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archive/August 2006  <

edited by Walter Rafelsberger

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monochroms TOYPS

A collection of aesthetically beautiful typing errors of the so-called >English< language. An unpretenitous listong.

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Views: 1538
Tanzania and Darwins Nightmare
Some things need time (like translating Milles Plateaux from French to German).


Let me tell you a story: A director named Hubert Sauper made a documentary called Darwin's Nightmare. If I remember correctly it took about five years to prepare and shoot the film. It premiered over two years ago. Later it got an Oscar nomination for best documentary. However, it seemed to me that it never had the impact it could have. The movie picks Victoria Lake's fish industry in Tanzania as an example of how different and wide-spread the influences of globalization can be.

Now, two years after its first screening, the movie seems to have a real world effect. Richard Mgamba, a local journalist interviewed in the film, was detained by police and threatened with deportation.. Sauper stated that Tanzania declared people who worked with Sauper on the movie as enemies of the state. And it seems Tanzanian authorities launched their propaganda machinery: It seems they inscentated demonstrations and did some press releases.

The good thing is, that it seems that there's some attention to the problem. The bad thing of course is, that there may be individuals in danger and that the discussion may not be about the core problem but only scratch the surface. The problem is not if the film affected Tanzania's fishing industry, it's about how a regime threats free speach and manipulates the public. Nobody of the demonstrators could have seen the film, it has never been screened in Tanzania. This could be a similarity to the demonstrations in Syria concerning the denish caricatures.

As a side note: Austrian based director Sauper critized Austria's most popular newspaper Kronen Zeitung about how they feature the problem and calls it racistic agitation. I haven't read the article yet.

Globefish, a division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, said the film had only briefly affected sales. Far bigger factors in the decline in exports -- worth $116 million last year, down from $127 million in 2004 -- were overfishing and low water levels.

Meanwhile Reporters Without Borders has criticised the Tanzanian government for threatening to deport a journalist who appeared in a documentary film the authorities say has damaged the country's economy and image.

Another question I have is: Who publishes daily-tsn.com?

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Views: 789
Stockholm Syndrom
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Piraten Partei Österreichs

Propaganda: Letzte Chance: Wir brauchen eure Hilfe!. Bis 25. August brauchen wir 2600 Unterschriften um an den Nationalratswahlen teilnehmen zu können. Wie's geht (inkl. benötigtem Formular) steht hier.

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Views: 2306
Smoking Toons

Via awn.com's newsletter

Under pressure from regulators and the U.K. anti-smoking lobby, Turner Broadcasting will edit out scenes of cartoon characters smoking in U.K. versions of classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including THE FLINTSTONES, TOM AND JERRY and SCOOBY-DOO, according to various news outlets.

In all, more than 1,700 episodes will be re-edited after the Office of Communications (Ofcom) received a complaint about two TOM AND JERRY toons -- Texas Tom" and "Tennis Chumps" -- which aired on Turner-owned Boomerang.

In a statement, the company said, "Turner recognizes that it is not suitable for cartoons aimed at children to portray smoking in a cool context and has additionally pledged to review the entire Hanna-Barbera catalog to remove scenes that appear to glamorize or encourage smoking."

Ofcom ruled that the two episodes of TOM AND JERRY were inappropriate for a children's show. Currently, Ofcom is viewing 160 other TOM AND JERRY episodes for additional offensive material.

Ofcom's rules do not allow smoking in children's programs unless there is strong editorial justification and it must not be condoned, encouraged or glamorized before 9:00 pm.

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Pflege Notstand

Klasnic sagt: Illegale Pfleger sollen bald legalisiert werden.

Bitte Frau Klasnic, das müssen'S mir jetzt erklären.

Soll diese Legalisierung etwa bedeuten, dass dieselben Leute (Ausländer, da haben wir's, und der Peterl hat noch gemeint, es werden weniger!) unter denselben Bedingungen (keine soziale Absicherung) für das gleiche Geld (2 Euro pro Stunde und das 24h/7Tage die Woche) einfach weiterarbeiten dürfen/sollen?

Was ein Erfolgsrezept.

Gratis Bonus obendrauf:
Durch die Legalisierung sinkt die Ausländerkriminalität. Stellen Sie sich vor: 40.000 kriminelle Ausländer weniger. Als nächstes schlage ich vor, Cannabis zu legalisieren und die offenbar unzähligen Drogendealer, die Herr Hojac kürzlich mit pulsTV am Brunnenmarkt besucht hat, in die gleiche Scheinselbstständigkeit zu drängen. Und die kriminellen Asylanten werden zu ganz legalen Sklaven. Hauptsache leistbar.

