| Name | Marco von Ballmoos |
|---|---|
| Member since | |
| [hidden] | |
| Home page | https://earthli.com/users/marco |
| Description |
The (only) developer at earthli.com. |
| 3216 | Articles |
|---|---|
| 111 | Comments |
Published on in Sports
Switzerland was already out and Portugal had benched many of their star players[1], but the Swiss came out still hunting for their first win in EM history. The Portugese had the game well in hand throughout the first half and both teams had a couple of decent chances. The replacement goalie for Switzerland was the old hand Patrick Zuberbühler—”Zubi” to everyone here—who made heavy use of his good friends the goalposts, as usual.
In the second half, the impossible... [More]
Published on in Sports
Spain and Sweden were relatively evenly-matched, with Spain going into the lead early on a corner kick. Ibrahimovich evened it up for Sweden in the 35th minute and, from then on, all was pretty much quiet with no real chances for either side. The only events of note were a pretty obvious bodycheck by Sweden in the penalty box that didn’t impress the referee at all[1] and a relatively obvious handball—again by Sweden and again in the penalty box—that also didn’t get called.... [More]
Published on in Sports
It just wouldn’t be Italy if they didn’t require certain teams to win and other teams to lose and goal differences to be just right in order for them not to be mathematically eliminated. The game was exciting enough, with Romania having a few chances, but Italy having quite a few more—they just didn’t capitalize as often as they should have. As usual, they had one goal taken back—a nice header by Luca Toni—on a poor offsides call, but that’s become so standard that... [More]
Published on in Sports
Instead of the Germans, it was the Croatians that were extraordinarily well-organized and put together play after play on the net. By the end of the first half, the Germans were showing their frustration after nearly every offsides call and after every defensive error, both of which occurred often. The referee was a bit yellow card-happy against the Croatians, handing out eight of them in the first half—sometimes for tackles that got a lot of ball and almost none of... [More]
Published on in Sports
This match marks the first equalizer of the tournament, with the Czechs pulling even not long after Portugal shot into the lead. The first half stayed relatively even, but the start of the second half was dominated by Portugal’s offense, which failed to crack the well-organized defense of the Czechs for twenty minutes before Ronaldo put his side’s second one in on a low scorching shot.
Christiano Ronaldo is the Portugese star and it’s amazing to see his... [More]
Published on in Sports
It was a miserable day in Innsbruck, but the steady downpour didn’t seem to have much of an affect on either side. There were more fouls early in the match, but far fewer once nerves had settled.
It started out as a pretty evenly-matched contest with both sides showing flair and imagination in controlling the midfield and penetrating the penalty area. Much to Russia’s chagrin, however, it turned into a Spanish clinic on goal-scoring. The Russians didn’t play poorly nor... [More]
Published on in Sports
Beni Thurnheer, whose in-game exclamations usually tend towards the annoying, put it perfectly with this turn of phrase: “Ein unglaublich langweiliges Spiel aber auf einem sehr höhen Niveau”. In English, that’s “An unbelievably boring game, but played on a very high level.” Both sides were good and showed strong defense, but it was a ninety-minute snooze-fest. The French coach walked onto the field after the final whistle, clapping slowly; it was hard to determine whether... [More]
Published on in Sports
At the end of two days of play, both hosts—Switzerland and Austria—have had a chance to play and both, as expected, got zero points for all their effort. So far, the usual suspects—and those rated higher in the FIFA rankings—have won their games, though not without a struggle and not without showing weakness in the form of a soft game or what looked like squads that weren’t ready to run the full ninety minutes.
If a squad can’t play ninety minutes in a Swiss June like this one—15°C... [More]
Published on in Miscellaneous
The article Just one question (The Guardian) features a whole bunch of British people I’ve never heard of, half of them asking pithy questions, allowing the other half to offer equally pithy—and often, far lengthier—answers. “Julia Neuberger, rabbi and Lib Dem peer”, appearing about ¾ of the way down the list, though it a good idea to ask Christopher Hitchens an insipid question that he’d been asked dozens of times before. Whatever you may think of Hitchens either personally or professionally, this is the... [More]
Published on in Quotes
“Question: What’s the only country that will never have a coup d’état?
“Answer: The United States, because they don’t have a U.S. embassy.”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
As detailed in Swiss reject new citizenship rule (BBC News), an overwhelming 64% of Swiss rejected a return to secret ballots for deciding citizenship. Also on the referendum was the elimination of the right-to-appeal for rejected citizenship applications. Both of these measures were enacted five years ago when the previous situation was deemed unconstitutional. This is good news, but the way the BBC reported it was interesting:
“The Swiss People’s Party, the largest in parliament, wants the secret... [More]”
Published on in Quotes
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while.
“Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, ‘Hey − don’t... [More]”
Published on in Quotes
“Back in my COBOL days I came across a program with three GOTO statements in a row, all to the same place. I asked the original programmer why he did that, and he replied that he wanted to make sure it really went there.
“Oh. I guess he only wrote one GOTO when he didn’t really care if it went there or not.”
Published on in Quotes
“This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.”
Published on in Video Games
The game’s hyper-realism is its downfall; when something doesn’t work as expected, you’re not only disappointed, you’re screaming at the television. Case in point, the mission called “Final Destination” involves hunting down a dealer, then icing him. Several things get in the way of this being an easy mission, though.
