Search Results: "phil"

Dirk Eddelbuettel: BHL, as reviewed by the NY Times

Having lived in France for a few years in the early nineties, it was hard not to notice BHL. Also called Bernhard-Henry L vy. In France, if you are somebody, you get called by your initials. BHL, the philosopher turned into a media-savvy writer and journalist was just about everywhere. Even I ended buying one of his tomes. [For those unaware of the cult of BHL, compare the very lengthy and admiring French Wikipedia article with the disclaimer-sporting short and sceptical English counterpart, or even, for completeness, the barely existing German one.] Well, fast-forward a dozen years and who marches onto Jon Stewart's stage at the Daily Show this Wednesday: Bingo, BHL himself. In the usual uniform: suit, spotless white shirt, perfect hair, though less of it than in the days. In rather passable English he gets to plug his new book on travelling the States. Of course, it's tough to be French and to write about the US as de Tocqueville is the inevitable comparison... So tough that the comparison has to turn into a take-down somewhere. Today's NY Times has a review of said book that is so highly entertaining that I cannot help but recommend it most highly, even if you never heard of BHL before. If the Times is this vitriolic, I can't even begin to imagine what a review in the WSJ would do to the poor man...

Andreas Rottmann: Drugs and the law

I agree with madduck when he writes that the way the law deals with drugs is very much black-and white and should be diversified. Quoting him:

… In particular, the law should differentiate between * drugs that are dangerous to the taker, or can cause long-term damages, such as physical or mental addictions. This class would be primarily made up of the so-called hard drugs: opiates, entactogens, inhalants, steroids, sedatives, and stimulants.
* drugs that cause hightened awareness and give the taker the ability to approach life, society, or any sort of philosophical question from different angles. In places, these are referred to as intellectual drugs: hallucinogens and (some) herbals.

I think the above text fragment perpetuates a common mis-use of the word “drug” meaning “illegal drug”. Certainly Alcohol and tobacco fall under the first category, as both not only “can cause” long-term damages, but certainly will do so if used in “appropriate” dose and frequency. Both are legally and socially tolerated drugs, however, at least here in Austria. The “danger” of any drug will vary with dose and frequency of (ab-)use, see also Wikipedia. Personally, what bugs me more than the laws, is the way this issue is handled by the mass media. Often enough, one hears about “drug deaths” or somone being busted with this-and-that amount of “drugs”, not even mentioning what kind of drugs were involved, which makes people with a basic knowledge of the topic think “bah, what crappy journalism” and probably deepens the black-and-white world-view of the others. When the broad public is constantly exposed to such an undifferentiated view, this will certainly shape public opinion, making more liberal (or rather libertarian) legislation on that topic unlikely.

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "Look In The Stars And Search For The Answer" 2.13.3

Sound Juicer "Look In The Stars And Search For The Answer" 2.13.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Only one change here:

Port to GStreamer 0.10

Thanks to Tim-Philipp Mueller and James Livingston for helping me here. This needs lots of testing, there are bound to be many regressions that need hunting and fixing. Everyone grab it now!

Edd Dumbill: Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart: Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose: Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us: Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application

Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application

The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

Edd Dumbill: Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart: Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose: Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us: Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application

The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

Edd Dumbill: Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart: Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose: Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us: Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application

The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

Philipp Kern: Social intercourse

I wonder if the line is finally crossed. From NMs we expect good interaction and reasonabl social skills. If they do not have those qualities, their ability to change themselves is checked, through a delay after which the application is re-evaluated. If one finally gets accepted as a developer, there are no guidelines in interactions to be followed. Due to lazyness anybody could then harm the project or just the work of others by behaving in a bad way. That’s just sad. It seems that the title is a pun to the topic. I originally did not intent it, but my favourite translator confirms it.

Christian Perrier: Perfect Major meme

Well, shame on me, this is again a meme I participated in, probably because Axel mentioned that this quizz gives more interesting results. It appears that I should be a Chemistry major, which I actually am (my career in computing began after a PhD in Materials Science and a the french equivalent of a Master in Chemistry).. I should also by graduated in Linguistics, what a surprise...:-) Also scored 75% for Theater which kind of a surprise as I'm sometimes a bit shy in public. Art and Dance scores are very low which is not a surprise at all as well. Quite an accurate quizz indeed.

