Sunday, June 29, 2008

 

Unknown error in XPath

Alright, I do have a reputation for putting Websites to the test, but they seem to break even if when I just innocently try to use them:

Screenshot of a Hallmark ecard showing "Error 500: Error evaluating XPath expression … Unknown error in XPath


I guess this was the perfect greeting card for me, better then the cute dog blowing up a birthday cake which was supposed to show :-)

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Friday, June 20, 2008

 

Happy anniversary, Marriott Rewards!

Marriott Rewards celebrates its 25th anniversary. The customer loyalty program was also recognized as the best award program by the Freddie Awards, and in my humble opinion rightly so.

High class properties around the globe, including hotels and extended stay suites, a painless online reservation system that doesn't require me to memorize lengthy membership numbers and company rate codes and loyalty to customers—my points never expired even when I didn't stay with them for a while—make Marriott Rewards a great program.

By contrast, Hilton HHonors not only forfeited my points but also canceled my HHonors account, in line with their terms of use, when I failed to accumulate points while the property I had usually stayed at was closed for renovation. (As a gesture of goodwill they did offer extra points for additional stays to compensate for the loss.)

Most customer loyalty programs are free. One notable exception is the Accor Favorite Guest program, which offers reductions on standard rates, reservation priority, gift vouchers and partner advantages like other programs do, “for only 130 euros per year”.

The quality of the customer loyalty programs may not be the most important factor when choosing accommodation, but a good program certainly helps with the decision where to stay.

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Firefox 3

The Mozilla project released Firefox 3 on June 17 with an attempt to set the world record in software downloads per day.

Firefox 3

While I consider raw traffic numbers only mildly useful and the hunt for traffic records somewhat old-fashioned (when IBM did run the Olympics Websites we would report record traffic numbers, and with the technology available back then the numbers were impressive, but that was in the 1990ies) I gladly did my part to set the world record. I mean, how often do you get a chance to be part of a world record, even if your contribution is only 1/8290545.

I even installed Firefox 3 :-) and for most parts have been satisfied with the result. The only complaint I have is that the installation overwrote the previously installed Firefox 2 despite placing the new version in a different directory, and sure enough some extensions were considered incompatible and therefore disabled.

Multiple Internet Explorer versions can coexist on the same machine thanks to the wonderful Multiple IE installer, can we please get an easy and automated way to run multiple versions of Firefox without fiddling with profiles?

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At home with two boys

It is almost a week now that the whole family has been back home, and we are slowly getting into a routine of handling two boys.

After a few days at the AKH Wien, Daniel was transfered back to the birth clinic on Thursday, and we returned home on the weekend.



Daniel is doing great; he mostly sleeps through the day and becomes more demanding at night (so please don't ask if we get much sleep!)

We greatly appreciate all the help we received from friends and family, a big thank you to Helga and Thomas who took care of Elias at 5 a.m. as we went to the clinic, Simone and Michael for having Elias over the weekend and my in-laws for looking after Elias while we were away.

Thanks also for all the kind wishes and greeting cards!

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Monday, June 9, 2008

 

Daniel Nikolas is here



Our hearts are full of love for Daniel Nikolas. Our boy arrived on Saturday, June 7 2008 at 5:26 a.m., slightly earlier than expected.

Little Daniel is currently at the AKH Wien for medical observation. The whole family is doing well, and Elias is excited about the arrival of "baby Daniel, baby Daniel, baby Daniel". More later, now back to the hospital.

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Friday, June 6, 2008

 

EURO 2008 in Austria and Switzerland about to start

The EURO 2008 will start tomorrow night with the opening matches in Basel and Geneva, followed by matches in Vienna and Klagenfurt on Sunday, not that I am interested in soccer or suddenly became overly patriotic (which probably wouldn't be a good idea based on what I read about our soccer team :-))

The only reason I care really is that our apartments are close to one of the venues, the Ernst Happel stadium, and we expect to see and hear crowds of fans passing by.

