Flickr now has statistics

Flickr now comes with quite improved statistics. When I say improved, I mean improved over the pure "this photo has been viewed x times" statistics - if you can call it "statistics".

Anyway, now there are proper statistics, like this:

You get web access statistics like the view count for photos, your photo stream, the sets and the collections (yesterday, this week, last week, and all-time).
Your most viewed photos (yesterday and all-time only)
The top referrers (yesterday and all-time only) (not surprisingly flickr itself is on top)

You also have "content" statistics like how many pictures are public/private/..., tagget/non-tagged, fav'd, ...



Here's the help for it.

Share Google Reader Items with Google Talk Friends

Google is going more and more social network; you can now share items in your Google reader with your "friends"... as defined in your google talk profile...

More details in the Official Google Reader Blog: Reader and Talk are Friends!

StarOffice 8 Update 9

... is finally here.

Get it from SunSolve as 120187-12 (for Winodws).

Sun ODF Plugin 1.1 now fully working with Microsoft Office 2007

For lack of an MS Office installation I cannot verify it, but this is great news reported by Malte Timmermann

Who is writing those press releases?

Found on the Sun website:

"Sun Accelerates Growth of UltraSPARC CMT Eco System; Releases OpenSPARC T2 Processor RTL to Open Source Community and Joins Five Major Universities in Launch of OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence"

Boy... are they trying to mock us? Or do those writers really mean that?

Yes, I do work for them, but not in PR

NetBeans 6.0 is out

and I installed it a couple of days ago.
Migration from 5.5 is pretty smooth (I only had to add the JAX-RPC WS plugin), and all projects compiled again.
I even noticed tons of nonsense in my code... Just in a couple of hours.

More on NB6 in the upcoming days, weeks, months.

Glassfish book

I just noticed that Glassfish (the Sun lead open-source JavaEE Application Server) has its first book.

Java EE Development Using Glassfish Application Server

There is a review by Arun Gupta (one of my favorite Java bloggers).

More on Glassfish here.

Dopplr and Lightning

I just noticed that Dopplr (the social travel site) lets me subscribe to my trips in iCal.
I did so from Lightning, the Thunderbird calendar plugin, and it works fine.

So I know have my office calendar, my Google Calendar and my Dopplr trips all in Lightning.
Cool (if somewhat redundant, though).

Nice FF extension - I think

A couple of months ago Gernot recommended a Firefox extension to me: Speed Dial

Basically it allows you to go one step beyond bookmarking and assign a speed dial (as on the phone) to your favorite pages - or the ones you most frequently have to visit (in case they are not your favorites ;-) )

It's really cool and neat... and I have it installed and running for about 4 months now, but I still don't "need" it...

Thunderbird - Display mailer icon

Cool Thunderbird extension to display an icon according to the senders mailer agent: DispMUA.

So those Outlook users can now be easily spotted.

Bad webpages

While trying to get some answers from the electronic timetable for the mass transit in and around Vienna, I had to cope with a site that makes about every web-mistake in the book (at least in my book).

1. They give you those ancient redirect warnings / helps ("If your browser does not support ...") in 2007 !! A web page that is full of frames assumes that frames do work, but redirects don't.
   Very likely ... and annoying.
   


2. They are totally up-to-date with their list of supported browsers:
   
   • MS Internet Explorer 6
   • Netscape 7
   • Opera 7
   Ever heard of Firefox ? Safari, anyone ?


3. In their search form they use bureaucratic terms like "Anfordern" (sorry for the German) etc. I just want to search and not "apply" for an answer...


4. They don't know when to use drop-downs or radio buttons. Take a look at this search form
   
   The radio buttons are supposed to change the meaning of the second entry field. In the first field you enter your city, in the second one either the name of a station/stop (if you know it), or a street address or any point of interest.
   Would you have guessed that from the layout ?
   Why not do it with a drop-down like this:
   
   


5. And please get rid of the "Start" label... this is not a multi-page wizard that guides me through a complex query, it's just one simple page...

