Das wollte ich doch die ganze Zeit schon machen: Da ich hier so viele neue Worte lerne, wollte ich Euch an meinen Favoriten teilhaben lassen.

Beginnen wir gleich mit einem ganz besonders schönen Exemplar:

That’s art, you bloody philistine!

Philistine, zu deutsch der Banause. Oder mit den Worten des American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

A smug, ignorant, especially middle-class person who is regarded as being indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values.

Schönes Wort, oder?

Update: Ben-Chi erwähnt, dass das Urban Dictionary meint: Homer Simpson is a philistine.

Übrigens hat mich keiner Banause genannt. Wäre ja noch schöner

Ladies and gentlemen,

may I have your attention for a second. As the founder of the task force agains the shameless raping of coffee products, I demand to abolish and forbid by law the so-called Espresso Americano.

Putting two shots of Espresso into a 12oz cup and filling it up with hot water is just cruel

Thanks for feeling with me

One thing reminding us constantly that OSX is almost as crappy as Redmond OS is the Spinning Beachball of Death.

Since I revently gave my Mac Mini a decent amount of RAM to waste for useless eyecandy, I don’t meet the little spinning fellow as often anymore.

However, the installation of the Eclipse IDE the last week brought a nice, new beachball appearance: When I use spotlight to start the program (as I usually do, because it’s so much faster than clicking through the menu structure), it will kill the system tray in the upper right corner of the screen.

The time stops counting and when I move the cursor over it, I see the cursor turn into the beloved beachball again!

I did not find any information about it on the net besides an old forum post in the google cache… But the solution seems to be, not to start Eclipse with spotlight but to actually click on it in the Applications folder or the dock.

Works for me, now.

Is that crazy or what?

Ein paar von Euch halten mich sicher schon für tierisch unfreundlich, weil ich nicht mehr auf ICQ-Nachrichten antworte.

Einfache Antwort (die ich auch schon auf englisch gebloggt habe): Die Firma, die ICQ betreibt, hat ohne Vorankündigung das Nachrichtenprotokoll geändert und damit meinen Messaging-Client mundtot gemacht. Einfach so. Und das geht nicht nur mir so, sondern auch allen anderen Leuten, die nicht den Original-ICQ-Client verwenden. Der ist nur leider völlig überladen mit Werbung und deswegen völlig unbenutzbar.

Abhilfe schafft ein freier Messaging-Client wie Miranda, Gaim oder Adium und ein Account bei einem Jabber-Server in Eurer Nähe. Jabber, das ist ein freies (kostenlos und mit öffentlichem Quellcode) Nachrichten-Protokoll, das genau so funktioniert wie ICQ oder MSN, dafür aber kostenlos ist und nicht einfach mal so von heute auf morgen unbenutzbar, oder kostenpflichtig, und so weiter wird.

Mit einem freien Messaging-Client könnt ihr eure Chat-Accounts parallel benutzen (ICQ und Jabber und MSN oder so) und müsst euch nicht auf das Wohlwollen eines einzelnen Anbieters verlassen.

(und wenn ihr ganz lieb fragt, bekommt ihr auch meinen Jabber Account ;))

Go, Jabber!

Update: Für Miranda gibt es eine Korrektur, die man bei addons.miranda-im.org herunterladen kann. Damit geht auch ICQ wieder. (via)

The popular IM chat service ICQ just upgraded their protocol (German link).

Usually, no big deal. The change should have been announced so everybody could adapt to it.

But, no, of course they just silently changed the protocol and thereby locked out the users of alternative (e.g. open source) IM clients such as Miranda, Gaim or Adium.

While this step is of course intentional (as the ICQ people want their users to use the original client for ad revenue reasons), it is another sign of why even such “trivial” things as closed source messaging protocols are bad. There is no security at all that the “owner” of the protocol will pay attention to your needs at all. Imagine you worked for a company. Would you rely on ICQ for your employees’ instant messaging? (Disregarding the privacy issues…,) it would mean that right now, the protocol owner would have seriously impacted your whole company’s information flow, costing you gazillions of money. You wouldn’t do that if you were a manager, would you? Similarly, why should we put our private conversations into their hands and allow them to mute us at any given second?

