Jens is currently successfully picking the cherries. He mentions a new weblog system called Syncato that is written in Python and uses Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML for its database. Even more important, Python is just the glue and most stuff is implemented with XPath and XSLT. Makes it a serious contender in the XML world and is a tempting approach to replace Movable Type.

The interesting approach is not to use XML-RPC or SOAP to provide access to weglog entries, but to provide standard HTTP-based web services. This means, you can use any HTTP compliant editor like OmniWeb to retrieve, edit and repost individual entries. The built-in advantage is that HTTP-based authentication is used along with all the nice amenities this can bring (using HTTPS, CERT-based authentication, system-level support).

Syncato‘s source code is available if you are interested to play around with it.

Uaah. VeriSign, a mafia-backed reseller of Internet-domains that once took over the Internet‘s Network Information Center and made money of it, has now started to hijack unregistered domains when accessed with a web browser. If you try to click a totallyunregistereddotcomdomain you get redirected to a VersiSign page stating that „They“ didn‘t find the domain, stating that „There is no Web site at this address.“.

Well, that‘s what error codes where made for. With this kind of (absolutely illegitimate) redirection, programs are no londer able to determine if a certain domain does have a legal DNS A record. This was helpful for spam detection among other thins. I hope public uproar will burn them to flames.

UPDATE: Slashdot knows more about this and provides links to implementation details.

The Camp was a hot place to be. It was the hottest week in Germany since recording of weather statistics started. So quite a lot of drinks have been consumed.

Looking at the statistics of what has been sold at the Camp, we now can name the clear winner of the drinking contest. No its not beer (alcohol isn‘t that popular on hacker event, if you ignore the OpenBSD crowd for a moment). It is – of course – ClubMate. This nice drink was even more popular than mineral water at the Camp.

This is no surprise as this drink is the CCC‘s favorite refreshment for a couple of years now. It is not as sweet as Coke and does not have as much coffeine as coffee and therefore is nerd‘s paradise in bottles.

Huh. Blinkenlights again. But this time it is the original stuff: the Corsair XMS Pro memory module are apparently the first to feature LEDs to show internal activity as you are used to from CPUs and disk drives. Pretty cool but this probably means you have to spend some extra money on a transparent PC chassis as well.

Hmm. This could have been mentioned earlier, but it got lost in the wilderness of the Camp. However, the last ICFP Programming Contest took place June 28th as has been correctly reported by Slashdot. Today, Slashdot gives an overview of the contest‘s results.

The task at hand was to build a a program steering a virtual car through a virtual race track. The program that was able to find the fastest route through a series of randomly created tracks won. The first and second place were written in C++.

However, there was a Judge‘s prize as well. It went to the team writing in Dylan. Instead of just finding an algorithm spitting out driving instructions for the problem at hand, they wrote a real simulator based on assumptions of the physics of the car and track.

Made my third appearance on the Fläming-Skate training course today. It is located around 60 km south of Berlin and features a perfectly tarmacced 94 km long track, usually three meters wide. Perfect for training. Today I raised the average speed to 23,8 km/h on my weekly 38 km long route. So I am making progress, which is necessary: only two weeks left. Next week I will spent some Euros on new wheels and bearings.

In Vienna I was introduced to a group called Assocreation. They have won an award of distinction at Ars Electronica Festival 2001 for their installation Bump.

Bump is a simple, but intriguing installation. Bump is basically a catwalk with a wooden floor. Below each plank, there is a sensor detecting when somebody steps on it. Also underneath: a pneumatic plunger that can push the board upwards. The clou: there are actuallly two catwalks, interconnected via the Internet. When a single board is stepped on on the first catwalk, the corresponding board in the second installation is pushed up, eventually synchronizing both catwalks.

If I could stay a bit longer, I would have a chance to test it myself: the group actually sets up Bump right now at Mariahilfer Straße 2. A second installation is about to be set up in Brighton next week and then the installation is about to come to life. It is going to run from Sept 18 to Oct 18, 2003. Maybe somebody in Vienna and/or Brighton might want to test it out and post a comment on how it feels. For everybody else, there is a video in QuickTime and MPEG-1 format

I am participating in a preparatory talk of the Quintessenz organization in their meeting room, which is part of the Electric Avenue nicely located at Quartier 21 of the Museumsquartier in Vienna. Around twenty people are sticking their heads together discussing action to be taken in order to get the next round of Big Brother Awards Austria up and running.

The awards are given to companies, organizations or individual who have „threatened personal privacy“ in one respect or another. The Big Brother Awards have been pioneered by Privacy International in Britain and the Austrian group introduced the concept in the german-speaking world. Germany and Switzerland followed up soon.

If you are interested in the BBA Austria, you might want to subscribe to q/depesche, the mailing list of Quintessenz, which is available via RSS as well, of course.

Berkeley DB has been the standard for low-profile and fast UNIX database needs for a long time. Development has continued all the way until today. For a couple of years, most of the work was done by Sleepycat Software while the product is still open source.

DB XML is an extension of the DB system bringing complete XML support to the database (using Xerces and Pathan for XML and XPath parsing). This opens the oppurtunity for applications to stop squeezing the hierarchical, flexible XML into arbitrary, developer-defined flat table structures and use the full power of XML. I strongly believe, that XML databases are soon to take off once the teething problems have been worked out and developer knowledge on critical technologies like XML and XPath has increased.

XPath is the query language of choice for accessing XML data with the new product. Unfortunately, the atom of Berkeley DB XML is a XML document and not a single XML element. This means, XML data can be added and replaced only as a complete set of nested elements, while retrieval (due to XPath) is possible on an element level.

While this solution adds a nice feature to the database system it is still not sufficient for a complete XML based solution as a full-grown application would need to update, insert and delete single elements, attributes or text nodes on demand on any node of the XML document. But I am not surprised as the necessary standards are not here yet. XPath 2.0 will be enhanced significantly in order to support an extended way of addressing data and will be the basis for XQuery 1.0 which is positioned to become the SQL of XML in the future. [via Notes From My Terminal]

IP traffic on AT&T‘s core network infrastructure already outnumbers traffic caused by plain old telephony system (POTS) by 8 to 1. This is the reason to invest another USD 3 billion in the coming years to convert the network to a complete Voice-Over-IP based network.