One of the positive side effects of the event was an improvement to the already excellent public transport system. The U2 metro line was extended to the stadium and will be extended further in the coming years. The upcoming event certainly added a little pressure to complete the extension on time.

The most notable change, however, has been the plethora of cars decorated with national flags, mostly Austrian, some foreign, and a few mixed. Signs to the stadium and the fan zone in the city center have popped up everywhere over the last few days, all kinds of merchandise are offered (anyone care for a football shaped loaf of EURO 2008 bread?), additional waste bins have been installed, and even the sausage stand around the corner looks much more colorful and inviting than usual.

We had actually planned to leave Vienna for the duration of the event and go on vacation but had to change our plans, more on that later. Let's hope for some exciting matches to please the fans and most importantly for a peaceful event.

To probe further: Official UEFA EURO 2008 Website

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Sunday, June 1, 2008

 

Buying a house

After many years of searching, we may have finally found a new home. It is a detached house in residential area of the 13th district of Vienna, not as close to the city as we currently live but still acceptable. Supermarkets, a playground and tram and bus stops are all within easy walking distance, too.

We did view the house twice and made an offer last week. The owner has accepted in principle, so now we need to work out the contract details. We are very excited about this and will post details and pictures as soon as we close the deal.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

 

PowerPoint: No comma, please

A colleague recently showed me a strange problem with Microsoft Office: When inserting a hyperlink in a PowerPoint presentation, one of the available options is linking to another page in the same document:



This seemed to work nicely for most slides but not for the particular slide he was trying to link to, and PowerPoint would not even show a preview in the hyperlink dialog box:



The programmer in me quickly scanned through the slide looking for “suspicious” elements, the only thing that caught my attention though was an innocent looking comma.

Turns out the comma is indeed the culprit, and the bug is well-documented in the Microsoft knowledge base: The hyperlink to a slide does not work when a comma is contained in the title of a slide presentation in PowerPoint.

Removing the comma, placing the hyperlink and then adding the comma back does seem to do the trick. Or, just don't use a comma.

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Saturday, April 19, 2008

 

Usability: When forward goes backward

The IEEE Computer Society recently invited members to participate in a survey. Admittedly, since taking on my current job I have developed a strange desire for taking surveys to see what others are doing and what we could learn from them.

Besides being too long (read: I stopped answering the survey once I figured this would take me longer than I was willing to click through question after question) this particular survey had an interesting usability problem: For some reason, the forward link to move to the next question is on the left, whereas the backward link is on the right:



The designer may have considered reading order or attempted to make the site more accessible by putting the more frequently used option first, which would be commendable, but the result is a poor navigation scheme. I would be curious to know how many respondents get frustrated about this and abandon the survey.

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Friday, April 18, 2008

 

VPS, PDC, DVB, EPG—Why can VCRs not just work?

Video cassette recorders (VCR) have a long-standing reputation for being difficult to use (searching for VCR and usability returns some 90,000 results on Google).

In the early days setting the timer right may have been challenging, and too often the program would change or fall behind and the tape would contain a different program, or a cut off film. Then came the Video Programming System (VPS) and ShowView, which made programming VCRs easy and greatly increased the likelihood of recording the desired program, and later Programme Delivery Control (PDC).

Everything seemed fine until last year when a decision was made to discontinue analog TV broadcasting in Austria and switching to Digial Video Broadcasting (DVB-T). The television system had maintained backwards compatibility with the great many enhancements over the years, from black-and-white to color, from mono to stereo and dual channel audio. This time, however, new equipment would be needed in the form of DVB-T receivers, and of course that means one for each TV set and recorder.

Our first attempt with a twin receiver bought on EBay was a dismal failure. The device seemed malfunctioning and vendor support was non-existent (more precisely, we were unable to locate the vendor, which seemed to have gone out of business). We happily lived for a few weeks without television.

