Made a thing in an "introduction to programming" class where non-engineers learned to write code. I might actually stick around, was fun to spend time on a random sketch while everyone else learned about variables. …

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After five amazing years at Last.fm I decided to hand in my notice a few months ago, my last day was at the end of August. As a parting gift and sign of appreciation of the many things Last.fm has given me I produced a series of data visualisations of the scrobbles of all Last.fm staff, alumni, and community moderators I could find, and published it last week. In total the series encompasses 8.7 million scrobbles across ~180 graphs. The visualisation is a structured heatmap that is designed to reveal periodicities: years, months, day of week, hour of day. Storytelling …

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Diy 02 by dekstop …

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In early 2011 we started the Young Hackspace: a monthly event where we invite groups of young children or teenagers to the London Hackspace and show them how to make things. It started with a chance encounter (I was giving a Hackspace tour to two interested parents) and quickly grew into an amazing regular encounter between hackers and kids... We started with a laser cutter workshop for eight year olds, combined with demonstrations of lasers in action; then a wood working and print making workshop; soon we'll have a "making electronic beats" workshop, probably in combination with a few …

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Last weekend I was at the music hack day in London, organised by Dave Haynes and James Darling: a two-day event where software developers met up and wrote music-related software (or built hardware.) Instruments, a distributed content resolver, various SoundCloud tools, etc. Although the event attracted lots of interesting people from all over the planet (well, Europe) I ended up coding most of the weekend instead of talking. (On that note, I'm still amazed by the amount of time coding requires, even after you learned how to channel your ambitions more efficiently. Software development is still a painful process.) I …

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Mark Downie on the Field-development list: More seriously, the trick I think with Processing is that it has been a wonderfully successful "stone soup". The IDE and its graphics architecture are left over from a different era and I can't see why it's language modifications are worth maintaining, but the vibrant community and library maker ecosystem is unlike anything else that's happening. But these two things are largely separable. The aim is to be able to connect with the latter while leaving the former behind. Quite a few people are realizing this — for example, lots of people are …

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This is mind-boggling. Think of the possibilities. Bringing down companies with a bit of crowdsourcing? Check. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars …

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Over the past extended weekend I created Pool Radio, a tool that provides access to hopefully interesting Last.fm radio stations. See also the announcement in the Subscribers and their tag radio stations group forum, with some great comments by Nectar_Card. I'm aware that not a lot of people will find this site very useful, but people with an appreciation for the random and obscure can definitely benefit from it. Here are a couple of great user tag stations I've enjoyed over the last week: raw_u's etiopia tag radio (tag page), jirkanne's lllllllllllllll tag radio (tag page), JessiCoplin's scott storch tag …

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Johan and I were overjoyed: last week Last.fm sent us to the Hadoop Summit 2008 in Santa Clara, California. Under Johan's wings Last.fm became one of the earliest adopters of Doug Cutting's Hadoop, and I'm a frequent user myself. And we had an excellent time. The conference was great as expected, we had lots of interesting conversations with people from all kinds of backgrounds. Additionally we spent the rest of our trip meeting people from other companies (Facebook, Powerset, and others), discussing technology (we're currently really interested in HBase), the various issues that arise from having to cope with …

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Photo by mlcastle, taken at 24c3. …

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... needs Java. Might post a description later. Update 2007-12-21 I spent a bit of time making swarming actually work, and tweaked some other things. Much nicer already. …

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[13:28] • martind is trying to create yet another yahoo account [13:28] martind: and it fails to do so, in both browsers, without explanation. [13:28] martind: ("Looks like there was some trouble creating your account. Please take a moment to review your answers.") [13:28] martind: WHICH ONES FUCKASS? [13:28] martind: the sad thing about it: I'm sure it's a bug in their code, and I'd be willing to take the time to send an email, but I'm quite confident that it would just be ignored. The Yahoo login system seems to be a great predictor of the upcoming breakdown …

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Over the last couple of weeks I finally revived the old habit of scouting for interesting bits of pop culture produce, and after overcoming work-induced inertia it paid off well. Feels good to be somewhat back on track... I'll start off with some music-related findings. If you're not listening to anything else atm I invite you to set the mood first by tuning in to my Last.fm station of the week: The Bug's similar artists (radio URL) [Btw: Elias is already working hard on improving our playlist tuning algorithms, you can expect some huge improvements in our radio experience over …

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Yesterday on the tube to Brixton I saw an ad for a really exciting product: a prepaid MasterCard. The promise was the possibility to take part in financial transactions that require cards (phone/Internet shops) without having a bank account. Which is a huge fucking deal. For me personally there are already two use cases that make it worth the fees: Having lots of cash but no bank account. Happens to drug traders and women traffickers, but also to people who move to a foreign country for a job. Especially when that country happens to have strict banking laws that …

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Oh boy. The new Rough Trade store (inside the Old Truman Brewery, just off Brick Lane) is the bomb. Seriously. Lots of space, great music selection (with a slant towards post-punk, but also lots of stuff between German minimal, Independent Hip Hop, Americana, ...). Most artefacts decorated with brief one-sentence descriptions. Great personnel. An entrance area with lots of seats, a bar for coffee, drinks and snacks. Open wifi, which I used to rip the CDs I just bought so I could listen to them on my way with all metadata in place. Beautiful interior, somewhere between bleak Berlinian …

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Your use of the Software is limited to a fixed number of users and weblogs, as defined below and enumerated in Exhibit A of this agreement. [...] EXHIBIT A ========= Unlimited Free Version Term: Perpetual Number of Servers: 1 Number of Authors: Unlimited Number of Weblogs: Unlimited Support Level: none included or purchasable Updates and Upgrades: free Updates Maintenance Fee: None Am now seriously considering to update (from 2.64). Since I'm not planning to ever make any kind of money from this (including ads) all my previous reservations are moot. Edit: Hah. Turns out they're about to GPL the …

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Get the JRuby Console, and then do stuff like this: irb(main):001:0> require 'java' => true irb(main):002:0> p = java.util.regex.Pattern.compile("/music/[^/]+/\\+images/[^/?]+?(?:\\?.*)?") => #:0x5efe34 @java_object=/music/[^/]+/\+images/[^/?]+?(?:\?.*)?> irb(main):003:0> p.matcher("/music/Christopher+Willits/+images/?").matches => false irb(main):004:0> p.matcher("/music/Christopher+Willits/+images?").matches => false irb(main):005:0> p.matcher("/music/Christopher+Willits/+images/").matches => false irb(main):006:0> p.matcher("/music/Christopher+Willits/+images/34523").matches => true Awesome! I've been waiting years for a convenient interactive Java shell -- and not to run the language, but to interactively test behaviour of library features under certain conditions. Don't want to write & compile a new class just because I want to check something out. …

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Interesting how they managed to make a simple URL much more cryptic. I imagine the author simply pasted this into an email, and the editor had no clue about web resource addressing schemes. Why should he. (Someone at least knew that you can omit the http:// protocol prefix.) Homework for today: write a 1-page essay on the effect of popular digital resource addressing scheme implementations and how well they they transcend media boundaries. (For extra points: address the ephemeral character of such schemes, and how search engines fit into all this.) …

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Unfortunately the stationers was out of black tape. I like the simplicity of this model, it's even more reduced than the old one. Less movable parts. The old one was a large piece with small bits glued on -- this one basically consists of two large pieces and some tape to close the sides. Four pockets inside, one outside for bills. Am now considering cutting the continuous flap in half, to create one flap for each side. …

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As recently mentioned I was looking for useful hacks for the iPod Notes feature, and as Google didn't turn up much of interest I started writing one myself. The obvious first application: an offline feed reader. Turns out it's remarkably easy to do this. The Notes file format is basically text with some HTML markup, and even allows for links between individual documents. I.e., converting a feed into a series of notes and an index is pretty straightforward. The harder part is the syncing mechanism. My requirements were: syncing has to work on a default OS X installation, it …

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A friend just told me this: Turns out the MP3s on your iPod are completely accessible, even without any dedicated software. They're simply in hidden folders. Writable hidden folders. …

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Started browsing around for interesting hacks for the iPod Notes feature (are there any good offline feed readers for that? Or anything else of interest?), and found the Notes feature guide. Which contains this gem: Links iPod Notes Feature Guide (PDF, 1.4 MB) …

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Felt like trying out virb's flash player embed. Not sure if they actually want you to do that -- after a quick search I didn't find a widget embed link, so I simply looked at their page source. You need Javascript and Flash to see the player. Alternative link (with the same requirements): virb.com/dekstop. if(hasProductInstall && !hasReqestedVersion) { var MMPlayerType = (isIE == true) ? "ActiveX" : "PlugIn"; var MMredirectURL = window.location; document.title = document.title.slice(0, 47) + " - Flash Player Installation"; var MMdoctitle = document.title; var object = { codebase : 'http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0', width : '520px', height : '276px', bgcolor …

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If I worked at apple I'd change my useragent just to mess with people. …

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IP Address: 81.177.22.216 Name: PreobrajenskySuka1 Email Address: URL: http://university-of-phoen0.blogspot.com/ Comments: Sorry, but topic starter, <b>you are sure?</b> prof.Preobrajensky. Good luck! …

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Finally had a brief glance over Lev Manovich's "Database as symbolic form" (can't remember why I bookmarked it), was underwhelmed. Nobody who is familiar with the structures of either modern culture or technology will find much new ideas in there. (Granted, it's from 1998.) But there was one paragraph that made me think: As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human …

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Bought some cheap second-hand gear from a friend of a friend, just did a quick test recording. Two distortion pedals (one left, one right) with empty inputs (dangling cables.) The second recording features an additional stereo compressor. I received some complaints about the last batch of mp3s -- these are much less harsh, I promise :) Will definitely play around more with this, but I need more cables. And microphones. Download bbq 1 -- meat.mp3 (7.8 MB, 06:50 mins) bbq 2 -- fire.mp3 (8.5 MB, 07:22 mins) …

