Interesting error page

While an Apple conference (and iPhone 3G announcement) is bringing twitter down (as expected), I found a more entertaining error page:




Very helpful. Thanks.

Twitter vs WWDC 2008

So, expectations are quite high at the crossroads of twitter and the iPhone.
Not only does eveyone (kind of) expect twitter to go down during the announcement, the twitter teams seem to be prepared for it as well.
See e.g. here amongst others.

Maybe expectations are a bit too high for both of them ... the (supposedly all new and now even more exciting ) iPhone, and the twitter coverage of it.

Good color coding

I like the way SourceForge.net tells my that the password I entered was wrong:


A green check mark ...

That's how you indicate an error. Not this panicky red or yellow stuff

Glassfish configuration for DB2

I ran into this problem at least twice, so here is the solution (at least for my own reference in the future):

If you want to use a DB2 (UDB) database from glassfish v2 using a Type 2 JDBC driver [1], you must make sure that the (native) library db2jcct2.dll (or .so) is in the (native) library path. The error message usually says something like "Failure in loading T2 native library db2jcct2".

This DLL resides in your DB2 install directory bin directory, e.g. C:\Programme\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN\db2jcct2.dll on windows, so you have to add this directory (C:\Programme\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN) to the glassfish (!!) native library path in the JVM settings

In the domain.xml config file this is the
native-library-path-prefix="c:\programme\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN" option of the java-config setting.

In the admin web GUI it is on the Application Server page;

under the JVM Settings -> Path Settings you will find the option Native Library Path Prefix:

One additional note:
[1] The IBM Type 2 JDBC driver is the one that uses the native DB2 client (used to be called Client Application Enabler or short CAE at my times with DB2 UDB v5) for DB2 access and connectivity. Hence, the necessity to be able to locate the native DLLs... So when the appserver and the DB2 engine run on the same host, you should use type 2 as well.

Way out

Way out
Originally uploaded by roetzi24

As part of my ongoing service to the general public, I'll provide you with a way out today.

Print it (or download it to your mobile device) and take it with you.

This way, you'll always find a way out

NYT and the 'new media'

In today's article about Don Grantham leaving Sun for HP, the NYT writes:

Sun Global Sales Head Resigns, Bound for H.P. - NYTimes.com:

"In a blog post, Sun CEO Schwartz referred to Grantham's departure in seemingly jocular terms. [...]

Sun could not immediately be reached for comment."

Dear NYT, there is a blog post - you even quoted from it. This IS A COMMENT.
Please understand blogs... please.

Towel Day

I (again) totally forgot about Towel Day this year until just after it ended... probably because I was offline that day (in Scotland).

So in order to always remember it, I created a (public) GoogleCal entry for it. You can subscribe to it via this button ...

And in doing so, I noted that when you publish a recurring event on GoogleCal (like I did, see the Google button above) it does not carry the recurrence information with it...
Stupid.

Thank you, twitter

Another reason to like twitter ... or the guys behind twitter: in their announcement/warning of the upcoming downtime, they linked the time to timeanddate.com, so everyone can see it in their own timezone.



Since I receive a lot of event invitations from the US I know that his is quite unusual... totally the exception.
So, thank you, twitter.

Dezentralized Twitter

A couple of recent Gillmor Gang episodes were dedicated to the concept (and necessity) of a decentralized twitter, and/or opening up twitter...

At one point, Marc Canter says:

"But there could be technically 100 Twitters, each controlled by different vendors, and we could have a backend kind of DNS thing to federate users. So if I registered with Pownce or Jaiku, my handle would work on Twitter, or vice-versa. And that’s what I’ve been saying."

More of Marc's reasoning on his blog here.
I don't think this can ever happen - as a DNS like infrastructure.

DNS might be a nice model of decentralization (in probably most ways), but to me it is a very one-way model of propagating data ...
You don't have to push data through DNS... it get's pulled by a host lookup... that's why I say "propagate".

But you have to push tweets. You cannot have every possible Twitter-Clone instance (and there would be hundreds, if you really open it up) pull data from every other clone... no way. And DNS is not a model for pushing data...

To make one thing clear: I agree with Marc that twitter needs to be decentralized in some way... I just don't feel that DNS can be the model for it.

Restore Natural Order

I just noticed that Thunderbird saves the world.
Really.

If you click on the column selection button in one of the table views, e.g. Inbox, or the Lighning event list
you get a "Restore Natural Order" action.

Cool.

If only we had that in the real world.

X.500 ?

Today I saw (quite an expensive) a car with the vanity license plate "X 500" on it.