Eventually we got a nice Sony HXD-870 HD/DVD recorder with built-in DVB-T tuner and at first were quite happy. Setting up the device was easy (except for the fact it did not recognize Austria as a country) and we were back to receiving and recording TV programs.

Although the new recorder supports VPS/PDC it does so only from analog sources, which are no longer available, but not from the digital signal despite the fact that the VPS signal is sent digitally as well. The new Electronic Program Guide (EPG) is convenient, but there is no way to tell the recorder to start when the program starts. Instead you can manually tweak the time range to increase the likelihood of recording the full program.

If that wasn't bad enough already, when we switched to daylight savings time, or summer time as it's called here, the program guide appeared to be off by one hour and so were all recordings. There is a timezone menu but toggling daylight savings time on and off did not seem to make any difference.

The Sony support Website was less than helpful. The only firmware upgrade was for the UK version of the recorder and fixed an unrelated problem that we hadn't encountered.
Fortunately a kind soul owning the same device came to rescue and shared instructions how to overcome this bug by switching to a different time zone and then rebooting the recorder. We have since been running on Helsinki time and had mixed success in recording programs.

With all the advances in technology and three-letter acronym features, we are essentially back to the functionality in the early days of video recording, manually setting times and hoping for the program to stay on schedule.

Why can VCRs not just work?

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

 

Back from vacation

We just returned from a few relaxing days at Reiter's Burgenlandresort in Bad Tatzmannsdorf.



This is the second time we stayed at this hotel, and we had a great time again. Elias enjoyed the many opportunities for playing, sliding and swimming, and the hotel even offered introductory Tai Chi lessons (as I found out afterwards, a different Tai Chi style from the one we learn, which would explain why moves by the same names would feel different).

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Monday, March 24, 2008

 

Goodbye, Indy!

Time has come to say Goodbye to my Silicon Graphics Indy workstation. It has been a difficult relationship for years, and I finally offered my Indy on EBay.


Introduced in 1993, the Indy for a long time was the workstation to have, powerful and good looking, too. When EuNet, PING and Computerwelt offered a fully equipped Indy workstation as the reward for the best Austrian Website, my good friend Peter Wansch and I submitted The WWW Entertainment Package, a collection of classic board games ported to the Web from the like-named OS/2 games package that Peter had developed.

I had just learned the basics of writing CGI scripts and managed to get four games up and running. Although playing games over the Web was kind of slow in the pre-JavaScript, pre-AJAX era the gaming site was very well received and generated both lots of traffic and nice feedback from gamers around the world, too. We asked people to register for free access, we made it easy for them to vote and we spent a considerable amount of time answering e-mails and encouraging games to vote.

To make a long story short, we won. In hindsight, we had a pretty good Website that was actively used and would continue for years, but some other submissions were pretty slick, too. I guess we didn't just win for having the best product, we won because of good marketing.

The news reached me while participating at the WWW3 Conference in Darmstadt and while I had been hoping for this when it happened I could hardly believe it—we did it!

What followed then was a huge disappointment. We learned that we would not receive the machine at the official ceremony at Café Stein but only a few weeks later, and what's worse in a different configuration: The 5 GB harddisk that was originally advertised may seem small today but would have been perfectly adequate back then, what we got instead was a machine with a much smaller harddisk, barely sufficient to hold the base operating system and multimedia tools, and no CD-ROM drive to install software from.


Filesystem Type kbytes use avail %use Mounted on
/dev/root efs 439704 408189 31515 93% /

Now the Indy came with great connectivity already, including Ethernet and ISDN ports, only my home office had neither and upgrading the machine with more memory, a larger harddisk and a CD-ROM drive (from Silicon Graphics only, others would not boot!) was too expensive an option. We could have sold the Indy, probably for a good price. Seriously though, if you got an Indy, would you sell it? (Don't answer, please.)

So for many years this marvel of technology has been putting on dust and remained unused. When I booted the Indy today it started up nicely, only issuing one warning message: “WARNING: clock gained 1856 days”

The auction has a few more days to go and already has six bids. It is about time that someone starts using this machine, and time for me to say Goodbye. It has been a difficult relationship, and yet I will miss this electric-blue colored pizza box.

