Yesterday I read the article by Patrick Lenz about his experiences with an external SSD on his iMac. This prompted me to investigate the speed of my MacBook Pros SSD with Black Magic DiskSpeed. Instead of 100 MB/s write speed, I saw a low of 14 MB/s for writing to disks. Searching a bit around [...] Read more – ‘Recondition an SSD’.
We had a blast and we are planning to do this again! More information at the website – or give me a holler. #blogReshared post from +SimplificatorPictures from the mobile-training.ch course. A new round is in the planning. Signup on mobile-training.ch or contact us if interested. Google+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created [...] Read more – ‘Pictures of the training Adrian Kosmacziewski and I gave this week’.
Today is a great day! I’m happy to announce that we are teaming up with our friends at Simplificator GmbH and will be part of their team, as of today. Lukas, Pascal and I go back a long time – we have been through some “interesting” projects and learnt how to work with each other. [...] Read more – ‘Simplificator and InVisible team up’.
It's so easy to be misunderstood as a man Embedded Link vowe dot net :: His and her diary from the same day vowe dot net :: Volker Weber and Associates Google+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘It's so easy to be misunderstood as a man’.
Reshared post from +Jenson TaylorWhy don't people believe in God?Google+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘’.
And thanks to Napster on my Sonos I can sample the music of the band…Reshared post from +Andreas SchepersCut Copy – Blink Any You'll Miss A RevolutionIch verliere mich ja ganz gerne in der Musik-Blogosphäre. Da finden sich dann so Videos von so Bands wie den australischen Cut Copy, von denen ich bis gerade eben [...] Read more – ‘Nice music and interesting music video! I like’.
For purely scientific reasons – another reshare…Reshared post from +Keyan MobliReshare this post so we can test the new Google+ Ripples! The more reshares, the more interesting the graph.So please, everyone reshare. https://plus.google.com/ripples/details?activityid=TupMP3ZjqUgGoogle+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘For purely scientific reasons – another reshare…’.
Ahh – here's the explanation of how to use the Ripple function before it is rolled out in the UI to everybodyReshared post from +Fernando FonsecaHow to test Google+ Ripples before they roll out to everyoneGoogle just launched Google+ Ripples, a way to visualize the impact of any public post. Here is how you can [...] Read more – ‘Ahh – here's the explanation of how to use the Ripple function before it is rolled…’.
That's one incredible useful feature: Ripples show you how a post of yours ripples through the G+verse. I've of cause had to reshare this post for scientific reasons.Reshared post from +Sean McCulloughHOT #datavizGoogle+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘That's one incredible useful feature: Ripples show you how a post of yours ripples…’.
+Maximiliano Firtman presented last week in Zurich, curtesy of http://aksoma.com and InVisible. He briefly mentioned this great chart that shows what levels of HTML5 compatibility the different mobile browsers have. Embedded Link Mobile HTML5 – compatibility tables for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, iPad and other mobile devices Trying to understand HTML5 compatibility on mobile and [...] Read more – ‘+Maximiliano Firtman presented last week in Zurich, curtesy of http://aksoma.com…’.
Are you interested in learning how to develop mobile web application in HTML5, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch and Phonegap. Application that run "natively" on your mobile devices.http://mobile-training.chWe will hold the first training in Zurich, November 15. to 17. Topics include:* HTML5 / CSS3* Understanding the differences between jQuery Mobile / Sencha Touch and when to [...] Read more – ‘Are you interested in learning how to develop mobile web application in HTML5, jQuery…’.
(These are just notes for myself, if you know anything about this, then feel free to correct, improve)* Use the new project wizard to create a web service (with JAXWS selected)* optionally, select the Tomcat Webserver (so that you can deploy from IntelliJ to Tomcat directly)IntelliJ creates a HelloWorld class and everything works fine when [...] Read more – ‘Getting a Java JAX-WS service created with IntelliJ 10.5’.
Interesting!Reshared post from +Volker WeberGoogle+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘Interesting!’.
Reshared post from +Lukas EpplerThis is one update notice to actually read. Put here for you in case your fingers clicked it away before your eyes had the chance to read it.iOS 5 Software UpdateThis update contains over 200 new features, including the following: • Notifications ◦ Swipe from the top of any screen to [...] Read more – ‘’.
You know the feeling – you do a quick “bundle update” and all hell breaks loose? I knew you do. I updated rspec from 2.5 to 2.6 in one of my projects, and it also updated the nifty faker gem we use for generating test data. Of course, this broke a couple of hundred tests [...] Read more – ‘Bundle update causes havoc’.
tl;dr: Apple does evolution and keeps its old iPhone 4 customers happy Crossposted on Google+: Some thoughts on the iPhone 4S After yesterdays announcement, the blog-/twitter/G+ and most of all the comments to articles “sphere” exploded with disappointment. Disappointment that Apple choose to do an incremental update of their iPhone product instead of boosting its [...] Read more – ‘Some thoughts on the iPhone 4S’.
tl;dr: Apple does evolution and keeps its old iPhone 4 customers happyAfter yesterdays announcement, the blog-/twitter/G+ and most of all the comments to articles "sphere" exploded with disappointment. Disappointment that Apple choose to do an incremental update of their iPhone product instead of boosting its version number to 5.Of course, most of the disappointment is [...] Read more – ‘Some thoughts on the iPhone 4S’.
Long shot: I'm trying to gauge the quality of some "random" numbers that I have generated. I'm using the "dieharder" http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/dieharder.php library to analyse the data I have (in a file)I use a file for my data (even though that's not recommended) and give that data to dieharder:dieharder -g 202 -f my_data.input -s 1(where -g [...] Read more – ‘Long shot: I'm trying to gauge the quality of some "random" numbers…’.
Kann ich mit leben. Embedded Link Where Did My Taxes Go? Where Did My Taxes Go? City of Zürich 2010. Civil Status Single Married. Income. Assets CHF. Annual Taxes. CHF. This Money Lasted The City For. sec. Tweet. What is this? This was done during the MakeO… Google+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. [...] Read more – ‘MakeOpenData zeigt an, wofür meine Steuerfranken in Zürich verschwinden’.
Reshared post from +Joseph LeeHere's my Star Trek post of the night, it's related to my previous red shirt post:https://plus.google.com/106176762220398854458/posts/2QC5CyWJuQUHere we can see they really earn their reputation as they die, a lot. My favorite death is the one where they get turned into cubes, and then even the cubes are crushed! I need to [...] Read more – ‘’.
I just love the way the TopGear guys test cars (where the definition of "car" is quite widely interpreted) Another great thing is how close to reality the tests are done: Shopping center, Drive-In at McDonalds and being blown up with explosives.A treat – as usualReshared post from +Maciej StachowiakJest piątek więc pozwalam sobie na [...] Read more – ‘I just love the way the TopGear guys test cars (where the definition of "car"…’.
This is an absolute genius idea – I have boxes full of cables that are but a tangled mess…Reshared post from +Alida Brandenburg[The "G" Clearly Stands for "Genius"]Oh, wow. On top of the last two posts (https://plus.google.com/u/0/103765013042311928518/posts/cfwYX5ACG99 and https://plus.google.com/u/0/103765013042311928518/posts/RqsXwoH9Xs9) +Patrick Dorr just shared with me this novel use for toilet-paper rolls! Keep 'em coming! The [...] Read more – ‘This is an absolute genius idea – I have boxes full of cables that are but a tangled…’.
looking through those 100 books I see a lot of old friends – and I guess some new, in the waiting, friends…Reshared post from +Colin McMillenBrilliant: a flowchart to help you choose the next fantasy/sci-fi book you should read. Based on NPR's list of the top 100 sci-fi/fantasy books of all time.http://www.box.net/shared/static/a6omcl2la0ivlxsn3o8m.jpgHat tip: +Mary Johnstone.Google+: [...] Read more – ‘looking through those 100 books I see a lot of old friends – and I guess some new,…’.
Oh – nice!Reshared post from +Frank StratmannPassend zum Papst-Besuch:Google+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘Oh – nice!’.
Nochmal ein Reshare (und ja, irgendwann kommt dann auch wieder mal eigener Content) – unsere Erde aus der ISS gefilmtReshared post from +Tom AndersonUsually I like to say something about the stuff I share. I think this pretty much speaks for itself. Looks better than sci-fi, but it's "real" :-)Google+: View post on Google+Post imported [...] Read more – ‘Nochmal ein Reshare (und ja, irgendwann kommt dann auch wieder mal eigener Content)…’.
Reshared post from +Kristian KöhntoppGoogle+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘’.
Wunderbare Bilder von unserem Planeten…Reshared post from +Andreas SchepersHeimatplanetLehnt Euch zurück und schaut Euch unsere Heimat an. Aus 800km Höhe.(Ein Video, dass meine Kolleginnen für das On Board-Entertainment der Lufthansa produziert haben: jetzt für online. Auch für Nicht-Flieger.)Google+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘Wunderbare Bilder von unserem Planeten…’.
so geht's!Reshared post from +Sean BonnerGoogle+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘so geht's!’.
wonderful!Reshared post from +Michael Lee JohnsonGoogle+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘wonderful!’.
Another company that want's to the cloud storage thing – with a twist: Infinite storage… IBIWISI, but I have signed up of course – you can too: https://www.bitcasa.com/beta-signup?share=1098369610 Let's see if this can contest dropbox… Embedded Link Bitcasa :: Infinite Storage On Your Desktop Bitcasa. Why Bitcasa? Blog. Somebody really likes you, they think you [...] Read more – ‘Another company that want's to the cloud storage thing – with a twist: Infinite…’.
süss – und genau richtig, was Zeitmanagement angeht…Reshared post from +Markus FelberAus der ReiheZeitmanagement für EiligeEin Blick aufs Tierreich kann beruhigend wirken…(Ganz ursprünglich gepostet von +GUNGA Gernot)Google+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘süss – und genau richtig, was Zeitmanagement angeht…’.
Reshared post from +Flemming FunchGoogle+: View post on Google+Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell. Read more – ‘’.
I think this os the first time I have seen him in an interview and talking. What a great mind he has! As someone who currently is "learning" and studying, his comments on personal learning strike home. I have so much joy from re-learning mathematics, thanks to the Khan Academy, for example.Reshared post from +KENNETH [...] Read more – ‘Some of the first SF I read was from Isaac Asimov, 35 or so years ago’.
117 days left before I have to hand in my Msc thesis, a bit more than a month before the http://ai-class.com starts (that I still hope to be able to take, in order to actually learn something new and be challenged – unlike the Masters course I've been taking the last two years). Also – [...] Read more – ‘The week is officially over, but there's still so much to do’.
Das zweite Coding Dojo fand am 7.7. in unseren Räumen statt. Wieder waren 4 Leute dabei, die sich diesmal mit BDD in JavaScript versuchten. Ein detaillierter Bericht findet sich auf der Seite des Dojos. Am 15. September findet das nächste Dojo statt – Thema ist noch offen – um Ideen wird gebeten. Read more – ‘Zweites Coding Dojo erfolgreich’.
Das CodingDojo vom 16.6. war ein Erfolg. Mit vier bis fünf Teilnehmern ein kleiner aber feiner Start. Einen Bericht findet ihr auf der Seite des Dojos. Das nächste Dojo findet am 7.7.2011 zum Thema “JavaScript Testen mit Jasmine” statt. Anmeldung via Dojo. Read more – ‘Bericht vom ersten Zürcher Dojo’.
Seit ein paar Jahren beschäftige ich mit Coding Dojos, also Orten, an denen Entwickler ihre Fertigkeiten und ihr Handwerkszeug verbessern können. Nachdem ich letztes und dieses Jahr an der RailsWayCon in Berlin jeweils ein solches Dojo durchführte, ist es jetzt an der Zeit in Zürich ein regelmässiges Dojo durchzuführen. Das erste Dojo findet am 16.6, [...] Read more – ‘Zürcher Coding Dojo eröffnet’.
Short week this week. The InVisible crew (Keith, Richard and myself) went to Berlin to RailsWayCon where I held a presentation about “Testing distributed / complex applications“. Testing distributed, complex web applications View more presentations from jcfischer We had a great time, meeting many people and listening to quite a few interesting presentations. We had [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2011-06-03’.
Bliki: TradableQualityHypothesis fowler on why quality in software development can't be traded (tags: software quality) Read more – ‘links for 2011-02-22’.
Forschungsmafia » Blog Archive » Noch ein Lacher zu X-Pire! und Professor Backes gefällig? link to pdf about formally examining security of protocols (tags: thesis protocol) Read more – ‘links for 2011-02-20’.
pg_search: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PostgreSQL full-text search rails plugin to use the Postgres fulltext search (tags: rails postgres search) Ist die zu-Guttenberg-Plagiatsaffäre ein Kanzlerkandidaten-Mord? Read more – ‘links for 2011-02-18’.
Invaders from Mars we have been invaded and we lost. Charles Stross on what went wrong with our socio-political system (tags: politics economics) Read more – ‘links for 2010-12-16’.
Magic Scrolls of Code: Behavior Trees by Example. AI in an Android game. (tags: game ai programming algorithms development) TMUX – The Terminal Multiplexer (Part 1) | Hawk Host Blog Introduction to tmux (tags: tmux terminal) Read more – ‘links for 2010-12-15’.
Debugging Rails Applications With ruby-debug – Intridea Blog (tags: debug rails3 ruby howto) Creating the missing Instagram web interface Mislav explains how to sniff HTTP traffic from an iPhone and create a web app that talks to the Instagram servers. Lot's of nuggets (json formatting library) (tags: api instagram ruby http json) Read more – ‘links for 2010-12-08’.
Pardon My French, But This Code Is C.R.A.P. (2) A simple measure to measure the quality of code: Cyclomatic Complexity and code coverage (tags: code metrics) What is "elegant" code? – Stack Overflow Good question and some good answers (tags: programming definition elegance) Read more – ‘links for 2010-12-07’.
boilerpipe web service to exctract content from a web page. looks useful for our scraping needs (tags: web-scraping java service extraction) J-_-L | Use fresh Ruby as your shell! (tags: ruby shell tool) Read more – ‘links for 2010-12-06’.
Building iPhone Apps using Titanium and CoffeeScript « Rigel Group (tags: coffeescript titanium iphone) Transparently Cache Network Calls in Titanium « Rigel Group CoffeScript Library for Titanium development (tags: titanium iphone coffeescript) Read more – ‘links for 2010-11-29’.
An update of our production server to Passenger 3.0 worked without problem – kudos to the guys at Phusion! We have changed several parameters and expect our large Rails apps to run faster and better. The main change was that we keep one passenger running for the most used apps, regardless if the app has [...] Read more – ‘Daily-Log, 2010-11-22, Passenger 3, iUI and authenticity tokens’.
A few weeks ago we upgraded the RAM on our main server. At that point, I discovered that the external backup drive we use to backup our hosting users home directory was full and no data could be written to it. I never discovered the problem, because df -h always told me that there was [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-17, inode blues’.
Preparing for the public demos tomorrow in Lyon… Florian Hanke is here and has been furiously working on his great phony GEM. Phony handles phone number strings and can format them, parse them and do other fun stuff. After this days work, it will be able to tell us, if a phone number is a [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-15, Capybara & Callbacks (with some phony thrown in)’.
We are using a lot of distributed Sinatra and Rails3 applications in our Mobino project. They speak HTTP-REST and JSON with each other. Because we are using Cucumber and RSpec, we also have some high level integration tests for the APIs. Today I started on cleaning up an API in the Rails app. I wrote [...] Read more – ‘Daily-Log, 2010-11-11 – Cucumber & APIs’.
Much planning done today, little programming. Our “secret” project is starting to look good and will be unveiled to selected companies next week in Lyon at the Game Connection. There’s a splash page for it too: Mobino University wise got to write about the Liskov Substitution Principle. Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-10’.
Thanks to you commenters. The Rails 3 function I18n.transliterate('some String with ümläüts') #=> some String with umlauts (or even ‘uemlaeuets’ if you specify :locale => 'de' as an additional parameter to transliterate) works beautifully. In other news, I think I have the old retro 700 character format nailed down – let’s see if the organisation [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-09’.
Over the weekend we expanded the memory on our main server. It now has 24GB and thus place for a few more virtual machines running. Take-aways: When you buy a server, buy more RAM than you think you need – you will need it. Also, while replacing memory is fairly fast, fscking half a dozen [...] Read more – ‘Daily-Log, 2010-11-08’.
Almost no programming today, but meeting with people, discussing the future. Also looking into the cost of doing business and re-calculating our hourly rates (We need to stop subsidizing too many projects….) In the end, we have decided to hire two new developers. If you are looking for a job in a great little company [...] Read more – ‘Daily-Log, 2010-11-05’.
The monit saga from yesterday continued – and was solved. Somewhere deep in the monit documentation, it is stated that monit calls the start and stop programs with a very very minimal environment, and certainly not the full environment that for example the deploy user has. So the following code will not work: check process [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-04’.
Yesterday, one of our Amazon EC2 servers “spontaneously” rebooted, leaving the production environment of our new secret project in shambles. The problem was that we hadn’t yet written monit scripts that watched over if the different database and application servers were restarted as they should have been in such a case. So I spent today [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-03’.
Spent quite a bit of time with Keith getting a Cross Site JSON call to work in jQuery and Sinatra. The problem (or security feature) is that a browser will not make an XMLHttpRequest to another domain than the one it’s currently displaying data from. We are building a widget that is going to be [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-02’.
Little work done due to hospital visit and lot’s of talking. Working on secret project (to be released soon) and getting fed up with this message when running the cucumber features (Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0, Cucumber Beta 0.22): “warning: regexp match /…/n against to UTF-8 string”. It turns out, that others have had that too: [...] Read more – ‘Daily Log, 2010-11-01’.
gist: 566725 – How to use Rails 3.0's new notification system to inject custom log events- GitHub How to extend the logging / instrumentation of Rails 3 (tags: notification rails3 logging) Read more – ‘links for 2010-10-07’.
xkcd: Online Communities 2 The follow up to the online communities map that hangs on our office wall How Google works [Infographic] | The Wall Blog Great infographic on how Google finds, indexes and displays search results (tags: google) Read more – ‘links for 2010-10-06’.
Lunch over IP: Reboot8: How to be a Renaissance man, and help Google eat itself Notes on the famous Ben Hammersley Reboot 8 talk about Renaissance man (tags: reboot8 renaissance) You're cuking it right Hints & tipps on using Cucumber (tags: testing cucumber howto) A few git tips you didn't know about Advanced git tips [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-09-26’.
Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development Sounds (at least) partially true (tags: agile humor enterprise) Fast user switching with Devise how to use devise and rails3 concerns to implement a "sign-in as" functionality (tags: Devise rails3) Read more – ‘links for 2010-08-29’.
I’m in the middle of starting a (potentially) huge project with a couple of friends. Having just finished (well, technically, almost finished) a large enterprise Rails project, I am really looking forward to working in a small agile team, on an extremely tight deadline, but doing stuff that is relevant and interesting. The enterprise project [...] Read more – ‘Deploy first!’.
Adequately Good – JavaScript Module Pattern: In-Depth Description of how to build a JS module (tags: design javascript coupling) Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-27’.
bernerdschaefer's akephalos at master – GitHub Headless HTML Browser for use in full stack testing (with Cucumber, cabybara) (tags: testing html cucumber rails) Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-23’.
Finding Leaks in Ruby Apps with Eclipse Memory Analyzer using eclipse and jruby to find leaky ruby cose (tags: ruby jruby eclipse memory profiling) Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-18’.
Browsing Memory the JRuby Way lots of information on how to use java memory tools to check on jruby / jrails applications (tags: jruby jvm profiling) Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-10’.
pivotal's cedar at master – GitHub BDD style testing framework for Objective-C, Cocoa and iPhone (tags: bdd objective-c cocoa) Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-08’.
AdhearsionConf – An Event for Ruby’s Leading Telephony Framework – August 14 & 15, 2010 conference for the adhearsion framework that inrerfaces ruby and asteriks (tags: ruby asteriks voip) Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-03’.
Getting Started with Shef – Chef – Opscode Open Source Wiki (tags: ruby chef howto) Erlang Factory – Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2010 – Talks (tags: erlang papers) Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-02’.
InfoQ: RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws (tags: rest webservices programming erlang yaws) paperplanes. Vim – A Never-ending Love Story I need to update my VIM configuration after reading this. And maybe, just maybe, try VIM again for Rails development. Right now I'm madly in love with RubyMine by Jetbrains. On the other hand, I [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-07-01’.
sanity's Athena at master – GitHub Ian Clarke (of Freenet fame) with an algorithm that allows for the search in tagged documents across large datasets – interesting (tags: algorithms data performance tagging search algorithm datastructure) Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-28’.
Your App’s Website Sucks » Matt Legend Gemmell List of common sense advice on what to put on a website to actually sell stuff :) (tags: marketing business design webdesign) iPhone Background screens Very nice, grid paper like, iPhone 3 and 4 sized background screens (tags: design background grids ios ios4 iphone) The Open Source [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-25’.
Operating at Scale – Esoteric Curio Excellent presentation on operations and scaling of web applications (tags: operations scaling) Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-23’.
Enabling LIMIT and OFFSET in DB2 9.7.2 putting DB2 into some kind of compatibility mode (tags: db2 sql) Accessorizer 2.0 add on for xcode that makes writing accessors easy (tags: xcode mac) Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-14’.
My development stack list of ruby (and vaguely rails) related development tools (tags: ruby rails tools) IEEE P1363: Standard Specifications For Public Key Cryptography (tags: standards crypto cryptography ieee pki specification) Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-13’.
You may have heard about it. The iPad. As a card carrying gadget lover, self-proclaimed Apple lover I knew I had to have one – as soon as it came out.. I’d worry about the use case later. But alas, things turned out slightly different. My wife, who is highly skeptical of all things electronic, [...] Read more – ‘about this new thing’.
Evocam Remote Buffer Overflow on OSX interesting read on how to create an Buffer OVerflow and an exploit (tags: security osx hacking exploit bufferoverflow) Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-11’.
Karsten Nohl, PhD: University of Virginia, C.S. Dept Long list of security related issues with RFID (tags: crypto hack research mifare rfid) Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-07’.
Hybrid one-time authentication on Ubuntu Server Interesting concept of integrating 2-factor authentication with a Yubikey for server logins (tags: authentication otp) Read more – ‘links for 2010-06-06’.
The GitHub Stoplight – Ideas For Dozens Cool idea for a build stoplight (tags: build computing diy electronics github hardware arduino build-system continuousintegration) Read more – ‘links for 2010-05-21’.
Installing Java 5 Back on Snow Leopard If you compile Nokogiri with the JDK 1.6, it will not run on a Windows machine with JDK 1.5 installed. Took me literally hours to figure that out. (tags: java development installation leopard mac nokogiri) Read more – ‘links for 2010-05-20’.
PRX's apn_on_rails at master – GitHub Use Apple Push notifications from a Rails app – nifty (tags: apple iphone notification push pushnotifications rails) RSpec presentation Lot's of goodies in RSpec – a lot of syntax that I didn't know about (let, anyone) – good reading, and will improve my Rspec code a lot (tags: bdd [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-05-10’.
CyberDojo « Mike Long’s Blog Blog post about a cyber-dojo – sounds like great fun for a geek hackfest. Includes link to Rails app that runs the whole kata system (tags: kata dojo rails) Read more – ‘links for 2010-04-29’.
jQuery HTML Table Toolbox – Noupe Need to know how to handle HTML tables with jQuery – here's a roundup of lot's of plugins to get you started (tags: jquery table plugins tables) Read more – ‘links for 2010-04-28’.
sitaramc's gitolite at master – GitHub An alternative to gitosis – very well documented, interesting features (tags: git gitosis server hosting development gitolite) Read more – ‘links for 2010-04-22’.
For an upcoming project I needed to set up secure communications using GPG. It’s been a few years since I used this, and I have never used GPG on the Mac before… Turn out, that it’s not trivial to get it running… Here’s a bunch of links that helped me get things working: http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/index.html – [...] Read more – ‘GPG Mail under Snow Leopard’.
botanicus's rango at master – GitHub (tags: development django rango gems webframework gem) Pro Git – Smart HTTP Transport (tags: git http sysadmin) Story Mapper by Carbon Five (tags: agile development ideas pivotaltracker project scrum stories) Taking a Backup Using Snapshots (tags: admin storage backup filesystem lvm) What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-04-02’.
Craig Stuntz’s Weblog : What is Homomorphic Encryption, and Why Should I Care? Interesting! (tags: code homomorphic security algorithms) Read more – ‘links for 2010-03-21’.
How I develop Clojure with Vim : :wq – blog (tags: clojure editor vim repl) John Goulah » Node.js, Websockets, and the Twitter Gardenhose (tags: javascript node.js programming websocket nodejs html5 twitter) Read more – ‘links for 2010-03-16’.
eagain.net Git – gitosis.git/summary the official gitsosis repository (tags: git server gitosis) Gigism: Install Git/Gitosis on a server (Debian) – Part 2 Errors that could happen when installing gitosis – in my case, the /home directory in NOEXEC, so I moved the git users home directory to another path (tags: git gitosis howto) scie.nti.st » [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-03-15’.
