Random thoughts
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Happy New Year 2008
We wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous new year 2008!
We spent new year's eve with Andrea's parents and friends in Salzburg. The weather was foggy so the fireworks weren't that impressive this year, and we did forgo the midnight waltz on the icy terrace as well.
Today was another lazy day, we listened to the New Year's Concert 2008 under Georges Prêtre while we had breakfast, and Elias became inspired to dance to the music after seeing ballet dancers on TV, which was very, very cute.
We did go for a walk around Aigen in the afternoon and Elias had a chance to see real cows in a stable nearby, he looked quite impressed. This was our last vacation day in Salzburg; tomorrow afternoon we will return to Vienna.
We spent new year's eve with Andrea's parents and friends in Salzburg. The weather was foggy so the fireworks weren't that impressive this year, and we did forgo the midnight waltz on the icy terrace as well.
Today was another lazy day, we listened to the New Year's Concert 2008 under Georges Prêtre while we had breakfast, and Elias became inspired to dance to the music after seeing ballet dancers on TV, which was very, very cute.
We did go for a walk around Aigen in the afternoon and Elias had a chance to see real cows in a stable nearby, he looked quite impressed. This was our last vacation day in Salzburg; tomorrow afternoon we will return to Vienna.
Labels: personal
Monday, December 24, 2007
Season's Greetings
Wishing everyone Merry Christmas, Frohe Weihnachten, Joyeux Noël, Feliz Navidad, Bon Nadal, Glædelig Jul, Prettig Kerstfeest, Hyvaa joulua, Gledelig Jul, Sretan Bozic, Buone Feste Natalizie and wonderful holidays!
Labels: personal
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
I, Blogger
So I have finally started my blog. While the blogosphere continues to grow at an amazing speed, some bloggers of the early days have already switched back to a static homepage they update every now and then, or gone completely offline.
Why now? No particular reason really. I have been playing with the idea of creating a blog and have written up a few blog posts locally without publishing them, just to see how I liked it and what I would have to say. (A few of those early secret blog posts still sit on my hard disk and will eventually show up here retroactively.)
Looking back, I first maintained plogs (for “paper logs”) some 20 years ago when Andrea and I were traveling around in Europe by train. Each of us would write down the experiences of the day, where we went, what we liked and disliked, just about anything that came to mind, in a small booklet. When we were both done with writing, we would read each other's notes, which was great fun.
The intended readership of these plogs was one person. The esteemed readership of this blog may be about the same size currently. By coincidence, Bernhard just started blogging too, so that makes us two late adopters and ensures each of us has at least one reader. Onward.
Next, there was a technology decision to be made: install blogging software or use a hosted service. Ed Costello had shared his experience with getting Movable Type working on pair Networks servers, reading through the steps and given that I wasn't planning to spend more than an hour or two in getting things running I chose to go with a hosted service, Blogger, and have been pretty pleased with it.
Why now? No particular reason really. I have been playing with the idea of creating a blog and have written up a few blog posts locally without publishing them, just to see how I liked it and what I would have to say. (A few of those early secret blog posts still sit on my hard disk and will eventually show up here retroactively.)
Looking back, I first maintained plogs (for “paper logs”) some 20 years ago when Andrea and I were traveling around in Europe by train. Each of us would write down the experiences of the day, where we went, what we liked and disliked, just about anything that came to mind, in a small booklet. When we were both done with writing, we would read each other's notes, which was great fun.
The intended readership of these plogs was one person. The esteemed readership of this blog may be about the same size currently. By coincidence, Bernhard just started blogging too, so that makes us two late adopters and ensures each of us has at least one reader. Onward.
Next, there was a technology decision to be made: install blogging software or use a hosted service. Ed Costello had shared his experience with getting Movable Type working on pair Networks servers, reading through the steps and given that I wasn't planning to spend more than an hour or two in getting things running I chose to go with a hosted service, Blogger, and have been pretty pleased with it.
Labels: personal, technology
Thursday, December 13, 2007
jQuery and Greasemonkey
Now that Fiddler stopped working for me I used Greasemonkey to modify pages on the fly to test some new functionality.
