What happens when people organize themselves to make one huge order at McDonald's?
Maybe, before going to McDonald's the next time, I should google the restaurant first. I'd hate to wait in such a queue.
(Thanks, Andy!)
As you already know, I'm really excited about the Mac and its OS X. And with great new Apple products having been revealed on MacWorld yesterday, I decided to do a series of blog entries about my first steps with the Mac. I hope that they will be interesting especially to other Mac rookies.
My Apple mania started when I read all the stories from other Mac users on the Web that were equally excited and wrote about the great tools they improved their web design, software development and overall productivity with. After an incubation time of a few weeks, I decided to shell out the money for the then newly released Mac Mini Core Duo with 1.83 MHz. I was hooked from day one on.
When you take a first look at Apple computers, you can't help but admire the appeal of their design, their look is a welcome alternative to all those white PC boxes. The Mac Mini I got myself is the understatement of a desktop computer, just a little silver box with a CD slot in the front, some peripheral ports in the back and a big Apple logo on top. But what more do you need? Well, an inside that matches the quality of the exterior, of course. With the Intel Core Duo processors, you have more than enough CPU power to do the usual things. Professionals that need even more CPU power or better graphics than the Intel on-board graphics the Mini offers should get the Mac Pro with 4 or 8 cores and high-power graphics.
When I switched my Mac on for the first time, I was immediately greeted by a chord sound that brought up happy memories of SGI workstations. The boot time is impressively short -- you won't have to go to the fridge to bridge the time until the login screen or desktop appears.
I've been a Linux fan for more than 10 years, using it on many servers as well as on my desktops and laptops. I really like the KDE desktop, it's really mature and there are many fine applications, smaller and bigger. But one thing that can still be annoyingly difficult is getting hardware to work. And that's where Apple has its strongest advantage: they know every hardware their OS runs on like the palm of their hands. So far, I never had problems with instable hardware, crashing drivers or other nuisances. It just works.
The best computer system is worthless if there's no good software for it. But that certainly doesn't concern the Mac platform. With OS X and iLife coming with the computer, you get a whole package of productive applications like the audio recording software GarageBand and iPhoto for picture management. All applications are well-integrated with each other, for example you can directly drag and drop pictures from iPhoto to GarageBand and store them in the MP3 file you're creating. And of course, there are lots of great third party extensions and applications. I'll blog about them in later entries.
Installing software in OS X doesn't demand from you to click through a multitude of dialog windows. You just open the installation package and drag the program icon into your Applications folder. That's it. And guess how you do an uninstall? No, you just move the icon from Application into Trashcan.
So, I'm a really happy Mac user and can only recommend you to have a look or two at one, too. You may be preaching the gospel of Jobs after a short while, too. ;-)
Wouldn't it be great if getting sued for patent infringement was covered by your company's marketing budget, too? :-)
It’s been months since I changed the RSS link on my blog to a FeedBurner feed because it has a lot of advantages both for me as an author and you, the readers of this blog. For example:
But there’s still quite a number of people that get my entries via the old S9Y feed. If you’re one of them:
Well, there it is: 2007! I hope you people out there had a good start and I wish you all the best!
Carolin and I spent New Year's Eve in Dublin, with the so very nice host family she lived with over the last year while studying at Trinity College. The weather in Dublin was rainy and windy, which certainly contributed to Carolin's cold coming back, so my year started with pampering a girl that was freezing and sneezing. I hope she'll be well again soon.
For me, the past year was great, with many interesting things, some of which I'd like to point out here.
Careerwise, the last year will be called The Schlund+Partner year". I "joined S+P when the WEB.DE portal was acquired by the United Internet group which S+P is a subsidiary of. Since a few days, though, I'm now an employee of 1&1 with which S+P has been merged. Over the past year, the sysadmin team that I lead got some new interesting and demanding responsibilities additional to the user management and billing systems. For example, we now also operate a data warehouse system on a fat IBM p570. My boss and I had to fight for more staff, but finally I was granted more sysadmin positions on the team (some of them still open!). I really enjoy the mix of leadership and technology that my job is about and since I also got great colleagues, I'm really looking forward to the coming months.