TunTap – Frequently Asked Questions Another part of the puzzle Caught in a Web » HTC Hero USB Tether on Mac OS X something that "just works" with the iPhone takes around 4 hours to get working with a Android phone… This instructions + liberal installation of Tunnelblick and Viscosity finally got the HTC Hero [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-03-14’.
mite.blog. Facts & figures: The first 20 months of our small SaaS start-up going for premium-only instead of freemium Facts and Figures from a SaaS startup only on number of users, conversion rates etc. Extremely interesting and encouraging reading. (tags: business entrepreneurship startup statistics) Read more – ‘links for 2010-03-09’.
eigenclass – Related document discovery, without algebra Finding related documents – without algebra (tags: ruby datamining lsi algorithms tagging programming data python) SVD Recommendation System in Ruby – igvita.com And a detour on SVD in Ruby (tags: ruby programming rails datamining learning rubyonrails recommendations algorithms) Practical text classification with Ruby « the zen machine Some [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-03-05’.
BashFlash – A different kind of Flash blocker for Snow Leopard Kill flash processes that use to much memory – nice addition to ClickToFlash (tags: mac software osx safari flash) Read more – ‘links for 2010-02-10’.
News: International OpenOffice market shares – Portal – Tutorials, Tipps und Tricks für Webmaster auf Webmasterpro.de Interesting study about the market share of different Office suites (tags: marketshare office openoffice) Read more – ‘links for 2010-02-09’.
HdM ePub – Micropayment für Content-Anbieter im Verlagswesen – Hlozanek, Mark interesting comparison of different micropayment offerings (german) (tags: ecommerce micropayment) persistence.js: An Asynchronous Javascript ORM for HTML5/Gears « I am Zef Just what the doctor ordered for HTML5 offline applications (tags: javascript database html5 sqlite) Read more – ‘links for 2010-02-06’.
{ :copypastel => 'A Maglev Store-y' } Persistable module for Ruby objects. Works in Maglev (tags: ruby maglev objectdb persistence) Read more – ‘links for 2010-02-01’.
Why Arel? « Magic Scaling Sprinkles The reasoning behind the new Rails 3 API for generating SQL (tags: ruby rails3 db sql rubyonrails design database arel activerecord) The new Actionmailer API in Rails 3 Introduction to the new API (tags: rails3 ruby rails rubyonrails actionmailer) gist: 289467 – GitHub Evolution of a python programmer – [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-30’.
/dev/null : Weblog Eight theses on why "startups manage to pull things off, that enterprise IT doesn't" (tags: software architecture entrepreneurship enterprise) Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-22’.
nvie.com » Blog Archive » A successful Git branching model A very good Git Workflow for developing, managing, releasing software (tags: git workflow release) Shuttle Discovery Beautiful Pictures of the Space Shuttle performing a "flip" manoeuver over Switzerland (tags: photo schweiz space_shuttle) Magnus Holm – Continue that exception And an expansion of the idea – [...] Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-21’.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures I have found my next 20 hours of watching videos :) (tags: programming video lisp education learning lectures) Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-20’.
Net::HTTP Cheat Sheet Should save some time sometime in the future (tags: ruby programming reference http cheatsheet net-http) Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-17’.
OtherLinks – Private Public Chat handy commands in s skype chate (tags: skype private_chat) Solaris 10 & OpenSolaris p2p, p2v, v2p : mrj's Weblog Move a running Solaris Server from one box to another (or virtualize it on the way). Cool! (tags: howto solaris opensolaris zfs virtualization p2v) Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-16’.
Stack Overflow Network Configuration – Blog – Stack Overflow Schema of how StackOverflows servers are clustered and loadbalanced (tags: server configuration HA) Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-14’.
jspdf Generate PDF from JavaScript (either in the browser or on the server) (tags: programming javascript pdf generator jspdf) Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-12’.
Europe Internet Usage Stats and PopulationStatistics (tags: reference research statistics europe usage) http://www.ribeeziemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/DMScott_Interview4.mp3 Great rant (mp3) on ROI and marketing (tags: socialmedia roi) Read more – ‘links for 2010-01-09’.
The Master, The Expert, The Programmer Another great write up by Zed Shaw (tags: programming code inspiration mastery interesting expert) Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-29’.
The Passive Splice Network Tap – Home of Janitha Karunaratne Simple way of sniffing Ethernet traffic (provided you have physical access to the cable) (tags: howto security network technology hacking networking ethernet tap splice sniffer sniffing hacks) Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-25’.
gitextensions – Project Hosting on Google Code In some companies, some people still have to use windows. This could help them (tags: git windows programming scm development software opensource versioncontrol) Qanban 0.1 Released! (tags: agile beta web kanban) Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-23’.
Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks // RailsTips by John Nunemaker Seems like it's finally time to look into this… (tags: database rails nosql) Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-19’.
EtherPad Blog: EtherPad Open Source Release This looks like a weekend project :) (tags: opensource collaboration etherpad wave) DB2 Error Messages Finder Handy to have around when you don't know what SQLCODE -913 means (some deadlock fwiw) (tags: sql db2 reference) Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-18’.
Maintainable Software: Rails Logging Tips Lot's of great tips for Rails logging (tags: rails rubyonrails ruby howto logger logging) chriseppstein's compass at master – GitHub This looks like an absolute amazing way of working with CSS – semantic CSS instead of spaghetti CSS. Let's see what our designer has to say about this (tags: css [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-17’.
Network Management: Multi-Node Cluster Shared Nothing Storage More OpenSolaris Share Nothing HA stuff (tags: Opensolaris solaris high-availabilty) Whitepaper-OpenHAClusterOnOpenSolaris.pdf (application/pdf-Objekt) Create a HA cluster on one machine with 2 virtual box systems. Step-by-step guide (tags: solaris, high-availabilty , howto) Shared Nothing Storage in Open HA Cluster – Augustus Franklin's Blog Description of a HA architecture with [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-11’.
EWD1165.PDF (application/pdf-Objekt) Edgar W Dykstra on the battle between science and managment – a good read and good thoughts. Blends in nicely with my current studying for a Msc in IT… (tags: programming management engineering software philosophy university science) Real time online activity monitor example with node.js and WebSocket @ Bamboo Blog Great article on [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-09’.
Sun xVM Hypervisor (System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System) – Sun Microsystems (tags: virtualization xvm sun opensolaris) Create a fully virtualized ubuntu-9.04 DomU on Sun xVM Hypervisor : Divyen Patel's Weblog (tags: xvm sun hypervisor ubuntu) Read more – ‘links for 2009-12-01’.
The State of XML Parsing in Ruby (Circa 2009) | Engine Yard Blog (tags: ruby xml library performance nokogiri hpricot rexml libxml parsing jaxp jruby) node.js and this is the main site of node (tags: networking nodejs concurrency v8 programming server webdev performance framework) Node.js is genuinely exciting This looks like a replacement for some [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-11-24’.
Apple's Mistake "Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals? Partly because they can afford to be. The best programmers can work wherever they want. They don't have to work for a company they have qualms about." (tags: apple iphone business software culture development) Clients From Hell some of the things read sound just [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-11-20’.
25 Tips for Intermediate Git Users : Andy Jeffries : Ruby on Rails, MySQL and jQuery Developer (tags: git tips tutorial programming reference howto versioncontrol github) IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines by AP: Yahoo! Tech IBM simulates the cortex of a cat… The singularity is near (tags: brain ai neuroscience) JPolite V2 [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-11-19’.
Dr Nic ’s Dead simple JavaScript Unit Testing in Rails (tags: javascript testing rails tdd bdd video js) How To Start A Rails Edge App The Easy Way | Ariejan.net step by step on how to clone rails edge and start a new app. Learnt a trick or two about git submodules (tags: rails edge [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-11-13’.
Official Google Blog: A tale of 10,000,000 books (tags: google books copyright blog google-books book) Pamela Samuelson: Google Books Is Not a Library (tags: Goog google books internet copyright digitization) Methodic approach to CSS coding: Four Bubbles Model – woorkup.com (tags: webdesign tips webdevelopment bestpractices css tutorial) Read more – ‘links for 2009-11-11’.
How to test file uploads with Cucumber « /* CODIFICANDO */ (tags: cucumber rails ruby bdd file) Testing PDFs with Cucumber and Rails | upstream agile – software see how to download files (tags: pdf rails testing bdd cucumber rspec) Read more – ‘links for 2009-11-10’.
Jeppe's Unicode page Handy to have around when you download a MySQL database and all the utf-8 characters have turned into gibberish (tags: utf8 unicode characters latin1 charset) Read more – ‘links for 2009-10-28’.
Winograd – Thinking machines (tags: programming ai philosophy terrywinograd article) Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript Programming the iPhone only with Web-Apps – open Book by O'Reilly (tags: programming iphone html css javascript) Video on the Web – Dive Into HTML5 Mark Pilgrim on HTML5 and video (tags: development howto reference tutorial html [...] Read more – ‘links for 2009-10-25’.
lenary's ginatra at master – GitHub Sinatra based replacement for Gitweb (tags: git sinatra gitweb) plateau09-hannenberg.pdf (application/pdf-Objekt) Study that shows that strongly typed programming languages increase the programming time (tags: programming typing strong weak empiric study) Read more – ‘links for 2009-10-15’.
Exploding Software-Engineering Myths – Microsoft Research (tags: programming research agile analysis engineering software-engineering management) Read more – ‘links for 2009-10-10’.
One of the assignments I have to write for the Masters Programme I’m working on now, had me thinking about re-mixing. I had written about the presentation by Cornelia Sollfrank at Tweakfest a couple of years ago on this blog. It prompted me to use the net.art generator to create the following image: Quite fitting [...] Read more – ‘Re-mixing Images’.
The project we are working on for a job-search box in Switzerland (“stellenanzeiger.ch“) has started nicely and we have already reached the “visitors per month” goal, our client had for the end of the year. We are constantly applying small fixes, reading more jobs (that would be a blog post all by itself), recognizing duplicates, [...] Read more – ‘iPhone interface for Stellenanzeiger’.
Last week I finally got a chance to use the new nested routes in a small rails app, managing invoices for one of our clients. Each invoice belonged to a school and both schools and invoices had an address. It seemed (and was!) the perfect oppurtunity for nesting some forms. I whipped up a sample [...] Read more – ‘Rails 2.3 and Nested Forms within Nested Routes’.
We just moved this blog to our own servers and updated to WordPress 2.7 in the process. While it seems that everything went smoothly, there sure are bound to be problems… I think that the Umlauts got messed during the move – but I’m not going to chase UTF-8 conversions…. Any other problems, missing stuff [...] Read more – ‘Blog moved and updated….’.
The BDD Workshop I held at RailsWayCon in Berlin went quite well. I bombarded the 30 or so people with a lot of new and unfamiliar technology – not all of which is RSpec or Cucumber related. Using a Twitter App as an example, we cucumbered, speced, stubbed and mocked around for a whole day [...] Read more – ‘Materials for BDD workshop’.
Only a few more days, and the Rails World will converge on Berlin for RailsWayCon, an alternative conference to the cancelled RailsConf Europe. I will be teaching a workshop on BDD on monday, 25.5 – including working with Cucumber. See the complete Schedule. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of good presentations and meeting [...] Read more – ‘Speaking at RailsWayCon in Berlin’.
Well this is my first post since joining Jens-Christian and Daniela here at InVisible, but the topic is an old one. About a year ago I released the Paperclipped Assets manager for Radiant, which started rather slowly, but has recently taken off and become quite popular. Thanks to the magic of github, I have received [...] Read more – ‘Amazon S3, Heroku and the Paperclipped Assets Manager for Radiant’.
twu.li starts to grow. We track almost 8000 twitterers for their updates and collect the URLs. This takes more and more time (there is quite some potential for optimizing it by requesting things in parallel). Right now, that’s about 3 hours to do a full scan (and it will get worse). New URLs can therfore [...] Read more – ‘scaling twurli’.
I haven’t written the last week, and I guess the suspense is killing all 3 of you, that read this blog. On day 4 (the day before Read more – ‘twur.li – days 4,5 …’.
Today was spent setting up infrastructure. Part of this sprint is to learn new things, so we took the opportunity to play around with some of the new features of Rails 2.3. The best thing so far is the templating system, that allows you to define which gems, plugins and other files for your rails [...] Read more – ‘InVisible Rails Sprint Day 3 – twur.li comes alive’.
Not much news today. Most of the day was spent on client work. I had the fun task of calming down everyones nerves – there are still two deadlines to meet this week, before we can fully embark on building the Twitter app that I need for my day to day work. I thought about [...] Read more – ‘InVisible Rails Sprint, Day 2’.
The last few months have been furious. Not only have we moved to the new offices, but Keith Bingman has joined us as on a regular basis, and Andrea Szabo is our intern for the next 18 months, while she’s becoming an application developer. Quite a few projects have been made, a new website is [...] Read more – ‘InVisible Rails Sprint, Day 1’.
We have been moving our clients websites to our own co-located server over the last few weeks and have had mostly good experiences doing so. Yesterday however, there was trouble in InVisible hosting land, and we had a couple of hours downtime on one of the websites (of course the one with the most traffic…) [...] Read more – ‘Hosting fun’.
It took a long time, but the publisher of my book and my company finally agreed on a method of selling the PDF of my Rails book not only on CD (and only to people in germany) but – as it should be – as a downloadable version. I have setup a small shop at [...] Read more – ‘The PDF is available for purchase!’.
On Halloween Friday was the Somesso conference on social media in Rüschlikon. After last weeks Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, this was a fresh and new conference put on by Arjen Strijker. There were quite a few bloggers covering the confernce, the usual slew of pictures taken and of course a lot of chatter on [...] Read more – ‘Somesso’.
Following up on my piece ‘the private net‘ from last week, some further thoughts on secure communications and a call to action: One secure way of communication, supposedly, is Skype. I have heard law enforcement people in Switzerland talk about their problems with Skype: They can’t monitor and eavesdrop on the encrypted communication. But is [...] Read more – ‘more privacy on the net’.
This article has been gestating in my mind for quite some time. It was pushed closer to being written by an incident a couple of weeks ago. I run a number of different websites (in this context namely iphone-essentials.ch). Also, since a couple of years, I had a Google AdSense account and ran ads, not [...] Read more – ‘the private net’.
The coming Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin (October 21.-23.) is hosting a lot of interesting speakers on a lot of topics “web 2.0″. I just did a 25 minute interview with Lee Bryant of headshift on various topics. We talk about Web 2.0, how social tools can be adopted by the enterprises, what changes might [...] Read more – ‘Web 2.0 Expo – Interview with Lee Bryant’.
Schweizer Landeskoordinaten – Wikipedia convert gps coordinates into Schweizer Landeskoordinaten (tags: algorithms gps map coordinates conversion) Read more – ‘links for 2008-09-16’.
Data Noise: ActionWebService is back using AWS with Rails 2.1.0 (use the nmeans-actionwebservic fork for 2.1.1) (tags: webservices rubyonrails webservice actionwebservice plugin rails) Performance Tuning Guidelines for Single-Server 100-500 User Systems – Zimbra :: Wiki (tags: zimbra tuning) Performance Tuning Guidelines for Large Deployments – Zimbra :: Wiki (tags: tips performance optimization zimbra tuning) The [...] Read more – ‘links for 2008-09-15’.
patrick collison – an offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch (tags: iphone programming howto wikipedia) Read more – ‘links for 2008-09-14’.
It took a bit longer than we wanted too, but I’m happy to announce that the PDF version of my Rails Book is now available. The book is getting excellent reviews (which I am very grateful for) and has been selling quite well on Amazon, thank you all You can buy the PDF version directly [...] Read more – ‘Get a PDF of my Rails book’.
notes – Research in Software Development …and ain't that the truth? (tags: wisdom programming development) Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : RE: Forward Agent forward mail while keeping sender information (tags: notes mail) CodeProject: TrackEye : Real-Time Tracking Of Human Eyes Using a Webcam. Free source code and programming help (tags: programming eyetracking webcam vision [...] Read more – ‘links for 2008-08-28’.
Amazon EBS – Elastic Block Store has launched – All Things Distributed (tags: ec2 services amazon ebs s3 distributed cloud storage) Why Amazon’s Elastic Block Store Matters « RightScale Blog (tags: ebs amazon aws ec2) Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store (tags: howto database tutorials ec2 [...] Read more – ‘links for 2008-08-21’.
Willkommen beim Eidgenössischen Institut für Geistiges Eigentum (tags: schweiz markenschutz property Business patent) Read more – ‘links for 2008-08-19’.
iPhone FAQ – Wie kann ich die Autokorrektur deaktivieren? disable stupid german autocorrection on iphone (tags: iphone hack spelling) Finally. Ruby on Rails gets internationalized – artweb design (tags: gem i18n rails ruby rubyonrails web rails2.2) The Ruby on Rails I18n core api – artweb design (tags: gem i18n rails2.2 rubyonrails api localization l10n) Video: [...] Read more – ‘links for 2008-07-23’.
Paul’s complete guide to installing OSX Leopard on your MSI Wind / Advent 4211 – MoDaCo hmm – I think I need a new subnotebook :) (tags: diy mac osx wind) Read more – ‘links for 2008-07-15’.
Time passes. You wait. More time passes. It might seem to you, dear reader, that nothing really happened the last few weeks. The truth – of course – is different. Just the most important things: Henriette and Thomas got married – check out the flickr pics I presented at rails-konferenz.de – Patrick Lenz made wonderful [...] Read more – ‘re-booting’.
TENORI-ON new take on music instrument. reminds me of the computer music program Presto by Guerino Mazzola, many many years ago (tags: electronics hardware music) InfoQ: Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Released why you shouldn’t develop for Sharepoint – opinion (tags: sharepoint programming anti) Read more – ‘links for 2008-06-15’.
stephencelis — Bashfully Yours, Gem Shortcuts open gem documetation directly from the shell – neat (tags: programming gem ruby tips bash shell) Star Guitar | indie music, film and video on demand – sputnik7 Wonderful synchronized music video by the chemical brothers (tags: music video) Read more – ‘links for 2008-06-14’.
Well-formed data | Elastic lists | Nobel prize winners demo Wonderful way of filtering and navigating data (tags: cool data design flash visualization interface visualisation navigation) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-27’.
Hello World and Fibonacci – Stefan Tilkov’s Random Stuff awesome implementation of Fibonacci in a Ruby Hash (tags: ruby fibonacci algorithms) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-21’.
Apple – Support – Discussions – Time Machine on the network is a dog, … fixing TimeMachine shortcomings when saving on a network (tags: apple timemachine network) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-20’.
Cubescape Play with isometric perspective (tags: fun design javascript game programming jquery ajax) Ajaxian » Wii Darts: Powering Ajax applications with Wii controllers Having fun with the Wiimote and an Ajax application… (tags: wii ajax wiimote java games javascript webdev) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-18’.
Developing an accessible slider | Filament Group, Inc. wonderful jQuery design with explanations of work process (tags: ajax code css javascript slider jquery) Filament Group Lab Example From Page from: jQuery Interactive Date Range Picker with Shortcuts impressive Datepicker component (tags: jquery datepicker javascript calendar date ui) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-16’.
faker-0.3.1 Documentation really useful to generate sample data to play around with your application (tags: ruby testing fake library rubyonrails data gem database) gchart-0.5.0 Documentation friendly Ruby interface to the Google Chart API (tags: api gem library programming ruby reference chart google graphs) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-15’.
js-hotkeys – Google Code jQuery hotkeys. seems to work very well (even special keys) (tags: ajax code event javascript jquery plugin keyboard hotkeys) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-13’.
TidBITS Blog Post: Time Machine Exposed! command line interface for Time Machine. Looks nifty – and so much better than the space UI (tags: backup timemachine mac utilities leopard tools) TidBITS Blog Post: Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively Find large files in Backup sets (VM Harddisks anyone) ant erase them (tags: timemachine mac backup [...] Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-12’.
InriaGforge: Sapphire Squeak Smalltalk without the toy character (tags: smalltalk squeak) Inter-Sections » Blog Archive » 13 Tips for creating a successful new online product simple rules, and not rocket science. still seen projects get all 13 wrong…. (tags: blog development howto inspiration online startup business) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-09’.
HoboFields Makes the model master of the database structures and creates migrations (tags: database gem plugin plugins rails migrations rubyonrails) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-08’.
Workstreamr | Work Made Social Stowe Boyds new gig… Looking forward to seeing it, after having participated in his great workshop at Lift 07 (tags: collaboration socialmedia workstreamr Business web2.0 social) Bertrand Russell : In praise of idleness (1932) Everybody works 4 hours a day and the world will be a better place… (tags: essay [...] Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-07’.
OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 Sweet – and an alternative / extension to the Joyent accelerators we are using (tags: solaris sun ec2 joyent) Overview – Seaside Tutorial Great introduction to Seaside. Some familiarity with Smalltalk or Squeak required. (tags: development documentation free smalltalk programming tutorial squeak seaside web framework) WikiMatrix – Compare them all Compare [...] Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-06’.
Bowled Over by RubyCocoa (tags: cocoa code development howto leopard osx programming rubycocoa ruby tutorial rspec) Picolena – DevjaVu (tags: gem library pdf rails rubyonrails search ferret fulltext document ruby) ongoing · Multi-Inflection-Point Alert Things are changing – new paradigms coming up (tags: business culture programming linux future technology rails-konferenz) Read more – ‘links for 2008-05-05’.
Actually, it has been done since Tuesday night at 03:00 in the morning and I’m still recovering… I wrote, indexed, checked and – most importantly – handed in 22 Word documents, 101 pictures (believe it or not, in BMP format, 20 drawings (EPS). I heard from my editor, that it’s in typesetting right now and [...] Read more – ‘Done’.
History have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice! From the International Association of Time Travelers: Members’ Forum Subforum: Europe – Twentieth Century – Second World War via Stefan Tilkov Atari [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-19)’.
Following the cartoon to Erik Burkes ‘Simplicity’ I stumbled upon (sorry, I forgot via what blog) on Ryan Tomaykos article Administrative Debris which in turn was inspired by Edward Tuftes critique of the iPhone. The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface – not computer administrative debris. Let that [...] Read more – ‘Administrative Debris’.
As promised in the last post, here’s my tiny plugin… and this is the readme: IntlDate Date or DateTime Columns are usually show in forms with the date helpers. However, often you just want a textfield, instead of the multiple combo boxes. This will work, but dates are displayed in the database format (2008-03-13 14:55:44). [...] Read more – ‘IntlDateField’.
Hello Lazyweb: I have written a small Rails Plugin to handle DateTime values in text fields. I would love to release it, but I’m not using Subversion any more. Can anyone arrange a login on Github for me? Read more – ‘Github’.
Choose Words fail me: Stroke of insight (if you only follow one link in todays flow: follow this one) Fez 2D Plattform game with a difference. Wow! iPhone Future Apps 12 iPhone Apps of the near future – we are going to live in interesting times. Evernote is almost there in a lot of areas. [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-14)’.
Don’t send Don’t use a method named send in your Rails Controllers. Trust me. Obsoletion Do you know the Hayes AT command set? What the difference between X-, Y- and Z-Modem is? (and which one rocks) Can you adjust the tracking on a VCR? Operate a rotary phone? Without dialing the dial? Yes? You my [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-11)’.
Noise Ben Poole brings back musical memories to me: Art of Noise: Community Anbieter wissen zu wenig über Communities Ganz erst gemeinte, wissenschaftliche Studie über Web Communities, ihre Aufzucht und Pflege. Spannend! Ich denke immer noch, dass Hughs Ideen über soziale Objekete sehr viel Wahrheitsgehalt haben. Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-10)’.
Waiting at the airport in London for the flight back to Zurich. Had an interesting and enjoyable day with a really good meeting, a walk in beautiful Regent Park with my friend Michael and lovely Thai dinner. Been sifting through the iPhone SDK information and videos. Ideas swirling through my head… Random Links of interest [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-08)’.
Smoke on Japan via vowe Git Backup Using Git to backup directories: gibak. I couldn’t get the OCaml files compiled (but I didn’t try that hard) Apple iPhone SDK released Server down MS Word 2008 – got 2.5 Gigs? My friend Benno writes a book in MS Word 2008 – he’s not happy… Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-06)’.
Wonderful unobtrusive jQuery Gallery A photo gallery that just consists of an unordered list? You got it. Example jQuery The next Rails project I start, I will be using jQuery. Err the blog intro to jQuery Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-05)’.
Flowing with the ebb Ebb aims to be a small and fast web server specifically for hosting web frameworks like Rails, Merb, and in the future Django. And it seems to be really fast: Ebb Google Gears go mobile Windows Mobile for now, others presumably coming too (iPhone, anyone?). Interesting blog entry about the whole [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-04)’.
Not really getting much done at the moment, but busy nonetheless. Here’s what crossed my newsreader: try-ing made easy Did you ever write this in your Ruby or Rails code? person.name rescue "" wouldn’t it be nicer to try to to it easier? person.try(:name) Chris thinks so too…. I improved on this (spectacularly) and now [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-03-02)’.
