I stumbled across Stanford on iTunes U today, which seems to be a great resource of fine academic materials and other gems worth listening to and watching, conveniently in the software you may use for your media collection anyway.
Then I found Steve Jobs’ commencement speech from 2005 that he held for the Stanford graduates of the year. It’s really inspirational and very worth watching, check it out:
Exactly 75 years ago today, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg. This was the start of the Nazi regime and marked the beginning of what would become the darkest chapter in German history.
The very same day, Hitler’s SA goons (nicknamed the “brown shirts”) started bullying people in the streets and held torchlight processions. In an article in the local paper today, it is mentioned that none of these processions happened in Ettlingen, the fairly little city I live in (which consisted of hardly 10,000 citizens at the time), and in the few remaining elections, the catholic “Zentrum” party still got the majority in the city, in spite of the overwhelming propaganda started by the Nazis. However, that this is a sign of “inner resistance” can be doubted: The same year, 1933, the city awarded Hitler honorary citizenship for his “immortal achievements” for Germany — something that hardly speaks for neutrality, let alone resistance.
A nice quote (yet, due to his slightly vulgar Berlin dialect, hardly ever officially mentioned) comes from Max Liebermann, a German painter of the time, who was allegedly watching the Nazi procession in Berlin from his apartment, when he said (my translation):
You know, I can hardly eat as much as I’d like to vomit.
In one month now, on February 27th, it will be the 75 anniversary of the Reichstag fire, an arson attack to the German parliament that the Nazis took as an excuse for their infamous Reichstag Fire Decree, abolishing central constitutional rights in order to suppress any opposition to the regime.
At the time, a Dutch bricklayer was allegedly arrested inside the Reichstag claiming he had set the fire. He was sentenced to death and killed in early 1934. However, he was likely a scapegoat and who actually set the Reichstag on fire remains unclear still today. Only two weeks ago, the death sentence against him was finally officially thrown out by a German judge, on the basis of the violation of “breaches of basic conceptions of justice”. At the time of the fire, arsonists could not be sentenced to death in the Weimar Republic; only an emergency decree released after the fact and applied retroactively led to his eventual execution.
As you can see, Germany still hasn’t worked through all the remainders of nazism and is still today in the process of “cleaning up” the injustice left by the regime.
The version control system Subversion comes with a handy function to copy or move an already versioned file from one place in the repository to another: The command svn move.
This is particularly good (and superior over, for example, CVS which is unable to do so) because the version history of the file is kept, and also the copy on the server is done lazily, meaning just because the file was copied there won’t be a second physical copy created on the server (yet, until you write to it).
A drawback of the command, though, is that it is only possible to move one single file or directory at a time. If you have a lot of files to be moved, this can get very tedious.
However, if the files you want to cover have something to be distinguished by, you may try the following (which I blog here mainly so I can get back later when I have forgotten the syntax again 
):
find . -name "06*" -maxdepth 1 -exec svn mv "{}" 2006/ \;
Note that I am filtering by name here (everything starting with 06), with a maximum tree depth of 1 (to avoid pulling in the .svn folder) and I am moving the respective files into the (recently created) subfolder 2006/. Also note that the the -exec flag of the find command wants to be terminated by a semicolon, but since that is a reserved character for the Bash shell, you need to escape it. This is something I trip over every time.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
After I posted about Fred campaign merchandise recently, I was pointed to the “home and garden” section on Amazon, which apparently has a lovely collection of Fred-related merchandise!
Of course I want most of these things (did I mention I will add them to my wish list) and probably “need” none of them 
.
Except for the Fred “ouch” toothpick holder, maybe (which would make for a nice voodoo doll, too!):
(Thanks for the link, Jenny!)
Looks like it’s George Orwell’s lucky day: Microsoft has filed a patent application for “a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.” (The Times, emphasis added).
Needless to say privacy experts are not particularly enthused, especially over here in Germany where the data protection laws are slightly on the strict side anyway. What I though was interesting is a quote by a German privacy expert, who said that while Microsoft may earn money from selling the product eventually, the companies who use it almost certainly won’t profit from monitoring their employees: She referred to a study made by the London School of Economics for Microsoft in 2003 which states that monitoring employees decreases their productivity and creativity. As such, the privacy expert says, Microsoft’s idea is “absolutely outdated”.
Considering the document was filed in June 2006 already and has only just came to public attention, the “outdated” claim may not be too far off after all.
Side note: As always, my blog represents my opinion only, and not Mozilla’s or anyone else’s. Just in case this was not perfectly clear to begin with.
Oh, that almost slipped through my radar: On January the 10th, Wikipedia’s featured article was the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, OR.
Which made me notice that I never got to go there, even though I lived barely a half-hour away for a year. However, I guess I made up for it by visiting the Idaho State Capitol in Boise, ID
tagesschau.de hat einen interessanten Artikel über das Tourismusgebiet Kumgang in Nordkorea, wo Südkoreaner Urlaub in den Bergen des eigentlich verfeindeten Nachbarn machen können.
Streng abgeschottet von der Zivilbevölkerung, natürlich.
