Sun to integrate Synchronica SyncML solution

Sun and Synchronica just announced that they are about to add Synchronica's SyncML solution to their communications software portfolio ... at least that's how I read the press release:

Sun plans to use the core SyncML synchronization engine and the back-end connectors of the Mobile Gateway product to synchronize SyncML enabled devices with the Sun Java System Communications Suite or Sun Java System Application Platform Suite. Furthermore, Sun intends to use the provisioning module (OMA CP) enabling over-the-air configuration of mobile devices, reducing the need for manual device configuration. In addition, Sun is planning to use Synchronica's SyncML clients for Windows Mobile/Pocket PC and Palm OS enabling industry-standard synchronization on Smart phones that do not support SyncML out of the box.

That would be great, especially given the huge installed base of the Sun communications products (mainly the Mail Server) with ISPs and Telcos.

The man who collects Apples - CNN.com

The man who collects Apples - CNN.com: "The man who collects Apples"

should spell "freak" not "man"...

"[...] they are always gonna be making new stuff, so I'm always gonna be buying new stuff."

Sun IBM Solaris Deal again

Why is it that a good share of the media coverage of the Sun IBM Solaris deal got it wrong.

E.g. Der Standard (my favorite print newspaper) talks about a „server alliance“ between „rivals Sun and IBM“ ...

Others do as well (maybe Der Standard just copied from AP, with a similar line

„Two longtime rivals in computing, IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., plan to cooperate on server technologies, a move that could put pressure on their joint competitor Hewlett-Packard Co.“

If you haven't read of the agreement before, you probably think hardware... right ?

But its not about HW, its only about IBM reselling („OEMing“) the Solaris Operating System for its x86 line of servers. It is a big deal, but not a HW collaboration. And it will put preasure on HP (at least I hope so).

Path Copy

Thanks to Gernot for suggesting this great tool the other day.
Ninotech Path Copy
What it does is soo simple but it really helps. I've just been using it for a couple of days and can hardly imagine myself living without it.
Well, no, not that bad, I do still have a life (he said while posting to his tech-blog on a weekend ... nudge, nudge). Yes I do.

Anyway, here's what PathCopy does:

Ninotech Path Copy is a shell extension for Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000, and XP that enables to copy the path of a file or directory to the Clipboard. You can then paste the path in to your document, e-mail, etc. You copy the path of a file or directory by right-clicking it in the Windows Explorer and choosing Copy Path from the context menu. The context menu then offers nine standard ways of copying the path, in addition to the user defined copying methods that you create yourself:

and you can pick whether you want to shortname or longname of the file, or the full path, or the full network path (UNC), ... Great.

Thanks, Gernot.

IBM to OEM Solaris

Yesterday Sun and IBM announced, that IBM is going to OEM Solaris on System X and BladeCenter, so its Solaris x86.
Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: Momentous Day for Solaris

This is great news for Solaris, and frankly for IBM. Bad news for HP (IMHO). I wonder if we will ever see a Solaris on Power...

Review of the Austrian ID system

Found a good review of the Austrian Identity system, a.k.a. "Bürgerkarte" (="citizen card").

Austrian ID system � Identity and Privacy Blog

A good point (with a false assumption) is at the end:

Finally, as with all smartcards used for online authentication, the need for smartcard readers to access the digital certificate. However, it may be that widespread availability of smartcard readers (one for every computer) is not a problem in Austria.

Given the current acceptance of the Bürgerkarte with citizens (or rather lack there-of), one can easily see that the burden of the card reader is indeed still a problem in Austria.

Citrix to buy XenSource

The week of (HW) virtualization (companies) ?

Hm, too many brackets for a good title, ... anyway, just hours (ok, I'm still exaggerating) after the VMware IPO, Citrix (of all) announced that they are to by XenSource, maker of Xen, which is a rival to VMware and favored by like half of the techies. It's one of those tech-religious things, I guess.

Citrix to buy virtualization company XenSource for $500 million | Tech news blog - CNET News.com: "Citrix to buy virtualization company XenSource for $500 million"

I wonder, why Sun haven't bought them....

Windows: add cmd to folder

Yet another windows customization reminder:

Since I frequently have to open a command prompt right from the folder that I'm on in explorer, I'd like to have a context menu entry for folders that does this.

Here's the way to do it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\Command Prompt]

@="Command Prompt here"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\Command Prompt\command]

@="Cmd.exe /k pushd %L"

Other ways to do it and more tipps in that category can be found here.

"Compiling"

is that still true ? what size projects are people working on these days ...



from xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

URL Fixer update

There is an update to URL Fixer that
a) seems to handle the .gov not more correctly when it is part of a national TLD, i.e. .gv.at used to be "fixed" to .gov.at by the default .gv -> .gov rule, which was wrong, at least for Austria.

but more importantly
b) you can now control it better.