Wir haben seit Februar 2005 einen Toyota Prius, der uns zuverlässig gedient hat. Wir benutzen ihn aber nicht sonderlich, leben gut erschlossen mir öffentlichem Verkehr und das Wallis ist dank der NEAT mit dem Zug schneller zu erreichen als mit dem Auto. Deshalb haben wir uns entschlossen, das Auto zu verkaufen: roter 2004 Toyota Prius [...] Read more – ‘Toyota Prius zu verkaufen’.
Not much flow today, due to things happening that I will qualify (in due time, when I have more distance) as “lessons learned in life”. Still a small morcel: Rails on Git koz talks about what is needed before Rails can move from SVN to Git. Interesting! (We have moved to Git exclusively at InVisible, [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-02-27)’.
Social ToDo Another one of my ideas that I don’t need to do, because someone else did it: Hiveminder. A wonderful presentation and introduction over on SlideShare by pjf: | View | Upload your own Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-02-26)’.
Scripting Screencasts Castanaut is a DSL and library to script ScreenCasts in Ruby. Nifty! while_saying "To install it, drag it to your bookmarks bar." do move to_element("a.button") drag to(88, 106) pause 0.5 hit Enter end Scripting the Shell What if you could use Ruby instead of the shell? You can local_dir = Rush::Box.new('localhost')['/Users/adam/server_logs/'].create servers = [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-02-25)’.
Opera Kestrel Mac Blog Opera used to be my favourite Web browser. That is until they started Kestrel (9.5) alphas. A lot of crashing… The advent of the new Opera Mac Blog also marks a new release… I have been using Firefox 3.0 beta 3 for some time now and actually have started to like [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-02-23)’.
Free Memory I have too many applications open all the time, and only 2 GB of memory. The memory management of OSX just doesn’t seem to be able to handle this, without regular reboots. iFreeMem seems to be the solution. Downloaded trial today, let’s see, how good it it. Current status: Arwen:files jcf$ uptime 8:26 [...] Read more – ‘The Flow (2008-02-22)’.
Today we launched a new website for one of our customers: Zollinger-Samen.ch. Zollinger Samen is a family owned business, that cultivates more than 200 plants (vegetables, flowers, herbs) and sells the seeds. They have operated over 20 years and have been pushed into the internet age by their sons. The website was built with Rails [...] Read more – ‘Zollinger Samen Website launched’.
meta note: I sure hope this isn’t turning into a regular feature I got the news from a friend this morning. Viviane, my girlfriend before I met and married my wife, decided to end her life yesterday. We spent a bit more than a year together, including a wonderful 4 week vacation in the US [...] Read more – ‘In memoriam Viviane Schwyter’.
Today at 12:35, Florians Brain Tumor finally took his life. Florian died in his sleep. I am so sad that he has left us. In September 2006 I visited him in hospital and left very thoughtful. That day I said I’d write a book, if I knew I only had a year left to live. [...] Read more – ‘In memoriam Florian Germersdorf’.
Yes, Leopard is that great, but getting a full Rails Stack working again is a lot of work…. (work in progress) Ruby / Rails Ruby and Rails are bundled with Leopard. Be sure to read about the Apple modifications What’s new in Leopard The rails command defaults to sqlite as it’s database. Use: $ rails [...] Read more – ‘Rails Stack on Leopard’.
Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree. “What are you doing?” you ask. “Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.” “You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?” “Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! [...] Read more – ‘Sharpening the saw’.
There’s an ugly political campaing running in Switzerland at the moment… Our right wing party is running ads against “criminal foreigners” and pictures them as black sheep… The implication of course is, that all criminal activity is from foreigners and all foreigners are criminals. Carole, Keith and I have done something about that: Get your [...] Read more – ‘sheep-shirts’.
While we wait for the iPhone in Switzerland: iphone-essentials.ch iphone-essentials.org Go yonder and spread the link love! Read more – ‘new pet project :)’.
My next public speaking – or rather workshopping – event will be on 13.9.2007. CH-Open is holding their annual workshop days and I’ll be holding Workshop number 13 with the title: Ruby on Rails – Hype, “Business as usual” oder “The next big thing”? It’s going to be a one day workshop and my plan [...] Read more – ‘Workshopping’.
Forget your mobile phone in the bedroom, go to the office (which is conveniently located in the floor above under the roof) and get a full days work done without any distractions… Of course, now I have to deal with the 10 missed calls from yesterday Technorati Tags: work Read more – ‘How to get things done’.
If you are trying to use HAML 1.7 and Ruby Gettext, you’ll have problems extracting the string information from the HAML files. While teamschnitzel has a solution that almost works, there was a change in HAML 1.7 that will render it useless. HAML deprecated the :precompiled accessor which the GetText Parser needs. Luckily, it’s really [...] Read more – ‘HAML 1.7 and Gettext’.
It seems, that everybody is using Slideshare – here am my presentations (some more coming) And here’s the deck I used at rails-konferenz.de – enjoy Technorati Tags: presenting, slidehare, rails-konferenz, slides Read more – ‘Slides for Rails-Konferenz Presentation’.
I have spotted the first photo-set of rails-konferenz.de – look who’s talking: by dbloete Technorati Tags: egosurfing, rails-konferenz Read more – ‘Photos of Rails-Konferenz’.
This post is a follow up and an expansion to my presentation at rails-konferenz.de on the topic of “offline Rails applications”. If you are not interested in lessons from history, technical details about replication etc. feel free to skip this… The rage these days is twofold: The “Rich Internet Application” (RIA) and the ability to [...] Read more – ‘Forward to the past’.
I have been using my mobile phones as a modem for the Mac Power/MacBook quite some time now with mixed success. While the different Nokia phone I used (Commuicator 9500, 9300 and the E61) generally work fine, they regularly just crash or drop the connection – sometime requiring a reboot of the phone. And, while [...] Read more – ‘unlimited mobile’.
While going through my spam folder, I happened upon this gem: I find it sad, that the off-shoring country no 1 is trying to off-shore their work… At least, from what I’ve heard, the west is paying the east for offshored work. Doesn’t seem, like this guy has heard of that concept… Technorati Tags: offshoring, [...] Read more – ‘When the outsourcers outsource’.
Next week, rails-konferenz.de is taking place in Frankfurt, Germany on Friday, 22nd of June. I will be there and present on “Working offline” using Joyent Slingshot. It’s going to be my second appearance at Rails-Konferenz, and I’m very much looking forward to being there. Be sure to say Hi, if you are there too. Technorati [...] Read more – ‘Presenting at Rails-Konferenz.de in Frankfurt’.
talking virtually While most of the added value of a conference is coming from the face to face meetings with a bunch of different people, the tech-crowd can do amazing things when given WiFi and some tools. I witnessed this power the first time at reboot 7.0 when spontaneous collaboration emerged. I’d like to give [...] Read more – ‘flow @ reboot’.
Today, Tweakfest 2007 starts. Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak will be holding a keynote, and the rest of the festival program looks really exciting! I’m happy to provide a little piece of the Tweakfest Puzzle with flow@tweakfest, a backchannel application that will collect users, visitors, spectators feedback and be projected next to the presentations. While I have [...] Read more – ‘flow @ TweakFest’.
I’m back from vacations in egypt. It wasn’t quite the vacation we planned, and due to various illnesses, I got to spend more time than I would have liked in an egyptian hospital, caring for my 7 year old daughter. But we made it back, and caught a lot of sun-rays. I have been reading [...] Read more – ‘Reading’.
I haven’t been very active here the last few weeks, due to an enormous amount of work that needed to be done. And I won’t be very active the next two weeks either. I’m going of the grid for a while… Read more – ‘of the grid’.
Remember my plea for help a couple of weeks ago? I haven’t really had any success with this (even though nice people tried to help me). But then things picked up in the last few days: I browsed through the “Agile Web Development with Rails” book and found a note that basically said, that Internet [...] Read more – ‘When tables are a bad idea’.
One thing that has always made Lotus Notes stand out above any other application development environment, is it’s ability to replicate data and design to different servers and/or laptops. This has made the development of online / offline versions of applications trivial. In general “it just worked(tm)”. While the Web (2.0) applications are taking the [...] Read more – ‘Joyent Slingshot’.
In the Extreme Testing presentation, I have a slide with assertselect examples, some of them lifted from the assertselect cheat sheet. All fine and dandy, except that this assert_select "form[action=?]", url_for( :action => 'foo' ) just doesn’t work. url_for is a method of the controller, not the ControllerTest class. So in order to overcome that [...] Read more – ‘assert_select and url_for’.
reboot 9.0 is happening on May 31st and June 1st this year. I attended both reboot 7.0 and reboot 8.0 and both have been wonderful experiences (reboot 7 being the proverbial “kick in the ass”). reboot 9.0 has a wonderful feature on it’s website: After registering, participants are asked to tag themselves with up to [...] Read more – ‘human? – reboot 9.0’.
Trotz aller Politikmüdigkeit und “die Politiker kümmern sich nicht ums Volk”…. Die Zeiten ändern sich. Bundesrat Moritz Leuenberger blogt! Bravo Moritz, das gibt mir ein klein wenig mehr das Gefühl, dass es Politiker gibt, die mich tatsächlich repräsentieren. Weiterhin viel Erfolg und gutes Gelingen! Technorati Tags: moritzleuenberger, politik, bundesrat Read more – ‘Moritz blogt’.
We use Joyent (affiliate link) for our mail (born out of Textdrive). Last weekend, the Joyfolks updated the application to a new version (and had quite a few problems in the process). One of the new features is Strongspace integration. Strongspace is a secure storage on the Net (accessible through SFTP, SCP and the like) [...] Read more – ‘Joyent, Strongspace and my Samba Server’.
Just 9 people met this time for the SwissRug meeting, but we had some really interesting demos and discussions…. Florian Hanke started of by showing a little application he had thrown together to get his computer to speak to him (a childhood dream). It’s called “James” and based on the speech recognition and synthesis of [...] Read more – ‘SwissRug Meeting Notes 1.3.2007’.
What happens if you play Beethovens 9th Symphony, strech it to last 24 hours (instead of the one hour it usually takes to perform it)? You get 9 Beet Stretch. Interesting music! Technorati Tags: music, beethoven Read more – ‘9 Beet Stretch’.
Was für ein Schwachsinn! Der PR Blogger gibt Short Tipps für die Blog-Promotion – etwa einen “Blog Karneval”, “Blog-Schnitzeljagd”, “Blog-Advent” und ähnlichem Unfug (“Promoblogging”). Irre ich mich, oder vergisst Herr Eck etwas ganz entscheidendes? Na? Keine Ahnung? Wie wäre es mit … Inhalt? Blogs wie der Turmsegler leben durch die liebevolle Aufbereitung von Lyrik. Nja.ch [...] Read more – ‘PR Blogging’.
We have safely returned from our holidays in the mountains. Both weather, snow and skiing was terrific, thanks for asking! On the last day, while gliding up towards the ski slopes, I solved a particular puzzling aspect of my life. I don’t really like to travel. I have nothing against sitting in a train (actually [...] Read more – ‘traveling – not at home’.
The big moment for me – and the reason for going to these conferences – is to get into a state, where I “connect the dots”. Meeting people, listening to talks, sharing ideas, talking, thinking. Mostly about seemingly unrelated topics (“Technology and Society” is a fairly broad description. And then, all going well, something happens. [...] Read more – ‘Lift 07 – connecting the dots’.
One of the decisions we made for a new project, was to use OpenID based authentication, instead of the normal username/password. This has led to interesting discussions – mainly about usability. MostNo people that have tried our new application, had an OpenID identity and so had to log on to one of the OpenID servers, [...] Read more – ‘OpenID gets a push’.
Lift really started today and had a bunch of very different talks that I attended. I’m not even going to try to summarize them – Stephanie and Bruno are doing a wonderful, wonderful job with their notes. (I wonder how Bruno manages to attend (seemingly) every talk and publish a concise recap with pictures and [...] Read more – ‘Lift 07 – Day 1’.
The first day of the Lift conference – the day with the workshops – is over. I was close to not attending, and boy am I glad, that I changed that decision two weeks ago. The day started of with a visit to CERN and their building of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). It started [...] Read more – ‘Lift 07 – Workshops’.
Now that’s a really great idea: HallwayTesting.com is a small scale usability lab. You post a website for scrutiny and a bunch of people can take a gander and criticize you. I have submitted my new web application – it’s going to be interesting to see, if there’s any good feedback coming from this! Technorati [...] Read more – ‘Usability Testing for all’.
A wonderful short video that explains what this Web 2.0 thing is all about. Wonderful concise. The right way to start the week in preparation for next weeks conference, that I’m sure will touch on some of these subjects. [via C0T0D0S0.org] Technorati Tags: lift07, antropology, puppy, web Read more – ‘Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us’.
The blogosphere doesn’t seem to like Snap Previews. After reading a couple of laments (including the one by Bruce Sterling) they now are gone from this blog…. Read more – ‘no more snap’.
Only of course, if you look at the pretty picture of the call graphs that the two systems have. Technorati Tags: apache, iis, security Read more – ‘Apache vs. IIS – IIS wins!’.
I’m taking after my late father, who loved photography, cameras and taking pictures. I lust for a DSLR (like the Pentax K10D for example). However, I’m not sure I’m worthy… The skill of good photography is not due to the size or the quality of the camera, but the eye of the photographer. And I [...] Read more – ‘worthy / not worthy’.
I’m working on an AJAXy application that works just fine and dandy with Safari, Firefox and Opera. And it works so so on IE6 and IE7. I have tried to come to grips with IE and script debugging but given up in disgust. Is there anyone out there that a) understand Javascript b) has a [...] Read more – ‘I could need some help with Javascript and IE debugging’.
Skype 2.5 has been released and it can do near DVD quality video chat. If you meet the necessary hardware requirements that is. And have a decent internet connection. I’ll have to try this later, not while I’m on a GPRS dial up with my mobile phone. Technorati Tags: mac, skype Read more – ‘skype 2.5 for mac does 640*480 video’.
This is for you out there supporting relatives, friends or customers… Trying to get a computer non-literary person to describe something over the phone (“now what does it say on your monitor?” “Dell”) or even have them do some tasks is an exercise in pain. There are of course solutions, like VNC, but even setting [...] Read more – ‘Copilot does Mac!’.
The secret project I’m working on is taking shape. And because of the looming deadline (Liftconference coming up fast), I had to give some thoughts on the hardware, I’m deploying this application on… I have been a Textdrive (affiliate link) customer since ever they existed. I have seen them grow from a small hosting company [...] Read more – ‘Getting ready for production’.
While talking to my friend Henriette about the problems of getting things done, we came up with the following 6 word story: babysteps will get you there too It’s a life philosophy – and true Technorati Tags: philosophy, projectmanagement Read more – ‘babysteps’.
Yes – new year, new rails! Rails 1.2.1 has been released… Get it through the ususal $ sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies There’s a summary over on DHH’s blog. On to new borders… And I guess it’s time to get to work on updating the Rails reference – stay tuned, this will take a few [...] Read more – ‘Rails 1.2’.
Vor allem für die des Deutschen mächtigen Personen: Mein Freund Michael und seine Freundin Monica sind vor ein paar Monaten temporär nach Lodon umgesiedelt um sich Fortzubilden. Ihre Abenteuer dokumentieren sie auf witzige Weise im Web (und dank wiederholtem drängeln meinerseits auch) als Blog. Bitte sehr: London Adventure Technorati Tags: blog, london Read more – ‘London Adventure’.
It seems like January has barely started, and already I’m more than waist deep in work: A not yet announced secret project, that I honestly started with today. Something I have never done before, and something that I’m both excited and scared about. You’ll read more about it, in the months to come. Another secret [...] Read more – ‘This is one crazy month’.
A friend of mine lent me a Wacom Intuos2 Tablet for a couple of weeks. I’m looking for a Mac program (preferrably shareware) to do some illustrations. I need a vector drawing program, that can output EPS. I have looked at Inkscape and it kind of works (X11 layer and all), but I’m sure there [...] Read more – ‘Looking for an illustration program’.
Yeahhh – the last Rosetta program to go away (safe for the few times I have to use Microsoft Office) – Mike West shows how to compile SSHKeychain as an Intel binary. Great! Technorati Tags: intel, mac, sshkeychain Read more – ‘Building SSHKeychain as an Intel binary’.
I did use Feedburner a long, long time ago – and switched it off again. Not being happy that I haven’t done any significant changes to my blog in a long time, I decided to move my RSS feeds back to Feedburner again. This has happened, and you should be getting the new feed automatically. [...] Read more – ‘Burning Feeds (Part 2)’.
Henriette and I have launched a new blog: blog.betabitch.com – a site where we will share our frustrations with all the beta software and applications and websites that we are experiencing. Feel free to join us in suggesting bitch-worthy sites, agree or disagree with us. We look forward to hearing from you. Technorati Tags: beta, [...] Read more – ‘Betabitch’.
Oh joy. The first day in the new year, and Dannie sees fit to tag me with the “5 things you didn’t know about me” meme. I was very introverted As a kid and youth, I was extremely introverted. I played with Lego, read a ton of books and couldn’t bear to talk with other [...] Read more – ‘five things’.
I’m hopelessly behind my RSS reading. I’m trying to catch up, reading really fast, skimming and unsubscribing from a lot of feeds. Merlin Mann’s 43Folders however, is going to stay a little longer – in part because he brought my attention to two really great applications for the mac: Backdrop and Menushade Backdrop just puts [...] Read more – ‘Two greatest Mac Apps’.
We knew that Solaris DTrace would be included in OS X 10.5 (Leopard). And of course there was much speculation, that some other Solaris technologies would make it into the next OS X version. It seems that ZFS is going to be included. This is great news. I’ve been reading about ZFS for quite some [...] Read more – ‘ZFS in Leopard’.
Who’s that trying to hack my Mac? use authsight and the built in iSight camera of your mac to grab a photo of anyone trying to log in with a wrong login/password. Technorati Tags: apple, isight, mac, login Read more – ‘Mugshot Galore’.
I have been having this idea for quite a while: I have lot’s of technology in my house and in the office. Starting with 3 Macs (including the iMac for my wife, that we got this weekend), a decent Home Theater with HD Beamer, lot’s of cell phones, and the robot cleaner. I use dozens [...] Read more – ‘Better living through technology’.
Via Jan Füllemann von novamedia hat mich auf ein spannendes Projekt seines Vaters aufmerksam gemacht: Ein fiktiver Radiosender bringt Reportagen aus den biblischen Zeiten. Die Hörproben tönen spannend und die CD’s könnten für einige aus meinem Bekanntenkreis interessant sein. Auch für Atheisten sicher spannend :-) Read more – ‘Radio Tyrus Calling’.
My presentation at tekzone went well. I found it very difficult to introduce this panel discussion in just 15 minutes. Based on the comments I got, I seem to have succeeded… The presentation will be available for download. I tried to show that there were a lot of languages before Java that have a strong [...] Read more – ‘Java, C#, PHP or Ruby?’.
Mein guter Freund Benjamin hat erst aufgehört zu lesen bevor er aufhörte zu schreiben. Um diesen Verlust wettzumachen, hat er begonnen auf dem Turmsegler ausgewählte Lyrik mit seinen Kommentaren zu veröffentlichen. Schön, dass du wieder angefangen hast zu lesen – ich werde dir über die Schulter schauen! Technorati Tags: lyrik, turmsegler Read more – ‘Der Turmsegler’.
Preparing for my workshop Enable Telnet Access see Oinkzwurgels page, download ‘syno-telnet-r3.zip’ and install it in the Synology Web Admin panel. The installation will stop at 99% – that’s fine Now you can telnet to the CubeStation: $ telnet 192.168.x.y CubeStation login: admin Password: BusyBox v1.1.0 (2006.08.06-13:52+0000) Built-in shell (ash) Enter 'help' for a list [...] Read more – ‘Rails on Synology CubeStation CS-406’.
Next week, I have two speaking engagements: On monday, the 27. I will be speaking at tekzone and sitting in on a panel about “Beyond Java” and speaking on the virtues of Ruby and Rails. If you are in Zurich at that time, drop in (free registration required). On Wednesday and Thursday (29.11 and 30.11) [...] Read more – ‘Speaking’.
Capistrano is the tool of choice to deploy Rails applications. However, it depends on the servers having access to the code repository (like SVN). In some companies, that’s not an option. Luckily, Capistrano is very flexible… Jim Morris has a solution that works wonderfully. Technorati Tags: capistrano, rails Read more – ‘Deploying with Capistrano’.
Culturedcode.com, the makers of Xyloscope (a program that I use for CSS work, as described earlier) have released a CSS reference guide in one HTML file. Through clever use of CSS, DOM Scripting and JavaScript, the complete reference is browseable in one windows. Nifty, helpful and in my bookmarks! Technorati Tags: css, reference Read more – ‘CSS Reference from the CulturedCoders’.
I’m busy coding an application, and I needed to find out if some value is included in one of several arrays: a = [ 1, 2, 3 ] b = [ 2, 3, 4, 5 ] x = 5 y = 6 Now the question is: Is x in either Array a or b? arrays [...] Read more – ‘Did I mention that I love Ruby?’.
Yesterdays rails-konferenz.de was quite a success. Almost 100 particpants showed up for a one day, information packed day. My presentation on “Extreme Testing” went very well. The slides should be up in a couple of days on the rails-konferenz.de web site. I had a chance to reconnect to people I met at other conferences and [...] Read more – ‘Back from rails-konferenz.de’.
Laurent Haug has done it again: Lift 07 is ready to rock your mind! I’m really looking forward to going to Geneva in February 2007 and getting my mind lifted – before it will be rebooted in June Technorati Tags: ballpark, conference, geneva, lift07, reboot8 Read more – ‘lifting off in 07’.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… However, I don’t find any imitation in this Rails Cheat Sheet Collectors Edition but only a blatant rip-off of my Rails Reference. What is disappointing about this is, that Benjamin Gorlick has been granted a Google Summer of Code grant for Rails documentation (also mentioned [...] Read more – ‘Flattery or rip-off?’.
Again – one of these “it takes several hours” to find it things: In an inherited application that I’m expanding, I was using RJS actions to handle inserts: page.insert_html :bottom, 'info_list', :partial => 'info' Because of some non-showing Umlauts, I switched on a filter to set the content type: class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base before_filter :set_charset [...] Read more – ‘Rails, Content – Type, RJS and filters’.
The inaugural meeting of SwissRUG / Zurich.rb / bunch of geeks was quite a success, with 16 people turning up. Due to some communications gone bad, the restaurant only had reserved a table for 10, but by grabbing the employees table, we managed to squeeze all in. Quite a mixed bunch of people: The operating [...] Read more – ‘first swissRUG meeting success’.
Maybe this saves you a couple of hours of frustration: def syslog_progress if request.xhr? worker = MiddleMan.get_worker(session[:host_info]) progress_percent = worker.progress render :update do |page| page.call('progressPercent', 'progressbar', progress_percent) if progress_percent >= 100 page.assign 'stop_polling', true end end else redirect_to :action => 'list' end end The RJS calls didn’t execute at all and the excessive use of [...] Read more – ‘Textmate Footnotes and RJS render calls don’t mix’.
As of today: The Manifesto for Agile Software Development We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following [...] Read more – ‘signed the Agile Manifesto’.
The first meeting of the swiss Ruby Users Group (and/or zurich.rb) is next thursday, 28.9.2006 at 19:00 in Restaurant Reithalle near the main train station in Zurich. (see details) So far we have 11 people coming, if you are interested in joining, please send me an email, so I can update the reservation at the [...] Read more – ‘SwissRUG / zurich.rb meeting 28.9.2006’.
Yesterday was one of these days where nothing seemed to happen. Actually a lot happened. I visited my friend Florian in hospital. After a brief stint in a recovery clinic he’s now back in hospital where he’s head was drained of excessive water. He slept while I was there, and I don’t think he realised [...] Read more – ‘(Not) productive’.
I’m sitting and watching an amazing screencast that shows, how Ruby Quiz 84 (computing and printing Pascals Triangle) is solved, using a test driven development approach. Not only is it a good show of how TDD works, but it also shows the power of TextMate (THE editor on Mac OS X) but also the beauty [...] Read more – ‘learning Ruby’.
Am 3.11 findet in Frankfurt die rails-konferenz.de statt. Ich werde dort sein und einen Vortrag über “Extreme Testing – oder wie ich lernte aufzuhören mich zu sorgen und Änderungen zu lieben” halten in dem ich aufzeige, dass automatisches Testen weit mehr ist, als nur ab und zu ein die UnitTests ablaufen zu lassen. Ich würde [...] Read more – ‘Auf zur Rails-Konferenz’.
Maybe I’m going to go to the german Rails conference in Frankfurt in the beginning of November. I just looked at the prices for the flight from Zurich to Frankfurt and saw theses quotes for the return flight: The world is coming to an end… Technorati Tags: conference, flying, rails, swiss Read more – ‘Flying has been more expensive’.
