A big grocery store chain in Germany offers a fingerprint system for easy payment in some of its stores. You register your fingerprint and instead of using cash or your credit card you indentify by pressing one of your fingers on a fingerprint-reader which matches it to the previously registered one

Earlier this week a german TV magazine showed with help of the CCC how easy it is to trick the system with a fingerprint copied from a cup or glass. That's not surprising. It has been shown numerous times in the past how easy it is to crack most of these systems.

Most astonishing was the answer from the grocery store chain. They don't see any need to act on this finding. The system is approved for use in united states government agencies and is being used by about 200 million persons. The manufacturer of the system claimed that his system is the most...

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After my vacation is over and my evenings and weekends are fully booked my hoster finished setting up the root server for Swyx Forum. Setting up DotNetNuke (incl. database) is up to me, but this will take some time now

Actually there was a reason why I ordered the server one week before my two-weeks vacation...

Anyway, there is a light at the end of the tunnel now

Yesterday I found myself in a time machine boosting me back in time into the year 1991. It was the year where I had to do my 12 month military service at the german navy. I was sonar operator on a so called mine hunter. We searched see mines (ground mines) by using sonar and then used a small remote controlled submarine to dop a bomb directly beside the mine to simply destroy it. In 1990 Sadam Hussein invaded Kuwait and dropped hundreds of mines into the persian gulf as a barrier to make sure no military vessel or oil tanker was able to approach Kuwait. A number of NATO countries as also germany sent their mine seachers / hunters down into the gulf to get rid of these mines. During this time I was stationed on the MHC Koblenz (M1071). So, that was the time where a saw quite a lot from the world ;-) A few years after my military service the german navy replaced to old mine hunter fleet we were stationed on by new high-tech vessels.

One of the ships (MHC Weilheim (M1077))  was handed over...

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Today I had an interesting morning. Out local university holds monthly lectures called "Modern Physics for everybody". It's for everybody [sic!], i.e. you do not need a physics degree to follow. Today's lecture was about H2O, water. Seems like a rather boring topic, but it was the opposite. The lecturer was the head of the computational chemistry group which uses computer simulations to study structure and dynamics of liquid molecules. He showed some nice visualizations of their simulations. He could only scratch the surface of the topic, of course, but it was fascinating, nevertheless

After that there was a chance to visit DELTA, the Centre for Synchrotron Radiation and to get a look at their electron accelerator. "The plaything of the Physics department's Dean" as it had been jokingly called during the lecture  (The dean made the introduction to the lecture and was there when his "plaything"...

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Randall has just started his new project Swyx WebCDR.

It is a web based CDR (Call Detail Record) tool. Please take a look onto the project pages for more details.

The current version is written in PHP (Apache Webserver) but we are also looking to provide an ASP (Microsoft IIS Webserver) version. So, if your are willing to help on this, feel free to join the team !

At last the first step to take swyx-forum to the next level is completed. During the last months the site has become a huge success. A lot of Swyx users and entusiasts have visited the community and quite a lot have registered and used the forum as well.

So after establishing itself as *the* independent place on the Net for Swyx resources, we want to step up and take it to the next level. So what will the next level be? We want to extend the site with a review section. At the moment we will use the Wiki, and the first review is published now. It takes some time to write a good review, and since all of us have full time jobs and none of us is reporters, we have to test and try the format a little bit.

Anyway, we are quite confident that reviews in general and Swyx related reviews will make the site an even greater resource for Swyx related information.

So, if you have the possibility, please feel free to write your own tech-review and post it in the Wiki. We will also very much welcome any...

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Today heise reports that Apple's newest MacOS version "Leopard" contains a security hole which had already been fixed over a year ago in an older MacOS version.

First the firewall with holes big as barn doors, now this. Apple says they take security seriously. But it does not look like they're following a defined, stringent secure development process.

It will be interesting to see how Apple will react in the next months and compare that with Microsoft's reaction to the same problem a few years ago.

Ok, Morten has promised that I will write about my norwegian experiances, so here they are. At least in terms of "having a traditional norwegian dinner".

Friday night we went out to a quite nice fish restaurant in the newly build shopping and restaurant area Aker Brygge in down town Oslo, directly at the harbour. The name of the restaurant was "Lofoten" which clearly indicated that we were not going to get some nice english style steak (if you don't know about the Lofoten you should read about them here).

As I already promised weeks before to give taditional food a try the waiter didn't provided me with a menu. In fact most of us (we were nine people at all) skipped the part with the menu, except Morten and his wife, the other Morten and Thomas. The fact that both Mortens as real norwegians were not going for the traditional fish should have worried me... Well, to be honest, it did, at least a little bit.

As a starter we got something that is called "rakefisk". Stop, that's not true...

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I missed my friday blog entry, but since Tom wrote his from the office next to mine I made that count for the both of us

As Tom has reffered to already he is on a visit in Oslo, so we have been working closely for the last couple of days. Tom is our official Hitchhiker, so we just had to add some entries into his Guide. I guess he will write about it later, if he is not too traumatized.

The entries will be rakefisk, lutefisk and multekrem... These are all traditional Norwegian dishes, and Tom had the oppurtunity to try these, and I can tell you that they are not 'mostly harmless'. If you ever been to Norway, you might have tasted the brown cheese that we are so proud of. If we can do that with cheese, just imagine what we can do to fish

I must be honest to you, Tom tried it and that makes him quite brave, I live here and never tasted it. That food is the reason it just took a second for the Norwegians to welcome pizza and hamburgers when we discovered that they existed.

...

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The weekend is close and therefore it's time for something to smile about

Being David Copperfield isn't that difficult as it seems. Everyone can do such magic things. You, me, eveyone !!!