After succumbing to the pressure from some of these colleagues, I started playing World of Warcraft I never played more than an occasional round of Quake 2, so seeing how much time I now spend with developing my Tauren druid makes me actually ask myself if I'm gradually getting addicted. It is so much fun to explore a virtual fantasy world and try to reach goals of increasing difficulty, often with the help of other players.
That I can play WoW at all is due to the fact that I got myself a Mac Mini Having also purchased an iPod Nano before, I've kind of mutated into an Apple fanboy. The experiences I had with their products so far tells me that Apple listens to what customers want and need. Their devices just work easy and intuitive. I feel respected as a product user which makes me a loyal customer in return. Sure, I'm still convinced that nothing beats Linux on the server side, but if I'd get the offer to exchange my Kubuntu ThinkPad with a MacBook, I wouldn't hesitate a second.
I not only started listening to podcasts but also producing one myself Podcasts are a great way of spending my commuting time with entertainment and learning.
And my daily commuting time actually tripled after we had moved to Freiburg in october. We had our doubts about living together for the first time in 8 years of our relationship, but we're really happy. 2006 actually is the year we changed from "relationship" back to "love" again. I'm really lucky to have you in my life, Carolin. And I'll do my best to keep it that way.
Well, talking about new year's resolutions, I have to say that I usually try not to get into that game. We all know that "the road to hell is paved with good intententions", as most resolutions don't ever get resolved anyway. And that's exactly what happened to me also all through the past year: there were just too many goals that I didn't reach. Sometimes, they were unrealistic from the beginning, others I just didn't follow through. That's a depressing thing to notice. So, if there is one important thing I'd like to change in 2007, it's to follow master Yoda's maxim: "Do or do not. There is no try." If you're interested in what I actually do -- keep reading this blog. :)
So, dear readers, how started 2007 for you and what are your expectations or resolutions for the coming year?
Although I claim to be living online, I won't be particularly connected to the net for the rest of the year. I've just arrived in Philippsburg to celebrate the holidays with my and Carolin's family and friends. Sadly, before she and I will be flying over to Ireland to spend New Year's Eve in Dublin, we'll have to attend the burial of her grandad who passed away last sunday.
Therefore, I, like many others, won't be as responsive as usual over the last days of 2006. But of course, emails will reach me: I'm typing this at my dad's computer, there are internet cafes, and finally, with my trusty E61, I can get an internet connection almost everywhere.
So, take care, folks, and thanks for all the great feedback over the past year. Have some blessed christmas days and a good start into a happy new year! "Peace" is one of the most important words in the story of Jesus' birth. Whatever that word means to you -- be it not having to work for some days, the company of people you love, or some quiet time without disturbances and sorrow -- may you enjoy it!
Merry christmas, see you in 2007!
Not only because I always have to have some Linux on my computer, but also because I often need a Linux system available for training and testing purposes, I installed Parallels Desktop for Mac on my Mac Mini yesterday. Parallels provides a virtual environment for installing other operating systems like Windows or Linux[1]. Its virtual harddisk files, its installation wizard as well as the start, stop and restart buttons on the guest OS window very much remind of VMware, but with a license fee of 79 Euro, there's quite a price difference, isn't it?
It took me 3 minutes to install Parallels -- you have to love the OS X installation process -- and then I tossed in the Ubuntu 6.06 server CD to install my first guest OS. After choosing Debian Linux" in the installation wizard, Parallels suggested appropriate environment settings and I only reduced the virtual harddisk size to 3 GB[2]. Ubuntu installed flawlessly, but after restarting the virtual machine, the boot process stopped at "loading the kernel". A quick search on the "Parallels user forum unearthed that you have to install the Ubuntu 686 kernel to fix that problem. So, after booting into the Ubuntu rescue shell and issuing sudo apt-get install linux-686" (as described in this "forum entry), Ubuntu started into the login prompt as desired.