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Just received this message from pool-151-202-103-233.ny325.east.verizon.net (the person didn't leave a name) -- You have difficulty authorizing Ableton Live? You are a bona fied incompetent moron. Update 2007-04-29 -- aaah, I see. Someone linked it in their forums. I had to laugh when I saw the comic book guy comment :) …

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The Guardian recently had two fascinating articles in the context of race in their history section. First last week's 'Flesh made fantasy' by Rachel Holmes, about an early 19th century African showgirl in England, then yesterday's 'The fascist who 'passed' for white' by Gary Younge, on an influencial early 20th century American fascist and his secret mixed-race origins. After a bit of further research and some writing I found myself confronted with an explosion of interesting side-topics, so for now I'll refrain from commenting on the latter. But both articles are recommended reading material. Buttocks, Bums, Arses, Posteriors, Rumps In …

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For a completely unrelated reason I was browsing old code project directories and found a copy of Stringulator, a throwaway weekend quickie from mid 2002. Turns out it runs on OS X, and it's relatively smooth. The best part though: when you turn on motion blur a relatively minor rendering bug gets triggered somewhere that makes the graphics look much cooler that ever intended... Now I wonder: did it also have a working fullscreen mode? …

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RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?dekstop\.de [NC] # old rule #RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [NC,F] # new rule RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.hai2u.com/HotBlowjob.jpg [NC,R] …

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Cheap laptop mic -> AU Lab -> lots of amplification, some EQ, compression -> MP3. I love this lofi stuff. 128kbps versions streamable on Last.fm, but you really want to download the 160kbps version linked below. I should fetch my mixer from Berlin, a little additional audio equipment opens up a much wider range of expressions. You can do so much with so little. 01 AU Lab Recording-21-25-26-344.mp3 (3.4 MB, 02:52 mins) 02 AU Lab Recording-21-32-22-415.mp3 (3.8 MB, 03:12 mins) 03 AU Lab Recording-21-42-06-649.mp3 (3.9 MB, 03:19 mins) 04 AU Lab Recording-21-56-02-348.mp3 (5.3 MB, 04:31 mins) 05 AU Lab …

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Since there are so many announcements about OpenID these days I decided it's time to actually have a look at the OpenID 1.1 spec. Turns out it's a light and fairly quick read, and its authors paid delightful attention to some crucial details. I especially liked this: The main advantage of [OpenID's delegation mechanism] is that an End User can keep their Identifier over many years, even as services come and go; they'll just keep changing who they delegate to. And was impressed to see stuff like this in the spec: It is RECOMMENDED that the form field [for the …

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Just saw this at a bookstore. Flicked through it, looks great, doesn't seem like a fluff piece. Lots of mathematical symbols everywhere, transformation methods etc. Will buy lots of stuff like this when I'm rich. Update Look what I found: Privacy Preserving Data Mining Bibliography, a categorized collection of papers. The table of contents provides you with a brief overview of the research field. Judging from the title, the paper you (and I) will want to check out is State-of-the-art in Privacy Preserving Data Mining by V. S. Verykios, E. Bertino, I. N. Fovino, L. P. Provenza, Y. Saygin, …

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A simple visualisation of a user's music listening habits over time, derived from their weekly Last.fm artist charts. Safari/Firefox only. The visualization concept is based on the gorgeous work Listening History by Lee Byron. See also part one: Chart Arcs. …

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Was browsing the Mozilla developer docs, curious about their documentation on JavaScript language updates over the different Firefox versions (JS is getting more and more Ruby-like). Realized that I need to brush up on my JS knowledge, maybe finally time to get that O'Reilly book. Found an "Introduction to the JavaScript shell" (they have a JS shell?!?), and this: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot login cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co -l \ mozilla/js/src mozilla/js/src/config mozilla/js/src/editline mozilla/js/src/fdlibm cd mozilla/js/src make -f Makefile.ref Compiled it, ran it. print works. Cool! Now I just need to figure out what to do with it. …

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I don't typically use this blog to post feature announcements of my employer, but this one thing we just launched minutes ago is seriously cool: You can now share arbitrary Last.fm radio stations (similar artist radio, tag radio, a user's personal radio, ...) using our embedded flash player. Put it on your blog, on your fanpage, anywhere you want. You don't even need a Last.fm account to do this. Here's the officially shit tag radio: …

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Having \n as the only type of newline. TSV as ubiquitous data exchange file format -- it even has its own mime-type. NTP on every machine. UTF-8. It's the simple things... …

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So regarding that upcoming + forced Flickr-Yahoo-ID merger... got the email a couple of days ago, read the Slashdot thread, and kinda felt unaffected by it all. I faintly remembered discussing this in some old Flickr group, but had forgotten the details; the whole thing seemed to have little real impact on my digital life. Will have to remember another login. But seeing Anil point to Bruce Sterling's commentary on the Flickr Yahoo login merger reminded me of my original reason not to like being forced to switch, just when I was about to cave in: A Yahoo login is …

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I'm start to look into more secure ways to store sensitive data, and Apple's encrypted DMG disk images seem like a good compromise between security and convenience. If you're worried about long-term storage and retrievability it of course has the disadvantage of being a proprietary format, which means you would need an OS X machine to decrypt those disk images. Not any more! In one of the interesting talks I missed during last year's 23C3 (while being busy doing other things) Jacob Appelbaum, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and David Hulton presented their successful attempt to reverse-engineer the file format. They provide slides …

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Just read David Byrne's Crappy Sound Forever!, in which he relates the evolution of popular and classical music as a series of technological changes, in a brief history from gramophone and microphone to MP3. I liked his observation that Hip Hop "might be the most radical popular music around" as it's the first mainstream music purely made by machines, where the composition has no relationship to a live performance any more, where the idea of a band vanishes: Most other pop genres retain some link to simulated live performance, but a song put together with finger snaps, super compressed vocals, …

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People seem to be migrating in drones from the former golden boy of the Rails community: the Typo blogging engine. Reasons vary (Sporkmonger's Bob Aman is put off by the lack of effective spam filters) -- but I can't say I'm surprised. Never installed Typo myself, but have been curious about the surprising amount of people who deem it acceptable to replace a solid solution (say, WP or MT) by something that exchanges stability for Ajax widgets. Apparently one year later the trend-setters can finally admit that flashiness is only cool when it doesn't require cleaning up every couple of …

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I finally have a digital camera again, and it's a great toy! Used iMovie 5 for this, but don't really like how effects and text overlays work (you can't apply them to individual frames). Still, it's quite simple to use and everything works flawlessly, not least of all iPhoto integration. (Note: Youtube indicated that this video was still in the upload queue about one hour after I posted it, don't remember that happening before.) Update: uploaded the file again, this time without audio -- and it was instantly available. Youtube might not support AAC, and iMovie didn't offer any …

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Oh, and regarding my last article: I'm told I'm full of shit. …

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(Just found this in my notes, written a couple of weeks ago, just days after coming to London.) london is quite interesting. in a way it's similarly divided as berlin is, with the west of the city as the "establishment", clean, rather wealthy, predominantly white (at least the places I've been to), and the east more interesting, racially mixed, culturally diverse, council houses and poverty everywhere, but also more "creative", shoreditch as hipsterpartytown central, the rest of southern hackney mostly lower middle class/upper lower class (which is it? dunno). interesting to move around in this city. the local dialects …

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Photo by smallcaps. Update: Just found a nice (and brief!) introduction to the Chaos Communication Congress at 46halbe.org, just in case any of the following sounds like noise to you. The congress layout for 23C3 is fixed, and we're starting to plan the details. One important part of this is finding Heralds: volunteers who for a couple of hours are willing to be the main spokesperson in a conference room, who announce the individual sessions, and help out when something goes wrong. This year we would like to have a Herald for every single talk, not just the big …

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Since I got my PowerBook early last year I'm on the search for decent alternatives to some of the applications I was using on the PC. Thanks to a flourishing development community I found replacements for the most important stuff (and more), but one thing that is still missing is a decent multi-track audio editor suitable for music production. I've been using Samplitude on the PC for the last couple of years, which after a brief learning curve turned out to be perfect for my needs -- it offers quite elegant means of editing audio, including non-destructive filters and timestretching …

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I was searching for a fast and modern graphing framework for server-side image generation (ImageMagick == too much hassle, too many weird dependencies, bitch to set up on OS X) and found Cairo, which looks like a great alternative. It's used for the GNOME desktop environment, and Mozilla will use it for various rendering tasks in their Gecko browser engine, but it also has bindings to most important scripting languages (notably Ruby and Python), almost no dependencies, generates PNG images out-of-the box, and seems quite well-designed. Links Cairo homepage Wikipedia: Cairo (graphics) …

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(From my Last.fm journal) A little while ago I implemented another visualization roughly based on Martin Wattenberg's arc diagrams. It's a visualization of a person's weekly Last.fm charts, designed to convey how your listening behaviors change over time, and also (just because it's really easy to determine) the mainstream-ness of your taste. The previous data visualization I had called IRC Arcs, so it's only natural to call this one Chart Arcs. I'm currently thinking about meaningful representations of a person's music listening behavior, e.g. visualizations that show aspects of your musical taste and habits, and I think that this particular …

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Last.fm station of the day: Trentemøller similar artist radio. …

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The following text explains how to get the Linksys WUSB11 2.8 working on OS X, and probably any other wifi adapter based on an Atmel AT76c505 chipset. (Caveat: As far as I know Kismac still does not support Atmel devices.) Short version for people who have patched wifi drivers before: try the XTerasys XN-2122B drivers linked below. (mailtomomo indicates that AIN's AWU2000B also has a driver for OS X, and they do indeed have a download labeled "Mac driver", but that only links to an .exe) Skip the prelude if you only want the raw facts. Prelude London has a …

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A couple of weeks ago my ISP apparently added Apache support for Ruby scripts, which they didn't provide until recently. Which is great news, but had an unfortunate side-effect: All download links to Ruby scripts on this domain broke, as Apache tried to execute them instead of presenting them in text/plain, but failed because none of the files had the executable bit set (and aren't meant to be executed anyway). A classic moment of naive assumptions on my side -- I should have anticipated that Ruby support is becoming a popular request for hosting providers these days. Due to me …