"By right-clicking on the address bar, you can set it to auto-correct your errors, or you can have it ask you before making any corrections."

Thanks.

Customize Placesbar (Folderlist) in Windows File Dialog

And while I'm in the "knowledge preservation" mode - this is some piece of information I was look for years (well, not constantly, but every once in a while). I simply did not google for the right thing.

Task: How do I get any (arbitrary) folder into the short-cut bar in the Open/Save-As Dialog in Windows (XP) ?

Not just History, My Documents, My Computer, ... no one needs those.

Answer: First of all, one has to know (i.e. find out) that this short-cut bar is referred to as "places bar" and those folders listed there would then be places.

This way it is much more effective to google for.

The places bar is defined in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ comdlg32\ PlacesBar
and consists of 5 entries (this seems to be fixed in the code, I could not find any reference to changing the number of entries),
called Place0-Place4.

For each place you can (read: have to) define its location in the filesystem or a handle to well known or pre-defined windows places.

You must enter the predefined places as numeric values (DWORD), e.g. My Pictures=39, Desktop=0, etc.
There are places on the web, where those values are listed.
I show an excerpt from here. at the end of this post.

Now I'm pretty sure that - like me - you don't just want to have any of those folders there, but something
else, like "D:\download" or whatever. In that case you make a String (instead of the DWORD) and just enter the name of the folder ("d:\download") as the value.

My placesbar at home looks like this (on my business laptop I have more "personal" places defined than just one) and the
registry (ready to import ;-)) like this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\PlacesBar]

"Place0"="d:\\download"

"Place1"=dword:00000000

"Place2"=dword:00000005

"Place3"=dword:00000011

"Place4"=dword:00000012

There are also tools on the web that help you create the respective registry entries. All you have to do then is, copy/paste those to your computer and import the resulting file into the registry.

There you go, quite easy actually.

Here are some of the folder definitions:

Folder	Hex	Decimal
Desktop	0	0
My Computer\Control Panel	3	3
My Computer\Printers	4	4
My Documents	5	5
Favorites	6	6
Recent	8	8
My Music	d	13
My Videos	e	14
Desktop	10	16
My Computer	11	17
Network Neighborhood (My Network Places)	12	18
All Users\Start Menu	16	22
All Users\Start Menu\Programs	17	23
All Users\Startup	18	24
All Users\Desktop	19	25
Application Data	1a	26
USERPROFILE\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\CD Burning	3b	59

Enabling directory listing in Tomcat

One and for all --- this is mainly for myself, because I tend to forget it and have to google it everytime I need it:

To enable/disable directory listings in Tomcat (5.x at least) I have to change the property listings of the default servlet in conf/web.xml

<servlet>
<servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.apache.catalina.servlets.DefaultServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>listings</param-name>
<param-value>false</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

Tomcat FAQ - Miscellaneous Questions

Google Pack now comes with StarOffice

This is great - google nows includes StarOffice in their Google Pack.
Not just a copy of OpenOffice, but specifically Sun's StarOffice...

Summer of storage

Seems to be the week of network storage: both Google and Microsoft launched storage related services; with Google it is just the option to buy (!) extended storage for Gmail and Picasa. Microsoft's Live SkyDrive is a „regular“ network storage offering, like XDrive and others already offer – just smaller.

Sounded more promising when I read the headlines ... ;-)

Dilbert on opensource

via Dilbert Comic Strip Archive - Dilbert.com - The Official Dilbert Website by Scott Adams - Dilbert, Dogbert and Coworkers!

Burton interop report on user centric identity

Burton Group Identity Blog: Recapping the Catalyst user-centric interop:

The Burton Group hosted a User-Centric Identity Interop at the Catalyst Conference in San Francisco during the week of 23 - 29 June 2007; a public demo session was held on the evening of Wednesday 27 June to showcase the accomplishments of the participants in this event.

Read the whole story here.

eWeek reviews Sun ODF Plugin

Sun Plug-in Brings ODF Support to Microsoft Office: "Sun Microsystems' ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office won't usher in an era of universal document interoperability, but eWEEK Labs believes it is the best option currently available for adding Open Document Format support to Office's massive installed base."

Update for Nokia 6233

Finally there is a new software version for the Nokia 6233 out: V 05.10 (check it at http://www.nokia.com/A4305060).

This fixes my problem with the previous release (4.91) which would not allow Google Maps Mobile to connect to the network. Now it works again...