Sounds to good to be true – well it is in a way. But it ain’t that bad… Prompted by Magnatune – freie Online Musik by Martin Röll I (re)discovered Magnatune, a online music store that sells music with a creative commons license. I promptly bought the album Big Dipper that Martin recommended. If you [...] Read more – ‘Free music, free books’.
I have started a new Rails project for a colleague of mine. Time to live on the (rails)edge again for this project. As usual, it’s fun to get into the freshly developed mode again, after having finished two large Rails projects. The feeling of building something out of nothing is great. And of course I’m [...] Read more – ‘Living on the RailsEdge’.
Satish Talim from the Pune Ruby User Group conducted an email interview with me about Ruby. I have the honour of being in company with people like Bruce Tate, James Edward Grey II and other true gurus. You can read it here Technorati Tags: interview, india, ruby, rubyonrails Read more – ‘interviewed’.
UPDATE: I have disabled comments for this post, because I’m getting spammed with hundreds of messages on exactly this post. Feel free to comment somewhere else :-) Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) are slowly picking up steam in Zurich (and Switzerland) so it seems to be a good time to start a Ruby user group. [...] Read more – ‘zurich.rb forming’.
After one public and two internal workshops, it’s time to announce the second public Ruby on Rails Workshop in Zurich, Switzerland. Details are on the webpage, here’s the management summary: Date: 27-29. September 2006 Location: Zurich, Switzerland Cost: CHF 1450.– Number of participants: maximum 6 Language: German or English This is a more of a [...] Read more – ‘Ruby on Rails Training / Workshop in September’.
Interesting read: On the implausibility of the explosives plot – an analysis of why the removal of shampoo bottles from planes is just a mad farce. And then some tips for budding terrorists and the proposed counter measures. Technorati Tags: bombs, terror Read more – ‘Where will the madness end’.
The good news first: I’m back from a week of vacation in Copenhagen where I had a chance to visit my 87 year old grandmother (who is in great shape), meet Henriette and her lovely family, show Copenhagen to my family. We were stopped in our travels by a lunch-box-mistaken-for-a-bomb on a train station, by [...] Read more – ‘Back on Track’.
Yesterday I visited my friend Florian. He had a shaved head and a slightly swollen face. His eyes were closed during most of my visit. He was neither asleep nor quite awake. Probably due to the multiple drugs he was taking at that time. But he recognized me and held my hand firmly, pressing it [...] Read more – ‘if not today…’.
This blog hasn’t seen much activity the last couple of weeks, due to not only a lot of work, but more back pain. It seems – so the doctor diagnosed – that I have developed Diskushernie. I have massive pains in my left leg (the Ischias nerve) and have to go to therapy 2-3 times [...] Read more – ‘Painfully quiet’.
Believe me, you don’t want to. At least, head the warnings about not removing the different architectures (specially if you are on an intel Mac). I just spent the best part of the night, reinstalling Mac OS X and piecing my setup together from various backups. How I found out? Ecto, a PowerPC program, crashed [...] Read more – ‘Dont. Use. MonoLingual.’.
Sunday, Copenhagen airport, waiting for the plane to take me home to Zurich. Reboot8 is over. (and parts of this text written after the weekend) Reboot feels to me like a drug trip (having some limited experiences in that matter, I think the comparison is valid). While smoking (and inhaling!) I usually came up with [...] Read more – ‘re-booted – re-birthed version 8.0’.
…until reboot 8 starts. I just saw the detailed program and I’m feeling like a kid in a toy store. So much to see, so much to hear, so much to learn… Until I’m flying for Denmark however, there’s a few things to get done: install a new version of one of the rails projects [...] Read more – ‘36 more hours…’.
Emacs Versors – Context sensitive cursor movement. Can we have that in TextMate plase? Searchable Ruby and Rails documentation – Good stuff Boompa Launch Post Mortem – 2 guys, 2 months, 1 Web 2.0 startup Pyro – a Mac App that wraps Campfire – simple is beautiful (be sure to check the InVisible Campfire) rcov [...] Read more – ‘Links 2006-05-26’.
The lack of updates here are due to a variety of reasons: having my wife in hospital to have her gall bladder removed having one of our rabbits disappear (either as part of a stroll in the wild or becoming a valuable member of the food chain – valuable for a fox, that is. Probably [...] Read more – ‘getting there’.
There’s so much to do and so little time, so I leave you with a few links to recently discovered gems: We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work — a look at extreme – ahh – batting by Ron Jeffries? Start-Up lessons — as always excellent reading by Paul Graham observe OS X filesystem events [...] Read more – ‘Programming links’.
Tomorrow marks the start of my third Ruby On Rails course. It’s going to be a 3 day course with a (somewhat lengthy) introduction to Ruby (and some of the joys of programming in a very dynamic language) with the rest of the time devoted to Rails. I firmly believe in hands-on training, so the [...] Read more – ‘Ruby On Rails Reference’.
Via the Yojimbo trial: the iTunes Signature Maker. It creates an audio signature based on what you listen to in iTunes. Here’s my audio signature – enjoy. Technorati Tags: iTunes, mp3, yojimbo Read more – ‘Listen to my Audio Signature’.
Then I have the person for you: Stefan is my brother-in-law and is free around June 2006. He (and my sister) are willing and able to relocate, both have excellent english skills. Stefan is the Head of Information & Media Relations at a swiss private bank and is looking for a new challenge. Als Kommunikations-Manager [...] Read more – ‘Does your company need a new head of information or communication?’.
Yes, the Intel Macs support Dual Boot Camp. And it works nicely, but requires the dual boot dance, which is time consuming. And while in Windows, there is no Mac goodness. Thanks to the good folks at Parallels this problem is getting smaller every day: Lotus Notes running on Windows XP running in the Parallels [...] Read more – ‘Notes on XP on Mac rocks’.
So I may be the last person on this earth to have read Dan Browns “The Da Vinci Code” (in it’s german translation, thanks to Eris who lent me the book) I finished it over the long weekend. As much as I like a good conspiracy theory, this book is so bad, I don’t know [...] Read more – ‘Da Vinci Code’.
It’s been more than a week since the last Week in Review (a format I have shamelessly stole from 37Signals, Fly on the wall), here’s what we have been up to: 3 days of Ruby on Rails Training, inhouse for a large corporate customer. It was a success in my book, and we had quite [...] Read more – ‘More than a week in Review: Back to Domino’.
I met Skip when he worked at Action Technologies as a sales man. When we worked on the “Ibex Domain Manager”, we hired him and brought him and his wife Cindy to Switzerland for a couple of months. He became a friend and we were sad, that we couldn’t get enough traction in the company, [...] Read more – ‘Skip Bockoven’.
Ever since the experiments with the Xen virtual server (which run beautifully, thanks for asking) lot’s has happend: It’s been – oh – almost 20 years since I sat in tests for 2 times 3 hours straight. That’s what I did last friday, as part of my education to become an “Organisator“. The tests went [...] Read more – ‘The week in review’.
More in my tale of the xen-server. My goal is to run Lotus Domino on this box, and the last installment saw the server coming up, waiting to be configured. Well, it turns out, that IBM presumes that you have X installed on your servers, because it wants to setup the server using a Java [...] Read more – ‘Configuring X and Domino Server on Debian Sarge XEN’.
Get the 6.5.4 TAR file from notes.net and copy it to your Debian server. Here’s my /etc/xen/notes.cfg: kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-xenU" memory = 384 name = "notes" root = "/dev/sda1 ro" vif = ['mac=00:00:00:00:00:01, bridge=xenbr0' ] disk = [ 'file:/home/xen/domains/notes/data.img,sda1,w', 'file:/home/xen/domains/notes/swap.img,sda2,w' ] To distinguish in which environment to type the following commands: host # means the [...] Read more – ‘Installing Lotus Domino 6.5.4 in Debian XEN’.
Sauron, my faithful basement server got another 512MB of RAM, and I plan to virtualize it to run multiple servers on it (most notably a Lotus Domino Server). This is the “step by step” account of how to install XEN 3.0 on it Fixing the size of the root partition My root partition was just [...] Read more – ‘Installing XEN 3.0 on Debian Sarge’.
Improving my datacenter in the basement, I installed a proper Firewall instead of the dinky 4-port NAT router that connected our house to the wild intranet. I used an Astaro Security Linux on an old PC, a setup that has served me well in the Office network. To make everything look really good, I used [...] Read more – ‘It’s the cables, stupid’.
Ray Ozzie, now CTO of Microsoft, then founder of Iris and Groove, has been doing some interesting work on the way, the web enables inter-app communication. His latest endeavour is Live Clipboard a way to bridge communication between web apps or web apps and desktop apps. There are a number of demo screencasts that show [...] Read more – ‘Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard’.
I was looking at my Campfire Chat and checked out the Account tab when I noticed that the 30-days option had turned into a “free” option. In addition, the paid options have a checkmark next to “ad-free”. Have the 37signals given us yet another free application? In the beginning, they said that there would only [...] Read more – ‘Is Campfire going free?’.
In preparation of the Rail Course I spent some time writing a couple of pages of “cheat sheets” or quick references of the materials presented. In the end, I got about 20 pages, mostly of short code snippets. I also have a presentation to start things, and I did that in Keynote. Beautiful program and [...] Read more – ‘Pages – Word – Markdown’.
Recently I was deciding what new digital camera to buy. A friend of mine lent me his Canon EOS D1 Mark II with some high-end lenses. I lugged several 1000 $ of equipment and several kg’s around for one long weekend and was able to snap around 1000 pictures. This camera is incredible good, the [...] Read more – ‘It depends’.
On February 27. and 28. I will be hosting Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich, Switzerland. There still are open slots, so if you want to learn hands-on how to build web applications using Ruby on Rails, now is the time to sign up. Details: Venue: Badenerstrasse 585, 8048 Zurich Cost: CHF 750.– Language: German [...] Read more – ‘Still open places for Rails Training in Zurich’.
37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Ruby On Rails have launched their next application: Campfire. Campfire is a chat application, that shares some traits with Internet Relay Chat but runs inside a web browser. There are some added benefits like searchable transcripts, file sharing. Plus, it looks really nice: I’m running on the 30 days [...] Read more – ‘Join the campfire’.
Tim Bray over at Ongoing talks about AJAX Performance. His point being, that we should use AJAX to offload heavy computation from the web-server to the users browser. I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there [...] Read more – ‘Ajax to do more stuff?’.
One of the really bad things in the blogosphere is keeping track of all the comments you made around other blogs. And if you use a news reader to aggregate the RSS feeds, it’s even worse, because you don’t even see any comments – unless you visit the blog in your web browser. Enter CoComment [...] Read more – ‘CoComment’.
After talking to quite a few people about my idea of open sourcing the course materials for my Rails course I decided to go ahead and just do it. The advantages outweigh the drawbacks as far as I can see them: Advantages Giving something back to the community -> Good karma Having other people look [...] Read more – ‘Open Sourcing – what next?’.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about ever since announcing the Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich is if I should “Open source” the course materials (maybe even making the development process open, so everybody could see where I am, what I’m doing) Today I attended a talk by Cory Doctorow who talked on [...] Read more – ‘Open Source Course Materials’.
In true geek tradition (reboot7, then Tweakfest) I’m heading of to Lift06 today. Lift is organized by Laurent Haug whom I met at reboot. Kudos to him for taking on the task of organizing a conference that pulls together a really impressive set of speakers. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing those people: Cory Doctorow [...] Read more – ‘Going to Lift06’.
Im Rahmen meiner “Ich will nicht nach Indien offgeshort werden” Weiterbildung, ein paar Notizen zur Ausbildung in Organisation die ich derzeit bei SGO durchlaufe… Technorati Tags: ausbildung, organisation, organisator, sgo Read more – ‘Ausbildung zum Organisator’.
Macworld has a performance test of the new dual core iMac vs. the old G5 iMac. They are saying, that the new Dual Core iMacs don’t perform twice as fast, and seem quite a bit disappointed. I think, they just aren’t comparing Apples to Apples. Let me explain: The old iMac is a single processor [...] Read more – ‘Comparing Apples and… Apples?’.
Trials and tribulations: Installing libgd Use Darwinports to install GD $ sudo port install gd2 (it seems that you need to install gd2, and not gd because otherwise the linker will complain about a function not being defined: Arwen:/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ruby-gdchart-1.0.0/examples jcf$ ruby bar_example.rb dyld: NSLinkModule() error dyld: Symbol not found: _gdImageCreateFromGif Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ruby-gdchart-1.0.0/./GDChart.bundle it might [...] Read more – ‘libgd and ruby-gdchart on Mac OS X’.
RubyOnRailsWorkshops.com is a web site that tracks all Rails workshops around the world. So if you’d rather go to Los Angeles than to Zurich, that’s the place to look. In related news, it looks like my Geneva Rails Workshop won’t be happening. So far I have one interested person (coming all the way from Denmark) [...] Read more – ‘Worldwide Rails Training’.
I once read (in Hickman / Weiss: The Death Gate cycle) a very simple explanation of magic – here it is paraphrased: All things are possible, even the seemingly impossible ones. Magic is the act of changing the probabilities of making the impossible happen. That’s not only happening in fantasy books, but in real life [...] Read more – ‘Magic? Of Course’.
The startup item for Postgres on OS X always fails on Tiger. Launchd (the launch daemon) to rescue: PostgreSQL launchd on Tiger gave me the starting point and my /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgresql.PostgreSQL.plist looks like this: < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> < !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>GroupName</key> <string>postgres</string> <key>Label</key> <string>org.postgresql.PostgreSQL</string> <key>OnDemand</key> <true [...] Read more – ‘Start postgres with launchd on OS X’.
I’m working on a Rails application on a Postgres DB Server. Our client has decided to change the database so that it uses db-schemas in order to simplify administration of rights on the database. However, he has also introduced tables with identical names in different schemas. Our rails application was already fairly well underway, so [...] Read more – ‘Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL Schemas’.
Keeping the tradition of getting real and the beta books by the Pragmatic Programmers, I have decided to host a beta version of my upcoming Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich workshop. The plan is to host a beta version of the training on 31.1 and 1.2.2006 in Geneva, just before the Lift06 conference. Here’s [...] Read more – ‘Beta Ruby On Rails workshop in Geneva, 31.1 – 1.2.2006’.
After having worked with RubyOnRails for over a year, with several successful projects done or in progress, I’m happy to announce the first Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich (german). This two day workshop in Zurich covers the basics of Rails development with the participants building a complete web application from scratch. They will use [...] Read more – ‘Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich’.
UPDATE: I had to disable comments, because I was getting spammed with hundreds of “cool site” messages. Feel free to contact me in any other way. Working with RubyOnRails is a really wonderful way of developing applications. The plugin system allows extensions without modifying the core of rails. Here’s my second plugin: WherePlugin It’s based [...] Read more – ‘Where Plugin’.
Meine Tochter bastelt für ihr Leben gerne. Für jedes erdenkliche Alt-Material findet sie Verwendung, denn die Sachen sind “brauchsam”. Und beim Skifahren ist sie sehr “getrauig”. Und bald wird ihr die Schule diese wunderbaren Wortkreationen austreiben. Technorati Tags: kinder, sprache Read more – ‘Brauchsam’.
Time for looking back at the year that was, and the year that’s coming, the good and the bad. Mezzoblue tipped me of, Ben Poole paved the way. Apple 2005 is the year I made the switch. I’m using a 15″ PowerBook for nearly all my work now. This Laptop is the single best investment [...] Read more – ‘7 things’.
I wish you and your families a wonderful x-max, a happy new year and some well deserved days of peace and quiet. I’ll be gone for a couple of days, hopefully to sun and snow, skiing and drinking wine. Expect light to no blogging. Oh and yes – This blog has moved to WordPress. Please [...] Read more – ‘Merry X-Mas’.
Can I crash is a list of bloggers giving room to fellow bloggers when traveling. Initiated by Henriette Weber Andersen. Cool idea. I have added Zurich, Switzerland, when will you add your place? Technorati Tags: blog, crash, travel Read more – ‘Can I crash you?’.
Yep, I can manage the occasional SELECT * FROM some_table; and even one or two constructs more. But I haven’t had a formal education in SQL (me being a Lotus Notes guy. (“Redundancy is good”). The GalaxQL program is a wonderful introduction to SQL and covers quite a bit more than just the WHERE statement. [...] Read more – ‘Learning SQL’.
Even though you haven’t seen me post on this blog recently, I have been busy deleting comment spam all the time. My MoveableType installation is pretty old, and the SpamFiltering solution is quite old too. Everything runs on a creaky server out of my office. Also I’m not to fond of fiddling with the layout [...] Read more – ‘Moving the blog to WordPress?’.
R. had told me about this strange “Services” menu in OS X, but I never really bothered to look deeper into it. The article “Mac OS X Services (the menu you never go to)” told me a bit more about the things possible, when text is selected… Let my Mac read some text loud Open [...] Read more – ‘Mac OS X Services’.
Now that Skype allows for swiss SkypeIn numbers, I have added one. You can call me on : +41 44 586 91 30. Technorati Tags: business, phone, skype Read more – ‘Swiss SkypeIn number’.
A tiny Javascript include allows you to play mp3 files directly on your website and to tag the file on del.icio.us. Nice, simple, practical. Technorati Tags: delicious, music, mp3 Read more – ‘Del.icio.us PlayTagger’.
It’s not enough that our mailboxes are overflowing with Viagra spam. Now Pfizer has started this add campaing in Zurich: Somebody please tell them the wrong’s of their ways Technorati Tags: advertising, viagra, spam Read more – ‘Real Viagra Spam’.
Both Bruce Sterling as well as the organizers of Tweakfest have allowed me to publish a recording of the speech that Bruce Sterling gave at this years Tweakfest. It was recorded using my Powerbook and it’s built in microphone, so sound quality is, let’s say “challenged”. Still, Bruce can be understood without problems. Enjoy: Bruce [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – The Bruce Sterling speech as mp3’.
After the question about “what happend to Foldershare” got answered (Microsoft bought it), the Mac version is back online, the only thing left, that left me wondering, was the question what was going to happen to the US$ 100 I spent just a week before the acquisition on the Foldershare professional service. Now that also [...] Read more – ‘Foldershare Customer Service’.
Tweakfest ist gestern zu Ende gegangen. Ein paar Dinge sind nicht in voller epischer Breite gebloggt, aber ich finde die Zeit dazu nicht mehr. Nur kurz zum Panel über “Copy Right”, das eine Diskussion zum Urherberrecht versprach. Obwohl die Panelisten einiges zu sagen hatten (ein PJ Wassermann hatte sogar eher zu viel zu sagen und [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Gedanken zum Schluss’.
Cornelia Sollfrank, Netzkünstlerin Net.Art Generator sucht Bilder im Internet (Künstler / Stichwort) und baut neue Bilder zusammen. Wer ist der Autor eines solchen Bildes? Das Programm? Der Computer auf dem das Program ausgeführt wurde? Juristisch ist dagegen erstmal nix einzuwenden. Leider scheidet Software / Computer aus, weil nur Menschen Urheberrechte erwerben können. Der Programmierer des [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Net Art Generation’.
Georg C. F. Greve, President, Free Software Foundation Europe A long presentation that covers the basics of free (as in freedom) software, touches Open Source Software, and moves on to show that proprietary software is a danger to society, because code (software) forms the basic structure of an (internet based) society. By using proprietary software [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Open Source is not enough’.
Gabriel J. Gomez, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich Talks about the work on designing a robotic hand that mimic the human hand. Exploring the concepts of grasping. Very high degree of freedom. Pressure sensors. Different movies of the hand opening, closing, grasping things (spheres, cylinders). The hand is controlled by a neural network, fed [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – The Human Roboter Hand’.
Fuminori Yamasaki, CEO iXs Research Corporation Shows a small ECO Robot KHR-1, that is sold for $1’000. He shows that it can walk, stand on it’s arms, somersault and make a cartwheel. It is used for example for battle competitions between humanoid robots. There are 100 competitors that match their robots every 6 months, so [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Robots are better Dancers’.
Walter Hehl, IBM Research Center Rüschlikon Gives a broad overview on the progression of computer processing power and storage and how this influences “pervasive” computing. Interesting points: “What was once private is now public”, “what was once hard to copy, is now trivial to duplicate” and “what was once easily forgotten, is now stored forever.” [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Future Life’.
Things to do at a conference: There shall be drinks and food. Preferably free. Preferably drinkable (coffee in the shape of dark water is not enough – especially if it costs CHF 1.50). I don’t mind paying for a beer or something solid to eat. But water/coffee/fruits have to be available. There shall be Wireless [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Random Observations’.
Das “Big Brother” Panel Die Debattierenden waren wirklich nett zueinander, sagten nicht viel neues und sind meiner Meinung nach am Thema vorbeigeschrammt. Neben dem Datensammeln im Namen der nationalen Sicherheit, das a) zur Sicherheit nötig ist (Peter Regli) aber b) nicht transparent ist und deshalb gefährlich (Matthias Leisi), dem Hacken von Krankheitsgeschichten durch WLAN lauschen [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Big Brother und ein Ende mit Schrecken’.
Update: The mp3 recording of the speech is online Professor, Dr., Cyberpunk (What would William Gibson say) Bruce Sterling gave a speech called “The Hacker Crackdown“, a reference to his 15 year old book about “hackers” and how the ideas and ideals have changed over time. Starting off by comparing the original motivations for “romantic [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – Bruce Sterling’.
Elmar Ledergerber, the mayor of Zurich, greets the – not to many – visitors and wishes “happy tweaking” The team behind tweakfest, explains the reasoning behind Tweakfest and what awaits us. The agenda and the goals of tweakfest look impressive. 10 things are going to be premiered, a lot of speakers. Art meets commerce. I’m [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest 2005 – What / Why’.
Tweakfest takes places in “Museum für Gestaltung” in Zurich. Interestingly enough, at a conference that is about “visions of the digital lifestyle”, there is neither electricity for the audience, nor wireless LAN. So there won’t be a backchannel, collaborative note-taking, heckling, background checking of the speakers or all the other fun stuff that would be [...] Read more – ‘Tweakfest – no infrastructure’.
Today, Tweakfest starts in Zurich. It’s a conference about “visions of digital lifestyle”. The program reads like a mixture of really boring (“Die Kreativwirtschaft als strategischer Erfolgsfaktor”) to the political interesting (“Totale Überwachung: im Namen der Sicherheit?” – featuring Matthias Leisi on the panel ) to the one I’m looking forward to (“From Science Fiction [...] Read more – ‘Going to Tweakfest’.
Laurent Haug of ballpark.ch is organizing a conference called Lift06 in Genva in the beginning of February. The roster of speakers looks promising, the price (CHF 295) looks right and Geneva is only a train ride away. I think I’ll be there (Laurent still needs a Ruby on Rails demo) Technorati Tags: conference, lift06, refactoring, [...] Read more – ‘Lift Off’.
After a couple of weeks of having FolderShare installed on a variety of Windows and Macintosh Computers, I decided to upgrade to the paid, professional version of their service. Foldershare allows you to keep multiple folders in sync across multiple computers. It works beautifully and flawless. Today I wanted to put it on my Mac [...] Read more – ‘What has happened to FolderShare?’.
Neulich im Postausgang: Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren ich habe mir die Un-CD “thelonius monk quartet with john coltrane at carnegie hall” gekauft. Diese ist zwar per “copy contol” geschützt, aber laut Hülle kompatibel zu Mac OSX. Nachdem ich die Un-CD in mein Apple 15″ Powerbook eingelegt habe, ist die Un-CD nicht erkannt worden. Es [...] Read more – ‘Brief an EMI wegen Un-CD’.
Stupid! I needed a 200 MB database file to do some work with it. I had been doing design changes to the database which were deployed to the productive system late in the evening. Then the last changes were done later in the evening by the content owner. The system admin who did the deployment [...] Read more – ‘No interoperability on USB sticks’.
That’s what I thought when I read the ongoing announcments (and the howling of the frustrated pro-users) over at Mac Essentials yesterday. Of course it would be nice to have new multi-core PowerMacs or PowerBooks. But few people would care. The announcements of the new iMac with it’s gadgets, FrontRow and of course the iPod [...] Read more – ‘Long term strategy’.
This is one of the things that I should have been setting up a long time ago, but haven’t. Yesterday was the day. Remote Backup of my PowerBook. Goal: Continuous off-site backup of the most important files (my home directory) on my laptop Ingredients: Strongspace (I got a 4 GiB account for $8 / month) [...] Read more – ‘Back-up’.
There are things in the life of an IT engineer that are likely to drive him insane. Not the installation of PostreSQL on OS X. Not writing multithreaded Ruby code. Not looking for performance problems in Java programs, running on Sun Solaris using vmstat, iostat and truss. Not even working with RoboHelp X5 and RoboSource [...] Read more – ‘Table of Contents’.
“Saw it on the net and will need it at some time”-dept: HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML is a nice writeup of things to do and not to do when creating XML. [via Ned] Technorati Tags: bozo, wellformed, xml Read more – ‘Don’t be a bozo when producing XML’.
