Ich gebe zu: Das GEZ-Experiment habe ich mir komplizierter vorgestellt. Kürzlich erhielt ich Antwort von der GEZ, dass mit der Abmeldung alles in Ordnung sei. Seht selbst:

Klar, das mit der Bearbeitungszeit von beinahe drei Wochen lässt sich noch verbessern -- aber noch nicht einmal privatwirtschaftliche Unternehmen haben es mit der Bearbeitung einer Kündigung sonderlich eilig. Das es bei der GEZ schneller geht, hat also wohl keiner erwartet.

Simples Fazit: Wenn man sich mit einem ernsthaften (d.h. legalen) Grund bei der GEZ abmeldet, gibts mit der Abmeldung anscheinend auch keine Probleme -- vorausgesetzt, man bringt die notwendige Portion Zeit mit. Das war ja einfach.

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Note: Several people asked where the link is to actually add feedback to the site. This is, of course, a good point. As mentioned in the comments: The designated entry point for the feedback application is going to be an extension bundled with Firefox 4 Beta. For more information, please read Aakash's blog post. To try out the application already, feel free to add happy or sad feedback to the test site.


This morning, we published the Firefox Input application. It is a little web application soliciting feedback from our Firefox Beta Program users. The aim is to make it as easy as possible for people to tell us what specifically they like or dislike about an upcoming version of Firefox.

The application was, as far as software goes, developed very rapidly: We made it from requirements to production in a mere three weeks. What made this possible was a number of reusable components that allowed us to avoid reinventing the wheel and stay focused on making the application awesome.

A few key components of the Input application:

  • Django. I can't stress this enough, but Django is a fantastic web application framework. It makes it incredibly easy to set up a web application quickly and securely. Their built-in admin pages save me days of work that I would otherwise have to spend to allow project admins to edit the application data.
  • Jinja2 and Jingo. The only big drawback of Django is its template language: The instant you make nontrivial web applications, it gets in your way. Luckily, like all parts of Django it is replaceable: Jinja2 and Jeff Balogh's jingo interface comes to the rescue. The two of them are already in use over at AMO and also serve us well on Input.
  • Term extraction. Firefox Input extracts key words from all feedback. Sure, you can just split the sentences into words, but if you want to avoid collecting all sorts of meaningless particles ("the", "a", "if", ...), it becomes a little more complicated. We are using the topia.termextract library, which gladly does the heavy lifting for us. Only caveat: It only works for English, so once the application is localized, we need a different solution for the other languages.
  • Search. For the longest time, there was no generic way to do search in a Django app (other than straight SQL queries). In the meantime, haystack has started to fill that gap. We use it on Input in conjunction with Whoosh, a pure-Python search library. That is very easy to set up, at the expense of scalability -- if we outgrow it, however, it will be easy to switch search engines with virtually no code changes at all. Thumbs up!
  • Product details. Only very recently we released a Mozilla product details library for Django, and this is the first application to rely intimately on up-to-date product data: Input only lets users of the latest beta versions of Firefox add feedback, so it auto-updates its product data periodically to gather feedback for the newest versions as quickly as possible.

As always, the source code of Firefox Input is openly and freely available. If you notice any problems with it, feel free to fork it on github, or file a bug in our bug tracker.

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John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, explains the difference between Soccer and (American) Football:

Very funny!

Thanks to several people who have pointed this video out lately!

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I just watched the pilot episode of Pioneer One, the "first ever made-for-torrent" TV series, and I liked it a lot!

The story is intriguing:

An object in the sky spreads radiation over North America. Fearing terrorism, U.S. Homeland Security agents are dispatched to investigate and contain the damage. What they discover will have implications for the entire world.

The pilot episode has been filmed on a budget of a mere 6000 dollars (all of it funded by private donations), and for that, the idea has been very well executed. I suggest you all see it, as the video is freely and legally available through VODO. Pioneer One is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike license.

What I find very impressive about the show is that unlike traditional producers, they embrace rather than demonize P2P file sharing. Therefore, the makers of Pioneer One have the chance to show that grassroots film-making (or rather, TV-series-making) that is successful beyond a tiny scale is possible by actively engaging the Internet community (for both funding and distribution) rather than using the Internet as a simple, tightly controlled broadcasting medium as if it was a glorified TV set.

When the article on Pioneer One faced (and fenced off) a deletion request due to alleged irrelevance on Wikipedia, I wrote the following in the deletion discussion:

Keep. Not for it being a low-funds TV series, as it is not exceptional in that respect, but for its attempt at being successful through Torrent distribution. [...] The main reason for its notability is that we see a huge effort on the side of traditional media distribution groups against P2P networking as a concept. They essentially argue that P2P is [not] tightly controllable and therefore it must be objectionable. Making an active effort to legally distribute media content via P2P is much more a political statement for the legitimacy of P2P as a cultural phenomenon than it is a way to keep distribution cost low. Compare this to other attempts at making a (mini-) series popular on the Internet (Dr. Horrible, for example) that while being free-as-in-beer (initially) did not use P2P technology (or any free-as-in-speech distribution channel), and you'll see how radically different Pioneer One is in that respect. [...]

Sure, it is not the first free-to-torrent project. But it's the first free-to-torrent series that might actually become successful. And it is a way for the filesharing community to show what it is really about: Free speech, not free beer.

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Considering how many draws we've seen in the World Cup group stage so far, I am probably not the only one who has wondered, exactly what rules do they apply for the placement of the group members if they end up having the same amount of points at the end of the group stage?