Details on upcoming PDF changes in OOo

GullFOSS: "Completing PDF support in OOo"

Scott MacGregor's Thoughts On Thunderbird

Thoughts On Thunderbird

One of our most important goals is to enhance the lives of Thunderbird users. We don’t know if we’ll ever have, as Mitchell states, “enough [people] to compete with other players for a consumer based product.” But we do know that millions of people use and depend on Thunderbird every day, and with dedicated resources and focus, we know that we can enhance the lives of millions more.Additionally, we want everyone to know that each developer, localizer, and tester means a great deal to us, and every contribution to Thunderbird is valued and important. Adding just one person to the effort, for example a dedicated Thunderbird build engineer, will make a huge difference. In fact, just that one person would have enabled us to release Thunderbird 2.0 a couple of months earlier.

FF extention: DocumentMap

DocumentMap is a great FireFox extension that lets you see the heading structure of the current document (not the DOM) in the sidebar... So you essentially get the same effect Acrobat Reader has with the what they call the bookmark view , but for web/html pages.

This is quite useful for huge (unstructered) HTML documents that are still structured enough to have proper headings defined (i.e. the h1, h2, ... tags)

I found this thanks to GullFOSS who use it as a better way to navigate the OpenOffice Developer's Guide:

Try it out and browse for example the Text Documents chapter of the Developer's Guide and press alt-o. I am sure you will like it.

Thanks...

.. and yes, the OOo Developer's Guide needs some more structure.

Mozilla Foundation to spin off Thunderbird ?

A recent post by Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker (mitchell's blog: Email Call to Action) call for a something like a vote on what Mozilla should be doing with Thunderbird:

"Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn't focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus - delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services - is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny."

And she gives 3 options:
Option 1. Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation [...]
Option 2. Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird [...]
Option 3. Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey [...]
(find the details at the original blog post).

Interestingly none of them reads "keep it as it is"... so this looks like they are abandoning their child... I'd hate that. Been a long time Netscape/ Mozilla-Mail / Thunderbird user. Especially now with the progress they made with TB 2.0. And now that SunBird / Lightning is finally (though still slowly) becoming a decent calender.
Forking TB into its on entity would probably weaken Firefox as well (gut feeling, can't really say why, but I think so).

Maybe Option 2 is the one to go to keep Thunderbird and Firefox really close.

EU's AntiGoogle

As reported, the EU has approved Germany to fund/subsidize the new European search engine, commonly known as the "AntiGoogle". Details here at EU OKs German online search-engine grant - Yahoo! News

In the details you will find that the money (120MEUR) goes mainly to SAP and Siemens (and other big companies)... So this really proves to be the Anti-Google: instead of letting innovation happen we give money to big over-managed corporations to "plan" for innovation... Totally the opposite of how Google came to life.

OOXML Fails to Gain Approval in US

An Antic Disposition: OOXML Fails to Gain Approval in US

via Rob Weir

Sun ODF Plugin tips

For hints, tips and issues with the Sun ODF Plugin for MS Office, consult Malte Timmermann's Blog.

WebCrash2007 - The Entire Internet has Crashed

Great fun...

via m3s online pamphlet

Google docs new user interface

Just noticed that Google docs has a more advanced user interface and layout.




Seems a lot more well arranged now.

IT Conversations: Simon Phipps

Great interview...

IT Conversations: Simon Phipps: "Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer for [Sun Microsystems], joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss Sun's activities. "

JTRES 2007 in Vienna

JTRES 2007:

The 5th International Workshop on Java Technologies for Real-time and Embedded Systems - JTRES 2007

Institute of Computer Engineering
Vienna University of Technology
26-28 September 2007
Vienna, Austria

Sun ODF Plugin 1.0 for Microsoft Office FAQ

to be found on Malte Timmermann's Blog

Wikipedian Protester

via xkcd

Microsoft Office users can now import and export to ODF

StarOffice 8:

"The Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office allows users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plug-in is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC). "

Download the ODF Plug-in.

Stylesheet fix for Weblog Publisher

Lately I noticed that the Sun Weblog Publisher uses an “additional” <p...> tag in list items <li>, which usually adds a line break right after the items bullet,

• 
  like this

I played around with the stylesheets of my blogs a bit to turn this off. The secret sauce looks like this:

ul li p {
display:inline;
}

To set the appearance or a paragraph that is nested within a list item of an unordered list to “inline” instead of “block”, so it no longer starts on a new line.

Hope this works now, I hate the manual edit...

Book: Everything is miscellaneous

Here's the book link to my earlier post on Everything is miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

Vodafone selected as Apple's Euro iPhone partner?

Good news from endaget:

Vodafone selected as Apple's Euro iPhone partner? - Engadget

YAZLS: Read / write ZFS beta for Leopard reportedly sent to developers - Engadget

Yet Another ZFS Leopard Story:

Read / write ZFS beta for Leopard reportedly sent to developers - Engadget:

"Read / write ZFS beta for Leopard reportedly sent to developers"

Everything is miscellaneous – Tagging vs. Categories

I just listened to Phil Windley's inverview with David Weinberger on Technometria (via IT conversations).
I sum up David's thoughts (expressed in this interview) in my words:

„Miscellaneous“ is a container or category, but not a tag.