You scored as Chemistry. You should be a Chemistry major! As if that isnt clear enough, you are deeply passionate about Chemistry, and every single chemical reaction and concept fascinates you. Pursue that!

Chemistry

83%

Linguistics

75%

Theater

75%

Engineering

58%

English

58%

Sociology

58%

Biology

50%

Journalism

50%

Psychology

42%

Philosophy

42%

Mathematics

42%

Anthropology

42%

Art

33%

Dance

17%

What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3)
created with QuizFarm.com

Joachim Breitner: On the right way - Meme Time

I usually try not to blog every meme I take (heay, that’s a line from “I’ll be blogging it”), but Alex’ positive view on this one made me interested. And indeed, this quiz seems to be relatively well done. So here it is:

You scored as Mathematics. You should be a Math major! Like Pythagoras, you are analytical, rational, and when are always ready to tackle the problem head-on!

Mathematics

92%

Theater

92%

Philosophy

92%

Engineering

67%

Psychology

58%

Biology

58%

Journalism

50%

Linguistics

50%

Sociology

50%

Dance

42%

English

33%

Anthropology

33%

Chemistry

33%

Art

25%

What is your Perfect Major?
created with QuizFarm.com

Nice result, so far, as I’m currently studying mathematics, and sometimes have a tendency to what we Germans call “Theater machen”. Personally, I’d expect Journalism a bit higher...PS, to the readers of planet.debian.org: I’m sorry for the random pop ups of old and/or German postings. I have no idea what causes them, and I’m glad to hear hints. The posts seem to actually come from the cache of the planet software itself, and something (me?) caused planet to dig them out again.

Axel Beckert: Quiz'n'Meme time again: What's your Perfect Major?

Although the recent Inner European quiz meme is currently much more popular on Planet Debian, the following quiz somehow shows how the result of such a quiz should look like and what the quiz system, which the Inner European quiz used, misses: Having more than only bit-like answers. With answers like this, neither I would have had to change answers to see how close I was to different answer nor would have Christian Perrier had to do the quiz with worst fitting answers.

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major!

Engineering

100%

Philosophy

92%

Journalism

92%

Art

83%

Mathematics

75%

English

75%

Biology

75%

Chemistry

75%

Theater

75%

Psychology

67%

Sociology

67%

Linguistics

50%

Dance

42%

Anthropology

25%

What is your Perfect Major?
created with QuizFarm.com

Since I always saw computer science more as an engineering discipline than a derivative of mathematics (at least the way I studied and like it ;-), I seem to have taken the right major. But also most of the other highscorers aren’t that unfamiliar:

Philosophy: Well, if you see how much philosophy is behind open source or politics, being engaged in open source software and interested in politics doesn’t seem to be that wrong. ;-)
Journalism: I like journalism somehow and I sometimes think about if this could have also been (or even be) a nice profession for me, especially since I managed to combine journalism and computer science in being an editor at Symlink.ch, a Swiss based and German written news and discussion site all around Open Source, IT politics and privacy. Sure, it’s no professional journalism and also not classical journalism, since it’s built on the same ideas (and software) as Slashdot.
Art: If I would have more time and leisure, I probably would also try to draw, paint or sculpture more again as I did during my school time. And since my brother and my mother are both active artists I expect that the results wouldn’t be that bad either. ;-) On the other hand, I also like to design CSS styles which IMHO can also satisfy my artistic bone…
Mathematics: Although I see more the engineering than the mathematics in computer science, mathematics still was one of my two majors in school (the other was physics) and in comparison to many other people I can say that I like maths.
English: That’s the only thing IMHO not fitting in here in such a high position since I’m neither good at foreign languages (see my English in the blog… ;-) nor do I like studying languages. And even if I should see that as “Literature” or “German” (my mother tongue) instead, it just doesn’t seem to fit. (Ok, journalism also has to do with language(s)…)
Biology: Biology was the voluntary science course at school I took until I finished school. At university it became my minor subject. I wonder why it’s that deep down in the statistics?
Chemistry: That was my second voluntary science course at school, but I dropped it before I finished school.
Theater: Well, no, I don’t think that actor would be good idea for me…
Psychology: I’m not sure, if sometimes being glad not to understand how my brain works is a good base for diving into psychology. (On the other hand: Would I write so much text about this quiz, if I’m not at least a little bit interested in psychology? ;-)
Sociology: That’s again more interesting.
Linguistics: If this can include computer linguistics, than it’s definitely something interesting for me, since it usually involves artifical intelligence and I wrote my diploma thesis about an AI subject and our research group did work a lot in the area of computer linguistics.
Dance: No. I’m glad it’s that far down there. Just wonder how it got even 42%.
Anthropology: Well, that’s again an interesting subject, but probably not a subject I would work in. So being that far down is completely ok.