I'm quite impressed how easy it is to install and maintain virtual machines on Mac OS X using Parallels. I have no doubt that I'll gladly shell over the 79 Euro after the 2-week trial period is over.
fn1. Solaris, BSD and even OS/2 are supported, too.
fn2. I really need an additional harddrive.
In Mike Arrington's opinion, the new POP fetching mechanism was Google Mail's missing piece to perfection Even though I like GMail very much, I'm not quite that excited. Neither is Om from Web Worker Daily
If I want to collect emails in a central Google mailbox, I can simply forward emails from other accounts to GMail. But with the central mailbox, there comes the problem of multiple email addresses: Regardless if mails came in via forwarding or via polling another account, users usually want to answer them with the email address the mails were originally directed to. GMail actually does allow sending responses with another verified sender address, but the mandatory "Sender" header Om describes ("on behalf of [@gmail.com](http://gmail.com)") confuses some email clients like MS Outlook and gets displayed to the recipient instead of the sender address chosen. So, your usage of GMail as your central mail hub is not really as transparent to the public as you'd probably like.
Having access to my email everywhere I have web access (and with the Nokia E61, that's pretty much everywhere I have a cell phone connection) is really nifty. And I like Google Mail's spam filter and tagging features. But on the other hand, the service still lacks import and export functions that allow users to transfer all their archived mail to Google as well as to back up their important communication pieces. Oh, and POP doesn't get replaced more and more by IMAP for no reason -- what about offering this much more powerful mail access protocol? Integration with Google Calender could be improved, too. So, the service still has some steps to go on its road to perfection.
Well, with Christmas coming and all, what's on your wish list for a perfect email solution?
I'm totally flabbergasted: Bill Gates not only has common sense, he even shows it in public! TechCrunch reports from Gates' meeting with bloggers where he expressed his dissatisfaction with DRM technology:
There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and "we need more flexible models, such as the ability to buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific. His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."
Amazing. Just amazing.
The german company Walther produces juice beverages and publishes Walthers Saftblog ("Walther's Juice Blog"), one of the most successful business blogs in Germany. Well, it seems more appropriate to say "published", since they decided today to shut their blog down after receiving a c&d letter from the German Olympic Sports Union ("Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund", DOSB).
In the 17-pages document, Walther is accused of, among others, exploitation of reputation, copyright infringement, deception and trademark infringement for publishing two harmless blog entries about the Olympic Games (entry 1&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 explaining the difference between the Olympiad and the Olympic Games, entry 2&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 about Germany's olympic successes).
German attorney and law blogger Udo Vetter can't find any offences, though. (At the most a small one, namely using the olympic rings logo without attribution.)
Of course, the german blogosphere reacts in the same way it did for example in the Heidi Klum incident it turns up the heat.
Once again, the blogosphere deals out wrath to one side and love to the other: For the DOSB, this could become a PR nightmare, with many bloggers writing articles on their websites as well as emails and letters to the DOSB. The Marketing Blog even plans a survey among the organization's sponsors.
On the other hand, company director Kirstin Walther expressed her amazement of all that support by strangers in an addendum to her blog entry&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more592 where she announced the shutdown of their blog. Let's hope they give that step a second thought. We all want justice to win, not the lawyers.
Finally, The New York Times columnist David Pogue debunks all the badmouthing of Windows Vista being just a cheap rip-off of Mac OS X:
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDNuq94Zg_8])
(via Mac Essentials)
"Auf dem Gleis" -- that's the title of an article about the Catalyst web framework for Perl in the german IT magazine "iX" . That title is a little side blow meaning that you don't necessarily need Ruby on Rails to efficiently get a web application with only a few lines of code.
The article from Jens M. Nödler and Sebastian Willert gives the reader a quick insight into how Catalyst works. It begins with installation instructions, shows how to code database access and user interaction by means of a small example application and ends with adding the Prototype JavaScript framework to the mix to integrate AJAX functionality.