Meaning: if you really need to categorize things, i.e. you have to stuff them into a physical or virtual container, you sooner or later end up with a „Miscellaneous“ category (drower, folder, ...). That's because, if things need a container (...) you have to invent one for things that don't match your other containers. Check your kitchen or basement for proof.

Tags (as used by Google, Flickr, del.icio.us, ...) are not containers as such. They don't hold anything. Things can be tag-free (maybe they shouldn't, but they can). So there is no need for a „misc.“ tag.

Do never create a „Miscellaneous“ tag. It does not make sense.

Quite interesting (at the end of the interview) are David's and Phil's thoughs on egoistic (my word) and altruistic (their word) tagging, i.e. if you tag only for yourself (the early days of del.icio.us according to David) you will and should pick other tags than when you tag for others as well („ social“ tagging).

Listen in.

Google reader down ?

... again ?
Half a day without Google Reader... I feel like cut off from the (rss) world...

StarOffice 8 Update 7

Get it from SunSolve

eNormicom: Welcome to eNormicom!

This is great fun... remember all those names that emerged in the (first) web/internet hype ?
The guys at 37signals have the name generator ("eNormicom") for it...


eNormicom: Welcome to eNormicom!:

"Welcome to eNormicom!

Look, we don't want to waste your time...or ours.

You must be determined to create massive economic results in the next 10 minutes. Ready? Then read on.

It takes a lot to differentiate your brand in today's 'me too' world of electronic business solutions. At eNormicom, we create and develop campaigns that break through the chatter clearly and consistently.

Is your company having an e-dentity crisis? Then you need the eNormicom Image Bucket Program™..."

via Doc Searls

My Blog Template

I just changed the template for this blog slightly, to make better use of the screen width.

So if you see any problems with alignment or on „legacy“ screens with less then 1024 pixels width just let me know.

Blogging with StarOffice

Finally I got hold of the Sun Weblog Publisher for StarOffice – the one that now works with the new blogger ... This entry is to test this assumption. Seems to work.

Orange to buy One

Orange just bought One, the #3 mobile operator in Austria.
This might finally end the lethargy at One, who had a mixture of stake holders, like Eon, Tele Danmark, Telenor and Orange. None of them seemed really eager to invest in the past with One really not having a bright future and being the constant subject of take-over rumors.

Now that Orange (and Mid Europe Partners, an investment firm, who will probably just act as a proxy to Orange/FT) bought 100% of One this might - and hopefully: will - change. To me, One in the past had no clear profile or positioning; they were (and currently still are) neither a (cheap) residential provider, nor a proper business provider.

This still leaves 4 operators in the small Austrian market:

• mobilkom-A1
• T-mobile (+former tele.ring)
• one
• Hutchison "3"

Price-wars are still going on - see the Austrian 3G data rates, e.g. one 3GB for 20 EUR per montgh, or "3" who priced the 3GB at 19 EUR. Frankly, I don't see that ending with this transaction, this is not a consolidation - might be the opposite: One now finally might have the energy to fully compete, not only on price.

Microsoft Surface Parody Video

Microsoft Surface Parody Video: "Great parody video of the recently announced Microsoft Surface Computer. “One day, your computer will be a big-ass table.”"

via TechCrunch

Java as seen by the Uncyclopedia

Hugely entertaining ;-)
Java - Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia

Interview: OpenDocument and the Move to XML Formats

A great interview on Opening Move by Scott Mace with Gary Edwards of the OpenDocument Foundation about OpenDocument and the Move to XML Formats. Good insights on Microsofts motivation and excuses for OpenXML instead of joining ODF.
(via it conversations)

My first Skype savings

Yesterday I practically forced my wife to call her friend in Bologna, Italy, using Skype(-out) and not the fixed-line (or her mobile). Since this ended in a 42min chat from Vienna to Bologna, we actually saved more then 6 EUR... and the quality was excellent.

In addition using Skype-out means you stay anonymous, since the other party does not get any meaningful caller id that they could link to you or use to call you back...

I guess I'll skype-out more in the future.

Chicken, ...

Probably the best scientific presentation (or non-scientific, for that matter) EVER.
(via wired, thank you gernot, for the pointer, made my day.)

The weirdest thing is, that there is a paper, that goes with it.

2 great videos about the future of media

... and everything related to media.

First, check out EPIC -

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline.
The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned.
What happened to the news?
And what is EPIC ?

(If the above link does lead you to a video, try this here.