It took me a while to figure out why a global variable which one of the dynamically added scripts created was not visible to my Greasemonkey script. Of course the answer was right there in the Greasemonkey documentation: "As of Greasemonkey 0.6.4, however, user scripts now have their own JavaScript context and execute completely separately from the content document." Fortunately, the document window is also accessible as unsafeWindow, and sure enough that worked.
PS. Michael Baierl pointed out a sample Greasemonkey script to load jQuery before executing functions that depend on jQuery—nice!
It took me a while to figure out why a global variable which one of the dynamically added scripts created was not visible to my Greasemonkey script. Of course the answer was right there in the Greasemonkey documentation: "As of Greasemonkey 0.6.4, however, user scripts now have their own JavaScript context and execute completely separately from the content document." Fortunately, the document window is also accessible as unsafeWindow, and sure enough that worked.
PS. Michael Baierl pointed out a sample Greasemonkey script to load jQuery before executing functions that depend on jQuery—nice!
Labels: javascript, webdevelopment
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Taking Sunday off
Andrea and I took Sunday off this week. Elias stayed with his grandparents at my sister-in-law's place, the first time ever without one of us around at night, and it worked out nicely.
We missed him on the way home already, but waking up at 10:30 a.m. without the usual "Mama, Papa, Frühstück, aussa, rasch" was very enjoyable for a change. The weather wasn't great so we stayed home and spent the day messing around.
Elias had a good time and didn't seem to miss us too much.
We missed him on the way home already, but waking up at 10:30 a.m. without the usual "Mama, Papa, Frühstück, aussa, rasch" was very enjoyable for a change. The weather wasn't great so we stayed home and spent the day messing around.
Elias had a good time and didn't seem to miss us too much.
Labels: personal
Friday, December 7, 2007
The 4-Hour Workweek
An interview "The Business of Life" first triggered my interest in The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris.
Of course even the author will readily admit that one should "not to take the four hours too literally" and it certainly makes a catchier title than "Save an hour per week for things you like", but then anything that means getting more done with less effort and having more time left for the things you really enjoy is good, right?
Ferris may get some basic facts wrong, as readers noted on amazon.com, but he certainly gets his marketing right. His book must have been featured in about every TV show and newspaper by now, judging from the number of comments and the news coverage since. Some claim this book changed their lives while others feel tricked by the simple, well-known recipes -- not everyone is going to make a living from selling nutritional supplements.
Despite the criticism I ordered my copy last month (so I guess the concept worked!) and also added Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, which received favorable comments that I can relate to.
The books were in the mail today, and I will start reading them over the holidays. They probably won't significantly change my life but they should make light reading over the holidays and nicely complement the fiction books, and they may even give me some useful ideas for New Year's resolutions.
Of course even the author will readily admit that one should "not to take the four hours too literally" and it certainly makes a catchier title than "Save an hour per week for things you like", but then anything that means getting more done with less effort and having more time left for the things you really enjoy is good, right?
Ferris may get some basic facts wrong, as readers noted on amazon.com, but he certainly gets his marketing right. His book must have been featured in about every TV show and newspaper by now, judging from the number of comments and the news coverage since. Some claim this book changed their lives while others feel tricked by the simple, well-known recipes -- not everyone is going to make a living from selling nutritional supplements.
Despite the criticism I ordered my copy last month (so I guess the concept worked!) and also added Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, which received favorable comments that I can relate to.
The books were in the mail today, and I will start reading them over the holidays. They probably won't significantly change my life but they should make light reading over the holidays and nicely complement the fiction books, and they may even give me some useful ideas for New Year's resolutions.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Spam filtering with countries.nerd.dk considered harmful
DNS blacklists (DNSBL) provide information about characteristics and past observations of IP addresses and have been used in filtering spam for more than a decade. In short, a spam filter may check one or more DNSBL services to determine if the network address from where an e-mail is delivered is trustworthy or suspicious.
Besides listing addresses of known spam sources or virus-infected machines, there are lists for criteria such as network type (dial-up/cable/DSL) and configuration issues (open relays, RFC non-compliance).
