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)

My readership

This is the geo-map of you (as in Time's definition of it) from last December until today. According to Google Analytics.

Yes, there is quite high a concentration in (and around) my hometown, Vienna, Austria, but otherwise quite international, I'd say.

So thanks to all of you out there

Apple's Boot Camp 1.2 supports Windows Vista - Engadget

I guess it's time for me to finally get my Mac...

Apple's Boot Camp 1.2 supports Windows Vista - Engadget

Engadget: mobile phone brands

Don't look now, but that Nokia in your pocket means you're over the hill - Engadget:

Nokia: Family-minded, middle aged managers, balance seekers, health conscious

Motorola: Fashion conscious, under 24, fun seekers, individualistic

Sony Ericsson: Ambitious young men, professionals, success driven, individualistic

LG: Favorite of mums, stay-at-home parents, success driven, harmony seekers

Samsung: Young women, career focused, success driven, fun seekers

Although from down under, it's not that different here in Austria
(No Australia - Austria jokes, please)

What a non-event...

CXOtoday.com > News > Business > BEA, CA Ally for IAM: "BEA Systems, Inc. and CA, Inc. have announced a partnership for identity and access management (IAM) across the enterprise."

so what...

Scott Rosenberg: Dreaming in Code

I just finished reading Scott Rosenberg's very insightul journal-like book about the opensource Chandler project:

Dreaming in Code

Excellent book; a must (just like Joel Spolsky's writings) for everyone responsible for SW development.

Frankly, I sometimes had the feeling he was not too sure about how familiar his (intended) audience is about development.

But boy, it does good to be reminded of Brooks again (and again).

URLFixer update for Austria needed

I just notices that URLFixer converts .gv.at to .gov.at, which is wrong...
I hope Christopher Finke will change it.

displaytag library fix details

I noticed some interest in my post about the fix in the displaytag libarary and have recently also been asked to post the fix:
here's what I did to the org.displaytag.decorator.TotalTableDecorator.java file:

public final String finishRow()
{
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer(1000);

// Grand totals...
Object decoratedObject = getDecoratedObject();
int decObjSize=0;

if (decoratedObject instanceof Collection)
{
decObjSize = ((Collection)decoratedObject).size();
}
else
{
if (decoratedObject instanceof SortedMap[] )
{
decObjSize = ((Object[])decoratedObject).length;
}
}

if (getViewIndex() == (decObjSize - 1))
{
if (groupPropertyName != null)
{
buffer.append(createTotalRow(false));
}
buffer.append(createTotalRow(true));
}
return buffer.toString();
}

the main thing is that I also accept Arrays and not only Lists (as in the original code)

Engadget: Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things

The funny thing about Google is, that every single aspect of their datacenters (n.b. the plural here) is a large enough sample for statistics.

No surprise therefore, that statistcs like the following can be release:
Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things - Engadget

URLFixer update for Austria

Chris fixed URLFixer to not-rewrite orf.at. Thanks
Sorry, Austria :: Now I Have a Blog Too

New Flickr Feature

A great new feature that make flickr even more collaborative/social/linked/... as reported on FlickrBlog:

"Invite a Photo
You're surfing through the Flickrverse and you find a photo that would be perfect for your group. This new feature will allow an administrator to invite that particular photo to their group without membership requirement. You'll see a new link under the comment box that says ‘Invite this photo to...’

The Human Clock

There are a couple of sites on the web (1.0, 2.0, whatever, I don't really care), where you can really get lost following the links - in a positive way.
E.g. imdb, partly wikipedia, and also flickr.

While "surfing flickr" I stumbled upon this nice web-site:
The Human Clock™ - A Clock Photo for Every Minute of the Day
There is a different picture for each minute of the day showing the current time of day.
Actually for most of the "minutes" there is more than just one picture, which makes it a lot more fun to watch the time go by.

Totally cool idea and well done.

DSL flat rate - finally

Finally in Austria broadband providers are moving to true flat-rates, i.e. without any fair use clause.

Mine, too.

So from 15GB fair use a month, I'm now on a true flat-rate.

Love it.

Of course, this renders my Google-Desktop-Gadget that shows my current DSL usage totally useless, not only because without limit I don't care about the usage, but also because the use statistics of my provider no longer shows any volume.

