Musings

Then I have the person for you: Stefan is my brother-in-law and is free around June 2006. He (and my sister) are willing and able to relocate, both have excellent english skills. Stefan is the Head of Information & Media Relations at a swiss private bank and is looking for a new challenge. Als Kommunikations-Manager mit internationaler Fuhrungserfahrung suche ich eine neue Herausforderung, in der ich meine Starken und Erfahrungen unter Beweis stellen kann. Nach ebenso abwechslungs- wie lehrreichen Jahren mit Fuhrungsaufgaben in verschiedenen europaischen Landern bei internationalen Bluechips ist es nun an der Zeit, die berufliche Ersatzbank zu verlassen und den Spielverlauf aktiv mitzugestalten. Erfahrungen habe ich vor allem in den Bereichen integrierte Unternehmens- und Marketing-Kommunikation, Public Relations und Public Affairs gesammelt. Bestimmende Merkmale meiner Personlichkeit sind Loyalitat, Engagement und ausgepragte Leadership Skills. Aufgrund meines bisherigen Werdeganges und des zugehorigen mentalen Weltburgertums bin ich international umfassend vernetzt und entsprechend mobil. ...

Yes, the Intel Macs support Dual Boot Camp. And it works nicely, but requires the dual boot dance, which is time consuming. And while in Windows, there is no Mac goodness. Thanks to the good folks at Parallels this problem is getting smaller every day: Lotus Notes running on Windows XP running in the Parallels Workstation on my MacBook Pro. This just rocks! And priced at $49, Parallels Workstation is a steal. Plus the development team is really responsive. They have releases the fourth beta today, just 2 weeks after the initial release. This one should solve most of the problems people experienced. Let’s see… ...

So I may be the last person on this earth to have read Dan Browns “The Da Vinci Code” (in it’s german translation, thanks to Eris who lent me the book) I finished it over the long weekend. As much as I like a good conspiracy theory, this book is so bad, I don’t know where to begin. Although it has some nice ideas (nothing earth-shattering in terms of conspiracies in my opinion) it reads horribly. The cast feels like out of the stories my son (age 8) tells me. And it seems to me (proud parent) that my sons characters have more depth, than the cast of this boy-scout like “Schnitzeljagd”. ...

It’s been more than a week since the last Week in Review (a format I have shamelessly stole from 37Signals, Fly on the wall), here’s what we have been up to: 3 days of Ruby on Rails Training, inhouse for a large corporate customer. It was a success in my book, and we had quite productive 3 days. I think I learnt as much as my participants, something I really enjoy about teaching. And what a wonderful sight, having the boss of a department sending his Java and Coldfusion programmers to a Ruby/Rails class, so that they won’t be stuck in their acquired mindset. Others take heed! Notes/Domino is not dead yet, it just smells funny. Or so it seems. I have started a long term engagement with another large customer with a huge installed base of Domino servers. I’m doing admin support programming, something I really like doing. Tracking down complicated chains of “it’s not working” is a game I like, and there are a few of these problems that wait for me. Interesting to see, that there are production environments, with mission critical processes (regenerating the NAB with thousands of access groups every night), that -don’t- didn’t use version control. Just finished installing the IBM Workplace Services Express today. This “not-enterprise, but small companies” style collaboration tool takes about 2 hours to install on a reasonably fast, 2 processor, 2 Gb RAM server, where it dropped around 5 Gigabyte of programs and data on the disk. Because it took almost 10 minutes to launch, eating up 1 GB of RAM in the process, I could only verify that it seemed to work, before I had to leave. Maybe there would be a market for a small collaboration application, built on an open source framework? One that does not kill the machine it runs on? Talking about machines. I’m a proud owner of a MacBook Pro. My sister needed a “new” laptop, so I gave her my 15" PowerBook. She’s satisfied, I’m satisfied, win-win all around. The main reason I like the MacBook Pro (except for it’s sheer speed which is nice), is that it runs Windows (yeah - booh, hiss). It allows me to run Windows XP with Lotus Domino Designer and get rid of my aging Dell Inspiron. Windows screams on the MacBook and it’s a joy to work with it (as far as working with Windows can be a joy :-) ). A great machine, and it seems that I’m blessed with a non-whiny machine - it still gets hot though. And that brings me full circle back to Domino. I handle two intranet applications running on Domino for another large customer. Both applications are due for content updates, and we usually slip in some functional changes at the same time. So I’m revisiting code I wrote a couple of years ago and constantly tidy it up, while building new functionality. One of the applications uses a lot of Javascript, and I plan on replacing a lot of code by using the Prototype JS framework. Another thing in the pipeline is to replace eWebEditPro with FCKedit. Right now, the sheer amount of work is almost overwhelming me. There’s also some Ruby on Rails development that needs to be finished this month. Hopefully it will get a bit more quiet soon. The signs look bad though, it seems like the demand for our skills is rising… ...

I met Skip when he worked at Action Technologies as a sales man. When we worked on the “Ibex Domain Manager”, we hired him and brought him and his wife Cindy to Switzerland for a couple of months. He became a friend and we were sad, that we couldn’t get enough traction in the company, that we could keep him. So he went back to the US, and we only talked to each other on a very irregular schedule. ...

Ever since the experiments with the Xen virtual server (which run beautifully, thanks for asking) lot’s has happend: It’s been - oh - almost 20 years since I sat in tests for 2 times 3 hours straight. That’s what I did last friday, as part of my education to become an “Organisator”. The tests went well (the proof will be the results that I get next month) and I’m happy to have that behind me. I’ve been to Opera with my wife. “La Traviata” is a rather simple story, but beautiful music and a wonderful performance at the Opernhaus Zurich. What is the best way to migrate away from a Lotus Notes application, when you need to keep some 5500 old data items? No, not importing everything into Remedy. Not building a “read-only” Ruby On Rails application. Keep the Notes Server, keep the data, let the users keep the “old way” of accessing data. Seems like a no brainer, but needed a pre-study with cost/benefit analysis. Organizing a new training class next week for a new customer. Im going to do a 3 days introduction to Ruby and Ruby on Rails class for 6 programmers. Unfortunately, Rails 1.1 was released today, so I need to update my documentation. The forgotten features of Rails 1.1 is a list of the small but important changes that also will help you I booked both flight and conference today: Reboot 8.0 I’m coming. (And I’m looking forward to that immensely). Henriette can I crash you? Reboot7 last year seemed to me to be a turning point in my life. I am sure, that Reboot8 will have a similar impact on the way I look at life. Technorati Tags: ausbildung, conference, crash, organisator, reboot, reboot8, sgo, xen ...