Anyway, you can guess that I don't like this page.

Sun Presentation Minimizer for StarOffice and OpenOffice

The Sun Presentation Minimizer is a great OpenOffice.org extension to reduce the file size of an Impress presentation. It does so by

• cropping images according to their visibility

• reducing image quality (e.g. 50% JPEG at 150 dpi)

• removing hidden slides

• removing notes

etc.

And – quite important – it gives you a summary of what it is about to remove or modify and also an estimate on the gain (new vs. old filesize). The default setting is for a copy of the file to be created, which is good, since this is the safe path...

I have tried it on one of my recent presentations, and could reduce it from 7MB to 2.3MB... quite impressive for the default options. And (on screen) the presentation looked exactly the same... which should not be too surprising, since you really do not need 300dpi for some supporting images and graphics.

Great tool. Get it here at the OpenOffice.org extensions repository.

Dopplr speaks Flickr

Dopplr - the travel social network - now integrates with flickr.
As usual with flickr meshups, you provide the "link" to flickr within Dopplr, and then ...




Dopplr will show photos that were taken during the trips registered in Dopplr ... clever, eh ?

OpenID According to Dave

Nice and simple (too simple, actually) introduction to OpenId:

Gmail inbox is just a label ??

Just noticed that tiny little "icon" next to a mail in my inbox in Gmail... and the hover help for it.

So "Inbox" is just a "label" ? Wow...
Then again, it makes sense.

XING becomes more dynamic

Xing - the "European Linkedin" or former OpenBC - just got more dynamic.

The "What's new in my network" feature automatically "pushes" information about changes of your contacts to your start page (and you can subscribe via RSS to it). From the help text:

In the "What's new in my network" infobox, you can see the latest updates and changes to the profiles of your direct contacts. You can choose which information you wish to allow your direct contacts to see in your privacy settings.

Helpful. And more linkedin / plaxo-pulse like.

Google Reader: recommendations and drag-and-drop

Two cool new features, reported by the Google Reader Blog and tested by your's truly:

1. Recommendations

   you'll see quite a few feeds that we think you may find interesting. "Interesting" here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion. (To learn more about how our recommendations work, see our help article about them).



2. drag & drop interface in the "folder pane"...
   (not sure Google calls it folder pane, but in all other programs with the same kind of UI it is called that)
   

My reading habits

This is what Google Reader trends says about my reading habits and thereby about my daily routines ...

Enterprise Identity Trends

I have been working with/in/for enterprise (!) identity management (IdM) for the past 4 years or so. What I noticed from recent developments and discussions with partners and customers is:

1. The market is now moving from a vendors to consultants and integrators. They finally got it. And the enterprises as well. We are no longer discussing whether Sun or Novell or Oracle are better, and which to deploy, but customers now first try to identify what their organizational needs are and pick a tool afterwards.
2. The focus is moving (right now) from pure user provisioning to a more full identity management including role management. See the recent acquisitions from Sun (Vaau) and Oracle (Bridgestream)
3. This means that the tool market will become “ commoditized”:
   Customers can now (see bullet 1.) focus on the higher layers first, while having the confidence that later they will be able to implement that on any on the top tools (Sun, Novell, Oracle, ...).

Well, my 0.02€ at least.

(For the sake of full disclosure: I work for Sun Microsystems)

Announcing 2008 TED Prize winners

From TEDBlog the 2008 TED prize winners are:

• Neil Turok
• Dave Eggers (who's book "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" I just love)
• Karen Armstrong

Flickr introduces Places

Flickr now does more with geotagged photos.

Flickr: Places:

"The Places project is our way of saying thank you to all our members who’ve taken the time to put their gorgeous photos on a map. Browse the whole globe, from your hometown to your favorite place, or places you’ve never even heard of..."

I think of it as a place's portal into flickr, check Vienna for example... here's the full URL which says a lot about the concept of places as well:

http://flickr.com/places/austria/vienna

ze frank on "privacy"

Ze Frank is back (not the full show, though, but still...), and I love it.