There are other possibilities. Meanwhile the free jabber protocol has become so mature that it is flawlessly usable. And more and more people are at least getting a jabber account additional to the other IM chat account(s) they are using.

So, until my messaging clients get an update, my ICQ communication will remain quiet. Go §$%$% [*] yourself, ICQ.

And please, people. Get a free messaging client (such as the ones I mentioned above) and get yourself a free jabber account on one of the jabber servers in your country. You can still use your old messaging protocols with them but it’s a great step ahead to not relying on un-free communication protocols anymore.

(and yes, if you ask, I will probably give you my jabber account address, so that you can add me to your list)

[*] all kinds of swear words to be inserted here.

Ja, sauber! Ist das noch derselbe Ort, der vor Kurzem einen Regenrekord verbuchen konnte? Wenn ich aus dem Fenster schaue, sehe ich einen tiefblauen Himmel, kein Wölkchen weit und breit, und zudem strahlenden Sonnenschein.

Der Wetterbericht verspricht dasselbe gute Wetter bis zum Ende der Woche und auch nächste Woche sieht es zumindest noch nicht nach Platzregen aus.

Liebe Deutsche, 61 degrees Fahrenheit (etwa 16 Grad Celsius) habt ihr nicht. Ätsch.

Und nachdem ich gerade meine Jazz Improvisation Midterm (Klausur in der Semestermitte, quasi) einigermaßen unfallfrei absolviert habe, kommt mir der Sonnenschein eigentlich ganz gelegen
Rock on!

The king is dead — long live the king!

Most of us Blog authors have kind of a spam problem. So do I, since my blog engine is quite popular not only among publishers but also among spammers. There are several anti-spam plugins out there. The easiest ones use a Captcha, what I never liked at all. It breaks any single aspect of usability. And it keeps annoying the legitimate users of the weblog. I want people to be able to comment on my blog entries with as little effort as possible. If I start bugging them with hardly readable and ambiguous characters, I simply deserve getting no comments. I should not waste people’s time.

Others work with some sort of embedded Java Script stuff (assuming the spammers’ user agents, unlike regular web browsers, do not interpret JS). That’s better, but not good either. Lots of these plugins refuse to take a comment from a user if he or she disables Javascript of course or if the page is accessed through a proxy or whatnot. Just getting a “sorry, I don’t like your comment you just spent 10 minutes on writing” will certainly scare away also the most curious visitor of your weblog.

The best approach currently available is similar to the one used by email spam filters: Accepting every comment, but doing a Bayes propability check on it to find out how likely it is spam and putting comments under a specific threshold either into moderation or the waste bin. When I still had Wordpress 1.5, I used to use the fantastic SpamKarma 2 that did a wonderful job on filtering my blog spam. After learning a few legitimate comments, it did not make any mistakes for the last year-or-so.

However, its major drawback was that it kept filling up my database (which is restricted to 50 Megs by my ISP) with spam comments until they were wiped after a week. At times where I got a real flood of spam comments, I even once experienced a broken blog since the database literally did not allow to write any single new record.

When updating to Wordpress 2.0, I therefore decided to give Akismet a shot, a new anti-spam web service whose plugin is now shipped with WP. You have to obtain an API key (which, AFAIK, you currently only get by registering a free weblog on wordpress.com), activate the plugin, hack in the key you just got and off you go.

Since tons of users are contributing good and bad comments, the web service does an impressively good job on putting spam where it belongs: in the virtual waste bin!

While I am still checking it out, I can already say that it does not seem to have a high false positive rate at all. Some legitimate comments went into moderation (therefore asking me to mark them as ham) but none of them was flagged as spam in the first place.

Akismet++ — and kiss your captchas goodbye!