Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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The whole Berlusconi being more of a moron than usual thing.
ID cards for the UK?. I never saw why they consider ID cards a big deal in the country where your every step is taped. At least in principle ID cards can be a handy official way of – surprise – identifying yourself, and even travel within Europe. Except in the UK, of course: When I registered for national insurance in the UK, they didn't recognise my perfectly good ID card as a form of identification. They did settle for a debit card, an NUS card and a university card, though. In practice, I guess ID cards can be bad when hooked up to a big database – but so are credit cards, CCTV cameras, car number plates etc.
ID cards are also bitched at by the good folks at 2lmc. Also link to internet badness featuring precious passages like
In accepting freedom of speech, we can't hide from its consequences - which in this case is millions of terrabytes of unreliable information, badly designed and clumsily written.
That page gives a fair amount of hover induced flicker and pain trying to copy text in Safari, by the way. Nicest spool title-wise today is the one linking to Coldplay are Crap, however. We used to operate pretty much on a Travis aren't good. Coldplay are Travis done badly.-paradigm. These days I don't even seem to care.
Jeremy Zawodny: Fun with mod_rewrite. I've read about this many times and it seems to be as close to magic as something as mundane as web servers can get. Can it also be used to redirect requests to a different site? I think we're running low on disk space and figure I could try 'out-sourcing' the images on my blog that way without breaking links.
The MIT's Open Courseware. Apparently they figured there is no way to do this properly and earn money with it. They also figured publishing course materials won't lessen the appeal of their university. Plus, they can afford doing such a thing – and thus did it. I think it's a great idea. It may even improve the courses at MIT – I guess lecturers will be even more careful in preparation if they know their materials will be open to a greater audience and the scrutiny of their peers. Just the opposite is currently happening for the lecture that I teach support classes for. Lecture notes are made on a fancy electronic blackboard and are available for download – but only for registered participants on the stupid web site. I think there should be nothing to hide in an undergraduate lecture – except if you're embarassed about it perhaps.