musings

It took a long time, but the publisher of my book and my company finally agreed on a method of selling the PDF of my Rails book not only on CD (and only to people in germany) but - as it should be - as a downloadable version. I have setup a small shop at https://rails-praxis.myshopify.com/ with a standard Shopify template and using Fetch.app to handle the digital downloads. This is a temporay solution until the publisher can handle digital downloads (which means, that it will be in place for quite some time I guess)… ...

On Halloween Friday was the Somesso conference on social media in Rüschlikon. After last weeks Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, this was a fresh and new conference put on by Arjen Strijker. There were quite a few bloggers covering the confernce, the usual slew of pictures taken and of course a lot of chatter on twitter. I was invited by Arjen to do a short pitch on Headshift. As others have noticed: ...

Following up on my piece ‘the private net’ from last week, some further thoughts on secure communications and a call to action: One secure way of communication, supposedly, is Skype. I have heard law enforcement people in Switzerland talk about their problems with Skype: They can’t monitor and eavesdrop on the encrypted communication. But is it really true? Some people I have talked to suggest that the price EBay paid for Skype a few years ago was way way more, than the business was worth. ...

This article has been gestating in my mind for quite some time. It was pushed closer to being written by an incident a couple of weeks ago. I run a number of different websites (in this context namely iphone-essentials.ch). Also, since a couple of years, I had a Google AdSense account and ran ads, not to cover my costs (the payouts were too low anyway) but as matter of getting a feel for this method of monetization on the web. ...

When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals at @media Ajax 2008 (tags: javascript ajax web security presentation csrf json) DelSolr – Simplifying Solr Facets in Ruby (tags: ruby rails gem lucene solr searchengine facet) Search smarter with Apache Solr, Part 1: Essential features and the Solr schema (tags: searchengine opensource faceted solr lucene search howto) Blacklight (tags: ruby rails rubyonrails lucene solr blacklight) Introduction - Fast File Search (ffsearch) ...

The coming Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin (October 21.-23.) is hosting a lot of interesting speakers on a lot of topics “web 2.0”. I just did a 25 minute interview with Lee Bryant of headshift on various topics. We talk about Web 2.0, how social tools can be adopted by the enterprises, what changes might be coming, what the various obstacles are, what role collaboration tools like twitter have and how they can evolve to support enterprise collaboration. ...