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I just completed a simple visualization of IRC communication behavior, you can see the graphics at mardoen.textdriven.com/irc_arcs/ -- this is the analysis of about a month's worth of IRC communication on a single channel. I especially like irc_arcs_incoming.png (top left) -- it clearly communicates a number of interesting attributes (the strongest ties, passive recipients vs. active senders, well-balanced vs. one-sided conversations, ...) The visualization concept is roughly based on Martin Wattenberg's arc diagrams (refer to his research page for the paper). But the semantics of these visualizations differ -- e.g., the element order of IRC arcs is not based …

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I thought I should start documenting some of the places I found in London. I'm mainly moving around in the north-east, in Hackney, Islington and sometimes Camden, but I've also been to Notting Hill for the carnival (tourist fest) and of course seen the center. To me it currently seems like London shares a similar east-west divide with Berlin, in that the West is the more established, richer London, but the East is where it's at, where the interesting stuff happens. Haven't been to Brixton yet though, so there still much to explore. And while I'm exploring I'd like to …

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Still pretty busy right now, so still no new posts for now... be patient. Download freq08.mp3 (2.8 MB, 02:27 mins) …

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I'm closing the comments down for now, as I'm quite busy with other stuff and simply don't want to handle the new wave of comment spam that started a couple of weeks ago. You can still reach me via the contact form though. I'll open the comments again at some point down the line, I'm quite proud of the average comment quality on this site, and I wouldn't want to miss your invaluable feedback. But since I wrote the "Spotlight Helps Fight Comment Spam!" article I've received more spam comments than usual, and each day a couple of them aren't …

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Just so I won't forget, and because it's useful to know. require 'RMagick' # generate rgb image buffer pixeldata = [] 14.times do |y| 100.times do |x| pixeldata ...or simply write to file. Result: Any hints on more lightweight PNG writers? ImageMagick can be a pain to install. There are some neat tricks for image-builders on why's sparklines for minimalists page, but jzp's PNG code shown there is for a very specific image and visualization format, and I don't understand PNG enough to adapt it. Update 2006-12-09: Olle Jonsson sends a link to png, a lightweight pure-Ruby PNG library by …

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I just found that StrategicBoard offers their keyword search results in an OPML format that contains feed URLs -- which can be a remarkable tool in a number of situations. Such a service is an essential prerequisite for feed grazing, i.e. subscribing to blogs temporarily while they're writing about stuff that you're interested in. (Feed grazing typically is part of automated processes, e.g. of simple news recommendation engines or topic exploration algorithms. Some desktop aggregators seem to support it already, unfortunately NetNewsWire isn't one of them.) Here's the URL for such a search query: http://www.strategicboard.com/index.php?fr=o&s=your_keyword ...and the result is an …

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I'm using a combination of fairly primitive methods to cope with blog spam. As this blog doesn't get too much comments the amount of manual work is relatively limited; main line of defense is an old-fashioned and relatively short blacklist. I'm notified of incoming comments, and in the rare event that a spam comment gets through I'll inspect it for new keywords. For a couple of months now it's become apparent that specific posts seem to attract more spam than others. I just thought that it may be great to have a statistic of this phenomenon -- so that I …

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Via the De:Bug Blog I just came upon the "Mission Statement" of Jimmy Wales' new site, Campaigns Wikia: Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics. [...] This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging …

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I just returned from a concert at WM Lounge, one of these places in Berlin that suddenly cropped up during the last couple of weeks, where you can watch the games and listen to bands play during intermissions. WM Lounge is a beautiful location in the center of Prenzlauer Berg, an old bath house with pillars and arches and flaking paint. As there was no game scheduled for today they simply had four bands scheduled to appear, three of which actually played. I went to see Team Blender, who I got to know because they're friends with a friend …

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This is an updated version of the first MidnightBot article where I visualize the times of day that people post on their blogs -- and it might not be the last iteration either. There were a number of reasons why I wasn't satisfied with the original graphs, mainly caused by the limitations of the software used (a simple Ruby sparklines library). Senorpako then suggested Processing, and that turned out to be a much better tool indeed. I'm not too fond of the Processing IDE, but you can just as well use Eclipse or any other editor instead. The first thing …

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Douglas Coupland - JPod. Page 190 of 449, as seen through the lense of my alien surveillance equipment. (view all) OK the last two entries were kind of a downer, so before the rest of my remaining readers jump the sinking ship I thought I should resume with something a little more consumer-friendly. I just finished Douglas Coupland's "JPod". As almost every other reviewer will tell you it's like an updated version of his early 90ies "Microserfs", which means it won't win huge literature prizes, but instead is light entertainment with a lot of insider jokes, jargon, an pop …

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I first heard of East Timor by watching "Manufacturing Consent", a documentary on Noam Chomsky. In this film Chomsky calls East Timor the great untold war story of the 20th century. He states that the atrocities committed by foreign nations in East Timor are comparable to Pol Pot in Cambodia. And he notes that, in contrast to Pol Pot, nobody seemed to notice. (The film, btw, I now consider mandatory viewing for every member of a society that has TV, newspapers, and/or corporations. Much time is spent on Chomsky's view of how public opinion is shaped by political and commercial …

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Today in the online edition of The Indepentent: "Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested", by Henry Porter. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up." Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the …

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I started to think about the different times of day people post on their blogs, and wondered what that said about your personality or occupation. So one day, with a long train-ride ahead of me, I set out to find out. The goal: for a selection of blogs, plot the time of day and day of week of the 100 most recent articles. Initial guess: all the cool guys post at really odd hours, and the boring guys only during their lunch break ;) Update 2006-07-05 -- check out the new version of the graphs. Much nicer, and, err, this …

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I finally found a decent way to produce music on my PowerBook. That was the last thing missing after I switched. I haven't been producing tracks for ages -- it's been a frequent pastime for years, but I just couldn't persuade myself to work on Windows just for the music. Anyway. This track is pretty representative of the stuff I did in the last 2-3 years, if a bit more focused. I still haven't learned how to properly use an equalizer (and probably never will -- I'm just not interested enough). Any professional audio engineer will blush when he sees …

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Did you notice Sam Ruby's new preoccupation with ETags? When he's talking with founders about their new web services, "the first thing I ask is; 'do you support ETags?'" I'm so glad that he's doing that, and talking about it publicly. I've been a web developer for a number of years now, and from the beginning I knew about some basic caching issues and about the HTTP 304 (Not Modified) response -- but it took me a while to figure out that in my scripts it's my responsibility to send this header. Request caching on this level is simply something …

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Just listened to a recent edition of Radio Open Source on the NSA wiretapping case, and was struck by how well the topic maps to social networks as we know and use them. Data mining, degrees of separation, pattern analysis, and more. With comments by William Gibson! Apparently it's not about surveillance, it's about mapping social networks. For these large-scale operations the content of each individual phone-call becomes irrelevant; what's more interesting is to find the degrees of separation between everybody, and then to be able to map out interesting subgroups. (See also my Datenspuren 2006 report.) Patrick Radden Keefe …

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I'm an avid OS X user, but that doesn't mean I'm not curious about other systems. At the moment I'm watching out for new Vista screencasts, and with the recent release of Beta 2 I got plenty of those. While watching a screencast on AlphaJunkie I was thoroughly entertained by the amount of dialog windows that randomly pop up to interrupt the user's workflow whenever he opens an application or uses an OS-level feature. "Windows need your permission to continue", "Do you want to get the latest online content when you search Help?", and my personal favorite, "Did you notice …

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I've been suffering from a minor iTunes annoyance for a while now and finally decided to look into it: There is no 'clean' way to import an audio podcast file into your main library. Audio files that come from a podcast feed are treated differently to 'normal' audio files in a number of ways, and sometimes that's not what you want. The simplest solution in most cases is of course to re-download the file from a browser or the commandline -- but in my case that didn't work because the file was no longer online. And dragging it to the …

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A couple of days ago Chaosradio Express published another great podcast: "Programmiersprachen und Dylan", a conversation between Tim Pritlove and Andreas Bogk on the subject on the Dylan programming language, and programming languages in general. The podcast has a duration of nearly two hours, but if you speak German and are interested in topics of such an abstract nature it's well worth your time. They start off from the very beginning (programming language basics, Turing machines etc) and gradually introduce more and more concepts of the Dylan language, some of which are really fascinating. All Roads Lead to Lisp I'm …

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Via http://del.icio.us/deusx I found Pointless Waste of Time's Life After the Video Game Crash, and enjoyed it. As the rest of the site had some other great bits and commentaries I started looking for a feed, but it seems there is none. So I made this instead: Pointless Waste of Time RSS Feed. It's really just an approximation, as Feed43's limited pattern matching abilities clash badly with the handwritten (and inconsistent) pointlesswasteoftime markup. Go visit, it seems like an interesting site. I'm not much of a gamer by any measure, but I'm a sucker for pop culture references and insightul …

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By pure chance I just stumbled over a Pandora's box of weird podcasts. Starting point was a great experimental/minimal techno track by Aldo Tamarind in the de-bug podcast -- see http://www.de-bug.de/pod/archives/1197.html. The music for that episode used to be stored on http://tamarind.podspot.de/, but by the time I got there (i.e., now) all content on that page was gone. Damn! So I started googling which led to some page on podspider.de -- don't go there, the page sucks hard, but the podcasts the page referenced were amazing. Quote: "related categories: eccentric, classical, religion & spirituality". Chrchrchr. E.g. http://cba.fro.at/show.php?lang=de&sendungen_id=14 -- Recordings of …

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Yesterday night I returned from Datenspuren 2006 in Dresden, a conference on privacy and technology organized by the local CCC. This was both the first time I was in Dresden, and also the first time I attended the Datenspuren conference, so I was curious to see both. Short version: I'll probably come back next time. What follows are random excerpts from my conference notes. update 2006-05-17 -- From the Chaosradio "Chaos TV" feed: "Bericht von den Datenspuren 2006", with an MP3 download of a radio special produced during the conference. 15 minutes of interviews with organizers, participants and guests (including …

