Kuro5hin has a nice review of a first look at the circulating Windows source code.

für Harald & Erhard Fotografie is a team of two skilled and creative young photographers that have documented quite a lot of our recent projects (most important: the Camp, Blinkenlights and Arcade). Their new web site has just been opened. There is a special Blinkenlights selection on their site.

It took a while before I understood the simplicity and power of del.icio.us.

The system is described as…

…a social bookmarks manager. Using simple bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them.

So what does that mean? Basically, del.icio.us is a bookmark database and you can create your personal account allowing to place bookmarks in it as you go. This is done by a simple bookmarklet that posts your current URL to the site, allowing you to add more meta data before you finally store it with a second click. This is fast. And it‘s powerful, as many other people use the service in parallel and quite often it happens that your browsing habits match that of others eventually placing the same bookmark in the database at the same time (day). Another page puts together the most popular links of the last day.

The main index – of course syndicated via RSS – now puts together a list of all dropped bookmarks, aggregating those links that have been submitted by more than one party. As each bookmark can be attributed by one or more „tags“, you can also search for hot links by category. All this comes in fast-loading, slim XHTML.

So you can both enjoy an evaluated list of bookmarks submitted in real time and have your own personal blog with zero effort. Have a look at my personal del.icio.us page to follow me surfing the web.

This is true weblogging and an interesting application of the „social“ type. A couple of hacks contributed by third parties show even more potential (e.g. integrating del.icio.us in you Movable Type blog etc.). The functionality of the site if also exposed via a simple REST API allowing for web applications to easily read and write to the database using standard HTTP methods with basic authentication.

Sushu has set up a site for her freequent traveller interactive hammock installation you might have seen at the last Congress. There is a small trailer video and photographs of the 20C3 setup as well.

Hmm. I missed that one, but two weeks ago the Jabber instant messaging protocol has become an official IETF standard known under the name XMPP.

It is an easy prediction to foresee that XMPP is going to be the upcoming Internet standard in instant messaging and other real-time data delivery protocols. I think the XML-based protocol can serve text and rich media chats, real-time key signing and exchange for personal encryption and many many other applications.

The only door-stopper so far is the lack of enough stable implementations – the client situation on the Mac is a very drastic example. There is barely nothing really usuable available. Yes, I know, there is Fire and a bunch of other Jabber-only clients but if you worked with iChat you will never go back to their prehistoric user interfaces. Eventually this will change soon as iChat already uses the Jabber protocol when doing Rendezvous chatting.

This tutorial on character code issues explains character encoding and elaborates on common problems with it.

Nobody will disagree, the Wikis, Weblogs and Mailing Lists are all very effective communication methods to make a loose group of people to work on a common topic. It‘s just pretty difficult to choose the right tool for the right operation as all have strength and weaknesses.

In a talk a ETCON 2004, Sam Ruby has given a review of lessons learned in the open development process of Atom and makes some very helpful comments and statements. I generally agree with his conclusions, like these:

• Use Wikis as common workspaces.  Polls, and any discussions where there is a desire to „sign“ ones name should be done on mailing lists.
• Mailing lists should be used for new discussions.  Revisiting and revising should be done on a wiki.
• Weblogs for summaries, progress reports, and to highlight areas of current focus

Andreas reports of his funny encounter with one of Jehova‘s witnesses which once more reminds me on the base line of Discordianism which gave name to this tiny website:

If organized religion is the opium of the masses than disorganized religion is the marijuana of the Lunatic Fringe.

He also provided a link to an interesting web site for atheists: The Skeptic‘s Annotated Bible.

The teenage mutant ninja hero coders describe a way of faking already existing Orkut accounts by having them removed first by sending forged emails. I have no idea why Orkut chose to make removal moderated (via email!) at all as the security problems are obvious. Some people already described that their account hasn‘t been removed on request as well so this is getting really annoying.

Well, I think that overall trust in the system is going to change rapidly if these things eon‘t be addressed. Once some alpha geeks turn their back on the system, outrage is going to destroy a significant user base that might be important to keep the network alive.

Also, the more careful geeks still do not want to have anything to do with Orkut and Orku-like system at all (which I can understand) but it‘s still interesting testing this rather new way of communication. Once the buzz is over, only a well thought-out security and trust system will work.

I was never really aware that this is, like, a real curse, y‘know? I mean, when I heard it the first time I was like „Woot! What‘s that?“. And now grammar critics are annoyed at word‘s staying power.

And then I was like „where does it come from“? Frank Zappa!

And I always thought that fuck (aka f*ck to Americans) was the real language virus. Guess I was wrong, eh? Like, totally!