Here's what he has to say on privacy...
ze's page :: zefrank.com: "privacy"

thank you, ze

A Career in Engineering

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

nothing to add.

5 Gmail features

They guys at the Official Gmail Blog were so nice to post 5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about:

5. "Archive and next" shortcut
4. Share mail searches with friends
3. Browser navigation and history
2. Bookmark emails
1. "Filter messages like this"

And for the last week or two I have the impression it is significantly faster now... (but maybe it's just an impression).

So, thank you, Official Gmail Blog, for the tips...

"Service provider" starts with "Service"

What does a "service provider" actually think, when they have a planned (!) mail outage for about 12 hours without prior announcement?

And then, why can't they configure the IMAP servers properly for that period of time, so that the do not complain about my password but just say that the service is down (which they can)?

And - while we are at it - what can they possibly mean with "Web 2.0 user interface" ?

So clueless...

Sun to acquire Vaau

So, Sun decided to broaden their Identity portfolio by acquriring Vaau... finally we will see some decent role management capabilities in the Sun portfolio.
Actually, this is a must, after Oracle bought Bridgestream this summer...

If you are into corporate press-releases then you might want to endure this: Sun Microsystems Strengthens Market-Leading Identity Management Portfolio with Intent to Acquire Vaau

(In the interest of full disclosure: I am a Sun Microsystems employee)

More Flickr Love

Flickr now lets me export my flickr group subscriptions as OPML.

How cool is that ?

Is it Christmas?

In case you wonder... check here at isitchristmas.com

The best part: comes with a cosy RSS feed, so you can stay up-to-date.

Bye bye "Thinkpad"

Lenovo ditches ThinkPad early | The Register: "Lenovo ditches ThinkPad early"

Book: Core Memory

A computer coffee table book ? Yes, in a way.

"Core Memory" is an illustrated book full of great photos of vintage computers, like the french minitel, the Apple II, Cray I (with all the cabling), Zuse Z3, good old IBMs, etc, etc.

IMAP for Gmail is finally really here.

Yes, now it does work. As the gmail blog pointed out it would take a couple of days for everyone to have it.

Since this night I have IMAP, too. And against my belief, I discovered it through configuring a Gmail account with IMAP in Thunderbird and wait for the error message to vanish.

So here's the proof:



And I also found the confirmation on the gmail blog here.

You actually get each Gmail tag as an IMAP folder, and the default/system and a special folder/view called "Gmail" with the

• All Mail
• Drafts
• Sent Mail
• Spam
• Starred

views in it. Looks like this in thunderbird.

Nice.

Sun wins over IBM

At least in James Governor's Dopplr challenge.

James Governor’s Monkchips: Sun wins the Dopplr 2 By A Nose:

"Sun wins the Dopplr 2 By A Nose Well the results are in folks. During the course of last week both IBM and Sun pretty much doubled their dopplr user populations, but Sun came out just ahead by close of play on Friday."

Well, I'm always glad to help.

About choice

Slightly - but not entirely - off-topic here...
but only slightly: currently IT and the surrounding industries are all about choice...

• Linux vs Solaris vs Windows
• Intel vs AMD vs Sparc vs Power
• Java vs .net vs Python vs Ruby vs ..
• Nokia vs Sony vs iPhone vs ...

to name just a few.

There are 2 great talks from TED about choice and our (=mankind's) inability to cope with decisions vis-a-vis choice:

1. Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?
   
   



2. Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice
   

I recommend you stick to this order...


See my other TED recommendations here.

FlightAware

Recently I stumbled upon this great service: FlightAware.

It is a free flight tracker that comes with all available (I think) information on flights (US only, right now) and Airports.

Want to know where the plane from JKF to Austin is right now ? - look here:



Comes with up-to-date location and arrival information and a nice history of the same flight in the past days/months.

You can also see what is going on around a certain airport:




Really good and cool stuff.
Just utterly, utterly useless here in Europe...

IMAP for Gmail - here's how to wait...