So in general, I think the quiz works mostly fine as well as I probably did choose the right subjects for me. *grin* Only thing I missed in this quiz was Physics as a possible result since I don’t think, it’s impossible (especially compared to the rest of the result) that I haven’t scored for anything typical for physicians.

Now Playing: Falco — Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da!

Axel Beckert: Seems as if I really should visit Ireland once

When I loaded Planet Debian today, the first story was «Pardon my French…ness?» by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. There seems to be a new meme going on, trying to find out «Who’s Your Inner European?» Antti-Juhani’s Inner European is French: «Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.» Well, since I’m quite francophile in many ways (cars, food, laissez-faire, etc.), I expected to get a similar result, but it was quite different:

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table.

Who’s Your Inner European?

Well, I like what I read or saw of the Irish countryside in books or on tv, but drinking? Alcohol? Sorry, that’s just plain wrong. Doesn’t choosing the cute classic Citroën (They wrote it without diaeresis! Philistines!) suffice? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen «Those damn British - they really get under your skin», but the newest idea of the British government to sponsor voyeurs with access to public surveillance cameras to enforce their Respect Action Plan (German written Telepolis article about — BTW: Has Telepolis no more english translations?) really really goes under my skin. (Although stories about implanted RFID chips even go deeper under my skin…) One annotator of the Symlink article (German, too) about that British government programme associated their ideas with the concept of the Blockwart (“block warden” or “wonk” in English according to the dict.leo.org forum, Wikipedia also mentions “block leader” and “block attendant”) during the Nazi régime in Germany: They were the lowest officials in the NSDAP and the local contact persons to SS and Gestapo. I wouldn’t wonder if the British government gets a Big Brother Award for giving this “respect” to privacy and human rights. But back to the quiz: Well, let’s see with which of the questions I wasn’t sure what to answer. If I change Tiramisu (yeah, I know, that there is alcohol in it, and I only like it with nearly no alcohol in) to Apple pie, nothing changed. Same after switching Pasta to Seafood and vegetables. Hmmm, well let’s try one of the obvious but not really wrong answers: Mousse au chocolat instead of Tiramisu. Et voilá! La France! :-) Oh, and yes, the ideas of the French government to make open source software, the web and other cultural achievements illegal aren’t my French favourites either… Update, 21:03: Christian Perrier suggested that the quiz could also be used to find out, which Inner European you’re definitely not. Well, somehow I hoped, it would tell me, I’m not German (I also marked Mercedes in that round ;-), but it told me, I’m not Russian, which is also fine since the quiz seems to focus the prejudices about Russians on alcohol consumption.

Now playing: Europe — The Final Countdown

Mike Hommey: What is your Perfect Major ?

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major!

Engineering

92%

Chemistry

75%

Mathematics

75%

Philosophy

67%

Linguistics

67%

Psychology

67%

Sociology

58%

Biology

58%

Theater

42%

English

42%

Anthropology

33%

Art

33%

Journalism

25%

Dance

17%

What is your Perfect Major?
created with QuizFarm.com

Erich Schubert: My social disorder: Happy

Given the posts on diverse planets, this seems to be a common nerd disorder...