One of my colleagues recently had e-mail to a client rejected by their mail gateway with the error message "554 Your Host 32.nn.nn.nn was found in the DNS BlackList at uk.countries.nerd.dk."
When he asked for help with this, my first thought was that one of our addresses had, rightly or wrongly, been listed as a spam source. However, after looking around countries.nerd.dk it became clear that the recipient was blocking all mail that appeared to come from certain countries according to the countries.nerd.dk database despite the disclaimer on that Website that "countries.nerd.dk is NOT a list of spammers, it is an IP-to-country DNS mapping service."
What's worse in this case is that the mapping was incorrect: The whole 32/8 netblock is declared to be based in the UK: "32.0.0.0/8 :127.0.0.2:Your IP is in uk, rejected based on geographical location". There may be some UK based addresses in that netblock but others are located in North America and possible other places too, and similar geographic mapping services managed to get the location of the particular mail server (almost) right.
Although many open source and commercial mail filters rely on DNSBLs, there has been valid criticism, and even lawsuits against DNSBL operators. The main concern I have is that administrators may rely on a single DNSBL service to mark messages as spam and reject them without understanding the service's reliability and limitations.
Besides listing addresses of known spam sources or virus-infected machines, there are lists for criteria such as network type (dial-up/cable/DSL) and configuration issues (open relays, RFC non-compliance).
One of my colleagues recently had e-mail to a client rejected by their mail gateway with the error message "554 Your Host 32.nn.nn.nn was found in the DNS BlackList at uk.countries.nerd.dk."
When he asked for help with this, my first thought was that one of our addresses had, rightly or wrongly, been listed as a spam source. However, after looking around countries.nerd.dk it became clear that the recipient was blocking all mail that appeared to come from certain countries according to the countries.nerd.dk database despite the disclaimer on that Website that "countries.nerd.dk is NOT a list of spammers, it is an IP-to-country DNS mapping service."
What's worse in this case is that the mapping was incorrect: The whole 32/8 netblock is declared to be based in the UK: "32.0.0.0/8 :127.0.0.2:Your IP is in uk, rejected based on geographical location". There may be some UK based addresses in that netblock but others are located in North America and possible other places too, and similar geographic mapping services managed to get the location of the particular mail server (almost) right.
Although many open source and commercial mail filters rely on DNSBLs, there has been valid criticism, and even lawsuits against DNSBL operators. The main concern I have is that administrators may rely on a single DNSBL service to mark messages as spam and reject them without understanding the service's reliability and limitations.
Labels: spam, technology
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Phone line working again
Last Wednesday, my home office phone line all of a sudden stopped working. The telecom provider tried to reset devices along the route to my home to no avail, so they promised that someone would look into the problem and call me back within 48 hours (on my other line, of course).
Time went by, and at Friday night nobody had called, and my phone line still was not working, so I called again. After enjoying some 20 minutes of "All service representatives are currently serving other ..." I spoke to someone who admitted that nothing had been done about my problem, and nothing could be done about my problem as it was now out of hours and technical staff would be back on Monday morning, I would get a call.
You probably guessed the response when I called again Monday morning, the problem ticket was still untouched and we scheduled an appointment for an on-site check this morning. My phone line was still dead and my mood had shifted from annoyed to resigned already. Around 2 a.m. in the morning, just about before going to sleep, for some reason I tried one more time and—my phone line was perfectly fine again! (This is like me feeling much better already when I have an appointment scheduled with a doctor, all the symptoms just go away and I question the need to see the doctor. Electronic devices seem to work the same way.)
The one week phone outage had a positive side effect though: Desperately trying to regain the convenience of a desk phone with a headset and a mute button, I successfully connected my mobile phone to my desk phone via Bluetooth. To my great surprise, this works perfectly fine. I can easily accept mobile calls on my desk phone, and choose between land line and mobile phone for outgoing calls ... nice!
Time went by, and at Friday night nobody had called, and my phone line still was not working, so I called again. After enjoying some 20 minutes of "All service representatives are currently serving other ..." I spoke to someone who admitted that nothing had been done about my problem, and nothing could be done about my problem as it was now out of hours and technical staff would be back on Monday morning, I would get a call.