Although my gmail account is still not enabled for IMAP, I added an IMAP/Gmail account to my Thunderbird.
Now Thunderbird will check, if I'm already enabled.

I'll get the following error message until my account is enabled:

Easy. And says it all.

IMAP for Gmail ! ... please hold

So the IMAP support in Gmail is not just a rumor but actually there, as the official gmail blog reports.

However, not everyone has is right now as they admit in the fine print:

(Psst. If you don't see the "IMAP" in the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab, then check back soon. We are giving it to users as fast as we can).

So, I'll be checking back soon, i.e. daily...

Mozilla Lightning 0.7 has been released

Major steps for the Mozilla Calendar project:

Lightning 0.7 & Sunbird 0.7 have been released

Lightning in the plugin (or add-on as they are now called) for Thunderbird.
(There's a standalone version, too, called SunBird).

I've been using betas and nightly builds for (almost) the last year now, and it is really quite stable.
Can't live without it anymore.

Great job, guys.

Now would you please fix the bugs I reported ;-)

IMAP for Gmail ?

TechCrunch reports that Gmail [is] Apparently Enabling IMAP Support.

That'd be cool...

It's true, they talk about it in their help on how to enable IMAP, but it is not yet there in the application.

I wonder if and how the map tags to folders ??
Or just a "plain"

• Inbox
• Sent
• Draft
• Spam

structure...

Then I'd finally have my local copy of Gmail in Thunderbird really in sync with the Gmail service, something POP3 simply cant do.

Lets (wait and) see.

James Gosling: JavaME is NOT dead

Boy, I thought I misread all the recent posts about James Gosling (godfather of Java , i.e. God and father of Java) declaring Java ME dead.
He rightfully points out that it is NOT. James Gosling: on the Java Road

Dopplr

Ok, so James Governor challenged us ("us" being Sun and IBM), and since my veins carry Sun and IBM blood (whatever colour that might yield) I had to accept.
James Governor’s Monkchips � Now its a game, an IBM vs Sun game. dopplr meets cagefightr



I now have dopplr account... I just don't travel that much these days... but I checked in my "trip" (within Vienna) to the World-of-Health-IT WHIT 2007 conference.

Ok, I'll most probably go there by underground, but it still counts as a trip, doesn't it... (please say yes).

Know what's great: dopplr accepts openID...

So finally know what I can do with my Sun openid...

Information R/evolution

The best ever explanation of tagging vs categories... since this

through Techchrunch

Sun and Samsung developing 'Java phone'

A late edition of an April Joke ???

"McNealy said Tuesday in Seoul that the companies were working on a 'Java phone' that would surpass Apple's iPhone in functionality and cost less, the mass-circulation JoongAng Ilbo reported."

Report: Sun Microsystems, Samsung developing 'Java phone' - International Herald Tribune

Oracle and BEA

The news about Oracle to buy (or bid for) BEA Systems is... well not really news, and wont really change a lot in the industry.

The funniest and news-worthiest (??) part is, that BEA thinks they are worth more... IMHO, they are lucky to be bought at all... now.

Several companies have fought over BEA years ago, but now ?
What do they stand for ?
What is their position in the market ?
And which market by the way ?
The Appserver market ? - nope, lost to IBM, JBoss (and more and more Sun/Glassfish)
The Integration/SOA market ? - too small a share.

I think, Oracle is just buying some remaining customers for their application server / integration story... to kick it off.

Wont really rock the industry... And (as usual with such acquisitions) the combined Oracle/BEA market share will shrink, they'll lose to JBoss/Sun... (I hope).

Turing Test Extra Credit

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

Finally, I got del.icio.us

Not the account, I have had that for quite some time now.

But last week - for the first time ever - I sent out a link to a del.icio.us tag instead of a list of links.

Now, whenever I add something to del.icio.us (with this tag), people (if they are smart) get the update via RSS... or (if they are less smart) when they retrieve my email with the link to del.icio.us they will still get the "new" link list there...

Finally, I got del.icio.us.
Pretty cool.

