Too Far Afield

I just wanted to read an aritlce published in the German daily newspaper FAZ which had the promising title (rough translation) “Invasion of Bloggers”. The aritcle was linked over at Blogtimes. However it was availlable to subscribers only. If I had the opportunity to read some good articles I might have boght the newspaper or even considered subscribing to it, but they won’t let me in. Just a thought….

On the other hand, all newspapers need to set some restrictions on their internet portals and it is at least better to show your articles to subscribers of the newpaper only instead of not showing them at all.

Another long night draws to a close. We finally launched a new web application for the same large German trade union I mentioned yesterday. However this time the app is not for a regional department but for the people at the headquaters themselves. As the deadline was 6 a.m. we are just about 2 hours before schedule. Thats tough. I’m going to bed now. I’ve got an appointment at 9 a.m. …

• On Friday Israel’s ambassador to Sweden destroyed an art installation showing a smiling Palestinian suicide bomber. A report for German readers can be found over at Spiegel Online: Eklat in Stockholm [via Davids Medienkritik]
• More rumors about NASA missions tell us why anyone would gain something from altering colours of Mars pictures: NASA hides the true colours of Mars
  [via Jason Kottke]

Someone remembered me that I forgot to post some personal stuff. That was especially delicate to me, because I just posted about the personal style of weblogs earlier this day. Well, here you go!

Preparing some enhancements of a web application we developed for a regional department of a large German trade union in July 2003, I needed some GD support in PHP4. We have had that extension on our servers from time immemorial, but unfortunately PHP said it didn’t know the function I wanted to use. Checking the PHP info page resulted in an answer to my question: The GD extension was simply not installed. It appeared that someone forgot to install the extension on that server after we migrated all our machines from SuSE 8.1 to Debian sometime between September and November last year. However after successful 1-minute installation (thanks to the folks who developed apt-get) the function did still not work as expected (at least it worked some way now). Further research revealed, that someone forgot to set new directory rights on all customer directories migrated from the old server. Remarkable the application worked that long without any problems on this strange setup.

I can think of many people in blogworld that devoted their blog to a single technical topic and as a reader you were given just a little hint of their other interests from a few posts they threw in over time.

Asa Dotzler recently had to make the decision mars vs. mozilla as he faced his readers complaints about his ongoing blogging on mars mission press briefings. Let’s see, how did the official definition of a blog read? Well, of course there is no official definition, but in each one you may find a sentence like the following, adapted from Jill Walkers definiton for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.

Typically, weblogs are published by individuals and their style is personal and informal.

The emphasis is mine, but I think that’s what weblogs are about. They are personal. If they weren’t personal they wouldn’t have been weblogs. At least I have to admit: I am not so much interested in astronomy either, but Asa’s occasional posts on that topic were quite interesting. I did always see it as a look beyond the border of my plate, as we say in Germany. You learn something new on your way through your regular readings about Mozilla, webstandards, politics, whatever. Don’t mind if someone wants to talk you into his favorite topics. See it as a chance to get beyond some borders and explore new frontiers. If you really are not interested: Why do you read it? There is no one telling you that you need to get through it and can’t skip anything. But remember the last time, you talked someone into the topic you liked the most and he just demanded that you talk about something else throwing some very harsh sounding words at you. How did you feel?

• Chris Hester has created some nice effects with CSS. There are no images on this page: CSS Pencils [via Douglas Bowman]
• Mozilla people have updated their roadmap slightly to say they will sustain the application suite: Mozilla Development Roadmap
• MozillaZine went down for more than 24 hours: Why MozillaZine Went Down
• ALA published an article about the perfect 404. Although there is (too) much client side scripting in there, some good points are made: The Perfect 404
• Peter Paul Koch introduces a new webdesign layer for javascript over at Digital Web Magazine: Keep It Simple: The Behavior Layer
• Andy Budd provides us with some thoughts on The Importance of Processes in Web Design [via Digital Web]

Martin Schmitt blogs about recent increase of rumors in Germany which say that the landing of Americans on the moon did never happen.