As a side note to flat-rates:
There is currently a lot of stir in the mobile arena in Austria, because what some mobile operators advertised as a free flat-rate - of course - turned out to have a fair use clause, and they started to threat the users who were above the limit. Lawyers and courts are already employed, and operators have changed the small print to some larger font in the mean time.
The main problem was that they advertised free off-net calls including mobile to fixed-line, which in turn are not free to the operator, because they have to pay interconnection and of course they have limited intentions to pay for that endlessly...

Well, there is no free lunch, how often do we have to repeat that...

Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 Released

My TB has just been updated to 1.5.0.10.
The fix I'm particularly interested in is:

• Fixed: 363113 - Thunderbird autocomplete freezes up to 1 minute after typing one or two characters of an email address

I was suffering from this one several times a day... I hope this is really gone now.

Firefox 2.0.0.2 Released

Firefox Magazine: Firefox 2.0.0.2 Released:

"New released have been announced today by Mozilla, Firefox 2.0.0.2. Including mainly several security issues fixes, in addition to an enhanced Windows Vista Support, a fix in german translation, and four new languages : Afrikaans, Belarusian, Georgian, and Kurdish. If you didn't get already the update message, you can download it directly from Mozilla website. Vulnerabilities fixed in this release :

* Embedded nulls in location.hostname confuse same-domain checks
* Mozilla Network Security Services (NSS) SSLv2 buffer overflow
* XSS and local file access by opening blocked popups
* Spoofing using custom cursor and CSS3 hotspot
* Information disclosure through cache collisions
* Improvements to help protect against Cross-Site Scripting attacks
* Crashes with evidence of memory corruption"

TechCrunch: Google Launches Apps Premier

Finally we see Google charging the users for their services with Google Apps Premier, i.e. a slightly more pro version of Google Apps (IMHO) for 50$ a year.

Google Apps for Your Domain was launched in August. The Google Apps for Your Domain page has already been updated to reflect tonight’s announcement. The service will include the existing Google Apps tools - GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and IM as well as the Google Docs applications that were just integrated into the suite today. Webmail will come with 10 GB of storage and Apps Premier includes service level agreements that promise 99.9% uptime and 24/7 tech support. A full comparison of the standard and Premier services can be found here.The service costs $50 per user per year, dramatically undercutting Microsoft’s offerings. Google’s package does not currently include a presentation tool like Power Point or a CRM application. The most likely next addition to the package could be an enterprise version of Blogger. General Electric and Proctor and Gamble are cited as among the first Google Apps Premier customers.

It’s G-Day: Google Launches Apps Premier

technorati tags:google, Apps, Google Apps

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) goes Web2.0 - visually

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) just updated their look and feel to more Web2.0 style...
I know this has nothing to do with Web2.0 - in any definition of the term - but it looks 21st century... finally.

Anyway, it way my first favorite web site "back in the nineties" that truly understood the value of linking, linking, linking... it was (and still is) so easy to get lost within imdb but just following link after link after link.
Like

1. What also played in ?
2. Where did he/she also play?
3. repeat ad inf.

I just love it. Still the #1 reason to switch on the PC while watching a DVD...

Scott Rosenberg: Dreaming in Code

Open Source conversations have a good interview by
Scott Mace with David Rosenberg about his new book
Dreaming in Code about the software development of the Chandler project.

Seems to be a good reading; I'm gonna buy it and probably report on it.
There is also a website with it.

TechCrunch: Google PowerPoint Clone Coming

Mike Arrington reports of sightings of a Google presentation application (Powerpoint, Impress, ...).
I am using Google docs & spreadsheets occasionally, but I'm still a bit conservative regarding a presentation package "just online".

Mostly when you present - especially with a customer - you struggle with the most basic settings at their conference or meeting room.
Just yesterday a colleague of mine did not get his notebook (DELL) to work with the video beamers of two different customer's. I managed to back up with my notebook (IBM, and I'm proud of it) at one location without any problems, but not at the other ... it forced me to switch my resolution down to 800... uargh...

