StarOffice 8 Update 6

is here.
Get it at the SunSolve server.

Caterina Fake - The History of Flickr

Great interview with Caterina Fake, one of the founders of flickr on IT conversations.

Thunderbird2: it's here

Finally, Thunderbird 2 has really been released.
Just downloaded and installed it (top replace my 2.0 rc2).

Got and get it - Reclaim your inbox.

Software AG Announces Acquisition webMethods

Somehow I seem to have missed this a 2 weeks ago...
SOA - Integration Industry Pulse - ebizQ: "Software AG Announces Acquisition webMethods"

read more about it - with an interesting analyis - at Beth Gold-Bernstein's blog.

Thunderbird 2 Final sighted on Mozilla FTP | Techbloggers

Thunderbird 2 Final sighted on Mozilla FTP | Techbloggers

If you are an early adopter and don’t want to wait a few more days to download and install the email client Thunderbird you could head out to the Mozilla ftp and download it for your operating system and language right away. The Mozilla team is usually upping the latest version of either Thunderbird or Firefox on their ftp mirrors to ensure that they can serve the server load when they publish the links on the official program pages. This is indeed a good way to download Thunderbird 2 fast because the servers will not be that populated at this time.

Paul Graham on Microsoft

Read the following great essay by Paul Graham called Microsoft is Dead:

"Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them."

Of course Microsoft is not dead, but there are clear signs, that they are becoming less relevant. For instance, with Dell (of all) announcing Linux preloads...

Sun now diggs, etc

I just noticed that on the Sun Microsystems homepage they include buttons/links to technorati, delicious , digg, and slashdot.

Cool move; not often seen with corporate websites.

Small (UI) change, big impact

Xing, my favorite professional network site, introduced a nice little change in their userinterface recently.

When working with lists (of contacts, etc) the pagination looked like this (my rendering):


Notice the ellipsis between 5 and 20 and that the continue link/button is the rightmost. This meant that when you went from page to page, the page numbers and their width would not stay the same and the exact location of the continue link would change its position. Which was exactly the link you are using to navigate to the next page...
Which essentially meant that you had to look closely at this pagination links every time you wanted to go the next page, instead of just (blindly) clicking forward.

They changed it to that:

So now (finally) the continue link will always stay on the same spot and you can (blindly) stroll through the whole list.

Small change, big impact (to me).

Thanks a lot.

Thunderbird 2: My own extension

Today I discovered that my own extension to Thunderbird did not really run under TB2. I did a little debugging this evening and found the problem:

document.popupNode.getTextAttribute('emailAddress')
no longer works; did fine, though, in Mozilla and TB1.x

I had to replace it with
document.popupNode.getAttribute('emailAddress')
and it now runs perfectly again.

I know this is not really of great interest to most of you, but since I found no reference at all to this behavior through Google, I thought, I'd document it here.

Thunderbird 2: Display Images

Yet another cool feature in TB2:
When an incoming mail contains images on the web (i.e. images not embedded into the message but rather on any arbitrary web site) Thunderbird in previous version as well as in v2.0 blocks the images per default.
This is to protect the end user from inadvertently and unknowingly sending information to malign websites.
Only if you deliberately click on "Load Images" those images will be loaded.

Now TB2 comes with an additional feature which looks like this:

The upper part has always been there, whats new is the
"Click here to always load remote iamges from some-mail-address".
If you click it, you will never see this message again for this very sender... instead images will always be loaded for mails from this sender, because you trust him, and declare your trust within Thunderbird.

This info is actually saved in the address book entry of the user.
You'll notice a new field there:
"Allow remote images in HTML mail."
This will be set by clicking on the above link. Obviously you can also do so manually...

I wonder if I want this option on a domain level... I guess not.

Thunderbird 2: Intelligent reply

Usually (in TB until 1.5+) when you replied to a message that you sent yourself, the TO: field in the reply would contain your account, and the original recipient would be in the CC.
In TB 2 when you reply to a message you sent yourself, the TO: will be filled with the original recipients.

E.g. you find a folder in you SENT folder (most usually) with
TO: foouser@someorg.tld
FROM: myself@someorg.tld

In TB until 1.5+ hitting reply would yield:
TO: myself@someorg.tld
CC: foouser@someorg.tld

In TB2 you get:
TO: foouser@someorg.tld

This is most definitely more likely what you intended.

Great work...

You're my favorite (Java) mistake

The most stupid mistake in Java I made (at least for this year):

Reading a (URLConnection) stream using a BufferedReader while it is ready(), instead of until readLine() returns null.

I wonder what led me to it...
Well, it is a bad idea - very bad, indeed.
Especially a Reader from a 3MB URLConnection is more !ready() then ready(), so it quite frequently terminated (silently) before its time.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, ...

Sun Weblog Publisher - waiting, waiting

There is still no news about a Sun Weblog Publisher that works with (the new) blogger, aka blogger2.

Please !!!

My first glimpse at Thunderbird2

I just downloaded the Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 rc2 to take a look on whats ahead.

One really neat feature I was craving for is the Advanced Folder View, i.e. in the folder pane you can now select which folders you want to see:

• all
• favorite
• Unread
• Recent (i.e. Most resently used)

This comes quite close to what I was used from Microsoft Outlook with the favorite's pane to the left. Granted, I haven't been using Outlook for the last 4 years now, but I still was missing the favorite folder pane from it.

Having all the unread folders in one list is quite handy when you have multiple accounts, news-groups and RSS feeds to look at.

Another cool feature is the promotion of labels from earlier versions to Tags. With labels you couldn't really do a lot... but now you can create any custom tag and assign any number of tags to a message. Of course you can search and filter by tags...

TB2 also supports Google Mail, just give your (real) name and gmail account – and that's it. Sadly, it's just pop3, so any additional info in gmail, e.g. tags are not visible to TB2...

While setting up gmail I noticed that the New Mail Notification alert/popup has now a lot more information... comes with Sender and Subject.

You can now Find text within the message just like in Firefox..

Also it seems to run quite stable... no problem encountered so far.

On the downside, none of my Extensions work with TB2... I guess most of them just don't declare TB2 support instead of having a real technically issue.

Making Firefox more del.icio.us

del.icio.us: making Firefox more del.icio.us.
del.icio.us released a new Firefox extension (oops: add-on of course, since FF2) which is now a lot more interactive and bookmark like.

Wifi Router replacement

I finally replaced my broken Netgear with a Linksys WRT54GL...
Works great so far.
Well, once I remembered that my DSL provider (AON) is not using PPPoE but PPTP...

Wow - there is something Google does NOT know.

I logged into my Google Docs & Spreadsheets again this morning, and look what I found:

Well of course the hint is very helpful... my last use of Google docs it really has been a couple of weeks ago...
and it is totally nice of them to
a) hide old documents and
b) tell me where to find them again.


BUT...

How come Google does not know that it "has been more than a month"... they know everything about me, but not when I last used on of their (major) applications ?

Come on...

This should actually read: "It has been more than a month, so please check ...." and not be phrased as a question.

Great SOA vendor review

Well, one might still argue about the term "SOA vendor" ... but here's an excellent rating
Service Architecture - SOA: SOA Vendor Ratings - Q1 2007

(and it is an excellent blog, btw)