The owner is most definitely not from IT or any tech business, since no one here in their right mind would choose to associate themselves with "X.500"...

Skype, Google and YouTube for fun and profit

Just noticed that I had some dust on the sensor of my DSLR (Nikon D70). And while I was IM'ing with a friend (Max) on how to get rid of it, I googled for "nikon d70 sensor clean" and the first hit I got was this video on YouTube, showing how to clean the sensor of your D70 from dust.

I then only needed Max to tell me that I could use any straw instead of that blower thingy (provided that I don't spit through it)...

e voila: I followed the instructions, did not spit, and the sensor now is clean again.

Thanks, Skype, Google and YouTube.

Stupid UIs

Another addition to the collection of stupid user interfaces.

This week's award goes to Nokia for replacing a YES/NO dialog with two buttons (green checkbox for YES, red crossy thingy for NO).
Well, it is intuitive, but keyboard shortcuts (Y, N) no longer work.

Well done.
Thank you.

Why OpenID should have relevance for the enterprise

As with federated identities, I thought that OpenID had no space in the enterprise.

The main thought was, that OpenID make me the owner of my identity, and lets me choose where to use it. This is usually not what the enterprise wants. My enterprise identity, i.e. my accounts and profiles with the IT systems of my employer, belongs to my employer, not to me.
So, why should an enterprise care ?
Well, there are people who use their corporate account names and passwords on external sites as well.
They might use it for their email account, or eBay, ... Or they use their corporate email address to register with amazon and others who base an account on a email address. And usually, people tend to use the same password as well.

Bad idea.

But this (mis)concept exists, since there are "external" account, CompuServe, AOL, fidonet, whatever... and of course all those fancy sites on the web. And this behavior could never be eradicated. Because people (and therefore users) are lazy bastards.

Well - you can write and publish policies that forbid this (and all enterprises have those), but frankly, who cares. Who even reads them.

So why not turn 180° and actually allow this... even more: encourage it.

Become an OpenID provider and let users use their corporate account to login at your openid provider site. That way, the can stay lazy, but never give a password to other sites... They only enter it at your site(s).

The only drawback right now is, that there are still not enough openid enabled sites... but they are growing... rapidly actually.

New StarOffice/OOo language feature

Just noticed that OpenOffice 2.4 and (therefore) StarOffice 8 Update 10, have a new faster way to select/change the language for the spell-checker - right down in the status bar (where you actually expect it).

A click on it, and you can change the language.
Fast. Intiutive.

Finally.
Thanks.

A case for Identity Federation for the Enterprise

When it comes to identity management enterprises today tend to only care about user provisioning, compliance and (worst of all) single-sign-on.

Identity Federation - like Liberty - is usually not really considered. And I neglected it, too, since customers were not really interested in it, or asking for it.

However, there is a good use-case for federated identities across within enterprises... I choose to say "within" because the case I'm about to make is when the user should not see enterprise borders:

Consider an outsourced process - like HR in our case at Sun - where your employees have to access an application that is outsourced as well. People then have to sign on to computers that are not being operated by you (your IT).

Big deal... those application can easily access my directory (LDAP or AD)... so why should I need identity federation there?
And you might even trust those external application to securely access your directory this way.

But you don't want your users to enter their corporate userid and password at any remote site - even if you trust that company.

If you do, you open up big potential for fishing... By using federation you keep the input mask for your userids and password within your IT, operated by your staff, transported only over your network. There is no chance that the password can get intercepted... or at least the risk is not higher than within your own network.
That's the point.

SourceForge.net supports OpenID

Just read on SourceForge.net: Community Blog that they now support OpenID for login.

Excellent !!

StarOffice 8 Update 10

StarOffice 8 Update 10 has finally been released as patch 120187-14 for Windows.

Contrary to previous patches, this one was quite troublesome to install: on both of my Windows machines (both with SO8 U9 already installed) the installation failed quit at the end with a failure to read the source .MSI file (claimed to be a network error, but that was just a crappy error message, all install sources were local). It then removed the whole U9 update, but StarOffice refused to load afterwards (incl reboot) because of missing DLLs and/or DLL entry points.

I had to repair SO8 base, then re-apply U10...

As I said, happened twice for me – cost me 2hrs each time ... so be careful.

Xing now shows contact map on Google Maps

Xing just added great (beta) feature to the Contacts page.
You can now view your contacts as a map using - of course - Google Maps.

Here's my map (you might want to click to enlarge)



Works surprisingly well, i.e. most of the people seem to have meaningful addresses in their profile.
And the visualization - as often - adds information.