Then come back here ;-)

Then have a look at the recently created work by Casaleggio Associati with a view back from April 6th, 2051
(via and Read/Write Web):



I really like the Google-Microsoft meshup logo at almost exactly 3'00:

Now, I'm not subscribing to all the views, fears and hopes (?) expressed in both videos, but they really make you think about the current developments and what might happen if the trend continues at that pace.

My own little Blackbox on Tour

See you on Monday for the real thing.

Hmmm ....Windows users download 1 million copies of Safari

Windows users download 1 million copies of Safari | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone: "Safari was an early hit with Windows users, who have downloaded 1 million copies of the browser since Monday, according to Apple."

I still don't get it...

Enterprise SOA Book

James McGovern challenges the publisher of (co-authored) book Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture:

If I were to convince my publisher to make this available under Creative Commons would folks find this noble or throw daggers? Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and make a strong commitment. If 50 bloggers trackback to this blog entry, I will ensure this happens by August 1st.

This is something to support - creative commons at work...
So here's the link... (count++)
Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership: Links for 2007-06-14

Web 2.0 - we need to rethink ...

Just found a great video (through Charles Beckham's Weblog) by Mike Wesch which - for me - illustrates the essence of Web 2.0

My first blackbox tour

I just had my first (private) little tour through a Sun Blackbox, an exemplar of which happens to be in Vienna these days (see also m³s coverage).



Boy that was cool...

to see how each rack is mounted on shock absorbers...
to actually see how you can save space in a data-center when you can design for it...
and just to think that you can plug a regular RJ45 jack onto that machine for network connectivity ... ;-)

Apple and ZFS - this is sooo much fun

Breaking news via Engadet: Leopard does / does not use ZFS, part III: it does! (kinda)

Hopefully this is the last time we'll be forced to post on this topic, but we're not holding our breath: now InformationWeek -- which quoted an Apple executive this morning stating the polar opposite -- is reporting that Sun's ZFS file system IS in fact included in Leopard, albeit with a number of huge caveats. According to a company spokesperson seeking to clear up Brian Croll's "misstatement," while HFS+ continues to be the primary system used in OS X, ZFS has been coded in as a latent, "read-only option available from the command line." An IW reader claims to have accessed the system through Disk Utility's Erase menu, and states that "ZFS is only available on non-boot drives on Sun systems, so this is also the case for Leopard" -- seemingly reinforcing Croll's later assertion that Apple is really only "exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage." So there you have it: Sun's Jonathan Schwartz wasn't pulling our leg after all, even if ZFS fanboys won't be pleased with the (presumably) final word on this.

This is getting more fun than I previously thought...

The new TV

I frequently find myself spending more time watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on comedycentral.com than watching TV. Yes, that's ComedyCentral DOT COM... meaning "on the net".

Internet really is the new TV... only with built in VCR (or rather TiVo) ...

Apple Safari for Windows - Why ?

Safari 3 for Windows - Engadget:

"Sign one more up for the browser war, Apple is shipping the third version of its well received Safari WebKit-based browser over to foreign shores to duke it out with the likes of IE, Firefox and Opera... on Windows."

Even engadget don't seem to take it seriously...

Why would I want YABOW (yet another browser on windows) ? Theres plenty of them.

To be frank, about 4:
Firefox (rulez)
IE7
IE6
Opera

Maybe Flock will get some traction, once it will finally be released.

Here's the browsers that access my blog:



But why would I want Safari ? What benefits would it offer ? Why would I want Apple to maintain a proprietary browser code if there is a perfect open source browser ?
What could Safari possible do better, than Firefox ? (And don't you say speed). It even renders horribly.

So: Sorry, Apple; I usually love you, but this is just nonsense.

ZFS for Mac/Leopard .... NOT

Apple: no ZFS for Leopard - Engadget:

"Senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS Brian Croll told IW point blank that 'ZFS is not happening,' contradicting Schwartz's assertion that his company's 128-bit file system would be bringing goodies like built-in data integrity and virtual storage to the iMac and friends."

well, the rumors were to good to be true... even by my big boss.

This make Shrek the only fairy tale these days.

More on Apple and ZFS...

Infoworld has an article on the rumors about Apple to integrate ZFS into the Mac.

InfoWorld | News | 2007-06-08 | By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld:

"Is ZFS Apple's secret weapon?
Sun spilled the beans about ZFS and Apple's upcoming OS X update, but what is ZFS, and how integral is it to Leopard?"

Well the most comfortable (unix) filesystem on the planet would make sense on the mac, wouldn't it...

More on Sun's Blackbox

Just found this on Jonathan's blog:
Blackbox on a Shake Table: "Blackbox on a Shake Table"

Earthquake simulation for the blackbox... here's the YouTube video for it.

Sun Blackbox in Vienna

I'm so eager to get a glimpse the Sun Blackbox ever since I first learned of it.
The first datacenter in a Box, as they call it.