PS. At the age of fifteen the Indy is still a modern computer. For some really old computers, have a look at the Old Computers online museum.

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Let it snow, let it snow, let is snow


Happy Easter, or whatever you celebrated over the last few days. As reported by Time Magazine Good Friday this year happened to coincide with many holidays of other religions: Purim, Narouz, Eid Milad an Nabi, Small Holi and Magha Puja.

We spent the Holy Week in Salzburg with Andrea's parents and had hoped for some nice warm spring days to go for walks or just hang around on the terrace—not so. With a forecast for cold weather and even snow over the weekend, we saw the traditional Sunday Easter egg hunt at risk and decided to cheat just a little, letting the Easter bunny hide his eggs on Saturday already. Elias was quite happy about this and managed to quickly spot and collect all baskets with eggs, chocolates and yet another picture book.



Moving the egg hunt turned out to be a smart choice. Sunday started out pretty nice as we went to church but then it would snow heavily for hours. Despite the car rental agency giving us an upgrade to a 4 wheel drive we even extended our stay at my in-law's place by another night and only headed back to Vienna today.

Now see what our car looked like in the morning! We had a pleasant drive though, with surprisingly light traffic on the highway.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

 

Safely landed

I am in Germany this week for training on e-procurement and business process modeling.

Three colleagues from Bratislava and I made it to the IBM facility in Herrenberg, which wouldn't be noteworthy except that the newspapers had detailed reports about an emergency landing of a Dash 8-Q400 at Vienna airport yesterday, and sure enough our plane was a Dash 8-Q400 too. The board magazine highlighted the benefits of the aircraft, such as lower fuel consumption than jets at relatively high speeds, the ability to take off and land on short runways, propellers which can be repositioned for excellent climb and cruise performance, and noise and vibration reduction for the cabin.

I didn't feel particularly unsafe even after reading the morning news as the many problems reported with this type of aircraft have been mostly related to the landing gear and there haven't been any serious accidents. Sure enough our flight went smoothly and we safely landed in Stuttgart.

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Monday, January 21, 2008

 

No wonder that this world blows itself up

While standing in line at the supermarket today, I overheard a lively discussion between the cashier and a customer who complained about not getting the discount price advertised on the rack.

This supermarket chain runs a fairly elaborate customer loyalty program, with some discounts applying only to members of the program. There used to be some problems in the past with keeping the signs and the computer systems in sync but not this time. There was no technical problem here, just an oversight on the customer's part.

The customer eventually agreed that the discount wasn't applicable, since she was not and did not want to join the customer loyalty program, and decided to return the tomatoes, mumbling something along the lines of "Everything is getting so much more complicated, no wonder that this world blows itself up."

Now I wouldn't consider the customer loyalty program a serious threat to the world, and actually enjoy the benefits offered, although it means knowingly giving up some privacy in exchange for discounts. (I will gladly post my grocery shopping list here too if someone is interested :-))

Scanner cash registers and storing membership information electronically on the ATM card are certainly vast improvements in usability and convenience over the old manual cash registers (I do remember checking my weekly grocery bill for errors back when I was a student, a rather slow process given the long list of just prices, but it was worth the effort more than once) and collecting discount coupons.

Those of us working in a technology industry should remember though that not everyone will want to or have the ability to adopt new technologies, and those who opt out must not be left behind.

Otherwise, this world will blow itself up ...

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Saturday, January 19, 2008

 

Learning Tai Chi

The well-being team at IBM offers a variety of courses to keep everyone fit and health.

Yesterday morning (at 8 a.m., I am not exactly a morning person so this was the hard part) I had my first Tai Chi lesson. Our teacher, Chung Hsien Jung, has won national and international Tai Chi championships, and more importantly creates a friendly and inviting atmosphere. Watching him perform a sequence of postures and moves is simply impressive and a good motivation to spend an hour or two every week to practice Tai Chi myself (not that I expect to get anywhere close to this level, but that's beside the point).

