Another chapter in the long American H1-B dispute. A so-called shortage of software developers that has to be countered with foreign workers who would also work more for less money. All accompanied by less and less computer science students. Nothing new on the Western front. (Source)

Well-known applications like Google Earth and Virtual Earth not only give you the possibility to hover above earth but to discover some cities by switching on a three-dimensional view thus giving you a hint of the city's appearance. I sometimes wish that it would be possible to visit historical sites as well. The Rome Reborn Project makes this possible with a 3D model of the eternal city. Now there's a new approach by Frank Dellaert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, together with his colleague Grant Schindler and Sing Bing Kang of Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington. Their software constructs an animated 3D model that shows the change of a city over the years.
Coming from old photographs of the site, the 4D cities software automatically arranges these photographs according to their common features until the visibility patterns of all the buildings are consistent. It then computes a 3D animation of the city, allowing a visitor to travel through time. (Source)

PennState's statement on the importance of brands in the search engine market. Users clearly preferred their favourite search engines, even when the results show exactly the same hits. Researchers presented faked result pages of various search engines on some given search terms to test persons and asked them to evaluate the quality of the hit list. Despite the exact results, participants of the study decided that Google and Yahoo outperformed all other search engines. Branding is being tied not just to product identification but also to product performance, says Jim Jansen, assistant professor and lead researcher. So newcomers, beware! (Source)

Paul Murphy's readable entry about the security context in the computer language discussion and why one language is not inherently more insecure than another. Except PHP, of course :-)

Last month, German parliament tightened computer crime laws, including §202c StGB, which says (translation by Phenoelit, thanks):

Whoever prepares a crime according to §202a or §202b and who creates, obtains or provides access to, sells, yields, distributes or otherwise allows access to

• passwords or other access codes, that allow access to data or


• computer programs whose aim is to commit a crime

will be punished with up to one year jail or a fine.
Additionally, this new section is interwoven with other laws, including the ones covering terrorism. The current interpretation includes the acceptance of others committing a crime using your (or our) material as violation of §202c.

This law passed our Bundesrat (or representative organ of the 16 German federal states) and will come into force in a few weeks despite several warnings from IT experts.

Oh thank you, politicians! I'm curious when prosecutors start sueing scientists and administrators for using and exploring bad, bad hacker tools. All this for fighting terror, of course! (To probe further, see Dunning-Kruger effect.)

Addressed by a young guy in his holiday job, trying to pursuade me to sign in for a newspaper subscription.
"Print is dead." I hurled at him, in a good temper.
He didn't understand. Gee, sometimes it's difficult to be the angry old man.

1. American lawmakers advise DHS to spend more money on cybersecurity. “I will get you the national strategy by the end of the fiscal year,” told Jay Cohen, undersecretary of the DHS’ Science and Technology Directorate to Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology Subcommittee. (Source)

2. Germany's Interior Minister wants to tighten law for the fight against terrorism by "clandestine seizure of private computer data" (amongst others, "like preventative detainments" and "targeted killings". (Source)

We no longer live in the world of 1949.

Germany's Interior Minister in an interview with Der Spiegel, July 2007

Indeed. Situation was much more troubled then nowadays.

A new book by Theseus Research CEO Karl M. Fant wants to dispel the belief that it's important to be a good mathematician for being a good computer scientist. Though I don't share this opinion I'd recommend reading the discussion about this idea. Since math is the language of science you can't do computer science without. On the other hand, you don't have to do math in your daily work, when you're, say, an administrator and try to make things done. But that's no science in the literal meaning, of course.

Various inhabitants of our garden. Enjoy!

IEEE members are discussing a common problem (scroll a bit down). I second most of these opinions.

A digital wand that you may 'paint' sounds on is a recent project of Ph.D. candidate David Merrill (MIT) together with fellow Ph.D. candidate Hayes Raffle that will be shown at this year's SIGGRAPH. The device lets you record a sound and combine it with any surface you may scrub it against. Unfortunately, I haven't found a sound demo yet, but this tool promises fun with interesting sound effects. (Source)

Projects like this remind me of my own Storm and Stress time when I had to develop a sound system for auralizing a Virtual Reality system (long, long ago). I've got a then revolutionary Polhemus system, the Paradigm Audio Library, a Yamaha Synthesizer (think it was a SY99), an Ensoniq DP4, an Atari ST with Cubase and a Silicon Graphics target system the software had to run with. Though this was really hard work (I had to learn Unix (IRIX on a SGI), C and that sound library with a half year. This deadline was fixed.), I never had more fun and never learned more about Unix/C/socket programming than in these days. It's great pleasure to see that there's still a place for innovative and geeky projects like the one above.