(shell) History meme

Just stumbled upon this nice piece of not-so-useful tricks... but fun.
via Tim Bray ongoing � History

history | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10
92 tarantella
69 ls
26 cd
13 clear
12 tail
11 rm
11 exec
11 cat
 8 date
 7 man

I must have been doing a lot of SGD/tarantella stuff lately. Can't explain the date, though ;-)

Dopplr and city data - no progress

I ranted about this earlier, but there is still no improvement.
Dopplr does a lousy job regarding its 'catalog' of city data.
Sad.

Citrix Rumors...

I heard a lot of rumors during the last year or so about Microsoft buying Citrix... now IBM and Cisco joined the list...

Rumors of IBM or Cisco buying Citrix?, from Brian Madden on BrianMadden.com

MacBook Air

I had the chance to "lift" an MacBook Air recently, because a co-worker got himself such a beast.
Boy... great device... really.

One can argue about the lack of ports and connectivity.
E.g. only one USB port and no ethernet, only WiFi.
Not the perfect enterprise laptop, therefore.

But to me it is the iPhone of laptops... gets people hungry for Apple.
Drags them into the stores and to the Apple brand.
Any maybe get a more "enterprisy" device.

Surely a plus for Apple.

docs.sun.com

Whoever changed the application or infrastructure behind docs.sun.com...


Thank you.

Performance and responsiveness is now on a level where you can actually work with it.

Java Conference in Austria

Finally, Sun talks Java again in Austria. [1]

On June 19th there will be a one day Java Conference called JavaDeus[2] in St. Pölten.
Free admission of course.

Topics will cover Java 7, Netbeans, openESB... as well as some not-so-directly-Java-related stuff like MySql and Solaris Dtrace... stuff for developers, if you will.
Details can be found here at www.sun.at/javadeus08



[1] Not only do I work for Sun, but I'm also involved in organizing this event.
[2] don't blame me for the name.

Speed Dial killed my Firefox

Strange... I have been using the Speed Dial extension for Firefox for quite some while now, and a couple of days it started to kill my Firefox after startup...
First I though it was the Norton §$%&/() product.... but then I played around with
firefox.exe -safe-mode
and voila it worked again.

Disabling extension by extension revealed that Speed Dial 0.7.0.8 was the culprit.

So it had to let it go.

Got rid of my printer

A couple of days ago I got rid of my printer at home... and old Lexmark [1] ink printer.
First of all because it was broken.
Secondly because it has been broken for about half a year... and I never really did mind... because I did not even want to print anything.
So now was a good time to discard it.[2]

Boy, did I suddenly gain space on my desk.

And I'm one more step closer to the paperless (home) office.
If that will ever work.

Reminds me of the decade old saying "We'll have the paperless toilet before we have the paperless office."

Still true today.


[1] well exIBMers just have to buy Lexmark, don't they.
[2] actual trigger was windowcleaning... and I had to move the printer to the side to get access to the window.

Worst german computer term ever

Well, maybe not the eternal #1 ... but still a good candidate is .... drum roll ...

SCHALTFLÄCHE

This is the german term quite frequently used for buttons & push-buttons.
Literally it means "switch(ing) area"...
as in switching gears or switching the light on ...
and area as in they area where you can actually do the switching.

This is such a stupid and inappropriate term...

Boy, even leo knows about it.

How to recognize malware?

The best indicator if a piece of software is malware (i.e. any kind of malicious software that wants to harm you or others) is that it does NOT come with a 4-10 page disclaimer and license agreement that you actually have to scroll down and read - page by page - and accept.

If it comes with one of them, its legitimate software that actually ran through a legal department. No malware there.
If it does not come with it... be afraid, be very afraid...

Then again, if a legal department was involved with the release of software, ... be afraid as well... or even panic!

FlickrPalmr

I just created a litte Java app that downloads prefedined (=selected) photos from flickr down to my palm.
I noticed that I can do this quite easily without the need for a conduit.

So here's what id does.

1. You create a set in flickr and add the files you want to have on your palm, let's call it "flickrpalmr" per default.
2. The program picks this set from the defined user (=your user)
3. Downloads all new pictures from this set to the palm photo installation directory, into a new set ("flickrpalmr", again)
4. if there was a photo in this directory that on flickr no longer is in the defined photo-set, it removes it from the directory as well.
5. hotsync the palm

This works due to the fact that the media conduit in palm really syncs the folder
<palminstall-directory>\<hotsyncname>\offline copy location\Internal
bi-directionally. Every subdirectory will become an Album on the handheld.