Image that in that situation you also have to struggle with network and internet connectivity. Many of my customers are quite paranoid when it comes to having visitor laptops in their network, and they don't usually have Wifi.
So especially when it comes to presentations I still like to have them strictly offline.

Then again, you might use just and PC provided by the customer... and there's no need to have OpenOffice/StarOffice or PowerPoint installed...
Come to think of it, this really might make sense.

So lets wait and see what Google will have to offer.
Maybe they will provide a nice little offline tool to (just) run your presentation, or save/download it as a PDF to take along...

Vodafone to work with Google (maps) ...

The world (or 3GSM in that case) is full of surprises:

Telecoms.com – News, Events and research for the telecoms industry:

"Vodafone Live! will be drawing on Google for its maps and local search service, it was announced Monday, while the company will be working with Citibank on a new mobile payments system."

So finally, they are opening up their Vodafone Live! and seem to stop developing everything themselves...

URL Fixer extension for FF et al

I finally installed the URL Fixer extension into my FireFox today (works for all mozilla based browsers).
What it does is, it tries to fix common typos in the address bar, e.g.
.cmo to .com and similar things.


Sadly it currently has no options page, i.e. cannot be configured. So we have to live with whatever the author comes up with and builds into it.

I surely hope there will be an option page soon. For his own sake, he doesn't want to chase every possible typo and release a new version for it... Apart from probably conflicting interests like there is a request to change .jo to .jp just because some Japanese users frequently mistypes .jp as .jo. Of course this would be convenient for him, but what would people of Jordan (.jo) think ? Or will someone from Jordan soon request .jp to be "fixed" to .jo.

So, - pretty please ... with sugar on top - make it configurable.
Apart from that: GREAT hack.

Jonathan Schwartz on ODF

Latest blogpost of Jonathan is open document format - quite interesting (as usual):

Imagine you're a legislator that writes a law, or a doctor that drafts a patient's record, or a student that writes a novel. And that five years or fifty years from now, you want to return to review your documents. Except the vendor that created the application used to draft those documents, the company that created the word processor, has either gone out of business, or decided to charge you $10,000 for a version capable of reading old file formats. Either scenario makes the point: Information always outlives technology.

Memory on the go

I bought some memory (512 MB DDR 333) for my home PC today, and - now thats the fun part - I managed to get that done between 2 consecutive underground trains (tube, metro, whatever you like to call them):

• Get out of the train
• out of the station
• across the road and into the shop
• ask for the memory, pay,
  
• get back to the station, see the train arriving (start to run),
  
• board the train and see the same persons that entered the platform when I left earlier
  

Train interval at that time was about 6 minutes.
Pretty cool, eh ?

Oscar for best supporting error message

And the award goes to .... Technorati.

For the best description of an error, not wasting my time with details, and yet reassuring me, that it was not my fault...

Sun Weblog Publisher

Sun has a nice StarOffice/OpenOffice extension to directly blog from SO/OOo to your blog of choice, called Sun Weblog Publisher, or SWP for short.
Get the details at here.

Unfortunately (for me) when it came out, Google changed the blogger api ("blogger beta", "new blogger", "blogger2") and the SO extension does not work with it, however - good news:

The SWP will support the new version of blogger.com in a March, 2007 update.

Waiting, waiting, ...

My Netgear is letting me down

Sadly in the past week(s) my Netgear MR314 started to let me down on the Wifi.
Worked like a charm for about 4 years now, but now the Wifi seems broken. Neither my Palm (T|X) nor my IBM ThinkPad are able to connect. And I triple-checked the settings... Ethernet still works fine.
I really loved this box, the last series of Netgear that just worked without problems. It just had 802.11b though, but I rarely cared (only when I had to transfer large files from the ThinkPad to the PC or v.v., but then I just plugged the ThinkPad to the (wired) Ethernet).
So, I'm gonna start looking for a Linksys ... or a used MR314... if I can get one for under 5€ ...

Sun announces ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office

Sun Microsystems Announces OpenDocument Format (ODF) Plug-in Application for Microsoft Office

Well, interop betwwen MS Office and OpenOffice/StarOffice just got a bit easier. Now I finally don't ave to feel that bad when sending ODF files.
Still, converting them to PDF before sending will remain a good practice (in most cases).

