Pythoneer

Compared to other browsers the WebKit crew has released a JavaScript debugger quite soon after releasing their browser. And here it is Drosera named after the largest bug eating plant. Nice idea for a debugger name :-). And the screenshot is very promising.

After the element inspector this is the next really useful tool, Safari is becoming more and more useful for development. Even though JavaScript development using browsers is still a pain … but I am looking forward. The technology is just too promising to give up too soon.
Besides Firebug this will be another one of my tools that I stuff into my toolkit box.

As usual I read it on techcrunch, this time about Flock.

Flock is a free web browser that makes it easier than ever to share photos, stay up-to-date with news from your favorite sites, and search the Web.

And of course I tried the browser, again. The first time I tried it was a couple months ago, when it was still some very early version and it was somehow not easy to understand how to use it and it was eating up all my resources.

Flock
Flock has officially released it’s first beta last week, and since then you can see a lot more press about it. Which is great I think. The browsers more or less haven’t changed during the last years. Flock is the first browser to integrate the web into the browser. That is very nice.
So I tried my flickr account with flock, and that was really nice, you get the pictures in a kind of a toolbar up on the top of the screen and can drag them in your blog post, or whereever you like. That is easy to use.
Flock lets you star sites - I don’t understand how it works. And if I have to read about it, it is probably too complicated to use. So I stared a couple of things and left the feature behind. I didn’t see no outcome.
Next was the RSS reader. Well, I exported my feed list from NetNewsWire Lite and imported them into Flock. First bummer: the groups were either not exported or not imported. Sux. Ok, I need to resort my feeds anyway. But feed reading is so much less attractive with Flock, that I tried to change the viewing mode, since I am a guy who needs a quick overview of the articles and then on my click I want to read it. Flock is wasting a lot of space and the overview it provides is not as effective as NetNewsWire, imho.
I thought adding a feed to the feed list is as easy as dragging the rss-icon to the list. Of course not, that would have been too easy. I tried some other things that I thought would do it, but none did. Next feature that doesn’t attract me.
Still, I made Flock my default web browser. That was about one or two weeks ago. Today I am switching back to WebKit. Flock’s RAM and CPU usage is just outrageous. I got 2GB of RAM and a G4 with 1.25GHz, which is not the newest but still the lowest high end. I have all my nine virtual desktops filled with any kind of applications, so my computer is packed and greedy apps are not welcoome. And those that start my fan too often and raise my load above normal levels are even less welcome.
I need a browser that does play nicely with my system. Flock definitely doesn’t!

WebKit
The nightly WebKit can also be called the latest developer version of Safari.

Actually I saw no reason to go away from WebKit, if Flock hadn’t come along with a set of really interesting features. The system integration of WebKit is probably the smoothest, the browser is rendering pages the fastest and it just feels handier than all others. For developing I am of course using FireFox with the latest FireBug - that is still unbeaten.

I can see the browsers are evolving and getting better, but there seems a long way to go. I am keeping my eyes open with curiosity.

In general my PowerBook is a very reliable computer, unfortunately also when it comes to crashing. Not what you guys think that it crashes three times a day. No, not at all.

Yesterday I was again close to reaching my uptime record of 14 days and some hours. I know that because my I use the screensaver ShowOff that always displays my uptime. Now I had that been close to the record again, yes again, I opened my laptop in order to get into a meeting that had just started. And booom “Please restart your computer”. What the heck … why does it always have to happen when the computer is reaching a long uptime?

I am already very careful not to plugin anything (esp. USB devices) while my PowerBook is waking up. I always login first even before plugging in the power plug … but it doesn’t always help

It seems that a lot of people are scared of open source software. Especially some think reinventing the wheel is better than using and adjusting an open source product which already does the same thing. They think they loose flexibility and the most used argument: they have to commit it back to the open source world. Stop here for a moment!

Look around on your computer and in your company. How many open source tools are you using, that you take for granted, that you expect to do their job? None? You would be the first person, I guess. And then you are afraid of commiting your little script to the world and make it open source? Sorry, but that is just egostic. Ok, the business is egostic nowadays, but the real question is: Are you saving money?

If you sell your work to a customer, who is paying you for reinventing the wheel, even though there is exactly the same tool, or even a better tool available as open source, then you are making money, of course! Good job, may be your customer discovers that some time and says good bye, if not be happy and reinvent things. Must be a boring job :-).

I don’t feel like writing anymore about it, there are surely better articles exactly about this topic, find and read them I will go for my Döner now. Good night …

Open source versus proprietary software: a discussion

I have found a very nice mod_rewrite tutorial, it is a little less geeky and ‘jucier’ than the official Apache URL Rewriting Guide.