One of the Blogosphere’s biggest claim to fame is the ability for conversations to emerge. The readers have the ability to respond back, creating a living two-way environment of interaction. So far so good. Unfortunately, there are a few problems. First the ubiquitous amount of spam that percolates the blogs. I regularly have to clean [...] Read more – ‘Tracking comments’.
This is too cool: Onlife looks at what you do in several programs (Safari / Firefox, Mail, iChat, iTunes) and stores all kinds of information about the interaction. You can then tag it (or leave it) and search for it. For example, I’m installing PostgreSQL on my Mac and I found some info on the [...] Read more – ‘Onlife remembers what you were doing’.
Just a collection of links to paper based organization systems: Pocket Mod: Flash based creator for small pocket agendas. Drag and drop layouts, print, fold: ready PigDogPDA: Use a Moleskin notebook for your GTD processing. Looks like it could actually work Moleskin Notebooks: From 43Folders -tips and tricks More Moleskin stuff: also from 43Folder Technorati [...] Read more – ‘Paper Based Planning’.
Somewhat of an add-on to the post “Lotus Notes is not agile“. The project I’m working on with the good folks of sourcepole, is a network monitoring tool. We are using Ruby on Rails to build a web frontend to some Ruby Network monitoring-fu. The network topology is stored in a database, and in our [...] Read more – ‘Refactoring Rails Applications or why tests are a good idea’.
Julian Robichaux has a recent article “Agile Development is not for me“. As you can guess from the title, he’s not in the agile camp: What’s worse is, the “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” mentality doesn’t take into account that there’s a certain kind of butterfly effect with software design. A [...] Read more – ‘Lotus Notes is not agile’.
What a nice little program! Active Timer keeps track of where you spend your time, while working at the computer. [via TUAW] Technorati Tags: mac, zeitmanangement Read more – ‘Active Timer’.
Do androids dream? Is there a world out there? The answer lies in this beautiful screen saver “electric sheep“. It runs on both Windows and Mac computers and all the computers running this screensaver communicate, exchanging DNA of new “sheep”, the wonderful creatures that show up on the screen [via bsag] Technorati Tags: engineering, kreativ, [...] Read more – ‘Saving the screen’.
MailTags for Apple Mail, adding Spotlight Meta Information to mails. Looks good, I’ll try it out. From the same people that gave us Mail ActOn (a plugin that I uses extensively) Technorati Tags: mac, mail Read more – ‘Mail Tools’.
This may be old news, but I just saw that Google does know quite a bit more about a website: Check out the “Blog”, “Screenshots” etc. links in the following screenshot. Is this something that is standard? It’s the first time I’ve noticed that in a Google search result Technorati Tags: google, adium Read more – ‘Google knows more’.
You haven’t seen this video yet (that’s why it’s called the unseen video, I guess). And the next time you see it, it will be different again. Today and maybe next hour, it looks similar. Check again in a few months… Ingenious way of randomizing the video, check it out – you will see it, [...] Read more – ‘Unseen Video’.
The usual stuff – cut out the middle man. Been there, done that (at least if you ever bought a Dell computer). What about banks? Zopa is exactly that. A place where people can lend and borrow money. If you lend money, it get’s split up into a number of different “money-parcels” and as a [...] Read more – ‘Disinter-mediate the intermediary’.
For an upcoming Rails project, the plan is to use the sqlite database. On Windows, the whole process of getting this installed was easy. Download the DLL, do a gem install sqlite3& and be done. Not so on OS X, where I plan to develop. sqlite3 is installed by default, but trying to install the [...] Read more – ‘sqlite3 on Mac OS X — trials and tribulations’.
A really interesting question. Can a Spam Filter play a game of chess? Matthias might be interested to try this at his job ;-) The tale of the spam filter that learns to play chess is very interesting. It shows, that seemingly simple algorithms can produce interesting results. via indy blog Read more – ‘Can a spam filter play chess?’.
Bitflux has compiled the Top100 list of swiss blogs. This humble blogs comes in at rank 99 (only a couple of ranks behind my blogging friend tanja) Interestingly, the Müga-Blog, one of the top business blogs in Switzerland doesn’t make the list. Is the Technorati ranking reliable? And when will our invisible business blog make [...] Read more – ‘Rank 99’.
A couple of weeks ago, we moved to a house. A beautiful house, a lot of rooms, a huge garden, cellar – everything needed. This weekend, the kids were out of the house (on vacation or with grand-ma). Instead of just enjoying life doing nothing, my wife and I spent saturday and sunday going through [...] Read more – ‘50%’.
Where indeed? Check this puzzle, reportedly by Einstein. And yes, I know who own the fish, but I’m not going to tell you…. Technorati Tags: einstein, fish, puzzle Read more – ‘Where’s the fish?’.
We like the moon via Don Dahlmann – ahh – interesting Pleix via vowe – disturbing Web Guitar via babo – fun Technorati Tags: music, guitar Read more – ‘Music, music, music’.
It’s absolutely unbelievable, how little it takes to make a good design. Actually, it’s unbelievable, how much it takes to make so little. The Mighty Mouse is such a thing. While I haven’t seen it yet, or actually laid hands on it, it seems to me, reading the descriptions, that the designers have put a [...] Read more – ‘The cult of the mouse’.
On one of my customer projects, I needed to access an Oracle 9 database to transfer information from a Notes database to the SQL database. Because this was going to be an intermediate solution, only for a couple of weeks, I hacked together something that used the Oracle ODBC driver and installed it at the [...] Read more – ‘Lotus Domino Server with ODBC connection’.
This will cost me many, many hours: Google Earth Unfortunately, no Mac version yet. Luckily, I still have a PC. Technorati Tags: google, earth Read more – ‘Earth’.
Obviously, Josh Petersen got in contact with the CopyCats of aimido. They responded and Harald Schröpfer, one of the missing advisors made an appearance on Josh’s 43things list. The home page of Aimido now sports a “inspired by…” blurb which lists 43things and goes on like this: 43things.com, blogger.com, friendster.com, Google Suggest, linkedin.com, meetup.com, orkut.com, [...] Read more – ‘CopyCats part II’.
Well, well, well. There is this company called 43things.com that provides a neat web service. And suddenly there’s a german company called aimido that does the same thing. Josh Petersen of 43things blogged about it. Who are David Kuczek and Berit Ernst? Why are they seemingly stealing the idea, the layout and the functionality of [...] Read more – ‘CopyCats?’.
Today my companies new blog: not.invisible.ch goes live. This blog will focus on the what our company is doing. A “behind the scenes” look if you will. We have heard the jokes about our companies name. While we consider ourselves successful if what we have done becomes “invisible”, the process, the thought, the work we [...] Read more – ‘We are not.invisible.ch’.
Blogging will be light during the next couple of days. We have taken the keys to our new house last tuesday and I have been busy honing my manual skills by laying down more than 60 square meters of floor in the newly refurbished roof of the house. My hands ache. My knees ache. I [...] Read more – ‘Moving, moving, moving’.
The European Internet Project (EIP) that was founded after reboot7 tries to bring together european people working on or for the internet project. It is trying to counter balance the US domination that has been the way of the internet for the last decades. While I applaud the idea, I think there are larger things [...] Read more – ‘Europeans unite’.
There is both a video and audio recording of the Q&A session as well as a transcript of the complete event available. Also Ross Mayfield has some more background information on the demo and the reboot7 event that we witnessed. [via crueltobekind] Technorati Tags: reboot7 Read more – ‘Wrapping up the Engelbart demo’.
There are lot of echos on the blogosphere about reboot. The best summaries I have seen so far are from Laurent Haug, who blogs at bohellz. Check them out! And sorry Laurent, that I didn’t manage to show RoR to you – are you in Zurich any time soon? Technorati Tags: reboot7 Read more – ‘Excellent summaries of reboot presentations’.
reboot is over, I missed the party last night, but I’m almost on the plane back to Zurich with a couple of hours of sleep. reboot was a great experience and I there was enough food for thought there to keep me occupied quite some time. What would be needed now is a couple of [...] Read more – ‘Thinking on three levels’.
The thing that pains me most about this conference, are the chairs. There are three different models in each of the halls, and they compete in the “which is the most uncomfortable” category. There is no clear winner, all of them are extremely uncomfortable in the long run. They therefore can’t be of danish design [...] Read more – ‘reboot pains’.
Ben Hammersley delivered a great presentation. He spoke about the history of blogging — all the way back 300 years ago to The Tatler as the proto-blogger. A very good and entertaining presentation with lot’s of food for thought. One patter of though is, that our society must come up with new social norms and [...] Read more – ‘It’s not Bill Gates fault’.
We were promised the “mother of all demos”, the complete Doug Engelbart demo done in 1968, that preceded so many technologies that we are working with today. The video can be seen partially on the net, but we got 90 minutes of raw footage. Foto by Michael Heilemann And boy – this really is called [...] Read more – ‘A near religious experience’.
Here’s an idea that occured to me here at reboot. Why not set up a special session with all 400 people and have them produce a product / a service during a time period of say 4 hours. There are so many intelligent, smart people around here that have all kinds of skills. Why not [...] Read more – ‘set them people to work’.
I may be the last person to enjoy a conference with a hi-tech factor. And that is probably because the last conference I’ve been to was back when having a modem line in the hotel room was considered high-tech. Here at reboot, 50% of the people lug and operate a laptop. I guess a lot [...] Read more – ‘Tech-Conference’.
Sitting in the breakfast lounge at reboot, I made two interesting observations: The ration between PC and MAC’s is roughly 1:1 (and I was thinking that the ration would be like 1:2) The Apple power adapter takes a normal 2-prong small 220V power cable (and no, danish 2 hole wall-outlets don’t like the swiss 3-prong [...] Read more – ‘The score is even’.
I’ll be leaving for reboot7 tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward both to return to the city where I lived for 4 years as a kid, to visit my grandmother (who is very sick unfortunately) and to see/talk/listen/discuss with the luminaries that are going to be there. Of course, I will try to get one of [...] Read more – ‘off to the north’.
Spotlight continues to be useful: With the RubyImporter Plugin it understands Ruby Code… Neat Technorati Tags: mac Read more – ‘Ruby Spotlight Plugin’.
The list of the 10 most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th century disturbs me no end. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss it by looking at the organization that created that list, but I wonder how influential that institution really is. Of course “Mein Kampf” is in there, “The communist manifesto”, “Das Kapital”. But [...] Read more – ‘Dangerous things’.
Lately, I have been the target of telemarketers. Wine, interesting and money-saving business ideas, investment ideas, what not. Today another phone call with a suppressed number: “Fischer” I answer (that being my name). “Good morning, this is so and so, from the company this and this, do I speak with <my wifes name>” “Do I [...] Read more – ‘Some telemarketers….’.
LotusScript allows you to execute a OS command by using the rc = Shell( "command" ) command. The problem with this is, that Notes starts the command asynchronously and returns 33 as the return code, meaning “it’s started”. There is no way to actually wait for the command to finish and – gasp – even [...] Read more – ‘Lotus Notes server on unix: Waiting for a shell command’.
Being a step-by-step guide as an aide for the failing memory. Inspired by the screenshots of Dee Zsombor Get a Tiger compatible Emacs (unfortunately Aquamacs does strange (i.e non-emacs) things with it’s windows, so ECB falls on it’s face) Install RubyMode.el (from the Ruby distribution) Download ECB Download supporting libraries (eieio, speedbar, semantic) and install [...] Read more – ‘EMacs on OS/X for Rails development’.
R. sent me a link to a transcript of Will Wright’s presentation of Spore, an evolutionary game, a couple of months ago. I was stunned by the descriptions. Today I found a link to a video of the actual presentation and demo of Spore. While I sat and watched in amazement, my wife and our [...] Read more – ‘Spores of life’.
If you are sometimes looking at a wonderful CSS design and wonder, how this was achieved, you could look at the HTML and the CSS code and start to figure out how to achieve things. This could take quite some time. Enter Xylo Scope. Xylo Scope loads all CSS files, and displays the relationship between [...] Read more – ‘A CSS microscope’.
Download the QuickTime High Definition Trailers directly (and save them for future viewing, for example on a HD capable projector – thanks Michael ;-) ) kingdom of heaven nasa wildlife Technorati Tags: mac Read more – ‘HD Trailers’.
Our office got a new HP LaserJet 2420dn printer yesterday to replace an old LJ6 (that was woefully inadequate for office use). Installation of the printer drives went fine (as long as you call a 67% success rate in the first round fine – now we are at 100%) Today the additional 500-page tray arrived [...] Read more – ‘More trays?’.
20 cool things in Tiger – and I haven’t heard about most of them… The best hint for me, was the hint for Keychain Access. I know that there is something that is called keychain, but I didn’t realize that it’s a full blown application that not only stores all your passwords (duh), but also [...] Read more – ‘20 things in Tiger’.
Last week my article on Ruby on Rails came out in Infoweek.ch. It briefly describes Rails, Ruby and gives a very high-level overview over the development and the advantages of Rails over other development frameworks. Thanks to the guys at Infoweek, I’m allowed to give you a PDF version of the article. Enjoy (and beware: [...] Read more – ‘Ruby on Rails Article in Infoweek.ch’.
The tale of the joys of asynchronous vs. synchronous processing. In one of my application users edit rich text in a web browser. This has been working well for 2 years, but all of a sudden problems have appeared. When the users edit very large portions of text, it sometimes is cut off at an [...] Read more – ‘To synchronize or not’.
It took a while, but now it’s online: The swiss (and the scandinavian) itunes music stores. The price for a track is CHF 1.50 ( around 1 Euro or 1.2 US$ – quite expensive, but this is Switzerland, where the money comes from). Also, version 4.8 of iTunes itself is available, and it’s playing videos [...] Read more – ‘iTunes Music Store Switzerland is online’.
Because we moved our TV from our home to our vacation flat, the only way to watch TV is to go on vacation. And here in the mountains, we have satellite TV. Most of the stuff on TV is crap. But there are a number of documentary channels that bring really interesting stuff. Like the [...] Read more – ‘Heavy Metal’.
After reading a bit about iSync & Tiger at vowe, I decided to give the solution outlined a try. However, I managed only to create a Kernel Exception on the phone, and to wipe out all my calendar entries. Yes, I had a backup (through the excellent mobical.net service, which allows to sync the phone [...] Read more – ‘iSyncing with the Nokia 9500’.
I was visiting Benno, my friend who got both a PowerBook for himself and an iBook for his wife. When I looked at his running applications, I noticed “Norton Antivirus for Mac” running on his computer. I laughed and said, that he wouldn’t need it. To this he answered, that there were indeed viriii for [...] Read more – ‘There really is nothing to see’.
A most excellent article on the technical details of Apple’s OS X 10.4. There’s a lot more changes than meet the eye. Interesting reading on kernel locks, file meta-data, Quartz architecture and loads of other things. And a pleasant difference to the many “Spotlight/Dashboard, so-what’s really new” articles that I’ve been seeing the last weeks. Read more – ‘Technical Tiger Background’.
I’m still sitting in the train from Bern to Zurich, in the business compartment (the one sporting electrical outlets). As usual there’s a deluge of laptops (mostly Dell). But within 2 meters of me are two other 15″ Apple Powerbooks. That’s the highest density I have witnessed in the last 8 months that I have [...] Read more – ‘Invasion’.
Something good is coming out of the NSA — a guide to secure various operating systems. I have cursorily glanced over the XP and the OS X guides and learnt quite a bit. This goes to my reference stack and will be thoroughly reviewed soon. Very interesting reading! Operating System Security [via vowe] Read more – ‘The NSA secures your computer’.
One of the things that bugged me about writing the blog, is that I usually have time to write when I’m not online (in the train). Recently, this has changed due to the availability of fast (and expensive) GPRS/EDGE, but the prices Swisscom charges for internet access are prohibitive high. I was toying with the [...] Read more – ‘Trying out offline editors’.
I admit it. I have switched. The Mac Mini was just the beginning, since last week I have a 15″ PowerBook. I really, really like it. I will not bore you to death with all the details of why the Mac is better — you have heard those things before. I have to keep my [...] Read more – ‘This Mac thing’.
This is the view I’m enjoying right now. Looking out living room window of our holiday-flat in a little village in the mountains south-west in Switzerland. This is a really small village, some 1300 inhabitants and almost non-existent tourism. But there are sheep and goats and this village happens to have the highest vineyards in [...] Read more – ‘Living on the EDGE’.
I’m sitting in front of two clustered Notes servers that have died on me when I tried to diagnose a problem using the OpenLog log database. I added some unsupcious looking code to circumvent a problem that of course failed. In order to get more informtation on what failed, I decided to use OpenLog to [...] Read more – ‘Notes / Domino Server crashes and fixup woes’.
Mike Clark has an incredible powerfull idea: Learning through testing. He describes how he uses unit tests to learn a programming language (Ruby in this case). Each unit test encapsulates a bit of language knowledge he has aquired. Writing the unit tests, he explores a bit of the language. Also, there’s a written trail of [...] Read more – ‘Learning through testing’.
I have successfully avoided a lot of the web based tools, aggregators, services, demonstrations of technology and general doo-ahhs. But I have come across two (and I’m probably the last person in the blogosphere to do so) that really have helped immensly in how I read, digest and store information. Let me introduce bloglines and [...] Read more – ‘Web services’.
Skype has started the SkypeIn Beta (Windows only at the moment). Sign up & set up is skype like easy and it calling my new number worked 30 seconds after paying for it. At the moment I have a 3 month subscription, paying EUR 10. This is more of a test, than a real number [...] Read more – ‘SkypeIn’.
from the my-outsourced-brain-dept: Install cygwin. Be sure to select the X11 base package open a cygwin shell start X: $ startxwin.sh you will get a xterm window on your Windows box type $ xhost + to disable host security, so that other hosts can connect to your server Enable X port forwarding in PuTTY ( [...] Read more – ‘connecting from a X-client to a cygwin X-server’.
Early in the morning, almost at the end of my 105 minute commute, I have to switch trains at Bern. Sometimes I pick up a Brezel as a kind of breakfast. That’s what I did today. As I was standing in the queue I noticed a man, about 50-55 years old, worn out, looking ragged, [...] Read more – ‘This morning at the train station’.
Today when Frodo, my Mac Mini woke from it’s sleep, I found this: a blue ball, that I can drag around on screen and that reacts to clicking on it — by becoming even more blue. What the hell is this? Read more – ‘What is the blue ball?’.
Gefunden bei Tanja’s Mügablog: Und wenn mein vierundneuzigjähriger Grossvater meine Grossmutter tröstet, weil schon wieder einer aus dem Freundeskreis gestorben ist, sagt er halt: “Gränn’ nid, es hettere no. U es chömere nache.” Nicht nur, dass die Sprache wunderschön ist (ich würde gerne diese “Fremdsprache” sprechen können), auch die Weisheit die darin steckt: Weine nicht, [...] Read more – ‘Gränn’ nid’.
Developing web applications is one thing, testing them another. Sure there are Unit tests, functional tests but in the end, the application also needs to be tested as the clients and users see it. And too many times, a seemingly simple change in an application breaks down parts of the application that weren’t regression tested. [...] Read more – ‘Automated Testing of (Domino) Web Applications’.
Actually – I’m not sure if he’s dead yet. I have an aquaintace that I met online and that I have seen in real life maybe two or three times. We share one common interest, but not much more (as far as I know). Yesterday I talked to a good friend of mine (met through [...] Read more – ‘Death of a Digital Identity’.
Microsoft has aquired Groove Networks. There are some more details on the website. Does this mean that Ray Ozzie has more time to blog? And does that mean, that Groove has been lost for the Mac community forever? I have been using Groove right from the start, before the 1.0 version (and wrote about it [...] Read more – ‘MS buys Groove’.
Kathy Sierra writes a wonderful blog all by itself with thoughtful and interesting short essays on how to create passionate users. The current entry on multitasking your brain is as good as ever. If you want to get more done, be mindful. If you want to have more time, be mindful. Mindful means one thing [...] Read more – ‘Mind on Multitasking’.
Of course I know about the openNTF website that collects open source Notes applications. Also I read about the OpenLog template, but I haven’t used it – until 2 weeks ago when I needed some information why my agents were failing suddenly after a Domino 5 to Domino 6 migration. I remembered about the OpenLog [...] Read more – ‘openNTF Log’.
From the “my external memory dept”: One of the simplest way to debug SMTP problems is to talk directly to the SMTP server using a shell (Telnet): Frodo:~ jcf$ telnet smtp.domain.ch 25 Trying xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx... Connected to smtp.domain.ch. Escape character is '^]'. 220 smtp.domain.ch ESMTP ready. MAIL FROM:name@domain.ch 250 OK RCPT TO:joe@doe.com 250 Accepted DATA 354 [...] Read more – ‘SMTP Cheat Sheet’.
If you need to find out which process is listening on a certain port, use the following: Linux netstat -natp | grep :80 Solaris lsof -i | grep :80 On Solaris, you need to have compiled lsof that you can get from Sunfreeware.com Read more – ‘Find out which process is listening on a port’.
Taking a cue from Gadgetguy, I have burned the most requested feed by running it through FeedBurner. This will massage the feeds, making them easier accessible to people using a browser and various other nice things (like giving me statistics on who is reading this blog – similar to Statcounter, who does an excellent job [...] Read more – ‘burning Feeds’.
I won’t have time to do this for another 2 weeks (see above for the reason), but I googled around for the problem of a crashing Lotus Notes 6.0.3 for Mac OS X and found … Ben already has it licked: Notes 6.5 on OS X. Also Nini seems like a good thing to have. Read more – ‘Installing Lotus Notes on Mac OS X’.
Ups – alle Sonderzeichen liegen auf der Mac Tastatur an völlig anderern Stellen. Vor allem Dinge wie eckige und geschweifte Klammern scheinen auf einer Schweizer Tastatur unauffindbar. Zum Glück gibt’s Tastatur-Tipps. Read more – ‘Programmieren mit dem Mac?’.
Boys need toys… but the wife likes them too, so it’s OK: Pictures taken with a Nokia 9500 – all complaints about quality to Nokia please. Read more – ‘New Toys’.
My MacMini arrived yesterday and I was playing the better part of the evening and a small part of the night (yawn) with it. First impressions: It’s small It’s quiet (unless it get’s really busy, at which point the fan kicks in – and that’s one noisy fan) Setup was very, very painless. I let [...] Read more – ‘Mini’s here’.
This is quite an up / down week, with all kinds of — let’s call them — interesting things happening. On the negative side: The air is so dry, that I wake up every night with a mouth so dry that my tongue feels like rasping through death valley At the same time my nose [...] Read more – ‘One of these weeks’.
Mixing ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 characters on a webpage, encoding Umlauts 16-byte ISO representation and declaring them to be UTF-8 – no wonder, some pages with Umlauts look like shit, or make the rendering application throw exception (complaining about malformed UTF-8). Such is the joy of i18n development. And a joy, if the people doing the [...] Read more – ‘utf-8 table’.
The comments on this blog are turned off, due to various major problems with the comment script sending out spam. I’m not sure if my vintage MoveableType installation has a problem, but I want to play this safe. Also, I don’t have time for redoing all the layouts at the momen, so I have just [...] Read more – ‘No Comments’.
You know that you should get some more sleep if you instead of working on the train during the commute, you read the last 60 mails on the RubyOnRails mailinglist you fall asleep doing so, and give up with the computer, closing more or less sleep for 40 minutes during the train ride wake up [...] Read more – ‘Too tired’.
Everybody is doing the Ta-Da-List dance, and rightly so. Ta-Da lists is a nice, clean, simple and useful application. Kudos to David – but then what do you expect from the guy who gave us Rails. As a service to the public, I have created a list of things that I plan to blog about [...] Read more – ‘Ta-Da Lists’.
I use Bloglines to read my daily dose of RSS. My work is spread around multiple places with multiple computers, and the thought of synchronizing 140+ feeds (what have I read, what haven’t I read) over those computers just doesn’t jive with me. And I’m not even sure, it this would work at all. Anyway: [...] Read more – ‘Bloglines counted’.
No, we’re not talking Windows XP, but eXtreme Programming. (Small but important difference) Jim Weirich is doing an interesting thing in the Cincinnati XP Users Group. They meet once a month to not only talk about XP, but to actually practice it. Doing this, they write software for a children hospital and learn XP (and [...] Read more – ‘XP Practicing Group Zurich’.
Damn – David & the assorted crew are so fast. I have the development timeline of RubyOnRails in my Bloglines and it’s almost always the feed with the most new entries. Now Rails 0.9.4 has been released and there’s a lot of stuff, that again will make my life easier. Mange Tak, David! Working with [...] Read more – ‘Rails 0.9.4’.
If you have this: httpd: could not open document config file /opt/apache2/httpd.conf when you try to start your Apache 2 with a different config file, then do this: /opt/apache2/bin/httpd -f /opt/apache2/conf/httpd.conf It looks like Apache doesn’t like relative paths when it’s called with a different config file. Read more – ‘Apache 2 not coming up?’.