So, if you're a german speaking Perl developer that's not yet using Catalyst for his web applications, have a look at iX issue January 2007.
Choosing a content management system is getting more and more difficult, because the amount of alternatives keeps growing almost by the day. First, there are the open source solutions like Joomla, Typo3, Drupal or WebGUI. Or should it be a more "professional" (aka proprietary) software like CoreMedia or Contens? Which features offered by a certain CMS are the ones you need? And what crucial features does it lack?
Already in 1998, when I had to choose a CMS for the company I was working at at that time, defining the necessary functions and comparing CMS solutions was so time-consuming that I made that task a diploma thesis for a student working at the IT department. Up to today, the expense of comparing CMS software has risen by orders of magnitude.
But The CMS Matrix comes to the rescue. This website lists several hundred CMS solutions from "Ariadne Content Manager" to "Zumu Software" and facilitates the comparison of up to 10 of them at a time. The task of defining your needs is still yours, but finding the one CMS that suits them best has gotten a lot easier.
I'm an uncurable optimist, believing in good and expecting to make a difference. People can debate endlessly if it's better to be a pessimist and not be disappointed or to be an optimist and have a happy perspective on things. For me, I'd say that optimism is the better approach -- it can even be fueled by pessimism, as I learned today.
At work, many of us write short daily reports of our accomplishments and decisions. Two of my coworkers obviously dealt with the same problem, but in different ways:
First, R. sent his daily:
Regarding the memory leak in GNU awk: Since I as an "old naysayer" don't suppose that it can be fixed anyway, I configured some resource capping.
S. later wrote in his report:
I'm gonna show that "old naysayer" R. I fixed the memory leak in gawk and sent it to the GNU developers. I'd have done that anyway, but now more than ever. :P
Getting things done also is an attitude.
Other than Spiegel Online International (why doesn't the german version report it as well?), I don't care if a great part of the german population will get american or british humour. I know I do.
And I also know that most of the dubbing staff doesn't.
Because I don't want to have to translate a sentence back into English word by word to recover its punch line, the great news of Comedy Central making a german channel,1518,449206,00.html quickly became a disappointment. Well, at least there's the Daily Show Global Edition on CNN. And, of course, YouTube.
If you're anything like me, your user accounts collection keeps growing week by week. All those Web 2.0 applications require a personal account with user name and password. Some let you choose the login name yourself, others generate it automatically from other information you input, e.g. your real name. Passwords make the whole thing even more complicated. But I finally found a solution that puts security in balance with ease of use.
There are many websites that offer advice on choosing a good password. Some of the basic rules are:
The problem is that most hard to find passwords are also hard to remember. There's a way around that problem by deriving the password from an easy to remember sentence. For example, from the initial characters in "Another two pints of Guinness, please", you get "A2poGp". But the number of easy to remember sentences is limited, too.
Because I wanted to get rid of the nagging feeling I got from using the same password over and over, I decided on getting a password management software that securely stores my account collection and lets me easily retrieve them.
Tom Raftery swears by Keychain as password manager But, additional to my Mac Mini, I have an IBM laptop with Linux on it, so I was searching for a cross-platform solution.
float: right; border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;" src="/uploads/keepass.png" alt="" />I found "KeePass KeePass is available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux and it stores all your login data in a securely encrypted file that you can put on an USB stick.
The USB stick with the KeePass file on belongs to those items I carry around in my backpack all the time. So, if I'm at work, I can plug the thumb drive into my Linux laptop. At home, I plug it into my Mac's USB port. Since KeePass uses the same file format and encryption algorithm on all platforms, I have access to my login data everywhere, just by entering my master password at the KeePass startup screen. (That's the one password I actually have to remember although it's a really tough one.)
KeePass is easy to use and has many sensible functions:
And, keeping the best for last: KeePass is free software. So, what's your lame excuse for still using your girlfriend's name as your single password? ;-)
Stress at the workplace is a common topic everywhere and increasingly a cause of health problems.