You probably guessed the response when I called again Monday morning, the problem ticket was still untouched and we scheduled an appointment for an on-site check this morning. My phone line was still dead and my mood had shifted from annoyed to resigned already. Around 2 a.m. in the morning, just about before going to sleep, for some reason I tried one more time and—my phone line was perfectly fine again! (This is like me feeling much better already when I have an appointment scheduled with a doctor, all the symptoms just go away and I question the need to see the doctor. Electronic devices seem to work the same way.)
The one week phone outage had a positive side effect though: Desperately trying to regain the convenience of a desk phone with a headset and a mute button, I successfully connected my mobile phone to my desk phone via Bluetooth. To my great surprise, this works perfectly fine. I can easily accept mobile calls on my desk phone, and choose between land line and mobile phone for outgoing calls ... nice!
Labels: technology
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Nostalgia
After several months of battery problems I finally had my Nikon D80 repaired; late autumn seemed like the perfect time, not much outdoor activity and photo shooting opportunities any more, and we had most family visits in October already and I definitely wanted the camera repaired while still covered by warranty. I recently got my camera back with the electrical system repaired, and so far it has been working nicely again.
Today I picked up some photographs which I had taken with my old Minolta Dynax 7xi SLR on November 1, and what can I say, I was very pleased with the results. Not that the D80 is a bad camera, it is an absolutely fantastic piece of technology, fast and easy to use and absolutely suitable for taking great pictures, but there is something about photography the old-fashioned way too besides the differences in resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, etc.
First, with film you don't end up with dozens of very similar pictures because you only take the one or two that look most promising. There are probably as many good pictures in the gigabytes of digital cruft accumulated on my hard drive, only they are harder to find and who really goes through and cleans out all the not-really-that-great-but-still-acceptable pictures taken digitally?
Second, there is the lack of immediate feedback which helps. Yes, that's right. Admittedly, I did miss the nice bright screen showing me what the picture looks like when I shot on film, so I had to make an effort to get everything right instead of going through several iterations, trying to judge picture quality from an LCD screen.
Third, picking up photographs at the store, flipping through prints which bring back recent memories is a ritual I have become so used to after more than two decades of doing it that I do miss it.
(If you want to know more about the technical aspects, Ken Rockwell has written a great article Film vs. Digital explaining pros and cons, with some eye-opening crops of analog and digital photos. Norman Koren has even more technical details in Digital cameras vs. film although the Website has not been updated in years.)
Back in 1998 John Patrick, then IBM's Vice President, Internet technologies, in his keynote speech at the WWW7 conference in Brisbane talked about how Internet technology impacted our lives and would change expectations. If memory serves, one of the examples he mentioned was the 1 hr photo lab and that people would not be willing to wait for a full hour to see pictures, they would want them right away (and students asking for a T1 at work, too).
Less than ten years later, broadband connectivity is widely available and is cheap, or sometimes free, photography is mostly digital and there are few labs offering decent film developing these days.
Neither would I want to go back to 56K dial-up at EUR 30 per month plus charges per minute, nor would I want to pay per picture (prints for a single roll of film cost another EUR 30), nor would I want to miss the convenience of my digital camera, despite my nostalgic, misty-eyed views.
Today I picked up some photographs which I had taken with my old Minolta Dynax 7xi SLR on November 1, and what can I say, I was very pleased with the results. Not that the D80 is a bad camera, it is an absolutely fantastic piece of technology, fast and easy to use and absolutely suitable for taking great pictures, but there is something about photography the old-fashioned way too besides the differences in resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, etc.
First, with film you don't end up with dozens of very similar pictures because you only take the one or two that look most promising. There are probably as many good pictures in the gigabytes of digital cruft accumulated on my hard drive, only they are harder to find and who really goes through and cleans out all the not-really-that-great-but-still-acceptable pictures taken digitally?
Second, there is the lack of immediate feedback which helps. Yes, that's right. Admittedly, I did miss the nice bright screen showing me what the picture looks like when I shot on film, so I had to make an effort to get everything right instead of going through several iterations, trying to judge picture quality from an LCD screen.
