Anti-pope protests in Berlin

September 22nd, 2011, 18:27 | No comments

Some (raw) photos from today’s protests against Pope Benedict XVI at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.

(All photos by Karl Andersson, free to share under the Creative Commons 3.0 license.)

Category: English, Politics
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Congratulations, Berlin Pirates!

September 19th, 2011, 3:03 | No comments

Fierce campaigning obviously pays off – the Pirate Party won 8,9 percent of the votes in Berlin’s elections last night. Congratulations!!!

Read more in German or in English or in Swedish.

Photo by Karl Andersson, from the Berlin CSD parade 19th June 2010. Shared by a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Click for a larger version.

Category: English, Politics
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Browser wars: Why Safari 5.1 is a turd and I’m switching back to Chrome – again

September 15th, 2011, 13:01 | No comments

Imagine spending 10 hours a day talking to a good friend. But sometimes that friend suddenly becomes silent – stops listening, stops talking – for half a minute, a minute, 2 minutes. He does this all the time. And always when you’re about to make your point. Sometimes he just loses it and forces you to start all topics from the beginning.

I’ve had such a friend for the last weeks. His name is Safari 5.1.

It just doesn’t work!

If you had such a friend – wouldn’t you consider switching, at least if there are other friends standing in line, just waiting for you to choose them as your daily conversation partner?

In more detail, Safari 5.1 has a problem called “web pages are not responding”. It will show you a dialogue that forces you to reload all web pages in all windows and tabs. As someone remarked in this thread about the issue:

This is the type of error message I’d expect to see in a Windows OS.

Indeed. User Bluespacecow explained why this happens:

To understand why this comes up you need to understand how the Safari processes have been redesigned for version 5.1

Historically plugins have been a leading cause of many a Safari crash. So in Safari 4 Apple seperated Safari into 2 processes – one of Safari itself and it’s renderer and the other for it’s plugins to run in.  This meant that if the plugin crashed it Safari would in theory continue to function.

This of course ignored the other ways in which a web page can crash a browser so in Safari 5.1 Apple separated things even further. Now  Safari is separated into 3 processes – The Safari app comprimising of the windows, menus, tabs, bookmarks and URLs of what’s loaded in each tab/window, our old friend from above WebkitPluginAgent and a new process just for the web page renderer. This new process is called “Safari Web Content”

What you’re seeing here is when the Safari Web Content process crashes on the content of a page for any reason.

Safari can detect when this happens and automatically restarts the process. When you click back into a window or tab where you had web page stuff loaded before it gets reloaded.

Not that it matters in the end why it happens. I agree with user black6:

Safari 5.1 is a real turd to be honest.

black6 continues:

I really like the new gestures of safari, full screen and it’s integration into the machine but if it can’t perform the fundamental basics of web browsing then what’s the point of all that bling?

Exactly! Remember how much I hated Safari in May? With the new updates, I started to use it because of Chrome’s unfixed toggle through windows-anarchy. But know what, since 5.1, Safari has exactly the same problem.

Seriously, how hard can it be to program a program that can toggle through windows in the right order? Seriously? I bet i could do it myself in Basic!

Ok, so I’m going back to Chrome for a while, despite I’m not a big fan of Google.

And for the record: Microsoft Word has been on the decline since 1992. True story!

Just fucking make it work, Apple.

Category: English
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What Japan and Sweden have in common

September 13th, 2011, 11:57 | 3 comments

Maybe this graph explains why I instinctively like Japan so much (without having been there). Apparently Japan is the most secular/rational country in the world – followed by Sweden:

Read more at Tofugu.

Category: English, Japan
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Why is German Youtube so bad?

September 5th, 2011, 12:07 | 1 comment

It seems to me that Germany has a very strong copyright lobby. It used to be that some videos were censored on Youtube in Germany because some music company – most often Sony Music Entertainment – had filed a complaint which made Youtube make the video unavailable in Germany. I remember finding it strange that artists with own video channels didn’t want their videos available to 82 million Germans. But what do I know of marketing strategies.

Nowadays it seems all music on Youtube is censored in Germany by default. Instead of opting out, record labels now have to opt in to have their videos available on German Youtube. I can’t interpret the massive censorship in any other way. Or why else would my friend Petter Wallenberg’s videos with epic Leila K vocals be censored here? I know Petter doesn’t want that, but I also guess he has more interesting things going on in his life than writing beschwerde to GEMA.


Someone put up a copy of the song though, that Germans can listen to:


Netzpolitik recently wrote about the American artist Nina Paley, who paid 55,000 dollars for the copyright to the music in her film Sita sings the blues. Despite this, GEMA censored it in Germany:


In an update, Netzpolitik writes that the video now is available in Germany. It’s like with the Iphone apps with political cartoons – apparently you must make some headlines and get the people on your side before the censoring company realises the loss in goodwill and changes its mind. In this case, GEMA blamed Youtube and Youtube blamed GEMA. Way to go, boys!

PS: Yes, I use proxies.

Update: Ok, I had to read up a bit on this of course. Apparently GEMA and Youtube has a conflict since June 2011. GEMA wants 12 cents per video with their music that is played, and Youtube says this is impossible. However, this doesn’t explain why GEMA apparently wants 12 cent each time I watch a video by the Japanese group AKB48 on their official channel:

It also doesn’t explain why GEMA think their artists are somehow caused harm when people watch their videos for free.

Category: English, Politics
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