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I decided on a whim to mirror "Network Forensics Evasion: How to Exit the Matrix" on my server, at least temporarily. This fairly elaborate text describes a number of technical (and some non-technical) means of hiding and obfuscating your "data trails". While this traditionally has mainly been a concern of crackers and dissidents, it's of increasing interest to the average consumer. I just started reading, so I can't say much about the quality of the document. The text comes with a disclaimer: I try to be as operating system agnostic as possible, providing information for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. …

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I just came home from an interesting discussion: the "tesla salon" had a session at club Podewil with the topic "verwertungsgesellschaften im digitalen zeitalter" (roughly: "collecting societies in the digital age"). The event was organized by Radio 1:1. They had a well-chosen group of participants: Tim Pritlove in his role as podcaster and "discordian evangelist", Julian Finn as a representative of FairSharing (i.e., the culture flat rate), and two netradio guys whose names I haven't written down and who sadly aren't mentioned in the program. Update 2006-05-04 -- Igor writes to ask if the session will be published as podcast …

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I've been silent for a couple of weeks now for a reason: I just submitted my finished diploma thesis (finally!), which meant I had little time for anything else. (Title of the thesis: "Using Evolutionary Algorithms to Explore the Sonic Spectrum of a Software-based Additive Synthesizer", iirc.) I'm now recovering and looking forward to my newfound freedom (but it's not over yet, there's still a verbal exam coming up). To rephrase: Don't expect many updates in the upcoming weeks either, I'm chilling. …

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I finally found a good test case to compare YARV's execution speed with the plain ruby interpreter -- and the results are quite satisfying. The script I benchmarked reads and parses 3.300 small XML files, extracts data, and writes the result to a tab separated file. (You can find a description of how to install YARV in the comments of why's recent article "YARV Merged Matz".) About the Test Case The benchmarked script, export.rb, is a real-life script that I wrote a couple of days ago: A friend is working on a profile matching algorithm for a community site, and …

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Last April, nearly exactly a year ago, I bought my first Mac (a 12" Powerbook), and after a while that became the only machine I use. There are at least two working PCs in this appartment that by now are only used as storage medium or by visitors. This last Wednesday I had to send the Powerbook in for repair (with a broken battery and CD drive), so I had to dig out the old Thinkpad as temporary replacement. And now I'm surprised at how fast habits change -- up until last year my main machines were always running Microsoft …

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I've just implemented article feeds for this blog, which is a great feature for everybody who wants to track comments on a particular article, or for people who want to track updates on articles that are too old to be included in the blog's main feed. Originally I simply wanted to add a comments feed for each individual article -- currently I only offer a single combined feed of all comments, and that's usually not what anybody is interested in. Why should you suffer from receiving many irrelevant entries if you're only interested in comments on a particular article? …

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flOw has everything I wish from a good game -- it's simple, yet it sets a great mood; it simply feels good to play it. And although the visuals are abstract it's a very organic game. There is a learning curve, but you're flexible in your approach to playing. And if you get the download version you can also play fullscreen. The game's only flaw is that you soon reach a point where playing on makes not much sense, because you've eaten all there is to eat. Not being an active gamer I needed a couple of attempts to …

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I found an older article on the Google Reader blog where they post a great bookmarklet: It displays feeds referenced by the current page and allows you to preview them in Google Reader. Convenient for their users, and a great building block for a more generic tool. I've modified their code in a number of ways -- the most obvious change is that the bookmarklet-generated links will point directly to the respective feed URLs, not to a Google Reader preview page. Then there are some cosmetic changes (I didn't like their choice of generated markup), but not much else. …

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While reading this: Google built a feed platform that is freely available for any user with a Google account. ... and re-reading this: The data technologies powering Google Reader can easily be used and extended by third-party feed aggregators for use in their own applications. ... it struck me: centralized aggregation, decentralized delivery and UI the hardest part in a reader (IMHO) is aggregation, because it offers a lot of pitfalls with little reward for making it "just work" more interesting: the visible stuff solves bandwidth issues for everybody solves stability issues for everybody saves costs for the developer/hoster (these …

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A couple of days ago while looking for some cheap entertainment I found a two-part Channel 4 series called "The Root of All Evil?", a documentary on religious extremism around the world. Usually those kind of documentaries are a pretty safe bet: you know the positions beforehand, sometimes you even learn a bit, and they don't annoy you like bad movies do. Perfect bedtime entertainment. Boy was I in for a surprise. Because they fed me what I least expected: Atheist propaganda. Yeah I too thought that this was a contradiction in terms. Now I know better. "Why should scientists …

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del.icio.us apparently has just added a feature that I've been wanting for a long time: It's now very easy to see the history of bookmarks for a specific URL without having to bookmark it yourself. Here's an example of such a bookmark history page: del.icio.us bookmarks for mailfeed.org. I regularly check these URL bookmark histories on del.icio.us, because it can answer all kinds of interesting questions, e.g.: How popular is this URL? Since when have people known about this? Who bookmarked this URL first? What are their comments? I imagine this caters to a small audience, but it's a …

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I just finished a first version of a custom database cache for FeedTools 0.2.23 -- basically a drop-in replacement for the default DatabaseFeedCache. I did this for two reasons: first, because I could (always a good reason), and second, because DatabaseFeedCache does not work at all in multi-threaded applications. DatabaseFeedCache is based on ActiveRecord, and while ActiveRecord is supposed to be thread-safe since version 0.9 I've found this not no be true, at least when using SQLite3. The implementation of SQLite3FeedCache is as basic as it gets, to the point where it's rather inefficient -- it does not even …

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I previously mentioned the all-Ruby Jabber server xmppd, a new project that is going to be really interesting once it's above a certain basic threshold -- a core goal of this project is to get to a stage where you simply start a script to get the server running, with minimum configuration and no root privileges required. As I'm a fan of such low-barrier-to-entry, low-dependencies software (cf. SQLite) I'm tingling with anticipation. I just found that a similar project has recently been launched in the Perl space, initiated by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal and Flickr fame. This project is called …

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NetNewsWire's developer Brent Simmons has silently been busy during the last couple of months, and is now starting to talk about his progress. And my guess was right: the major new feature is NewsGator integration. Don't want to dismiss it though, it seems that among numerous bug fixes we can also expect significant speed improvements on some operations. The main surprise to me, though, was this particular announcement: P.S. It's a free upgrade. In fact, existing NetNewsWire users will get two years of free upgrades plus a free subscription to NewsGator. Whow. Another OS X developer being crazy friendly with …

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I just wanted to check out the beta of Ableton Live 5.2 -- since switching to a Mac last year I haven't found a decent audio sequencer yet that I could actually afford, and had been hearing great stuff about their recent improvements. Well what can I say: I didn't get to actually use Live, because its copy protection mechanism sucks, and clashes badly with my stubborn viewpoints on privacy -- and then some. For example... When you start up the application for the first time it requests admin privileges?! After canceling this request you're informed that it just …

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I'm a pretty geeky guy, but there are quite a number of technological trends that I've known for a long time before I actually start using them, and where I simply don't know how much I'm missing. A particular field of software that suffers from this is communication software: namely instant messaging and voice-over-IP. I had an ICQ account in the 90ies (when I was working at SinnerSchrader in Hamburg), but basically used it to make lunch plans with a buddy and not much else. Well that has finally changed. Within weeks I got a new ICQ account, a …

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While browsing the Ruby presentation of Srdjan Marinovic I came upon the following snippet, a great example of what makes Ruby such an exciting and productive language: class Foo alias_method : old_say, :say_greeting def say_greeting(*args) log... old_say(*args) end end The code above redirects calls to an existing method old_say in class Foo to a proxy method say_greeting, which logs the method call before it hands over to the original method. This demonstrates how Ruby classes are inherently "open", in that they can be modified at runtime. That code sequence can be used to override both method calls to your own …

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Reading some of the comments of another Slashdot article on Windows Vista made me aware once more that the landscape of operating system adoption is shifting: the Windows slice of the pie seems to be getting smaller, at least for home users. For one thing, people start switching to Apple. I haven't counted yet, but the amount of people you meet who casually mention that they just got their first Mac seems to increase exponentially. Then, during the last months, it became abundantly clear that Ubuntu is becoming a serious alternative to commercial desktop systems. I've been waiting for signs …

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Slick, Libre Charts? Either there is no great, simple application for well-designed charts and numeric diagrams on OS X, or it's amazingly well hidden -- all I want to do is transform tables of numbers (and text labels) into beautiful visualizations. Like in Excel, only good-looking. I don't even care about the output format. Keynote only works for small data sets, and all free/open source applications I've looked into suck (examples). As an alternative I thought about scripting Inkscape, but haven't yet looked into it. Gruff on the other hand is often too limited for what I want to …

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I just got a mail from Patrick, a friend of mine whose job mainly consists of working on very cool interfaces all day long, and who some time last year started circuit bending with his friend Dennis. They took apart cheap children's keyboards, soldered random bits and pieces onto their circuitry, and then presented their setup at last week's dorkbot at c-base here in Kreuzberg. Sadly I missed the performance, but there's a video ("circuit benders from hell", 30 MB Quicktime -- I don't think he minds that I share the link). Look ma, they're using my mixer! (An …

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I've been submitting feature requests and bug reports to the NetNewsWire forum -- Brent Simmons seems pretty responsive. I'm looking forward to an application update, it's been months since 2.01 was released, and I'm wondering what Brent's working on (probably mainly NewsGator integration, which at the moment is of little use to me.) The more I'm using the application the more I'm finding its limitations -- it's still the best aggregator for the Mac (though Vienna is getting closer and closer), but sometimes I'm a bit envious of the Windows world where FeedDemon is making great strides lately. I'm …