Brilliant New Startup: Useless Account

Mike Arrington on TechCrunch reports the best startup ever ;-)

Brilliant New Startup: Useless Account:

"The site has a single function - to create a new account. [...] Once you’ve created your account, you can log in, and edit your account. That’s it. The reason this is really, really funny (for us) is because that’s what we do all day - create new account after new account at every new Internet startup that comes along. I am a seriously huge expert on account creation."

Steve Jobs on DRM: let's get rid of it

A letter from Steve Jobs on DRM: let's get rid of it - Engadget - finally.
So he (or apple) no longer need the friends with the big music companies...

Thunderbird 2

Fair question from Matt.

What ever happened to Thunderbird 2? The nightly builds claim to be version 3 now.

Photo Matt » Thunderbird Release?

Interestingly there are quite contradictory answers in the comments section...

technorati tags:thunderbird, mozilla

HP to support Solaris on x86

It appears that HP's fondness for Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system has returned. The hardware maker today announced quick support for the latest version of Solaris across a number of its Intel-based servers.

HP smacks Sun with Solaris stick | The Register

technorati tags:HP, Sun Microsystems, Solaris

Java errors moving to runtime

Noticed how Java errors are moving towards runtime in recent releases?

Take for example the printf and its formatting syntax... where most of use were rejoicing when this good old C feature finally made it to Java.
However, a typo in the format string will not be caught be the compiler, but only by a runtime exception.

Similar situation with annotations, since they all have their configuration or parameters in syntactically unchecked strings. No compiler support for typos.

Flock 0.7.10 is out

The 0.7.10 Flock Maintenance Patch has several enhancements and bug fixes including: * Added support for Blogger Beta auto detection * Added a progress bar when adding photos to the Photo Uploader * Added support for .bmp type photos * Open or closed state of the photobar is preserved across Flock restarts * Better error messaging and error handling when uploading photos to Photobucket.

Flock 0.7 Release Notes

technorati tags:flock, mozilla

Blogged with Flock

Open Source Conversations: Dave Bradley

There's a nice talk/presentation about the design of the IBM PC 25 years ago. Not technical, but very entertaining and informative:
Open Source Conversations: Dave Bradley

del.icio.us

Got myself a del.icio.us account today. Just to see if its usable.

I sometimes just want to (book)mark a page/site for later reference/study, and that from 2 or more computers.
del.icio.us seems like a reasonable service for this.
(disregarding the social networking part of it, which I'm currently not really interested in).

If anyone cares you can find my stuff here. It will be visible to anyone, but the purpose is mainly for myself.

Sun and Intel to partner

Here are Jonathan's words:

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog : Weblog

The short form of the relationship is this - Intel has agreed to endorse and OEM from Sun the open source Solaris OS. Just stop there for a second. If you're an industry watcher, that's a pretty big change for the both of us. Intel has annointed Solaris as The Mission Critical Unix for Intel/Xeon. They're also endorsing, and we'll jointly be optimizing, the NetBeans and Java platforms, and working with us to fuel the communities from which they spawn. Again, if you're an insider, that's a big shift in the market - welcome to the community, Intel!

Could be a huge push for Solaris. It of course also means that Sun will build a couple of Intel CPU based machines, not only AMD's Opteron

Could be just the usual marketing stuff, like all the "alliances" and "strategic whatnots" we see these days in the industry.

technorati tags:Sun Microsystems, Sun, Intel, Solaris

Java on Vista @ .NET Developer's Journal

There's a nice article on how Java runs on Vista at the .NET Developers Journal (of all ;-) ).

Java Software on Vista
— People have been wondering lately: How does Java software work on Windows Vista? The short answer is: Java software works great on Vista. In fact, the entire Sun engineering team working on Java Platform Standard Edition has been tuned into Vista and making Java software work on it since it was named after a breed of cattle.

JDBC on DB2 UDB 8 stopped working

All of a sudden my netbeans would no longer connect to my DB2 UDB 8.1 database.
Got me a missing package error. So I tried all the usual db2rbind all and bind db2ubind.lst and db2cli.lst and whatnot (whatever I could remember from my DB2 days at IBM).

Still no help.

So I googled for the error message, and indeed IBM changed the package with a fixpak, the details can be found here at the IBM site.

