It is more than ten years old but it still can be considered to be one of the funniest techie books: The UNIX Haters Handbook is mental relief for everybody who has suffered from the insanity of some of UNIX‘s underpinnings. However, don‘t take it too seriously but it is worth a read anyway.

The book was just brought back to my mind because of a stale link being reported on my home page. So I went and looked for an updated page on the book just to find out it has been released in PDF format for free (as in beer). Go get it!

The Strandbad Mitte café recently opened up their DSL line to visiting customers via WLAN. Hooray! I do not remember how long I have been waiting for this feature to arrive. Being able to do real net work and to order a coffee at any time is the quality in life I have been looking for all the time.

So here I am, reviewing my stuff, listening to a techie webcast in the background, chatting with a few friends and getting real work done. This is the kind of decadence I like.

I never understood why the cafés didn‘t get it: a DSL flatrate is so cheap and a WLAN access point doesn‘t cost much in addition. But for the customers this simple installation is a boon. And it is digging the grave for the commercial hotspots that try to sell you WLAN airtime for being „connected“ to the Internet.

Telecommunication companies are so stupid. First they thought WAP was a good idea. It wasn‘t. Then they thought UTMS would save their asses soon. Well, they spent by far too much money on it and won‘t make much money with it soon because they didn‘t know how people use the Internet. While they might appreciate big bandwidth there is something that is by far more valuable: being connected all the time, even with small bandwidth. So, GPRS could be a big winner as it provides just that on top of the well-established GSM networks. But high prices make people stay away.

So then they thought WLAN is the big winner and they hopped on to the bandwagon of the New Hype (TM). But it‘s going to kill them as WLAN is difficult to control and Free Café Internet will kill their revenues. Hope it does. Suckers.

Beeing a geek and blogger I am following the discussions around the evolving syndication standards quite closely without getting myself too much into debate. The RSS 1.0 vs. 2.0 war was already dirty enough.

For my own part, I can say I am clear supporter of the original vision of the Semantic Web and therefore RSS 1.0 was my choice as a syndication format. I see the added complexity of RDF-based feeds in comparison to the not well-defined RSS 2.0 approach that‘s based on simple XML but I think it is worth the price.

But I must admit that we are still too far away from the Semantic Web. The application of today is called Weblogs and while I was a bit sceptical regarding the upcoming Atom format I see the point more clearly now: Atom is about making Weblogs doing the right thing: expressive syndication, well-defined remote posting, retrieving, editing of weblog entries and maybe the format will prove to be extensible and flexible enough to incorporate Wikis as well (which I consider to be a bug win).

But nothing has made me more aware of the important role Atom might play in recent mumblings of Brent Simmons (author of NetNewsWire) and Nick Bradbury (author of FeedDemon). They both stress the point that upcoming versions of their programs will NOT accept any Atom feed that does not comply to the basic rules of XML: well-formedness.

Applause, applause: these guys are so right! The time has come to finally make use of the power of XML. Well-formedness (and it‘s big brother validation) are going to make the web a better place and while weblogs have pushed HTML and CSS standards big time already, this move will create even more awareness for XML‘s true power: being able to ensure structural data consistency. If only the web browser guys would follow the same path with XHTML 1.1 and 2.0.

If Atom will be pushed along like that it will have much more impact on me and the blogosphere than any revision of RSS could ever have. That doesn‘t mean I have lost faith in RDF, but RSS is just a small part of it‘s world and it‘s good there has been some time of basic thinking and testing by the weblog world. RDF will play it‘s role in the near future in areas where it excels: combining semantic data of various sources and create complex views of that data jungle. Atom will focus on weblogs (and similar systems) and das ist auch gut so.

English photographer J.D. Perkins has been a loyal visitor of our Blinkenlights installations in Berlin and Paris. He has now published a collection of photos of these events and some of the 20C3 as well.

Have you ever been in need of a map of the local metro of a city? Well, then The Subway Page is for you.

The blog editing client Kung-Log has been reborn under the name ecto. I am posting this using the recently released beta version. Looks like an improvement at first sight. Let‘s see how it turns out. I am bit afraid that the authors are planning a Windows version too. As Cocoa is not really cross-platform I wonder what this means for their code base.

This picture has just been passed over to me. The picture was taken by the russian photographer Victor Achlomov (Виктор Ахломов) in 1977 at Kalinin Prospect in 1977!. Actually the clip here just shows a part of picture. Here is the full photo which reveals that this is actually part of soviet propaganda showing a СССР (USSR) on four big buildings.

The photograph was just part on an exhibition called Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000 that took place at Martin-Gropius-Bau here in Berlin. Unfortunately, the exhibition just closed and I missed it.

This is one of the earliest demonstration of the Blinkenlights concept I know of. But I am aware there is another similar thing being done in GDR for on of their party conventions. Have to dig that out as well.

If anybody capable of reading russian might be able to look for this photograph in the russian web space — I would be more than happy to get a link.

Oh it‘s just one of these days on the river. And the tugboat is getting into trouble and back out of it again!.

Kuro5hin points us to results of experiments in the 50ies: a man draws 9 pictures after having taken LSD.

Never thought Apple would post anything but the original 1984 ad to commemorate the glorious anniversary of it‘s information purification device a.k.a. Macintosh

But the new version is digitally enhanced with the kids‘ new toy. Unbelievable. Look twice. Falk saw it first :)