Comic: Little Bobby Tables

This is just fantastic:



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

flickr loves me

Seems to be a new feature, or maybe I just didn't look carefully enough in the last year...
On the start page the now also tell me the group/discussion updates.

That's nice.

OpenOffice as a Java Update

This just popped up on my computer...



would be even cooler if it detected my (running) StarOffice ...

Announcing the Apple iProduct

found here
thanks, Gernot

Nokia 6233 update fixes my bluetooth problem

I used to have problems with the bluetooth connectivity of my Nokia 6233 in my car.
Bluetooth connection would drop every 2 minutes or so, and then reconnect...
Unless (get this) I had the mobile "hidden" e.g. in the pocket of my jeans, ... then it would work.

With the new SW update this problem has now vanished.
Great.

Nokia vs open

Just listened to the most entertaining podcast from the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference (from IT conversations): Tero Ojanperä (CTO of Nokia) made my day with the following line:

We [Nokia] have been long time advocate of the openness.

Bruhaha. And to prove my point:

Porting between S[eries] 60 and open source will be really easy...

Porting between open-source and anything... just shows their mind set

Apart from that it just shows a totally uninspired Nokia when it comes to internet and mobile.

Ballmer Peak

from xkcd.com

The OpenOffice.org Extension Repository

There is a new repository for OOo extentions.

What I like - from the first look only - is, that it is not only categorized, but also tagged.

via Erwin's StarOffice Tango

New Software update for Nokia 6233

Yet another software update for the Nokia 6233, v 5.43 to replace my 5.11
Get it here.
Not only does Google Maps continue to work, but now one can link (Java) applications directly into the GoTo Menu...

Thanks Nokia.
And yes, thanks, for having me re-configure the active standby yet again...

3365 unconfirmed Thunderbird bugs

Yesterday I opened a Thunderbird bug/enhancement. While I was in bugzilla I ran quick query and found that
3365 bugs against Thunderbird are currently still unconfirmed. (btw: FireFox has 5406 which is - relatively speaking - less)

Ahem... about time someone started to work on them...

Strikethrough in OOo vs MSOffice

Yet another nice little story on Office shortcomings. PowerPoint cannot strikethrough. They rather recommend to manually put a (graphics) line over the text.
see details at m³s online Pamphlet

Excel bug

Boy am I glad that I run StarOffice, not MS Office. A new bug was discovered in Excel that runs like this:

850*77,1 = 100.000

instead of 65535.
Of course I immediately tried in StarCalc, and it does it correctly.

Wonder, if Microsoft users consider this an incompatibility between Calc and Excel...

See the explanation and discussion here, and also the explanation by Joel Spolsky.
So, it is a display bug only... and it is (I fully agree) extremely rare and unlikely...

But still fun ...

Thanks to m³ for the pointer.

eCommerce how NOT to...

I spent the last 30min of my online life ordering to tickets to a Toumani Diabaté concert in Vienna.

Now - I love to be able to do that online... but I think it would have been faster through a booking call center - that usually takes only 5minutes.

Walking through the order application took about 1-2 minutes per page -- but not user time, no. HTTP Response Time.
And the worst part - guess what...

The final message, where the final confirmation should appear was an asp error...
That's bad.

Real bad.

StarOffice 8 now includes Google Search

Update 8 of StarOffice 8 - released just this week - now includes what I'd call the 2nd part of the Sun/Google deal around StarOffice:

It comes with google search integrated.


Both Web and Destkop - Cool.

Btw: Sun still kept their branding in, because the web search runs through
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/search-en.xml

StarOffice 8 Update 8

... just arrived.
Get it from SunSolve.

Best order confirmation - ever

Here's the order confirmation I just received after I placed an order for MOO cards for my flickr photos:

Hello Roman

I'm Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order
with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will
print it for you in the next few days. I'll let you know when it's done
and on its way to you.

Please do not remove the photos you have chosen from your account until
your order has been printed, or some pictures may come out blank.

You can track and manage your order at: http://www.moo.com/account

Please note, as your order will be shipped via Royal Mail First
Class/Airmail, it should be with you in around 10 working days, but it
won't have a tracking number.

