Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

Picture

Name Marco von Ballmoos
Member since
Email [hidden]
Home page https://earthli.com/users/marco
Description

The (only) developer at earthli.com.

Contents

3209 Articles
111 Comments

21 years Ago

Moveon movies

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

Moveon.org campaign videos

Move On.Org is sponsoring an ad contest that has just wrapped up the first phase. They got over 1500 entries for a contest called Bush in 30 seconds, which solicits ads describing Bush’s achievements over the last 3 years. (Yeah, it’s only been 3 years; feels longer, doesn’t it?)

Voting for the main event is over, but you can still vote for the funniest, best youth ad (“Al Keyda” should be in the ‘funniest’ list, but “Bring it on” is the winner here, I thought) and best... [More]

Kids

Published on in Quotes

Kids are like a hangover; they’re the punishment you get for having fun.

PABAAH − Grass Roots McCarthyism

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The Daily Show brings us another great, totally straight-faced interview by Rob Corddry called Red Menace*. In this one, Rob interviews a dude who is completely earnest about boycotting movies with “communist” and “unpatriotic” Hollywood stars. There must be a tear in the eye of every rabid, right-wing radio or TV idealogue right when they see this guy (which they won’t because it’s on the horribly unpatriotic Daily Show).

He’s from an organization called PABAAH, which is a really cool acronym... [More]

Doom3 Screenie

Published on in Video Games

Is this seriously a screenshot?

Wow. Coming in April. Time to upgrade.

Lenny Bruce pardon combats terrorism

Published on in Miscellaneous

No Joke! 37 Years After Death Lenny Bruce Receives Pardon (NY Times) highlights two completely inadvertent examples of high comedy. Apparently, George Pataki has pardoned Lenny Bruce of his obscenity charge 37 years after his death. Unfortunately, that’s a little late to prevent the US government from having hounded a man to his death for having an unsanctioned sense of humor.

For those bits of high comedy, you have to read his announcement:

“Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties,... [More]”

What to believe?

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The article Guilty of Being a Palestinian in Iraq by Kathy Kelly (Counterpunch) documents the plight of two Palestinians in Iraqi internment camps run by the US in the flowering democracy of Iraq.

  1. Is there corroboration for this?
  2. Where would it come from? CNN? Not likely.
  3. How spun is this against the US?
  4. What percentage true is it?
  5. Is it any wonder Germany got so far as it did in WWII?
  6. Why do we always ask “how could the German people not know?”
  7. Japanese internment camps
  8. If these were Iraqi soldiers doing this to... [More]

Saddam caught, world saved

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

Threat level orange. Merry Christmas

U.S. Raises Threat Level to Orange (Newsday) announces that all may not be “Mission Accomplisheder” with the capture of Saddam (as the White House put it).

“The government on Sunday raised the national threat level to orange, the second-highest, saying attacks were possible during the holidays and that threat indicators are “perhaps greater now than at any point” since Sept. 11, 2001.”

I’m sure all of America’s fear- and world-weary travellers really appreciate the... [More]

Drinking guidelines for the holidays

Published on in Fun

Drinking Responsibly During the Holidays (The Onion) is a list of rules for kids of all ages:

  • If you are a woman, remember: Women are more sensitive to the effects of alcohol. If you are a man, remember: Women are more sensitive to the effects of alcohol.
  • Always drink from the bottle labeled “XXX.” The bottle with the skull-and-crossbones on the front is poison.
  • Drinking alone is a telltale sign that you know better than to put up with anybody’s bullshit.
  • Drinking more than seven nights a week is not... [More]

Published on in Jeet Kune Do

Warmups

  1. 25 squat jumps
  2. 25 regular pushups
  3. 25 wide pushups
  4. 25 diamond pushups
  5. 35 crunches (legs up)
  6. 35 bicycles
  7. 25 leg raises
  8. hold legs 6 inches off ground for 45 seconds
  9. Stretch up

Drills

  1. Mirror drill − 3 minutes
  2. Front hand education − straight lead/backfist, straight lead/hook, hook/backfist, low straight to high straight
  3. Knife drill − standing in place, practice 5 angles of attack
  4. Knife drill − with a partner, parry (meet) 5 angles of attack with the same angle, going back and forth... [More]