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I make a lot of little notes in text files that never develop into a full article and eventually get deleted. So to change that, and to maybe even increase the post frequency a bit, I'll start publishing smaller comments. Have no idea yet which way suits me best though; first approach: assemble several semi-connected commentaries to get to article length. TextMate 2.0, which I guess won't be released within the next six months, will be a free update for registered users of TextMate 1.x -- a bold financial decision for the developer Allan Odgaard, but great for his users. …

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I just started to write an aggregator in Ruby which will form the basis of a number of web applications, and a couple of minutes into the project I'm already excited about the expressiveness of Ruby and its standard library. So much so that I had to share the results of my first five minutes of coding. I decided that the aggregator I'm writing will take its feed URLs from an OPML document. A nice property of OPML is that it allows you to group feeds into a hierarchy of named elements, so that you can e.g. group some feeds …

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For the last couple of years I've been toying with ideas on how to cut back on my expenses, and one of the top items is the plan to cancel magazine subscriptions. They don't actually cost that much, but I've been getting better information elsewhere, and usually quicker; to me the print media is on the verge of becoming irrelevant. But every couple of months I stumble upon an article in the printed press that I didn't catch via other channels, and that manages to refresh my interest in the old media. Today was one of those days: while …

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A couple of days ago Jon Udell complained about the alledged "customer lock-in" in Apple's iTunes: ...although the podcast's feed URL is discoverable by way of the Show Description contextual menu option, the ensuing dialog box does not permit the displayed URL to be copied. That's why I had to manually transcribe the URLs... Via 0xDECAFBAD's daily del.icio.us links we're notified of an article on BlogicBlog, "The techie way of liberating the podcast URL from iTunes", where the unnamed author suggests to use a network sniffer like Ethereal to watch outgoing traffic while you refresh the respective feed in …

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This must be the most entertaining short I've seen in months. A couple of very geeky Brits, introduced by a Swede, show you how they are using Erlang as part of their PABX (or PBX, as the youngsters are calling it these days), and demonstrate the usefulness of realtime, declarative, symbolic programming. Is it industrial advertising? Or educational? Or is it just an awesome piece of academic retro futurism? Is it subversive comedy, dripping with pop cultural references and contemporary irony, or quite to the contrary simply an antiquated piece of another time? You decide. It's much more efficient! "Declarative …

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I just got a copy of Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information', and while I only skimmed over a few passages I found its historical examples of data visualization intriguing. A little searching then brought up "Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization", which is an interesting gallery and timeline of the development of the modern info-graph. While many examples shown there do indeed focus on mapping applications, the cornerstones of data visualization are all there, and the site shares many of the examples Tufte also uses in his book. This week I …

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There currently are quite a number of very happy reactions over the announcement that Telestream's product Flip4Mac WMV is now available for free -- Flip4Mac WMV is a collection of "Windows Media® Components for QuickTime" that allows you to play certain Windows Media formats from within Quicktime, among them apparently some older formats that Microsoft's Media Player 9 for OS X can't play (I'm not actually sure about that, but this seems to be a reason why people install it -- that and the fact that MS has just discontinued their own Media Player.) It's curious that there is a …

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This documents how Apache 1.3 on OS X can be set up to serve .rhtml files using Ruby's ERB template system. Most of the required configuration is already described in Brian Bugh's article Using ERB/rhtml Templates On Dreamhost, but OS X's basic setup is conservative enough to require a little additional configuration. However the real reason I'm writing this is that I additionally wanted to limit the handling of .rhtml scripts to my user account's "personal web sharing" directory (which maps to a tilde URL like http://127.0.0.1/~username/), and this isn't as straight-forward, so it took me a while to …

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Recently there have been a number of requests for new ideas in the aggregator market, and as I'm constantly dissatisfied with my feed consumption experience (no matter the tool) I have lots of opinions on the state of aggregator software -- and even some ideas for improvement. I'll save the grand overview for later; because some things are better shown than told I thought a good start would be to show sketches of what I'd like to see in the next generation of aggregators. Here's Sketch One, which is kind of an accumulation of concepts, and which describes the basis …

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Just found out how to work around a major nuisance of GMail: the inability to select the low-tech HTML view as default interface. It's probably going to be old news for a lot of people, but it was new news to me, so I'll post it here for others to see. Background I've been using GMail as a secondary email provider for a while now, and while I like that its Javascript-based interface affords you speed improvements and other nice enhancements I can't get used to a major drawback: you lose the browser's history function, at least in Safari. Others …

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Another 22C3-related Ruby script: I thought it would be neat to convert the list of Weblogs writing about 22C3 into an OPML file which can then easily be imported into your favorite aggregator. Ruby to the rescue. The script scrapes the Wiki page (or rather its export format version) and iterates over the table of blogs, adding a feed URL of each blog to the OPML outline. Look at the code for further information. Of course you can also simply get the exported OPML file linked below; but I expect that the Wiki page will change a lot even after …

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Just before I left my house over the holidays I wanted to print out the schedule for 22C3, and found that I couldn't -- no matter which browser, OS and method I chose, the schedule table was unreadable. A couple of hours later I sat in a train and had some time to spare, so I hacked together a Ruby script that parses the iCal version of the schedule for 22C3 and creates an HTML page with a clean, readable timetable that you can also print ;) You can get the script below, and a version of the generated HTML …

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I just had a couple of wonderful days of being busy deploying a new site, MailFeed.org. The site is a public service derived from the mailfeed.rb script posted earlier: you send email to an address at mailfeed.org, and it shows up in a public feed. If you don't know it yet have a look at the site, and then come back. Originally the idea for this arose of a nuisance a friend wanted to get rid of: that there still are people sending out email newsletters instead of writing feeds. But during the last couple of days I found that …

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Query By Example by Meredith Patterson was one of this year's Google Summer of Code projects, and of all the projects I've looked at it seems the most exciting. Originally I wanted to wait for some more information about the project before writing about it, but as there weren't any news save some quiet early releases, and as I really need to clear my backlog of topics, I decided to have an early look. Query By Example sets out to get rid of a current limitation of relational databases: the lack of support for fuzzy searches. Here's the short project …

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I just updated to 10.4.3, and after the first reboot Little Snitch reported a network request by Dock.app to apple.com -- something which had never happened before. The first time I let it slip, but the second request came when I opened Dashboard for the first time, and this time I started tcpdump before granting access. Among the expected traffic (updating the weather forecast) was a rather unusual request: 22:19:57.059318 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 27097, offset 0, flags [DF], length: 147) 192.168.0.4.50428 > www.apple.com.http: P [tcp sum ok] 1:108(107) ack 1 win 65535 0x0000: ..[.q>..$..^..E. 0x0010: ..i.@.@......... …

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FeedTools is an amazingly complete Ruby library by Bob Aman for accessing, parsing and generating feeds from within Ruby. While it is designed to work well with Rails applications, you can just as easily use it in your Ruby scripts: feed = FeedTools::Feed.open('http://dekstop.de/weblog/index.xml') puts feed.title feed.items.each { |item| puts item.title puts item.link } Requesting a feed every time you run your script is fine as long as you only parse your own feeds, but you should be a bit more polite as soon as you start requesting someone else's feed. Over time feeds can cost site owners a lot of …

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I've written a Ruby script that extracts keywords from a MovableType-exported plaintext database, and while doing so wanted to include the Rails Inflector so that the script could merge singular and plural versions of the same word. It wasn't that obvious to me how to include the Inflector in Ruby scripts outside of Rails, and I searched for a while until I found the proper usage; so I'll document it here to save other Ruby newbies some time. In the end it boiled down to finding the proper require statements -- I'm not sure if this is the best way …

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On friday I received a message via my contact form that looked a lot like the comment spam that blogs normally get: with a generic reference to my site content ("Well done very nice page" etc.), and a link to what obviously looks like a spammer's site. Signed with a name and email address. Unfortunately my web hoster's logfiles weren't accessible (again), so I couldn't check whether this was a manual "attack" or from a bot. Well the logfiles just started working again, so I had a quick look and now I'm a bit worried. Look at the (abbreviated) excerpt …

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A friend has asked me for a way to read email newsletters from within his feed reader, and after some digging around I found it's straightforward enough to access POP3 mail from within Ruby, so I created mailfeed.rb. mailfeed.rb is a Ruby script that generates an RSS 2.0 feed from the content of an email inbox. This can e.g. be used to read email-based newsletters from within your feed reader. (See also: MailFeed for PHP, pymailfeed for Python.) It's really a pretty simple script, so there are a number of caveats -- e.g. there is no limit on the …

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The Fahrplan (schedule) for 22C3 (the Chaos Computer Club's Chaos Communication Congress) is now online, along with the blog, Flickr pool, wiki, and podcast. So I started to browse and collect lectures I'd like to see, and then realized that like last year I have a scheduling problem... I'm still trying to find out how I can use the iCal calendar file for things beyond looking at dates in iCal. Apparently the data is imported read-only, which means I can't annotate; and it would be great to find ways where iCal can help you schedule your congress experience. There of …

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There are more and more details emerging about MIT's/Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop, and the more is revealed the more exciting it sounds. Kofi Annan has just unveiled the first prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, and there are a lot of other important people involved (apparently Rupert Murdoch is among the sponsors). This project is a rare (yet well-publicized) example of individuals at the right places joining force to not only develop a technology that might change the world, but also doing so openly and without financial merit for themselves. Negroponte puts it best: I'd …

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There is an interesting post on Slashdot pointing to an article by Ben Meyer, about the concept of a Type Manager as opposed to the oldschool concept of a file manager. Quote from the Slashdot introduction: In the past few years many of us have been introduced to a new type of application, the Type Manager. Most of us are familiar with iTunes, but there are many other Type Managers out there that are gaining market share and a rabid fan base of users such as digiKam and amaroK. ... After creating a list of all the traits of a …

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There is another wave of comment spam coming to my site -- the new variant, where they don't post their own URLs any more, but either URLs that aren't active yet, or URLs of blogs that have already been infiltrated with comment spam. The rationale behind that: I'm supposed to not be put off by the usually offtopic comments and broken grammatical structure and leave them alone, which increases the PageRank of the URLs posted, which in turn increases the PageRank of all pages these URLs link to. Comment spam by indirection. Here's the kicker: they are already putting quite …