Remember, I'm just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions
regarding your order please first read our Frequently Asked Questions
at:

http://www.moo.com/help/

and if you're still not sure, contact customer services (who are real
people) at:

http://www.moo.com/service/

Thanks,

Little MOO, Print Robot

MOO "We love to print"

Order details as follows:

It is clear. It has all the information necessary. It tells me what to do and what to expect.

And its fun...

How to kill a dragon with various programming languages

There's a beautiful princess, prisoner in the highest tower of a castle, guarded by a mighty dragon, and a fearless knight must rescue her…

This is how each language would manage to rescue the princess from the hands of the dragon

• Java - Gets there, finds the dragon, develops a framework for dragon anihilation with multiple layers, writes several articles about the framework… But doesn't kill the dragon.
• .NET - Gets there, sees the idea of the Java developer and copies it. Tries to kill the dragon, but the monster eats him.
• C - Arrives, looks down at the dragon, pulls out his sword, beheads the dragon, finds the princess… And ignores her to see the last checkins of linux kernel cvs.
• C++ - Creates a basic needle, and gathers funcionality until he has a complex sword that he can barely understand… He kills the dragon, but gets stuck crossing the bridge because of memory leaks.
• COBOL - Arrives, sees the dragon and thinks that he is too old to kill a monster that big and rescuing the princess, so he leaves.
• Pascal - He prepares for 10 years to create a dragon anihilation system… When the moment comes, he discovers the program can only take lizards as an entry.
• VB - Builds a dragon destruction weapon based on several components, jumps to the back of the dragon and in the most critical time he discovers that the sword works only on rainy nights…
• PL/SQL - Gets data from other dragon slayers, creates tables with n ternary complexity relations, tridimensional data, OLAP, takes 15 years to process the information… And by then, the princess became a lesbian.
• Ruby - Arrives with massive fame, saying he is the best at anything and when he faces the dragon, he shows a lame motion picture of himself killing a dragon… The dragon eats him out of boredom.
• Smalltalk - Arrives, analyzes the dragon and princess, turns around and leaves, they are way too inferior.
• shell - Creates a very powerful dragon slaying weapon… But in the moment of truth, he can't remember how to use it.
• shell(2)- The guy approaches the dragon with a two line script that kills, cuts, disembowels, impales, chops to pieces and packs the beast, but when he runs it the script grows, it fattens, irritates and puts alcohol in the fire of the dragon…
• Assembler - He thinks he's doing the right and most efficient things… But he writes an A instead of a D and kills the princess to end up f***ing the dragon.
• Fortran - Arrives and develops a 45-thousand-code-line-solution, kills the dragon, meets the princess… But she calls him a weakling and runs after the Java programmer who was elegant, and also rich.
• FOX PRO - Develops a dragon killing system. It's gorgeous and works on the outside, but it's really patched inside, so when he runs the dragon anihilator, he realizes he forgot to index the DBFs.
• PROCESS ANALYST - Approaches the dragon with two tons of documentation, develops the unified dragon-killing process, he develops a DFD to free the princess and marry her, convinces the dragon that it's the best for him and it won't hurt. When he executes the process, he estimates the effort and the damage he will cause with a plan signed by the Pope, Buddha and Michael Jackson. Then he buys a couple of nukes, 45 cannons, an aircraft carrier and hires 300 heavily armed men… When all he needed was the sword he was holding in his hand in the beginning…
• CLIPPER: Sets up a routine that loads a codeblock array to insult the dragon, serenade the princess, load the sword in memory, beat the crap out of the dragon, clean the mess, prepare a raspberry milkshake for the princess, make love to her, take a bath, start the car, put it some gas and come back home. When he runs it, he gets a "Bound Error: Array Access" and the dragon eats him with fries.
• Lisp, where the famous knight-errant, after speaking with numerous experts in dragon-killing, and modeling the knowledge they posess, he programs the system, and when he runs it he realizes he forgot a bracket (bender the offender).
• HTML: Mounts a web on famous swords used to kill dragons, but he ignores the W3C standards. When he meets the dragon, he finds out the code isn't compatible with his browser, so he's left swordless. The dragon eats him as an appetizer.
• Prolog: Thinks he needs a weapon to kill the dragon. Searches in a catalog for 182014 weapons. By the time the princess dies of her age, he's achieved to know how to make every weapon starting with A: Atomic Bombs, Anti-Air Weapons, Arches, Ammunition, Axes...
  
