2000 Watt powersupply - are we nuts ?

Just found this on digg:

Ultra Announces 2000 Watt Power Supply for Desktop PC's - Biggest ATX PSU?

Ultra Products today announces that it will unveil the world ’s first 2000W ATX Power Supply Unit for the PC at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Legit Reviews has some of the first available pictures of this monster posted and take a closer look at what this PSU can do. The +12V rail supports 150 Amps! That's just bloody insane

digg - Ultra Announces 2000 Watt Power Supply for Desktop PC's - Biggest ATX PSU?

are we totally nuts now ? 2kW on the desktop ? what for ?

I'm beginning to love the power saving  SunRays more and more each day.

technorati tags:sunray, power, psu

engadget: Bluetooth patent suit hits Nokia, Samsung and Panasonic

engadget reports here that Nokia et al are sued for patent infringement regarding Bluetooth.

If patent claims are any measure, it seems that bluetooth finally did become successful

Wifi vs VoIP

Before Christmas I had a conversation with some former colleagues of mine. We had all worked for the same wireless operator, and most of them still do.

During that conversation one of them said, that he thinks that VoIP over Wifi will replace GSM because its cheaper.
I begged to differ:

His line of thought was, that Wifi is cheap and now that PDAs and phones do support voice over Wifi (e.g. Skype).
Everybody, he said, will switch to PDAs with Skype getting access from cheap local hot spots. GSM (or rather managed/operated voice and networks) will cease to exist.

To me there are several obvious flaws in this reasoning:

Wifi is not cheap.
Granted there are free (as beer and as in speech) hot-spots (like fon, but only a very limited number of them.
Commercial hot-spots charge horrendous amounts per hour/day...
T-mobile in Austria charges 1€/min or 8€/hour; A1/mobilkom is even more expensive

Wifi is not easy to configure
Well, maybe it is on the mac, but not on Phones and PDAs. To be clear, it's still easy to configure the pure Wifi/radio stuff, to get access to the
small network at the hot-spot, but that usually does not give you internet access beyond the hot-spot. In order to get that, most sites force you through some web authentication to be able to charge you.
Repeat for each location where you want to place a call.
Don't even consider a handover (like you are used to on the mobile)

Wifi is not easy to find
Forget all the finder services and icons and logos and what not. You still have to look for it.
GSM/3G you don't have to look for.
It's just there.

I wouldn't want my proverbial mother to have to configure a Wifi phone (not even my real one).
Nor do I want to have to educate her on the usage of the phone...

The transition from the good old fixed line phone to the mobile was difficult for many people, but essentially the only real change was, that you have to press the green button after you keyed in the numbers.
That's it. Ah, end yes, you no longer needed a cable.

Consider all the changes between the classical telephone sytem (including the mobile) and VoIP/Skype over Wifi.
It's more then just the green button. You have to register with several operators, you have various accounts...
So most people just wont follow you there.

Granted, it is possible, and to (us) techies it is a viable option, but only as long as we can cope with the service and usage limitations.

There is really no technical limit: Wifi can transport voice with top quality (provided the hotspot provider knows his stuff)
It's really just the people.

Wifi phone services do work already.
They can also work for my mother, but only stationary, i.e. replace the phone at home by a Wifi service.
My point is only about mobile networks, not about fixed line or home installations.

Palm replacement

So finally my replacement Palm T|X arrived (see what happened to the old one here) .
First of all, eBay, or at least certain eBay members, are just great. The T|X arrived exactly as described on ebay and quite in time, considering the holidays.
Secondly, as I already noticed a couple of hard-resets earlier, the Palm OS Wifi settings are not hard-reset safe, so they also don't survive a migration to a new piece of hardware.
What I found out was that you have to beam the file wiFiDbLibMruDB-WMru with e.g. T'Catalog (formerly known as z'catalog), then you get all the Wifi Settings on the new device as well... Especially the Wifi keys...

