December 7, 2007

Nazi symbolism on Wikipedia

Christian Decker wrote this just before lunchtime:
This is typical for Germany. Always afraid to face their past and being in any way connected to it. Trying to hide it behind a hypocritical facade suing whoever gets too close and tries to discuss it:

There’s been no shortage of stories lately alleging that Wikipedia moderators have fascist tendencies, but a new case goes one step further. A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism.

Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) told reporters that she had filed the charge on the grounds that Wikipedia’s German site contained too much Nazi symbolism with a particular fetish towards the Hitler Youth movement.

Schubert told Reuters (via SMH) that “The extent and frequency of the symbols on it goes beyond what is needed for documentation and political education…This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”

Schubert went on to claim that there may be a Nazi plot afoot on Wikipedia itself: “There are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped.”

Wikipedia Germany denied the allegations, saying that the imagery used was used for educational purposes. Use of Nazi symbols except for educational purposes is illegal in Germany.

And I’m not saying so because I sympathize with neo-Nazis, being german myself I’m convinced that we can’t just cover it all up, and prohibit everything, we have to liften the veil of secrecy the last generations have put on history. By hushing it all up we make the neo-Nazi even more attracting to young people.

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December 4, 2007

Getting touchy

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:

iPod TouchI got myself an iPod Touch, and I’m in love!

Now, some of you might remember that I’m not a huge fan of Apple Products, or better to say their users that far too often become Apple-Apostles, but even I have to admit that the new iPod is a masterpiece of usability and beauty (once you have unlocked it). Yes, that’s right, I had no other choice than to ask a friend of mine to unlock it, since it was impossible to do so on my Linux machine. Then I had to hack it to get it working with Linux, since the connector cable won’t work either. The only solution I have found so far involves jailbreaking, installing the SSH server and then use sshfs to mount the iPod’s Disk to my Linux box. It’s really a shame that Apple keeps ignoring the needs of so many of it’s customers! And why, oh why don’t they just put the VPN client and Mail client on the iPod…???

Enough of the rants, let’s get on with the good stuff: the browser, the Youtube app really kick ass and I’m happy that I can use some of my favorite webapps:

  • Todoist: the best task tracker there is.
  • Gmail: do I even have to tell you why?
  • Facebook: Getting social on the way
  • and being able to read the slides of my upcoming lections while not even getting up from bed is nice too :)

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December 2, 2007

No good blogging tools for Linux

Christian Decker wrote this around lunchtime:
Don’t Linux users blog or why is it that there are no good blogging on Linux? The problem is that I often get ideas for a post while offline, on a train or plane, and usually I have no time or simply forget to write the posts to the blog. It would be so nice to have a specialised tool for Wordpress that had a richt text editor (although I often use plain text too, especially when posting code), that takes care of file uploads and supports tags. Anyone knows about such a tool?

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