Dear Aussies,

no need to be shocked about Australia's cockamamie performance in the IT competitiveness report published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Your overall rank is 5 and when I'm comparing this to our - Germany's - embarrassing 16th rank, I just can say: "Go Aussies Go!"

This year, for the first time, Region 8 has become the largest IEEE Region, not only because of its huge geographical area – from Capetown to Vladivostok -, but, more relevant to IEEE, because of its number of members having voting rights.

Get ready, IEEE-USA! Region 8 is coming ;-)

(Dear IEEE members, Region 8 or not: VOTE!)

More inhabitants of our garden.

A browser technology that binds single IP addresses to DNS names causes a vulnerability that will especially affect Web2.0 applications. Ironically, this techniqie (DNS pinning) has been developed to protect users from DNS spoofing, but the various embedded technologies within a browser might do their own DNS handling and circumvent the browser's security mechanisms. This way malicious web sites might establish a VPN connection to the victim's network. There's no patch yet to solve this issue that could be called a design flaw. Especially web sites and services that need a lot of JavaScript or various browser plugins to run will be affected by this challenge. Looks like big fun for Web2.0 sites. (Source)

"The IEEE Standards Association now requires that members of IEEE standards development projects reveal any knowledge they have of patents they or their employer hold on intellectual property being considered for inclusion in the standards." (Source)

Accentuation by me. Listen to that people.

To reveal somebody's taste in music can be embarrassing and boring. You'll won't find any two persons who like the same 10 records and trying to persuade a good friend why that particular piece of music is just great often opens out in a life-long hostility between both friends.

Nevertheless, I'm the boss here and I don't have any friends here I might alienate, so I dare to present some very special music tips from time to time. Since the title of this posting is numbered, you may expect further tips in the future.

My first discovery is Craig Tanis, appearing in several instances as Dr. Kong, Starfinger, and other names. His lively music beyond popular music expectances is bulky, barbed, and sometimes extremely funny. I'm listening to this guy for about two years and I'm still not bored.

The reality is that it is very rare to have young women portrayed in the media as having a role in ICTs or engineering. They are usually doctors, nurses, lawyers or reporters. When was the last SITCOM where the female leading role was a computer scientist, an engineer, or a webmaster?

So, where are the positive role models? I'm pretty sure that nobody would be interested in a TV show about computer scientists. But nowadays, computers are everywhere, so there are indeed some female characters in TV series who convey a positive message about working in science and engineering.

There's Crossing Jordan, a crime series about members of the Boston Medical Examiner's Office and police detectives. Especially Nigel Townsend (played by Steve Valentine) is a weird, but friendly character, and obviously a resourceful computer wizard. The main character of this series, Jordan Cavanaugh (Jill Hennessy)
is as attractive as clever in finding the villains.

CSI, the famous series about forensic scientists, is full of characters who are well educated and competent in engineering and IT topics. There are also strong female characters, even with non-academic background (Catherine Willows (played by Marg Helgenberger)). This is true for the original series and for its spin-offs, too.

Last but not least we have Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Though it's not the world of science the characters live in, the "Willow" character (Alyson Hannigan) first starts as a typical computer nerd and supports Buffy fighting the powers of evil.

None of these characters is without quirks. Below their glossy or spectacular surface, these series deal with the tragedy of life and each female cast is not just positively charged, but a lively character with her ups and downs thus resulting in an overall credibility. So if one looks for positive role models, she might dig deeper, but might find some treasures here and there.

A study by Forrester Research predicts an upswing for dynamic languages like PHP, Ruby, and Python. Why should one use this crap? PHP is the Visual Basic of the Web, but it's also a security nightmare. Ruby receives rave reviews because of its high-level OOP approach. I think it's just another Web2.0 hype. And Python is praised for its 'fun' factor, but I can't see any arguments beyond that but baiting against Perl.
So tell me what you can do with these languages you can't do so by using Perl or a C derivate. (Source)