Aug 7, 2006
David Golden released an early version of a binary distribution of Perl for Windows called Strawberry Perl The POD says:
The purpose of the Strawberry Perl series is to provide a practical Win32 Perl environment for experienced Perl developers to experiment with and test the installation of various CPAN modules under Win32 conditions, and to provide a useful platform for doing real work.
A problem that arises when you install Perl modules from CPAN are XS modules that need to be compiled. Strawberry Perl solves that problem by including a compiler and a set of pre-installed modules.
Although Strawberry Perl is still in Alpha and not recommended for production usage, it is great to have a Perl distribution that aims at delivering the same power Perl has on Unix to our unfortunate colleagues using Windows.
For more information, also visit win32.perl.org
Aug 6, 2006
I mean, when you're using that mobile phone. It's so annoying when I'm on the train, or even worse, in a restaurant, and someone starts yelling "HELLO? OH, HI! YES. NO. YES, IN AN HOUR. OKAY." And you, what about all those gadgets on your belt? Who are you, Batman? Oh, don't get me even started on -drunk- dialing drivers. It's dangerous enough with all these idiots on the road, we don't need people squinting at their tiny LCDs while doing 130 km/h!
So, please take at look at the Ten Commandments of Cell Phone Etiquette
Aug 5, 2006
In Working on tasks in the right context, I already mentioned ways of managing to-do-lists online. I'm using the more universal Backpack, but there also are web services that are especially geared towards the "Getting Things Done" method of task management.
Zenlist is based on the free GTD software Tracks Usage of Zenlist is also free and the registration process is painless. It looks quite handy to me and I'll give it a test ride.
Another free service is iCommit which also uses the GTD nomenclature of tasks, contexts, projects and so on. To me it doesn't look quite as smooth as Zenlist. That may be one of the reasons that iCommit is getting a complete overhaul at the moment. But it undoubtedly does the job, too.
I'm looking forward to more productivity tools on the web. The beginnings certainly are promising.
Aug 5, 2006
(gefunden bei Gerrit van Aaken)
Aug 5, 2006
(from Japundit)
Aug 3, 2006
Honda produced a great commercial for the Accord showing a Rube Goldberg machine consisting of car parts.
This must have taken a zillion tries but finally was a single shot.
Aug 3, 2006
Wenn die Klügeren nachgeben,tt2m4/panorama/artikel/790/81709/, regieren die Dummen
Ich bin geschockt.
(via Su-Shee)
Aug 1, 2006
A country's economy depends highly on how it acts as a medium for business. The World Bank just issued its report Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs where countries are evaluated on how they facilitate business and job market growth.
In terms of ease of doing business, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA are top. While Ireland ranks at 11, Germany is far behind on rank 19 -- despite the claims of our politicians about how their measures are greatly fostering business.
(via Guy Kawasaki)
Aug 1, 2006
Thanks to Tom&func=viewSubmission&sid=354 and Kluus, I just had a quite different impression from one of my favourite songs, Nightwish's "Wishmaster".
I just watched this YouTube video from a guy that made his own video clip based on misheard lyrics of the song "Hamster -- A dentist..." I had to constrain myself so much from scaring my colleagues by rolling on the floor laughing.
Jul 31, 2006
Seemingly, Kristian Köhntopp wasn't as weary as I was today. In his (obviously german) article Leben mit Fehlern - der Schlüssel zum Scaleout ("Living with errors - the key to scale out"), he describes how to solve scalability problems by implementing software based on a service oriented architecture (SOA) and by loosening requirements.
He explains how too much restrictions, imposed by concepts like Two-Phase Commit or ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), can make scaling an infrastructure a difficult task. Using WEB.DE, MySQL and Amazon as examples, Kris illustrates how using an architecture that employs small distributed services as building blocks, abandoning some of those tight restrictions, and dealing with a certain level of uncertainty or inconsistency makes distributing load and gaining performance a lot easier.
It's an article well worth reading.
Jul 31, 2006
The Oracle DBMS has powerful features for handling big arrays of data. With release 1.18, DBD::Oracle makes these features accessible from Perl DBI:
With this release DBD::Oracle finally implements Oracle's native Array Interface. You will see very dramatic increase in speed. For example; the time for a 2 million plus insert query dropped from well over an hour to less than 10 minutes when using execute_array() and the new code.
