Excellent service

The power adapter of my thinkpad gave up on me the other day; so I called IBM/lenovo support, because the thing is still under warranty; they just had a replacement part sent to me next morning... no walk-in, no hassle, nothing; just a 5min phone conversation, where the guy checked my serial number against their warranty database, double checked my problem, and told me that it would be sent and should be there (i.e. at my home) next morning.

And it really was.
Great... execllent service (hate to say this about competition, but it nevertheless feels good).

BlogTalk in Vienna, Oct 2-3,2006

BlogTalk Reloaded - the conference is scheduled for Oct 2–3, 2006.It will be held in Vienna, Austria.

Writely

Finally Writely (recently bought by google) opened up for registration again a couple of days ago. So now I got my writely account and tried a view documents (all .swx or .odt). And those were quite complex.

Apart from a 500KB limit (boy, that's really low) it worked perfectly.

Even found some hidden/invisible anchors etc that I did not see in StarOffice.

It also comes with an RSS feed on the document revisions... great for people collaboratively working on documents.

Now if only they would enable to directly same from google mail... that would be something.

technorati tags: google, writely, staroffice, openoffice, odt

Kim Cameron on federation vs user-centric

Theres a very interesting series of comments on Kim Cameron's identityblog on the difference between user-centric identities (infocard) and federation (liberty) - and/or whether there is a difference at all.

Find the details at Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog » Federation and user-centricity

technorati tags:identity, liberty, federation

Caches, parte deux

Well, I guess I know the reason for the Google Desktop caching issue:

The website sends the following headers (and only those)

 HTTP/1.0 200 O
 Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 17:51:07 GMT
 Server: Apache
 Content-Type: text/html


Wow, thats bad, ... really bad...

technorati tags:google, cache, http

Roman vs Caches

I'm struggling with caches now;

1. Flock doesn't seem to pick up feed-changes (which with other readers work) - even if I force it to reload
2. Google Desktop seems to cache XmlHttpRequest results, without me being able to control it (setting headers like pragma, cache-control, etc)

Good thing I finally found my snoop equivalent for windows: Ethereal. So at least I have some aid for debugging...

technorati tags:flock, google, snoop, cache

Web Stuff I don't get...

e.g. MySpace or Digg ...

I can't even say what I dislike about them, I just don't get the hype around them... Take digg: it's nice, but why vote on articles? The "wisdom of crowds" quality it seems to get by it, is - IMHO - spoiled or rather lost, because it's always the same little crowdette that votes anyway - oligarchy rather then democracy...

technorati tags:digg, web, myspace

Google Desktop Gadget - revisited

Adding timer-support was a lot easier than doing the HTML parsing (see My First Google Desktop Gadget ).

Just init with

setInterval(OnTimer, 1000 * 3600 ); // check once every hour

And in function OnTimer() you we just call what we created before.

Same goes for menus; add a refresh menu item like this

plugin.onAddCustomMenuItems = AddCustomMenuItems

function AddCustomMenuItems(menu)
{
  menu.AddItem(strMenuRefresh, 0, OnMenuRefresh);
}
function OnMenuRefresh(item_text)
{
  OnTimer()
}

Easy, isn't it ?

technorati tags:google, javascript,

My First Google Desktop Gadget

Tried out my first Google Desktop Gadget - purely, entirely in JavaScript.
It goes out to my provider's service homepage, retrieves the current DSL usage (for this month), does a lot of ugly HTML fixing/patching (boy, is their HTML broken), to finally pass into DOM.

Then pick the relevant values out of the DOM and display them...

Took me about half a day; the most part was fixing the HTML, so not GD related.
Now comes the GD stuff, like how do I refresh every x minutes or so... stay tuned, tomorrow is another day.

technorati tags:google, javascript, dom

Varargs Puzzler

When I take a look at Richard Bair's Blog: Varargs Puzzler  I feel that I have to learn a lot more about varags in Java 5 - actually I avoided them so far. I guess now I also know why ;-) They don't really seem to behave straightforward, to they.

technorati tags:java

Flock and technorati

Hm, flock offers a notification service for blogs, and also comes pre-configured with technorati (which is good), but it does not seem to ping technorati, when I post to my blog (through the flock interface)...

technorati tags:flock, feed, technorati, blog

oops - Bugzilla vs RSS

This is sooo embarrassing: Bugzilla - contrary to my belief (IT conservations: Bugzilla vs RSS) of course does give you feed, at least on queries/searches. Still not on individual bugs, though.

Flock again

The cool thing about flock is, that it derives from firefox, so my (in the meantime) most important FF extension, ProxyButton, works here, too.

technorati tags:flock, firefox

IE7... so ??

Microsoft is advertising on their site for IE7 with the slogan

we heard you. you wanted it easier and more secure.

Wow... what an insight. Couldn't they have guessed that - like years earlier.

And by the way: are they now admitting that IE4-6 were crap?

technorati tags:browser

Atom intro

Here's an excellent intro into Syndication and Atom by David M Johnson.

technorati tags:rss, atom

Bugzilla vs RSS

Why doesn't bugzilla support RSS, i.e. I'd like to subscribe to a product or component oder a specific bug... (or keyword, or contact, or assignment, or severity ... you get the drift)?

technorati tags:rss, bugzilla

Flock - posting to blogger

Had a little trouble with the recent post, because Flock (0.7.4.1) has a problem with the initial (!) blog setup.

First of all, setting up your blog(s) in Flock is easy: Just key in your blog url (e.g. it-conservations.blogspot.com and the provide userid/password; the rest will be done automagically.

However, to successfully post to my blog, I had to delete this setting and create the very same again with the following parameters (for blogger)

• blog-url
• userid/password
• get your blog id (can be found on your dashboard, or just view-source on your blog)
• api uri: https://www.blogger.com/atom/<blogid>
• api: atom (doesn't work with the blogger api also provided, at least not for me)

works like a charm then.

technorati tags:flock, blogger

Flock

Started to test the new Mozilla/Firefox derivate: Flock

A neat little webbrowser (based on FF) that specialized on ... (dare I use the term) ... Web 2.0 features, i.e.

• integrated photo support (in my case flickr)
• integrated blog support (used for this post here)
• integrated rss support

and many more ... stay tuned, I'll be playing around with it some more.

technorati tags:flock, rss, browser, firefox

Portlet 2.0 Spec early draft

Found on The Portal Post : Weblog
An early draft of the upcoming Portlet 2.0 Spec aka JSR286 is available.

OpenDS

Sun kicks off OpenDS (open directory service) project on java.net.