So the directory c:\programme\palmone\txr\offline copy location\Internal\flickrpalmr\ gets sync'ed to the Album flickrpalmr on my T|X.

If I remove a picture from the photo-set on flickr, it will be removed from the directory and thus from the palm.

Then you have to cron (or create a "scheduled task" under windows) for the java program for e.g. every hour or once a day... e voila.

Not the nicest integration, but it works.

What I initially wanted to do, was to avoid the set, but go for a tag only. You'd just have to tag your photos with "flickrpalmr" (or whatever you'd prefer), and that'd be it.
The flickr api, however, does not seem to expose a method to retrieve all picture from a user with a given tag.
You have to walk through all the picture and then for each photo check, if it is tagged with "flickrpalmr". With 500+ pictures this is extremely slow. And it does not make a difference if you only want to sync 20... you have to enumerate all of them.
So I went for the photo-set.

If only I had ...

(today's episode) ... known twitter 6 years ago.

At that time I was working for a mobile operator in Austria, and my department (SW development) was separated from the rest of the company (that included being separated from the IT operations group) into a building 5-10 minutes away - by car!

We had to commute with taxi about 2-3 times a day from our office to the main campus and back again.
More often then not two or more people would not know about each other taking the same trip and therefore take 2-3 cars at the very same time for the very same trip ... instead of just one.

So I came up with the idea for a little SMS application, where I'd advertise my planned from from our building to the main office by sending a text message to this service.
Everyone in my group who - here location comes in - is currently in the off-site building would get this notification and could reply with e.g. "join" or some other keyword, and I'd then get the summary who would like to join me.

We never created this application, although it would have been quite simple and fast to develop.

Should've built it.

Today, I'd probably do this with twitter.

Flickr mobile soo different from (full) flickr

Why is this ?

Look at the regular Flickr home page:

You have a clear structure there.

1. upload
2. your photos / recent-activity / comments
3. photos from contacts
4. everyone else
5. your groups

On Flickr mobile you have

1. recent activity
2. photos from contacts
3. comments
4. upload
5. your photos
6. everyone else
7. explore
8. your contacts

or, if I use the numbers from full flickr.
2b. 3. 2c. 1. 2a. 4. na na


But why ?

I understand that options 7 and 8 are added, because in the full flickr interface they are in the javascript drop down menus. Hard to do on a mobile.
But why change the order and structure of the other items ? Why not keep them in sync ?

And most importantly: why do I care ?

Can't say, but just annoys me.

Safari for Windows - again

Just when I almost forgot about Safari - the Mac web browser - on Windows , Apple brought it back to my attention, by including it in the Apple Software Update...

Just why ?

If anyone has a good reason for me to install Safari, please post it in the comment. And no, I don't need a reason to convert to Mac (I'm almost there), but a reason to install Safari on Windows !

Joel Spolsky on closures

Joel Spolsky has an excellent explanation on why you'd want closures ... without using the term "closure" at all.

Can Your Programming Language Do This? - Joel on Software

Sun IM in Firefox

Sometimes it takes someone "from outside" to point out the obvious...

I knew that the Sun instant messaging service (IM) was XMPP capable (or "uses XMPP"), I also knew that there is an IM/XMPP plugin for Firefox called SamePlace ... I actually had it installed on my Firefox for a couple of weeks.

But it took a customer to point out to me, that I could use SamePlace to connect to our IM server!
Today I tried, and of course it works...

So, thank you.

Software Simian

The always omniscient Dilbert must have heard of my role change within Sun...

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

Google takes a swipe at OOXML

So - according to El Reg - Google finally takes side in the ODF vs OOXML war.
And - personall I'd like to add - the right side.
Details at Google takes a swipe at OOXML | The Register

Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design

Watch this great presentation by Jeff Han at TED 2006 about multi-touch interfaces...
This makes the iPhone multi-touch just a kindergarden prototype ;-)

TED | Talks | Jeff Han: Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design (video)

Most missing feature on my Nokia

The last parade of Nokia mobiles I had [1](and still have) lacked one important feature:

If I go to the calendar „application“ I can schedule a call with a person from my contacts list or any phone number I choose to enter. At the given time I will get a reminder and - by simply pressing the green „call“ button - I call this person.

Nice.

Comfortable.

Good.

Why, then, can't I create this entry from a person/contact context. E.g. I am in the address book / contact list, or I am in the missed/received calls list... most of the time I want to schedule a call (or call back) from there. I saw that someone called e.g. whilst I was in a meeting, and I want to call him back after the meeting, say in 30 min. Or I just called someone, got on their voicebox and want to try again in an hour.

