Notes from my terminal

Censorware, next generation

Ian Bicking paints a dark and disturbing picture of the freedom-loving net-activist's ultimate nightmare: Censorware using Bayesian filters.

"Blacklists and keyword blocking don't work well, especially if people are actively working to foil you with proxies and red herrings. Which are all issues that spam filters have had to deal with. As the spam filters become better at this, it's only a matter of time before the political filters catch on too."

[via netzzensur weblog]

Chaosradio

Chaosradio, the CCC's monthly radio show on Radio Fritz was on tonight, hosted by some of the finest bloggers in the German blogosphere: Tim Pritlove, Jörg Kantel and Max v. Malotki. Subject was "the blogosphere" itself. I got my few seconds of fame and a chance to drop some names at the very end of the show when I finally made it through Fritz's listener-call-in prevention mechanism :). The whole show in various audio formats should be available in the next few days via ftp.

위키위키

I feel kind of stupid for not discovering it earlier: No Smoke is a gigantic Wiki community for Korean speakers. Fun, intelligent and interesting to read. Their manifesto (English text follows the Korean original) nicely sums up their attitude. As I wrote in a previous rant on my problems with the Wiki Way, classical WikiWords are not an option in Korean (the script doesn't know the difference between capital and small letters, unlike the Latin alphabet). That doesn't seem to stop the Wiki -enthusiastic bunch there, however.

Feeling semantic

SchemaWeb is a repository for RDF schemas expressed in the RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL schema languages.

Even more Lisp

Rebel with a Cause makes a fascinating reading. It's a case study about building a web application using Common LISP for coding (OpenMCL, to be precise), Portable AllegroServe as a web server and an Apple XServe as the server platform.

Translating between programming languages

Or, to be precise, between one of the most powerful and best established LISP dialect (Common Lisp) and one of the most elegant and fun to code in (Dylan). Lambda the Ultimate has the writeup. Although I also believe that automatically translated code almost always needs manual tweaking, this is great news for the Gwydion Dylan community and other Dylan coders: They can all do the Lambda Dance as software and libraries written for Common Lisp become available for Dylan immediately.

Omnia tuas castras inesse nobis

In tela per orbe universo, lingua latina morta vere non est. Aut paginae domesticae, aut vocabulae (vide vocabulam computatraliam) existare perserverant. Mihi maxime placet. Ecce "De clunibus magnis amandis oratio" (Baby Got Back). In lingua latina translatus "rap song" (cantus rhythmicorus) est.

Benchmarks for XML tools

Benchmarks about software may lure you into the trap of reducing a complex problem to mere speed numbers, but they are a good starting point when evaluating your tools. XMLbench has appealing charts about the performance of XML and XSL libraries and similar software solutions. libxml and libxslt, which are also the tools I prefer, come out quite well. Don Park's blog (where I got the link initially) has some insightful comments on the numbers and Tim Pritlove also wrote something on libxslt the other day.

Cafe Blog, Teheran City

With more than 10,000 Persian weblogs, blogging is extremely popular in Iran, as we can learn from this article in Hossein Derakhshan's blog. Being no expert on the country and its culture, I can only speculate about possible reasons for this phenomenon. Could it be the strong oral tradition of Persian literature, with all its epics, myths and storytelling and the love for beautiful poetry (after all it was the poetry of Persia's Hafiz that made such a strong impression on Goethe that he went on to re-create the mystic's verses in German in his "West-Östlicher Diwan")? Or is it -- as Derakhshan suggests -- that the female population in Iran embraces blogging as a means of self-expression and discussion (often published anonymously, but available world-wide)?

Anyway, Iran slowly becomes something like a trendsetter in the blogosphere. Where else in the world would you find a venue like Teheran's Cafe Blog, catering bloggers with (non-alcoholic) Irish Coffee? Again, the story in English is at Derakhshan's blog. Fascinating.

What online photos really mean

An easy guide to the interpretation of (teenage) online photos. They say it's for friendster.com, but the rules work for any kind of online presentation where young and desperate people flock.

Laika, dog in space

46 years ago, on November 3, 1957, the USSR stunned the West by launching space hero Laika, a dog whose Russian name translates as "barker", into space. Her mission in the Sputnik capsule, launched to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian October Revolution, eventually meant her death, as Sputnik burnt in the atmosphere on its way back. However, her story isn't forgotten. The Soviets continued to send dogs into space, while the Americans preferred monkeys and apes, as this neat site on animal astronauts documents.

Vienna

Angelo, math and Apple geek, half-Austrian, and Netzladen inhabitant, put this enjoyable guide to Vienna online. Alas, it's all in German, but don't let that stop you.

Congress 2003 planning seems to start

It's only November, but over at the CCC wiki , people are already busy organising this year's CCCongress. Nice.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

On my first visit to Korea, I was amazed by the fact that people would decide all kinds of things like who was to pay the next round of drinks by proclaiming that the problem could best be solved through "gawi bawi bo" (가위 바위 보, "scissors rock paper") and starting a game played with their hands that I knew from my childhood as "Schnick-Schnack-Schnuck" or "Knobeln". The rules are simple: Both players must flash their hands at the same time, forming either a rock (fist), a paper (a stretched out flat palm) or scissors (a fist with index and middle finger extended, like the two blades of a pair of scissors). Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, paper beats rock. Until then I thought of this game as being unique to Germany. I could not have been much farer from the truth, as the game of rock, paper, scissors seems to be one of the most universially played on this planet.

Known as "RoShamBo" (with various different spellings) in English-speaking countries, the game is most likely of Asian origin, probabely from the Japanese "JanKenPon", but as Phil Price tells us on his page where he researched the origins of the game "judging by a scene in one of the tombs at Beni Hassan in Middle Egypt, it appears that finger-flashing games have been known in Egypt since about 2000 B.C."

Geeks may have their own reason to be fascinated by the game, as the page on the International RoShamBo Programming Competition reveals a lot of interesting information on programming your own RoShamBo programme. And if you have to go for a human-against-human competition, be sure to read this page on advanced strategies for rock, paper, scissors.

Deprecated HTML Halloween costume

While people in the Cologne area (or the whole "Rheinland" for that matter) dress up in costumes for carnival, Americans do it for Halloween. And I must admit that I find the idea over at "little. yellow. different." cool enough to consider it as an option for next carnival. Gives a whole new meaning to the word "tag team".

Breaking the Blog silence

So, okay, I'm back to do some blogging. Like all apologies for blog silence, this one is rather lame and uninteresting: There was just too much real life stuff to do to let me get distracted.