I'm a -passionate- Stoic, so I'm very hard to get stressed. Even today, having to do all the work myself because everyone of my team is either ill or coming late for a night shift, I don't feel particularly uncomfortable.
I don't like being stressed, so I do everything to avoid it. That doesn't necessarily mean that I try to avoid work, though. In the contrary -- I dislike boredom as much as I dislike stress. "I'm not stressed, I just have a lot to do" is one of my favourite responses when people are concerned about my workload.
One measure for building a wall between Busyland and Stressland is organization. Approaches like Getting Things Done aim at actively managing one's tasks instead of being managed by them. They also build a feeling of accomplishment. It's like a good workout at the gym: having done a lot of work doesn't necessarily mean that you'll go home exhausted and tired -- it can even give you additional energy and motivation.
It's a myth that stress is equal to workload and can be overcome by more or less work. It's even more a myth that stress is an indicator of how important you are at your company. Stress is only an indicator for how good you feel at work, and it always is a negative one. Chief Happiness Officer" Alexander Kjerulf debunks the "Top 5 myths about workplace stress in his blog.
To accept stress as a normal condition of work is bad for people and bad for business!" is the central important insight in his article. In my opinion, it's one of managers' top priorities to shield their subordinates and themselves from stress. Even if that means "doing strange things because they help to discharge.
A few days ago, Bloglines added a playlist feature to their online feed reader: Just like titles in a music collection, you can group your feeds into separate playlists that make reading of new blog entries and news as well as listening to new netcast episodes much easier.
You can group your feeds at your choosing, so for example, you can make a "almost no time" playlist that only contains the most important information sources that you want to tap even when there's only little time.
I'm quite happy with Bloglines adding practical features periodically, and no other RSS aggregating service could so far draw me away from Bloglines.
Of course I had a look at the new Google Reader, and it really is nice. The user interface, e.g. the "mark the entry as read not until I actually read it" feature, is great. But Google Reader falls short in one area that is very important to me: mobile access. While Google also offers a mobile version of their feed reader, you can't choose which feeds you actually want to read when you're on the road. It just displays everything, in chronological order. That's very impractical when you subscribe to high volume feeds like Engadget or the Perl Monastery. I don't want to have to go through hundreds of product announcements on my smartphone before I get to the feeds of my friends.
Bloglines allows me to choose which feeds should be displayed in the mobile version. And with their new playlist feature, they make displaying different feeds in different situations even more flexible and easy.
Today, I discovered two completely different areas where playlists can bring both order and diversity into your stuff:
First, there's music collections. I guess that's what you thought of when you read playlists". With playlists, you can divide your music into different categories, genres, moods and so on. What I really got to appreciate are iTunes' "Intelligent Playlists". Those playlists are not simple static folders you drag and drop your songs into, but dynamic collections of music meeting certain user-defined criteria. If you want to see some examples how you can get the maximum out of those music organization tools, read about "Merlin Mann's playlists
There's another kind of collection that can also be organized with playlists: From now on, you can make playlists of your Bloglines RSS feeds#128. But I'll write about that soon in another article.
This morning, the conductor not just took a short glance over people's tickets, but took the time to chat a bit with kids and intensively comparing the photo on my commuter card with the real thing: "Well... Hm... Okay. Hair two millimetres longer on the picture, but... Okay." He then complimented on the photo of the woman vis-a-vis and left us smiling. Having some fun on my early morning commute isn't that common, and didn't happen at all when I had been driving to work alone in my car. So this will unconsciously, but certainly, affirm my decision to take the train.
There are a lot situations that you're used to endure, but not to enjoy. It's where you think, "I may have to be here, but I'd rather be somewhere else." The daily commute is one such situation, and being at work is one of those, too. So if you want people to draw a connection between work and fun, put some fun in for them!