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CollaborativeRank is an interesting service that builds on the del.icio.us database. They provide bookmark search, a ranking of popular bookmarks, and they attempt to find connections between the things people store in their del.icio.us account and their area of expertise. It's the last feature that I find the most interesting. While it disguises as a ranking of users, its main promise is that it could help you find experts on arbitrary fields. During the last couple of weeks I've been watching my rank, and while I wouldn't necessarily agree with its estimation of my expertise it's still interesting to watch. …

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Just read in a comment by Esteban Kozak that SearchFox RSS uses both "attention and community data" when determining the value of an article, which means that some of the weird effects documented earlier might be a result of other people's behavior, as opposed to my own. To recapitulate: I'm trying to understand the algorithms behind SearchFox RSS's "Topics I Like" listing, and found that some terms are conspicuously high on the list where they don't really deserve to be (currently: "quake", "ning" -- see image below), and others that I care about more are nowhere to be found (currently: …

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In today's server logfiles: 13 requests from a host called "teamramrod.com". This is a pretty obvious movie reference, yet it made me curious enough to go check it out. www.teamramrod.com redirects to google.ca, but we can at least check the domain entry: $ whois teamramrod.com (... bla bla ...) Administrative Contact: Team Ramrod Rodney Farva 51 King St. Spurbury, ON , CA (519)5551235 () farva@teamramrod.com I thought this was rather funny. …

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I don't get it. Around the time I wrote about SearchFox RSS's "Topics I Like" feature I adjusted some of my reading habits (notably minimizing the consumption of web two-point-oh hype, and subscribing to more non-tech-oriented feeds), and the list of "topics I like" hasn't really adjusted to that. Maybe I'm too impatient, but I was presented with about 1.200 articles since last Wednesday and the list of "topics I like" seems rarely changed. I've included a screenshot of my current dataset below; I've also appended the words to the original data set. Note how e.g. "Ning" and "Quake" are …

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One of the things I like to do in my spare time is analyze web server logfiles. It doesn't even have to be those of my own domain, but it helps if it is a site that I know and use. I've been starting to write an article about some recent findings back in August and, as it goes, had it in a draft state for months. I just decided that I'm going to post the first segment in an ongoing series about my habit of logfile analysis, and maybe I'll go into some of the techniques I use later …

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Chris Zumbrunn has news in the comments of my article "RFE: Server-Side Javascript?": There is a new JavaScript execution framework called Rhinola which looks like what I asked for: a framework that enables server-side JavaScript web development! A quick search leads to an enthusiastic article ("whoa! rhinola rocks!") on the haboglabobloggin' blog (which just went offline while I was writing this...), but the author mentions that the current incarnation of the software requires quite some Linux admin-fu to get it working; I assume this will change over the next year as the product matures. Rhinola is currently based on the …

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For the last two weeks I've observed SearchFox RSS's list of "Topics I like" to both find out how it's working and to see if it accurately reflects my taste. See my earlier article "SearchFox Rocks. But Where Are the Web Services?" for a little context. Random observations: The keywords are indeed ordered by rank, the first keyword being the most highly ranked. You can deduce this by comparing the keyword movements at the start and end of the list over time: lots of movement at the end of the list. Easy come, easy go. The list actually reflects what …

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On David Weinberger's blog: transcript of a talk and Q+A by Joshua Schachter of delicio.us. It's a bit sketchy, but has some interesting bits nevertheless. I was especially delighted by the discussion after Joshua introduces the upcoming "network" and "group" features, where groups are opt-in collaborations and networks more like the current inbox feature, in that users won't be told that you have included them in your network. Excerpt: I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip …

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The new episode of This Week in Tech features copyright lawyer and Creative Commons-guru Lawrence Lessig, and it's a great show with lots of great clarifications and anectodes about America's current state of copyright law. Probably the best way to learn about the subject and still be entertained. The cast of this show is a pretty diverse list of characters coming from different backgrounds (most are journalists of some kind, some are also publishers, hobby musicians, or software developers, and Lessig obviously is a lawyer), and it's great to see how they interact. It seems to me that this is …

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This is an update on my ongoing series on web service client authorization ([1], [2]): exciting times ahead! To reiterate: there are more and more sites appearing that provide means to connect to them to read and manipulate data you have stored on their servers via web service APIs. This enables the creation of third-party applications and services that build upon these sites and enhance their services. E.g., there is an iPhoto plugin for Flickr, lots of alternative interfaces to your del.icio.us bookmarks, etc. The problem: nearly every one of these services requires you to give up your username and …

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SearchFox is really great. It's a web-based feed reader (currently in beta) that watches you reading feeds, and which uses this attention data to improve your reading experience. After you have used it for a while SearchFox develops an understanding of the things you care about, and presents these accordingly (feed articles are sorted by ranking, not time). How SearchFox works There are several ways to tell the application that you like a specific feed article: by reading the article (in SearchFox you are presented with a list of headlines and some metadata, and have to click a link to …

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The last time I wrote about it this was little more than an extrapolation of what was happening, but now (only weeks later) we're getting beaten over the head with it. This is what I see when I search my memory and feeds archive of the last couple of weeks for the term "buys": eBay buys Skype Yahoo buys Upcoming.org News Corp buys IGN Google buys Meetroduction Fox buys MySpace Verisign buys Weblogs.com AOL buys Weblogs Inc. (not related) eBay buys Verisign Payment Services ... and most of these businesses were traded for unholy sums of cash. Note how the …

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Take a look at this very strange del.icio.us account: http://del.icio.us/cuthu -- I stumbled upon this user while datamining my own del.icio.us account with simple Ruby scripts and an SQLite database. His account shares three bookmarks with mine (covering three very distinct and arbitrary topics), and it only caught my eye because of the very strange appearance of its bookmarks. So I took a look at the user's del.icio.us page. Excerpt from the page (sans formatting): http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/05/Sep/fema4.html [nitrogen:#geeks] http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/05/Sep/fema4.html to nitrogen #geeks ... on 2005-09-27 ... copy this item http://qdb.us/48067 [prj:#geeks] n2: http://qdb.us/48067 to prj #geeks ... on 2005-09-27 ... copy …

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Surprisingly language constructs emitted by the same entity seem mostly repetitive, even if covering different subjects. "Interesting". Popkomm Panel: Management, the new Majors? - dekstop weblog "Surprisingly the most interesting aspects of the panel were the insights into DJ Bobo's business life; take a closer look at his numbers quoted below." to dekstop.de popkomm conferences music pop_culture distribution ... on 2005-09-29 ... Popkomm Panel: A&R in a Digital Environment - dekstop weblog "Surprisingly the panel was mostly about ringtones -- it turned out interesting nevertheless, even if the participants enthusiastically painted a picture of a brave new world that to …

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2005-09-16 15:30-16:30 Moderator: someone from Musikwoche We were told that the panel was about the evolving possibility of artist self-management, which sounded pretty exciting; but as with the previous panel, turned out to be too business-focused and didn't contain any really new ideas. I expected some thoughts about Internet distribution and new communication channels, but those topics didn't appear at all. Surprisingly the most interesting aspects of the panel were the insights into DJ Bobo's business life; take a closer look at his numbers quoted below. The overall theme of the panel seemed to be: it's less about the music, …

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2005-09-16 14:30-15:30 Moderator: Joe Taylor, Record of the day Surprisingly the panel was mostly about ringtones -- it turned out interesting nevertheless, even if the participants enthusiastically painted a picture of a brave new world that to me looked rather devastating. Note: I forgot to write down the full list of participants. From memory: someone from Jamba, Record execs from both Indie and major labels, and someone who develops ringtones and was involved in the production of the crazy frog. Also note that we missed the start of the panel, so the first 30 mins or so are missing. And …

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Strange, the DVD format is only ten years old and already on the verge of being obsoleted. In two years time everybody will buy Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. But those will be out of date in five years as well, because by then everything will be stored on hard drives, and rented off the Internet. From then on new data formats will appear every couple of months, but nobody will care because thanks to DRM all content will only be consumable for a couple of days anyway. You will stop updating your home entertainment center to accommodate new physical content mediums, …

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In June this year I started looking for ways to use JavaScript as a server-side scripting language to replace Perl, PHP and others, and documented my findings in the article "RFE: Server-Side Javascript?". Although all the pieces to bring JavaScript to the server are there, nobody has actually undergone the effort to implement it yet; but it seems there are more and more people interested in trying it, and I guess by this time next year we'll have some stuff to play around with. The reason I'm posting again is that I just found another related project: TrimJunction, which is …

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Last week a friend invited me to visit the Popkomm, using the press pass of a colleague. Who am I to refuse a free invitation? Having never been at the Popkomm, I was curious to see what it actually was like. Another friend had already warned me that the general attraction was to meet business partners and potential clients, and that it wasn't really a place to experience new forms of culture, or a place where a lot of new bands got signed -- so my expectations were rather low. And still I was surprised by what you find there …

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After the recent Ballmer debacle I merely glanced at a screenshot of the Channel 9 interview with Bill Gates, and downloaded the interview with Marc McDonald instead. This turned out to be a good decision. Most of the Channel 9 interviews by now are product presentations, but occasionally there are real gems that should be mandatory viewing for everybody in the field. The sessions with Bill Hill about Typography, human perception and interfaces are such gems (see links below). This session with Marc McDonald is of near Bill Hill-level quality, but admittedly on a subject that is a bit more …

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Yet another patent that describes a technical "invention" both blatantly obvious, and with apparently well-know prior art: "System and method for obtaining information relating to an item of commerce using a portable imaging device". A method, system, and apparatus are provided for allowing users to readily obtain information associated with a selected item from a remote location. More specifically, a user at the location of the first entity operates a portable imaging device to capture an image of identifying data, such as a barcode, that identifies a selected item. The captured image is then communicated to a server operated by …