Why didn't anyone think of this use case?

Why doesn't any mobile support his ?

I just checked: not even the iPhone...

[1] 6310i, 6230i, 6233

When did Google acquire FeedBurner?

Strange, I never noticed that Google has acquired FeedBurner.

Tracing back the news, it must have been late May last year...

Finally last.fm, too

Just to let you know - in case you care - that I'm now on last.fm as well.
What is last.fm ?
Hm, I guess best decribed as social network (and recommendation engine, ...) around music, with really everything you can imagine around this meme.

Find me here.

What a humble error message

This came up when I wanted to update my nightly build of Lightning:



I just like the wording...

Want to have...X300

My current laptop is a ThinkPad T43p... love it.
But what I crave for is the Lenovo X300.... the Mac Air equivalent on the non-Mac-World.

Mozilla Messaging is out

Finally Mozilla Messaging is "out".

"Out" as in "out in the wild", i.e. spun off of Mozilla.

And they announced the plans for Thunderbird3.

"Current plans for Thunderbird 3 include:

* Integrated calendaring (based on the existing Lightning extension)
* Radically improving search
* Many other user interface improvements such as faster workflow, improved feed reading, simpler user interface, automatic configuration, and more."

So, not a lot:

• Lightning (Calendar project) integration was to be expected,
• "radically improving search" is still not a lot if you think of the current search non-capabilities...
• and the items under bullet 3 I don't care for a lot.

Guys, what about a proper address book and social network integration ??

Now on Twitter

Just signed up for Twitter.

If you haven't yet heard of twitter, it is probably best described with their own words:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

I'd say, it's very related to IM, but more broad-casting then the 1:1 dialog you usually see on IM. Also it is a bit less about conversation.

But then again, how should I know, I just started...
Follow me here .

(Of course I added a twitter gadget/widget/thingy to this blog over there ->)

m³: Silver Bullet Wiki?

Martin has interesting observations (and rants) on Wikis as tools for building/negotiating an agenda for a meeting.

m3s online Pamphlet :: y2008 : m02 : Silver Bullet Wiki:

Instead of emailing a meeting agenda, put it on a wiki page and email people a link to that page. If changes need to be made, anyone on your team can do so and everyone will have immediate access to the same, up-to-date version
[...]
And how does that differ from a Word file on a fileshare, a Sharepoint place, an Exchange shared folder or a Lotus Quicker?
A fool with a tool is still a fool. If people are not used to working on ONE copy of a document – no matter what technology – they will still end up with several versions of the document. Either by printing it to PDF, copying into the calendar-entry, etc.
[some typos corrected]

But Martin, why so strict ?
I'd understand "wiki" as a pars-pro-toto for all of the options you suggested.
I strictly oppose to the Word file (or ODT file for that matter;-)) on a whatever server.

Cool would be:

1. A "document" (not word) on a server -> then you get the single copy property.
2. directly editable through web and an API -> allows for easy and direct access from all possible tools
3. obviously you want the author/editor of a change/addition/suggestion to the agenda visible and identifiable
4. And then you'd want both an RSS/Atom feed from that document as well as an iCal/webcal/caldav access to this document. (And others: you might want to generate your PDF directory out of it for archival and print).
   
5. It should of course carry the whole event/appointment data as well.

That's what I'd want to see... If that's then implemented in Exchange, SharePoint, Domino/Notes or on a Wiki - I couldn't care less.

BUZZER

Wrong, sorry. I do care.
By my nature I'd prefer the Wiki or Notes approach over any Exchange/SharePoint approach... not so much religiously, but they tend to guarantee more open access - meaning both users, and APIs.

Sun about to buy Innotek

In case you are into reading corporate press releases (yuck):
Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop

There is also - of course - the usually witty El Reg version of it.

Yahoo Officially Rejects Microsoft Offer

Yahoo Officially Rejects Microsoft Offer:

"As expected, Yahoo has officially rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid to acquire the company. In a brief press release issued ..."

End of act #1.
Brief intermission.

Let's see how this will continue.

OpenSolaris and the System z

OpenSolaris and the System z:

"Sun Microsystems and Sine Nomine Associates have demonstrated the OpenSolaris code base running on an IBM System z mainframe. [...] The Solaris demonstration included support for powerful Solaris features including Solaris ZFS, and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), which help customers improve uptime, cut costs, and speed time to market."

So the MVS, no OS/390, no z/OS, whatever, guys who still refer to files as "members" can work with ZFS...
(or would that be z/FS then ;-))

Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch

I just finished Nicholas Carr's new book The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny
a couple of days ago.