Technorati DOES support blogger labels

I stand corrected, technorati indeed does support the (new/beta) blogger labels as technorati tags.
Don't know how that slipped me, I thought I double checked... or then again maybe they just introduced this feature recently.

eBay to support RSS

eBay now supports RSS feeds for searches;
well at least I just discovered them, might be that they support them quite a while, but I just haven't noticed.
Anyway this is a cool feature.
I'd just love to see an RSS feed on my watch list as well.

Firefox 2 and Google Reader

Firefox 2 can directly subscribe RSS/Atom feeds to Google Reader.
I love it.

StarOffice 8 Update 5

StarOffice 8 Update 5 for Windows is out and my StarOffice installation was kind enough to inform me about this.

This is because, finally the folks at OpenOffice.org finally implemented a update notification feature.

So if anyone is interested in the update, it's here.

technorati tags:staroffice, openoffice.org, openoffice, OOo

Flock supports new blogger

Flock 0.7.9 is out and it supports the new blogger (formerly known as blogger beta) APIs and interfaces.

Thanks.

technorati tags:flock, blogger

Mozilla drag and drop

Just found out here at Dictionaries for Mozilla Thunderbird that you can drag a URL/link from Firefox into the extension dialog of Thunderbird.

All I can say is: wow.

(well I guess Apple Mac users would have done this anyway; we PC users loose the sense for whats intuitive, we're kind of out-educated by windows.)

technorati tags:mozilla, thunderbird, firefox

Fighting Spam

One of my mail providers with quite some heavy Spam problems recently implemented a new anti-spam technique, which actually reduced my daily Spam from about 100 to 5-10 e-mails a day. The ISP side Spam filters conveniently caught 99% of them, with not too many false positives (“false positives” are regular e-mails that erroneously are treated a spam), so the 100 really did not bother me that much. Now the 5-10 are really fine. For various reasons I wont disclose the feature they implemented, but it seems to work well so far.

Which leads me to the still unsolved problem of Spam; Spam or UBE (“unsolicited bulk email”) could only evolve because there is no cost associated with sending or transporting email. Spammers therefore can send out as many messages as they want, with the most dubious messages, because if even only 1 in ten thousand users clicks on their link or offer, it would still be worth it.

So the more general model here is, that the spammer has a means of transporting a trigger message to his supposed audience that leads at least a tiny fraction of the audience to do something that causes the spammer to receive money; e.g. place an order with him, usually for sex related drugs or fake luxury stuff, or it might be even ad sponsored web pages.

According to this, spam works if the gain (financially for the spammer) from one user performing this action times the success rate (i.e. the fraction of users who fall for this of all the messages sent) is higher then the cost of delivering the spam messages. As long as email is free, this will obviously always work. Even if we make it significantly hard for spammers to break our spam filters, with huge numbers it pays.

As a formula:

cost-per-message*messages + setup-cost + cost-of-counter-fighting-antispam
< gain-per-click * success-rate*messages

Some parties therefore suggested to collect a very tiny amount of money, say 1cent, for each email. Regular users like you and me wouldn't really notice, because with even 100 e-mail a day its only 1€or 1$. Spammers would notice, because at several thousand to million messages it would make them pay more than the receive.

I have my doubts regarding this model:

1. Morally: 1 cent per message seems little to us Europe or US, but is a significant barrier to everyone else, e.g. Africa; we don't want to truncate them from the net.

2. A problem of collection: who should collect the fee ? the ISP cant and won't, because that would be event based billing, which most of the smaller ISP simple aren't setup to do.

3. even if the ISPs were to charge for it, there would emerge at least one ISP who would break the system for a very small email flat rate, and it would pay again for spammers

4. if the receiving party collects, then from whom ?

5. the spam model is only about the relative price of the message to the gain (see above), Spam SMS (“short messaging service” on the mobile) shows that it works with high cost delivery (and SMS is probably the most expensive today) if only the gain is high enough; with SMS spam it is usually a call to a toll-number (1-900 in the US, 0190 in Germany, 09xx in Austria)

So as neat as charging for e-mail messages seems, because it would attack the very model of spamming, I doubt that it can work at all (or should work at all given the cost for the 3^rd world).