• PHP: Creates a web page that when he executes it would eliminate the $dragon selecting from a weapons databese in MySQL over an Apache server. Nevertheless he forgot the WHERE in the DELETE query and kills the princess, the dragon, the peasants, the witch, the sorceror and the programmer himself.
• JavaScript: The programmer tries to kill the great green dragon that spits fire throug his mouth. He creates a script that will delete the dragon when he loads a webpage, to create seconds after, some damsels to throw him flowers and make clapping sounds. Unfortunately he didn't take into account the DOM structure of the lizard, also known as Mozilla, and the only thing he gets is to fill his console of errors and that the Book of Mozilla tells how he was devoured.
• ActiveX: The programmers create a tunnel to enter the dragon's lair from the castle and run a program that will kil the dragon from a safe and prudential distance. The dragon discovers the tunnel, eats the workers who dug, the dragon slayers, and enslaves every servant in the castle. The castle becomes a dragon-breeding place, full of little dragons that the dragon sends in pop-ups to other castles. The untasty remains of the knights are put in cans of Spam and sent to other castles as well as a warning. (aquelquesiente)
• Basic. He creates a weapon able to kill paper dragons, but no matter how they improve it, they discover it's not good enough to kill any dragon bigger than a baby poodle.
• Matlab: They create a loop that calculates the trajectories to shoot a giant arrow at the dragon. The program works flawlessly. What they need now are the voluntaries caoable to launch tha arrow with the necessary strength and accuracy.
• Videogame Programmer : Spends two years programming a state-of-the-art sword with shaders and all. When the time comes to kill the dragon, he finds that half the knights aren't strong enough to raise the sword. Then someone programs a patch that reveals the sex scenes with the princess and Hillary Clinton makes it a scandal.

via Roumen's Weblog

Is an application server needed for transaction processing? (Eric Newcomer's Weblog)

Excellent thoughts by Eric Newcomer...
Is an application server needed for transaction processing? (Eric Newcomer's Weblog)

Any by the way - he's updating his book.

iPhone in Austria on T-Mobile

Rumors and media reports are growing that in Austria (as well as in Germany) T-Mobile will be the exclusive partner for the iPhone.
Which is
a) not good, because I'm on A1 mobilkom (but I'm not really sure if I want to convert to the iPhone anyway)
and
b) quite exciting because it might eradicate the paradigm #1 of the Austria mobile operator landscape, being that "mobilkom will always be #1".

With T-mobile having acquired tele.ring and they got quite close to mobilkom in regards of number of subscribers. For Q1 the regulator reported mobilkom at 3.7M subscribers and T-mobile/tele.ring at 3.2M. The trend for Q2 and Q3 I personally expect is that the gap would become narrower.

Now if T-Mobile had the iPhone exclusively the one customer segment they never managed to get from mobilkom is getting more available to them: the business users.
Which in turn could make them #1.

A thrilling fall is ahead... ;-)

Do Banks use the Internet?

From a recent discussion, I wonder whether financial institutions acutally make use of the internet when rating customers.

Does my bank google for me when I apply for a loan/mortgage?

Or do they check Xing or LinkedIn to see how I am connected in my job? It might be possible to find indicators on how secure my job (in general) is, or how easy I find a new one, etc...

Does my insurance company check the internet? E.g. flickr to find out how much I'm travelling abroad?

Does anyone look at myspace or (more likely) facebook?

Do they learn from the information I give them anyway?

