view, a potentially horrific one from the consumer point and slightly alarming if you use your common sense.
Soon, Microsoft could have a critical mass to push (possibly hardcore) Digital Restriction Management into the market, aimed at outlawing and criminalizing customers for noones sake but for the profit of very few companies. Given that in 2003, customers cheered at the introduction of a not too opressive DRM because it came with the right label on it, it wouldn't surprise me if in 2004, customers will willingly switch to a possibly not so unopressive DRM operating system because it comes with a cool new browser.
Meanwhile, we might see a deadlock in web development and possibly hard times for Mozilla. Jeffrey Zeldman sums up why:
The announcement that Microsoft will no longer improve IE unless you buy its next OS (or subscribe to its MSN service), coupled with AOL’s announced willingness to play ball for bucks, raises slippery questions. If AOL is to use IE instead of its own Netscape browser for the next seven years, but IE will not change outside the Longhorn OS, will AOL users be stuck with IE6 until 2010? (IE6 was released in the year 2000.)
Will AOL continue to develop Mozilla/Netscape, using the cash it got from Microsoft to create a browser that is superior to the outdated one its AOL members must use? [And that's the option that would make them friends] Or will it dump Netscape at fire sale prices after having cut a deal that lowers Netscape’s value by further diminishing its market share? [IBM would make a good new home]
If AOL abandons Netscape, will Mozilla keep going? If so, will Windows users who do not upgrade to Longhorn switch to Mozilla (or Opera), or will they keep using the current version of IE6 for the foreseeable future? If they do that, will web development methods freeze? What happens to CSS3 and XHTML 2 if the bulk of web users (including AOL users) “standardize” on a year 2000 browser for the next three to seven years?
These are the questions CNET and other news organizations – and you – should be asking
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