Technorati Tags:spam, e-mail

Palm R.I.P. II

I knew the fellow eBayers wouldn't let me down; as planned
here, my replacement Palm T|X (used) should arrive in the next couple of days.

Thanks to ebay (and paypal) for making transactions superfast.

Blogger beta finally out of beta

So the "new blogger" or "blogger beta" finally went out of beta.
Get the new features here in the tour.

blogger vs technorati

Now that the (beta/new) blogger supports tags -or labels as they call them - there is the problem, that it does not pass them on to technorati, or technorati does not read them.
Since I don't want to double-tag I only use one of the tagging systems.
Currently I stick with blogger for testing - and because its a lot easier.

Anyone remember the floppy disk?

Today I was confronted with almost the whole history of portable disk media:

I had to install some piece of SW from a DVD onto an old Laptop running Windows ME (please, don't ask me why, I had to... OK)
So the laptop only had a CD drive, not a DVD drive. And no Ethernet or Wifi, either (of course, you will say).
Then using my regular PC I copied the data to my external USB drive, connected the laptop via USB to the drive... and voila, it complained that it was missing the USB mass storage drivers.
That sent me looking for a 3.5" floppy disk for about 1/2 hour. I didn't have any...
So I wasted a CD to transfer just the USB drivers, installed them, and the USB worked fine.

So, from

• Floppy (Ok, I couldn't, but I would've if only I had one)
• via CD
• and DVD
• to USB drive.

Not bad, eh.

Java IS everywhere...

I just installed my DVB-T set-top box because the Austrian broadcasting system is switching from analog to digital. Since I don't have cable ('cause the cable company refuses to install cable in my area) and just don't want to have a satelite dish, I'm still on the terrestrial system.
Now I have to switch to digital... So I just bought the box... and guess, after switching it on, when the device first initializes, it shows a Java powered logo.

Sooooo cool.

Google finally working on/with Blogger

So, finally: years (ahem) after Google took over Blogger they are integrating it their ecosystem.
At least as viewed from a more or less outside perspective.
As you see from the URL (... blogspot.com) I'm hosting my blog(s) on blogger and will be using the new features gradually.
Some of those new features are:

• post to blogger from google docs/spreadsheets...
• labels (i.e. tags, just not linked to technorati, unfortunately)

Stay tuned.

technorati tags: Google, Blogger

Palm R.I.P.

Last week I opened my Palm T|X and I thought there was a leave on the screen.
If only...
It took just a couple of seconds (or probably less) to realize, that the display was actually broken (internally somewhere) and the weird leaf-like pattern must be some liquid of the LCD display (or whatever).

So I wondered whether I should really bother buying a new T|X especially since this one is only about 1 year old... And it's still priced at 250-270 EURO.

Now since my Nokia 6233 can do IMAP over SSL for e-mail and actually also do some decent web-surfing... Both over UMTS/3G...
Then again, the palm is still a much better device for surfing (and sudoku, mind you) and of course I need

I guess I will nevertheless get myself a replacement T|X, there should be some good offers on eBay..

technorati tags: Palm, Nokia, Wifi, UMTS

Calacanis' Podcast device

Jason Calacanis sketches a new postcast-only device he wants to build together with Dave Winer and Peter Rojas; which is obviously DRM free ("obviously" because it's Dave Winer and its about podcasting - so there), and able to fully support Wifi.

At one point, when they talk about how Wifi could be used to download music from your PC (or the net) as well as exchange podcasts between devices, Dave says that obviously RSS would be used for that.

At first I just thought: how typical for him - everything has to be RSS. But then I thought a bit more about it - and yes, he's right: RSS (as well as Atom, in my point of view) would do the job. And quite well, too.

