• Mr. Bill – Suave (via) - sweet sweet music (well, I guess not everyone's taste, but mine).
  
• Switching from vim to emacs, day 1 - a comic
  
• SSH: More than secure shell - I had a post on SSH in mind for a long time now, but well, this person's article already tells everything
  
• Work on unimportant problems
  
• Open source graphics card
  
• DIY Bookscanner (via)
• I'm a softwaredevelopeeeeer~~~ (via)
  

• Abgeordneter griechischer Neonazi-Partei verprügelt live eine kommunistische Politikerin
• Agaven-Blüte in Hollabrunn
  
• Was ist nur aus dem Wochenende geworden? (via)
  
• Noten. Die Lehrer und ihre Urteile.
  

Source: fatpita.net Die armen Ramersdorfer bangen um ihre wohlverdiente Ruhe. Die will ihnen nämlich ein "City-Service-Center" (was immer das ist) wegnehmen. Soweit sogut, nun schlugen sie als Alternative einen Kindergarten vor. Eine sinnvolle Lösung, denn Kindergärten machen keinen Lärm. Steht so im Gesetz.

Die Idee ist gut. Die sollten sich die Diskussionsparteien zur dritten Startbahn in München mal zu Herzen nehmen. Die Lösung des beschriebenen Lärmproblems ist so einfach: Wir bauen Flugzeuge mit integrierten Kindergärten. Für die Kinder ist das sicher ein schönes Erlebnis, in der Früh in München zu sein, zu Mittag in London, und dann wieder zurück, und das Schweben über den Wolken ist sicher auch ein schönes Erlebnis. Sie erquicken alleine durch ihr Dasein weiterhin die Fahrgäste, denen man Bild- und Tonübertragungen des Geschehens in der Kindergartenabteilung ihres Fliegers zeigen könnte. Und das Beste: Diese Flugzeuge würden keinen Lärm machen! Es sind schließlich Kindergärten!

(Sorry for this one)

• 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.
• Productivity tips, tricks and hacks for academics
• I have learned a new word for an interesting phenomenon: Speckles
  
• Implementing a Polyphonic MIDI Software Synthesizer using Coroutines, Realtime Garbage Collection, Closures, Auto-Allocated Variables, Dynamic Scoping, and Continuation Passing Style Programming (via)
• Remee Lucid Dreaming Mask (via)
• The 5 Stupidest Looking Superpowers in the Animal Kingdom
• Artist turns his dead pet into flying helicopter after it is killed by a car
  

• Schule produziert lustlose Pflichterfüller (via)
  
• Gelähmte Ratten laufen wieder
  
• Versuchstier des Jahres: Die Atherosklerose-Maus

License: public domain (via)

• The Official Website of Andrea Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer, E-Cat, therefore watermelon!
• 15 Ways To Use Vodka
• 48 pages of admirable engineering for symbolic links under Windows.
• Naked Man Eating Victim’s Face Shot Dead By Police
  
• I told you I'm brushing my teeth (a comic).
• It is almost Dead Duck Day
  
• Report on North Korean labor camps in Russia.
• Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind
• JavaScript SIP client sipML5 supports audio and video calls - I did not test it though.
• Nice essay on functions on the Cantor Space, a topic I also wrote about.

• Minirechner Cotton Candy und ein Android-PC mit VIA APC mainboard werden bald verkauft. Kleine Computer scheinen also nicht nur im Schlaufonbereich ein Trend zu sein.
• Leap Motion: 3D-Steuerung per Handwisch
• Top Ten der neu entdeckten Tierarten
• Betäubungsfreie Schweinekastration wird endlich verboten
  
• Und dann noch ein bissel was zum Urheberrecht, was zu den steigenden Urheberabgaben, und ein paar schönen Rechnungen dazu. Ich will ja niemandem einen Floh ins Ohr setzen, aber warum kriegen die Verlage eigentlich kein Geld von der Papierindustrie? Wäre doch ungefähr genauso sinnvoll.
  

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• Some picture from before 9/11 ...
• Linux KVM for FreeBSD
• Whohas - search for packages in multiple distributions.
• Build the Enterprise (via) - not sure whether this is useful.
• Writing a FUSE Filesystem: a Tutorial, another informative page, a Hello World example, not everything seems to be quite up to date, but enough as a learning source. Yes, I like FUSE.
  
• Evil - programming language
• Copy Pure Text - useful extension for Firefox.
  