Luckily, the official 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa regulations come to the rescue. Article 39, no. 5, reads:

The ranking of each team in each group will be determined as follows: a) greatest number of points obtained in all group matches; b) goal difference in all group matches; c) greatest number of goals scored in all group matches. If two or more teams are equal on the basis of the above three criteria, their rankings will be determined as follows: d) greatest number of points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned; e) goal difference resulting from the group matches between the teams concerned; f) greater number of goals scored in all group matches between the teams concerned; g) drawing of lots by the FIFA Organising Committee.

In other words, if the points are the same, and both goal difference and scored goals are the same, they resort to how the two or more tied teams fared only in their games against each other. And if all else fails, the order will be drawn from a hat.

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Hard drives (or controllers, rather) capable of hot-swapping (that is, plugging and un-plugging a drive into a running system) used to be a feature reserved for expensive professional RAID installations.

With the advent of SATA in the mainstream, that has changed. Supposedly any SATA hard drive can be hot-plugged now. But what if you actually try and nothing happens? Chances are your controller doesn't let the OS know about the newly found drive on its own.

Try this to rescan the SCSI hosts (each SATA port appears as a SCSI bus):

echo "0 0 0" >/sys/class/scsi_host/host<n>/scan

and to remove a drive:

echo x > /sys/bus/scsi/devices/<n>:0:0:0/delete

Replace <n> with the right numbers for your system, respectively.

Also, just to state the obvious, don't do that to a mounted drive, ever. Especially not the one that holds your system partition ;)

(via.)

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Coincidence? I let you be the judge ;)

From Leech, John (1817-1864), Drawings. In the Public Domain. Via: The Internet Archive.

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Need to add a robots.txt file to your Django project to tell Google and friends what and what not to index on your site?

Here are three ways to add a robots.txt file to Django.

1) The (almost) one-liner

In an article on e-scribe.com, Paul Bissex suggest to add this rule to your urls.py file:

from django.http import HttpResponse

urlpatterns = patterns('', ... (r'^robots.txt$', lambda r: HttpResponse("User-agent: *\nDisallow: /", mimetype="text/plain")) )

The advantage of this solution is, it is a simple one-liner disallowing all bots, with no extra files to be created, and no clutter anywhere. It's as simple as it gets.

The disadvantage, obviously, is the missing scalability. The instant you have more than one rule to add, this approach quickly balloons out of hand. Also, one could argue that urls.py is not the right place for content of any kind.

2) Direct to template

This one is the most intuitive approach: Just drop a robots.txt file into your main templates directory and link to it via directtotemplate:

from django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    (r'^robots\.txt$', direct_to_template,
     {'template': 'robots.txt', 'mimetype': 'text/plain'}),
)

Just remember to set the MIME type appropriately to text/plain, and off you go.

Advantage is its simplicity, and if you already have a robots.txt file you want to reuse, there's no overhead for that.

Disadvantage: If your robots file changes somewhat frequently, you need to push changes to your web server every time. That can get tedious. Also, this approach does not save you from typos or the like.

3) The django-robots app

Finally, there's a full-blown django app available that you can install and drop into your INSTALLED_APPS: It is called django-robots.

For small projects, this would be overkill, but if you have a lot of rules, or if you need a site admin to change them without pushing changes to the web server, this is your app of choice.

Which one is right for me?

Depending on how complicated your rule set is, either one of the solutions may be the best fit for you. Just choose the one that you are the most comfortable with and that fits the way you are using robots.txt in your application.

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Note: Several commenters have provided valuable feedback that I am responding to with updates to this post and in the comments. Make sure to read both!


On yesterday's WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs introduced "FaceTime" and explained its base technologies with the following words:

"Now it's based on a handful of standards... but this is going to be an open industry standard."

I wish Steve Jobs would cease calling H.264 and similar standards "open". Technologies that cost millions of dollars to use are, by definition, not open. He can hope it'll become an "industry standard" (as in, used by companies apart from Apple), fair enough. But he can't say it is going to be "open". That's like a college kid calling the grocery store "free" just because daddy gave them an unlimited credit card. And it's doing a huge disservice to the Open Sourcestandards community by misusing the term in the worst possible way.

Quote and photograph courtesy of Engadget. Thanks!


Update, 4/9/2010: For a while, I removed the above text in order not to express unwarranted criticism towards the speaker. After several rounds of user feedback, however, I decided to keep the original text and update/annotate this post as necessary.

Update on the definition of openness:

As Sandy pointed out in the comments, there are many definition of what standards are considered "open" and depending on which of these you follow, varying licensing fees, as long as you don't exclude anyone with enough money to buy them, are still valid for calling a standard "open". I disagree with that view, but it is a possible interpretation.

Commenter Dave mentions that Steve Jobs usually makes sure to call actual open standards "open" and calls H.264 and similar technologies "industry standards" instead. He is therefore likely to know the difference between the two, even though calling an entire stack "open" in spite of some of its components not matching that definition is a strange, or even misleading, point of view.

Finally, Jo argues that the mere fact that other vendors can build devices to connect to the FaceTime stack instead of it being limited to Apple products only makes it "open". In other words, this use of "open" would be a synonym of "standards compliant". I believe that is still a very limited view on openness, but at least it is more open than the alternative: a locked-down proprietary solution.

Peter also reminds us of the technical limitations: Since all mobile devices need hardware support for video encoding and decoding, Apple had to settle for H.264 a long time ago, and even if they wanted, they could not simply switch over to a different codec. Most people (me included) also seem to agree that H.264 is -- from a purely technical standpoint -- a good choice for the FaceTime stack.

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I am two days late for this year's anniversary, but this is just too impressive: Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.

Make sure to click on the picture to see bigger versions.

(via Justin, thanks! Source: US or Canadian National Archives, via Wikipedia. Public Domain.)

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