Listen to it on CalacanisCast Beta 7: Dave Winer and Peter Rojas discuss the RWC Podcast player - The Jason Calacanis Weblog

PS: I myself am still using my iPod nano to listen to podcasts - and I still like it - no matter what everyone else says.

technorati tags: RSS, iPod, Wifi, podcast

Nokia 6233 vs Gmail

So I finally got a new phone: Nokia 6233 (to replace my 1 year old 6230i).
Works great, has nice little features and a good display (and hopefully the camera is better now, didn't test it yet).
Of course - as with every odd generation of Nokia phones - it has problems with bluetooth stability.
But is has a quite good email client app.
Comes with preconfired template settings for gmail.
However, they are wrong.
If you try the ones that come with the phone, you'll get a certificate error from google.
Even if you do a manual configration according to google (find the detalis here).
Certificate seems to be for googlemail.com instead of gmail.com and so the phone rejects it.
It's hard to diagnose with the crappy error messages, but at least it gives you a hint to the certificate.
Google for the problem and you'll find the solution to change the hostnames to xxx.googlemail.com instead of xxx.gmail.com.

Then it will work.

technorati tags: Nokia, 6233, google mail

Java Tutorial 4th ed

The 4th edition of the Java Tutorial has been released.
Now includes Java 6.

technorati tags: Java

Chet Haase's Blog: Java on Vista: Yes, it Works

There were rumors that Java does not (yet) run on Vista.
They are wrong - see here Chet Haase's Blog: Java on Vista: Yes, it Works

Flickr geotagging Vienna

Flickr now finally has a proper resulotion for Vienna for geotagging.
Now you can actually locate street corners etc...
That's good.

technorati tags: Flickr, Geo

Sun Open Sources Java Platform

So finally Sun does release the next Java version under GPLv2.
See the press release at Sun Open Sources Java Platform and Releases Source Code Under GPL License Via NetBeans and Java.net Communities

technorati tags: Sun Microsystems, Java, GPL

Firefox 2 and ConQuery

Upgrade to Firefox 2 (couldn't await the auto-update) worked great, just one of the most important extensions (now called add-on in the menu) is disabled, because its not compatiable with 2.0: ConQuery.

However, there is a modified (yet not official) version of it; check here.

technorati tags: Mozilla, FireFox, ConQuery

Mozilla Lightning Calendar support

Lightning , the calendar plugin for Thunderbird now comes with WCAP support in beta 0.3.

WCAP is the http(s)/XML based protocol for the Sun Calendar Server. Obviously, we in Sun are using our own calendar server product, so now we finally have at least beta support out of thunderbird.

Be sure to use the proper extension when installing, because for 0.3 there are at least 2 versions out there, one without and one with wcap support.

technorati tags: Mozilla, Thunderbird, Lightning, Calendar, WCAP

Google Alert

Google Alert is a great services where you can register your google search and have the (new) results delivered to your RSS reader (or e-mail if you insist) on a daily basis (in the free version; the pro version can deliver more often).

Cool thing to have (amongst others of course) my ego/vanity search results delivered automatically.

(Google Alert is a not a Google service but 3rd party).

technorati tags: Google, Google Alert, Search

book: The Cluetrain Manifesto

In Web/internet terms this is an old book, but still soooooo true. Probably more than ever.

Rick Levin, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls & David Weinberger:
The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Read it.
Get a clue.

With every blessing there is a bug.

My ADSL provider kindly upgraded me again, this time to a fair use flatrate.
Which - of course - is cool.

However, since there is now a flatrate, my Google Desktop Gadget which I hacked to always see this month's DSL volume, is now obsolet.
Not only that, it was also broken, because the webpage I have to parse to get the usage, has the relevant information on a different place for flat rate accounts than for strict by-volume accounts.