Now, finnaly, it comes to Vienna on June 18th. I will be there. That should even give me the chance to look and walk into it.

(for full disclosure: I'm a Sun Microsystems employee)

Techcrunch: Xing In Talks To Acquire Plaxo

Xing May Be In Talks To Acquire Plaxo: "

We are hearing a LOT of chatter about a possible Xing-Plaxo merger in the $250 million range. The deal makes some sense - newly public Xing is headquartered in Germany and hasn’t gotten much traction in the U.S. where it competes directly with LinkedIn. Plaxo, with a very strong U.S. presence, could give them the opportunity they need to attack this market."

User Generated Content ?

I dislike the term "User Generated Content" for various reasons... I for example, when I blog, do not consider myself as a "content creating user"... much less a generator...
To me, it is not "content" what I produce/write/publish/"generate"... just thoughts, rants, bits and pieces of information ... "Content" is too generic a term to apply to ones own ... eh ... things.

As a consequence, I usually like to mock the term as "Useless, generated content" (fully aware that it of course can be applied to my own blabber here).

But just a few minutes ago, I learned what "useless, generated content" really is: just browse the "Books starting at 2.98 EUR" section at Amazon... the number of totally useless and pointless books you can find there... wow...

Blog Microbuttons

Kosmar created and posted a set of micro-buttons ready to use in your blog (or any other site for that matter):

Great work.
The best part of it is of course that he uses flickr as a repository for them...

Amazon supports RSS web feeds

Finally amazon.com (not .de or .at, mind you) supports RSS feeds based on product tags.
RSS web feeds for tagged products (syndication)

So you can have all the newly available (or upcoming) products in your RSS reader, provided you find the right tags.
Unfortunately they do no allow combinations of tags, so you can search for e.g. "Seinfeld" but not for "Seinfeld + DVD"; neither a "+" (a.k.a. urlencoded space) nor %2B nor %26 (+ and & respectively) do work. Concatenating the tags like /seinfeld/dvd/... doesn't work either.

Well, as long as they don't have it in an amazon near me (i.e. .de or .at) it doesn't really bother me that much.

Slashdot:Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?

Slashdot | Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?: "Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?"

Finally, someone getting the value of Sun's ZFS - built into Solaris and OpenSolaris (and some rumors say it will be ported to the Mac).
The most impressive demo of ZFS can be found here (sorry, german only).

Planet Identity

Planet Identity: "Planet Identity is an aggregation of public weblogs related to Identity Management."

Flock moving after all ?

Despite my recent rant Flock seems to be progressing, as Evan Hamilton reports on the Flock blog:

We are very close to releasing a new and upgraded version of Flock (due out in the next 6 weeks or so). This next version will be the final step before we release our 1.0 product (and already includes a large majority of the back end work required for us to deliver v1.0). In the interests of reflecting the reality of this next Flock release, the version number for the release has been designated v0.9 (not 0.8 as previously suggested). We’re super excited to get this penultimate release out to all of you who have been waiting patiently.

Anxiously waiting for it.

Schedule meetings with Doodle

Today I stumbled upon a great service (or was reminded of it, to be honest) to easily schedule meeting across organisations.
Now don't expect something fancy with calender synch and free-busy-scheduling etc... nothing like that.
Just a simple web-based tool to facilitate the coordination and polling for a meeting date & time.

The service is called Doodle and works like this.

1. Create a new appointment like this:
   


2. Select one or more (!) dates you'd like to propose for the appointment.
   
   


3. Fill in the time slots on those days
   
   


4. Save the event and use the first link provided by Doodle and copy-paste it into the email you send off using your e-mail client with any message you like.
   
   
5. The recipients will then eventually receive your email, click on the link provided (see above) and see the status of the poll like this:
   
   


6. Then they simply fill in their name and check or uncheck their preferences/votes and that's it.
   

Quite easy, right ?

And even more important:

1. You don't have to register for the service.
2. The recipients don't have to register for the service.
3. You don't have to give the email addresses of the recipients to Doodle, because you're not using Doodle to actually send the email.
4. You're quite spam-filter-proof, because you are sending the invitation and not a internet service.
5. No technical stuff with .ics/ical/... calender formats and synching, nothing. Plain simple.

I really like that service.

(Of course it would be great that once the meeting has been voted for and decided upon you'd get an iCal file to import into your calendar... but I'd rather prefer it that simple...)

USB Mini Fridge

We all saw it coming, didn't we:

Check out the new $33 USB Mini Fridge.

via engadget, thanks.

SAP wants to go Idenity Management

hear, hear, ... SAP likes to join the IDM vendor league by acquiring MaXware.