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Translation: The file 'iTunes Library' apparently is not a valid music library. iTunes has attempted to rebuild your music library and renamed this file 'iTunes Library (Damaged)'. Net result: the music is still there, but I have to manually reconstruct all podcast subscriptions... if I can even remember them. Otherwise: good luck reading the proprietary database format. Damn. Serves me right for being such a curious bastard. Note to self: next time wait. Let others do the mistakes of an early update. Update: Ok, I think I got them all. After about the third podcast I realized that Google …

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Judging from the screenshots, iTunes 5 has put an end to Brushed Metal!! Haven't installed it yet myself, but I'll take it as a sign for good things to come in 10.4.3. I'm also curious what other changes have lead to the major version jump -- let's hope they have made some improvements to the podcasting workflow. Judging from the feature overview page the sources list can now have folders, which is a really useful addition. And what the hell does this mean: "now supports iPod syncing for Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows PCs"?? …

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While playing around with the cool new <canvas>-tag, I found that Safari seems to have a bug in its canvas implementation -- it stops working as soon as you link an external style sheet to the HTML, even if the style sheet is empty. I'm not sure yet if this is an actual bug or if I'm overlooking something; but then, nobody is actually using <canvas> on styled production sites, and all the demos I saw online are using unstyled HTML, so it's not that unreasonable that it's not a well-known bug. Update: I posted this to the webkit-dev mailing …

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I own a simple MP3 player by a German company called dnt, the player model is called "Fun 256". It doesn't have any fancy features, doesn't play OGG, and occasionally chokes when presented with high bit rates, but it's adequate for my needs. When I started using iTunes this spring I made up for its lack of generic player support by using a combination of a dynamic playlist, the "Copy files to folder" AppleScript from Doug's Scripts for iTunes, and an AppleScript that marks selected tracks as played. This way I could fill up the player with songs that I …

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If you enjoy reading Ayn Rand, and are thinking about learning some key facts of her "philosophy of Objectivism": don't. I read "The Fountainhead" last year, at the recommendation of a friend. Only a small number of pages into the book I was already hooked, and finished the whole 700-odd pages in the course of three or four days. I enjoyed it immensely and still count it among my top five favorite books of all time. As the back pages of the book were filled with quotes about Rand's Objectivism I became curious and consulted the Web. The term Objectivism …

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A short excerpt of current news, from my perspective. First signs that the Flickr sell to Yahoo might be good for the founders, but bad for the community. A bastard-child of universal login is emerging, with all the benefits. Encapsulating almost everything. The DRM emperor gets new clothes: exchanges the old business suit for ill-fitting cargo pants. Acrobat Reader to support 3D data. Exciting stuff, if you're an Adobe manager in need for new markets. And a lot of business as usual. Welcome to the next corporate Internet boom. …

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I've made some smaller changes to the blog's RSS feed; depending on your aggregator this could cause a little inconvenience, as blog entries might show up as duplicates, or because old entries might reappear as unread. The changes I made remove all trailing "index.html" filenames from permalinks and entry GUIDs, which means links are now cleaner and less dependent on the blog software (I might be switching to TextPattern in the near future), and it also makes it easier for me to read my logfiles. This will be the last time this happens, I promise (*knocks on wood*). Now I …

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I already gave a basic description of Pandora in my previous article, "Finally: An Alternative to Last.fm". Brief recapitulation: Pandora is a music streaming service that lets you control the kind of music that is played. You can define "stations" by bookmarking song titles or artist names, and the site then plays music that shares similar properties with your selected songs. In contrast to Last.fm, which is a social network, Pandora builds on a concept of rich metadata to find relationships between individual songs. This time I had the opportunity to actually use the system, so this should make an …

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Tom Conrad has apparently just presented "Pandora" at Bar Camp. Scoble quotes an email from Tom with a short description of the service: "Pandora is a "music discovery service" designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It works like this: you give us the name of an artist or song and we instantly create a "station" that plays songs that share musical characteristics with the artist/song you entered. From there you can fine-tune the station to your tastes by giving us feedback on the individual tracks we play. You can make up to 100 unique stations …

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While writing another bug report for Apple's OS X feedback page I used the dictionary popup to look up the word "noticeable" (I always forget if it is written with or without an "e"), and found not only that I had gotten it right this time, but also that Apple has added a very nice description of when to use this term and when others are more appropriate. I use the dictionary popup all the time, but I've never seen this type of content: an introduction to better English language usage. Very nice! Here's the text: noticeable adjective easily seen …

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How about this for a definition? It's just a small event, but their approach to invitations bugs me a lot. I was already wondering how O'Reilly could keep up their seemingly altruistic behavior on such a massive scale, to the point where they're now more talked about for their community involvements and conferences than for their books. Apparently they couldn't. It should have been clear that their main interests are not simply to advance technology, to help create new ideas, but that these are just tools to earn money. I simply forgot about that, and liked them a bit more …

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I'm on constant lookout for a better system to maintain this website -- currently it's a rather loose mixture of MovableType 2.6.x, custom PHP, and individual HTML pages, and it really shows. There is more inconsistency that I would like to have, and it is not easy to maintain -- every change to the layout requires modifying several template files, and modifying twice as many HTML files. Add to this the fact that some pages require different layouts (which sometimes involves custom style sheets). In short, it's a mess. I'd like to have an integrated solution, and it wouldn't hurt …

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I've been using modified del.icio.us bookmarklets to feed my del.icio.us account, and thought I should share those. More experienced users will find nothing new here, but it's just as likely that it will interest some people. del.icio.us already have a list of bookmarklets for various browsers, and I started from there. I have made two additions to the default bookmarklets: a faster way to enter an extended bookmark description, and the ability to add a predefined tag. This is my generic "add to del.icio.us" bookmarklet, "add bookmark": javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/new/martind? url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href) +'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title) +'&extended='+encodeURIComponent(getSelection()) Note the code after "extended=" -- this tells the …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. I'm having a series of conversations with Falko Schmid about current interfaces to structured information, and about using existing web services to build all-encompassing information structure and search facilities. Our conversation started with the realization of a problem: apparently nobody can build a single system that integrates all information. There have been many attempts to accomplish that (Google and Wikipedia being the most prominent and successful) -- but if the last years have shown us anything it's that there is no way to define a stable content structure that …

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I'm currently testing the Safari CookieFilter script and have stumbled upon strange launchd behavior that I can't explain nor find a way to fix. Essentially launchd seems to be fairly liberal in how it interprets LaunchAgent triggers, and regularly seems to choke under conditions that I can't reproduce. The current release version of the CookieFilter LaunchAgent is designed to trigger the script every time there are changes to your Cookies.plist storage. But after running the LaunchAgent for a couple of days I found that it seems to stop responding to changes of this file. With some testing I found that …

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Normally I don't even glance at site ads, but while browsing Roger Ebert's site I saw a Google ad that made me stop and read. And reload. As if our democratized content mediation process wasn't confusing enough we now have Google ads that spread awareness of fraudulent business practices behind services advertised on other Google ads, and Google ads that look like they spread awareness of fraudulent business practices behind services advertised on other Google ads but in reality lead to fraudulent products. How bizarre: advertisers devalue the messenger (the Google ads medium) in an attempt to relativize a (probably …

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Went to the cinema at Potsdamer Platz; due to some unfortunate timing the evening ended different than planned, but I had fun nevertheless. Some of these photos are illegal under German copyright law (UrhG), paragraphs 12-21, 23, 32, 52, 62 and 63, unless they are regarded as a quotation according to paragraph 51, or unless Flickr is to be regarded as "public space" according to paragraphs 58+59; and they violate articles 1, 3, and 4 of the European Directive 2001/29/EC ("on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society"), and article 5 of …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. In my earlier article, "Connecting Web Services: Inherently Insecure", I commented on the sad current state of security in connecting public web services like Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm and others with specialized client software. In this article I'd like to make suggestions as to how this current situation could be improved. So as a follow-up to my complaint above, this is a proposal of a simple method to provide more secure web service client authentication that should adress most of my ealier criticism. Let's start with a scenario that illustrates …

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I was looking for ways to automatically start my Safari CookieFilter script, because if I had to launch it manually every time I wanted to clean up Safari's cookies I would never really use it. On a Windows machine I would put the script into the Autostart folder so that it would be executed upon system startup, but I've found that I never really reboot my Mac, so that wouldn't work. Another option would be a script that invokes CookieFilter before it launches Safari, and to only start Safari via this script -- but this idea seemed to simple and …

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Since Tiger I've been pretty satisfied with Safari, and there are fewer reasons to install third party plugins than ever. Yeah I could use Firefox's keyword search, but after having one too many browser crashes due to a SIMBL plugin running amok I figured I could just as well live without it. The only thing that has really been missing was a working Cookie whitelist. There is Cookies Eater, another SIMBL plugin; but that hasn't been updated for the current Safari version yet. And even if it had been, I'm not so sure that SIMBL is the best way to …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. During the last couple of months I've been using more web-based services like del.icio.us, Flickr, last.fm and others, and while I like the growing availability of web site APIs I'm often wary when testing out the possibilities, e.g. when testing a new client software: They usually require that you hand out your full login data! Consider this: I like Flickr's ability to group photos into sets, but their current Flash-based Flickr Organizr, to be honest, sucks. It's bloated, and while it imitates native applications in its user interface, it …

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Asa follows up on his recent Linux not ready for the desktop commentary. He acknowledges that there are several lines of argument that disagree with his assessment, and he reacts by making this a bigger topic in his blog: he announces a four-part series about more specific questions of Linux on the desktop. I've been using various SuSE Linux distributions since the mid-/late-90ies, and I love it as a server, but I definitely agree that Linux is still anything but user-friendly. I've been trying some versions of the Ubuntu Live CD and was delighted by the approach; but there still …

