Make sure your Laptop doesn’t feel naked! You want a dojo sticker? Let’s meet at the next dojo.beer() and you will get one for sure! But please, don’t torture your Laptop 
by not having one.
The picture was taken at lunch at the AIA 2008, which was a great event. We had a lot of fun and besides evangelizing for dojo we from uxebu tried to promote our AJAX+JavaScript services, hopefully successful.
I just found eye-fi via the Sitepen blog. Just mix wifi and a flash card and you got more spare time and less cables hanging around. Cool.
I open this screencast (and I love to watch screencasts before trying the demo). And I see it is 10 minutes long, it has no chapter markers and I don’tknow which parts I can skip to really only see what I am interested in.
So let me just adjust the playback speed! That would be so cool! Whenever I think it’s interesting I just slow down the video speed (if I have not yet gotten used to the speed :-)).
Just give it to me I am an information junkie, but I need to consume faster, so I can consum more!
Nachdem freelancermap.de mir mehrere Mails schickte mit dem Subject “Projektanfrage” oder “Termin zum Vorstellungsgespräch” oder so ähnlich und weiterführende Links mich immer nur zum Bezahlen aufforderten entschied ich mich den Account zu kündigen. Eine wirklich nette Mail kam als Antwort:
Thanks to this blog article I found Katapult, which is basically the same as QuickSilver for Mac OS X, without which I couldn’t live anymore. And since I have my Ubuntu screen placed right beside my Mac’s screen and am using only one mouse and keyboard for both thanks to synergy, I was moving over to the Ubuntu screen and wanted to start an app by hitting APPLE+Space … doh … no way. So finding Katapult just really makes working with Ubuntu easier. Though it is a KDE app Ubunbtu let’s you run it and you don’t even realize that.
Ubuntu is just great.
Finally I got around to setup a proper system at home, after a while of thinking that a laptop is the overall best solution I am happy to have two 19" BenQ FP93G X, one connected to my main machine, the still in use G4 15" PowerBook and the other one hooked to some older AMD about 2GHz running Ubuntu.
And today I connected the awesome sound system SoundSticks II from harman/kardon. After a little of searching I also found out how to turn up the volume. And they even had thought of allowing to adjust the direction the satellite speakers point, this sound is just awesome. And now listen to Pet Shop Boys Sodom (Trentemoller Remix) (link to iTunes) and this system was worth every cent!
Actually I do only want to know about objects in my application, I don’t really need a relational database in the common sense below my application. It’s just one more level where data have to be mapped to something unnatural. So why should I not start looking a bit closer into real object storage, like db4objects does it. I will have to take the time, may be I can cut another unnecessary layer of complexity from my application.
The technology is always making us take a detour, simply because it is not really a human thing to use. How human is it to communicate with each other by converting our interaction signals (voice, gestures, …) into digital streams of multiple zeros and ones. This is so awkward and simply feels unnatural. The same applies to writing web applications.
First we are limited by the capabilities of the browser. Then we have to support all the browsers, that in turn again implement the same technology in different ways. Beyond the browser we have to communicate over a dumb protocol, which does not allow for real interaction and actually makes us covert our data in a way so that we can send them over the protocol. Next and probably the worst of all, is we are trying to use those data in a way that has a completely different way of modeling the data then the actual usage case does it. Wouldn’t it be ideal to auto-determine what and how to persist data, states and combinations of them by “scraping” the user interface that is created for the user? Why do we have to map the user interface first to some low-end technology, some markup, later convert it into data streams, use it with objects and finally persist it in a completely different final format, in a database. Oh man, this seems soo much overhead and error-prone. But I am getting too philosophical. Back to work …
I just came across those three very interesting articles (they are linked one among another, so finding them was easy :-)). Since I am building a new web app I have to think about the following things. And I have to do it better than I thought before I read those articles.
The well-known article Cool URIs don’t change from Tim Berners-Lee.
URL as UI is also about URI design, it contains a couple more practical tips and some reasoning that I should really consider when creating my URIs like: easy to type, all one case, hackable, no longer than 78 characters, etc…
And I should read this one about Usability of Confirmation Email and Transactional Messages, it just costs a US$100.
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.
Since I used to work in this field, it was really interesting to read this article Introduction to Smart Cards. Especially bearing in your mind the combination of secure cards and distributed apps on the web …
Future for smart cards depends mainly on the introduction of multi-application cards and overcoming the simplistic mindset that smart cards are just a method of making a payment.
If you have a great idea and want to given away the source code for free and not earn millions - now you can do it at the c’t Masup competition. You only have to write a cool application, a Mashup web app and give away the source code including SQL dumps and documentation, of course! And if you get lucky you get a free iPod video for it. Yippi … let’s start coding :-).