So, back to Javascript, do some debugging etc, etc ...
Works again now.

displaytag library fixed

So I went and fixed the problem with the displaytag library I had yesterday.
Fixing it was easier then gettings the environment set up.
First - get maven;
Then find out, that there is a maven module for netbeans called Mevenide (for netbeans). This makes live with Maven(2) a lot easier, because maven based projects now simply appear as projects in Netbeans (not quite but almost liek ant-based).

Then it was just 2 hours to resolve the dependencies and actually find out how maven works.
And then 2 minutes to fix the problem:
Accept a SortedMap[] (yes, an array) where there's just a (List) cast in finishRow() in the TotalTableDecorator
(and of course use .length there instead of .size() )

Once that is done, it simply works as expected.

technorati tags: Java, JSP, HTML, displaytag

Display tag library

Got a great tip - thanks, Jasi.

displaytag is a great TLD for building tables in JSP files. Helped me to reduce my table formatting code from like 50 lines in a JSP (all with grouping etc) based on standard JSTL tags to just 12 lines:
<display:table ...>
<display:column .../>
<display:column .../>
... (10 columns alltogether)
</display:table>

Works great.
Does grouping and totals/subtotals according to those groups itself.
Allows for various formatting customizations.

Just one bug annoys me - seems to have to do with the data types I use:
When building a total sum it breaks with a ClassCastException... bug has already been filed; I'm waiting for the fix.

technorati tags: Java, JSP, HTML, displaytag

Java 5 SuppressWarnings

When Java 5 introduced Annotations, it also came with an @SuppressWarnings annotation.
The purpose of it is to mark a block (e.g. a method) so it would not generate certain warnings.

In my case I have to mix a "legacy" library with my own code that uses generics. So "per definition" I get unchecked-warnings whenever I assign the non-generic collection from the library to my "generified" collections.

No worries there, that's what the

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")

is for - right ?

Wrong.

Well not quite wrong. It's true, that's what the annotation is for.
However, it does not work.

I did a lot of yelling, wondering, code-changing (e.g. the explicit-non-varargs version like @SuppressWarnings({"unchecked"}), ...), but that did change this.

What helped was of course googling around for a couple of minutes.
There I stumled onto Sun bug #4986256 which clearly describes that the @SuppressWarnings was indeed documented, but not implemented in 1.5.0.

Well finally, it has been implemented in update 6 and guess what - I was still on update 5.

So am now on update 9 and it works.

technorati tags:Java

Netbeans 5.5 trap

Arghh... I just installed Netbeans 5.5. the other day, to replace the rc2 I used to work with.
Install was smooth, I also re-declared all the libraries I used in a particular project (like javamail, htmlparser, and the postgresql drivers).
Everything compiled fine - and also did run fine - in the IDE only.

I found that in the .jar file I had all the references to those libraries to the local lib/ directory, like lib/javamail.jar etc), but no dist/lib directory, much less of course any library there.

However, in the dist directory NB put a nice little readme file stating the following:

========================
BUILD OUTPUT DESCRIPTION
========================

When you build an Java application project that has a main class, the IDE
automatically copies all of the JAR
files on the projects classpath to your projects dist/lib folder. The IDE
also adds each of the JAR files to the Class-Path element in the application
JAR files manifest file (MANIFEST.MF).

To run the project from the command line, go to the dist folder and
type the following:

java -jar "Aware.jar"

To distribute this project, zip up the dist folder (including the lib folder)
and distribute the ZIP file.

Notes:

* If two JAR files on the project classpath have the same name, only the first
JAR file is copied to the lib folder.
* If the classpath contains a folder of classes or resources, none of the
classpath elements are copied to the dist folder.
* If a library on the projects classpath also has a Class-Path element
specified in the manifest,the content of the Class-Path element has to be on
the projects runtime path.
* To set a main class in a standard Java project, right-click the project node
in the Projects window and choose Properties. Then click Run and enter the
class name in the Main Class field. Alternatively, you can manually type the
class name in the manifest Main-Class element.