RSS becoming dominant

I just noticed, that RSS (or rather the RSS reader, google in my case) is becoming more and more important as a means of accessing content.
I really "read" more Flickr updates through Google Reader, than directly in Flickr. One reason is, that it is easier and faster to navigate in a feed oriented reader.

Hell just froze over

Microsoft Windows and Sun x64 Servers and Workstations:
"Sun and Microsoft Expand Strategic Alliance Sun and Microsoft have announced an expanded relationship including Sun becoming a Windows Server OEM. Sun will soon resell Windows Server 2003 with select x64 systems."

Dilbert 2.0

so true...


via Dilbert.com

IBM to join OpenOffice.org

IBM joins the OpenOffice.org community to develop and promote OpenOffice.org technology

Welcome, guys.

from OpenOffice.org and Simon and CNET

emacs

UserFriendly Strip Comments

From one to many

Last weekend I (again) discovered what every programmer / architect knows anyway:

The step from doing something on ONE item to doing it on MANY items is the hardest.

And there's an add-on:

Moving from ONE to TWO (in the above sense) is more complex than from TWO to MANY (unlimited).

The reason for the latter is that (to me) "2" is still not as generic as "n", or as I like to put it:

2 is just a special case of 1

quite often if you (in code) have to do something specifically twice, you don't use any loop or iteration construct, you just do it twice.
E.g.
foo.doSomething();
bar.doSomething();

only if you have to push beyond 2 people start to use collections and iterations.
for (Object o: somecollection)
{
o.doSomething();
}

just for 2 objects, no-one bothers to create a collection, they just instantiate two objects.

At least thats what I usually do - and I know others as well.

But - as I said - I experienced the "from 1 to n" problem last weekend - let me elaborate:

In our neighborhood we have a great service that delivers a box of vegetables right to our home.
There's also a website, where you can check this weeks contents of the box.

Unfortunately, though, the site does not offer an RSS feed.
No problem, I just create(d) my own, with a simple job, that runs daily:

1. connect to the site
2. scrape the contents of the site
3. re-format them
4. and put them into a (static) RSS file, hosted on my homepage.

Put that RSS URL into iGoogle and have the contents right there in my personal google portal.

Easy.

Just 2 weeks ago, we decided to have 2 boxes (one with vegetables only, one with vegetables and fruit) on alternating weeks. So I had to re-write my little thing to handle two different "boxes" instead of just one.
(Frankly, I just went for the n-solution, not the 2)

I more or less had to totally re-design the whole hack... About the only thing that remained quite stable was the core RSS handling (through Rome) and the scraping/parsing of the HTML (using HTMLparser).
What I had earlier looked more like a classic C (not C++) program, with almost everything done in main()... I knew it was a bad design... but I did not anticipate the initially.

So, this was a really good lesson for me again, to "design for n" early.

Google reader finally searches

or rather; lets you search.
Official Google Reader Blog: "We found it!"

Thank you.

How not to do Social Networks

Mashable is reporting a disgusting (for lack of other words) behaviour of social networking website Quechup: namely, sending out emails to your contacts (in your name) without your explicit permission, or without even telling you, it does.

Cardinal sin/offense

Ugh!

Steve Gillmor vs Jonathan Schwartz - live ?

looking forward to it...
Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab � BRIC Schwartzhouse

ISBN cross referencing

A couple of weeks ago, m³ posted a rant, on how Amazon webservices don't have a consistent ASIN accross amazon stores. He gave a book example, where I retorted in my comment on this blog, that this was not Amazon's fault, but simply the fact, that different editions of the very „same“ book simply have to have different ISBN (and Amazon relies on the ISBN for book, and I'm glad they do).

Now I just discovered a service, that cross-links the various ISBNs for what we consider the „same“ book:

OCLC Openly Informatics

xISBN

The service is quite simple – you pass in an ISBN and get a list of ISBNs that reflect related editions of this book. There's a nice FAQ ( pdf) for it.

Try this link for the latest (and hopefully last) Harry Potter.

It is not a total solution to m³'s problem, but seems to be an incredible useful service by the OCLC – the Online Computer Library Center.