If you speak german you might want to listen into the recording the recent radio show on weblogs that is available in Ogg Vorbis (72,9 MB) und MP2 (250 MB) and MP3 (130 MB) format.

Great QuickTime VR movies of Planet Earth showing all kinds of aspects of the global biosphere have been produced by a team based on data of the Atlas of the Biosphere. [via Dubium sapientiae initium]

By fiddling around with the USB interface of his iXus digital camera, a guy calling himself „uberhax0r“ actually managed to make a whole Linux system run on his device. Check out the photos, it is really cool.

Update: also quite crazy is the project MAMED! which brings the MAME arcade machine emulator and other games (like Doom) to digital cameras running the Digita operating system.

UPDATE: Seems as if I ran into an April Fool‘s joke. The whole Linux on the DigiCam thing is a hoax. I swear I will never recommend anything on the web before checking it :)

This is one of the coolest gadgets I have seen so far: digital sundials.

„In the true tradition of all sundials, the device is purely passive – it operates without electricity, and has no moving parts. Instead, the sunlight is cast through two cleverly designed masks in the shape of numbers that show the current time of day. The sundial is available in two versions, for use in either hemisphere. Placed on the inside of a south-facing window (north-facing in the southern hemisphere), the sundial can be read through the horizontal mirror. The display updates every 10 minutes, and gives a remarkably accurate record of the time during the daylight hours.“

Have a look at the videos. Simplicity to the max.

Recently it became known that there is a bug in one of Movable Type‘s scripts allowing spammers to use it as an e-mail gateway. The good news is that the cude people at Six Apart have already released a modified version of the script fixing that hole.

The bad news is, that they chose to replace the script in the release 2.64 of Movable Type. Why don‘t they increase the version number? I mean, that‘s what version numbers are for. When somebody reads about this bug later and just checks that the latest release (which fixes the bug) is 2.64 and he looks at his installation and sees it is 2.64 as well, why should he bother re-installing „the same“ stuff again? I‘d like to see

Cryptome has posted some photography of the DHL aircraft that got shot recently in the heavens of Bagdad. Quite fascinating that they managed to bring the machine down to the ground safe when I look at the damage the rockets caused.

Leo and Moophius are doing it in the Meatrix.

I am going to make an appearance at today‘s edition of Chaosradio which is a monthly show by Chaos Computer Club Berlin on a local radio station called Fritz.

Topic today is the Blogosphere and I am going to do the show with fellow bloggers Max and Jörg. Maybe interesting for those of you who understand german. The show starts at 2003-11-26T22:00+01:00 and can be received via the Internet as well.

My dear readers may remember my recent entry on Dylan. It might be worth noticing that I ambiguously stated that multiple dispatch was an invention of Dylan which it isn‘t. I was corrected by P. Tucker Withington, one of the authors of the great Dylan Programming book.

If you are interested in more on Dylan, you might want to have on the slides of a talk by Chris Page given on the SmartFriends™ U: Languages and Libraries conference last September. The slides are available in PDF and Keynote format.

Why are all these guys using a Macintosh? In the Blogosphere, you forget there even exists a Windows operating system. Well, does it exist?

Arrived in Dublin yesterday. It‘s my first time in Ireland and I am happy being here as I always wanted to know more about this place and get beyond the clichee of Guiness and Irish Pub culture. I am going to be here just for two days so I won‘t see much, but it is a welcome break for me from Berlin.

On the first sight, Dublin is similar to many british towns. Brick houses everywhere, double yellow lines going along the border of the streets, people drive on the left. But everything is much smaller. Almost no house is more than two storeys high, just a few taller buildings mark the financial district.

As I arrived, the streets are packed with cars. Dublin has a transport problem and I was told that public transport is one of the hot topics right now. A tram system is under construction but still years away. There is no underground, everything is run by buses and taxis.

Ireland was long a forgotten place with not much money and therefore the infrastructure was way behind. There was never an industrial revolution and the country moved from an agriculture to modern technology in a rush in the last 20 years. Today, computer manufacturers (among them: Apple) and tons of call centers have settled in Ireland making use of the lower costs for personal (aka „Human Resources“) compared to the rest of Europe.

So things have changed rapidly in the last years and Dublin is getting a major facelift as a consequence. The Docklands area, the old harbour, is attracting business and entertainment venues like it did in London in the 80ies. So Dublin is a bit behind other cities in that respect but has the advantage of a lot less legacy structures as well. Without doubt, Ireland has benefitted a lot from the European Union in that respect and is certainly closer to the „Continent“ than Britain will ever be.

Ireland is bilingual. Apart from English, there is Gaelic being spoken in certain areas of the country. All sings are bilingual as well, although in Dublin nothing but English can be heard. I was told that this changes fast once you move westwards.