For documentation and downloads, go to CPAN~pythian/DBD-Oracle-1.18a/, as usual.
Jul 27, 2006
As a part of the -boot camp- introduction programme our new sysadmins go through, I also give a talk about the concepts of the CORBA middleware architecture. I explain what CORBA is, what its goals are, as well as its advantages and its shortcomings.
I put the slides of my talk (in german language) online just now.
Jul 27, 2006
In a recent poll, 50% of 1,020 Americans declared that they believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003. Last year, it was only 36% that answered this question positively.
Pollsters deemed the increase both "substantial" and "surprising" in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.
It seems that George W. Bushs spin doctors are worth their money. The other possibility is that the average IQ of U.S. citizens is dropping rapidly.
Jul 27, 2006
In a comment on my blog entry Mobile phone backup with ZYB#c707, John pointed to a tutorial on how to use ZYB.com as a kind of middleware for syncing Outlook and your mobile phone.
The idea behind TechTag's How to easily sync Outlook calendar with an ordinary cell phone if you can use the ZYB service not only as a backup facility but also as a "shared storage" to keep two phones in sync, why shouldn't it be possible to sync your phone with your Outlook calendar and contacts via ZYB?
The only problem is how to connect Outlook with ZYB. TechTag tried two different SyncML plugins for Outlook, having more success with the non-free one.
Jul 26, 2006
Did you already do some work on your PC today? Checked your electronic mailbox? Surfed the Web? And everything worked? Maybe you just got some reports that your corporate website is running smoothly and page views are growing and growing?
Well, then maybe it's time that you remember who makes all this possible -- the people working in the background running network cables, installing software, doing upgrades to your hardware and explaining in a soft voice that your printer will function just fine if you actually switch it on.
Yes, I mean those scruffy people in the basement. The sysadmins.
Friday July 28th is System Administrator Appreciation Day Think about something nice and give them some love for them sacrificing their spare time and mental sanity for you.
Jul 26, 2006
From now on, I'll publish my pictures on Flickr You can't give talks about the advantages of the Web 2.0 and stay credible without using these services, can you? ;-)
At the moment, I'm uploading the pictures I took during the journey through Ireland that Carolin, Tom and I went on in 2002. To be exact, jUploadr is doing the upload.
jUploadr is a great tool for annotating, tagging and uploading pictures to Flickr. Since it's written in Java (as you can guess from the initial "j"), it's platform-independent. So it works on Linux and it makes photo sharing on Flickr so much easier: just drag and drop your pictures onto the jUploadr window, type in some headlines, descriptions and tags, and click "Upload!". Easy-peasy.
Jul 26, 2006
Mobile Diva Darla Mack confirms rumours about Skype releasing a mobile version of their VOIP client for Symbian-based mobile phones:
According to Alberto Lorente, managing director of Skype in Spain, from September, Skype will also be compatible with telephones equipped with the operating system Symbian, which is used by Nokia.
That's great news, because the hope of a Skype client coming was one of the reasons I decided to get a Nokia E61.
In other news, there will also be a new version of Skype for Mac OS X (german). That's also great because a MacBook is entry no. 1 on my christmas wish list. :-)
Jul 25, 2006
I like radio drama plays, especially on my iPod when I'm commuting. My favourite is the "Paul Temple" detective series written by Francis Durbridge. Although (or because?) West German Broadcasting (WDR) produced the series[1] already in the Fifties, it's great entertainment to listen to.
From this month on, the PodShow crew around Adam Curry takes its shot at a drama series podcast: Shadow Falls
Shadow Falls tells the eerie tale of a remote Northeastern town that holds secrets some will kill to protect and others will die to expose. Settled 400 years ago by the survivors of a mysterious tradgedy, the people of Shadow Falls have become pawns being used by two supernatural forces seeking to win a war older than time itself, a war which many believe could trigger the Battle of Armageddon, and wipe out humanity as we know it.
The characters are played by professional actors and, much like in Desperate Housewives", there's also an in-story narrator, Molly Hammacher, a girl that vanished in the past. Molly even has her own "Diary Blog giving additional background information.
The first part of the series was released a few days ago. It's great and I'm looking forward to the next one!
Oh, and the title track, I am -- Molly's Theme by Munk, is great as well!
fn1. Obviously, it's a german translation. There's also an english radio drama series of "Paul Temple" available on CD, but I didn't try that yet.
Jul 25, 2006
If you're not a newlywed and don't plan to marry either since you don't even have a girlfriend, maybe you're feeling a little bit lonely right now. Well, using the right technology and strategy, those times can be over!
Johnny is a 22 year old Internet nerd. He works as a programmer with some megacorp, went straight from the computer labs in college to the cubicle farm. He needs to get out more and he needs a girlfriend.
What Johnny -- and you as well -- can do to get a go at the girls describes Damien Mulley (an irish bloke, of course) in his blog entry How to use Google to get a girl and get laid
Jul 24, 2006
According to studies conducted by the "Berlin Institute for application-oriented innovation and future research", male Germans spend half an hour more on household and family time than 10 years ago. Women on the other hand, reduced their weekly household time by 5 hours. (You do the math.)
And while women also spend one hour less with their children, men have increased quality time spent with their offspring by one hour. Interestingly, this hour isn't taken from working time. "The new man actually does exist", the scientists concluded.
(via SPON,1518,428099,00.html)
Jul 24, 2006
It's one thing to create hype about some secret new product that "will revolutionize internet communications". It's another thing to actually have something on his hand when cards are called. And a third one to know how to behave in online space.
COMBOTS, the new project of my former employer WEB.DE AG (before selling the WEB.DE portal to United Internet) uncovered their secret product at this year's stockholders' meeting in mid July. Well, lo and behold -- it's an... instant messaging application. Wow. But wait, it's got funny avatars instead of simple buddy names! And you have to pay if you want a new one. Or a new bodily expression for your current one. Now, that's just great.
Stockholders thought so, too. Their stock value instantly dropped by more than 10%. Screwing the stock options I got when I was hired.
But what concerns me quite a bit more is that, for a company that wants to revolutionize the internet, COMBOTS doesn't seem to know how to behave in that space. Some of their reactions to the dismissal iof their product were as stupid as can be: critical parts in the COMBOTS Wikipedia article were removed several times. The origins of these alterations, as well as these of abating forum and blog comments could be traced back to the COMBOTS company gateway. How boneheaded do you have to be to believe that you can get away with such a threadbare behaviour?
I'm curious how that story will go on. But I don't think I'll ever make some money selling those stock options.
For some more comments (in german), see praegnanz.de, Werbeblogger%e2%80%93-wenig-drunter-3/, or Netzhure
Jul 23, 2006
It's unbelievable: from Monday on, you will be able to use a real Lotus Notes client on Linux!
Think about it: Lotus Notes hasn't been available for more than a few years (Notes 3.0 was released 1993) and the Domino server has just been made available for Linux (in 2003) -- and already, there's a native client for Linux!
IBM certainly is an early adopter. :-)
PS: If you'd like to take a look at the history of a software that has been there forever, see The History of Notes and Domino
Jul 23, 2006
No, not the small country in Great Britain. I'm talking about the dirty game Japan is playing to dominate the IWC(International Whaling Commission). It's easier than you think: just bribe enough small countries normally not interested in whales (how many people in Togo may have seen one in their entire life?) and presto -- enough votes in favour of the japanese whale killing lobby.
That's outrageous. And sad. Will we still be able to hear whale songs in the ocean in a few years?
Jul 21, 2006
Skype gets ready to throw several brands of WiFi phones at their users (after they throw some money at Skype, of course). There are four models in the wings:
- the F1PP000GN-SK from Belkin
- Edge-Core's WM4201
- SMC's WSKP100, coming in August,
- and of course Netgear's SPH101, due this month.
Handset prices will range from about $300 down to (more acceptable) $189.
You should keep in mind that some public hotspots require a web-based login first, which quite rules out the SPH101 for travel usage.
(via Engadget)
Jul 19, 2006
Lars Trieloff ponders upon a context-aware to-do-list system Actually, dividing tasks into contexts so that each task can be dealt with when you're at the best time and place for it is a basic principle in David Allens Getting Things Done
I've been practising the GTD approach for some time now and it helps me in a great way to keep focus on what has to be done, when it has to be done and where I can do it.
I use Backpack!.html to manage my task lists. Every context (at home, at work, places i can use a phone, etc.) has its own page with a to-do-list there. Every task finished gets ticked off, and the next day, I delete (with great pleasure) all these old tasks.
With Tracks, there's even a special software to practise GTD online. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.
