Freitag ist zwar schon vorbei. Trotzdem zum Wochenausklang was Lustiges.

Ralf König: Der Gesetzgeber

Yesterday I posted something about the different perception of the Office 2007 user interface. A few months ago I stumbled about a presentation Jensen Harris from Microsoft gave at Mix’08 about how the Office 2007 “Ribbon” came to be. If you have 75 minutes and are interested why the ribbon is like it is, view it. Jensen’s blog entry has some additional links which are worth a look, too.

Yesterday evening a few colleagues and I went to a pub for some beer . We couldn’t completely keep our work out and for a few minutes had a discussion about the current Microsoft Office user interface. One colleague mentioned that he needed about an hour including reading the online help to find the function to paste something from the clipboard into Word as plain text, i.e. to get rid of the formatting. First I thought he was kidding me, but he was serious. If you start Word, the ribbon looks like this:

We all know that magazine covers or advertisements are retouched. This week’s issue of c’t has an article about the small ridge between photo enhancement and manipulation. It contained a link to this website:

www.glennferon.com

Glenn is a Photoshop genius. Look at the portfolio on his website. When you hover the mouse over an image you’ll see the original before retouching. I spent the last half hour clicking through his images and comparing original with the “enhanced” versions.

Microsoft is still the worlds richest company with around 23 billion dollars in its valet. But Apple might soon catch up. Apple now have a 20.8 billion dollar in cash and is adding a nice one billion dollars to it every quarter at the moment.

Apple has apparently included a blacklisting mechanism in iPhone OS 2.x via which the device can phone home, check for unauthorized applications, and disable them.

Why use expensive debuggers or anti-virus software. Diagnosing PC problems is so much easier:

It’s Friday, therefore something funny. In a TV spot presidential candidate John McCain states that Barack Obama is just a celebrity like Paris Hilton and not fit to lead. Paris Hilton responded:

Have a nice weekend.

The Olympic swim centre in Beijing has been constructed with foam bubbles in mind.

The result is so strong, the engineers say, that the entire building could be turned on its side without collapsing. Furthermore, the remarkable effect is that they’ve designed a building without triangles.

Spectacular.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/34283/description/A_building_of_bubbles

Morton wrote two blog entries related to the 8th of August. Most 08.08 related posts today will probably be about the Olympics in Beijing. I won’t talk about that. Here are two notable examples what happened on August 8 in the past:

In 1952 Jostein Gaarder was born. He’s well-known for Sophie’s World, A Novel about the History of Philosophy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1902 Paul Dirac was born. He was not only a famous theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1933 together with Erwin Schrödinger, but...

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Thomas Edison receives a patent for the mimeograph. It will dominate the world of small-press-run publication for a century.

The mimeograph machine (commonly abbreviated to mimeo) or stencil duplicator, along with spirit duplicators and hectographs were for many decades used to print short-run office work, classroom materials, and church bulletins. These technologies began to be supplanted by photocopying in the 1960s, although in mid-range quantities, mimeographs are still more economical than photocopiers. Photocopying and cheap offset printing have replaced mimeography almost entirely in developed countries. But...

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This is the time when all the Olympic spirit will ignite in peaceful glory in China. 8 years in the planning, 40 billion dollars spent, and 8 is a Chinese lucky number.

The last moths I have been using a free WEB meeting service called DimDim. This is a great tool with a price/performance ratio hard to beat.

Heute abend (5.8.) läuft im Ersten ein Dokumentarfilm, den ich 2005 im Kino gesehen habe und dessen Bilder ich auch heute noch erinnere:

We Feed The World

I’m wondering when the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) will issue a travel warning for the United States. It seems to be necessary. You may not only loose all your electronic devices, but you may end up in jail without charges or legal recourse.

Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.

(Link found here).

On this year’s Black Hat security conference a public discussion was planned with Apple’s security engineering team. Apple is been criticized by the security community for their secrecy. What a great opportunity would that have been to show how they take security seriously. But that discussion will not take place.

Finally. I completed my income tax return. Theoretically it’s possible to do that online without any paper involved. Earlier that year I requested a software certificate for that.

… or use proper encryption when you visit the United States. Reason: The U.S. government can take it at the border, whenever they want, keep it as long they want and share the information with anyone they want.

Next month E.S.T’s last album Leucocyte will be released. I’ve already ordered it, of course

They finished it a few days before the tragic accident. Release had been stopped by the two remaining band members. But today I got an email newsletter confirming the upcoming worldwide release to be September...

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