Solche Leute würden gerne einen Plattenspieler haben, der auf Luft schwebt, der von einem Riemen angetrieben wird, den ein blinder, 89jähriger Franzose in einem Bergdorf aus seinen Achselhaaren gedrechselt hat Boxen kaufen Zum niederknien, Herr Dahlmann! Und wie es dass trifft. Siehe dazu auch AV Fetishism (Nicht dass es qualitativ mit ihrer Schreibe vergleichbar wäre) Read more – ‘Audiophiles Einkaufen’.
So, how does a markov chain entry look like? Thanks – but you thought, that my sheltered existance, in my business model is in a matter rest. After almost never end. So far 76% copied, next line of these programs would fail. No – do you? Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a [...] Read more – ‘Markov Entry’.
Writing text and playing with text is all good fun. Using Markov Chains one can generate text that is almost readable, almost understandable, but not quite. Markov Chains analyses the frequency of words in relation to another. Analysing text basically means counting which words follow each other. Producing text is done by picking a word [...] Read more – ‘Markov Chains in Ruby’.
I was very, very interested in reading about what Steve Jobs would come up with earlier today. And when I saw it, I ordered one. I got the small model (1.2 GHz, 40Gig HD), but added memory and bluetooth. Unlike vowe I think the mini hit’s a very sweet spot. If this mini works out [...] Read more – ‘MacMini’.
I was reading through the IMDB Discussion on Koyaanisqatsi when I stumbled upon this gem The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meanings. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. Stanley Kubrick, 1968 Read more – ‘Quoting time’.
Here’s to the crazy ones… the misfits; the rebels; the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do, [...] Read more – ‘crazy’.
I haven’t watched much news lately. Yesterday was an exception. The pictures of destruction and death that I have so far been able to keep outside my attention have been haunting me since. I realize that I’m not capable of even trying to begin to understand what has happened. As the death toll rises, the [...] Read more – ‘The threshold of caring’.
You might – if you have come here through the normal web address – have wondered why the site was empty, except for a lot of links. Well, I have had a lot of comment-spam and while it generally was easy to get rid of it, it has rebuilt the site. And I have specified [...] Read more – ‘Comment spammers empty the site’.
“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use XML.” Now they have two problems.” Nice summary. This comes from an article: Python is not Java that has some other stuff that people coming from Java need to unlearn. Read more – ‘XML Problems’.
Every country gets the government it deserves. How do we contact you? Donate or send email to info[a]yourewelcomeeverybodyD0Tcom. If it’s hatemail, don’t waste your time. The email is formatted to reduce spam, make sure you replace the bracketed “a” with the at sign and the D0T with an actual period. If you cannot figure this [...] Read more – ‘You are welcome’.
After vowe has done it, here’s my invitation to join openBC. OpenBC seems a lot more complete than LinkedIn and it has a distinct european touch. And that sounds kind of sensible when you do business mostly (ok – exclusively) in europe. Join in! Read more – ‘OpenBC.join()’.
What is Amuda? Where is it? For whom will it be? Why is it? The only thing we know, is that it’s only 5 days away. Coming December 1st Read more – ‘What is amuda?’.
Wenn ihre Firma psychologische Coaching benötigt und im Raum Basel ist, dann ist Altai eine gute Adresse. Im Raum Zürich empfehlen wir natürlich InVisible Read more – ‘Feeding the GoogleBot’.
Remove all .debug stuff in existing java files: a handy SED reference !/usr/bin/sh find . -type f -name '*.java' -print | while read i do echo $i echo "" >> $i sed "s/^..debug(.)\s;.$/{;}/" $i > $i.tmp sed "s/(.*.isDebugEnabled()/(false/" $i.tmp > $i.tmp2 cp $i.tmp2 $i done Don’t ask. Read more – ‘doing some nasty stuff with java and logging’.
whew. After quite some time debugging, working, sweating and swearing, we are releasing the new beta build (525) of ZAPPATA today. More IMAP tweaking in this release, and ZAPPATA now can run as a Windows Service. (Be sure to read the ReadmeWin.txt for some snags in this build) You can get it here zappata-0.4.525.exe (Windows [...] Read more – ‘New ZAPPATA release released’.
No, the tale of the blue packet is entirely a work of fiction and there is no, absolut no way, that something like this could happen in real life. Read more – ‘The blue packet’.
Did I mention that I have fetishes? Keyboards, some that I’m not going to talk about on this blog ;-) and then AV. Last weekend, my friend Michael and I went to to visit the AdVanced04 high-end exihibition that displays the best in Audio and Video high-end. Visiting feels a lot like visiting a toy [...] Read more – ‘AV fetishism’.
In between all the work that is heading our way, we found time time to launch our companies website: Head over to www.invisible.ch and check it out. (German speaking only) If you are looking to hand out consulting work with Notes/Domino, Unix, Java, Intranets in general, maintenance of infrastructure give us a call – especially [...] Read more – ‘invisible web site launched’.
The last couple of days were quite a ride: Crashing applications on production servers, family woes after 25 years of not talking to each other, my server that died on saturday, a DNS move, a business critical application that stopped working at the customers site on friday and we got it working again at noon [...] Read more – ‘Hope it works out’.
Access to this site has been flaky for the last couple of days. I apologize. First of, my server decided to act up and hat to get the BRS treatment. Then I moved my primary domain www.invisible.ch to TextDrive, something I have been planning to do for a long time. There isn’t that much content [...] Read more – ‘Moving, moving, moving’.
A very helpful site Silktide Silkscore. It evaluates your website and gives suggestions on how to improve it. There’s a marketing ploy there (Silktide offers consulting services) but I think this is brilliant and how the web is supposed to work – IMO. Silktide gives something valuable for free. They offer additional services – that’s [...] Read more – ‘Silktide’.
What a timely coincidence (actually, there are no coincidences, there is only synchronicity, but that’s a different entry): Prelude Tim Bray on mobile needs was quickly followed by Jeremy’s mobile needs to which Russell responded. Being pda-less after my vacation and T610-less after a roller coaster-ride, I have reverted back to my trusty SonyEricsson R520 [...] Read more – ‘Mobile Needs’.
Brain Dish is the description of an experiment at Florida University. 25’000 brain cells from a rat brain, “living” in a Petri dish are hooked up to a flight simulator and “learn” to fly a F-22 jet. In a way, I’m thrilled by this. I have been working with neural networks in the financial world [...] Read more – ‘The world is coming to an end’.
Ich habe zumindest den Schluss gesehen. Die Idee habe ich von Don Dahlmann geklaut (der sie auch geklaut hat) (und das ist ja auch ok). So lustig wie Don kann ich nicht, trotzdem: Hier ist sie: Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel – Der Herr der Ringe Ja – zweimal komplett. In Englisch (natürlich). Nachdem wir in [...] Read more – ‘50 Bücher’.
choppy. And blocky. And something you will hear a lot about (at least in Switzerland) in about three weeks (in time for the holiday spending season). Yes – the technology is neat. Yes – it works. No – I don’t think it’s going to be the big hit, the marketing people think it will be. [...] Read more – ‘I have seen the future and it’s….’.
R. stumbled upon Jeftel that promises (among other things) an end to Spam. They do it by using a proprietary, peer-2-peer email system. That’s great news actually, beacuse it shows us, that we haven’t been the only ones having this idea. (And as Simon Garfinkel notes, P2P comes clean and can be used for other [...] Read more – ‘Secure Email’.
I returned from a long weekend (or rather, a very short vaccation) from the south of France, left the family behind to do some more vaccationing and resumed the task of earning money (as every caring family father should do). It was difficult at best to get back. We had a wonderful lunch in La [...] Read more – ‘Foreigner in a foreign land’.
That’s a bit of a pain (because Java is not free software), but Martin Fowler has a method for installing Java on a Debian system Read more – ‘Install Java on Debian’.
We have released a new build of ZAPPATA today. You can grab it from the Download page. We spent a lot of time polishing the IMAP server and it should behave nicer with a wider variety of clients. The IMAP RFC 3501 is not exactly lightweight, and the protocol is very powerful and very chatty. [...] Read more – ‘New Beta of ZAPPATA released’.
Joi links to a video from a massacre on people in Falluja. This is not only disturbing. It’s sickening and makes me want to puke. This is NOT the way to create peace. It’s an atrocity in an illegal war. Read more – ‘War’.
I have installed Subversion on my main development server and it was much easier than anticipated. This document (german) helped me getting it to work within a couple of minutes. Recommended. Now I need to convert my CVS repositories over to SVN…. Read more – ‘Subversion’.
It’s hard to memorize all the fun things you can do with the shell on a *nix system. Here’s my crib-sheet: Find all files containing string in the current directory tree find . -type f -exec grep string {} \; -print In all files in directories dir1 and dir2, replace “aaa” with “bbb” #!/bin/sh for [...] Read more – ‘Handy Unix commandlines’.
Today a mail passed my spam filters. Let me quote a couple of things from it: Hello Jcf, I visited invisible.ch today. I am with Family Safe Web and I think that your site could be of interest to our web site visitors. Family Safe Web would like to invite you to trade links with [...] Read more – ‘I hate to break it to you guys’.
from the Use-your-readers-as-knowledge-base dept: I have a client that has the requirement to have an intranet application available offline and make it available on a CD. Basically it’s just a bunch of html files (that originally live in Notes). So far, we have exported all the relevant documents using the Midas Richtext LSX and stuck [...] Read more – ‘Local Web Server for Windows with search’.
Ahh – brings back memories of me playing NetHack on my trusty Atari ST… |!/[)[)+.@%/])|)?+%))If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a mimic. I can be whatever I think you need me to be – it might look like I’m here to help you, but really you’re here to help me.Which NetHack Monster [...] Read more – ‘Which Nethack monster’.
I have to do some things on a Sun Solaris box where the only scripting languages available are sh and perl. No python, no ruby, no … well you get the point. I don’t like PERL a lot, even though the monks are chanting it’s praise. Granted, it can do amazing stuff, but then a [...] Read more – ‘Perlearning’.
When everything is gloom, when your mood is dark, when work seems to much like work and to little like fun. When the sky is gray (or at least when it seems so), there is only one Cure. You have to listen to Happy Music. I continued to rip my CD collection and got to [...] Read more – ‘Happy Music’.
No mention of .txt files could go without the mention that Emacs is my favorite editor. Tim Bray gives us a glimpse into his .emacs and there are a number of things that I will try out to see if they fit my style of working. Read more – ‘Some EMACS stuff’.
In this technological mess, that we tend to call home, there’s a new addition to the machinery: He’s big, he’s black, he’s ugly and he’s loud. My wife already hates him with a vengeance. Right now he sit’s in the living room, but he will find a new home as far away from the civilized [...] Read more – ‘Welcome to …’.
I have struggled to install Debian on my new file server. With the new installer disk this was a breeze – until it tried to download additional packages from the internet. Turns out that I had access to my internal network, but no access at all to the external world. I checked the things one [...] Read more – ‘Internal YES, extneral NO’.
A lot of people have been asking: What is it, that ZAPPATA does? The technical answer: It’s a personal mail server that uses it’s own peer to peer, secure infrastructrue to exchange mail But there’s another answer: Michael Sampson has written an excellent report with an overview over different collaboration technologies. In it, he lists, [...] Read more – ‘Well, but what is ZAPPATA?’.
I have salvaged a Dell PowerEdge 1400 SC with dual P3 / 800 MHz CPUs. It is going to serve as my home file server (with a 3Ware RAID Controller and 480 GB of RAID 5 disks). So far, it has booted with a Knoppix CD, so I know that it will work (eventually). Here [...] Read more – ‘Links: Installing Debian on Dell Poweredge 1400’.
It took quite a bit longer than expected, but R. and I have managed to release the first public beta of our vision of Personal Groupware: Please feel free to download the beta version of ZAPPATA and abuse it. Read more – ‘ZAPPATA Beta is released’.
I have a Sony Ericsson T610 and happened upon these nifty tricks that increase the fun factor. The T610 is a nice little phone, with a bad camera but otherwise it’s full featured. As usual with SE phones, it’s bluetooth implementation just works and it does all the stuff the mobile professional with too much [...] Read more – ‘T610 Tricks’.
Version 1: su bea -c "cd /opt/local/somewhere && ./runSomeShellScript.sh" Version 2: su - bea -c "cd /opt/local/somewhere && ./runSomeShellScript.sh" It took me about an hour to figure out why my installation package (which used version 1) didn’t work. Stranger because it worked flawlessly from the commandline. All *nix geeks will already have spotted the difference [...] Read more – ‘Spot the difference’.
It’s great to see how popular my website has become. And of course I received about 60 comment spams while I was on holiday. Deleting them manually using GPRS was slow and will cost me a fortune. Now I have implemented the MT-Blacklist by Jay Allen. Hopefully this time, comment spam will be a thing [...] Read more – ‘Comment Spam’.
I’m back, the holidays were great. Work has me back with a vengeance. Here are some quick links: Freeware NT/XP programs – quite some useful stuff here XP SP2 Installation instructions – I managed without, but maybe it helps you Read more – ‘Quick Links’.
Ben Poole has improved upon my NotesWiki I did a long time ago, and come up with this wonderful NotesWiki. The joys of Open Source Software ;-) Thanks Ben! Read more – ‘A better Notes Wiki’.
… reading… relaxing… playing… sleeping… viewing modern art… visiting relatives… enjoying the family… listening to music… swimming… walking on the beach See you in 2 weeks Read more – ‘Gone…’.
Now that summer finally has arrived, there are some tough decisions to be made before you take a walk in the city: Either you don your personal music bubble (iPod + Koss PortaPro) and then miss the duo (she plays saxophone, he the chapman stick) playing music by Michael Brecker. Or you don’t. And then [...] Read more – ‘Summer in the city’.
I’ve been in a project that eats a lot of time (4 hours of commute being one of the “killer features”) for a while now. Unfortunately that has not really helped me on my guitar playing. The internet to the rescue: Indian music at your fingertips. [via Don Dahlmann] Read more – ‘World Music is in the air’.
Uh oh. Executing rm -r with root permission is dangerous (as others, unnamed persons know). Luckily not in / and not on a production server. Learn this lesson: When testing scripts that delete files, do an echo instead of a rm until you are sure, that you are in the right path. Waiting for the [...] Read more – ‘rm -r is dangerous’.
In the my-external-brain dept. What happens when Microsoft designs an iPod cloneCreating validating XHTML forms with NotesPraise the SMTP designer at Lotus (actually, that’s more like: slap them for not implementing this sooner)Five steps to implementing GTD (Getting Things Done) with Lotus NotesEric Mack on using Notes for Action management Read more – ‘Quick Links’.
What happens if you sort Amazon reviews bottom up? You get classics. “I found Mr. Davis’ playing to be laughable at best. Finally, it’s irritating; and confusing that so many people laud it.”“It’s full of bland harmonizing by guys that could barely swim.”I must admit I was misled from the beginning, I thought that this [...] Read more – ‘Amazon bottom up’.
I have been using Skype for a while now and been very satisfied. Recently, Skype has expanded to include calls to POTS (Plain Old Telephone Systems). You have to buy credits (minimum €10) and then can call. Interesting rates! Calling Germany from Switzerland is about 50% cheaper than using my discount telephone carrier. Voice quality [...] Read more – ‘Skype does normal phones’.
A couple of weeks ago, my laptop running Windows XP decided to have a fit. After the application of generous amounts of TLC, chanting secret mantras and threatening to accelerate it with 9.81 m/s^2 , I got it working again. It decided to re apply about 73 security patches and service packs and booted. However [...] Read more – ‘Repair the repair function please’.
Read it: Typography for Writers by Dean (I’m reading through his old stuff – disturbing, entertaining, thoughtful, not boring) Read more – ‘Typography for Writers’.
I stumbled over Doc Searls “re-mail” entry, where he reflects on an earlier entry, about RSS is opt-in authenticated Email and the answer he’s gotten on that. Interesting! ZAPPATA started out as a collaboration tool that would use the technologies from the syndication world ( RSS/Atom, polling ) to build a decentralised collaboration tool. And [...] Read more – ‘The answer to Doc Searls’.
Engadget has an article on how to turn XP into a Mac OS X lookalike. I like the dropshadow effect on the OSX windows, so I added YzShadow (it seems like it’s difficult to download this, a little googling brings you to a danish page that has all the Yz utilities). So fine, I have [...] Read more – ‘Trying to emulate OS X’.
try this cute game and watch the relativity[1] of time become a reality… [1] Time passes much quicker when you are engaged in the game Read more – ‘Not enough do to?’.
The last weeks must have been a frenzy for Dean and Jason over at TextDrive. They managed to get 200 people to sign up for a hosting package that enabled them to start a company. I have bought into it, and have so far received tremendous good support from Jason and Dean. Even special DNS [...] Read more – ‘Textdrive hosting’.
Back in the old days[1], I worked at a company that imported Mac Emulators for the Atari ST and sold them. We had all kind of fun stuff to deal with, the most notorious being to find old Mac ROMs for the emulators. Anyway – today, it’s easier: Use the Web Based Mac SE without [...] Read more – ‘Web based Mac SE’.
Software Principles by Google: We believe software should not trick you into installing it.When an application is installed or enabled, it should inform you of its principal and significant functions.It should be easy for you to figure out how to disable or delete an application.If an application collects or transmits your personal information such as [...] Read more – ‘The Google Software Principles’.
The offer that Dean is making is quite good. The business model is intersting too – instead of opting for VC funding, Dean is searching out 200 customers to start with. Each pays $199 and get’s lifetime (of Deans new company lifetime that is) webhosting. 1 GB of disk, 10 GB / month of traffic. [...] Read more – ‘TextPattern to offer webhosting’.
Thank you very much, Eric Idle. Thank you for singing it out loud. (Oh – and I know this will attract the comment spammers — so be it — after all, it’s for a good cause) [via vowe] Read more – ‘Fuck you very much’.
Today has been a web design day… Here are some of the tools that have helped me (or would have helped, had I found them earlier): The Bookmarklet DOM inspector — absolutely fantastic. This saves me from starting Mozilla to use the DOM inspectorThe DOM tree chart — also from the SlayerOfficeThe Listamatic — convert [...] Read more – ‘Webdesign day’.
The older I get, the more I remember I have noticed lately, that I remember more and more things from my past. While I have been busy the last years on building a family, career and one or two businesses, I didn’t have much time to remember things. Everyhing felt fresh, new and interesting. But [...] Read more – ‘Remembering’.
Generate matching colors: Colormatch 5k (doesn’t work well in Opera)ColorMatch Remix (works fine both in Mozilla and Opera) Inspired my current experiments in designing a website with orange as a dominant color and David Sheas entry on Colour Schemes Read more – ‘Color matching’.
Here’s today’s interesting stories: Doing Extreme ProgrammingP-P-p-powerbook — or how a scammer get’s what he deservesLeo — a programmers editor, browser and literary programming toolDavid Shea on when Tables are OK — CSS is good and there still is (some) room for tablesnot long now — a nano future Read more – ‘The link harvest’.
And it’s the same old song that has been played for centuries. The civilised world is going down. No — I’m not talking about the torturing in Iraq. Not about the boneheadedness of some of our politicians. It’s not about Six Aparts controversial new licensing scheme for Movable Type (me? I’m planning my move to [...] Read more – ‘The civilised world is coming to an end’.
Another get’s bitten by the Blog Virus (although Dani at the moment only seems to have a light blog-flu. Welcome to the club, and please write more ;-) Read more – ‘Dani @ /dev/null’.
ZAPPATA has it’s own forum now The main website isn’t updated yet, but Raphaël and I are proud to present to you the ZAPPATA forum Expect more information soon. In the meantime – join our forum and discuss with us Read more – ‘ZAPPATA forum’.
If you provide an option to test something, make sure that it tests the right thing The ZAPPATA crew was doing some spike testing today with different technologies, and due to the nature of the OS market, we did the tests with the tools most widely in use: Windows XP and Outlook. The Microsoft-Way is [...] Read more – ‘When the test is wrong and other Microsoft stupidities’.
Having clear URLs on your page or in your web applictation not only is a help to users, but make you think about structure and usability. And – I was wrong I just happend to come across an email on the Prius Mailing List that had a number of links to Prius ressources. With great [...] Read more – ‘Most stupid URL’.
Shirt origami really worksEven long-sleeved turtle-necks can be folded neatly (do as described, turn it around, fold longer sleeve inwards at the end of the other sleeve, final fold as usual)kids clothes work too, but the bigger the easierEven though kids clothes are smaller, they aren’t faster to process — and there’s more of themHow [...] Read more – ‘Thoughts from the cellar’.
The weekend is my reserved for washing. A family with two small children brings together quite an impressive array of dirty clothes during one week. In our family unit, I’m the one tasked with the weekly fight againt entropy and dirt. It’s not my favorite pastime, but I actually enjoy being down in the cellar [...] Read more – ‘Shirt Origami’.
What is this? The 20 Questions A.I. couldn’t guess it… I am guessing that it is astrology? Yes , No , Close 29. I guess it an equation? No. 28. Would you use it in the dark? No. 27. Can you eat it? No. 26. Can you control it? No. 25. Is it comforting? No. [...] Read more – ‘20 Questions’.
My wonderful wife celebrates her birthday today. Happy birthday to you – thanks for the time I can spend with you and our kids. I hope, we’ll never end up like this ;-) Read more – ‘happy birthday to you’.
Today I signed the contract for our new car. Now the waiting time begins. If all goes well, we’ll receive the Toyota Prius in February 2005. I saw the Prius 2 months ago at a car show and liked the technical data. It’s a hybrid car with two engines: a regular gas-engine and an electrical [...] Read more – ‘T – 10 months’.
Of course Matthias Leisi has been online for quite a while. Now he has his own braindump on the web. Welcome to the club! Read more – ‘Matthias online’.
Requiring this kind of confirmation is as draconian as it is futile According to this meme about grabbing the nearest book and looking up the 5th sentence on page 23. (the book is The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin) [ via FrozenSkies, via the Textpattern Support Forum] Read more – ‘Memery’.
This evening I had this strange experience that a lot of my blogger colleagues probably have had already… I have met the first reader of my blog in flesh. I knew Tanja through the web and mail and tonight we were at her place for dinner for the first time. Suddenly she said “you are [...] Read more – ‘Blogger meets real life reader’.
I don’t like people deep-linking to my images. And neither do others. Some quick mod_rewrite rules helps… I noticed an increased activity on my blog and a lot of referres from an italian site recently. Today I had time to look at the logs and I found a site that linked to my Gicaometti image. [...] Read more – ‘Fun with mod_rewrite’.
It’s time to show the music industry who their customers are — by boycotting them. (like vowe) After Germany the swiss IFPI has announced that they are sueing “music pirates”. Well, dear music industry: You are alienating your customers. I have bought > 800 CDs, a couple of 100 LPs (back in the old days) [...] Read more – ‘Boycott the music industry’.
When the weather is bad, the day is grey and the kids have watched too much TV already, I´m going to fire up the search engine on this site and search for How to make a pop up scene by Ned. Read more – ‘Pop-up scenes’.
And boy does this seem to be difficult… Here’s what I need: b/w printing (color nice, but not fundamental)duplex printing a big plusColor scanner (good, but not pro quality)Fax – manual and from computerNetwork enabled (wireless plus)Postscript plus Read more – ‘Looking for a all-in-one office printer/scanner/fax’.
I was on a bug hunt the last couple of hours. When I looked at a web page served by our application server, it’s content showed up. When I pressed reload, only the summary of the content showed up. Somehow, someone changed my ( my! ) private variable somewhere. I sprinkeld the code liberally with [...] Read more – ‘Finding side effects with IDEA’.
How do you find a URL in a normal text and turn it into a HTML link using regular expressions? That was the challenge I faced recently. Oh – and of course not only well formed url’s (with the http:// in front of them, but any kind of url. Why invent something, when there’s google [...] Read more – ‘Finding a URL in a text’.
I’m watching over a Notes based Faxserver at a client. There is a lot of personel data imported daily from a SQL database. The process has been taking longer and longer and longer, not finishing and occasionally crashing the server. Babysitting the process, dropping in occasional log messages (something the original developers didn’t do) and [...] Read more – ‘Pesky Deletion Stubs’.
Here’s collection of a lot of useful bookmarklets / links for the webdeveloper. Allows you to change the way forms work, view headers, outline your pages, validate your html/css and much much more. Works with Mozilla and Firefox. Read more – ‘WebDevelopers Toolkit for Mozilla/FireFox’.
In Mozilla FireFox: type “about:config” in the adressbar and the hunt those settings and change them accordingly: userpref("general.smoothScroll", true); userpref("network.image.imageBehavior", 0); userpref("network.http.max-connections", 48); userpref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16); userpref("network.http.pipelining", true); userpref("network.http.pipelining.firstrequest", true); userpref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 100); userpref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true); user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 100); by Geek Styke via Simon and his blogmarks Read more – ‘Optimizing FireFox’.
I said: Don’t! Don’t go to CrazyMachines. Don’t download the demo. Don’t play it. Don’t rush out and buy the game… [1] [1] If you do and live in a country other than “Deutschland (Deutschland)” (like “Deutschland (Schweiz)” you will get errors when installing (An error about “Transform” and “Transformpfade”). Just switch to the “Deutschland [...] Read more – ‘Attention: Don’t look at this game’.
