Palm and 3Com re-united

So, HP bought Palm... not Apple, as has been rumored over the last couple of weeks.
Palm and 3Com [1] finally re-united.

IMHO (and as a former Palm fanboy) this still does not give Palm/HP a chance in the smart phone market: HP/Compaq never managed the iPaq to smart phone transition - with the help of giant Microsoft - so why should they be able to manage it now without any help, when they are up against Apple and Google (and. yes, Nokia, but they are an easy target).

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[1] Sorry, "HP networking" as they are called since last week.

James Gosling to leave Sun/Oracle

Well, this kind of sort of in a way was to be expected. James Gosling left Sun Oracle, as he reported here.

eCard problems continued

Well, the problems with my healthcare card (eCard) as an Austrian Citizan Card (Bürgerkarte) still continue.

1. My old card had problems, so it was replaced with a newer version last December...
2. Then the availabe citizen card software (Bürgerkartenumgebung) was not compatible with the new type of cards, and I was told this would be fixed in January.
3. It was not

However, now there is a new citizen card software called MOCCA: it is Java based (finally) and available through webstart...
Works quite well for the one application where I would not really require the Bürgerkarte: Finanzonline - the federal tax return/claim application. It does not require a citizen card login... but there it does work.

For applications that require the login, like my (federal) pension plan, it still does not work.

Error code 2006:
HTTP/HTTPS binding: Incorrect parameter encoding.

Seems that they are not ready for MOCCA yet (after about 2months).

Could someone out there please coordinate the government agencies? What about synchronized releases of obviously interdependent pieces of software?

Annotations

via geek & poke

Flickr language - could this be any more embarrassing

Remember how I ranted about how Fickr changed the language to German for my account, and I could not find how to change it back to English...

Oh this is sooo embarrassing.... really... but I have to admit this...

Anyone ever take a look at the bottom most bar in flickr?

Yeah... that one.

Turns out, that when you click on English, it changes the language to English.

Another example, if you click on Deutsch, it changes the language to German/Deutsch.

Funny stuff, really.

Flickr language

And why exactly is it, that Flickr fall of a sudden talks German to me?
I did not change any preferences, still have en_xx way before de_xx in my browser language settings, ...

But starting last weekend, Flickr is German.
And no option[1] to turn it off.

What the f%&/( ??
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[1] none that I could find, anyway.

April 3rd - I'd rather stay offline

So, the iPad will hit the stores on April 3rd this year...

I think I'll stay offline that day, because all the blogs, twitter, facebook and whatnot will be full with love and hate messages, and Why the iPad is the best device ever, and Why it is total crap...

The usual fight between Apple fan boys and the Apple haters, as well as those who expected a thinner/smaller MacBook with a full OS and those who love the idea of a larger iPhone...

I'll just stay offline ....

Google Acquires Online Image-Editing Tool Picnik

Odd .... Google Acquires Online Image-Editing Tool Picnik (see also here)
I know Picnik mainly from / for Flickr, which now is a Yahoo company...

So, did Google just grab Picnik before Yahoo had chance?

Then again, it was also available for Picasa et al... still surprised me.

Skype on Nokia E71 - update

So, I've been using (native) Skype on the E71 for a couple of days now, and it really works quite well.
Faster then the Java version (and that's me saying this). And more complete.

It does, however, not honor the settings for

• Default access point

and

• Sign In [When Skype starts].

It currently ignores both.

I changed them to their other respective values, restarted Skype, changed them back, still no change.

Skype on Nokia E71

When I read that Skype was dropping support for the Java Mobile version of Skype (light), which I use on my E71, I just thought "What the f*"... [1]
Then I continued to read to find out, that there actually is a native Symbian version of Skype, that I totally missed during the last 1.5 years...

So, lets install it... just point your phone browser to skype.com/m.
Check back here to find out what my experience with it is.
Looks promising at first sight.

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[1] yes, I literally thought "f asterisk"... :-)

Coding Canary

Yes.
Exactly.


via Geek & Poke

OpenOffice.org 3.2 available - a highly recommended update

via Malte Timmermann's Blog

This update is highly recommended, not only because of the many security fixes and security feature improvements, but also because of some noticeable performance improvements.

As always, make sure to only download from trusted sources, like http://OpenOffice.org. The reason is explained here.