The dealer has a friend when you confront him; this friend opens fire as soon as the cut-scene is done and the game helpfully auto-aims on the other guy, who’s running away from... [More]
Published on in Technology
The world is full of ideas, some of them good. There are some ideas that sound so damned good that they keep coming back, no matter how many times they’ve been stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake. They are ideas about products not enough people want (pet supplies online), products offered under impractical conditions (DRM music) or products that would never work (hovercars). And then there are the all-encompassing theories-of-everything (TOEs) of the IT world that haunt the R&D... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
According to a Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) study, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has busted over 400,000 people in the last decade for marijuana possession. That makes it the center of the drug war, according to NYCLU: City Now World’s ‘Marijuana Arrest Capital’ (wcbstv).
According to State & County QuickFacts (U.S. Census Bureau), New York City (NYC) had a population of just over eight million people in 2003[1]. Also according to the census of 2000, 44.7% of NYC identified as Caucasian, while 26.6%... [More]
Published on in Video Games
LollipopGTA lets you do a lot of naughty things: hire prostitutes, gamble, run rackets, kill people, commit vehicular manslaughter and on and on. The game is named after a crime and features thugs, gangsters and women of ill repute all over it. Yet, once again, the white knights of morality are assailing it as being bad for kids. No kidding; that’s why it’s rated M for mature. According to the ESRB, no one under 17 should be buying it or even playing it. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. There are plenty... [More]
Published on in Video Games
Broker Bridge Hill
Escape on a Crotch RocketGTA IV hits the ground running with a rain of reviews preceding the official release date (just in time to fuel midnight lines around the Best Buy) which, according to GTA IV Reviews: An Exercise In Hyperbolism by Luke Plunkett (Kotaku) are unilaterally gushy. Welcome to the land of opportunity by Crispin Boyer (1Up.com) is, apparently, one of the better ones. It gushes on some about the new multiplayer mode (which is apparently as good as advertised), then actually offers some criticism:
“I do wish that Rockstar had added checkpoints in the... [More]”
Published on in Quotes
“She ended the Cold War did she? Well good for her. I couldn’t stand her.”
Published on in Quotes
“Yes I called Marxism ‘the sweetest dream’ in one of my books. Then I discovered it was all a load of old socks. It seems incredible now that quite intelligent people believed in it all. What doubts there were were expressed in sly jokes. The jokes contradicted everything we believed in. We used to joke about how we were wrong about everything.”
Published on in Quotes
“I wish they’d just get it over with and make [Iraq] the 51st state, because I think it’s the perfect red state: religious fundamentalists, lots of weaponry. How could you go wrong? We’re already spending a significant fraction of our gross national product on the infrastructure, such as it is, on Iraq. Make it the 51st state and get it over with. [Laughs.]”
From an interview with the Oscar-winning director of Fog of War (IMDb) and the new Standard Operating Procedure (IMDb).
Published on in Technology
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
If you’re planning to buy a computer this holiday season—and you don’t opt for the shiny goodness of an iMac or iBook—then you’ll probably be getting Windows Vista. Windows Vista is very shiny and pretty and probably sounds like a great alternative to its predecessor, Windows XP. However, the minor improvements to the file explorer and organization (and major ones to... [More]
Published on in Programming
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
Metadata is, by definition, data about an application’s... [More]
Published on in Tips & Tricks
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
Once you’ve got an XWiki up and running (whether you imported a Mediawiki or not), you’ll find you want to tweak the standard rollout a bit.
After working a while with XWiki, you may notice it getting slower. Our XWiki was kind of slow from the get-go and we pretty quickly figured out why: the slowdown was caused almost entirely by the pretty, DHTML list of all pages in the panel on the... [More]
Published on in Programming
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
The first publicly available version of the Encodo C# Handbook is ready for download! It covers many aspects of programming with C#, from naming, structural and formatting conventions to best practices for using existing and developing new code.
Here’s the backstory on how and why we decided to write a formal coding handbook.
Here at Encodo, we started working with C# less than a year ago. We... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
When non-Americans can corner an American abroad, they more often than not end up following this line of questioning: “I can understand, in some way, how you guys elected Bush the first time—avoiding, for now, a discussion about what we mean by ‘elected’—but how in the name of the sweet baby Jesus did you guys elect him a second time?”
The short answer is: Americans care about policy issues—just not when they’re actually voting. They’ll be happy to answer poll questions that show concern... [More]
Published on in Miscellaneous
Up and Then Down by Nick Paumgarten (New Yorker) is a well-written look into the world of elevators and the companies that create them. It mixes research with the story of a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Some interesting tidbits from the article:
Published on in Fun
The Daily Show did an extremely silly tribute to fallen British soldiers recently, with Jon Oliver reading a list of heroes and Jon Stewart caught completely unawares[1]:
Britain's Fallen Soldiers by John Oliver & John Stewart (Daily Show)
The list of names is extremely silly and transcribed below[2]:
Published on in Miscellaneous
Op-Chart: Making Money Hand Over Fist (New York Times) is another in a long line of really slick, interactive, infographic presentations. Because of the extreme noise on the trading floor, traders use hand signals to indicate buy/sell interest, prices, amounts and status information.
“An oil trader demonstrates the hand signals used on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Text and graphics by Ben Schott, a contributing columnist.”
