You probably know that feeling: there is a party going on and the music is loud, the guests are shouting and maybe they are even pissing in your stairway. You need to bring the word out to regain your peace. You take out your broomstick and start knocking on the ceiling. This method worked for quite a long time.

In these digital days, new annoyances have come up. Your own web site has somehow joined your private space and when people start to beleaguer your digital infrastructure it‘s getting really complicated as your neighbour is no longer next door but can be basically everywhere on this planet.

Long time blogger Mark Pilgrim just had this problem. Somebody was sucking files like mad, causing load and cost showing a very rude form of misbehaviour. Time to take action. But what can he do?

He chose to publish all the information available about the suspect wielding the only broomstick available to him. What will happen next? He could care. Or he couldn‘t. Well, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn‘t and people start calling for new laws to be enforced or whatever.

We still have to develop our global digital social system.

The Girls of 64 are preserving the sexy side of the Commodore 64. Do you really think you are


mature enough to enter this site? Then go ahead.

Like so many, I started programming on a Commodore 64. This was an affordable, simple computer with cool graphics and – for that time – stunning sound (it had three independent synthesizer channels with programmable ADSR waveforms). I think I laid my hands on one in 1983 first and I bought my own machine in 1984.

The C64 made me a programmer. Although quite a lot of games were available for that machine, gaming didn‘t interest me that much (and this is still so). After having read Rodney Zaks‘s „Programming the 6502“ book I dived into the machine and I soon became quite capable with that little monster.

Back then, a group of journalists at Heise Verlag (now famous for c‘t magazine and the daily Heise Newsticker) started a cool project, called INPUT 64. It was actually a magazine on tape: the first interactive computer magazine ever and that way somehow a predecessor of the web today. All the software came on Tape (!) accompanied by a small booklet. INPUT 64 took off in 1985, changed to Floppy Disk in 1986 and lived until 1988.

As I lived in Hannover back then, I became aware of the project pretty soon and eventually became one of the programmers who contributed to the magazine‘s content. The staff chose my program DISC MON 1541 to be the program of the month. I was proud. And it was actually a quite useful program: you could interactively browse and change the memory of the peripheral disk drive in a pretty intuitive way.

Imagine my joy when I bumped into an archive of the INPUT 64 magazine today. And there it was: the disk image of the 08/1985 edition was there and contained the lost piece of software (you can run it using a C64 emulator like Frodo or Power64). Furthermore, me and my two programming buddies created the new introductory sequence that was included since 10/1986. And it is all on the web. The web is so cool.

Finally we contributed in another and final way: getting bored of the C64, we all turned to UNIX back then and we heavily evangelized UNIX in our neighbourhood. The editorial staff of INPUT 64 became addicted to UNIX as well and in the end INPUT 64 went away and the staff moved over to their next magazine: iX, a UNIX magazine, which still exists.

I didn‘t update my home page for a couple of years now. So I took a closer look and to my dismay, the HTML was old and ugly, the links were worn out and it didn‘t tell the whole story anyway.

So I spent some time updating both content and the underlying code. Now the web knows a bit more about me and the code complies to current XHTML and CSS standards. I guess this will make me sleep better now.

Because 2003 is 19 years too late!

War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. It seems, the only way to fight the idiotism out there is sarcasm. I agree.

For a long time the world was stuck into a non-topic: the „right browser“. If we may believe the news, there won‘t be any new Internet Explorer – for the Macintosh. Seems like Microsoft is just doing the right thing and is no longer polluting the Mac space with it‘s dirt.

But wait! Internet Explorer for the Mac wasn‘t that disgusting. Actually it worked a lot better than Netscape 4 which was a very dirty bastard. And it is still faster and much better integrated than Mozilla. And surprisingly it even had a much better standards support than its Windows counterpart (at least it was able to display transparent PNGs, which the Windows version still can‘t).

But I do not shed a tear now: Mac IE 5 is buggy as well and Microsoft is famous for not doing much on the feature front once the product has been released. Only security fixes have been released in response to or in fear of bad press. Now they are complaining that they couldn‘t integrate with OSX as much as Apple can. Huh, bad style! Didn‘t they deny that was the case with windows in the infamous IE/Netscape „war“? And what about OmniWeb? Their integration has been pretty fine so far…

The good thing now is: if MSIE will be gone on the Mac, web standards organizations and evangelists get new ammo. Safari is much better on web standards than Internet Explorer and Apple does not need Internet Explorer to survive. They have good browser now and in terms of usablity it is setting new standards. And the Mac space is crowded with good browsers these days: Camino, Mozilla, FireBird and wKiosk all share the Gecko foundation. Safari and OmniWeb base on KHTML.

Of course, the Mac still represents 3% of the overall market. But it is certainly still the platform of choice for designers, creatives and other pros. No IE on the Mac: probably the most promising news since Mozilla 1.0.

I am going to attend Hackmeeting 2003 next week. It is about to take place in Torino, Italy on the weekend of June 20th to 22nd. It is going to be my first Hackmeeting although this is already number six in a row. Hackmeeting is supposedly pretty popular: a couple of thousand hackers attend and it is a real grass-roots initiative. I am really looking forward being there.

I am going to do a talk on – you guessed it – Project Blinkenlights. Apart from the usual buzz I am going to focus much more on the underlying technology and all the other nerdy details. The talk is scheduled to be on Friday, June 20th, 2003 at 22:00h.

I will also show the documentary „Codes – Makers And Breakers“ by Jannik Splidsboel (originally presented at 18C3) which was done two years ago and shows some coverage of the Hackmeeting 2001 in Catania as well as HAL 2001.

Kung-Log is another useful tool for Mac OS X like NetNewsWire. It allows offline creation of Weblog entries and has options for basically everything you need to support Movable Type weblogs (like this one). It actually has one extra feature, NetNewsWire is missing: you can upload files (like images) as well. That way, you don‘t have to go to the web based admin interface at all.

There is just no better introduction to Discordianism than the one given in the fifth edition of the Principia Discordia: „if organized religion is the opium of the masses then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe…“: read it.

MacOSXHints – a really, really useful site, describes another way for circumventing the iTunes 4.01 sharing limitation. This time it involves Rendezvous Beacon of Chaotic Software which is a handy small tool by itself.

Chaotic Software is the producer of quite a lot useful tools which I have been using now and then, especially MP3 Rage and Web Devil (until OSX gave me curl and wget, of course).