Perfect Intro to Cluetrain and Web 2.0

Look at this excellent TED presentation by Alexis Ohanian of Reddit to understand how the Cluetrain Manifesto maps to Web 2.0...

And what it is, that corporations and organizations simply have to get.

Good code

So true.

via geek & poke

Facebook: Half-hearted email replies

For a couple of weeks now, Facebook allows you to reply to a notification (e.g. when someone comments on your status) via email.

Xxx Xxxxxx commented on your status:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras neque diam, tincidunt sit amet faucibus quis, tincidunt eu mauris. Nulla vitae est ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. "

New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this status.

To see the comment thread, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

So just hit reply on this e-mail and type away your response.

A really nice feature, since most of the time I read the comment first via email, not on Facebook itself - no matter if mobile, iPod or Web. So being able to reply right from my mail-client is really convenient.

However, the one notification one cannot reply to via email, is a notification from a facebook message itself. If someone sends you a message on facebook, you have to log on to facebook and reply their.
Odd.
Half-hearted.
Please...

Urgent feature request for Google Reader

If some Google engineer reads this...(yeah, very likely):
Could you please do a quick hack in Google Reader that would allow me to "mark all items about iPad as read and boring".

That'd be helpful right now.

Cowardly admin

How nice... I got this error message on a webserver just now:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, /dev/null and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

The server administrator /dev/null... didn't know that admins are that self-conscious nowadays.

Regex Pitfall

I guess this was the first time ever that I had to search/match/replace with regular expressions across line boundaries.
Not the usual multi-line ("/m") operation; quite the contrary, I wanted the source string to be treated as one single line regardless of newline-characters in it.

In other words: the dot (".") should also match a newline.

Not that easy, it turns out.
Quoting from the Regex Tutorial:

The dot matches a single character, without caring what that character is. The only exception are newline characters. In all regex flavors discussed in this tutorial, the dot will not match a newline character by default. So by default, the dot is short for the negated character class [^\n] (UNIX regex flavors) or [^\r\n] (Windows regex flavors).

Changing this behavior is actually language dependent.
Since I needed it within JavaScript (XUL/Thunderbird) I had to revert to a [\s\S] instead of the .

JavaScript [does] not have an option to make the dot match line break characters. In
those languages, you can use a character
class such as [\s\S] to match any character.
This character matches a character that is either a whitespace
character (including line break characters), or a character that is not a
whitespace character. Since all characters are either whitespace or
non-whitespace, this character class matches any character.

Weird. Unreadable. Requires a comment.
But it works.

Who is Facebook afraid of?

These days Facebook is really pushy and aggressive to get the data of your contacts who are not yet on Facebook.

Exhibit A: Facebook FriendFinder

Facebook seems to shove the FriendFinder into your face these days, no matter when or where on Facebook you are at the time.

For a time there even were almost full-size banners on top of the main Facebook page (stream) for it.



Exhibit B: The new iPhone app

The new Version 3.1 of the FaceBook app for the iPhone allows you to sync your iPhone Contacts with Facebook. Now as nice and handy this may be for syncing the Facebook contact information (picture, phone number, address, birthday, ...) down to your iPhone I'd never let all my phone contacts by synced up to Facebook.

Well, I don't have an iPhone (yet), but a - in this regard - functionally equivalent iPod Touch, which obviously does not contain as much contact information as my phone. And the E71 app for the iPhone is way to broken to ever get such a sync feature.

So this is not a problem for me, but I'd not even sync my handful of iPod contacts to Facebook. Even if I could.

They are really kind of desperate to get all your contacts data, i.e. your whole social graph.

New Austrian ecard still not a Citizen Card

So during my previous attempt to activate my national health card ("ecard") as a citizen card ("Bürgerkarte") I was told that this very most recent version of the ecard was not yet supported and I should check back in January.

Guess what I did today...

Well to cut a long story short, it still does not work.

Why did I even bother to try...
I've been working in the IT industry for the last 20 years now [1], always on - sort of - the production side: vendor, developer, ... never really on the consumer side...

So I should know what a vendor or developer means by saying "in January". It's rather like February 12th or so... and not January 18th... duuuh... should've known... been there...

So, if anyone cares to try this "in January", i.e. before 18-Feb-2010, just be so kind and post a comment with your results here.

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[1] OMG...that long?