Actually, I found that quite nice, to put a readme file to exactly the place where you are looking when you try to find that error.
What was less helpful was, that there was no lib directory and all the FAQ and questions on the mailing lists etc just said, that you probably have not defined your main class in the project's properties.
But I did.

Finally I re-re-re-read the readme file and thought a bit more about the condition:

* If a library on the projects classpath also has a Class-Path element
specified in the manifest,the content of the Class-Path element has to be on
the projects runtime path.

meaning, that if there is just one single entry in the classpath that points to a directory instead of a .jar file not a single jar file will be copied. Not just the one that is - eh - ill defined (i.e. directory instead of .jar, but lets not argue about that), but actually not a single .jar file is being copied that.

So I browsed through all my library definitions, and - of course - there was one that pointed only to the directory, which was fine for the IDE, but not for the .jar builder (it was the javamail, but actually it was my error).
Corrected this to point to the javamail/mail.jar file and everything worked fine.

Cost me just about half a day.

technorati tags:Netbeans, Java

Firefox 2 is out

Finally Firefox 2 got released. I still wonder whether I sould do a full install or wait for my 1.5.0.7 installation to be auto-updated...

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla

OOo/Staroffice update feature

Finally: OpenOffice resp StarOffice have a "check for updates" feature.
Introduced in SO8 Update 4 resp OOo 2.0.4
qa: Issue 66949

Sun Project Blackbox

So Sun (disclosure: the company I work for) just announced "first virtualized datacenter". Tons of memory, cpu, disks, ... crammed into one standard shipping container; including cooling and all...

Check out the details at Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog; be sure to watch the enclosed youtube video.

technorati tags:Sun Microsystems

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

So Google finally merged docs (writely) and spreadsheets ...
Google Docs & Spreadsheets
they are moving - it seems.

IT Conversations: S. Ramadorai

Very good interview to accompany Friedman's book.
IT Conversations: S. Ramadorai

YouTube - A Message From Chad and Steve

This is what happens, when you get loads of money from google...
YouTube - A Message From Chad and Steve
you have to appreciate that they at least stay "serious" for the first minute or so... I couldn't stay serious that long if someone gave me that much money...

then again, maybe for for 1.6B$ I could

book: The World is Flat

I know, everyone talks about the book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman.
Since I've just read it, I'll simply join in ...

Now, it's not too techy a book, but it really describes what's happening with the new way of globalization ("globalization 3.0" as Friedman calls it), the new structuring of work and supply chains, the new role of the individual (vs the corporation vs the state/nation), importance of (a new way of) education, ...

I don't always agree with him, especially with his terminology, which sometimes seems strange for a technical guy, e.g. when and how he uses the term "workflow"... but those things are easy to forgive or ignore; its a good book, with a good thesis.

Well worth reading.

Google to buy YouTube

So Google finally did it: they bought YouTube.

Crazy, ... why ?

Not for the technology... they already have that (and could build it in just weeks).

Not for the content, because most of the contant is hardly legal.

It only makes sense insofar, as they (Google) are the only major player who don't really have to care as much about copyright issues with the content as the others (AOLs, Microsofts, Apple, Murdoch, ...).

technorati tags:google, youtube

Windows update ?

I still wonder, what Microsoft wants to tell me with the following update:

Google maps on mobile

I just learned the other day at java.com that there is a J2ME version of google maps for you mobile; works pretty well, actually, including maps and satellite

Google babysteps

Significant Babysteps at Google:

• Writely and Spreadsheets can now export to PDF.


• Writely now uses gmail/google account.


• Writely is now part of "My Google services"

ProxyButton on Thunderbird

Just found out (by trying, of course) that the ProxyButton extension I'm using on Firefox also works on Thunderbird.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, proxy

Innovation looking for application

Today's episode: Thumper.
Sun's "hybrid server", i.e. with both, lots of CPUs (AMD in that case) and lots of storage.
If you know what to do with it, tell sun here with a YouTube video and win one of them.

