InVisible

On one of my customer projects, I needed to access an Oracle 9 database to transfer information from a Notes database to the SQL database. Because this was going to be an intermediate solution, only for a couple of weeks, I hacked together something that used the Oracle ODBC driver and installed it at the customers site. We got it to work on a R6 Notes client, but not – as intended – on the R5 server they had hidden away in some basement. Recently we moved to another Notes server (R6.5 this time) but the agent still had problems. ...

This will cost me many, many hours: Google Earth Unfortunately, no Mac version yet. Luckily, I still have a PC. Technorati Tags: google, earth

Obviously, Josh Petersen got in contact with the CopyCats of aimido. They responded and Harald Schropfer, one of the missing advisors made an appearance on Josh’s 43things list. The home page of Aimido now sports a “inspired by…” blurb which lists 43things and goes on like this: 43things.com, blogger.com, friendster.com, Google Suggest, linkedin.com, meetup.com, orkut.com, parship.com, ryze.com, technorati.com, tickle.com, tribe.net, Richard Horne`s "101 Things to Do Before You Die", and many more... Thank You! What irks me about this, and about the email they sent to Josh, is the complete and utter refusal to own up to what they have done: Not only stealing an idea but the actual look and feel, the way things interact and so on. ...

Well, well, well. There is this company called 43things.com that provides a neat web service. And suddenly there’s a german company called aimido that does the same thing. Josh Petersen of 43things blogged about it. Who are David Kuczek and Berit Ernst? Why are they seemingly stealing the idea, the layout and the functionality of another companies business? What happened to having your own ideas? Do their partners, Andreas Arntzen, Lars Langusch, Harald Schropfer and Oliver Weyergraf know that their business is looking like it was lifted 1:1 from someone else? (who, by the way also have a german presence) Do they care? Or is it totally intentional? ...

Today my companies new blog: not.invisible.ch goes live. This blog will focus on the what our company is doing. A “behind the scenes” look if you will. We have heard the jokes about our companies name. While we consider ourselves successful if what we have done becomes “invisible”, the process, the thought, the work we are doing is not. The not.invisible.ch blog’s task in life is to make that process visible. I hope to gently persuade my partner and our employees to blog too - we’ll see how that goes. ...

Blogging will be light during the next couple of days. We have taken the keys to our new house last tuesday and I have been busy honing my manual skills by laying down more than 60 square meters of floor in the newly refurbished roof of the house. My hands ache. My knees ache. I know why I work in IT and not on the construction sites of the world. ...