It is already a lot of years ago, that I was in the United States as an exchange student and going to highschool and later college (TSJC) but the later was just two weeks, which I enjoyed very much nevertheless. And since then I was always trying to kind of look around the area where I used to be and now I found city-data.com, which has very many infos and even some pics of Garden City, Kansas and Trinidad, Colorado. Quite interesting …
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 …
I was just listening to Clayton Christensen’s, the inventor of the term disruptive technology, speech “Capturing the upside” from the OSBC 2004. When he uses the example of open source tools, which sometimes have less features and might be harder to use and claims this as a disruptive technology my brain started to draw the line to EQing.
But lets go slowly here. What are those two things?
A disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill [...] or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements [...].
And EQing is a technology introduced by Kathy Sierra.
An audio equalizer was a natural metaphor for us, and [...] we use the concept of EQing to brainstorm new designs.
Christensen states that open source is a great example for disruptive technology, because it (sometimes) brings products to the market that are crummier. The disruption is not a breakthrough improvement but a redefinition of improvement.
It performed so poorly that it couldn’t be used by customers in the main stream. But it brought to the market a simpler and more affordable product that allowed a whole new population of people to begin owning and using it.
This quote is just something that EQing is projecting very nicely as moving sliders. You just (create and) move the sliders “number of features” and “usability” way down, which results in moving the sliders “price” down (or simply remove it :-)) and “availablity” further up (there might be better names for the sliders). May be I don’t hit the nail exactly on the head. But I hope you know what I mean. Disruptive technologies might come around by just tweaking a set of parameters of existing technologies/products. Somehow the EQing technique is very nice to picture what happens. I might start using it a bit more intensively.
Not to forget that Christensen says later this product at some point also intersects with the main stream.
Please note that I did not try to explain the theories in detail neither I enlightened you on all parts of it. I only pulled out those parts that I think had an interconnection for me at this point in time. The entire theories are much more exhaustive than stated here.
That is actually what I always had wished for to have, just collect and put all the stuff together that I get from all the different kind of sources.
plum.com is a free Internet service for collecting and sharing the things you care about, stumble across or need. With plum.com it’s a snap to grab almost anything from the Web (pages, text, photos, feeds), as well as from your desktop, e-mail, and share it in any form - as a blog, list, album, or live feed. Plum’s patent-pending Meta-Match technology connects people and their knowledge with higher relevance than ever before.
The sad thing about it is that a friend and I we were working on just the same thing but we never got it that far, we dropped the idea after almost two years of development … I will follow plum.com closely. Watch the presentation they gave at DEMO 2006, it rocks! Unfortunately its not available yet …
Find out when my watch arrived. Just look at the picture and you should know. To make it not too easy, subtract ten minutes, because the picture was ten minutes after the UPS guy rang the bell! Finally I got my ubercool christmas present, yes.
Now I am going to wear a watch again after at least 10 years without! Let’s see if I will get used to it. If not my wife will get mad I guess.
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
Just a minute ago Alice was at my door. Really, she wanted to take over all my communication channels and suck my money out of me. I thought she was pretty, but I think she is really ugly. Don’t let the images trick you!
I am still baffled by the rudeness that guy was putting on.
The bell rang, I opened and there were two guys standing there. The one closest to me was the one talking. He was holding a block of paper and looked like some official guy that came to read the gas counter or alike. But when he said “I am coming to inform you that we are lowering the prices.” I knew there was something wrong with this guy. He was looking at me the first 10 seconds just to have eye contact (Oh, God. I made eye contact. - Wayne’s World). Then he looked down on his paper while talking to me, which - I have to admit - was smart and made me feel like I had to give answers and have to act now. Clever but quite rude!
I asked him what company he is from and what he wants. He was talking really quick, almost as if he intended me not to understand him and said “Alice whatever”. In Germany Alice is quite known I guess, they had some clever advertising everywhere. And until today Alice was kind of sympathetic to me - not anymore!
I still had the feeling as if I was in charge of telling this guy something and that I owed him. It took me a while to realize that I just had to tell him to go home and that I could also let my lips form the words. I told him that I do already have a phone company that I am happy with. He said that he could also offer DSL, which I replied again that I have that too and I am happy with it. It was kind of friendly but actually each one of us just had one goal. He wanted me to sign a contract and I just wanted to close my door as soon as possible.
Finally, I guess it was not even a minute, I told him that I will not become his customer and closed the door. Oh man, that somehow left me quite surprised but actually just because of his cold-blooded way of talking me into a contract. Shivery …
Picture from www.alice-dsl.de
I was not really waiting for it, but that is something everybody should know by heart: Wayne’s World quotes!
Other people love Dilbert, Donald Duck, Batman, etc …