Finally some DSL speed

My ADSL provider seems to have upgraded my line (and others, I guess) to about 3Mbps... without telling me.

Cool (since I still pay the same price).

Search plugin along the way

Lot of stuff today :-)
Just did a nother Firefox search plugin (this time for Sun internal use), while updating iTunes to version 7 and having my iPod nano updated to the lastest SW release.
I guess I'll continue all that during the confcall which is about to start ... :-)

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, search, mycroft

Firefox search help

Just noticed (i.e. read in the online help), that you can select the search-engine within the search-bar in Firefox with Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down, (when the search-bar is focused) i.e. you walk through the various search-engines.

Cool.

Btw: updated the falter.at search plugin to support side-bar results - ready to test here.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, search, mycroft, falter

Google spreadsheets support opendocument format

Finally; Google added ODF (.ods) support to Google Spreadsheets.

technorati tags:google, openoffice

My first Firefox search plugin

Just created my first Firefox search plugin for searching the best restaurant guide for Vienna: "Wien, wie es isst" at falter.at.

You can find the plugin at the mycroft page.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, search, mycroft, falter

NetBeans and JBoss

The JBoss Application Server and NetBeans IDE have been bundled together to provide NetBeans IDE users with a well integrated out of the box experience to build Java EE 5 applications on the JBoss Application Server.

JBoss.com - JBoss NetBeans IDE

technorati tags:JBoss, netbeans, java, j2ee

Blogs as a mirror to society

I just noticed how blogs (or their statistics, rather) mirror our society:
Check out todays top searches on technorati:
#1 Steve Irwin , the crocodile hunter, who so tragically died being pierced by a stingray.

Check out the blogging statistics for his name (and note that the guy was of quite some fame when he was still alive):

Nothing until Sep 4 (the day he died) and then 20.000+ postings a day !!!

Scoble?

Just noticed that since Scoble left Microsoft, I subscribed to his new feed, but I never read it...
So it really was more about Microsoft internals, than about Scoble.

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.

We need more RSS!

Why don't people use more RSS? - or Atom for that matter;

personal note: I guess I have to include a default disclaimer in my template stating that I usually use RSS as a synonym for all the relevant protocols and their variations; but since I guess everyone but the religious guys does that it wouldn't make much difference.

One such nice application for RSS is (enterprise internal) Business Intelligence:
Within my companies reporting system I can choose to have several reports (related to my job, obviously) sent to my e.g. daily via e-mail. So first of all, this is nice: I don't have to go into some BI-whatnot-datawarehouse-thing-application and query the data myself - quite convenient.

But it would be even greater if I could just (RSS-style-)subscribe to that data, and thus get a notification as soon as the data changes, and even better: I could more easiy integrate into my productivity applications (OpenOffice).

So people stop treating RSS as just a means to get blogs or news distributed; it's basically just about any kind of content.

Whats up with technorati?

Was it the redesign? Is it just me?
Technorati is incredible slow - at least today.
And it also reports wrong content - it lists outbound links on my blog(s) that simply are not there.

The NetBeans worldTour

Coming this fall - The NetBeans worldTour.
Unfortunately they don't stop in Austria, but at least in Prague (well obviously, since netbeans is being developed in Prague).

DRDA book

This is just because I was asked - again.

Yes, it is true, I did write a book on DRDA once - The DB2 Universal DRDA Certification Guide, part of the IBM DB2 Certification Guides series.

So if you ever have to configure a DB2 connection from Windows to MVS (as if that was still around), I'm your man.

More RSS

... or Atom to be more exact.
Google Mail has an atom feed for your inbox.

gapingvoid

IT convservations now featuring the gapingvoid widget to directly include the daily gapingvoid cartoon.

Ethan Nicholas's Blog: All about intern()

A nice input on intern()ing Strings in Java.
Ethan Nicholas's Blog: All about intern().

Make sure to read the comments section regarding caveats in respect to gc.

I share my OPML

I now share my OPML at share.opml.org.

