Having fun with science and technology.
Enviromental Impacts of Eucalyptus Plantations in Brazil Posted: 2010-02-08 20:40
In recent days, you might have seen web adverts for investing into Brazilian eucalyptus plantations, even on technically oriented sites. While the investment may sound financially attractive it presumably involves several ethical hazards.
OpenOffice tops 20% market share Posted: 2010-02-02 06:33
The guys at Webmasterpro have published a study that analyzes the install base of various office packages among German users. While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing.
Microsoft to Get Malware Bailout in Germany Posted: 2009-12-08 19:18
With the economic crisis still being in full effect, Germany wants to throw government money at another industry giant. However, this time it is not an ailing car manufacturer, but the software producer Microsoft. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) plans to team up with internet service providers (ISPs) to establish a call center helping malware-troubled Windows users.
Getting PSfrag-ged EPS files to work with Inkscape Posted: 2009-08-13 06:35
When preparing figures for papers or other scientific content I routinely use PSfrag for inserting LaTeX commands. Sometimes I would like to edit the result with Inkscape to add some fancy stuff, but unfortunately most of the time Inkscape cannot open the created EPS file. I have written a short guide describing how to finally get it to work.
US Government Works Still Protected Internationally Posted: 2009-01-20 18:52
Recently on debian-legal someone asked whether you may freely distribute works created by a US government entity in other countries than the US. Well, I've asked a guy working on international copyright law, and unfortunately the answer was "no". Even though these works do not enjoy copyright protection in the US, they are still protected in other countries.
Qinf: A Free Quantum Information Suite for Maxima Posted: 2008-10-22 20:17
I have dropped Mathematica in favor of Maxima some time ago in order to escape from obscure bugs remaining unfixed and licensing troubles, and have not regretted it since. Now I just came across Qinf, which is a free (as in GPLv2) quantum information suite for Maxima. While the package is still under development it already contains quite a lot useful functions like partial traces, entropy calculation, operator expansion. So if you use Qinf instead of another package relying on a proprietary CAS, you can prevent your code from being trapped.
Academic Journals Resolve Copyright Conflict over Wikipedia Posted: 2008-10-06 18:43
The American Physical Society (APS) is one of the most important publishers in physics, well-known for its Physical Review journals, including their flagship Physical Review Letters. Like most other publishers, APS requires authors to transfer copyright, meaning you may not use the materials elsewhere without permission from the APS. This created trouble for some researchers who wanted to put their research on Wikipedia and other open content sites because the APS refused to permit them to do so. Fortunately, the APS has now changed their copyright policy, thus resolving the issue.
libquantum 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 released Posted: 2008-09-09 06:27
Two new versions of libquantum have been released. The 1.1.0 development release adds support for exact diagonalization, while the 1.0.0 stable release contains only bug fixes. Further information can be found on the libquantum website.
Few Banks Use Extended Validation Certificates Posted: 2008-08-04 06:55
The latest thing against phishing are extended validation (EV) certificates. Supported by Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, these certificates promise that the site has gone through a more extensive validation of its owner than ordinary SSL certificates. However, when it comes to market adoption after almost two years availability, these new certificates have failed badly. Only thirty percent of the world's largest banks already present an EV certificate in their online banking application.
OpenJDK in Debian Posted: 2008-07-29 12:02
Over a year after Sun's initial release of OpenJDK as free software, Debian successfully managed to build a version of OpenJDK using only free software. Apparently, the hard part was bootstrapping OpenJDK with the GNU Java compiler gcj. And it seems they did a very good job, as there are hardly any drawbacks compared to the proprietary version.
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- Copyright 2006--2010 Hendrik Weimer. This document is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See the licensing terms for further details.
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Latest postings
| 1. | Enviromental Impacts of Eucalyptus Plantations in Brazil |
| 2. | OpenOffice tops 20% market share |
| 3. | Microsoft to Get Malware Bailout in Germany |
| 4. | Getting PSfrag-ged EPS files to work with Inkscape |
| 5. | US Government Works Still Protected Internationally |
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