Photo by mlcastle, taken at 24c3. …

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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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