Your Social Dysfunction:
Happy
You're a happy person - you have a good amount of self-esteem, and are socially healthy. While this isn't a social dysfunction per se, you're definitely not normal. Consider yourself lucky: you walk that fine line between 'normal' and being outright narcissistic. You're rare - which is something else to be happy about.

); background-repeat: no-repeat;">

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Another quiz meme: You scored as Mathematics. You should be a Math major! Like Pythagoras, you are analytical, rational, and when are always ready to tackle the problem head-on!

Mathematics

100%

English

100%

Engineering

92%

Journalism

92%

Philosophy

67%

Theater

58%

Linguistics

58%

Psychology

42%

Dance

33%

Sociology

33%

Chemistry

25%

Art

25%

Anthropology

17%

Biology

0%

Philipp Kern: Problems with Apple's HDDs and Linux

David, please look at Paul’s entry about broken HDDs within laptops and at my post about my problems with the HDD in my iBook. It seems that those cycles are issued much more on laptops, especially on those Apple laptops. I don’t encounter such an amount on my desktop, nor anywhere else I checked. Paul happens to own an Apple PowerBook, too, so it seems somewhat restricted on this specific set of laptops. I already sent it in two times, but the AppleCair repair procedure in Europe is quite quick. It’s just that the hotline isn’t cheap (but they don’t get paid for their telephone service). I don’t boot Linux on my laptop anymore, at least for now. I can’t afford another HDD failure.

Zak B. Elep: RFS on robotour and animal, more adopted packages, trip this Thursday, and blog layout b0rkage

As I’ve blogged earlier, I uploaded the updated Debian packages for robotour and animal last night on mentors.debian.net, and am now looking for sponsors. I also noticed that Clint has some packages for sale; I’ll take dbacl and bricolage

And my fellow MOTU Stephan also has njam from Ubuntu up for adoption, and I’m taking it into Sid, not simply because I feel its my duty being a Ubuntu MOTU to give back to Debian, but because I am an existing Debian maintainer who wants to contribute more to Debian in that capacity. Some of those newly-adopted packages would have to wait, however, until I get back. I’ll be leaving for Manila this Thursday to take my UPOU midterms, as well as to get some things from my old house in Makati. I might be seeing Jerome, Clair, JM, Sacha, and the other PLUG folks at their induction. Among other things, some of my IE-using friends noticed some breakage with my blog layout (sigh). I’ll try to fix this later… Update : Anibal Avelar seems to be the DD for njam already, but I couldn’t see the package in the package pool or in the static packages page, despite being said so in the developer QA page (even the QA page for njam itself doesn’t exist). \sh, it seems that the game is still afoot! Update 2 : Ken Bloom comments that Anibal’s package is in the NEW queue.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Principles, Software and Freedom

Apologies to anyone that finds this preachy or holier-than-thou. I don't consider myself immune to this criticism: my mobile phone still runs non-free software. I realize that what I describe here is a process for everyone. I'm just trying to make sure nobody gets too comfortable with the status quo. It's been interesting to see non-hackers finding inspiration in the free/open source software movement. In particular, I've been watching this phenomena for a couple years in the the non-profit and NGO sector. Folks in these groups are often very philosophically aligned with the freedom movement behind free software and there are a number of organizations that are involved in promoting free software and the ideas behind it to NGOs and beyond. What's amazing to me is that in many situations, major advocates of free and open source software in these areas -- people who are advocating the software because of the freedom and not only for the pragmatic benefits -- don't actually use free software on their desktops or in other places they could. Sure, everyone uses Firefox. Sure, everyone uses Apache and GNU/Linux for their web servers. Sure, everyone uses Drupal, Mambo, Plone, or another free CMS. But one can't help but notice that Firefox, Apache, and free CMSs are higher quality, more featureful, and easier to use than the proprietary alternatives. People arguing for free software from a principled position need to remember that principled positions are sometimes inconvenient. Free software is no exception. It's frequently different, sometimes incompatible and a bit more work. In some situations (dare I say it?), it's not as good as the proprietary alternatives. We all need to remember that living a principled life is not always the easiest path. If you take a principled position against GMO foods or in favor of organic produce, you'll probably spend more and shop farther from your house. Your favorite fruit may not be in season year-round. If you only buy fair-trade clothing, your garment choices will be cut down in ways that will sometimes be inconvenient. It's nice when taking a principled position also means you get to do what is most convenient. But there's little principle in taking a principled position only when it's convenient. Yes. There are problems -- often major -- with free software: usability, documentation and otherwise. There are also ways to address these problems. Few of them require that you be or become hacker but almost all of them involve using the software first. I don't have to think hard to recall all of the times I've received contributions (e.g., documentation, suggestions, translations, patches, etc.) from people who don't use my software. If you don't think that spreading free software is an ethical act, you can happily ignore me. If you agree that it's the right thing, think hard about your principles and challenge yourself to take the next step -- whatever that is.