I fully agree with his main observation, that IT (equipment, installation, development, operation) will move from in-house data centers to some IT utility providers, like we saw a century ago with electricity. No one will manage and operate their own CRM, ERP, Mail, ... in the future.

And just for the fact that with his book he brought this very idea to a broader audience, I applaud him.

Then again, I don't really like the rest of the book. Instead of describing what some players in the IT industry (IBM, Sun, ...) are doing with respect to this development, Carr just expresses his love with Google and its founders.

A missed opportunity.

Nevertheless, ... well, see my first point.

Google, IBM, Yahoo, Verisign, Microsoft to join OpenID

From OpenID.net:

"This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board."

Good.
Very good.

Great Fun with Amazon images

Abusing Amazon images:

"Amazon.com feeds out a lot of product images, putting out the same book cover (say) in a variety of sizes and formats. By experimentation, I found that they don't actually have all the sizes and formats stored. Instead, they have a system that generates each requested image. The details of size and format are built into the image's URL."

great details on the URL structure of Amazon images.

Read it, learn it, live it.

Firefox share up over 20% in Europe, mostly at expense of IE

Great news via Ars Technica: Firefox share up over 20% in Europe, mostly at expense of IE:



In the country breakdown Austria is reported at good 31,9%

Please don't

Microsoft bids for Yahoo | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone:

"Microsoft went public Friday with a $44.6 billion cash-and-stock bid to acquire Yahoo.

In its response, Yahoo called the Microsoft bid 'unsolicited' but did not reject it."

Now that I finally became a flickr, del.icio.us and upcoming addict, ... PLEASE DONT.

My notebook on a 2x2 SunRay

For a customer demo we setup a 2x2 SunRay Thinclient configuration, i.e. 4 physical screens connected through 4 SunRay units but building one large logical screen. Then I RDP'd against my Windows XP laptop on my ThinkPad T43p.

Cool.

Yes, I'm a freak. So what...

Dopplr's Raumzeitgeist - if only they had proper data

From the Dopplr blog:

While we’re busy working on new stuff for 2008, we thought it would be fun to look back at the first year of Dopplr in our inaugural “Raumzeitgeist” round-up.

Zeitgeist of course means “Spirit of the times”. You’re probably familiar with Google’s wonderful ‘zeitgeist’ report they publish annually, reflecting culture in what people were searching for that year.

“Raumzeitgeist” translates literally as “Space Time Spirit” and that’s precisely what we’ve got here. It’s about where we, the users of Dopplr, travelled through space and time on our little planet last year…

Cool stuff. Unfortunately, they still lack many cities in their database.

What I Read - II

Finally, you regular readers of my blog (thank you, btw) may have noticed that there was some activity in the right column here (->).
Apart from having an Upcoming box, I finally automated the What I Read widget as I mentioned earlier.
Basically it's a tiny, tiny database ("databasette") that holds the data, a (localhost only) web application for me to maintain it, e.g. search the title/author/isbn on amazon, put it into the database, attach my "reading" data to it.

The data is then published as a javascript file at my (static!!) webspace. When I say "published"... well, its just a little script that wgets the data locally and ftps them to my webspace account. But hey, it works.
The javascript is "widget-ready" to be included in my blog.

New and improved: there is now also an Atom feed for it.
It is good for google reader, but the feed widget on blogger fails to display the images... so I stick with the javascript version there.

Sun's openID service down

Sun's openID service (for employees[1]) at http://openid.sun.com is down at least since Friday... and I could not find any notice in any blog or somewhere else.
Strange.

I feel so locked out of some services...

[1] yes, I am a Sun employee, as I herewith again declare for full disclosure.

JSTL fineprint

The following fine print in the JSTL fmt:formatDate documentation just cost me about 45 minutes of my life:

If this action fails to determine a formatting locale, it uses java.util.Date.toString() as the output format.

Meaning that, if you do not set the locale explicitly in the JSP (with fmt:setLocale) and you e.g. use WGET against your JSP page - which per default does not carry any locale information - you get the stupid default format

Sat Jan 26 18:10:50 CET 2008

instead of whatever you specify. Even if you explicitly give a pattern with fmt:formatDate value="${now}" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'"
you nevertheless get the verbose stuff from above.
You have to setLocale first...

Sick. Just sick.

Vista consumer virtualization ban lifted

Finally Microsoft gave up and - contrary to what I reported before - now DOES allow all Vista Editions on virtualization platforms:

Microsoft relents: Vista consumer virtualization ban lifted:

"It only took them a year longer than it should have, but Microsoft has finally relented and approved the use of Windows Vista Basic and Premium Edition in virtualized environments, for both 'consumers' and business users. Among other things, the change means that Mac and Linux users can now run Windows Vista in a VM without having to pay for the more expensive Business or Ultimate editions. This is a boon to anyone who needs virtualized environments for testing and development."