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Scoble interviewed Steve Ballmer (transcript, announcement). Finally! While watching the short video I was struck by the realization that the Steve Ballner shown here is not that different from the one in the monkey dance video. Even worse: the video shows that Ballmer is a scary, scary man. He looks like a gnome, a ghoul, with the eyes of a predator. He doesn't seem genuine, real, or honest; and he is striking an upbeat pose that does not fit. Anyway, I watched the video and became very bored and very disappointed very quickly. Lots of marketing fluff and the empty …

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I've just started using TextMate. My initial assumption was that it is still early in the development process, so I planned to wait for a later release before I would decide if I should register a copy; but then I started using it for a couple of days and found several functions that blew me away. A tip of the day introduced the "^R" shortcut that executes the current line as shell script and inserts the output into your document; this is quite useful to me as I'm starting to use the shell and especially shell scripts for various text …

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Just saw a guy on a bike who was listening to Hip Hop playing on his cell phone. He was actually using it as a music player, not as a ringtone; and while he was riding along he subtly grooved to the music, occasionally glancing around if he was passing anyone he knew, or if anyone was watching. It seemed strange at first, but then I realized that I had seen this before, in a different context: There are more and more young people on the streets and in parks who use their cell phones as a way to play …

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Another wonderful podcast from Dave Winer, which starts off as a monologue about his recent Audible experiences, sidesteps into a little DRM history, and ultimately comes to the center of the problem with current media distribution: Customers are treated like thieves, there's too much distrust, and it seems as it's building up. His prediction is actually a lesson he learned as CEO of a software company in the 80ies: ultimately users will learn in how many ways DRM screws their side of the bargain, and that's when the model stops working. This is quite an emotional podcast for Dave, and …

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Via Dave Winer: Apple seems to be caching podcast feeds and MP3 files as part of their iTunes podcast integration. The Dailysonic blog gives several reasons why this is bad for the content producers, and could even cost them money. In a nutshell: Podcast producers need their subscriber numbers for the advertisers. And, worst of all from a listener perspective: The caching mechanism seems yet to be unreliable, which means that some podcasts never reach the listener. Hm, I see... I was wondering how Apple were keeping track of their subscriber count. Routing it over their servers makes sense for …

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Just stumbled over Alex Payne's blog and was so delighted about his witty prose that I decided on a whim to do something for his Google ranking. Even if you're not interested in web development, or in his commentary on Apple consumer products, you still might want to take a look at the site for the entertainment value alone. For example: The iPod Story, and his Google "world domination" commentary Not So Evil. …

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I'm in desperate need for a better backup strategy. By now it has become clear that our data storage media are utterly unstable; I've had lots and lots of misburned CDs, CDs that I can't read after years or even months, of after I change CD drives; I've had backups on DVDs that only can be read on specific computers, and at least four hard drive crashes (that I can remember) during the last 3-4 years. So I'm always interested in what other people have to tell about their experiences. Here's an interesting discussion on MetaFilter about Safely Storing Mp3 …

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I just read another rant about the many weaknesses of PHP, and of course I'm in complete agreement. Over the last years I've come to use PHP more often than I would have liked to, simply due to the fact that it's pretty much the only scripting language that is available virtually everywhere; and in contrast to Perl I don't have to look up function calls and the language reference as much, simply because it is closer to what I'm normally using (namely the C languages, and Java). But the reason I'm posting this is not my urge to awaken …

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miniplayer is a minimal interface plugin for musikCube. it has basic player controls, a search field, it can access your playlists, there is a simple behavior-controlled suggestion mechanism (which is just a fancy way of saying "SQL query"), and a couple of small things that make life easier. I probably like the search field the most. type in a word and hit enter: the search result is sent to "now playing", and miniplayer immediately starts playback. instant gratification. if no songs are found the search field keeps focus, so you can correct your query and try again. I still have …

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last.fm remote control is a client for the last.fm stream webservice, implemented purely in html+javascript. this means that you can control your last.fm radio stream with an html page, with some limitations. it has the big advantage that it's snappy. no sucky skinning problems, it loads in a breeze, doesn't crash or hang your pc. and you can bookmark radio stations! and: you don't have to give your last.fm-password to a stranger (i.e., me) in order to use this. all communication takes place between your computer and the last.fm-servers; I won't see your username, not even your session ID. this …

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"I Like This!" is a simple music recommendation plugin for the musikCube audio player. With this plugin musikCube users can recommend their favorite songs and net radio stations while they are playing in musikCube; all recommendations are then listed on this site. I's an easy way to share your musical taste with others, and to give others new ideas on what kind of music there is. It is also a proof-of-concept: an attempt to show how easy it is to develop a musikCube-plugin that uses xml-rpc to communicate with a remote computer. This opens up a whole space of new …

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Designed as a replacement for the Windows text editor Notepad, Florian Balmer's Notepad2 is a small, fast, simple and beautiful open source application. Along with an impressive set of basic text editing features it provides several useful tools and lots of neat little helpers that will improve virtually all text editing experiences, both for the programmer and the occasional user. Notepad2 has a nice interface with well-designed icons. It provides customizable syntax highlighting for many file types: all major programming languages (including perl and python), various file types relevant for web development, along with some rather exotic ones like XUL, …

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origrama .2 cdr compilation from 2004. ths.thesibution to thse-party at the geburttty recording, but great perfoe tracks are my contrrmance at the pastaginal, dirty, e membesclub in berre are some nice contrilin in october ere was a releagreat drums. the making of you are second place; shirty. thanks to <a href="http://www.podsdarapomuk.de/">daniel</a> for organizing all of thi2004. thebutions on that album, but of course my tracks are the best. get the mp3s at http://dekstop.de/mp3/d03_2ps/. …

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multipan is an autopan plugin for VST hosts. it uses three LFOs to create a quasi-chaotic panning movement. why I did this? I like to chain autopan plugins that are set to different frequencies in order to produce chaotic panning movements. and after doing this manually once too often I thought I could just as well make a plugin out of it. download at http://dekstop.de/multipan/ …

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I've just spent several hours looking for a free or open source hex editor, and it is surprising how many editors there are, and how few are worth checking out. I didn't think I would ask for much: a simple standard interface and the ability to open large files. I must have looked at more than 50 websites and installed nearly 20 applications, until I found HexEdit from Catch22 Productions. I have used the free version of ECS HexEdit for quite a while, but its nag screen and ancient interface started to bug me. xvi32 is a nice editor, and …

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isisnommen kractentWithCntValues(TRnt isConEE *tree, indes, int(*compoem("PAt(tree-t no>noee- curreurrentBdes[ rranch], rranch); /*** wiee->currentBrd daent(tree->nos hier thConsistdes[trtBranch], ee->curre escomsitionFt r, inunction)(int s), auss ****/ systpogeht esitionF uncteFuncion, inverstion)){ entBranch] =USE"); get the mp3s at http://dekstop.de/mp3/d02_qt/. …

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Alex Moffat has created a wonderful little tool to rapidly create UML sequence diagrams. The GPL licensed Java application, appropriately named "Sequence", creates diagrams from short sequence descriptions and allows you to export them to a PNG file. Sequence can't replace more sophisticated applications like TogetherJ or Visio, lacking e.g. support for asynchronous messages, but serves well as a small tool for quick sketches. You can literally design your first diagram seconds after downloading the Jar file. Example of a small sequence diagram: Loading a media file via the user interface. The MediaPlayer class notifies its caller of the properties …

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Thomas Meinecke - Tomboy.Pages 128/129 of 251. As far as I can remember I first heard of this novel while driving, listening to the radio. I was on my way to Stuttgart or Karlsruhe, and they broadcasted a review of Thomas Meinecke's Tomboy, along with a general insight into the term "tomboy" and other gender-related subject matter. I later read a positive review in a German magazine and went out to buy the book. It lay on my shelf for a while, and I remember taking it with me on a canoe trip north of Berlin, in the hope …

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Finally there is a trailer for Vincent Gallo's new movie "The Brown Bunny", and it looks interesting. A contrasting split-screen: on the left closeups of a party of twentysomethings in a bedroom, then a girl (Chloe Sevigny); possibly memories of the protagonist's past. On the right the camera drives on a deserted highway, towards dusk. Filmed in a typically vintage Gallo aesthetic, which in its reminiscent emotional appeal matches the music playing in the background. There is no voiceover or dialogue, only music. To quote an IMDB comment: "If you don't let yourself rock by the melancholic tone that …

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Don DeLillo - Underworld.Pages 222/223 of 827. Don DeLillo's Underworld is often described as the essential contemporary American novel, the Moby Dick of our time. A critic's evaluation is quoted on the back cover of the book: "Underworld is a rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department -- dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity ['truthfulness'] and the rest". I don't quite remember when I first heard of this book. After having planned to read it for a long time I finally gave in and bought an English copy. It then lay on my bookshelf, next to Pynchon's …

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Greg Apodaca, a photographer and digital artist, uses his online portfolio to demonstrate common image manipulations of photographs for magazine articles and advertisements. A fascinating and shocking insight into the hyperreal. Quote: "It doesn't seem natural to me to take out every curve, to airbrush out every blemish, but what the Art Director wants, the Art Director will get." Greg's Digital Retouching Portfolio Maxim Should Be Ashamed, photo manipulation gone wrong …

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Am Ende von American Splendor wird während der schönen Abschlussszene "My Favorite Things" gespielt, in der Version von John Coltrane. Die Melodie kam sehr bekannt vor, auch Bruchstücke des Textes fielen mir wieder ein. Woher denn? Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with strings These are a few of my favorite things Google sagt es ist ein Titel des Sound of Music-Soundtracks; hab den Film aber nie gesehen. Glaub es wurde in einem aktuellen Film oder einer amerikanischen Serie zitiert, keine Ahnung wo (Friends? Hm, nee. Vielleicht …

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"The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture." Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades More art from Jason Salavon …

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Moon hieen eurdy elles and schodies. Favosic betwpeaop hctronoecmoonic muampp and elve meltroeica. Mulered drti-layumsrite trst driack: 01 teve get the mp3s at http://dekstop.de/mp3/d01_sl/. …

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Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. …

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Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. …

Full entry