For example, I often do unexpected things that make people laugh. As a boss, I'm not expected to make public semi-rude comments about my team, so I do. Of course, I make it obvious that I'm joking. There are so many ways of turning wrinkled brows into smiles. (Oh, here's the conductor again consulting the girl over there on keeping her teddy bear warm.) Noone likes brown-nosed people, so in management meetings (that most people outside our department probably consider boring) I blatantly confirm that I share my boss's opinion (and try not to get beaten up by my fellow leads). What happens is that there's more energy around the table for some time.
Put a smile on people's face. Brighten up their day. Help them feel they're at exactly the right place to be.
I wish we had a saying in German that stresses the importance of clear facts and messages as well as the english "To assume makes an ass out of u and me." It's true: if you have to guess about things you may very well end up guessing wrong. So you don't want people guessing about you, neither.
Two examples out of my recent experience show why sending clear messages is not as common as it is helpful.
Example one: A coworker recently complained to me, "I can't believe he hasn't finished his task yet, given that the deadline is tomorrow!" When I asked him, "Did you tell him that you want him to have it finished until today?", he answered, "Well, we already talked about the deadline three weeks ago!"
Another colleague had gotten heavily irritated by coworkers that always interrupted his work, coming directly to his desk instead of just sending an email -- or even coming round immediately after sending one. Because body language alone didn't seem to get the right message over, though, he asked me what do to about it.
I think both cases are in the long run about sending or not sending clear messages. In the first example, yes, there has been talk about the deadline, but to not follow up with a clear mutual agreement that this crucial task has to be finished until then is neglecting the fact that people don't just work on one task. In today's workplace (if it is anything like mine), there are so many projects and distractions begging for everone's attention that we have to make clear statements to ensure people give our goal or project at least nearly as much importance as we do. To assume that people will meet a deadline that has been disussed once quite a while ago is dangerous, to say the least.
But that doesn't mean you have to continually harrass your colleagues or subordinates. After explaining why meeting your goal is important, get the other participants to acknowledge that importance and then agree upon on a delivery date. Put that agreement in writing so that there is something you and your counterparts can fall back to. Then finally get the heck out of their way and let them fulfill their responsibility.
And that brings me to the second example. Let them do their job. If you made clear that the task you want them to do is important and they acknowledged that they share that sense of importance, leave them some air to breathe and some time do work their magic.
People that just come up to my desk and interrupt me either think that I don't have important things to do -- at least not as important as what they want to talk to me about -- or don't think about my situation at all. There are only a few people like my boss that are entitled to push my "priority override" button. Most people belong to the second category, the "not-thinkers". But there's an easy way to make them think (and sometimes, even understand):
The best way of communicating that you don't like being interrupted is, well, communicating. (I wonder if that really is news to you.) Humans do that best with spoken words, so tell them that they are interrupting the task you're doing, that you're not happy about that, and neither won't be the people that gave that task to you. Explain to them that recovering from interruptions takes an enormous effort and be clear that you therefore only want to be interrupted when there's a real emergency. For all other cases there's always email (or even a ticket system, which I highly recommend). They don't want you to be interrupted while you're working on their projects, do they? Well, the Golden Rule applies.
People that don't meet agreed upon deadlines or ones that keep disturbing you even after explaining the consequences of interruptions need special treatment. This could mean a more intensive talk in private, or a talk with their boss. But that's another topic.
Ergo: be clear what you think and what you want people to do or not to do. Telepathy isn't a gift as widely spread as you might assume.
It's a Tauren, dammit! Yes, that's right, I started playing World of Warcraft yesterday. I couldn't resist Armin's pushing any more.
After reaching level 5, I have to admit that it's really fun and captivating. I can see why people spend hours and hours playing WoW.
I don't know yet if I'll get a die-hard player myself, but for now, I'm looking forward to my next round and even more the first raid with my colleagues' guild.
Well, look at that! Seems like the CTO of my former employer started a side business! Could that mean that their new product's success chances aren't as high as they predicted at their recent shareholders' meeting?
Let's hope that's wood burning, not stocks...