Barnhard Blog

Relax, one of my favourites..

Ah, phone hacking, yet another way.
Best tip: turn off when not using it ? Other Scams.

Update: ‘bluejacking’ of ‘bluehacking’ of ‘bluesnarfing’ ?

Normally we hear the opposite, but as it seems with the start of the year not Wikipedia has been banned but a country BY wikipedia. Huh?
 
Update:
More bad news: Wikipedia also seems to contain many members who discriminate, without knowledge and reason, against Blogs and people.

Funny how they make it a bit interactive.

Oh no, not the network, run forest!

Lets vote for the best web 2.0 site. Voting is very simpel, social bookmarking too.

There’s an annoying trend among many to assume that patents are a proxy for innovation. In fact, this leads to the false assertion that more patents or more patent applications somehow means more innovation. However, as we’ve obviously seen, the reverse can often be true.

More in this article of techdirt.

Notice something in this youtube clip? Yup they are talking in feet here and feet there, instead of meters. Well the good news is that if NASA does reach the Moon next time, they will be talking in Meters. Finally.
 

I noticed that Flatpress is in development.

FlatPress is in early development and NOT a full alternative to WordPress. It uses fewer server resources, works without interaction with a MySQL database. FlatPress works by storing post data in text files called “flat files”. The FlatPress site admits that this isn’t the best way to blog as “flat files are painfully SLOW”. Also it lacks the ability to use WordPress Themes and most WordPress Plugins, so it is not a WordPress version for everyone.

Sounds a bit like Pivot, from which experience I expect Flatpress to work fine for small sites. While I’m excited that so many clones (Lyceum, K2, WP MU) are developed I silently hope they do try to develop really simpel ,”one button press” tools to switch between them. Not only would that save developers of each group time for improvements but also users would gain value of all clone efforts.

Great development.

A nice 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements. (via)

Masses online operate as expected according to the long tail principle. More information.

The video images of the Apollo flights that made it to live public television were of degraded quality. While the engineers noticed it at the time they saw the public didn’t care initially. They then assumed picking up the better quality original raw data that was succesfully stored in Australia, before it got badly relayed to the US. With the recent Moon plans coming up and dying worksmen of the time looking up the tapes, the originals now seem to have gone missing.

Some of his sources recalled sending 14-inch magnetic reels to a storage area in a building called Goddard Corporate Park. Wood soon discovered that storage facility had been closed for years. “Nearly all the stuff that was there was destroyed,” he says. Then he hesitates. “I need to be careful here. Would you cross out the word destroyed?” It was also possible that the tapes were “degaussed” – erased so they could be used again, a fairly standard practice at the time. In short, no one knows what became of these priceless minutes of historic footage.

While the search hasn’t stopped yet, the current status isn’t good. Read the longer story at Wired’s One Giant Screwup for Mankind.

While Sealand is for sale now, apparently PirateBay seems to want their Pirate Nest.
Update: $ 13,000 collected sofar
Interesting stuff: Sealand wrecked by fire, Pictures onboard the building
See also: HavenCo on Sealand

Update: Turns out to be hoax .

The Doomsday Clock (see “o” in magazine) has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to nuclear weapons and other threats.
 
 
The scienctists now consider moving the clock closer to midnight.
 
 
 
 
 

Without snow and no snow falling I thought my last ski holiday would have been doomed.
However snow-machines and stored pools of water, even without snow falling, opened more slopes every day from the moment of arrival. As if nature wasn’t needed and we shouldn’t need to worry about global warming.

Okay with only machine snow we could just as well head for Dubai, but recent reports from the OECD does suggest even machines won’t do the trick for ski slopes in Europe with expected temperature rises.

The report, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, will predict the disappearance of 75 per cent of Alpine glaciers within 45 years, a surge in avalanches and floods and the closure of all but the highest ski resorts.

There is no mention of an exact number of total resorts in danger but this graph gives a count per area. More media coverage is here.

Drupal, a Blog CMS like Wordpress has released after 8 months, on its 6th birthday, Drupal 5.0.

Drupal in general differs to some extend with Wordpress because its constructed from a full CMS rather than a specialized blog CMS.
 
An often heared complaint of Drupal is that its too complex and takes long to get running. While I haven’t tried out the newest version of Drupal yet, from their “what’s new” vlog (mp4) I understand it now has an installer (the quick start), a new default theme “Garland” (which look much better) and improved theme management. When I compare the vlog with the update vlog of 4.7, we can conclude that Drupal definitely has improved, which is great.

While each CMS remains to have their own advantages and disadvantages, I’m happy to see that overall feature competition among Blog CMS is picking up.

Explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer extraordinaire.
Chronology his life, glimpse of his photos and radio report (real player) about him (6min).
Bradford Wasburn, named one of the last great explorers, even at an age of almost 90 he still was busy trying to correct the right height of the Mount Everest. Besides the adventures, telling them and showing them as Director of the Boston Museum of Science was an equal love of him.

Washburn took some 15,000 pictures with negatives so large that the prints can be enlarged to landscapes themselves. He showed me one such print, of Mount Blanc in the Alps, in 1986. He suggested I climb the mountain for a story that celebrated the first ascent by Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat 200 years earlier. Then with a wax pencil, he drew the climbers’ route directly on the gorgeous print that he gave me. [Boston Globe]

He nicely point out that a small reorganisation or “non-hieracy on paper” still keeps fears of a monopoly running.

However, AT&T lacks the vertical integration it once had, which had been the reason for the anti-trust suits that led to the 1984 breakup. Wikipedia footnote

But then again, other global players aren’t small either and rising?

Update:
Since the story gets deleted every time, here’s the final picture:

In the EU we voted NO against the constitution and there is little energy spend in discussing it any further. Even although we have to make a decision wether we will accept one eventually or not.
How different then is the interest and discussion regarding the constitution on the other side of the Atlantic!

Disputes over the federal constitution have been intense there for years, especially recently when the president was asked to defend the Bill of Rights, Guantanamo and wiretapping.

I understand that the US constitution has actively been used for hunderds of years, under a different party system, which doesn’t make it fully comparable with the proposed EU constitution. However problems with habeas corpus exist with the proposed EU constitution too [a counter-argument].

Also the No-voters of the EU constitution demanded that the European Parlement should have the right to propose laws, just like the US house of Representatives . For the record, the proposed EU constitution doesn’t offer this. However isn’t this working towards a federal EU? The development of the EU chairman into a president for that matter would similarly provide new “trias-politica” conflicts.

I think it would be a good thing if the EU constitution discussion would reach the news a bit more often.
Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.
[Full article at physorg & via ]

Optical storage is by many scientists seen as the futures way to store more information. Since other recent developments in the optical field , these new developments show the storage field hasn’t slowed innovation speed.

The votes have been counted.

Friday the 23 March 2007 will the awards be handed out in Antwerpen, Belgium.

The awards site has opened an enrolement form which you can fill in if you like to come.
 

Download the upgrade here. (more about Ella)

So, for the first time in WordPress’ history, I have an answer to when the next version is coming out: April 23rd. Even better, the development will be driven primarily by the features you guys are voting for on the ideas board. (But wait, there’s more: the ideas board now has a new Hot-or-Not-like interface for rating a bunch of ideas at once, so go get your vote on and have a say in WordPress 2.2.)

Update:
Our contribution so far to the Ideas section: Event Calendar standard in Admin and Post section