This is only interesting insofar as

• SAP is a bit late to the game
• they did not really acquire a player in the IDM space (as e.g. Sun did when they bought Waveset, and others).
• If they still pursue their monolithic approach, then good luck with Identity Management, it just wont work that way...

SOA: CRUD is CRAP

Nice post on Service Architecture - SOA: CRUD is CRAP.

I especially like the sentence:

"The single most depressing thing for me in IT is how many applications are really just Mainframe data processing solutions with better screens."

ODF vs MS OpenOfficeXML

So much for the OPEN in Microsoft's OpenOfficeXML, they simple start by locking you in:

from Crushed by the Wheels of Industry | Tech News on ZDNet

But when I read the files in Word 2007 and eventually found the "Save As" entry in the new menu system I discovered to my horror it was grayed out. "This feature is only available in the full version of Office 2007." popped up a helpful little message. "Click here to purchase it." Getting increasingly worried, I decided to try a more desperate measure. I selected the whole file and looked for the "Copy and Paste" option. I might lose the formatting this way, but at least I'd get the text of the essay she'd written.

Copy and paste were disabled in the same way, and with the same message.Copy and paste were disabled. Think about the fear and paranoia that led to that decision in the product design meeting for the trial version. "We want people to save in the new formats. The new formats are better." So much so that all customer choice must be disabled by default. Choice is an optional extra, only available after purchase.

In case you missed it: SAVING (to other formats) and COPY-PASTE are disabled... and they still call it OPEN.

How can Microsoft get away with that ?
(Of course this is only for the sake and in the interest of the consumer ... right ?)

about beta software...

Thanks to userfriendly.org

Firefox shortcuts

I just learned of a Firefox (and other Mozilla based browsers, like Flock (if it will ever move on)) keyboard short cut I did not yet know in Mozilla Firefox And Flock Shortcut Keys:

"Ctrl (1-9): Switch to tab corresponding to number."

Dell to join alliance that isn't

Dell signs on with Microsoft, Novell:

Dell Inc. has agreed to work with Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. under an alliance the rival software makers formed last year to make it easier for the Windows operating system and the increasingly popular Linux system to work together, the companies said Sunday.

As if there was something like a real MS//Novell alliance worth joining.

In other words: Customers are forcing Dell towards Linux, and this is the corporate way to do it.

Supermarket 2.0

Great commentary on the Web 2.0 hype...



I especially like the tags everywhere...
(via japhy.at)

Flock not moving at all

Flock, the social webbrowser, seems to be at a complete standstill for months now.

Flock 0.7.13 Release Notes

The 0.7.13 Flock Maintenance Patch fixes a Photobucket/MacAfee interaction issue that intermittantly causes a "lost internet connection" error.

technorati tags:flock

Google calc

I noticed the other day that quite lot of people (IT people, mind you) don't know that you can use google as a calculator and converter:

try this for math: 2*4**5-7

or if you want to convert units e.g. btu in kWh try this term 2000 btu in kWh.

Cool, eh ?

Small attachment icons in Thunderbird 2

Just found this on myIT6.Knowledge:

"Small attachment icons in Thunderbird 2
1. Tools > Options > Advanced -> General and click on “Config Editor”
2. Search for the preference “mailnews.attachments.display.largeView“
3. Change value to false"

Great. Saves space on the message pane.

The i is getting lame

So Google re-launched their personalized home as iGoogle... the internal code name it always had.
I sort of liked the lower case "i" years ago around 2000ish in iPlanet, when everything else was e-Something...
(iPlanet was the name of the Netscape/Sun/AOL alliance, when Sun Microsystems bought the server software part of Netscape from AOL...)

But now with iPods, iMacs, iPhones, iGoogles, iXxxxx its really getting lame.

iMe is getting bored.

The buzz about (cell) roaming

I really don't get the excitement about prices for roaming with you cell phone (within the EU).

The European commission argues that placing and receiving a mobile call in a “foreign” country within the EU has to be the same price as within your home country - and I don't see why...
I'm making the following points for voice roaming only (I'm not talking data/gprs/umts roaming here).

There are several sides to this discussion, and I tend to take the operators (or most of them) side. Here are my points against regulated/mandated roaming tariffs.

1. European telecoms market, especially the wireless / mobile / cell part is truly deregulated. Service and innovation have gone up during the last 10 years like nowhere else, prices have dropped to nearly zero.
2. There is a real market with real competition.
3. Roaming costs don't seem to matter: Drei /Three / Tre / 3 (Hutchison 3G) is the only operator in Austria to offer roaming from all international Hutchison 3G networks at the same prices as at home. Still (according to RTR - the Austrian telecoms regulation authority) in Q4/2006 they had only 4.2% market share. To me this means that roaming costs have no impact on the choice of operators and are therefore quite irrelevant.
   