Problem

After upgrading your server to DB2 UDB Version 8.1 FixPak 10 (also known as Version 8.2 FixPak 3), you will encounter an SQL0443N error if invoking a DB2 Call Level Interface (CLI) catalog function (such as SQLTables(), SQLColumns(), or SQLStatistics()). For example: SQL0443N Routine "SYSIBM.SQLTABLES" (specific name "TABLES") has returned an error SQLSTATE with diagnostic text SYSIBM:CLI:-805. SQLSTATE=38553

Cause
The CLI catalog functions execute routines on the DB2 UDB server. These routines use packages that are created by the db2schema.bnd bind file. The package name for db2schema.bnd has a different name in DB2 UDB Version 8.1 FixPak 10 than it did in previous fixpaks. If this bind file does not get bound to all of your existing databases on your server, you will get the SQL0443N error message.

Solution
As documented in the FixPak Readme file for DB2® Universal Database™ (DB2 UDB) Version 8.1 FixPak 10, you will need to bind the db2schema.bnd file locally against each database, as follows:


At a command prompt:
db2 terminate
db2 connect to
db2 bind /db2schema.bnd blocking all grant public sqlerror continue
db2 terminate

...where represents the name of a database to which the utilities should be bound, and where is the full path name of the directory where the bind files are located (usually sqllib/bnd).

The bind operation needs to be done within a local connection to the database.

CalacanisCast Beta 9 - open vs closed

I just listened to the CalacanisCast Beta 9 where discussion is around the iPhone and whether apple should have opened it up or not. Great discussion. Of course Doug Searls is disappointed (or probably even offended) by Apple using OS X for the iPhone instead of Linux, but that was to be expected.

There's an interesting point (I think it was by Mike Arrington or Dana Gardner, not sure) that most people still go for closed systems, because "they know what they will get".

Working on this idea, I think that the real reason behind is, that people think they know what they will get (with closed system), so it's just about perceived predictability or quality.

Which - in consequence - means that the reason closed systems are so popular is, because they (or their owners, builders, vendors, organizations) can afford marketing:
Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Sun, ...

Lets check which open source systems are successfull:

• Linux - marketing by RedHat, Novell/Suse and proxy marketing by IBM and HP.
• FireFox - well FF only became successful when the Firefox organization started actively market it.
• Apache ... hm... I guess one could argue proxy marketing through IBM and the likes as well here.
• OpenOffice.org ... marketing by Sun and Novell

So its still like with VHS vs betamax... isn't it.

More (or less) on the iPhone

No, not that silly stuff about the Cisco lawsuit.

Rather about the (missing) features, as engadget - finally off the hype - cares to report (The iPhone is not a smartphone - Engadget):

# No 3G.We know you know, but still, it hurts man.
# No over the air iTunes Store downloads or WiFi syncing to your host machine.
# No expandable memory.
# No removable battery.
# No Exchange or Office support.

Not a smartphone by my standards, either.

technorati tags:iphone, 3g, apple

My first comment spam

Wow, I just got my first comment spam on IT conservations.
Shall I feel proud now? Or afraid?

Well, neither; I just removed that crap and record the fact here.

Firefox drag & drop

I just noticed that you can drag the favicon icon of Firefox (next to the URL in the address field) to the personal bookmark list or even any filesystem folder (to create a shortcut there).

Don't know why I did realize that sooner...Shame on me.

The Apple iPhone runs OS X

So it has finally been announced today, after months (if not years) of roumors.
The Apple iPhone.
A screen-only phone... no (hard) buttons... kind of where the palm started...
check the details here at engadget.

Google Reader attention recorder

Google Reader (like all Google services, I guess) does record your attention; check your reader trends at
http://www.google.com/reader/view/?page=trends.

A lot better then root vault, e.g. but then again it only tracks your feed attention. Also, I don't see any code of conduct regarding what they do with your attention data; apart from the "Don't be evil", which Google is trying to get rid of anyway.

Still cool.
At least they show me what they know about me.

So that brings Google to my

• attention data (reader, gmail)

and my

• intention data (search)

Don't know which of thses categories documents fall in, but they know that data as well...
Scary, isn't it.

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