Leider ist die Generation Web 2.0 eher unpolitisch, beziehungsweise virtuell politisch. Da ist nicht mehr viel los mit Reichstag besetzen oder so. Schade eigentlich. Davon hätte ich gerne Fotos…
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE MOVEMENT WAS NOT INVENTED HERE
Der Segway Personal Transporter darf nun auch durch das Saarland rollen, wie heise online unter Berufung auf eine Pressemitteilung des Ministerium für Inneres, Familie, Frauen und Sport (jap) berichtet. Nach dem der tolle Roller (nur knapp 7000 Euro, und dafür kriegt man nur zwei Räder) schon von der Polizei probegefahren wurde (z.B. in Fußgängerzonen), ist das Saarland nun Vorreiter bei der bundesweiten Zulassung des Segway als Kraftfahrzeug.
Sehr interessant (und typisch deutsch) sind übrigens die Voraussetzungen: Ein Mofa-Führerschein, eine Schulung, ein Kennzeichen und eine Ausnahmegenehmigung.
Piece of cake.
Fark got a new design. What is with everyone redesigning these days?
I will be participating in this year’s Summer of Code, working on WordPress internationalization. You can read my full proposal online. Of over 6,000 applications, about 900 were accepted. WordPress could only accept 10 out of about 90 applications. It’s bound to be an interesting summer with working on WordPress and Habari at the same time, plus $work, photography, and ‘real’ life.
The frenzy officially starts on May 28th, but I’ll likely start working on things earlier — as soon as I have some time at $work, that is — since the task is not quite as easy as it might appear. A big part of the trouble stems from the fact that WordPress uses third-party components which are maintained by their respective project groups, and, in the case of TinyMCE, aren’t even PHP, but JavaScript. The other problem is translating basically static texts like the README file, but also plugin and theme descriptions. Obviously, we can’t expect every plugin and theme author to speak several languages, and since metadata is stored in a plaintext blob, we can’t use gettext or similar tools (aside from the fact that we can hardly ship a giant gettext mo containing all translations for all known plugins).
And I haven’t even begun to talk about cultural localization…
Whee, the nice folks over at Watershed Studio have credited me for the stuff I contributed to the Sphere Related Content Plugin. 😀
I just ordered:
And now I want stuff to arrive, like, this instant!
Let’s create a 2.2 branch and start removing the current tagging
implementation. I’ll announce on my blog that 2.2 will be delayed.
So, fear not, ye UTW users. There shall be no tagging in 2.2.
The discussion has been lively to say the least.
Update: Demolition!
Update: Official Announcement
This year’s edition of the Headway Festival–the fifth–took once again place in club P60 in Amstelveen, The Netherlands. A promising line-up including big names such as Zero Hour and Redemption, and soon-to-be big names like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Loch Vostok, put this festival on the must-visit list for me.
Amstelveen is a nice city just south of Amsterdam, where the roads are wide and the trees are green and the people are nice, and everyone speaks English and German at least, and public transport works. Also, cabs and restaurants are expensive, but it cannot all be sunshine, right? (Also, public transport went belly up in the Easter chaos just when I tried to catch a train, but that’s another story.)
The venue, while a little small, is still very nice, featuring two bars, and a snack café next door. They offer a nice selection of beverages (read: beers), the food is comparatively cheap and very tasty, and the sound and light technicians actually listen to the music, as Sleepytime can confirm. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Read on for the review of the first day of the festival, Friday, April 6th.
All photos from the Headway Festival 2007 are online at mattness.net.
Obsidian opened the festival on Friday. Hailing from Amsterdam, NL, they can almost count as ‘local’. Playing a technical style of progressive death metal, they can well be compared to Textures, although they miss the polish of their fellow countrymen. They put on a solid show, but the vocals appeared to be weaker than on the records. Nevertheless, a good beginning for a great festival.
Coming up next were To-Mera from the UK. Having heard some samples before, I had dismissed them as a rather generic, female-fronted prog metal outfit. I haven’t warmed much towards them from their Headway show either. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good musicians and the band performs well, but I personally don’t find the music interesting. The vocal lines seemed to be detached from the flow of the music, and the stage presence was lacking. In the end, the impression that remains was that of a band with much potential (and a good-looking singer), but which could do a lot better. If you like jazzy prog metal with strange female vocal lines, check them out.
