Invisible

Keep Your Voice

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:25:00 +0200

Keep your voice (this text is 100% human generated)

After a while you will be able to recognize the slop. Open Facebook, open LinkedIn, open an Email newsletter. You will find the same patterns, the same bullet points, the same gushing language. There are (of course) multiple problems with that.

Let me start with a non-obvious one. I find that my writing changes based on the slop I’ve been fed. I write this post without a plan, without a structure and without AI support. And still I can feel that I gravitate towards the same slop-style of writing that I’ve been exposed to over the last year or so. The thought alone is horrible. We are loosing our voices — not only because we use AI to (help us) write, but because we are exposed to so much of the blandness that AI writing is.

Use AI to Get Rid of AI

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:22:00 +0200

Warning: This text is 100% human written (mistakes and all)

As I wrote a few days ago, I have been a heavy user of AI over the last months. I have spent a lot of time in Claude Code and the terminal (my natural habitat — it’s fun, that it makes a come back (after too many years spent in Powerpoint, Confluence and Jira) and I enjoy using it (mostly — the CC application has some warts, but that’s another story).

(Re-)Discovering Agentic AI

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:45:00 +0200

Warning: This text is 100% human written

I’ve (re-)discovered Agentic AI last December through a LinkedIn post forwarded by Ann Harding. The post mentioned Daniel Miessler and his „Personal AI Infrastructure" (PAI) project. Let’s just say — something clicked. I spent days (and many nights) learning, being amazed, working, building, refining Claude Code and what it can do for me.

Six months ago, I saw the downsides of AI as it is being used today (energy use, climate, intellectual property, ethics, politics, techbros, social, …) and didn’t really see any „real" value being produced. That has changed! Not the first part, but the second for sure.

135,000 Lines of AI-Assisted Code: A Month with Claude Code

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0100

A month ago, I wrote about my first three weeks with Claude Code. At that point, I had a few tools working: an email CLI, a Tana integration, some calendar automation. It felt like a lot.

I just ran the numbers. It’s considerably more than I thought.

The Numbers

Here’s what Claude and I have built together since early December:

Project	Files	Lines of Code
Supertag CLI (Tana)	163	44,116
Tool for my Psychotherapist wife	63	21,331
Email Skill	46	10,523
Daily Briefing	-	4,481
PII Anonymizer	-	2,894
Calendar (ical)	-	2,235
Tado Thermostat	-	1,551
Other KAI Skills	294 total	~70,000

Total: roughly 135,000 lines of TypeScript.

Three Weeks with Claude Code: Building a Personal AI Infrastructure

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0100

Three weeks ago I started using Claude Code, Anthropic’s CLI tool that lets Claude work directly in your terminal. Shortly after, I discovered PAI - Personal AI Infrastructure, a framework by Daniel Miessler that turns Claude Code from a capable tool into something far more powerful.

The core insight of PAI is deceptively simple: apply the Unix philosophy to AI. Small tools that do one thing well. Composable. Each tool you build makes the whole system more capable. Daniel built the meta-layer - the skill system, the delegation patterns, the constitutional principles that keep Claude focused and effective. I get to build on top of that foundation.

Exil Sessions 12: Laulalisään

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:43:49 +0100

Laulalisään is the recording of my twelft gig at Exil in support of Nik Bärtschs’ Ronin.

Laulalisään by Jens-Christian Fischer

Laulalisään

Exil Sessions 11: Klingalered

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:43:49 +0100

Klingalerede is the recording of my eleventh gig at Exil in support of Nik Bärtschs’ Ronin.

Klingalerede by Jens-Christian Fischer

Klingalerede

Exil Sessions 10: Jelamagua

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 15:43:49 +0100

Jelamagua is the recording of my tenth gig at Exil in support of Nik Bärtschs’ Ronin.

Jelamagua by Jens-Christian Fischer

Jelamagua

Alive

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 13:26:44 +0100

After over two^h^h^h three years of not doing anything here, the recent exodus from “Birdsite” to Mastodon has brought up the topic of self hosted and independent content. Time to dust of the old blog.

I had to update a few files in my Chaschper Theme to make it compatible with a more recent version of Hugo than the one I had installed. I also had to do the usual Yak shaving to get everything back up to speed on a new laptop (where new is relative - I’ve had this machine for over 6 months and just not had the need to run Git or Hugo from the commandline since then. New job, new profile - long story, and one for another day)

Exil Sessions 9: Ilandoruntis

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 15:43:49 +0100

Ilandoruntis is the recording of my ninth gig at Exil in support of Nik Bärtschs’ Ronin.

Ilandoruntis by Jens-Christian Fischer

Ilandoruntis

2019-10-13 Rossweidliegg Uetliberg

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 09:50:00 +0200

There are several dozen kilometers of hiking ways on our local “house moutain”. And sometimes, a small trail forks off of the main ones. If you take those trails and follow them, adventure awaits. Tourists laugh, when you tell them that the Uetliberg is dangerous and that people have had to be rescued by helicopter.

The trail I took up “Rossweidliegg” and then along the mountain wasn’t that dangerous, but there were a number of places where things could get quite hairy… As a reward I got wonderful views over the lake, the distant alps and the city.