   If roaming costs were such important an issue as to justify a regulation of the market, Drei would have a significantly higher market share (say 20% or so). Customers should migrate in cosmic proportions from A1 and T-mobile to Drei if roaming costs were really an issue.
   
   They don't - look at the figures.
   
   
4. The commission tends to argue (in the public) with the telephony cost during vacations; so the image there is Joe Average looking for his friends on a beach on a Greek island and calling them – with his Austrian phone on their Austrian phones. Or my favorite example: the dutch guys during their skiing vacation in Austria, chatting on the ski-lift over the phone, just because they are bored.
   
   I don't see the point for intervening in, and interfering with, a perfectly functioning market, just for that.
   
   Which also leads me to the next point. the business travellers:
5. Just the mere possibility to be able to call someone on their phone no matter where he/she is; or from the callee's perspective: the possibility to be called wherever I am, without having to communicate me coordinates, without having to tell people at which hotel/venue I'm staying for the next 3 days, just so they can call me there – this very possibility is an increase in productivity and availability that outweighs any (any!) roaming-costs.
   (I'm not saying that this constant availability is a blessing, but that's not the point here, anyway.)
6. Just consider the value of being able to call someone from my phone, even when I'm at a hotel in Rome or Athens or London (or ...) and not having to look for a pay-phone or paying the hotel quite a huge premium for the phone.
   I remember that about 10-15 years ago when you wanted to place a call from a French public pay-phone, you had to purchase a pay-phone card/voucher with a certain amount of money. First of all, you had to know that; then you had to find a place to buy that card (and therefore had to make yourself understood); and in addition this card meant that the money was tied-up. You could not use the credit on the card for anything else. This is not about huge amounts of money, but if you had to place just one call (e.g. home) and had to purchase a card for this single purpose, the call was more expansive than any roaming call today is.
   
   
7. I'd like cheaper roaming as much as the next guy, but... Telcos and mobile operators have to make money. That's the whole point of a deregulated market: To bring in, or enable, private companies to offer a range of different services (quite frequently at different service levels as well) and let the customers and the population decide where to put their money. If the operators don't make money, they'll go out of business and there goes the competition and the market.
   
   Granted, in Austria many of the operators make a huge part of their living (=EBITDA) from visiting roamers, i.e. visitors to Austria, who use their cell here, and therefore the Austrian operators charge money to the home-operators of those visitors.
   According to 2006 annual report for Telekom Austria (whose wireless daughter is mobilkom austria, A1) roaming revenues for the whole group (i.e. inkl Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria) were 258 MEUR out of 2902 MEUR total revnue. Meaning 9% come from roaming. Those 9% would have to come from somewhere else, and this somewhere else can only mean a) higher national tariffs or b) less subsidizing on the handsets.
   I wouldn't like either.
8. In many cases (not in all, I agree) roaming needs additional infrastructure and therefore additional investments: Vodafone et al in Greece wouldn't plan for the coverage they have on the islands just for the local population; the population and local revenue in Austrian and Swiss valleys and the neighboring mountains would never justify the infrastructure built there... it's the visiting roamers, and – of course – their revenue.
   

So my point is: there is a market, let it take care for that.
Just because the market - as of today – did not bring down roaming prices, does not mean, that the market does not work. It just means that the market participants, i.e. the consumers, don't really care for the roaming cost. (Except maybe for that invoice they get in August when the come home from Spain...)

For the sake for full disclosure: I used to work for mobilkom austria. but no longer do; and I don't own any stocks or interest in any telco.

StarOffice 8 Update 6

is here.
Get it at the SunSolve server.

Caterina Fake - The History of Flickr

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

Thunderbird2: it's here

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

Got and get it - Reclaim your inbox.

Software AG Announces Acquisition webMethods

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

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

Thunderbird 2 Final sighted on Mozilla FTP | Techbloggers

Thunderbird 2 Final sighted on Mozilla FTP | Techbloggers

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

Paul Graham on Microsoft

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

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

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

Sun now diggs, etc

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

Cool move; not often seen with corporate websites.

Small (UI) change, big impact

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

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


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

They changed it to that:

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

Small change, big impact (to me).

Thanks a lot.

Thunderbird 2: My own extension

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

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

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

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

Thunderbird 2: Display Images

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

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

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

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

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

Thunderbird 2: Intelligent reply

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

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

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

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

This is most definitely more likely what you intended.

Great work...

You're my favorite (Java) mistake

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

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

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

Stupid, stupid, stupid, ...

Sun Weblog Publisher - waiting, waiting

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

Please !!!

My first glimpse at Thunderbird2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Firefox more del.icio.us

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

Wifi Router replacement

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

Wow - there is something Google does NOT know.

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

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


BUT...

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

Come on...

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

Great SOA vendor review

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

(and it is an excellent blog, btw)