Anders kann ich mir dieses "Modell" nicht erklären, denn ob es auch mehr Pflegegeld geben könnte, darüber hielt sich Klasnic bedeckt.

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Wiki based CMS and Application Design

Some time ago I posted some conceptual thoughts on effectively managing hierarchical data. I am working on a showcase with the results from my efforts: An extended Wiki system which should bring you the best from all worlds (hopefully). All meaning the simplicity of Wikis, the publishing power of CMSs, the dynamics of business and application logic and finally the hype of AJAX.

What I'm working on is basically kind of a wrapper for PhpWiki. I did a lot of research on various frameworks for rapid application development, and unfortunately, none of them did really satisfy me. There are very good ones of course, but I always had the feeling I had to start from scratch to achieve what I had in mind. Then I came back to PhpWiki which might appear like a rather strange choice as a framework. However, in my opinion, Phpwiki in its core has a very useful codebase and supports a lot of plattforms.

So stay tuned, an early Web-2.0-like closed alpha testing site is not far away from release.

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Views: 1571
What is Attention Data

Jim Meyer describes attention data like if his mom was asking (This is a good thing, I'm not ironic...this time).

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Views: 1136
Smarty vs. XML XSLT

A comparison of Smarty and XML/XSLT. The article doesn't go too much into detail, but it's a start.

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Punks not dead

Schauplatz Josefstädterstraße:
Malzbiertrinkende Fun-Punks hören mit schicken MP3-Playern vermutlich Indymedia-Podcasts. Auch die US-Geheimdienste haben inzwischen bemerkt, dass es mit Schwierigkeiten verbunden ist, Terroristen nur vom Dress-Code ausgehend auszumachen. Und Neonazis gehen scheinheilig im Che-Guevara-T-Shirt spazieren. Alles nicht mehr so einfach.

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OE24.at

Natürlich: Ich auch ein Opfer der Fernsehwerbung, renne zum Rechner und tippe: http://www.oe24.at/. Erster Gedanke: Na bravo, die lassen den Mac wieder links liegen, nix funktioniert. Erst nach einer Weile verzweifelten Klickens stelle ich fest: Der Fellner tut ja nur so, als wär' das eine fertige Homepage. Bin zwar kein Experte, doch zumindest ein Usability-Guru, und scheiterte trotzdem kläglich. Wie viele Hofer-PCs werden in der kommenden Woche zum Saturn getragen, weil der Browser offensichtlich kaputt ist?

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Views: 1089
PHP Design Patterns

Sounds interesting...but I'll wait for reviews. The last book I bought on programming because of a feeling was bullshit.

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Pflege Notstand

Die Tiroler verstehen unter Notstand ja auch gern was ganz anderes. Der ORF hat übrigens eine Stellungnahme des GHM bzgl. dem "Notstand" um Pool-Dienste in Pensionistenheimen...

"Im Büro von Gesundheitsministerin Maria Rauch-Kallat (ÖVP) zeigte man sich vorsichtig gesprächsbereit: Man könne über die Bestimmungen noch nachdenken. Allerdings müsse man dann wohl auch über komplizierte arbeits- und sozialrechtliche Aspekte reden, hieß es."

Dieser letzte Satz lässt mich fassungslos paralysiert verharren. Derweil meinte der Kanzler doch gerade noch Kottan zitierend: "Pflegenotstand gibt's kan!" Offenbar wirklich nicht. Scheinbar doch, wie die momentane Situation eines meiner Kollegen zeigt.

Plugin RawHtml disabled. Raw HTML is only allowed in locked pages.
<?plugin RawHtml
Gerne werde ich soziologisch und medientheoretisch ausschweifend weiterberichten, sofern es meine Zeit erlaubt. Inzwischen lege ich den lesetechnischen Konsum vom <a href="http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/3825283151&tag=shaminocommet-21&camp=1638&creative=6742">Das Elend der Welt</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=shaminocommet-21&l=as2&o=3&a=3825283151" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> ans Herz. Im Kapitel um die Krise der Justiz geht es um ganz ähnliche Zusammenhänge wie den von NEWS ausgerufenen Notstand.
?>


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Rapa Nui

3quarksdaily reports Kevin Costner and Reynolds were wrong.

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WTC

Brain wash accomplished. OliverStone in 2001

I think the revolt of September 11 was about "Fuck you! Fuck your order." Does anybody make a connection between the 2000 election and the events of September 11?

2006 he is assimilated with popcorn cinema's entertainment junkie generation.

Stone insists that he has no political opinions of the event.

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Staatsverschuldung
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WWDC und Microsoft

Im Sinne der Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie war die WWDC für Microsoft ein voller Erfolg.