People finally getting RSS

... and with RSS I mean the mechanism, not the specific protocol or version (so this stands for RSS 0.x, 2.x and Atom as well).
Apart from RSS as a feed mechanism for news and blog sites, there are some nice RSS "applications" that provide a feed into a "personalized query" (for lack of other words).

Take flickr for example: they provide (among others) an RSS feed for "Comments you made" (see my comments here.

Or openBC: there you have a feed for e.g. "Members who have recently visited my contact page" or "Contacts of mine whose company or position has recently changed".

Very useful.

Open Source Portlet Repository Project

on java.net: Open Source Portlet Repository Project

Get a Mac - TV Ads

There's a gazillion of reasons to buy a Mac (at least now), but the current TV ads are the best...
watch them here.
Apple - Get a Mac - Watch The TV Ads

And then buy one - I will.

Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet

Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet

jMaki - AJAX for JSP

Just announced/released on ajax.dev.java.net with a nice democast.

Finally a neat JSP AJAX integration.

Seems like there finally is a reason to switch to JavaEE5 and Netbeans5.5.

EJB 3.0 sessions in 2006 JavaOne

Wonseok Kim lists the JavaOne sessions from this years JavaOne in his post.

Here (PDF) is a great intro/motivation presentation he points to.

Ray Ozzie on Composite Apps

or rather mesh ups... but whats the difference anyway.
Listen to this on the conversations network.

OpenOffice Calc Tips

Nice collection of OOo/Calc tips can be found here

Nicholas Negroponte

In his Pop!Tech 2005 speech Nicholas Negroponte says:

People who write software get basically remunerated for writing more software and what they are doing is writing more features.
If you just paid people for every line of code they removed instead of add you would have a much better software world.

Listen to it on the conversations network.

Scoble to leave Microsoft

more details here

Google spreadsheets

Finally logged into Google spreadsheets yesterday... Why don't they support the OpenDocument format resp. OOo format?
Do we really need just another Excel?

Cool Mozilla hacks

A friend just pointed out the marvelous combination of Conquery and the mycroft.
The perfect example (quite local to him and me):
define the vienna city map search in mycroft and then mark an adress and go for it.

Cool.
mesh-up-y.

JBoss to join NetBeans

According to Sun and Infoworld, NetBeans has enlisted JBoss to its community.

Cool.
netbeans++;

Search engine optimisation ??

I just received an invitation to a search engine optimisation conference.

Hey, I thought we were already in 2006 ... who is still interested in
this ???

Google spreadsheets

one more step in Google's way to the (web) office space: Google Spreadsheets - after they acquired Writely a couple of weeks ago for web-based text processing.

Some JavaScript enlightenment

Dean Edwards posted the "Levels of JavaScript Knowledge".
Working comfortable on level 5, I have to admit, I didn't even know there was something like level 6...

Flickr

Flickr is usually traded as one of the signposts towards Web 2.0. And there's nothing to disagree with, since Web 2.0 is defined through examples like Flickr and GMail and Google Maps and so on.

Having played around with flickr for some time now, I have to admit its one of the best applications (or probably better: services) on the Web.

• It serves a clear purpose, and (more important) does this perfectly
• it is driven by its users resp. the community (uploading, comments, tagging, groups, ...)
  
• it interoperates with various other services (e.g. blogging interface to all major blogging sites/types)
• it offers its own services to other services
• its user interface is just perfect, and I'm not (only) talking about its dynamic AJAX style, but also the way they guide a user and how you do configure your settings; they don't confront the user with tech terms, but mainly ask questions.
  
  

Take a look at their account settings page here... and compare this to other settings/preferences dialogs.


So, yes, flickr is pretty cool; if the web is really heading that way, I'll be glad to follow.

Less is more - heresy ???

Listen to this interesting speech by Jason Fried at the Web 2.0 conference 2005.
Less is more ... heresy or true ?
I don't know, but I like the way he thinks...