Third, picking up photographs at the store, flipping through prints which bring back recent memories is a ritual I have become so used to after more than two decades of doing it that I do miss it.
(If you want to know more about the technical aspects, Ken Rockwell has written a great article Film vs. Digital explaining pros and cons, with some eye-opening crops of analog and digital photos. Norman Koren has even more technical details in Digital cameras vs. film although the Website has not been updated in years.)
Back in 1998 John Patrick, then IBM's Vice President, Internet technologies, in his keynote speech at the WWW7 conference in Brisbane talked about how Internet technology impacted our lives and would change expectations. If memory serves, one of the examples he mentioned was the 1 hr photo lab and that people would not be willing to wait for a full hour to see pictures, they would want them right away (and students asking for a T1 at work, too).
Less than ten years later, broadband connectivity is widely available and is cheap, or sometimes free, photography is mostly digital and there are few labs offering decent film developing these days.
Neither would I want to go back to 56K dial-up at EUR 30 per month plus charges per minute, nor would I want to pay per picture (prints for a single roll of film cost another EUR 30), nor would I want to miss the convenience of my digital camera, despite my nostalgic, misty-eyed views.
Labels: photography, technology
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Rain, rain, rain
So we came to Vorarlberg to see my family and go for walks in the mountains, but with the exception of Monday it has been raining heavily every day. Too bad we didn't get a chance to go for walks, there are some nice and easy walking trails from Dornbirn-Bödele which I walked many times as a kid. At least we managed to spend a few hours outdoors on Monday, walking over to the Hochälpele ski lift (a drag lift so it is not in operating currently :-)) and back to the Meierei, an alpine dairy serving huge cheese boards. Elias had a good time with the cows and calves, he even offered them his bottle of apple juice, and saw (and smelled!) turkey and pigs for the first time.
We spent the rest of the week sleeping, reading, eating and meeting with family. On Tuesday afternoon we met with my mother and grandmother at a café in Dornbirn. The next day we went to see the Inatura exhibition, a kids-friendly museum of nature with stuffed animals you may actually touch, living insects, tunnels to crawl through, beautiful koi carps, and last but not least bouncy bounce. Afterwards we said hello to my other grandmother, Elias was tired from the exhibition and slept through for a while before walking around and opening all cabinet doors within reach, mumbling "no, no" all the time to remind himself that he wasn't supposed to do that.
On Thursday we had lunch with my grandmother again and enjoyed a traditional Riebel, then went for a walk in the city despite the heavy rain and finally went swimming in the Hallenbad Dornbirn, which was recently renovated and looks much nicer compared to when I was a kid. Elias was equally impressed and frightened by the fast water slide ("black hole") and the water fountains in the playground. Andrea and I were mostly impressed that a floor as slippery as this one would ever get approved for an indoor pool area, and indeed we struggled to get back to the changing room without slipping.
We had dinner at our hotel Berghof Fetz every night, and on most days Elias decided he wasn't tired enough or too hunger to go to bed, so he joined us several times, much to the amusement of the staff and other guests who smiled at the appearance of Elias in his pajamas and a sweater. And I finally managed to read Donna Leon's book about Venice and a good part of Thomas Glavinic's "Arbeit der Nacht", which is about a man living in Vienna who wakes up one day only to slowly discover that he seems to be the only living being in the world. The story is simply but quite exciting and the style is unique, fresh, simple, quick, not sure how to best describe it, but at almost four-hundred pages the book does have some lengthly parts too. Still, I am curious to find out what's behind all the occurances throughout the story and will continue reading as time permits.
Now time to pack, tomorrow we will head back to Salzburg for the christening of my niece Theresa.
We spent the rest of the week sleeping, reading, eating and meeting with family. On Tuesday afternoon we met with my mother and grandmother at a café in Dornbirn. The next day we went to see the Inatura exhibition, a kids-friendly museum of nature with stuffed animals you may actually touch, living insects, tunnels to crawl through, beautiful koi carps, and last but not least bouncy bounce. Afterwards we said hello to my other grandmother, Elias was tired from the exhibition and slept through for a while before walking around and opening all cabinet doors within reach, mumbling "no, no" all the time to remind himself that he wasn't supposed to do that.