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Views: 1654
OpenLayers

From openlayers.org

OpenLayers is a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies. OpenLayers implements a (still-developing) JavaScript API for building rich web-based geographic applications, similar to the Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth APIs, with one important difference -- OpenLayers is Free Software, developed for and by the Open Source software community.

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Views: 1511
hAtom and Technorati

In my neverending search for the perfect markup for Technorati to parse, I adjusted this blog to comply with Microformat's hAtom. I've no idea if it works...

Update: Didn't work.

Update: Finally Technorati admit's that there are problems with their parser: How to get your blog indexed by Technorati. I'm still testing and we'll see if it works better now.

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Views: 1352
Venture Capital

Did some research on VC, here are some links:


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Views: 1897
IPIX and 360° Panoramas

Heise online reports that bancrupt company IPIX will sell their patent holding the creation of 360° panoramas. Part of the patent protects undistorting images made with fish-eye lenses. As one commenter remarks this could be an opportunity for the open source community to buy out the patent and make it free. So how do we start? Fight them with their own weapons!


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Hamachi and Subversion

I was looking for quite some time now for a solution to use a Subversion server for version control of the projects I'm working on.

sourceforge.net (CVS only), berlios.de and the all new Google Code are of course great for open source code, but there are often times when your code's not ready for public prime time or if you work on projects for clients and won't publish the code.

Since I own no dedicated web server and have access only to servers which could use Subversion but would not allow usage in a commercial context I had to look for another solution. I tried openSVN for some time now and it works fine, however, I felt I wanted my own baby and have total control.

Unfortunately I was never able to use one of my own computers as a server since they're all behind a shared connection where I have no access to the firewall settings.

But I had the luck to find a solution this week: I stumpled upon Hamachi which is some kind of a LANoverWAN solution. It seems popular among gamers because it allows you to play games like in a LAN environment and let's you omit services like battle.net. It simulates an additional network adapter and let's you create your own private network. That way I use now my acient iBook 500 to host my Subversion repository via Apache and can access it from everywhere. I can even mount the iBook's shared drives like in a local network.


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Views: 1162
Flickr RSS and Bloglines

Don't know if you're aware of this, but I came upon something nice when combining Flickr and Bloglines: Login to your Flickr account and go to your "Recent Activity" page. You'll see that there you can subscribe to a special RSS-Feed. If you take this feed and add it to your Bloglines subscriptions, you'll be always up do date about activity on your Flickr images.

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Views: 972
Zensur

DerStandard informiert.

Wir bitten unsere LeserInnen zu beachten, dass wesentliche Informationen über die aktuellen militärischen Aktionen einer Zensur unterliegen. Eine unabhängige Überprüfung solcher Angaben ist der Redaktion und den Agenturen in vielen Fällen nicht möglich..

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Pictures From War

In the ongoing debate about fake press images Austrian Broadcasting Corporation writes that in the current conflict in Lebanon the iconography (of press photos) is similar to the ones of war press coverage in the past. I couldn't disagree more.

In my opinion aestethics of those pictures changed significantly over time. In Gulf War 1 we had a distant, steril view. We saw some black/green infrared style HUD display pictures of bombs hitting their targets precisely.

1990

warpics-1990.jpg&w=500&q=90

Afghanistan and Gulf War 2 brought us the embedded reporter. The images gave you the feeling to be right there (with our boys) in the Big Brother container named Iraque.

2002

warpics-2002.jpg&w=500&q=90

Now in July 2006 it's different again. The snapshot look is gone. The pictures from Lebanon look so professional, as if every photographer there is striving for a press picture of the year 2006 award.

2006

warpics-2006.jpg&w=500&q=90

For now we should not think about some obviously bad faked and manipulated pictures, we should think about how those so called authentic photos are manipulating us.

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Views: 971
Torrent Raiders

Via eyebeam.org: Torrent-Raiders by Aaron Meyers & Corey Jackson.

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Views: 968
Sneakers Theory going Mainstream

Via 3quarksdaily: Umberto Eco on why we should beware mad scientists.

The article states that there are two hollow earth theories. Well, there is actually another one. It was in the 90ies of the 20th century when a tyrolien scientist and philosopher told me of the Sneakers-Theory (Turnschuhtheorie). He stated that the reason why sneakers are bent upwards at the front is because earth is against common knowledge not a flattened ellipsoid but more an inward curved cavity. Through this reversed curvature sneakers get bent upwards.

The Guardian mentions also that there are rumors that Nazi V1 missiles missed their targets, because their routes where calculated on the basis of a hypothetical concave surface instead of a convex one. Obviously that couldn't be more wrong. If Hitler's scientists had believed in the Sneakers-Theory, the rockets would have hit the right spot.

Update: See the related article The Gravity Train on Brownian Emotion.