With Dutch Sun Caged, the ‘headliners’ part of the evening began. The very convincing prog sound lead by Marcel Coenen was backed up by Paul Villarreal’s powerful singing. Roel Vink’s fat bass lines also helped to create a rich atmosphere of sound, and the band played a great show with great stage chemistry. Most songs were from their new album, Artemisia, and fans of progressive metal of the likes of Dream Theater or Pain of Salvation with a hint of Ayreon should definitely give it a spin.
Then, finally: Zero Hour, featuring the Californian prog metal wonder twins Jasun and Troy Tipton, now with Chris Salinas on vocals. And, boy, is he powerful! That man is at once an angry beast on stage and at the same time able to get a ballad across wonderfully. With the lively twins bouncing around the stage, and Chris playing the rock in the center, their show was a joy to watch. With the audience in bliss after they played “There For Me”, they continued with a diverse selection of songs and even played a song–“Temple Within”–from the upcoming album, featuring a darker and broader sound compared to Towers or A Fragile Mind. Zero Hour’s shows are always worth seeing.
Read on for the review of Saturday, April 6th.
The day started with the industrial-seeming hardcore prog of Dutch Transmission0. While their performance was good, their unique blend of hard riffs and soundscape lines takes some getting used to. There is no doubt they are good, but early in the afternoon, after a night of 3 °C and too little sleep, I couldn’t really appreciate them.
Seventh Wonder were noticably softer, almost mellow at times, and also more fun since their announcements were in English and thus, understandable by yours truly. Also, the speaking voice of singer Tommy Karevik was a little messed up, which ended with him asking people to call him “girl”. The audience cheerfully obliged and everyone had fun. Musically, Seventh Wonder are rockish and symphonic with heavy overtones. Their sound is well-rounded and multi-layered at once, which grabs and holds the listener’s attention all the time.
Billed as “a side project of Kristoffer Gildenlöw” by their label, and as “a serious band” by Kristoffer Gildenlöw, DIAL definitely showed that they mean business. With Liselotte Hegt on vocals and bass, Kristoffer Gildenlöw on most everything, and even their drumer going to pick up the bass in the middle of the show, DIAL laid down a sound carpet of progressive gothic death rock-metal. Unfortunately, technical problems caused a few delays which also broke the flow a little. Their first studio album, ‘Synchronized’, will come out May 8th and should go on your pre-order list right now.
With superb virtuosity and stage chemistry, Christophe Godin’s Mörglbl project then flooded the venue with a multi-layered prog-jazz power metal inferno. Christophe Godin is a crazy, crazy man; most importantly, however, he and his friends are a lot of fun on stage. When they’re also playing technically perfect jazzy riffs over a snazzy groove, nothing could possibly go wrong. A great way to spend an evening, definitely.
The Prog/Industrial/Death/Power Metal mix of Loch Vostok welcomed the audience after the dinner break. Their singer & bass player Teddy is a powerful force on stage, and their songwriting is strong and uncompromising. The songs would work just as well, if not better, with less screaming and growling, IMO, because I couldn’t help getting the impression that the aggressiveness of the music is forced at times. Nevertheless, Loch Vostok are dead serious and seriously good.
Now, writing about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is a lot like dancing about architecture. I would just write ‘HOLY SHIT, these guys ROCK’, and that would conclude my review of Sleepytime. Their first ever European concert, they stood up to their reputation of uncompromising avantgarde artists. Self-made clothing, make-up, self-built instruments, and just the right level of weirdness. Did I already mention how great their show was? If you missed them at Headway, look at their websites for more European tour dates.