On Thursday we had lunch with my grandmother again and enjoyed a traditional Riebel, then went for a walk in the city despite the heavy rain and finally went swimming in the Hallenbad Dornbirn, which was recently renovated and looks much nicer compared to when I was a kid. Elias was equally impressed and frightened by the fast water slide ("black hole") and the water fountains in the playground. Andrea and I were mostly impressed that a floor as slippery as this one would ever get approved for an indoor pool area, and indeed we struggled to get back to the changing room without slipping.
We had dinner at our hotel Berghof Fetz every night, and on most days Elias decided he wasn't tired enough or too hunger to go to bed, so he joined us several times, much to the amusement of the staff and other guests who smiled at the appearance of Elias in his pajamas and a sweater. And I finally managed to read Donna Leon's book about Venice and a good part of Thomas Glavinic's "Arbeit der Nacht", which is about a man living in Vienna who wakes up one day only to slowly discover that he seems to be the only living being in the world. The story is simply but quite exciting and the style is unique, fresh, simple, quick, not sure how to best describe it, but at almost four-hundred pages the book does have some lengthly parts too. Still, I am curious to find out what's behind all the occurances throughout the story and will continue reading as time permits.
Now time to pack, tomorrow we will head back to Salzburg for the christening of my niece Theresa.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
PHONETIC.FON
The amazon.de Web site has had a problem which has bothered me for some time: The search field on the homepage rendered at about half the usual height and text appeared invisible or white on white, so it was impossible to see text:
It wasn't that bad, I am a pretty solid typer and got the search terms right without seeing what I was typing, most of the time; still an inconvenience when trying to modify a search term, especially when the site starting redirecting search responses to addresses that no longer contain the search term, but not bad enough to spend time figuring out what was causing this.
Today one of my colleagues mentioned that he had found a solution to the problem: the PHONETIC.FON file seems to be the culprit, and indeed renaming that file has solved the problem nicely:
(A quick search for PHONETIC.FON sure enough turned up a page Why Do My Fonts in Netscape Navigator Look Funny? in the Netscape Unofficial FAQs.)
It wasn't that bad, I am a pretty solid typer and got the search terms right without seeing what I was typing, most of the time; still an inconvenience when trying to modify a search term, especially when the site starting redirecting search responses to addresses that no longer contain the search term, but not bad enough to spend time figuring out what was causing this.
Today one of my colleagues mentioned that he had found a solution to the problem: the PHONETIC.FON file seems to be the culprit, and indeed renaming that file has solved the problem nicely:
(A quick search for PHONETIC.FON sure enough turned up a page Why Do My Fonts in Netscape Navigator Look Funny? in the Netscape Unofficial FAQs.)
Labels: technology, webdevelopment, windows
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Smart advertising
Samsung deserves credit for smart advertising. Countless times I have spent hours at an airport, desperately crowding around the few power sockets in the wall with a bunch of other folks charging their cell phones, laptops and media players. I even got to the point of bringing warning signs to place around the cable since for some reason the chairs were never closer to the power sockets, and sitting on the floor typing for a while made my wrists hurt.
But now relief is here: I am sitting at JFK airport now, as usual traffic on the SPB was light and I am here way too early, but no more sitting on the floor, looking for power. Throughout the terminal, there are Samsung mobile recharge stations, well-designed poles with power sockets and even a small round table to put the power supplies and other equipment on. No more tripping over wires, no more fierce looks when using power for more than a few minutes ... there is plenty of power now, for everyone. The poles are effective for promoting Samsung products too: The latest Samsung mobile products are featured on the poles, at eye height, not just printed ads but real devices behind a glass cover.
When was the last time you saw advertising that was useful and looked that good?
But now relief is here: I am sitting at JFK airport now, as usual traffic on the SPB was light and I am here way too early, but no more sitting on the floor, looking for power. Throughout the terminal, there are Samsung mobile recharge stations, well-designed poles with power sockets and even a small round table to put the power supplies and other equipment on. No more tripping over wires, no more fierce looks when using power for more than a few minutes ... there is plenty of power now, for everyone. The poles are effective for promoting Samsung products too: The latest Samsung mobile products are featured on the poles, at eye height, not just printed ads but real devices behind a glass cover.