In case you every forget how to create a virtual host on a Mac OS X (like I did), this article just reminded me how.

fscklog pointed me to an interesting technique called liquid browsing, I have to say awesome! Just watch the video and you will see how useful that is for browsing categorized data, I can imagine a lot of use cases for it. Wow, I will be watching …

Feedreaders are a nice thing, but still have way of what I want. Actually I want to have feedreader that understands my interests and realizes that, when I have only half read an article that it either marks it as not-interesting or unread (it should be able to find out). I should be able to rate articles and tell other “go away”. May be I would give it a week to learn what I want, but after that I want it to know! Searching through all the articles that had landed on my desk(top) and finding the interesting ones is one of the things that is pretty time consuming.

My current strategy is that I have stripped down the number of blog I subscribed to and I only have one category called “Read always”, which contains about 30 blogs. Mostly those are family related blogs and a couple of those that I am interested in. When I am bored I go into the other categories and read articles there, but that happens like once a week.

Actually I imagined a system that does all that news-reading stuff for me but as audio, so that I can be on my way home and when putting on my headphones it gives me an overview of what news might be interesting for me. With two buttons on my (remote) control I tell it to skip of remember this article (sometimes I just don’t feel like to certain topics, though they are interesting). And after a while this news-reader (which is a real reader!!!) will also have learned, that I don’t want to listen to the difficult technical stuff when I am on my way home really late at night, but that I want some easier topics or even music (though that happens rarely :-)). Let’s keep dreaming …

Finally Safari gets some developer usable tools. The Web inspector introduced a little while ago is still in development but available via the nightly builds. Now I only want a JavaScript console and even better a debugger. I haven’t developed much JavaScript for Safari yet, but if it has no JS console it is a drag. Hopefully the day I have to take on Safari it will :-).

a spanish delicacy, created by Mayflower GmbH, the well known Munich-based PHP specialist, will be presented at CeBit these days. Just the logo has something to do with a sausage, Chorizo will show you where your web application is vulnerable.

Initially Chorizo is focused on PHP based applications, which have a big potential of vulnerabilities. Later Mayflower will add support for other languages as well. But the plugin mechanism enables you already now to add your own test cases.

To set up Chorizo you only need to tell your browser to use a proxy and you can start shivering. Chorizo will surely find the security wholes in your application and you will need to work overtime. Go and check it out and make your apps secure!

Here is the screencast.

Not everything is great about having a Mac. But the one thing that really drives me crazy is when I hit the wrong key combination, especially when it is Apple+Q instead of Apple+W.
Apple+W is for closing a window, such as in my editor, Firefox, Safari or whatever application.
Apple+Q, which laying right beside it (!!!) is for quitting the entire application.
It is just very sad when I close the entire application though I only wanted to close a window of it.

I am using ShowOff as a screensaver and every time I put the Mac to sleep I jump higher the closer the uptime comes to 10 days. But somehow it happens that I don’t reach the 10 days. I use my computer every day and I wake it up multiple times every day, so it’s not bored for sure. But the maximum I manage to reach is 10 days. But not because I am restarting my Mac on purpose, just because it crashes always around 9 days or the latest when it reaches 10 days, last crash yesterday. It always crashes when I wake it up from sleep mode and even before the login screen appears it asks me to restart, it does that nicely but that doesn’t help :-(. May be I should file a bug report to Apple and tell them to increase this timer a bit, 30 days would be cool i think :-).

May be I should learn how to read faster and how to suck information into my brain at a higher speed. I just need a loooong time to read long articles. I enjoy reading articles on Joel on Software or by Paul Graham as much as I hate it. Just because it takes me hours to finish them, I am just tooo slow reading them. I am sure there is a service that converts their blog articles into podcasts. Just get their voice scheme from any of the interviews they have given and generate the article as podcasts.

I don’t want to compare my thought spitting on this blog to the articles mentioned above. But I might be allowed to say that my slowness is the reason why my articles are that short. And, the shorter the article the less errors I can make, hehe.

Yeah, I partly used to read some articles using my Mac’s function to read out selected text, but that is actually harder to follow than reading it myself. And it’s not just one click either. Mmmmh, if all the blogs would just make all their articles available in full length via RSS I could imagine a service which converts them into a podcast and I can just use my iTunes to synch those blogs as audio …

Oh yes, that would really take my laziness to the next level!

Today I read that Google is working on Goobuntu. And that Google has an eye on Napster. Is Google sucking in everything possible?

Yesterday I had heard some podcast (as usual from venturevoice) where the interviewee (the founder of blogger.com, it was) mentioned that he didn’t really understand why Google wanted to buy blogger.com. It just didn’t seem to fit in a search engine company (or may be even an ad seller in the second place), what in his opinion Google was at that time. But when gmail came out, he said it became more obvious. But does it really make sense buying all those companies? What is Google’s big goal?