Published on in Jeet Kune Do

Warmups

  1. Shadow boxing
  2. 75 jumping jacks
  3. 25 pushups
  4. cat stretch
  5. 25 wide pushups
  6. cat stretch
  7. 10 reverse negative pushups (start low, not on the ground, push up to halfway on the count, back down when say ‘down’)
  8. cat stretch
  9. 25 bicycles
  10. 15 crunches with legs pulling in as well (like jacknives, but collapsed)
  11. stretch up (3)
  12. 20 Squat jumps
  13. Tiny break
  14. 10 squat thrusts

Live Round

Go for about 3 minutes apiece:

  1. Straight Lead
  2. Straight Lead/Backfist
  3. Straight Lead/Uppercut
  4. Straight Lead/Hook (high)

... [More]

Published on in WebCore

Both earthli Projects and the earthli WebCore are still in development, but here’s a screenshot showing the new look for the job page.

Altruism is a myth

Published on in Quotes

Beware of those who believe in altruism. It’s a quick step from believing it may exist, to seeing it everywhere, to believing yourself capable of it. If you think you are being altruistic, you have more than likely failed to examine your own motives properly.

earthli moves again

Published on in earthli.com

earthli was down for a few hours recently because the server has moved to a new home, a move of only a few km. earthli’s generous hosting company, Opus AG has moved into fresh new quarters, which means earthli shouldn’t move again in the near future. Current bandwidth is 1MB upload capacity.

If Bill Blum were President

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

Myth and Denial in the War Against Terrorism by William Blum (ZNet) write about the real causes of terrorism instead of the blithe “And the more you love freedom, the more likely it is you’ll be attacked. … they hate our democracy, our freedom, our wealth, our secular government … [people who] reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands … ” claptrap issued forth from our estimable administration. One can dispute how ‘secular’ the US government is, but one can’t argue... [More]

Published on in WebCore

 WebCore boxThere is a brand new release of the earthli WebCore, along with upgrades for all four modules. The modules are now available for download in easier-to-install packages and include much better installation instructions.

As you can see, the WebCore has also acquired a shiny new logo.

New logo and upgrade

Published on in earthli.com

 Earthli, less than a year after it’s last logo change, has once again updated its logo. This one really feels like the one that will stick, as it’s unique and looks nice. It also lends itself much better to a smaller, more recognizable page icon (if you’re using a browser other than IE, you should see the icon in your page tabs or bookmarks). It also doesn’t remind people of IE (like the last one, with the ‘e’ in it) and doesn’t steal the look of Mac OS X with the ‘aqua’ rendering.

The logo... [More]

Beyond satire

Published on in Miscellaneous

 KB toys has transcended any cynic’s wet dreams by offering a George Bush action figure. It’s not Bush in the oval office or gazing with steely resolve into the distance; it’s Bush dressed up as a fighter pilot and designated as an “Elite Force Aviator”.

Go to the link and read the text; it’s not a joke. A more fitting symbol of the deep illness of America society would be hard to find. A wonderful sign of the hope for American society would be if people boycotted KB toys because of this. I hope... [More]

Published on in earthli Software

 Finally a browser detector you can depend on. Let’s face it, with all of the browsers on the market today, you need a slightly more sophisticated tool than just searching for ‘MSIE’ in the user agent, right? The earthli Browser Detector does just that, using a relatively sophisticated algorithm to suss out what kind of a browser is really hitting your server.

earthli Browser Detector

Part of the earthli WebCore.

New themes & home page

Published on in earthli.com

Earthli has a new default style — based on OS X backgrounds and colors. Also, for all you IE users stuck in the dark ages, there is now automatic support for using GIFs instead of PNGs so you’ll get to see all the icons correctly.

Earthli has been upgraded to the latest version of the WebCore. All applications have been upgraded, but only Projects really has new functionality. The entire site benefits from upgraded styles and theme handling.

 

The war’s over, right?

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

Common Dreams is reporting in Wolfowitz: Iraq War Was About Oil that “at an Asian security summit in Singapore”, Paul Wolfowitz said:

“Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”

This is the same guy who was also quoted earlier this week as saying that, in the recent Iraq war, “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one... [More]”

Cost/benefit analysis − Gulf War II

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

“What possible justification could we have for going to war with Syria? Oh, I’m just kidding—go right ahead, I don’t care.”
- The OnionWhat do you think?, April 23, 2003

Bombs Away, And Poor Pay by Jimmy Breslin, found on ZNet got me thinking about ways of convincing people without morals that the Bush administration is out of control. It’s quite obvious that a good percentage of the US population is willing to plunk down their hard-earned tax dollars without considering moral issues,... [More]

Spam legislation

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

Congress has finally found something to do; US lawmakers lose patience over spam on the Register reports that:

“US lawmakers finally appear to be losing their patience over spam, with unsolicited e-mail now costing American business billions of dollars every year.”

