December 31, 2003
Finishing 2003...
Happy New Year!
Guten Rutsch! 새해 복 많이 받으세요! If you need an idea on what to do for New Year's Day, why not try a Korean New Year tradition and play the somewhat strange, but fun game of
Yut Nori? We'll do that in our little family, anyway. All the best for the next year to everyone reading this.
December 30, 2003
Pretty RSS
Here's a nice idea: A posting on
how to integrate CSS into your RSS feeds, as seen
at Joi Ito's blog. Looks very appealing and nice (at least in NetNewsWire). I wonder if you could go even further and link the RSS with an XSLT stylesheet for infinite possibilities in transformation?
December 29, 2003
del.icio.us
You probably read it everywhere else already, but
del.icio.us is a noteworthy web service. They
describe themselves as a "
social bookmarks manager", but it's really just a handy way to dump your bookmarks and let everyone (including, but not limited to, your friends) search them.
XSLT and Ruby: Quicklinks
Keeping in touch with 20C3
Couldn't make it to the
Chaos Computer Club's annual congress this year. However, there are some ways to keep in touch with your buddies partying over there: There's a
QuickTime live stream playing the
Blinkenlights Reloaded installation at night and in the evening, you can listen to the
MP3 stream of the congress radio. Another very cute feature is the internal phone network, reachable by dialing +49-30-7262244 and an extension from the the
PhoneBook.
December 19, 2003
Think different.
From an Associated Press report:
"Hussein told capturing forces that his only regret was that due to the timing of his apprehension, he would never have the opportunity to play Halo on his 17" Powerbook. Soldiers were able to capture Hussein by following a power cord running to Hussein's laptop from a neighboring structure. Hussein told U.S. forces, 'Although I was stuck in a whole, couldn't bathe, and have pooped on myself on numerous occasions while down here, the Powerbook's backlit keys made computing easy.'"
[via
hebig.org]
December 18, 2003
Atom in depth
Sam Ruby has put his
presentation slides on Atom for his talk at the XML conference online. Makes a fantastic reading if you still wonder what all this
Atom hype is about (
"Can't we just use RSS 1.0 to do everything?" "Wouldn't RSS 2.0 be simpler?"). The answer is: Both specs leave a lot to be desired and Atom tries to solves these problems, especially by focussing on clarity and rich content in feeds, while also providing the user with a whole new API for posting and editing.
December 11, 2003
Perthon -- Python to Perl Language Translation
The purpose of this project is to automatically translate Python into human-readable Perl using Perl. It is currently
making use of Damian Conway's Parse::RecDescent
for the parsing/lexing.
Apart from Perthon being a great project just for hack-value, I find two things surprising:
- Call me a geek, but in their side-by-side comparison, I actually find the (machine-generated!) Perl code both more readable and consistent.
- Don't you think it's telling that they do the parsing and lexing in Perl, even though Python evangelists keep recommending Python as the generally better option for all the purposes we used to use Perl for?
December 10, 2003
Getting stuff out of your Macintosh
I discovered two nice tools to bring Apple applications' data on the web:
Both tools are actually rather small and lightweight Perl scripts. You have to be grateful to Apple for their decision to let Mac OS X store
configurations and property lists in XML almost exclusively.
December 09, 2003
nmap ruby
Mario did it. He made
everybody's favourite network scanner nmap work in a distributed environment, say,
a hacker congress. The magic is done by one of the best things since sliced bread,
distributed Ruby.
Read Mario's blog for his client/server solution.
Notes from my bookmark folder
Just a random quick link list on CSS and XSLT tricks and resources I find helpful:
Non-profit auctions
Another "fun auction" on eBay got me thinking. This time you can
bid on LimeLoop, an Austrian geek who desperately wants to go to the
Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin (December 27-29).
I really wonder why this model isn't more wide-spread for non-profit, activist-style fund-raising or charity. eBay, while generally cool, just isn't the right tool to just cut it. A platform for auctions to finance things like grassroot projects would be neat to say the least. Such a platform should ideally distribute the necessary costs between a group of people (who typically won't have much money to spend as well) and keep track on how far the set goal of a given amount is still away. You could probably do this best using a mode called "American auction" (at least I know it under this name): it's not the highest bidder who has to pay it all, but rather everyone who bids on the "item" (project/concept/individual) has to put their money in the pot imediately. Thus money is already being collected while the bidding is still going on. Using this technique (quite common on charity events) you could reach the desired price pretty quickly. So, where's the grassroot version of eBay? Any takers?
December 06, 2003
There's more to bluetooth than spamming
Over at the pretty nifty
mobilewhack.com site,
Rael Dornfest dreams up an interesting idea for finding friends in the urban jungle using bluetooth as your compass:
voulezvous.
December 02, 2003
No wax, just iPods
MP3Jing looks like a fun little hype currently emerging. According to
this article, clubs in
London and New York already started to host "iPod Nights" where everyone can plug in
their beloved harddisc mp3 player in order to entertain the masses:
"It's practically insane when you think about it," says Zak Carr, a recent iPod owner. "At any given night, there could be a half a million songs in one room."
December 01, 2003
Get your torrent files via DNS
Interesting concept for DNS abuse: Instead of hosting
BitTorrent files on a central host,
md5hash.info offers a public service using the caching feature of the DNS infrastructure to distribute your files world-wide. Weird and potentially dangerous, but very creative. Still seems to be experimental with a whopping number of 0 torrents hosted :) (last time I checked, anyway)