Redemption, headliners of this year’s Headway Festival and met with high expectations, finally entered the stage to bring the festival to a good finale. However, their show seemed a little half-hearted. I’m not a huge fan of Redemption; they play Fates Warning meets Threshold, a little more perfected and technical–and white-washed. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a surefire recipe for good prog metal. It just isn’t unique most of the time, and as such, nothing to write home about. Their performance at Headway was further butted by the accumulated delay, Ray Alder’s voice not being in all too good shape, and little interaction on stage in general. Whether it was because they had to shorten their playlist a little, or because only a few hundred people came to see them, their show appeared to be nonprofessional–although the performance itself was musically almost flawless. Except for when they played their encore, Ray missed the cue for the final chorus, that is. It is unfortunate that they played such a mixed show because they should be capable of doing much better. Thus, the festival sadly ended on a slightly down note.
Altogether in the end however, it was a great festival. Many thanks to the organizers! It’s a pity that only a few hundred people came this year.
Greetings to Margaret, Carla, Giuli, John, Nils, Hans, the barkeepress from Friday, the security guy (sorry, I have no clue how to spell your name), and the public library girl. See you on Headway 2008 (or ProgPower)! 🙂
Update: I forgot to mention that you must hack a core file and adapt your theme, too. See the end of the article.
Upgrading to WordPress 2.2 bleeding edge is an adventure, always. Not necessarily because they introduce new bugs–it’s the new features that are sometimes worrying. When one svn up changed all the feeds from somewhat-valid RSS to invalid Atom, I didn’t complain because, hey, it’s the bleeding edge, and Atom is so much better anyway. I just fixed the bug, and it was good. (In retrospect, I should have sent a patch. I forgot.)
Having tagging functionality in the WordPress core is a good idea, too. In general. Basically. However, if there already exists a widely-deployed tagging plugin–and for WordPress, one very much does exist–it may be a good idea to look at the functionality and semantics of the existing plugin before reinventing the wheel, badly.
UTW has a function named is_tag(). WordPress 2.2 adds a function of the same name. Ergo, things break. Renaming the plugin dir helps, but your tags are gone. Re-activating the plugin shows you the shiny new plugin sandboxing (which, btw, Habari started in January), but doesn’t bring you back your tags.
Some searching might point you to the UTW tags importer (Options > Import > UTW). After a funny message about deleting unwanted tags from the UTW management page (hey, no plugin, no options page, okay?), the import kinda works. The “Did we say 5 steps? We meant 4. Ha ha ha.” joke is getting pretty old pretty fast, though. Then, instead of the UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost() function, you use the_tags() in your template. Of course, the semantics of the_tags() are slightly different from those of the_category(), and completely unlike the old UTW functions semantics.
So I decided to get UTW back. Despite claims to the opposite, the changes required are actually pretty simple: open ultimate-tag-warrior.php and search for occurrences of is_tag(. Replace all occurrences with UTW_is_tag(. Activate the plug-in.
Update: Do the same in your theme – where you use is_tag() now, change it to UTW_is_tag(). Then, open wp-includes/rewrite.php, search for the function get_tag_permastruct, and add return false; directly after the opening brace. (This unbreaks /tag/ pages.)
Done.
Heute im Zug, im Regionalexpress 3314 von Frankfurt Flughafen Regio nach Saarbrücken.
Kurz vor Bad Kreuznach, die Durchsage: “Im vorderen Zugteil … ein unbeaufsichtiges Gepäckstück … Besitzer … melden … ich wiederhole: Der Besitzer der blauen Tasche bitte … ansonsten wird die Tasche in Bad Kreuznach entfernt.”
In Bad Kreuznach: “Da das Gepäckstück … vom Bundesgrenzschutz (sic) … verzögert sich unsere Weiterfahrt um etwa 30 Minuten.”
Nach Bad Kreuznach: Wieso macht man sich solche Mühe eigentlich nur bei ganz offensichtlich mitten im Flur herumstehenden Gepäckstücken? Wenn ich Terrorist wäre, würde ich mit ein paar Taschen einsteigen und sie schön ordentlich im Gepäckfach verstauen. Dann nach ein, zwei Stationen mal kurz aufs Klo, und dann die nächste raus. Niemand achtet auf ordentlich verstautes Gepäck–bis zur Endstation. Für den genannten RE, zum Beispiel: Frankfurt/Main Hbf rein, eine Station nach Frankfurt/Main Flughafen Regionalbahnhof raus. Am besten am Wochenende, in den Ferien.
Man gut dass ich kein Terrorist bin.