InVisible

Improving my datacenter in the basement, I installed a proper Firewall instead of the dinky 4-port NAT router that connected our house to the wild intranet. I used an Astaro Security Linux on an old PC, a setup that has served me well in the Office network. To make everything look really good, I used red and green network cables that I had salvaged from somewhere. Installing the firewall was straightforward, I copied the settings I use at the office and just changed from PPPoE (ADSL) to Ethernet Interface (Cablecom) and was set, more or less. ...

Ray Ozzie, now CTO of Microsoft, then founder of Iris and Groove, has been doing some interesting work on the way, the web enables inter-app communication. His latest endeavour is Live Clipboard a way to bridge communication between web apps or web apps and desktop apps. There are a number of demo screencasts that show how this works. As usual (?), Ray is licensing this under a Creative commons license so we all can share the fun. ...

I was looking at my Campfire Chat and checked out the Account tab when I noticed that the 30-days option had turned into a “free” option. In addition, the paid options have a checkmark next to “ad-free”. Have the 37signals given us yet another free application? In the beginning, they said that there would only be a 30-day free trial. I’m still holding out my final opinion on campfire. I really like the way it’s designed, I like the simplicity, but I don’t (yet) see the real benefit of using Campfire vs. for example IRC. And my biggest gripe is, that I can’t specify which people are allowed into which rooms. As it is now, I can’t have rooms for all of my clients, because everybody can see everything. Openness is good, but it only goes so far… ...

In preparation of the Rail Course I spent some time writing a couple of pages of “cheat sheets” or quick references of the materials presented. In the end, I got about 20 pages, mostly of short code snippets. I also have a presentation to start things, and I did that in Keynote. Beautiful program and I think I managed to create a good presentation. So the choice of the program to write the text was easy: Pages. At least that’s what I thought. But while Pages is quite simple to use, and it produces good looking pages, it is slow. Slow as molasses. Typing a character seems to pain the computer no end. After writing one or two pages I gave up in disgust and turned to Microsoft Word. The Mac version actually is quite good and I managed to write the 20 pages. ...

Recently I was deciding what new digital camera to buy. A friend of mine lent me his Canon EOS D1 Mark II with some high-end lenses. I lugged several 1000 $ of equipment and several kg’s around for one long weekend and was able to snap around 1000 pictures. This camera is incredible good, the picture quality is great, and the controls make so much sense (once you get used to using two hands to change anything). Clearly a DSLR is the way to go. Maybe not a D1, but an amateur version, maybe a D350 or a Nikon D70 or similar. ...

My - time flies. If you’re in Zurich, come by tonight. There might be cake. There might be wine. I’ll be there.