http://konrad.foerstner.org ... for your consideration Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:35:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The 25th Chaos Communication Congress (25C3) that took place from the 27th to 30th December 2008 in Berlin was an excellent meeting - like all *C3s I participated so far. The topic "noting to hide" was a theme that was found in many talks about technology and society. Some of ... http://konrad.foerstner.org/2009/01/small-personal-25c3-wrap-up/ Man, time flies, autumn is here (actually the chocolate stuff for Christmas are around much longer) and OpenBSD 4.4 is realeased! So if you haven't tried the sweetest operating system of the planet universe you might give it a try this time. Banish all the proprietary and wanna-be- Unix ... http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/10/openbsd-44/ As reported yesterday, the German province Bavaria officially gave the police the right to use tools to scan computers of potential criminals starting from August 1st (the media call these tools “Bundestrojaner” - ferderal Trojan horse - in this case “Bayerntrojaner” - Bavarian Trojan horse). Looks really like another chapter ... http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/07/next-lost-piece-of-privacy-and-democracy-battle/ George Carlin, the disputed libertine comedian, died last Sunday in the age of 71. Man, we will miss your awesome humor. http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/06/rip-george-carlin/ The DiSo project is a promising attempt to create a distributed social network which is not following the "silo" approach as other social networks do. The blog of the project offers a short (4 min) introductionary video in which Chris Messina explains the vision and ideas behind this solution. The ... http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/06/diso-the-distributed-social-network/ Yes, maybe I am little bit too nitpicky, but this bugs me: April 30th 1993 the World Wide Web became officially accessible for the general public and libwww became open source. Some media saw this as a reason to celebrate yesterday the 15th birthday of the WWW. Due to this ... http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/05/the-www-is-not-the-internet/ After 6 months of hard work the OpenBSD project released version 4.3 of the great, (non-)fishy operating system. As usually there is a collection of micro-interviews with some of the developers about new features at the O'Reilly's BSD DevCenter. http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/05/openbsd-43-released/ This year the well known EMBL PhD Symposium will cover fields belonging to the topic "Decision Making in Biology - Nature at the Crossroads" and you can already register. It is still some time until October (23rd - 25th) so the program is not yet available but the list of ... http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/04/ready-to-register-the-10th-international-embl-phd-symposium/ Outch! Styczynski et al. [1] found an error in the BLOSSUM62 - THE substitution matrix used since 16 years in bioinformatics for protein database searches. Lessons learned: Don't stop questioning even fundamental laws/tools/assumptions/etc. Transparency - in bioinformatics the access to the source code and the data - is essential for proper science [Via Suicyte ... http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/03/blossum62-error-never-stop-questioning/ Steven M. Thompson has initiated a petition to make Accelrys' GCG and SeqLab available under an open source software. He wants to prevent the loss of these bioinformatics tool sets after Accelrys' recent decision to stop the support and development of them. http://konrad.foerstner.org/2008/03/petition-open-the-gcg-and-seqlab-code/