To me it seems that they are unfocused and don’t only want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It rather seems like another big company specialized in online services. Aren’t we waiting for a Google portal which just combines all the services under one hat? Is it not the next logic step to prevent having a sites per service and use the synergy effects (great words “synergy effects”, reminds me of viagra, hehe) even more intensely? So will Google just be another Yahoo?
Even this mind gambling is kinda tricky to do. The strategy seems a bit blurred. Or is it that the size Google has reached constrains them to buy all those companies and do all those things?

I am sure there are enterprise services Google offers and that they make a lot of money with. But are those bunch of services they blow out (maps, gmail, orkut, froogle) not just the means to sell ads? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind it. But then they are just a potential buyer for all companies/services/sites that attract enough people to generate revenue by ads. And that again would prove the theory that Google is unfocused and does not only want to organize the world’s information. Ok, it would only be unfocused concerning this fact but if you see revenue as a focus they are definitely not unfocused!

May be I should just inform myself a bit better, or I am just jealous

I am using Desktop Manager since the beginning, and it is just great. It handles everything: X11, Exposé, the Dock and everything just as I would expect it. It doesn’t show any unexpected bahviour as many of the other virtual desktop managers do.

Now I start having wishes of what I would like to have additionally. Since my PowerBook is my tool for everything I am also mixing work and private very much on it. I want my desktop manager to know when I am in a business environment (by detecting the network location(s)) and turning on/off applications or even switching between entire sets of virtual desktops. That would be cool. When I go home and I open my laptop, it connects to my home network it should automatically detect that and turn off all the business stuff, e.g. the TimeLog tool, etc. and it should turn on my NewsFeed reader, the IRC client and so on.
A first step might be adding rows of screens to the Desktop Manager, that would already help a lot. I would simply have a row of virtual screens that contains all the private apps and another with all the business stuff.

Well I downloaded the source, may be I get do dive into the code some day …

Ori just released a new verison of TestOOB, congrats. I had actually planned to contribute another tiny feature, but didn’t get around to implement it yet, but I will get into gears now.

Great tool …

Quite a while ago I had written that I wanted a QuickSilver plugin for dict.leo.org the best and most exhaustive german-english translator. Well I was playing around with QuickSilver, I even got the plugin from the tutorial running. But I realized the easiest way is still

• launch QuickSilver
• type “l” (lower case “L”), which brings me to my Safari history for dict.leo.org, if that’s not the case in your QuickSilver, make it learn by typing “leo” and finding the right history, you must have been on the page before, of course, and the next time you type “leo” it should appear first, by the time it will do so for “L” too
• hit ENTER
• and you are right at the input field of the page
• type the word, hit ENTER
• done.

A little while ago I was discussing with some friends why dynamic languages (I mean those that allow for rapid prototyping, such as Python) are not used more often on embedded devices. And one argument was that those languages need dynamic memory management, which sounds reasonable. So it would take quite something to run Python on some embedded device and build all the necessary memory management etc. around it. But hardware is getting cheaper and even faster, Flash RAM could replace a hard disk and you could be up an running in a low budget area. Just throw Damn Small Linux on it and that’s it.

Ok, there are some embedded devices that are just too small or have too time critical applications where you can’t do that. But DSL just refreshes this question in my head, since I am currently working with embedded devices again. I think the good old C will stick around, of course, but dynamic languages will more and more spread where C is still used. The prices just have to drop and the devices just need to get smaller. Or not?

Just imagine which impact that would have on the development cycles, the stability and testability of this kind of software. When you are programming you actually don’t want to manage the memory, you want to solve a problem. And this fact needs to be more focused on when programming. And languages like C just don’t allow that.

There is hope …

Update:
Bertrand just commented about Nokia putting Python on their Series 60.

Yes, I am writing stuff and not hacking. Sometimes that is fun, if it doesn’t last for too long. And I was, again, looking for how to insert cross-references inside a document, to another chapter (to figures it is really easy)! Just read here how to do it.

Mmmh, I have included the Google Analytics code in this page on Friday I think, but still no result. It still tells me

Tracking Unknown
The Google Analytics tracking code has not been detected on your website’s home page. For Analytics to function, you or your web administrator must add the code to each page of your website.

And I am so curious to know what kind of traffic I got (almost none I guess, anyway). I don’t think the problem is that the http://wolfram.kriesing.de is just a redirect, because that is the URL Google only accepts (doesn’t allow http://wolfram.kriesing.de/blog). Waiting …