Notes from Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Unintended Consequences: Four Years under the DMCA

    Since they were enacted in 1998, the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright pirates from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works, and to ban “black box” devices intended for that purpose.In…

  • Business-centred design

    Guuui.com: “The user-centred design approach has been taken on from the field of software development to the field of web development. But software applications and web sites are not similar. Thinking of web site visitors as users misses the point, that most web sites have a strategic objective to meet. Balancing users’ needs and strategic…

  • PostgreSQL on MacOS X

    Apple Internet Developer Site: In this article, we show you how to install and configure PostgreSQL on Mac OS X, and then how to use it with Perl, Java, and PHP. Finally, we demonstrate how you can use the web-based phpPgAdmin to administer your databases.

  • Blogs refine enterprise focus

    InfoWorld: “Building on the success of Weblogs for personal Web publishing, enterprises are starting to tap into blogs to streamline specific business processes such as intelligence gathering or to augment traditional content-and knowledge-management technologies.”

  • Discourse Systems

    “Discourse Systems is a newsletter and directory of resources about computer-supported consensus building, conflict resolution and decision-making, using Internet groupware, knowledge-based systems and process models of argumentation, deliberation and negotiation. We focus on e-democracy and e-governance applications, for all phases of the policy-making life cycle: agenda setting, analysis, policy creation, implementation (including electronic service delivery),…

Got any book recommendations?