A dutch mayor considers the upcoming What The Hack open-air hacker conference a public threat and does not want to issue the necessary permit for the event that is about to take place at the end of July. Read all about it in the official press release at the conference site. You can read the letters so far online as well.

An accident has kept me away from everything for a while: broke my hand and had a more or less complicated operation. My recovery is now coming to an end as it seems. So everybody who had to wait for response will soon ehre from me.

I just bumped into this text by Paul Graham written in March: Return of the Mac. He describes the current impact the Mac platform has on the technological elite which he describes as “hackers”:

So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.

He’s so totally right. And he gets “hackers”. Later, he states that hackers “follow the most powerful OS wherever it leads”. He’s so right on this one as well.

So the war is on and Apple’s got to show they can keep up the pace. If they continue as they have been doing for the last four years, I am confident we’ll see significant change in the coming years leading to a situation which is by far more valuable than the current lame “Only Windows” world.

Which is good.

Sven Neumann, renowned GIMP hacker and Blinkenlights software architect, has a blog now.

Adium is a hell of an instant messaging application. Version 0.8 adds Off-The-Record encryption and has a heavily revamped user interface. If you don’t need audio nor video just looking for a power user savvy communication tool, Adium is the way to go.