From the HTTP response headers that the del.icio.us API sends:
HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:10:01 GMT X-Delicious-Debug: Hi there (...)
Uh, hi, Yahoo! ;)
A Heavyweight Named XCode
Today I had to upgrade Apple's XCode to the current version 2.4.1, because the old XCode 2.2 that came with my OSX install CDs resulted in errors with some apps (ffmpeg, in my case). The XCode installation package weighs in at 924 Megabytes, just a little short of one Gigabyte. Slim is not one of the words I would use for that...
And all that just to install Macports, my favorite tool to bring the most powerful Unix tools to OSX.
At least their download servers are pretty darn fast -- that eases the pain:
I am just wondering: What do people do with a slow internet connection or a small harddrive?
For Mor^H^H^H a colleague
I just noticed that youtube is an excellent resource for all things Care bear:
Good to know! ;)
Microsoft and Their 497,000,000 Euro Fine
Almost half a billion Euros, which is about 600 million US Dollars, is the fine against which Microsoft fought with an appeal at the European Court of First Instance. Today, they lost: The court ruled that the decision of the European Commission to impose the fine on Microsoft was appropriate.
For almost a decade now, the European Commission has been struggling with Microsoft (to little avail) against their alleged abuse of their significant market power. In the center of the controversy is the hardly uninstallable Microsoft Media Player, which was considered an abuse of the OS monopoly to create another monopoly in the media player market. However, when it comes to monopolists abusing their monopolies, the European Union tends to have little sense of humor (a fact that Microsoft could have known in the first place). And thus, they fined Microsoft in 2004 with 497 million Euros and demanded them opening their APIs so competitors could give the consumer a realistic choice of softwares. Microsoft complained against that at the European Court, and now, only ;) 3 years later, the 248-page ruling was published.
Well, you can almost imagine how it went on in the meantime: After Microsoft still didn't completely comply with the demands after two years, they were fined with another 281 million Euros in 2006. In early 2007, the European Commission complained that Microsoft charged too much money for the API documentation and threatened to fine another 3 million Euros per day (dated back from the 1st of August 2006) if they kept up that practice.
Microsoft's main lawyer said today that they will "analyze" the whole ruling and then decide if they keep going on -- but I have a feeling that this is the amount of money that Microsoft is not happy losing: I assume the judges at the European Court of Justice (the next and last instance) are already waiting for the appeal in the mail.
Animator vs. Animation
Check out this cool animation:
The author writes:
An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find - the brush tool, the eraser tool - to get back at his tormentor. It's resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.
This is just awesome. But sometimes I am glad I'm not in the animation business. :)
Oh, and if you can't get enough, there's a sequel, too! (And it features Firefox :))
(Thanks for the link, Jenny!)
CakePHP: Delete Cached Models on Database Change
Last week, I had to back out a (quite big) patch from the to-be-published addons.mozilla.org trunk because while it worked on our developer instances, it behaved totally strange on the staging environment: When I saved a record using the newly added UI, the changes partly didn't show up in the database.
So we went ahead and delayed the release of the patch until we figured out what the problem was.
After a little digging around the internet today I found a hint suggesting to flush CakePHP's cached models/table descriptions from the app/tmp/cache/models directory every time a database change is applied -- which fixed the problem we encountered.
So, fellow CakePHP users, keep that in mind next time you alter your DB, and your life will be happier :).
Firefox Scooter
If I was to buy a scooter, it would be this one -- And no, Mozilla is not expanding into the scooter business ;)
This is a picture I took a long long time ago in Karlsruhe and just now stumbled across again.
Summer-born Children Prone to Near-Sightedness
As we all know, September-born children are the best anyway (well, at least I did).
Sadly, they also seem to be among the most badly sighted ones:
Israeli researchers now found out that being born during the summer increases the risk of becoming near-sighted significantly:
Children born in June and July - the months with the most sunshine - are 25 percent more likely to become nearsighted (myopic) than those born in December or January, according to Israeli research just published in the on-line edition of the most prestigious eye medicine journal, Ophthalmology. (...) The more light a newborn is exposed to after birth, the more the eyeball lengthens, according to the study, causing images to be focused in the vitreous part inside the eye rather than on the retina at the back of the eye.
Well, at least now I have a clue where my glasses come from -- and I guess I am lucky not to be born during the really bright months, or I'd be a total mole.
(Link to the article, requires subscription)
Update: This got boingboinged. Thanks, Xeni!
Time to get an iPhone
A teen from New Jersey unlocked the iPhone, so it can be used with non-US phone networks. Nice move.
The hack takes "about two hours and involves some soldering and skill with software" though, the guy says. So, if you don't want to brick your phone, maybe it's not such a good idea after all.
Also, I wonder how long it takes until the companies in question sue the bejesus out of that kid. Or, if they are smart, they just hire him. We'll see.
Google to increase GMail Storage?
Rumor has it, GMail's storage may some day soon be cranked up to 10 gigabyte.
That'd be sweet, for sure.
While I am really not (yet) in danger of hitting the limit (at the time of writing it's 2887 Megabytes), I still find myself deleting pictures etc. that I get by email if they are "too big" ever so often. Maybe I am too conservative there, but I still consider mails > 1 MB to be "big" and I tend to delete them if and when I can. It'd be nice if I had a reason to get more 21st-century-ish about it :)
I need to admit though, that GMail and most of its competitors are already beating accounts like my university email by far. I finally stopped using that one when I ran into its ridiculous 50 megabyte limit twice a month.
(via valleywag)
Update: It's Google's "Shared Storage" Program that made people's GMail storage amount increase. Sadly, they increased the impressive one dollar price for 6 Gigabytes to 20 dollars just shortly after the program was started.