Monthly Archive for January, 2003

Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a War

NY Times: »In a two-hour interview in his United Nations offices overlooking Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Blix, the chief chemical and biological weapons inspector, seemed determined to dispel any impression that his report was intended to support the administration’s campaign to build world support for a war to disarm Saddam Hussein.
[...]
Finally, he said, he had seen no persuasive indications of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush also mentioned in his speech. “There are other states where there appear to be stronger links,” such as Afghanistan, Mr. Blix said, noting that he had no intelligence reports on this issue. “It’s bad enough that Iraq may have weapons of mass destruction.”«

Bookie & Rendevouz

»Bookie provides Rendezvous bookmark sharing. No configuration – just double-click and go. Bookie places a small icon in your menu bar from which you can globally access your bookmarks and those of any other computer on the LAN. Alternatively, you can set Bookie to publish your bookmarks, collect others, or do both (the default behavior). Bookie can also be configured to run on a single port to assist those running firewalls.«

I wonder if that is something Apple is going to integrate sooner or later anyway to push Rendezvous to their customers.

FreshlySqueezed is also offering some nice Freeware applications.

Movable Type to support CC licenses

»We are delighted to see that the popular weblog application, Movable Type, is adding support for choosing Creative Commons licenses in its upcoming version

[Creative Commons: weblog]

Wise move! Why not really support this licensing stuff into the software – it is an important issue and should be on the screen of any weblogger when he starts his weblog.

Desert Caution

Norman Schwarzkopf: »”The thought of Saddam Hussein with a sophisticated nuclear capability is a frightening thought, okay?” he says. “Now, having said that, I don’t know what intelligence the U.S. government has. And before I can just stand up and say, ‘Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we need to invade Iraq,’ I guess I would like to have better information.”«

Threat to world peace

“Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place.” —Pres. Bush addressing the nation from Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002

This PDF map shows all (?) production facilities and arsenal storages for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the USA.

U.S. prepares for possible use of nukes

»Military officials have been focusing their planning on the use of nuclear arms in retaliation for a strike by the Iraqis with chemical or biological weapons, or to pre-empt one, Arkin says.«

Sci-Fi-London

SCI-FI-LONDON, a strictly non-geeky, serious look at science fiction and fantasy film! We take place in Feb 2003 at London’s favourite cinema, The Curzon SOHO (Time Out readers’ poll 2000 and 2001), The Other Cinema, London’s newest arthouse screen.

BTW: America is old Europe

In a moment if critizism Jack Straw reminded Germany that it has signed the 1441 resolution and therefore should not be too explicit ruling out military action. Good to know, Jack! Needles to point out that U.S. and Great Britain have signed the UN charter as well – and that is ruling out military action without UN mandate.

And for some reason the UN carta doesn’t define such a thing as “preventive war”.

I don’t know – do you know? America is a problem. Iraq is a problem.

OmniOutliner 2.2b

The new version of OmniOutliner does Export to Apple Keynote. I wish Radio Userland had this as well. You can download the Beta 2.2 here.

Doodim

I just tried this little MacOS X tool: It dims the inactive applications in the background. You can switch it on and off from the menu bar. With a fast Mac, many open applications and a huge screen this may be really be an enhancement to the UI.

San Francisco bans Segway

This is a real parody. Maybe they should ban cars and open the streets for Segways. You would even be twice as fast with 12 mph because there would be no traffic jams. In Cologne there are ground-level entrances into most of the the subways and you’re allowed to take a bicycle with you. The combination of Segways and a kind of »drive-in« subway trains would be a killer application for public transport in big cities.

MozTop

Paul Everitt shows off MozTop. [ZopeZen]

The United States of America has gone mad

“The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.”

Perl XML-RPC

One of my students has created an XML-RPC library for Perl, that he claims is way faster than the three Perl implementations listed on xmlrpc.com that are all base on the same XML library (his doesn’t). Unfortunatly he seems to be too shy to release it to the public. I think he should get a Creative Commons license and publish it. What do you think?

MacOS X Apache as Proxy Server

It is easy to utilize a MacOS X machine as web proxy server – and it may even make sense to proxy locally on your own machine.

MacMegasite tip:

»Mac OS X’s built-in web server can act as a caching web proxy to speed up your web surfing by caching graphics and other page elements locally.«

CocoaMySQL

CocoaMySQL is a free, open source application to manage MySQL databases (locally or over internet). It lets you add and remove databases and tables, change fields and indexes, view and filter the content of tables, add, edit and remove rows, perform custom queries and dump tables or entire databases. [MacMegasite]

Which country really poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003?

“So TIME asks you: which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? North Korea, Iraq or The United States?”

141729 people voted when I clicked. The answer is no surprise to me, but I made a screenshot just in case…

WebCoreHack

“Kazutoshi Kubota produces a WebCoreHack that succeeds in rendering at least some HTML using Safari framework, WebCore. Small progress on the way to general-purpose HTML rendering in Cocoa apps, even before Apple publishes any documentation.” [Marek's Weblog]

AdaptableStorage for ZOPE

“AdaptableStorage lets you store ZODB objects in your own database and in your format, without using special content classes. You can use a filesystem directory, a relational database, or whatever kind of database you might have as a ZODB.”

iPhoto2

thinksecret.com has some details and screenshots about iPhoto 2.