Isn’t it great that as long as spam was just annoying everyone in the country and hampering our collective ability to make use of the Internet, it was fine to leave legislation out of it and accept spam as an unfortunate side-effect?... [More]

The War Racket (Butler)

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

I’m reading The Clash of Fundamentalisms, by Tariq Ali, which includes some great references. One of them is by USMC General Smedley Butler, who served for 33 years in the Marine Corps and received 2 congressional medals of honor. His first book was called War as a Racket, which appears to be reproduced in its entirety at LexRex and HackVan. In a speech in 1933, he explains his position (the text is obtained from Smedley Butler on Interventionism:

“War is just a racket. A racket is best... [More]”

Static-typing for languages with covariant parameters

Published on in Programming

class DRIVER
  feature
    name: STRING
    license_valid: BOOLEAN
end

class TRUCK_DRIVER
  inherit
    DRIVER
  feature
    maximum_weight_vehicle: INTEGER
end

class VEHICLE
  feature
    drive (d: DRIVER) is
      require
        d.license_valid
      deferred
      end
end

class TRUCK
  inherits
    VEHICLE
      redefine
        drive
      end
  feature
    weight: INTEGER

    drive (d: TRUCK_DRIVER) is
      require else
        d.maximum_weight_vehicle
          >= weight
     ... [More]

Comic Book History

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

That title is disengenuous. Anyone who’s ever really read comic books knows that comic books have much better dialogue and much better plot than the cheap version of history being served us by this pathetic brigade of fools in charge of the largest weapons store on Earth.

If you didn’t even feel a little bit stupid being American watching Bush strutting around on the deck of that aircraft carrier to “close out the war”, in a flight suit no less, then you obviously weren’t paying attention.
... [More]

Message Logging

Published on in Programming

I’ve recently written a new message-logging system for my company and wrote up a bunch of thoughts on the subject into a white paper, Message Logging. The abstract is below:

“Discusses the requirements of software logging, relative to the needs of different types of users of a product. Outlines the goals of a logging system with respect to these users and provides guidelines and a set of rules for providing good self-documenting software components and processes. Sending messages and handling... [More]”

Planning complex software processes

Published on in Programming

I’ve recently written a new startup system for my company’s main software library. The technology on which it’s based is documented in the white paper, Describing Multi-step Processes. The abstract is below:

“Discusses the properties and requirements of multi-stage tasks or processes. Addresses the challenges associated with maintaining and customizing complex hierarchies of tasks by using a declarative approach which concerns itself less with the absolute ordering of steps within a task and... [More]”

Bill Hicks on the Gulf War

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

I’ve got all of the Bill Hicks albums. I think it would have been really cool to hear what Mr. Hicks had to say about the last two years in America. I think the eeriest part is that you can get an extremely good idea by listening to the albums he record a dozen years ago. You see, he was extremely critical of the first Bush administration, and Republicans and Right-to-lifers and the war in Iraq. Listen to (or read, some are available here at BillHicks.com) his material and you’ll be absolutely... [More]

Bigger than FOX News

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

“More people (4 million) tune in to The Daily Show in a given week than watched Fox news at the height of the war (3.3 million).”

It seems the Daily Show has more fans than I thought. The article rightly points out that it’s Stewart and his brilliant delivery that holds the show together. The reason it appeals is that he doesn’t take sides against policies, he takes sides against stupidity; against illogic; against doublespeak.

“Stewart’s on-air persona is that... [More]”

Cake walk or siege?

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

Ann Telnaes editorial − 2003-03-27I was going to write an all gloom-and-doom article (to which I’m sure you’ve grown accustomed), but it seems the war suddenly got a lot easier and it’s become the cake-walk that Rummy and Shrub have been saying it was/would be all along. As US troops steam into Baghdad, meeting “ meeting surprisingly light resistance” (NY Times), does anyone else get a bad feeling? Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but when it goes from ‘laying siege to Baghdad’ to ‘surprisingly little resistance’, either there’s... [More]