Are doping and corruption phenomina we have to accept because everybody does it and because there are higher purposes demanding for this? I'm discussing this at eclectic imaging.

I'm really curious about this. A SPAM detection that is inspired by the mechanisms of the immune system would indeed be something new. More about this at the website of the international Alife conference and here at this place, as soon as I get more information.

I don't know anything about the formulas being solved there. But the evolutionary computation of a a century-old algebra problem done by researchers from Hampshire College in Massachusetts and the State University of New York proves its strength. The user is allowed to play God a little bit by selecting the elements of computation to use and by determining the measurement of desired designs. Starting with random combinations of elements, each computation step generates offsprings that are "recombined" and that may "mutate", then evaluated (thus simulating some kind of 'fitness'). The solution emerges during this artificial evolution process. The aforementioned researchers, Hampshire’s Lee Spector (genetic programming), and SUNY-New Paltz’s David M. Clark, along with Spector’s students Ian Lindsay, Bradford Barr and Jon Klein, won the 2008 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference’s top prize. (Source)
Learn about the basics of Genetic Programming.

They won't tell which Christmas Perl 6 will be released, but they know how to water Perl enthusiasts' mouths: Wall talked about that in his annual "State of the Onion" speech at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) (Source)

Some weeks ago I mentioned the pros and cons of the international efforts of making more women want to have a career in IT. It's a matter of fact that professions dominated by women often belong to the low wages sector and that several jobs that were largely occupied by male employees in former times (secretaries, teachers) now are badly paid and often have a poor reputation. Microsoft and IBM are now investing into the Indian job market, trying to attract young women for having an IT career. This should not be a too difficult exercise, as women in the so-called third world and in developing countries are way less shy when it comes to math and technical jobs (in contradiction to Western countries). This investment will leave its traces in the Western job market. The more IT gets 'female' in the old world and North America, the less important this sector will be. The more the big players invest into countries like India or China, the more likely get off-shoring measurements.

To get this straight: IT needs women. There's no need for male-dominated geek monoculture. But there's no need for the aforementioned working structures either: neither does IT need a restructuring towards a low-wage sector nor is it good to abolish Western IT by off-shoring to India. It don't have a solution for this. It's true that young people are less and less interested in IT and that they have some good reasons for this. It's good that they get encouraged to give it a try, but I wonder if the touting for IT is without ulterior motives. Supporting young women in India sounds great, but I wonder if well-educated IT pros will want to work for small money in their country all the time. Neither the then following brain drain from developing countries nor the continuing off-shoring will happen without consequences, especially not in the Western world. (Source)

I'm so glad I can post my musings 'in camera', without getting too disturbed by commenters (except from spammers - hi, Birkoff!). One of the more distinctive German IT news portals - heise.de - dared the impossible and changed its layout. Articles now can be found left from the middle and no longer in the center of the multi-column design.

What a blasphemy! Literally thousands of comments claim about that (at the time of this writing I count 2412 comments) and some users even threaten to cancel their c't magazine subscription. (c't magazine is a print journal of Heise Verlag that is loosely coupled with the Heise web site.)

I'm so glad...

Dato Barbakadse, Georgia's famous writer, in a short radio interview. He described his troubles when saving all his work on various servers somewhere in the Internet to prevent data loss just in case the Russians would drop a bomb at his workplace. He called it an "escape into virtual space".

Seems that cyber warfare becomes a constant in armed conflicts between countries like it happened in the last few days in Georgia. When Arbor Networks' Jose Nazario noticed data streams containing strings like 'win+love+in+Russia' and DDOS attacks started as early as July 20, this was just a test run for worse things to come, including web site defacements and a general inavailability of Georgia's Internet infrastructure. The role of Russian telecommunications firms that hosted servers involved in the attacks (or at least that contributed to the general propaganda) is yet to be analyzed. With estimated costs of 4 cents per attacking machine, this kind of attack will be seen more often, especially against countries whose infrastructure depends on the Internet. (Source)

When you search for errors that might occur when logging into the Site Manager, a tool for maintaining the Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS), you will get quite a decent list, but this time I have to offer a new one and, fortunately, its solution. After double-clicking the Site Manager icon the login dialog appeared, clicking the "OK" button resulted in an error message, stating a 500 server error. No further details.

Examining the web server log of the associated Site Manager website, revealed that the error occured when a file resstub.asp was called, obviously line 16 threw an error. Analyzing the HTTP traffic (you can easily do this with a tool like fiddler; just start it before your client application and get insight into the data flowing between the server and your client) confirmed this. Here I was able to read the error message, telling me that an object creation in the ASP code failed.

Line 16 in resstub.asp reads as follows:

Set pBinFiler = Server.CreateObject("AEBinFile.AEBinFile.1")

There was not much info I found about the object ("AEBinFile.AEBinFile.1"). I did a search on the local harddrive of the server where MCMS is installed for the actual DLL (AEBinFiler.dll) and I found it - twice. One location was the original place at \program files\microsoft content management server\server\iis_nr\system\marshalling\resstub.asp, the other place was the "bin" directory of another CMS website I deployed a few days ago. And that was obviously wrong! When I deployed that website the installer registered this other DLL in the new website's "bin" directory, thus causing the HTTP 500 error.

The problem was solved by issuing a

regsvr32 AEBinFiler.dll

in the original MCMS bin directory.