On the relative importance of MySQL

Since the announcement of Sun buying MySQL recently we (Sun) of course had a lot of conversations with customers, partners and Sun internally about the value and position of MySQL.

To show the relevance of MySQL I searched for a couple of database products (or their names) on some job portals (jobfinder.at, jobfinder.de, stepstone.de, monster.at, monster.de, monster.co.uk), the (not new) idea being, that the number of job postings does correlate to the importance of a platform or system.

I know that this is not representative... but it gives a nice overview. And the ranking of the databases on the various job portals is consistent. (All figures rounded, and those 5 were the only ones I looked for... so it is strictly not percentage of the DB market but it gives you the relative positioning)

So:

#1	Oracle (to be expected)	50%
#2	SQL Server	29%
#3	MySQL (!!)	13%
#4	DB2	6%
#5	postgresql	1%

I did the same on amazon.com on books which gives a similar, but not identical picture:

#1	Oracle (again)	85%
#2	SQL Server	6%
#3	DB2	6%
#4	MySQL	3%
#5	postgresql	1%

Not really surprising that DB2 ranks before MySQL here... What does surprise me is that almost all books seem to be on Oracle.

Also of course there is a skew towards Oracle, since I only search (literally) for “Oracle” so the results might contain jobs and books about Oracle applications or (in case of books, not jobs I guess) the Oracle of Delphi, or other totally unrelated Oracles ... see the Wikipedia disambiguation page for a list of oracular things in this world.

Anyway: the results to me are clear:

MySQL has more importance than DB2 today (this of course kind of hurts me, me being an old DB2 fan) and is not that far off from SQL-Server... half of its “value” in both book and job search.

Europe: Your IP Address Is Personal

Finally someone said it... glad to live in Europe.

Europe: Your I.P. Address Is Personal - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:

"Nonetheless, Peter Scharr, Germany’s data protection commissioner, told a hearing of the European Parliament that I.P. addresses should generally be seen as personal information, according to a report by The Associated Press. Under some laws, and much industry practice, information that can identify an individual is often subjected to tougher standards for how it can be recorded, stored and transmitted than information about anonymous users and groups of users."

share.opml.org, retired

Dave Winer reports on Scripting News:

"We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be"

It was a nice and interesting idea and service, and I got some interesting patterns and information out of it, but hardly anyone used it.

To be frank, I haven't uploaded my OPML in months (years?)...

What I Read

In the right column of this blog you may have noticed a new little feature called "What I read"...
Basically this is a little javascript to embed that lists the books I am currently reading (and nicely links to Amazon, of course).

Amazing what you can do with a little jscript...

Currently this is a manually created thing, but I'm working on a nice little Java (web) application at home that will help me create and upload this jscript file automatically, e.g. search title from amazon (using the amazon webservices) and fill in the author and ISBN details, etc, etc.

Stay tuned.

Yahoo to start supporting OpenID

Yahoo! backs! OpenID! | The Register:

"Yahoo! has pledged to support OpenID from the end of the month, giving a massive boost for the online identity framework that aims to cut password headaches."

Smart move for Yahoo.
Good move for everyone.

Some reactions on Sun buying MySQL

Here are some select comments on Sun buying MySQL from my blogroll:

The Register: Sun pulls MySQL into its orbit
Ars Technica: Sun targets open source LAMP stack with MySQL acquisition
Read/Write Web: Sun Dives into Database Market: Buys MySQL
c|net news: The best decision Scott McNealy ever made (being more about Jonathan than just the acquisition)
NY Times: Sun to Buy Swedish Software Firm for $1 Billion

Today is Acquisition day: BEA agrees to Oracle offer

BEA finally says yes to Oracle - for $8.5bn | The Register:

"Oracle has signed a definitive agreement to buy BEA for $8.5bn."

No cheap Vista for Desktop Virtualization?

I just got a pointer to this litte know fact (at least I did not know it) from the VMware site:

Microsoft Virtualization Licensing and Distribution Terms - VMware: "Restrictions on Virtualization and Vista:

Microsoft has recently announced a prohibition on virtualizing the less expensive versions of Vista (Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium). Microsoft’s explanation has been that virtualization is not broadly usable by consumers or other mass market users, and therefore should be restricted only to the more expensive versions of Vista"

This means that you cannot use a cheaper version of Vista for desktop virtualization (VDI) ...