People seem to be doubtful, because NASA used processors that would not have had enough power to operate a standard microwave oven.

Martin says: Although most people today operate computers that have more capacity than all computers of the year 1969, there happens nothing, that is nearly as innovative and suggestive like the landing on the moon was back then.

Die hatten ja früher gar nix!

That is quite true. Maybe we need to explore some new frontiers?

Heiko Hebig (the .com guy, not the .org one) and others are blogging about the upcoming elections in my hometown Hamburg. For our German readers – here’s the link: Wahl in Hamburg – Hamburger Wahlblog [via Heiko]

Lately it seems to get common to tell Linux people about other operating systems. There is BSD For Linux Users by Mathew D. Fuller and there is What is Mac OS X? by Amit Singh. However it may be worth a read. At least Linux people are willing to learn about new and innovative things, aren’t they?

As a side note I’d like to say that Amit gives some nice conclusion containing interesting views not only about the Mac OS X operating system but also on others. For example he writes the following unique piece titled Choice, Choice Everywhere

Linux provides an incredible amount of choices – for everything. You can choose your distribution (and/or flavor) from an insane number of them, although the mainstream ones are not that many (I’m lying: even they are too many, and they all differ, sometimes subtly, sometimes vastly). You can run Linux on an even more incredible array of platforms – some of which one would never imagine could run anything, let alone an operating system. You can put Linux on watches and PDAs, or make clusters using it cheaply and efficiently. There are all kinds of devices that run Linux. You can install Linux in seemingly infinite number of ways. You can even compile the entire system from source (Gentoo Linux) – optimized for your particular machine to extract the last ounce of speed. You can have more number of different filesystems on Linux than you had total files on some older operating systems. You can have a similar number of packet classifiers in the kernel, and far too many other entities to be mentioned here. You can have support for devices you never knew existed, for protocols nobody even uses, and of course, for those that everybody uses. You can have almost all the window managers ever invented for X11. You can program in a zillion programming languages on Linux. You can choose from among more than one desktop environments, based on your personal preferences, taste, working style, religion, or whatever else. You can have APIs from myriad systems and environments on Linux, either natively, or retrofitted/emulated. There’s even STREAMS for Linux. Countless organizations, people, software, … have benefited from Linux (including Mac OS X).

None of the above is exaggeration – I only used some minor figures of speech. Rather than go on and on haphazardly with this, I think that Linux essentially represents the union of a lot of, if not most, operating system (and related) technology ever created. I think it’s a marvel that such a thing could be created, has been created, and is available for free!

This is given to you without any comment.

Professor Paul Davies has interesting thoughts on Life (and Death) on Mars. As the article was published by The New York Times, registration is required. [via Jason Kottke]

In March 2001 Harvard University established a new e-learning portal called Harvard@Home, that

enables you to experience some of the exciting research, teaching, and public addresses making news across the University today—right from your desktop.

There are serveral videos of different length and on different topics for your enjoyment. Especially the latest series titled A new American Empire? is quite interesting. [via Die Zeit Blog]

Sean Penn returns to Iraq and files a personal, candid report from the front

Sean Penn is an actor and director from San Francisco Bay Area. He criticized the American President Mr. G.W. Bush with a self-financed letter in the Washington Post published October 18, 2002 and a self-financed ad in the New York Times published May 30, 2003.

In December 2002 he went to Iraq himself to learn about the American-Iraqi conflict from the people who were living through it. Just a week before Saddam Hussein was finally cought he did a second trip to Iraq to observe how the American invasion changed the life in Iraq. His thoughts about the trip can now be read at the website of the SF Chronicle.

Don’t forget to check out the 2nd part of his report. A link can be found just beneath the row of pictures at the very top of the article. [via Davids Medienkritik]

We’ll see what time brings …