"Germany's highest court has restricted the right of the security services to spy on the computers of suspected criminals and terrorists." (BBC article).

I have been a fan of germany's highest court for a long time. The german Basic Constitutional Law is one of the greatest of it's kind worldwide and the Federal Constitutional Court is its guardian. And it often proved to be a worthy one as for example 25 years ago, when it introduced the basic right of 'informational self-determination'.

Our current minister of the interior has brought up many sick ideas lately and one was the invention of the so called 'federal trojan horse' - a computervirus that should be distributed to the people to be able to spy on their computers. Though I have a lot of faith in our highest court, I really feared how they will decide about this.

Turns out that there wasn't much to fear. This court really is worth every penny it earns and they didn't only stop the trojan, they didn't only declare the first law for it as being completely unconstitutional - no, they even made a gift to the german people, they gave us a new basic right:

This is awesome!!
I'd like to thank them from the bottom of my heart and if I ever meet one of those guys, I'll buy him a beer!

Next insane thing to come to their court will be the 'Telecommunications data retention' - but I'm looking at that more relaxed now, they'll figure it out! :)

Lately I began diggin' GTD and I have to say that I love my new hipster PDA, which I chose as one weapon to evaluate. imho GTD creates reminders by planning to make resources collide. Well, today was a day where resources collided by accident and something beautiful emerged - look at what I've done:

This is the result of months of breeding over thoughts colliding with a work brainstorming session following a talk with a colleague about social networks and the known revenue model of selling customer data.

Later then, in a chat with a very close friend of mine, I realized that there is a pretty similar revenue model for the next stage of evolution of social networks. Indeed this will create something called Social Mining - which will be (yup, for real: I googled and wikipediaed it and found nothing) the marketing term (or buzz word, if you like ;) ) by which it will be sold to VCs, commercial customers, press... in short: the public!

So thanks a bunch to everybody involved today and note to self: "Gotta get some evenly lined index cards". ;)

I just disabled trackback-pings to this blog as I was making more advertisement for Pr0n than for Free Software. If you want to trackback me, contact me by email please.

Also I realized, that the images in the Blog are all f#$+*d up, somehow the imageids aren't correct any more. I'll fix that all later sometime - until then you can probably have a couple of good laughs by scanning older posts and reading the comments to some images. :P

"Ain't life a bitch?" Billy Cole said in The Last Boy Scout and shot himself in the head. Well, yes, life is a bitch, especially if other people shoot you in the head as happens to peaceful monks in Burma.

Free-Burma.org declared this day to be the "International Bloggers' Day for Burma". Bloggers should cease posting for one day and just post the following banner:

Fair enough a deal for creating some awareness in this world! I probably create more awareness by posting at all again, but it's the effect that counts. If you got a blog, join in and whether you have a website or not: Join the list of participants

The first teaser trailer for the upcoming John Rambo movie which is set in Burma features this dialog:

John J. Rambo: You bringing any weapons?

Burnett: Of course not.

John J. Rambo: Then you ain't changin' nothin'.

Let's hope that the world won't need more weapons to change bitchin' life in Burma for the better!

ohloh is a pretty nice n' nifty web2.0 service, that allows anyone to assess Open Source projects and coders. I don't know, why I just now stumbled across it (my bro told me about it), but it is pretty decent.

The basic idea rocks as it combines good statistics gathered from openly available SCM (Source Code Management) tools like CVS, SVN and git (which btw rocks) with collective, subjective information won from the ohloh community. The latter works by providing the people the ability to give kudos to other contributors and by putting projects into one's stack. Stacking is an interesting idea as it not only allows you to see which projects are much used, but also allows for suggestions as on Amazon "other users also use...". Spiced with tagging(which doesn't really deserve this name though) and mashed up with Google maps, this makes an overall pretty good application.

The source code statistics are good, but still flawed. For example *lite CSS is mentioned to be "Mostly written in JavaScript", which obviously is bulls#%$ and I only made 100 commits in TikiWiki. But well, I made exactly 100, that's not bad either.. ;) Also I would wish some more RSS-feeds, for example for projects or contributors.

Anyways I today played three hours with the site and wish them good luck! The concept is great! :)