And this in return means, that Microsoft is afraid of VDI. That simple.

Jonathan Schwartz: Sun to buy MySQL (AB)

Jonathan Schwartz's Blog: "We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB."

Wow.

Dopplr and city data

Dopplr is a great service... I really like it.
However, the quality of the city/location data ... well ... sucks.
At least for Austria.
Try Saalbach (major skiing resort) or the city of Krems ... totally unknown to Dopplr and replaced with nearby villages that don't make any sense.
Dopplr say that rely on data from the GeoNames project, but Geonames has all those data...(try Saalbach or Krems)... so why doesn't Dopplr know about them...

Strange.

Sudo make me a sandwich

Oh, this is better then all thinkgeek t-shirts combined ;-)

Offline for a couple of days

Am Weissensee
Originally uploaded by roetzi24

I'm enjoying some days off at lake Weissensee in Carinthia, Austria - pondering how to implement an idea for a flickr application I had.

Anyone know a good site with hosted Tomcat or - even better - glassfish ?

Wien 2.0

Vienna's 11th district goes Web 2.0 ???




(Well I kind of helped with the Dopplrgasse, it is of course Doppler...)

Flock featured on Mahalo Daily

Flock - my favorite Flickr and YouTube browser just got featured on Mahalo Daily.

Watch it here and

Word of the Year - w00t

via UserFriendly

Bugzilla RSS vs Google Reader

I've been monitoring the Mozilla Lightning bugs in bugzilla for a while now using an RSS feed of bugzilla into my Google Reader.
I frequently noticed that the information on some bugs was not complete, but did not really care.
Today's view however, was the best so far and comes with quite some aesthetic touch:


You can really watch as Google Reader tries to retrieve the feed and fails, tries again 3 hours later, gets some more date, and fails ... etc etc ... ad inf.

But it looks great.

Le Web 3 Videos online

The videos of the Le Web 3 conference from Paris are online here:
leweb3

New Flickr Uploadr

Flickr released their new version (3.0) of the upload tool, aptly called uploadr.
2 technical details worth mentioning:

1. It is open source.
2. It is based on XULRunner, the mozilla runtime.
   (and therefore Windows and Mac OS-X)
   

Actually it is the first XUL application (except for Mozilla and all the direct spin offs like Flock) I came across "in the wild".

As for the features:

• you can now manage a lot more attributes offline, i.e. still on the PC
• the user interface and layout are a lot more clear than in previous version
• since it is XUL it has - like Firefox and friends - an easy online update feature.
  

Sadly, though, the most important "Upload Photos" button vanishes unpredictably from time to time (for me). Hope this gets fixed...

Or no, it's open source, so I'll just check out the source myself, wont I.

Home PC power consumption

I'm doing some math around the power consumption advantages of thin clients, namely the Sun Ray, versus regular PCs (spell: green IT).
So I borrowed a power meter from a colleague and just checked my own PC, a fairly regular, non-game, non-graphics PC:
2 GHz Athlon, 1GB RAM, 2 HDs, Radeon 9000 on-board graphics, and the usual peripherals like Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers... nothing fancy.

Without the monitor the PC uses the following power (measured right at the power plug):

• 0W when totally switched off at the back-side
• 2,7W (!!!) when switched off only with the front side switch (or shut-down menu),
  as well as in hibernate mode
• 7W (!!!) in stand-by mode
• 115-130W when in use

I could not find a clear correlation between the power consumption and CPU or disk usage. It would just oscillate between 115 and 130W...

So - again without the Monitor - over a whole year, with my regular PC usage at home this amounts for 328kWh or about 6% of my electricity bill.

OpenID on blogger

Google, or rather Blogger only, now
allows commenters to identify themselves using OpenID.

Finally.
Thanks.

Of course, I enabled it for my blogs.

Import, Export, Up, Down ?

On a web page (in this case a calendar service on the web) would you really use the DOWN-arrow for import (i.e.UPload to the web page) and the UP-arrow for export (i.e. DOWNload from the web page).


Rather confusing, I thought.
Why not use an arrow that goes INTO a box for import and an arrow that goes OUT OF a box for export...

Facebook - Should I? Do I have to?

For a couple of weeks now I am quite successful in NOT opening a facebook account/page/whatever they call it.

I first thought that Steve Gillmor (of the former Gillmor Gang, now just The Gang) might force me to, but I found the podcast outside facebook.

So it is still open again: Should I join facebook ?
(I'm not really interested in one more social network, but I'd be interested in the applicatoins/service platform it constitutes).