The decentralized social network Diaspora which was even mentioned by the German Pirate Party now works together with the startup hub Y Combinator. I tried to install it once, but I gave up. It was too complicated, and it seemed too much like a stack of hacks. Probably I would have been able to install it, but for what? Nobody I know would use it. It was hard enough to convince people to use Jabber, and I still use ICQ and MSN with many of them.

People knowing enough to install it are usually familiar with other, more common technologies. People who would, in theory, use it have Facebook and stuff, and are unable to run an own server. I see only a very small niche for Diaspora, and this is the main problem: The most precious resource a social network has is its users.

An alternative that I liked better was Google Wave, which has now become Apache Wave. However, this is also hard to install. And complicated.

And both of them, and Facebook and Google Plus and whatever else, have one common problem: They solve already solved problems in new proprietary ways. What I want to see is a software solution that uses well-established protocols and formats, and just gives a simple layer to combine them.

Firstly, there are already enough protocols for chatting. There is no need to add yet another one. Just use IRC or XMPP. There are already plenty of web-frontends for them, there is no need to reinvent the wheel again. Same goes for notifications. To notify persons about timelines and events, there are common protocols. You can use RSS or Atom feeds, or IMAP. There are web-frontends and libraries for all of them. Again, no need to reinvent the wheel.
It gets a bit harder with discussions, as there is not yet a common format for such discussions in the web. However, there have been fora since a long time, there is enough expierience with these. And outside the web, there was the Usenet, maybe one could adapt the NNTP protocol.
For decentralized authentification, maybe GPG or Tripcodes are the best way of not having to store account specific information on every server, and still verify their origin. This problem is a bit harder, but it is not unsolvable.
"Personal pages" with a lot of design and stuff. Well, there is HTML and CSS. And there is bbcode and wiki-code. It is not like this was not a solved problem.
Facebook was, as far as I read, experimenting with video chats. Well, I already wrote about that problem. For audio-calls, TeamSpeak might be a practical solution, which also allows group chats, but of course is a proprietary protocol. I have heard of Mumble, but never tried it. For video calls, well, there is Ekiga, but there need to be good and stable versions for Windows and Mac. This is probably an open problem. There are protocols, but there is no software.
Desktop sharing is the other thing that is often mixed up with video calls. Well, cooperative working and desktop sharing can be done through VNC, but the applications must support it. But still, this is a problem with many solutions.

I do not say that it is not a lot of work to put all these pieces together, make them stable, and user friendly. I just think that doing it this way will have better results than creating something completely new.

There are some common desirable properties of data representation formats. Readability by humans is one such desire. Readability by computers is another one, which somehow contradicts the first one. Portability across platforms is one. Efficiency and compactness is another one that contradicts portability.

A binary format can be very computer-friendly, and very efficient, but it is usually not human readable, and it is often not easily portable due to encoding issues and integer byte orders. S-expressions are human readable and comparably easy for a computer to parse, JavaScript Object Notation is a bit harder to parse for computers but offers a bit more structure for the human to use. However, these formats have the usual encoding issuses and they are not very efficient (of course they can be gzipped).
XML is neither human-readable in its current form, nor is it simple to parse it by computers, nor is it compact and efficient, and portability is given in theory, but in practice there are a lot of fallacies. Yes, I do not like XML. I do not like most of the modern web-standards at all, because most of them just appear not to be thought through. That does not mean that I would be able to do everything better from scratch, it just means that there are a lot of well payed people out there who invented all of that crap.

However, during my time as an admin in the data center of my university department, I gained at least a little expierience with software - though of course not as much as someone working at a huge company for years - and that little expierience tells me to always look at what software can rather than what it cannot do, when really trying to build something. You will find deficiencies in every abstraction layer you have to work with. And you cannot build any realistic project completely from scratch, you have to rely on things others have done so far.

Now, XMLRPC is a standard for doing remote procedure calls over HTTP via an XML substandard. It can be called via default AJAX APIs from the browser, and it can be exported by a lot of languages, even Common Lisp has a library for exporting functions. So yes, it is a standard that bases on XML, and even apart from that it has its own deficiencies (like no default mechanism for null-values). But it gives an acceptable infrastructure for simple remote procedure calls. And for everything more complicated, you will use a specialized format, anyway.

That is why I like XMLRPC. It is a stupid standard, and actually, I would be able to come up with something better in, say, 20 minutes. But that is not the point.