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Views: 2129
Time Factor

p2pfoundation has an interesting post about the importance of time as a dimension in social networking technology. My concept of Rhizome Navigation includes some of these thoughts. Simply spoken Rhizome Navigation transforms measurements of (unix) time(stamps) and visualizes them as a graph. That means it substitutes the room dimension with the time dimension. That's possible and even useful, because there is no relation to physical space in virtual rooms. That means the representation of space in virtual reality is an empty variable which we can use and fill with some kind of metaphor. A useful metaphor. However, some simply don't get it.

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Views: 1134
Talladega Nights

I question if that's a compliment: It's better than Days of Thunder - Tom Sorenson is the man who knows.


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Views: 988
Tideland

tideland.gif&w=500&q=90

I thought this was already out and I missed it, but it seems TerryGilliam needed a bit longer to bring Alice back. To shorten your wait see Neco z Alenky.


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Views: 1604
PhpWiki and Semantics

As I'm using PhpWiki for several years now and think it has a very promising codebase under its hood, I also understand that it's not widely popular for several reasons. First the standard skin doesn't look that fancy like, say WordPress. For me that was always the least important thing, because I've always created my own templates. But I'm sure it's clever marketing. Second, WordPress is optimized as an out-of-the-box blog with Semantics and SEO in mind. I know PhpWiki has all of this too (see Tao of Mac), but it's implementation is more rudimentary. In my opinion most PhpWikiPlugins have just a certain showcase character and you'll have to adjust them very much to your needs - but hey, please prove me wrong!

But on the other hand that's PhpWiki's big plus: Flexibility. I think PhpWiki comes with a terrific core and let's you extend it. It goes that far, that I would say PhpWiki is not just only a Wiki but has the potential being a basis for some kind of RapidWikiApplicationDevelopmentFramework.


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Views: 618
Alexa.com

''We are currently gathering approximately 1.6 Terabytes (1600 gigabytes) of Web content per day''. That reminds me of austrian radio station Ö3 when they migrated to a digital studio environment several years ago and stated proudly that they had 72Gbyte of capacity to store their music (not per day of course).


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Views: 1524
RSS

Long did we suffer, but for now it arrived: The official Metaportal der Medienpolemik RSS Feed. New Futter for your preferred feed reader.


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Views: 1310
RotePiraten

Da macht Wählen wieder Spass: Nach ca. 1 Monat (wir berichteten) haben die Piraten auf dem Schiff der KPÖ gemeutert: PPÖ is born.
http://ppoe.or.at/unterstuetzungserklaerung
Ins Parteiprogramm könnten Sie gleich aufnehmen, dass in Zukunft eine Email als Unterstützungserklärung reicht und nicht ein extriger Amtsgang notwendig ist....

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Views: 2475
PhotoSynth
Microsoft's PhotoSynth press kit is on and impresses.

I have some comments concerning the "2 weeks to process" mentioned on drinsama.de . I think the author misunderstood something. I don't think PhotoSynth is meant to be a stand-alone application like RealViz Stitcher or other stitching software. Think more of it like a 3D-Flickr, a web based service where you upload your photos. The whole work calculating the picture's position is done automatically on the server(s) (like in a certain Oregon Data Center). As always, there's a high possibility that M$ screws it.

It seems PhotoSynth uses different techniques which you could summarize as Optical Flow. For a long time now RealViz' for example used this technology in specialized software packages mainly aimed at the Visual FX market. Recently those technologies emerged in postproduction workhorses like Apple's Shake.

You can find more info on optical flow at fxguide's article Art of Optical Flow.

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Views: 1217
SemifiktiveHalbwahrheiten

Semifiktive Halbwahrheiten - Reality Generator.

Paradoxerweise wird das Fernsehen im Grunde vom Wort dominiert. Das Photo ist nichts ohne seine Legende, die sagt, was man zu lesen hat - legendum - das heißt aber oft genug: Legenden, die Unsinn schwafeln.
Das Fernsehen, das die Wirklichkeit wiederzugeben behauptet, wurde ein Instrument zur Schaffung von Wirklichkeit; aus dem Be-schreiben der sozialen Welt durch das Fernsehen wird ein Vor-schreiben. Das Fernsehen entscheidet zunehmend darüber, wer und was sozial und politisch existiert.

Über das Fernsehen, Pierre Bourdieu, 1998 (en/de/fr)
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Views: 1109
Quintura

Deleuze hätte eine Freude mit diesen Russen:

http://search.quintura.ru/

Update: Wie berichtet zuerst nur für Russen, jetzt auch für Engländer...und bald auch für Frauen (siehe rechts unten). Interessant.




Owner: Walter Last edited on September 3, 2006 11:57 by Walter / Views: 5232


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