RaSchi’s Valhalla

Intel Research has published about Intel Mash Maker Technology Preview, a Firefox add-on which is supposed to make mash-up development a point-and-click process. Unfortunately it’s preview only and only for a limited audience. That means you can sign-up and you enter the waiting list. If you watch these videos, you’ll most likely be as impressed […]

The American Civil Liberties Union has installed a countdown labeled the Surveillance Society Clock. It is six minutes to noon.
The timer is supposed to alert the public to the increasing trend towards a surveillance society. The initiative imitates a similar countdown which was set up by nuclear scientists after the WWII and which was supposed […]

In his blog on ZDNet.com, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a report about a stealthy Windows Update. And apparently Mircrosoft has responded to his inquiry and confirmed. Despite the fact that the Automatic Updates service is set to not download or even install updates automatically, the updater does still download and install updates for the Automatic Updates […]

Well, it’s not that long ago that I upgraded my Wordpress installation to 2.2.2, with which I had some trouble due to a larger gap between the former installed release and the upgrade and also due to a non-restorable backup. Now Wordpress 2.2.3 was released today and I figured that it may be a good […]

Reading my c’t (admittedly still with some vacation backlog) I stumbled upon this link to “Sprachnudel” - a German slang dictionary - wikistyle. It’s a dictionary of German slang expressions, of course built by the community, featuring the nowadays standard features such as tagging (incl. tag cloud), RSS feed, etc. The “random word” button seems […]

Slashdot has a report on mandatory Keyloggers in Mumbai’s Cyber Cafes. I thought in cyber cafes keyloggers are in the default configuration anyway.

German VoIP provider SipGate announced an open API to their VoIP service. The API is based on XML-RPC, the HTTP connections are secured using SSL/TLS. They have some Perl examples on their website, there’s a .NET SDK and a Firefox extension as well. Now, it would be interesting to look a little further into it […]

Cisco seems to have announced to bring it’s telepresence equipment to the consumer market (says computerwoche.de. Their current enterprise solution with three big screens, high-end audio, etc. is at about 300k$. A lower priced edition with only one big screen is available at 80k$. Now they plan to release an edition which will use […]

Well, well, well… It’s been a while since I last posted here and I had planned on getting back to blogging for a while already. Now, after coming back from vacation, I thought this might actually be a good time to do so. However, during my vacation my database ran over quota and everything here […]