Diskurswelt.de

I left Bamberg last weekend.

There is so much that could be said about this beautiful town, my alma mater and all the friends that I will dearly miss. For now, I would like to keep it brief: Adela!
And with Daniel in mind: Servus! Tschüss! Ade!

In case you are looking for me, you can find me in Cologne (German: Köln).

I can put any item of my choice on your personalized amazon.com homepage. Did I hear you say Bollocks!? Well, here is proof:

1. Open this page.
2. Visit amazon.com.
3. Observe Dale Carnegie’s classic How to win friends and influence people appear on your personalized amazon.com homepage (see screenshot below for comparison).
4. Order it if you are interested, it is a great read (optional step ;-))!

So how does it work? The page contains a hidden iframe that triggers an HTTP GET request to the book’s page on amazon.com. Now amazon thinks you are interested in this article and recommends it and similar ones to you on their homepage. I would like to leave possible malicious applications to your imagination.

How to fix this? If the X-Frame-Options response header is set to SAMEORIGIN, modern browsers will not allow third party websites to include a page. Interestingly, the German amazon website amazon.de does this.

I have informed amazon.com of this issue via Twitter and E-Mail.

Disclosure: all links to amazon.com are referral links.

Update (2012-04-05): amazon.com got back to me and told me that they have added the X-Frame-Options header.

Phew, I have not posted photos in quite a while. So here’s a few shots I took in the summer of 2009 in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state.

The first nine were taken in Friedrichstadt, a lovely little Dutch town with canals. I always enjoy going there (and they have a great ice cream parlor).

The following five shots were taken in Husum, the grey town by the sea (Theodor Storm). I love to stroll around the harbour. Although Husum is a rather small town, it’s of importance for the region due to its role as the capital of the district Nordfriesland. Nowadays, it is actually not very grey.

The last three photos were taken on Nordstrand, a green peninsula near Husum. Nordstrand is an invitation to relax and forget all worries for a little while.

Oh, how am I longing to go back!

This is YouTube letting me know that I cannot watch a certain video. The reason?

Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may [sic!] contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.

GEMA is an acronym and stands for Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte which is a marble of German officialese and roughly translates to Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights.

Because the GEMA asks for €0.1278 [sic!] per play — a price which is obviously not sustainable for the traffic gorilla that is YouTube — many of the (music) videos I have posted on Diskurswelt are not available to you if you are visiting from Germany. Sorry about that, but there is not much I can do about it. We have to wait for GEMA and YouTube to stop pointing fingers and sort this out like grown-ups.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon the blog Jack of All Trades Programmer by Florian Bergmann, who left the University of Bamberg and is now studying at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. So far, he’s been blogging about technical topics. The content available as of today is very similar to Simon Harrer’s blog.

So Simon and his readership should probalby add this blog to their feed readers (I already did).