See for yourself !

I missed it in cinema, but viewed it on DVD today: "The Last King Of Scotland", the movie which got Forest Whitaker an academy award for best actor. He was impressive in "Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai" (1999, Jim Jarmush). But his representation of Idi Amin in "The Last King Of Scotland" is just amazing. Now I'm a little disappointed that I didn't see it on the big movie screen.

Over the last two weeks the down times of Swyx Forum have increased as you might have noticed. Unfortunately it always takes some time to get it up and running again as I do not have direct remote access to the machine to restart the webserver by my own but instead need to ask my hoster to do so.

The reason for these downtimes is, that the web framework Swyx Forum is using (DotNetNuke) is somewhat unstable in virtual environments, which is in fact a problem of asp.net, the web layer of Windows itself. After updating to the new forum version the downtimes have increased dramatically. Obviously this version touches unstable functions of DotNetNuke / asp.net more often than the old one.

But, good new is, HELP IS ON THE WAY !

Swyx Forum will definately move to it's own server machine which brings two major advantages:

more stable environment direct remote access for me and Morten (to be able to react faster on any kind of problem) Further advantages will be of course

...

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Today Astrid Lindgren would have been 100 years old. As many others I grew up with her stories about Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Langstrumpf in German), Karlsson-on-the-roof (Karlsson vom Dach), Emil of maple hills (Emil Michel aus Lönneberga), The Brothers Lionheart (Brüder Löwenherz), Ronja the Robber's Daugther (Ronka Räubertochter) and many, many more.

I've read a lot of books during my childhood, but Astrid Lindgren's were by far the best.

Happy Birthday!

Usually the following chain reaction is not possible in online stores, but you never know...

http://producten.hema.nl

"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!"

That's the title of a set of books, written by Richard P. Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of our century. Not only was he brilliant in his profession, theoretical physics (which won him the nobel prize), he was also a remarkable lecturer, story teller and finally also bongo player. He died in 1988.

His lectures where crowded with students, everyone wanted to learn from him. He had the ability to explain the most complex relations in simple words giving even "outsiders" of physics a chance to understand what's going on.

His "Feynman Lectures on Physics"  (three volume books on the basics on physics) are still the most popular books for students.

Last year I was happy finding an audio cd collection containing original recordings of his lectures from 1961-63. I was even more happy realizing I was able to follow his explanations

...

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For all us hardcore Swyxers, christmas is coming early this year. In the end of November the next generation of SwyxWare, version 6.10, is scheduled for release.

At the moment a lot of us is busy with running the beta of 6.10. And I want to give you all a short summary of the experience so far.

The major improvements in this version are.

The possibility to use a remote SQL Server, 2005 Express or the real thing SQL Server 2005. All the user and systems files (with the exeption of recordings) will now be stored in the database and not in the file system. SwyxIt! is no longer bound to a Windows User Account. DCOM is not longer used, so a pure Swyx login can be used. If you want to, Window authentication may still be used. Mobile Extension Manager. This new server component adds the possibility of a new kind of parallell call to an external device. A review of this feature will be published later. Swyx SIP phone; S315. Swyx will release an entry level SIP-based phone with...

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Snowball is a medium sulphur crested Eleanora cockatoo and he loves to dance and sing.

He loves the Back Street Boys. No one taught Snowball to dance... he just heard this song and suddenly felt like dancing. When he's really in the mood, he dances and sings.

And at the end of the performance he takes a bow or two or twenty !!

But see for yourself:

http://birdloversonly.blogspot.com/2007/09/may-i-have-this-dance.html

After Sebastian started his new project Swyx IM on his own pages, the Swyx Forum project pages are availalbe now as well.

Swyx Forum provides community services for the project, mainly the forums. For downloads and issue reporting you will be diverted to Sebastian's own page automatically.

Please let me thank Sebastian for all his efforts (and lots of spare time) he spends on his projects, SwyxIt! Gadget and now Swyx IM as well. I know how busy he is already with his daily job ...

So, if you feel like "wow, that's cool, what can I do to support this project (or others)" don't hesitate to get in touch with us. The more people we have in our project teams the more work can be done and the better the projects will become

Yesterday Google announced the "Open Handset alliance", which is supposed to offer an open-source mobile phone operating system. Until now they have nothing to show but announcements of a lot of big companies building these alliance. They claim that first phones will be available in second half of 2008.

I doubt that provider such as T-Mobile will allow that platform to be completely open. They have to ensure that such phones interact properly with their mobile network infrastructure and they probably won't allow arbitrary modifications of core parts of the phone.

But the really frightening part is this:

All applications are created equal Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services. With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to...

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Well, I would've liked to wait until friday with this one. But in the blastingly fast mediaworld of the Internet, it would probably have been seen by everyone at that time. It has been on YouTube for more than a week now

But this is too good to be missed; Top Gear, the BBC motor show, arranged a race between a car and a jet-fighter. Why? Because they could!

Watch it here: Bugatti Veyron vs Eurofighter Typhoon

Last week during my vacation I refurbished my kitchen a little bit to make room for a dishwasher. I choose a new one offered on eBay as "buy it now" by a small family business located in southern Germany. Shortly after placing the order I got a call from the seller, who wanted to confirm the purchase and to make sure that I had choosen the correct dishwasher, because I choose a fully integrated one which needs a wooden front matching the rest of the furniture. That obviously needs a little more effort to install and he simply want to make sure that I was aware of that. Someone seemed to care about their customers. I really like that. It's not the typical experience you have with retailers in Germany.

I choose express delivery for an extra 30€ to get the machine the next day. When it didn't arrive during the promised 24 hours I called the seller. They couldn't do much except complaining at the shipping company. In the...

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