When was the last time you saw advertising that was useful and looked that good?
Labels: advertising, innovation, technology, travel
Sunday, July 15, 2007
iPhone update
So after nastiblogging about the iPhone yesterday I managed to get my hands on an iPhone when I was at the Westchester mall yesterday afternoon. What can I say, I still think that the poor battery design, the lack of high-speed Internet connectivity and the limitation to one carrier per country make me think that this isn't a cell phone I would want. But it does feel very, very good. The user interface is amazingly simple and straightforward, no long-winded multilevel menus, no key sequences to remember, the browser works well and rendered www.ibm.com nicely, including the recently added dynamic components. The touchscreen keyboard works pretty well for text thanks to error correction (but otherwise requires some practice and probably even then it won't match the speed of a tactile keyboard).
Labels: technology
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Customer support at its best
Shareware and open source software have been said to lack official support. This may be true for some products but certainly not for my favorite editor, EditPlus, for which personal support by the developer is second to none.
Hats off to Sangil Kim, not only does he write fantastic software and respond to feature requests and (rare) bug reports almost immediately, he is also the most organized person I can think of. When I tried to reinstall EditPlus on my new computer, I managed to locate the original registration email which had the version 1 registration key, but couldn't find the upgrade key; so after searching all places where I typically keep this type of information I sent off an e-mail to the EditPlus support address, and within a few hours received a copy of the original e-mail from 2000(!) that contained my registration key. Thank you!
Hats off to Sangil Kim, not only does he write fantastic software and respond to feature requests and (rare) bug reports almost immediately, he is also the most organized person I can think of. When I tried to reinstall EditPlus on my new computer, I managed to locate the original registration email which had the version 1 registration key, but couldn't find the upgrade key; so after searching all places where I typically keep this type of information I sent off an e-mail to the EditPlus support address, and within a few hours received a copy of the original e-mail from 2000(!) that contained my registration key. Thank you!
Do I want an iPhone?
The New York Times has two entertaining videos by David Pogue about the new iPhone, the pre-release The iPhone Challenge: Keep It Quiet and I want an iPhone.
What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.
Dear Apple folks, please try harder!
What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.
Dear Apple folks, please try harder!
Labels: technology
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Luncheon at Le Château
After two days of hot and humid weather, the thunderstorm and heavy rain last night had worked miracles and today was a beautiful day, just perfect for a luncheon at Le Château in South Salem, New York, to celebrate the successful launch of our latest Website design and the Virtual Business Center in Second Life.
It was good to meet so many colleagues and friends, including some people who I had worked with for a while but never met in person. We started with drinks and hors d'oeuvres in the garden, followed by short talks by our executives and an awards ceremony before we went on with lunch. Well, actually, since we were running behind, lunch didn't quite start after but during the business session. It was kind of weird to see restaurant staff squeeze through between our executives with soup bowls while they were still handing out awards and congratulating award winners. The lunch was excellent though, and we all had a good time at Le Château.
At night Christian and I met with Margaret at a restaurant in Armonk, Opus 465, for a light dinner and interesting discussions about processes (so yes, we did get some work done and not just eat all day long!)
It was good to meet so many colleagues and friends, including some people who I had worked with for a while but never met in person. We started with drinks and hors d'oeuvres in the garden, followed by short talks by our executives and an awards ceremony before we went on with lunch. Well, actually, since we were running behind, lunch didn't quite start after but during the business session. It was kind of weird to see restaurant staff squeeze through between our executives with soup bowls while they were still handing out awards and congratulating award winners. The lunch was excellent though, and we all had a good time at Le Château.
At night Christian and I met with Margaret at a restaurant in Armonk, Opus 465, for a light dinner and interesting discussions about processes (so yes, we did get some work done and not just eat all day long!)