Moray Allan

Some of the books I read in 2005:

Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces
Bob McCulloch, My Fare City: A Taxi Driver's Guide to Edinburgh
Origen, On First Principles (translated by G. W. Butterworth)
Sin-leqi-unninni, Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: from paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD
M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them
Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories (translated by Ronald Hingley)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Otto F. A. Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
R.W.B. Lewis, Dante: a life
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture
Arturo P rez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (second edition)
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated by Desmond Lee)
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins, Rosslyn: guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail
Ginevra Lovatelli, Secret Rome
Dauvit Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy (editors), Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (translated by Walter Hamilton)
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown)
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Georges Perec, A Void (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Saul Bellow, The Victim
Franz Kafka, The Trial
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount; Baron in the Trees; The Non-Existent Knight) (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)
Eusebius, The History of the Church (translated by G. A. Williamson)
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar's trial by fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room)

Philipp Kern: Plone 2.1

I had my first contact with Plone on Friday and I immediately started to use it, i.e. Plone 2.1, for one of the homepages I administrate. It is the best free CMS I encountered by now. I figured that customisation is very easy, and their acknowledgment of accessibility and clean HTML is pretty nice. Zope is, despite of what I thought from my other contacts with it, quite nice in terms of usability. But I really have to thank Debian’s Zope team and Fabio Tranchitella for their easy-to-use packages. I’m now running Zope 2.8 running on Debian Sarge just fine, with very few efforts of backporting. However, Martin, you need to compare Ruby on Rails rather to Zope CMF than to Plone itself. Rails is only a framework, whereas Plone is a fully featured CMS on top of CMF. As far as I know, such a featureful and free CMS has yet to be built on top of Rails.

Martin F. Krafft: Plone 2.1.1 - WOW

My tendonitis forced me to take a leave of absence from Plone development right in the middle of the Plone 2.1 release cycle. As life moves on, however, I find myself in the position to teach Plone to employees development of the Humboldt University Berlin in two weeks, so I spent today checking out what I missed the last couple of months. Life did go on, and the Plone guys didn't sleep. Without going into details, I would like to give a big shout out to everyone who contributed to the 2.1 release (although my name was left out of the CREDITS.txt file -- I surely wasn't instrumental in the release, but I did make several commits). Plone 2.0 felt great, Plone 2.1 is even slicker. Even better UI, great development features, and it's all a lot cleaner and nicer to work with now. In fact, I grew mildly ecstatic upon first encounter. Great work, guys (and girls). I had previously considered Ruby on Rails, but I noticed too many parallels to Zope for it to be worth the effort. Plus, Rails has to come a long way to reach up to what Plone can already do (correct me if I am wrong)... and that's before Plone does the migration to Zope 3. I am proud to be able to teach Plone to others in two weeks. Update: Philipp, thanks for getting the comparison right. I completely agree with you.

Axel Beckert: Blosxom like alternatives to Blosxom

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives. First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs). But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit. First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release. The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-( But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday