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?’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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?’.
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 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’.
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….’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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()’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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….’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
… 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’.
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’.
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?’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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 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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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?’.
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’.
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’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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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?’.