Labels: travel
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Wabisabilabi
While sitting at Vienna airport and waiting for my flight to New York, a newspaper article about a security startup caught my attention: The Swiss company Wabisabilabi has established a market place for security exposures with the intent to give security experts "fair compensation for their discoveries".
Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.
The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:
On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?
Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.
Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.
The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:
On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?
Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.
Labels: security, technology
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Google dropped my site
Google's Matt Cutts asked for feedback on the webmaster guidelines and I gladly shared my experience there:
Recently, Google sent me an email entitled "Entfernung Ihrer Webseite sitename aus dem Google Index", notifying me that one of my sites had been dropped from the Google index for violating the content quality guidelines. Now that site certainly deserved to be dropped for various reasons, not the least being that the content was old and not highly relevant and I am quite happy to see that site dropped.
I couldn’t find anything related to the specific issue highlighted. In addition the issue highlighted doesn’t exist (or I don’t understand what it is trying to say, maybe something got lost in the translation since the mail was in German):
Wir haben auf Ihren Seiten insbesondere die Verwendung folgender Techniken festgestellt:
*Seiten wie z. B. example.com, die zu Seiten wie z. B. http://www.example.com/index.htm mit Hilfe eines Redirects weiterleiten, der nicht mit unseren Richtlinien konform ist.
Translation: In particular we have noticed the following techniques on your pages: * Pages such as example.com, which redirect to pages such as http://www.example.com/index.htm using redirects, which is not compliant with our guidelines.
Now since when does Google consider redirects within a site evil? Plus, the referenced domain example.com does not even exist, nor does the homepage redirect either.
I couldn't care less about this particular site. What worries me though is that I haven't been able to identify how the site violates the guidelines, even after reading the guidelines more than once, and chances are that I have used the same techniques on other sites where I do care.
Recently, Google sent me an email entitled "Entfernung Ihrer Webseite sitename aus dem Google Index", notifying me that one of my sites had been dropped from the Google index for violating the content quality guidelines. Now that site certainly deserved to be dropped for various reasons, not the least being that the content was old and not highly relevant and I am quite happy to see that site dropped.
I couldn’t find anything related to the specific issue highlighted. In addition the issue highlighted doesn’t exist (or I don’t understand what it is trying to say, maybe something got lost in the translation since the mail was in German):
Wir haben auf Ihren Seiten insbesondere die Verwendung folgender Techniken festgestellt:
*Seiten wie z. B. example.com, die zu Seiten wie z. B. http://www.example.com/index.htm mit Hilfe eines Redirects weiterleiten, der nicht mit unseren Richtlinien konform ist.
Translation: In particular we have noticed the following techniques on your pages: * Pages such as example.com, which redirect to pages such as http://www.example.com/index.htm using redirects, which is not compliant with our guidelines.
Now since when does Google consider redirects within a site evil? Plus, the referenced domain example.com does not even exist, nor does the homepage redirect either.
I couldn't care less about this particular site. What worries me though is that I haven't been able to identify how the site violates the guidelines, even after reading the guidelines more than once, and chances are that I have used the same techniques on other sites where I do care.
Labels: google
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Timely communication
Apparently IEEE offered some incentive last year for renewing the membership before year end which I had completely forgot about, or not even noticed when I renewed my membership. This morning I received a friendly invitation to claim my free eBook:
"Because you renewed your IEEE membership by Dec. 31, 2006, you are eligible to download an IEEE-USA eBook at no cost!"
Nothing terribly wrong with this, although I wonder why it takes an engineering organization 178 days to send an e-mail with a download link.
"Because you renewed your IEEE membership by Dec. 31, 2006, you are eligible to download an IEEE-USA eBook at no cost!"
Nothing terribly wrong with this, although I wonder why it takes an engineering organization 178 days to send an e-mail with a download link.
Labels: technology
Security by obscurity
developer.com ran an article about AJAX security, the title of which caught my attention. The suggestions the author makes, however, are either obvious (use a well-tested framework instead of writing your own code) or plain wrong (pretty much the rest of the suggestions). Michael Baierl has commented in detail about what's wrong with this article.
Another unfortunate case of security by obscurity.
Another unfortunate case of security by obscurity.
Labels: security, webdevelopment