This server was down a bit during the day when I installed the new 3Ware RAID IDE Controller and moved a couple of directories to a mirrored disk. The process was more or less painless but I learnt a couple of interesting tid-bits. Computers don’t turn themselves on, when they don’t have power. That means [...] Read more – ‘RAID 1 – easy as pie’.
invisible is not only the name of this blog, but also the name of my company “invisible Jens Christian Fischer”. I do consulting, Lotus Notes / Domino mainly, intranets, web development and so on. (If you need a consultant in this area, send me an email) My wife’s company is called “visible”. Both are what [...] Read more – ‘Announcing merger: InVisible GmbH coming’.
Oh – I learnt something today… You are all pretentious twats Every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky. Espresso (double), Windows, city, primary, atheist… You decide on the rest ;-) read rant [...] Read more – ‘All MT Blogs must die’.
Ladies and gentlemen, please update your bookmarks: http://blog.invisible.ch The old adress will work for some time, the /archives link will work indefinitely, but please go to the new adress in the future. I need this address for something else soon. Read more – ‘New address of this blog’.
The server you are hitting is about to undergo some major surgery. First of all, it will get a 3Ware 2 Port RAID Adapter together with 2 Samsung SpinPoint 160 GB disks, serving in a RAID 1 configuration. Next, the aging Red-Hat 7.3 system will be updated to a Debian Woody Stable release. I have [...] Read more – ‘Preparing update’.
We were at the handing out of prices for the best business idea at Venture 2004 this evening, held in the Auditorium Maximum of ETH Zurich. My new venture, ZAPPATA Networks had entered with their business idea in the beginning of January, and today the best 10 business ideas were awarded CHF 2’500.– Not surprisingly, [...] Read more – ‘venture.ch’.
And while I’m at it… What the heck is that? This pops up from time to time, and sometimes it goes away, sometimes it doesn’t… Anyone out there seen this and know what program causes this? (I have the urge to remove that program from my system ;-) ) Read more – ‘Server ist ausgelastet…’.
Confession: I don’t run a virus scanner. I had one and it brought my system to a crawl. I deleted it. But then I don’t use Outlook, I don’t use IE so I think I’m pretty safe… And so far, that seems to hold true. With all the MyDoom brouha going on, I thought it [...] Read more – ‘UI gods @ work’.
So I have this small, self-built, fan-less (thus silent) server that has been backing up my laptop, serving my music and video and generally been a nice chap, and easy going. That is until a couple of days ago it stopped responding. Today I had time to hook up a monitor and a keyboard to [...] Read more – ‘120 Gig died’.
A cool blog it is – Belle Du Jour Diariy of a London Call Girl but until now you had to wander to the site to do the reading. Now she sports RSS feeds (and more importantly) an ATOM feed as well… Time to update ZAPPATA to handle xhtml in a <summary> tag… Read more – ‘Belle du Jour with Atom Feed’.
I have a raved about Zoe before because it’s just a very handy tool to have. It (of course) archives my email and I can access it from remote sites as well (fascist firewall/proxy combos not being in the middle). Today I learnt that Zoe helps me with accounting. It’s the time of year where [...] Read more – ‘Using ZOE for accounting’.
Just noticed that my blog has been empty for a couple of days. I have been so busy during the last couple of weeks, that everything else in my life has taken a seat on the backseat. It’s a pleasure to work for 12 hours in a stretch, fully concentrated, no distraction necessary or allowed. [...] Read more – ‘Empty Blog? No – the ZEN of working’.
That’s what IntelliJ claims that you have, when you develop with their upcoming Aurora release. Take a look at what I get as a result from my UnitTests: Now that’s really what I call: “developing with pleasure” Read more – ‘Develop with Pleasure’.
I recently got a Neuston Virutoso MC-500 streaming media client. A nice box that really does what it’s supposed to to: Stream music and videos to my TV and living room amplifier. The only drawback: It requires a windows PC as a server. I have moved all my media to a little fanless Debian box [...] Read more – ‘Virtuoso Neuston MC-500 & Linux Server’.
I’ve been busy working on an Atom parser the last couple of days. Time to also publish this blog in ATOM 0.3 format.. Thanks to Mark for the MT Plugin. And now back to work. After the joys of Atom, now is the time for the dreariness of RSS 2.0 and it’s ugly parents. Read more – ‘Atom feed available’.
Sometimes you don’t fight the skis. You don’t fight the weather. You don’t fight the mountain. In rare circumstances, your body flows down the mountain in fluid motion. You don’t have to think about the at of skiing. Your body just does it. You become part of the mountain. Excellent. All in all I achieved [...] Read more – ‘The ZEN of skiing’.
Yesterday I understood the lyrics of a song by Laurie Anderson that I have been fond of for about 20 years. Sometimes I take a while longer… The man walks into the flowershop and asks: What flower best expreses the passing of time, days go by endlessly, pulling you into the future… And the florist [...] Read more – ‘What flower’.
My wife learnt to drive a car about a year ago. We tend to talk about driving, styles of driving, how to drive etc. Almost every time you drive, somebody will make a mistake or be deliberately rude on the road. My wife usually get’s nervous and upset when that happens and starts to shout, [...] Read more – ‘The ZEN of driving’.
It’s getting better all the time… RSS ReaderNew GUIself learning categorisation of mailIRC clientlot of bug fixeslot of new bugs I like it so far.. Sure it has a couple of warts, but knowing how those guys in Norway work, Opera 7.50 wil mature fast. I just wondered, when the last feature upgrade for IE [...] Read more – ‘Opera 7.50 Preview 1’.
Another thing found 100 Years Of Turbulence by maciej who hangs out on #joiito. This article beautifully links the history of flight with patents – and gives a very good example of why patents are a bad thing. Also a blog to put on the read list Read more – ‘F(l)ight Patents’.
This is a really usefull collection of different solutions to common web navigation problems. Finding out what works and what not, and why is kind of left as an excercise to the reader – but I like the many examples and the non-in-your-face “This is wrong” useit style. Widgetopia Read more – ‘Widgetopia – a look at the web GUI’.
I confess – I have a fetish (well actually, a couple of them, but I’m only going to talk about one that is for public consumption). I am into keyboards. Computer keyboards. I don’t know when it started, but I was always fascinated with keyboards. I learnt touch typing at the tender age of 12 [...] Read more – ‘Confessions of a fetishist’.
Good guide on installing and configuring Debian to be used as an ISP server. Has some good information on configuring various interesting stuff… The Perfect Setup Read more – ‘Setting up Debian for ISP use’.
from the “it-just-works” dept: three people, three computers, three operating systems – one new WLAN access point in my office. Installing the access point (D-Link AP2000) and finding the DHCP setting for it’s IP adress: 5 minutes (D-Link could use some help designing the web interface for their access point… Good: You have to change [...] Read more – ‘3 Computers and a WLAN’.
What a joy… coding a simple website with some text on the lower right, independent of browser window size. No, no JavaScript please. And no – no tables, they are so 90s. So – because it’s “Ã la mode” it’s XHTML and CSS. And because it’s commercial, it should look good on a number of [...] Read more – ‘CSS – lower right text & Mac’.
I know and write in way to many languages. Specifically in computer languages. Over the years I have written code in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, LotusScript, LotusFormulas, Smalltalk, Perl, Python, Ruby, Pascal, Modula-2, APL (read only, thanks god), 8051 Assembler and probably a couple of things I have hidden from my conciousness. I love languages. [...] Read more – ‘Languages and Syntax’.
I moved my Linux Home Server from a Sereniti 2000 case (which is a hopeless piece of crap, cheap metal, had to hammer one screw through the aluminium because it was stuck and the screwdriver literally screwed it, and noisy as hell) with a smaller Morex 2688 which sports a lot less space inside but [...] Read more – ‘New Toys and time to remeber’.
The first backup with BackupPC has finished – faster than I expected. When I checked the backup set, I saw, that the /Windows and /Documents and Settings directories didn’t get backed up…. Hmm – looking at their properties, I found that there were not shareable because “the operating system needs them”… What? A bit of [...] Read more – ‘Simple File Sharing’.
A while ago, I was listed on the Swiss Weblogs Wiki and had a chance to update my profile. Stephanie who runs the list, mailed me and asked me to provide some keywords to go with my entry. I couldn’t think of any, so I let the matter rest. After a couple of weeks, she [...] Read more – ‘On Keywords’.
I had a go at installing BackupPC on a smallish personal server I built for a project that didn’t take off. The machine is a Via Eden board (with a high-performance C3 500 Mhz CPU :-) ) and a 120 Gig Harddrive. There’s a Debian Woody installed and I used this lazy afternoon to convert [...] Read more – ‘BackupPC installed’.
I have been thinking about how to reliable backup my different computers and laptops. One solution that I favoured was to use rsync to synd all my stuff to a central server (and use rsync again to sync the backup sets between two servers on different locations). I thought about a neat frontend for, that [...] Read more – ‘BackupPC’.
I have enjoyed the The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and the Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide books by Dave and Andy Now they have written two new pragmatic books with a third on the way: The Pragmatic Starter Kit with books on CVS and JUnit already available. I’ll be buying them after [...] Read more – ‘Pragmatic Books’.
It’s been quite a while since I have been doing long presentations, actually trying to teach things to people, but nonetheless, Conference Presentation Judo was a good read, and got quite some head nodding from me… “Yeah – I remember making that mistake” If you give presentation, take a look, and you might learn a [...] Read more – ‘Conference Presentation Judo’.
Here I am, innocent and all, when all of a sudden a new Yahoo Messenger window opens… The transcript might not be suitable for younger persons that are influenced easily but fun nonetheless… Bot technology has improved quite a bit! Read on for the conversation: Read more – ‘Interesting things happening on the AI front’.
We had a good laugh at this one – people who know me personally and know what I did in the beginning of the year will know why… AskIgor is a service that will automatically test faulty programs and tell you why they fail. (Limited to C/C++ Linux86 programs at the moment – but hey [...] Read more – ‘Ask Igor’.
Ole had this to say… In a few cases, the blog was still there, the blogger was still active, but I didn’t see anything interesting. And if I don’t find it interesting, I’m not going to link it. Your mileage may vary! And – I’m still on his extended blog-roll… Feels good, somehow ;-) Read more – ‘Made it through the OLE filter’.
Catching up on my reading of Joel pointed me to ProFont, a rendition of the Mac 9 point font for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’m a sucker for big screens with small content, so I downloaded it and I’m using it on the 1600×1200 display. People will cry that it’s too small, but I’m the [...] Read more – ‘ProFont’.
Raphael of Zoe fame invited me to connect to his LinkedIn network. “Great”, I thought, “pushing 20 connections” and clicked on the supplied link – only to be thrown a 404 Hmm – going directly to LinkedIn brought me this strange page . Whois GoDaddy? Registered through: GoDaddy.com Domain Name: LINKEDIN.COM Created on: 05-May-03 Expires [...] Read more – ‘What happened to LinkedIn?’.
I travelled to Munich today for a very important meeting about my company. Due to the strike of the strike of the railroad workers in Austria, I traversed a tiny part of Austria by bus, curtesy of swiss railroads. Unfortunately that prolonged the trip by 45 minutes. In the afternoon preparations for the meeting that [...] Read more – ‘Tired’.
Almost two weeks without an entry on the blog – oh god. My faithfull readership (yes – I know that there are some out there) must have turned away in disgust. I have had way to much to do the last couple of weeks, and my “hair turning gray ratio” has accelerated at an uncomfortable [...] Read more – ‘Time flies’.
In case you hadn’t noticed… I’m on a blogging break. I have been very busy the last weeks and I had to cut down the time I read other peoples blogs. It seems that the act of not reading a blog leads to also not writing a blog. I have a couple of new things [...] Read more – ‘Blogging break’.
I have had one too many comment spams now. I have implemented James Seng’s MT plugin that displays an image with some numbers that you have to type in the box below. Only humans are supposed to be able to do this ;-) On a side note: On a Redhat 7.3 system, you need to [...] Read more – ‘No more comment spam’.
Well – you know what happened to my P800. While it was getting repaired (actually it got a new screen and parts of a new case) I lived with my old R520 and the Tungsten T3 came out. I broke down and now have the T3 – and in combination with my R520 it beats [...] Read more – ‘Do you want a refurbished P800?’.
After the switch of the graphicscard last week, the problems with my laptop persisted. That meant that the friendly technician went out of the door and came back a day later with a new mainboard for my computer. After exchanging that – the weirdness on the screen was gone – finally. So I’m left with [...] Read more – ‘80% new Laptop’.
Uh – oh… so much for my productive streak today… The Lock On: Modern Air Combat demo is out… See you later Oh and download of the 123 MB file was done in just about 30 minutes – thanks to my 1024/256 ADSL and BitTorrent Read more – ‘There goes the productivity’.
After all in all one hour on the phone yesterday with Dell support, flashing of the BIOS, unplugging and plugging the LCD cable and other chant and incantations, today a technician arrived with a brand new LCD panel and switched it for the old one. After switching on the laptop – the same display problems [...] Read more – ‘Saving a Dell, part II’.
I grudingly accepted a change in ADSL plan last week and was looking forward to 512/512 soon. Until 5 minutes ago, when I got a call from my ADSL ISP. The lady told me, that my phone lines wouldn’t be able to handle 512 upload, so I had the choice of staying (staying? You sent [...] Read more – ‘Free the last mile, part II’.
This is great: Answer twelve questions about a font you see, and Identify a font tells you what you are looking at. [via Pieter] Read more – ‘Identify a font’.
The display on my Inspiron 8200 has gone from slightly flaky to totally unusable in a matter of only two days. It started with odd colors during boot – it looked like the red has gone. Then some syncing errors cropped up. After a couple of seconds it would be ok… Now the display has [...] Read more – ‘Saving a Dell’.
Ever been in an elevator? You know that there are security camers? See ElevatorMoods for what could happen in an elevator. Read more – ‘Elevator moods’.
Welcome to Caves of HTML! You are in a dark cave scattered about with fragments of HTML and graphics. You think you saw a domain name go scuttling along the wall where the light from the entrance just reaches. It’s cold. ? Make pop-under You can’t do that now. Welcome to the caves of HTML Read more – ‘The Caves of HTML’.
Last week I dropped my P800 3 meters onto a concrete floor. The screen broke so I sent it in for repairs. Today I got a call that the repair is going to cost over CHF300 – a new P800 can be had for about CHF 900. While I like the P800, it has enough [...] Read more – ‘Mobile Phone Decisions’.
The book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen is one of my all time favorites. David has helped my productivity enormously with his workflow process and most of all the idea, that you need to get all of the things you need to do out of your head and on paper so they will stop [...] Read more – ‘52 ways to getting things done’.
So I’m a master geek! I scored 70% on the Geek IT Test which ranks me as master geek. Take the test, but don’t forget your Mailinator email adress when you do. [via Duffbert ] Read more – ‘Master Geek’.
Jef Raskin commented on my mini-review of his book “The Humane Interface” and provided a link to the demo of the zooming interface. It’s a interactive flash movie, that shows a Zooming User Interface at work. I’m not sure, if the ZUI realy is THE way to represent a large amount of data or not. [...] Read more – ‘Demo of the Zooming User Interface’.
Today I got regular mail from my ADSL ISP (Econophone): Swisscom is changing ADSL speeds and I have to choose my new connection speed. At the office, I currently have 1024/256 which I find is a great ratio for downloads and for keeping all my servers running and responisve. (This blog is served through that [...] Read more – ‘Free the last mile’.
I managed to close two projects last monday, successfully deploying a new release of a Notes based manual (remember the 15’000 links that needed to be changed) and the productive release of a relational database (with a Notes backed – no, don’t ask) on a corporate intranet. Almost everything went smooth, I have two rather [...] Read more – ‘Coming back’.
DonDahlmann über die Musikindustrie YES! Ich besitze 800 CD’s – ich habe jede einzelne davon gekauft. Ich höre viel Musik (dank dem IPod kann ich jetzt auch einen kleinen Teil meiner Sammlung mit mir rumtragen). Aber ich habe keinen Bock mehr jede CD ungehört zu kaufen. Ich mag die EMules und Kazaas dieser Welt. Aber [...] Read more – ‘Musik Motz’.
After over a day where no-one called me I finally persuaded two friends of me to give Skype, the “internet telephony program” a try. Installed, made a connection, started talking and nearly fell out of my chair. I use a Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop with the built in mic and speakers. And the voice connection [...] Read more – ‘More Skype’.
Do you want to talk to me? Call me using Skype from the makers of KaZaa. Peer to peer Voice over IP (P2PVOIP – what an unwieldy acronym) My username on Skype: jenscfischer Read more – ‘VOIP’.
Nur mal kurz auftauchen um zwei Links zu platzieren, über die ich mich kringelig gelacht habe: Mein erster Sex und Was bedeuten SM Kontaktanzeigen wirklich Und jetzt zurück zu Buchhaltungshandbüchern Read more – ‘Erster Sex und SM Kontaktanzeigen’.
I have dabbled for a long time to set up my perfect email environment. Now it slowly comes together… Here are the advantages of my setup:access to my complete email from everywhere where I have internet accessFulltext search and auto classifiyingAlmost spam freevirus freeManagment free Interested? Here’s what you need:A Linux server under your control [...] Read more – ‘EMail heaven’.
As mentioned yesterday, I had to do a bit of work on an application that included the possibilty of redoing some 15000 links. Here’s what’s happened: I’m maintaing a Notes application for a corporate manual. This manual get’s revised every 6 months, with new versions being put out. The revision coming up is major, so [...] Read more – ‘Fixing links’.
Raggle, a RSS aggregator written in Ruby (via Jeremy)Brainstorm & Raves on OperaOpera 7.20 Beta 7 (which I use for 95% of my browsing Read more – ‘Quick Links’.
I already rank nr 3 on the google search for ascii porn, so I figured I could top this of with a link to a view on teletext found via marc’s voice: Teletext Porn. Oh — and those that have been waiting for some update on new HTML designs – bear with me. A project [...] Read more – ‘Teletext Porn’.
Yesterday on TV: A 82 year old swiss lady, looking not one day older than 60. She must be the happiest person on this earth. She is doing day-care for 10-14 children – ranging from toddlers to kids going to school. Getting up every day at 5. Firing the stove with wood. First kids arrive [...] Read more – ‘A happy life’.
I have bought and installed Crossover Office to run IE 6 and Lotus Notes on Linux. There is an installation option for Lotus Notes by default, but it failed me when I tried to install the Domino Designer and Adminstration clients. This is what I did to get it to work and to have a [...] Read more – ‘How-To: Install Lotus Domino Designer on Debian’.
I installed Woody (the “stale” release) on my Inspiron 8200 and followed both the link mentioned below and Stephan Wehrheims Instructions and got a running system fairly soon. After compiling the kernel (and flipping options rand^h^h^h^h with care and deliberation) I was left with a kernel that booted but didn’t have network connection. The ping [...] Read more – ‘Compiling Debian on Inspiron 8200’.
My wife just called me – all up in rage. She just lost two hours of work. We are using Groove extensivly to distribute documents between ourselves and the different locations (at home, in the office, on the various laptops) we are using. After she had worked on a document in Word that she had [...] Read more – ‘Where’s the user-friendly text system?’.
Yesterday one of my clients called me several times in a very short time to ask a couple of questions. The last time he called, he said: “Sorry for bothering you again, I guess you will kill me”. My reply: “Don’t worry – instead I will bill you!” Read more – ‘Consultant Speak’.
Original Debian Install ManualInstall Debian Woody the “pure” Debian way on a Dell Inspiron 8200Anyone notice a pattern? Read more – ‘Debian & Dell Links’.
I’ve had my share of slow down’s on this Dell Inspiron 8200 (read about the adventures with the taskmanager in Windows XP). Yesterday I installed Red Hat 9 on the same machine and it seemed incredibly slow – especiall loading stuff. Talking to my colleagues, hdparm was mentioned… Maybe the harddisk was in PIO mode? [...] Read more – ‘PIO or DMA?’.
When I write documentation I use DocBook to write structured text. DocBook is either in SGML or XML and can be – shall we say – interesting – to write in Emacs, my tool of choice for text processing. Enter XXE by french company XML Mind. XXE is written in Java, does WYSIWIG editing of [...] Read more – ‘XXE – the Docbook Editor’.
uh-oh… Hugh noticed… Also, Guido van Rossum reviews The Humane Interface Meanwhile, I have been busy sketching UI ideas for use in the browser (and that means, that I have to revisit my opinon on browsers not being able to handle all UI needs. I’m piecing together some DHTML / JavaScript technology to handle some [...] Read more – ‘More humane interface’.
I was googling for something totally different, when I stumbled on Die Deutsche Amalgam-Page, La Bulldozer’s Sig Page. It’s a collection of usenet .sigs from a lady that posts/posted regularly on de.alt.naturheilkunde (so the .sigs are more interesting for german speaking people I guess). She is/was very controversial, biting, sarcastic – the .sigs are a [...] Read more – ‘Renate “Bulldozer” Ratlos SIGs’.
Jef Raskin was the man responsible for the Macintosh. I stumbled on his website a couple of days ago and read about his explorations on Interface Design. Intrigued about THE (The Humane Environment), a new paradigm for interaction with the computer. Interestingly enough, I haven’t been able to see THE yet – the screenshot image [...] Read more – ‘Reading: The Humane Interface’.
I’ve been chasing a bug for a couple of hours now…. “Entry not found in index” seems to be a classical @DbLookup that fails… Well, wading through the form, removing blocks of fields, testing again, and again and again and never getting rid of the error on one specific document (but on other everything’s fine). [...] Read more – ‘When do documents change their UniqueID?’.
MESS An emulator of old, old computers. They emulate almost every computer I ever owned (ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Oric1, C-64) or used (the “ur” commodore and the TRS-80) SmartSpace – SyncML for the P800 SyncML Reference Toolkit (Sourceforge) Implementations of the SyncML protocol Synchronisation von Terminplanern mittels XML PHP Implementation of SyncML Read more – ‘Note To Self: Check out SyncML and MESS’.
The friendly people over on Joi’s IRC channel #joiito helped me by having me look at the Task Manager “Show Kernel Process” option. Then I wandered through the options and saw that the update frequence of the graph display was set to to “stopped”. Still wondering why it continued to show 100% CPU even when [...] Read more – ‘CPU at 100% (Part 2 – final)’.
In preparation for the project ahead I decided to install IIS and the latest fixes on this Windows XP SP1 machine. Then I got ActiveState Python to work as a handler to .py files (something that Microsoft Knowledgebase helps you with. I was rewarded with a working IIS con Python server and an unbelievable slow [...] Read more – ‘CPU pegged at 100%, Who to blame? (Part 1)’.
I have a “filler project” coming up and I need to choose the right tools to get the job done. There’s a bit of infrastructure in place: MS SQL Server, IIS and a couple of databases on the SQL server. I need to write a web enabled front end for those, containing two forms to [...] Read more – ‘Choose the right technology’.
I’m working on a large spreasheet that builds a trackrecord of my other companies financial product. Without a formal education in Excel (and not being one of those people that read books about standard products ;-) ) my use of excel formulae was limited to the mere basic stuff. Then I needed to reverse the [...] Read more – ‘Excel Galore’.
Need an email adress – NOW? enter : “whatever@mailinator.com” then head over to Mailinator.com and pick up the information you need. Perfect for those sign-up services that you will be using only once. And the best thing – mailinator needs no sign-up. Just by sending an email to that adress, creates the mailbox. Read more – ‘Mailinator’.
vowe how could you… bringing the Rocky Horror Ring Show to my attention… I’ve seen the movie (several times), I’ve been in the theater, I’ve been to an open-air movie showing, dressed up in my wife-to-be’s underwear (I had met her the night before and invited her to a night at the open-air movies, and [...] Read more – ‘Rocky Horror Ring Show’.
This morning my trusty P800 wouldn’t let me work at all. Programs weren’t starting, couldn’t open contacts (Disk Full message). I switched it off and then on – and was greeted with “your disk is corrupt – I will format it to fix the problem”. GREAT Really great – after formatting the disk, my phone [...] Read more – ‘P800 woes’.
An intersting audio application: Query By Humming from the inventor of the MP3 format allows you to hum a fragment of a tune and the computer tells you the name of the song. Test it at Musicline (server seems to be down) [via heise.de ] Read more – ‘Query by Humming’.
For a small project coming up, the Twisted Framework in Python seems like an intersting foundation. Twisted handles all kinds of network stuff for you and allows you to write the top level stuff without having to worry about the gory details of the network. An Fake SMTP server only takes 136 lines of Python [...] Read more – ‘Twisted Python’.
I’m running Debian on my Laptop (thanks to Knoppix), so I guess I’m entitled to go to the Etoy Debian Party in Zurich… [Via BitFlux] Read more – ‘etoy Debian Party in Zurich’.
eyes closed illumines love shield to words Hmm – I guess it could be a lot worse than that – and the Darwinian Poetry project has generated worse poetry. I’m specifically interested in this kind of research, because my company Ivorix – evolving software builds software that relies on some of the same mechanisms to [...] Read more – ‘Darwinism in Poetry’.