Tai Chi is based on the theory of the Taoism and the principle of the contrasts of Yin and Yang. The sequences of moves are used for supporting healthiness, relaxation and physical balance. We learn the Chen Style (陳氏), the oldest form of Tai Chi characterized by the combination of slow, supple and fast, powerful movements. To some extent the concepts and the moves reminded me of Jujitsu, which I had practiced many years ago.

The first lesson was fun, so I will be back again next week!

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localhost considered harmful

Tavis Ormandy has posted a potential security exposure with DNS entries for "localhost" in zone files on Bugtraq. While the impact of this exposure seems minimal, I would rather err on the side of caution, and this should be fairly easy to fix.

"localhost" DNS records in a domain should not be confused with the ".localhost" TLD defined in RFC 2606 Reserved Top Level DNS Names, and should be configured on nameservers. I haven't been able to find a requirement in the RFCs to have a "localhost" entry in a domain, nor can I think of a compelling reason for keeping the entry as long as nameservers for a domain are properly configured to handle queries for "localhost.".

RFC 1912 Common DNS Errors explains how to configure the localhost and 0.0.127.in-addr.arpa zones:

The "localhost" address is a "special" address which always refers to
the local host. It should contain the following line:

localhost. IN A 127.0.0.1

The "127.0" file should contain the line:
1 PTR localhost.

and recommends to not define "localhost" with the domain name appended.

Thoughts on removing "localhost" from zones, anyone?

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Monday, January 14, 2008

 

Blogger

Choosing a hosted service for blogging was a matter of a few minutes, and it didn't involve working through feature lists and comparison charts.

I started playing with Blogger and within minutes had a basic template and publishing to my Web server working. The template language looked sufficiently flexible, and the backing by search giant Google made this an attractive choice too.

WordPress would have been next on my review list. The hosted options are probably comparable, with WordPress offering some advanced features for a fee. Anita Campbell has published a great article about moving a blog from Blogger to WordPress, citing a number of good reasons why the latter is a much better option, although Blogger was “simple to set up and use”. Good enough for me.

One minor limitation I noticed is that Blogger only creates a single XML feed but no category feeds, which can be created easily using the rich Blogger data API.

The only complaint I have about Blogger is the incorrect rendering of ampersand and angle quotes:
  • Ampersand: &
  • Angle bracket open: <
  • Angle bracket close: >

They are represented correctly as entities in the XML feed, but rendered as plain characters in the HTML version. This looks like a bug that should be easy enough to fix.

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Sunday, January 13, 2008

 

IG-L

When we spent our summer vacation in Sicily in 2004, I often wondered why some road signs in Sicily listed detailed information about the relevant laws and even the specific section and paragraph of the act.

Since 2006, the immission control act Immissionsschutzgesetz-Luft (IG-L) has been enacted in Austria, which allows authorities to impose certain restrictions on production facilities, traffic, and outdoor combustion to reduce immissions when pollution thresholds are exceeded.

The act requires that immission control related speed limit must be signposted with reference to the act. On previous trips between Vienna and Salzburg I had complained about the unnecessary distraction by additional signs; after all I don't usually care why a speed limit has been put in place, although there is evidence that drivers are more likely to adhere to environmentally motivated speed limits (source: Luftreinhalteplan Stuttgart), and lower speeds generally mean lower emissions (source: Land Tirol: Tempo 100).

One set of road signs around Linz looks especially bizarre: a combination of lifting the 100 km/h speed limit and introducing a 100 km/h speed limit for immission control, and vice versa in the opposite direction.

Recently some of the roadsigns were replaced with large over-the-road displays which allow for dynamic speed limits depending on weather conditions, traffic flow and pollution levels, which is goodness. I wonder though how many drivers will have a clue what the big white letters IG-L next to the speed limit signs mean ...

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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.

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