„A web log! An online diary! A way to connect with millions and millions of Internet users and share my life!“ Dork Tower gets the point.

I am using XSLT for some years now for doing all kinds of processing like importing and exporting databases, converting markup code and generating web pages. Because I was using almost all of XSLT‘s features and some important extensions of the standard EXSLT function set, I needed a conforming and feature-rich XSLT processor.

So my first choice always was Michael Kay‘s most excellent Saxon which not only covers the published standards completely, but is always a bit ahead of the pack. This comes as no surprise as Michael Kay is the maintainer of the upcoming XSLT 2.0 standard and has written a highly recommendable book on XSLT which unfortunately seems to be out of print as the publisher Wrox came into deep trouble recently and their fate is unclear to me.

However, Saxon is written in Java and therefore it is pretty slow. The good news is that the other XSLT processors have finally catched up with standards support and I have happily switched to the XSLT C Library of the GNOME project which is much faster and has good support for EXSLT, multiple output documents and some SAXON extensions (like explicit XHTML support). Well done, guys! This made my day.

Hooray for Zoidberg!

The first version (0.1) of the Camp Conference Schedule is out.

This includes a description of the lectures and speakers I have covered here recently: John Gilmore, Stephanie Wehner, Mathias Bröckers, Gerhard Wisnewski, Paul Wouters and Simon Budig.

According to a press release, Thyssen Krupp has added another elevator car to existing elevator shafts in a building of University of Stuttgart so that there are now two elevators in one. The technical descriptions leaves things open like how you can get from bottom to top without changing cars, but maybe this usually doesn‘t happen in this building anyway. Who knows.

Simon Budig has been a member of the Gimp development community and has already done a lot of talks on using and scripting the Gimp and he provides a long list of tutorials and other resources on the Gimp on his home page.

Simon prepares two talks for the Camp: one on using the Gimp and another on how to write plug-ins for the Gimp. With the imminent arrival of Gimp 2.0 at the Gimp Developers Conference at the Camp, his talk will surely provide some insight on recent developments in that area as well.

Axon, Barbwire, Dada, Elbo, Feedcast, Loki, Sygnal, Wyre and SIKUS seem to be the final candidate for the name of this new content syndication standard usually referred to by Echo or Atom. You can vote on the final name beginning August 1st. Bloggers are asked to link to the vote. So here you are.

nice site

Paul Wouters is a programmer and system administrator in the Netherlands with a strong Linux preference.

His obnoxious freedom of speech ideas has resulted in a close bond with Scientology lawyers, spammers, various organisations involved with Internet Tapping in the Netherlands and the Linux IPsec community. At HAL2001, under the watching eye of the Dutch secret police, he lead the wireless networking team. He is also involved in the OpenTap projects providing GPL‘ed solutions to the dutch tapping laws to prevent undetected leaking of information to third parties like Israel. Read Dutch tapping room not kosher on this issue. He also gave a talk on wiretapping at 18C3.

At the Camp Paul is doing talks on wiretapping („Wiretapping in Europe: Update“ together with Jaya Balloo – a sequel to a talk at 19C3, on the spam problem (see Paul‘s spam statistics) and he is co-talker to John Gilmore and Hugh Daniels on opportunistic encryption using DNSSEC.

Mathias Bröckers is a famous name in Germany for quite some time now. He was one of the more visible people driving the acceptance of hemp in Germany with the opening of stores selling hemp textiles and pushing German politics into allowing the growing of hemp as it was done one hundred years ago before the big marihuana paranoia was pushed by the alcohol industry.

Mathias has recently done some books on conspiracy theories and has also reported on the whole 9/11 snafu since day one, especially by writing a series of articles for Telepolis (the most excellent news source in Germany in my opinion). The latest production on this topic is the book „Fakten, Fälschungen und die unterdrückten Beweise des 11.9“ (facts, forgeries and suppressed evidence of 9/11)

Matthias Bröckers is going to do a talk on this issue („Operation September 11th: Analysing Virtual Reality“) at the Camp. He will be accompanied by Gerhard Wisnewski who is author of the book „9/11. Angriff auf den Globus“ (9/11. Globe Attack) on the same topic and who wrote another book on the relationship of politics and terrorism focusing on the german terrorism movement „Rote Armee Fraktion“ in the seventies.

Aha. The USA is having look at Germany again. This happens every now and then. Let‘s see. This time it‘s CNN reporting that according to a poll, one-third of Germans under age 30 believe the U.S. government may have sponsored the September 11, 2001.

The outcome is not a real surprise to me and I support the claim that this is due to the „widespread disbelief about the reasons given by the United States for going to war in Iraq and suspicion about media coverage of the conflict had fostered a climate in which conspiracy theories flourished.“

It was fascinating to see how the US managed to eat up all the support they got from Germany within months. While tons of people were on the streets after the attacks to support the USA the same ton of people turned their backs after they noticed that now the real threat is now residing in Washington, has no clue and does not care about what the rest of the world thinks.