Ben Poole mentions Testing 1,2,3 in the Notes/Domino context (of course taken from the Xtreme Programming school of thought. He links to Duffbert’s XP experiences. Let me chime in with my experience on TestingFirst with Notes. I worked on a large Domino project last year with a team of 5 other people. I tried to [...] Read more – ‘XP on Domino’.
I’m a big fan of Willam Gibson. I was heavily influenced by the Neuromancer series and I (think) I have read all of his Sci-Fi novels over time. So when I started reading again (instead of sitting at the computer all the time) it was time to pick up his (not-so) new book: Pattern Recognition [...] Read more – ‘Reading: Pattern Recognition’.
Tim Bray makes a case for not being a “sharecropper” and developing for the browser only or rather – to code to open standards, XML, RPC etc. and so on. I agree 100% – that’s a good thing to do. But he makes the case, that the browser is the best thing that happened to [...] Read more – ‘The browser – the one user interface?’.
I’m in the finishing phase of “the” project, I’ve been working on for the last 6 months or so… On friday we deployed my web solution to the productive environement and it ran (almost out of the box). Today is the day where a couple of small corrections are being made. Tomorrow I’ll start to [...] Read more – ‘Finishing’.
Yesterday while going out with friends we talked about what Google knows about us. Myriam said that she had googled for her Matthias before going out with him in earnest. We then wondered what Google might now about Myriam…. I checked – it knows nothing at all. Time to change that… Ohh – you wanted [...] Read more – ‘Adding Myriam Leisi Ohoven to Google’.
I recently wrote about the LinkedIn Locked Out problem I was having. Well – LinkedIn changed a subtle thing: You can opt in to receive requests directly from people that are more than 4 degrees away from you. I wondered how I came to suddenly have 60+ people in my network that I didn’t know [...] Read more – ‘Linked in!’.
Only two days after I ordered it, it’s already on it’s way from the factory at Taiwan. Wonder how fast it’s going to be here… My first piece of Apple equipment – ever since I had to program Modula-2 back on the Mac’s at the technical university. Now this little piece won’t do any computations, [...] Read more – ‘It’s on it’s way’.
I’m doing a lot of quite complex Domino development at the moment. I’m using Hide-When functionality to hide/show pieces of HTML based on various conditions of the document I’m working with. It’s a pain to maintain, because it ain’t clear what lines are hidden under what conditions. Then it hit me: Why not use color-coding [...] Read more – ‘Hide when – show them in color’.
The Martian NetDrive is exactly the kind of gear I need – both at home and in the office. It’s a small fanless Linux box with a 120GB disk and both wireless and wired LAN capabilities. It acts as a SMB fileserver and the claim is that you unpack it and then plug it in. [...] Read more – ‘Need this’.
While on holidays, I thought a lot about my life and what I can do to improve it. I wrote a couple of pieces that I will post during the next few days. Consider them as personal ramblings. I have decided to to change a few things in my life, and those thoughts reflect on [...] Read more – ‘Changing’.
I will sleep more! I’m on the second day of our holidays on a camping ground near Venice in Italy. I have just woken up from a quiet nap around noon, at the time where the heat brings all life to a crawl. I feel refreshed and awake – what a difference to this time [...] Read more – ‘On Sleeping’.
GPRS coverage in Italy I didn’t bother with. I am back in switzerland and will be in my bed in two hours. Joy! A bed without sand in the sheets… Read more – ‘coming home’.
Ahhhhhh – yesterday was hard: Getting up at 5 in the morning and working more or less straight until 20:00 (for clients that is). Then get home, ready the car and start packing. We planned on leaving really early (like 04:00 today) but only got in bed after midnight so getting up time was pushed [...] Read more – ‘Gone in two hours’.
I’m really busy getting ready for the holidays. Here are a few bookmarks that I need to look at later: CSV file handling in python Fulltext search, Lucene and Bayesian modules in Python Compiling the Linux Kernel the Debian way Read more – ‘Quick Bookmarks’.
Simon Willson does it again: (or rather he links to the right stuff): The CSS Bookmarklets let you for example edit CSS and see the changes while you edit the stylesheet. Or they show you the ancestors hierarchy of the styles. Way cool and this will help me in my development efforts! Read more – ‘CSS Bookmarklets’.
Over at the MIT, the researchers are looking for needles in the Haystack. The blurb reads interesting: the universal information client Our research seeks to bring modern information management and retrieval technologies to the average computer user in order to make computers a more compelling place for users to interact with their information. Haystack looks [...] Read more – ‘The needle in the haystack’.
Trepia is an instant messenger with a twist: It supposedly knows where you are and populates itself with people from your neighbourhood. Hmm – I have people nearby from Dover, Massachuset (?), Dresden, The Nederlands – interesting… All in all: 28 people in my area… Wow – a big area! Read more – ‘Trepia – IM your neighbourhood’.
Over at What Do I Know there’s a great feature, that allows you to switch CSS on the fly – never seen that before – I like it! A List Apart show’s how this is done. Read more – ‘CSS / JS Style Switcher’.
While meandring through the blogosphe I stumpled across Mark’s Recommended Reading which finds blogs that might interest you based on the blog you are reading. I had a similar idea a while ago. It’s good to see that I don’t have to implement it ;-) Read more – ‘Webbing the Blogs’.
Note to self: if Ivorix is hiring, here’s the Job profile to emulate. (and no, due to the current economic situation, Ivorix is not hiring) via hugh Read more – ‘Hiring – made easy’.
It worked ;-) I had to fumble a bit to get LILO to work with my harddisks, but I found a helpful description over on the Knoppix Formums that did the trick for me… More small things that needed fixing: Can’t access my other harddisk as non-root Fixed: sound is garbled in hd-install, works fine [...] Read more – ‘Switch made’.
I’m working on a Dell Inspiron 8200 with Windows XP. When I bought it a couple of months ago, I alos put a copy of RedHat Linux 7.3 on it, but didn’t use it much. Prompted by vowe about his installing RH 9, I decided to try that too. 3 Diskimages and an hour of [...] Read more – ‘Switching – blogging it’.
I haven’t seen this discussed widely yet – but TDNBW (This does not bode well) for Microsoft: The city of Munich, Gemany decided on 2003-05-28 to migrate from Windows NT to Linux and OpenSource based solutions for their 14’000 desktops. Sources: Microsoft kann in München nicht “fensterln” (heise.de) Suse Press Release While this is only [...] Read more – ‘Munich chooses Linux over Microsoft’.
Implemented Kalsey’s Technorati Plugin – you can see the last couple of inbound blogs in the sidebar on the right. Read more – ‘Added Technorati Links’.
PragProg features Dave and Andy who wrote two wonderful books…. Dave has some thoughts about Code Kata’s. I’m a student of Karate myself, so this rang a bell for me. I will think about this some more, when I’m more awake than right now ;-) Oh – Andy is blogging too Read more – ‘Kata Coding’.
Not content of just having a blog or a wiki, Martin Fowler rolled his own Bliki. Back when I started my blog, I used Steve Pikes PikiePikie, which was a wiki with blog functionality. Sadly, Steve seems to have given up on development. His server has been down for a loooong time. Update: There seems [...] Read more – ‘Martin Fowler’s Bliki’.
The project I’m working on is coming to an end. I have promised myself, that I’ll buy a portable MP3 player when it’s over. I was in K55 – the MP3 shop yesterday and had a look at the (old) Apple iPod and the Archos AV140. I have a hard time deciding. The interface of [...] Read more – ‘Please advise me on new gadget’.
My son is almost six years old and one of the last kids on the block to bike. Even the three year old kids could do it. We didn’t understan why … Then my wife had the idea to go to a “real” cycle shop. We came out with a new (and expensive) bike. That [...] Read more – ‘Learning to bike’.
One of the really cumbersome things in Domino development is the constant struggle to get Domino to do what I want it to do. Case in point: I have a textfield, but I want to let the user edit the text in a textarea. Domino only displays textareas for RichText fields – which is not [...] Read more – ‘Domino 5 -> Textfields to Textareas’.
One week after I found out about LinkedIn and promptly started to invite a number of my business contacts. So far, this hasn’t led to me being part of a “the total is greater than the sum of it’s part’s” network. In fact, I’m part of a 5 person network with me being the most [...] Read more – ‘LinkedIn LockedOut’.
You may notice that the site looks slightly different. I’ve started to play with the CSS that makes this site appear as it does. Nothing fancy yet… Read more – ‘minor changes in CSS’.
I saw the moblog gallery on Joi Ito‘s site. “I can do this too…”. So here is a picture from my P800, shot last weekend, uploaded to MT through the wonders of GPRS and Opera for Symbian. Read more – ‘mobile blogging with the p800’.
Finally: the Jeff Russels Starship Dimensions allow you to compare the size of – let’s say Babylon 5 to a Star Wars Death Star… Scary :-) [via Ned] Read more – ‘Starship Sizes’.
Doing the “creative break” routine after spending hours of debugging a complex interaction between all kind of different servers and wondering why things didn’t work (because nobody had allowed the standard user to actually do anything in the system) – I stumbled upon The Iceberg Secret, Revealed by Joel which talks about why the impression [...] Read more – ‘Icebergs and Screen Design’.
Updated with more links I like networking. I like the idea, that everybody is connected to everyone else through not more than six other people. I was a member of sixdegrees.com – but never got much use out of it. Anyway – there’s a new company, LinkedIn, Ltd that offers this kind of networking. It’s [...] Read more – ‘LinkedIn – a network of professionals’.
Ever wanted to make a prediction about the future? To bet on it? Head over to Longbets.org to do so. One of the bets: The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be someplace other than on a planet or on a satellite of a planet Betters include “ordinary” people like Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Dave [...] Read more – ‘The Future is Then’.
Surfing the referres, I happend upon Rant Central where a link to me was. The entry below was link to the Frank Zappa quote of the day. Thanks for making me aware of this. And yes: Frank, we really miss you – and here’s todays quote Read more – ‘Frank Zappa Quote of the day’.
I stumbled over the Many-to-many blog when I dug into the background of LinkedIn Network. I’ve since started to read more on the blog and – well – it’s interesting reading. I have been working with Lotus Notes for over 13 years now – and I think Notes defined some of the aspects of “social [...] Read more – ‘Social Software Blog’.
Just ran into this again, when we discussed programming langues here in cubicle world… How many languages do you know? 4? 10? 42? Try 515 – and see how to write “99 Bottles of Beer” in all of these languages. Brainfuck? Anyone? Read more – ‘99 Bottles of Beer’.
So you thought, that designing with HTML and CSS would lead to boring designs? That you don’t have enough control over the layout of the page? Head over to the ZenGarden, sit down to look, change the designs and learn. [via Tom Coates] Read more – ‘ZenGarden – a study in CSS’.
In my current project I have the pleasure (?) to work with Perl. I found out that there are hundres (thousands?) of useful modules out there. Before they can be used however, they have to be downloaded an installed… Grief! Here’s the dummies guide to doing it: (Assuming a Cygwin installation on a Win32 box) Read more – ‘Newbie Guide to CPAN’.
Vowe discusses the value of “WikiWiki in Domino. (Because people are starting to do that). Well – I’ve done it a couple of years ago – and I’ve had mixed joy from it. The lack of a regular expression parser in Notes has led to some quite ugly parsing code and not all of the [...] Read more – ‘Back from the Past’.
Here are applications for the P800 that I really like: ActiveDesk: When you flip open the phone, a summary of your calendar entries, tasks and messages appears. I like it better than Handy Day, YMMV Tipic is a Jabber chat client that supports AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger. Cool! SymIRC is an IRC client Both [...] Read more – ‘Useful P800 applications’.
Hmm – my P800 stopped syncing with Lotus Notes. It just doesn’t work anymore. I have the latest sync software, I have the latest Notes 5 version (5.0.12) and nada happens. I get the informative message, that the sync finished – but it doesn’t do anything. Of course there are no log files. There are [...] Read more – ‘P800 stopped syncing’.
Browsing through the referrers, I found this site with LotusScript snippets. This looks really useful – specially the MsXML and the string classes… Notes is a fun coding environment – so every bit of help helps ;-) Read more – ‘LotusScript Snippets’.
While I use Opera as my day to day browser, for webdevelopment there’s no way around Mozilla. Gemal has an article about development with Mozilla and talks about the DOM inspector, the HTTP Liveheader viewer (which I needed this very moment to debug an interaction between a browser, an authentication server and a PeopleSoft application [...] Read more – ‘Mozilla for Webdevelopers’.
I’ve been an on and off Opera user back in the Opera 4, 5 and 6 days. Ever since Opera 7 came out however, Opera is the single browser I use. Today Opera 7.11 is released. I cam across this 30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover (TnTLuoma.com) 30-days guide to Opera (the 6 version) [...] Read more – ‘I know Opera is great – do you?’.
Arial – You’re pretty normal. That’s certainly nota bad thing, as a lot of people like you. What Font Are You? (Standard Fonts) brought to you by Quizilla Read more – ‘Arial? I’m Arial – ahhhhhrrrrgggg’.
I’ve been quiet the last few days, I know. My time has been unevenly split between work and family (and guess which part got more of my time…) I’ve had the most unnerving experience yesterday when I moved my Domino application from my development server to the production cluster (two domino servers). My tests all [...] Read more – ‘One date down – more to go’.
Regular visitors know about my problems with the speed of this site. There always was a delay of several seconds for every request made to the webserver (apache). Thinking out loud with my colleague and friend Matthias led me to play with the configuration of my named deamon. Lo and behold – there was an [...] Read more – ‘This site sped up’.
I just realized that this search on Google lists this humble blog on number two position. Hmm – should I start to do more about this? Try them, list them, review them? (Yes – I know I also could write one…) What do you think? Read more – ‘ups – more p800 applications needed’.
Is it for real? Is it a fantasy? I don’t care – this has to be one of the most grabbing blogs I’ve ever read: “… she’s a flight risk” Copied from the comments below – with links intact Wired News does a good job of recapping the events so far, and the author of [...] Read more – ‘Flight Risk’.
Oh my – work is backing up again, and the precious easter holidays were nice but too short (and I spent one day doing my accounts instead of spending it with the family). Also – there always seems to be something happening: if the work situation is good, then problems on the private front creep [...] Read more – ‘Not dead yet – and talking’.
There were two things that set back my P800 development last week: My Symbian emulator crashed right after startup – making debugging of my application just a bit problematic Way too much work – three clients, three deadlines While I can do something about the second point (work, work some more, and then work at [...] Read more – ‘P800 emulator working again’.
One of these funny stories – looking at them retrospectively: I have been wearing glasses since I was 4 or 5 years old. I’m so used ot them, that they don’t disturb me the least. Until now I thought that my two kids (aged 3 and 5) wouldn’t need glasses because we always had the [...] Read more – ‘Atropin – don’t try this at home’.
Check out the Sidney Morning Heralds Story about the checkpoint incident that cost 7 to 11 civilians their life. Now we know what decapitating in war means. Read more – ‘Decapitating’.
Via vowe: Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates by Arundhati Roy is a strong text that sums up a lot of the problems we, the people, have with this war. A must read! (and while you’re at it, read The algebra of infinite justice posted on 29. September 2001) Read more – ‘Bring on the spanners.’.
Lee has released an electronic version of his book LotusScriptor’s Plain Simple Guide To The Lotus Notes C++ API. . Thanks – this might come in handy sometime Read more – ‘Notesapi.com’.
I’ve been playing around programming my P800. (BTW: This is by far the best mobile phone I’ve ever used – and it’s PDA capabilities are impressive.) There are a couple of things missing – that’s why I’m looking at the programming side. I have coded with Java and my first application is coming along nicely. [...] Read more – ‘Programming the P800’.
I got it – today I got a call, that my SonyEricsson P800 was waiting for me…. What a nice phone! I’m playing around with it and trying to get it to sync all my adresses and calendar items. I managed to get my addresses over from Outlook, but no go on the calendar front. [...] Read more – ‘Unbelievable P800’.
My old mobile phone is starting to break down – time for a new one. After some thoughts, I decided to buy the SonyEricsson P800 which got a good review on Geek.com and not too many complaints on the Usenet. All going well, I should have it tomorrow (but then, most of the time, things [...] Read more – ‘New mobile on the way – links’.
I haven’t had a chance to read until just now – and I’m deeply impressed how Robin Cook expressed his views on the war, on Britains role and on some of the background. Read the speech, at BBC’s site. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate [...] Read more – ‘Cook’s resignation speech’.
No – you and I don’t have to agree with all they write, but I feel that there is more meat here in the virtual spaces of the internet, than what we get served on TV: Outside The Beltway Agonist The Command Post Read more – ‘War Blogs’.
Jetzt ist es also passiert: Die ersten Bilder von toten und gefangenen Amerikanern tauchen auf. Klar, dass die amerikanische Öffentlichkeit solch grausiges nicht sehen darf. Klar, dass ein Aufschrei des Entsetzens losgeht und sich Herr Rumsfeld auf die Genfer Konvention beruft, die es einzuhalten gilt. Wann wurde die Genfer Konvention eingehalten, als in Guantanamo Gefangene [...] Read more – ‘Krieg ist nicht chirurgisch’.
Das habe ich heute in meiner Mailbox gefunden, einen offenen Brief an Präsident Bush: Danke, dass Sie der Welt gezeigt haben, welch tiefe Kluft zwischen den Entscheidungen der Machthaber und den Wünschen des Volkes liegt. [...] Danke, denn ohne Sie hätten wir nicht erkannt, dass wir fähig sind, uns zu mobilisieren. Möglicherweise wird es uns [...] Read more – ‘Danke Präsident Bush’.
Thanks to Ned for sharing this link to The Tyranny of email. It contains some good thought – like the three hour rule: I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows. It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into “right brain mode”, and really focus [...] Read more – ‘Tyranny of email – and warping’.
One project I’m working on has me working with different databases and Java objects. I needed some pointers on design and was given this incredible great link: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler, the guy who brought me into the ExtremeProgramming world via his book Refactoring. Read more – ‘Patterns in the Enterprise’.
After almost a year with an Ipaq3870, I’ve dusted off my old Visor Deluxe and reinstalled from a backup. Synched with Outlook to get back my calendar and adresses and I’m back in business. Two programs that I have missed so much during the PocketPC days: Lifebalance HourzPro Nothing on the PocketPC comes even close… [...] Read more – ‘Back to the Handspring Visor (from old blog)’.
I’ve been quite active on IRC lately (my friends know where to find me ;-) – and while I use Mirc for regular sessions, it can be handy to have a web-based alternative. I found it at IrcNet – thanks Sascha! Read more – ‘IRC through a web interface (from old blog)’.
What’s the difference between IE6.2800 on WindowsXP SP1 and IE6.2600 on Windows2000? 6 hours of finding a workaround for what seems to be a bug in IE6 on Win2000. In the application I’m writing I had to edit richt-text (using eWepEditPro). I did that in a child window and triggered a saveAndReload function in the [...] Read more – ‘IE 6 != IE6 (from old blog)’.
A long time in the coming: Freenet, the secure and anonymous P2P plattform, is out in a new version. New features include: - FEC – Forward Error Correction: Large files are split into many small pieces that contain information that allows freenet to reconstruct pieces that have gone missing. - Support for dynamic IP adresses [...] Read more – ‘New version of Freenet is out’.
I found this annotated speech of Bush over at Back to Iraq in the commentaries. A terrifiying read early in the morning… The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. [Why are they so much better at it than I am? I want time and advantage, too!] It has [...] Read more – ‘Annotated transcript of Bush’s speech’.
So it seems that tomorrow is the night the war begins (full moon rising, one day after the “ultimatum”). I didn’t grow up when the saying was “Make love, not war”. When I was a young adult, we watched war on CNN and heard that making love was dangerous (AIDS). “Make War, not Love” seemed [...] Read more – ‘War – huh – what is it good for’.
I had to drill a couple of holes today to hang a picture and a piece where the kids can hang their clothes. We have solid concrete walls and my old power-drill just didn’t cut it. So today I went out and bought a new one: 750W instead of 400W. A second grip in front [...] Read more – ‘The right tools’.
Tja – da hab ich also zwei wunderbare Kinder. 3 und 5 Jahre alt. Ein Quell ständiger Freude. Das Ende meiner Nerven. Die Ursache meiner grauen Haare. Aber ab und zu darf man die Perlen des Elternseins erleben… Mein Sohn übt im Kindergarten das Theaterstück: “Schneewittchen”. Er wird einen der sieben Zwerge spielen. Als ich [...] Read more – ‘Kinder Philosophie’.
What happens when you have uptime of over 200 days and you need to reboot your linux machine? You forget how to do things. And if you don’t have the documententation handy…. Here’s how the Notes server on linux is started: su notes cd /usr/local/notesdata /opt/lotus/bin/server or for a more detailes script, check out this [...] Read more – ‘How to start a linux server’.
Here I am at my Wife’s Sisters computer, trying to fix a printer that no longer prints black. (Google tells me that the printhead probably is clogged with dried black ink) Anyway – I’m accessing the Internet to diagnose this problem – nothing special there. But I’m doing so, using a 56k Modem. God – [...] Read more – ‘Spoiled by Speed’.
Interestingly, my old blog (on the Wiki) doesn’t work when I access it with my browsers, from my computer. But when working on a different computer, it shows up fine (minus CCS, minus images) – well, time to move the more interesting entries to this new format. Read more – ‘Starting to move stuff from old blog to this’.
I’ve had a Barix Exstreamer for quite a while. It has been sitting in my bedroom, mostly not playing. One of the reasons was the the server software (zServer) that Barix provides isn’t quite to my liking. Barix has since made zServer open-source and I have started to work on it (something that unfortunately I [...] Read more – ‘Barix Exstreamer and Streamsicle’.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise: The Obsverver has an article that shows, that the NSA is snooping on phone and e-mail conversations of the members of the UN security council. Land of the free – ehh? Read more – ‘US spying on UNSC members’.
I have been using Zoë for a while now (as a kind of Google for Email) and I’m more than happy with it. Recently Raphaël included the possibility that Zoë also handles RSS feeds like email. When using this feature with this Blog, I noticed that the RSS entries that come from this site are [...] Read more – ‘Moving to RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds in MoveableType’.
You have heard about the DAU’s (Dümmster Anzunehmener User) – but you have dismissed the tales as fantasy. Well – one guy working support has fotographic evidence, that everything said and told is simply not true – because the real truth is, that it’s even worse! Stupid Computer tricks Found trough: Industrial Technology & Witchcraft Read more – ‘Support Horor Stories’.
Thanks to DominoGuru for sharing this priceless find of well thought out web development… Presenting: The Buffy Pages Should they have acted up lately, you might want to check what message they gave to their users by opening the dialog box. Somebody report this to Jakob Nielsen Read more – ‘Freightening Web Development’.
Another one thanks to Anke: A commentary on the Bush – Blair relationship… Yes! This mean, that this blog not only covers technology, art and design but ventures into poltitics as well… Read more – ‘Blush – the movie’.
OK – I’m easily impressed. But what this company has been doing to webmail is simply astounding: Oddpost creates a Outlook like environment in the browser. Complete with type-ahead, drag&drop and whatnot. It’s fast, easy, nice. Unfortunately you need IE5+ to use it…. (Can we have Opera 7 support, please? Or Mozilla at least?) Very, [...] Read more – ‘Webmail on stereoïds’.
Flash from the past… Reading A List Apart on flexible layouts, following to the A donkey on the edge blog of the author of said article the song below hit me… Oh yes! I remember “Plastic Bertrand”. Unfortunately, Dug’s blog doesn’t seem to have Permalinks, so I copied the text of the song here… Enjoy! Read more – ‘Yam! Bam! mon chat Splash’.
Why hasn’t anybody shown me this before? Modify fields from a view level without creating an agent This little formula allows you to edit any field with any type in a notes document. This is so handy when developing…. Read more – ‘Notes: Modify fields from view’.
I just received my bi-weekly email from Jakob Nielsen that told me about his new usability column, over on Use It. Is it just me, or are his columns getting more and more irrelevant? I remember finding his site, a couple of years ago and reading every single column he published – and I have [...] Read more – ‘Is Jakob Nielsen’s UseIt column still the “de-facto” standard?’.
Always trying to copy vowe I also wanted to have his Referrer list show up on my page. Thanks to a little googling I found Stephen’s Web ~ Referrer System and had it implemented in about 5 minutes. Thanks Stephen Read more – ‘Referrer Script by Stephen’.
Thanks to Hugh I found this article Ned Batchelder: Fix Error Handling First on error handling and fixing handling errors. A good read and something to keep in mind (Of course I do already – but you should too ;-) ) Read more – ‘Fix Error Handling First’.
It seems that something with my dynamic execution of cgi’s causes the slowdown on Apache. Now that the Blog is static, everything seems to move quite fast (except for the fact that it takes me ages to edit the pages – but hey – that’s ok, isn’t it?) Check out a slow apache server on: [...] Read more – ‘Apache slow down solved?’.