2019-10-11 Round Galsklint

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:30:31 +0200

A long walk around Galsklint, the most west part of Fyn, the island in the middle of Denmark. We took a nice 10km walk around the whole area, saw different water ways, small islands, two castles, worlds end, swans, sun, rain, ferries, sail-boats, fishermen, and a lot of more or less motivated school children on their yearly “Motionsdag” just before the fall holidays.

Much needed after a long and tiring week. Back to Switzerland tomorrow.

Lillebelt 2019-10-10

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 17:17:09 +0200

Morning walk along the small belt - the water between Jylland and Fyn in Denmark.

The Farm

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 19:55:18 +0100

I spend my summer holidays with friends in a remote place somewhere in Denmark on an old farm. It is a time of talking, laughing, sharing stories, crafting, sports and good food. And sometimes there’s music. In previous years I shared some of my songs, this year I performed a set with guitar and iPad and a portable speaker for a few friends one afternoon.

As usual, I recorded the set - this time I tried to capture all tracks and not just the resulting stereo mix. As usual with technical things (and musical technical things in particular), it went wrong and out of the 7 armed tracks, only 4 had a signal. Luckily that included the raw guitar and the synths (as well as two of the effects tracks). I was able to re-create the missing effect tracks and the only thing that was really lost, was the drum track.

Café noire

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 10:01:18 +0100

One thing leads to another. Someone I know knows someone, we exchange emails and he sees that I make music and asks me to perform some live music at a private event. Thus was born “Cafe noire”. It had been many months since I performed and I was nervous about how much I would be able to bring to the event. It turns out that I’m really happy how the performance went. I was able to create an ambient sound scape that conveys a mood and that I still enjoy when I listen back to it.

Walking Distance

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 03 Mar 2019 15:12:17 +0100

I was travelling home from Basel last Friday afternoon, when two gentleman sat down across me on the train. One of them mentioned, that he just had stowed his cymbals, and that he was in a band that was an on a small european tour. We started talking and found out that we shared views not only on music but also on a lot of other topics, more or less related to music.

DMX Lightning

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 19:14:14 +0100

Last year I bought some cheap DMX capable lights - a Full Color Brick and a Mini White Par. Both work fine without any additional contols - the Color Brick can fade through various colors and the Par can be set to a specific white value.

It is clear, that this is not enough, so I got a cheap USB to DMX interface to control the two lights and start out in Light Show Business. Also, there needs to be software. A quick search for DMX software turned up QLC+ - a free, cross plattform, open-source software. What’s not to like?

Friesenberg 2019-02-04

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 14:33:26 +0100

On my way to work, on a sunny Monday morning. Snow from yesterday. No fog. Almost perfection.

Habits

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 21:19:40 +0100

Almost exactly 6 years after I talked about Habits it is time to pick up the topic again. It seems that starting a new year brings out the desire to work on self-improvement in me. And that means working on all of the things that “one should do” regularly (like brushing teeth).

A couple of years ago, I tried the BJ Fogg Tinyhabits method to intrduce new habits (it seems that the topic of Micro Habits is the new hot shit anyway) and failed spectacularly. I don’t even remeber what I tried to achieve then. Other habits have been more successful: 2 years ago I bought an Apple Watch and have been closing my rings almost every day ever since (I’m on day 703 of 1000). I learned that I needed to be able to make exceptions (being sick is one of them, helping kids prepare for final exams another) and be ok to breaking the chain. Still I have been walking to work almost every single day for the past two years.

Nik Bärtsch Winter Workshop

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 15:02:35 +0100

Nik Bärtsch is one of the central figures of the Zurich based, swiss minimal rhythmic music scene. His band Ronin plays every Monday night at Exil. Friends and I have been going there regularly for our dose of Ritual Zen Funk. These concerts each have been wonderful experiences.

A couple of weeks ago, Nik announced a Winter Workshop, a long weekend in Tessin. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough attendees, so it had to be shortened to just one Saturday. That was yesterday, and I had the pleasure to take part in a long and intensive movement and rhythm workshop in the Kokoro Dojo where Nik and Andrea led a very small group (just two of us).

Fuzzy File Finding (and warm fuzzy feelings)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 21:05:03 +0100

While my day job is managing a team of 8 engineers (which means a lot of meetings), I do get to work with the CLI from time to time. As you might know, working on the CLI means navigating deep dirctory structures and working with millions of files. It doesn’t matter if you are into operations or into development, working with directories and files are going to be your bread and butter operations.

The Forest of Unending Warmth

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 19:11:33 +0100

The music of Erik Emil Eskildsen (eee) is not something that naturally would be played on the radio. Which is a shame, and also a good thing (Art!). His music takes time to listen to, and it also needs repetition and intensive listening.

I stumbled upon eee via Markus Reuter - both of them play Touch Guitars, an invention by Markus. (Markus, of course, I met via Make Weird Music - a fantastic collection of interviews with musicians, away from the main stream)

Responsive Images

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 22:09:27 +0100

My quest for a slimmer website is ongoing. The newest addition tackles responsive images. This technique allows the browser to select an optimal format for an image, for example a small image on a mobile phone and a larger one, on a desktop.

The technique I use is based off of the works by Laura Kalbag, Adam Wills and Nils Norman Haukås.

I use the same Hugo Image Processing techniques as in other parts of the Hugo Chaschper template, this time in a figure shortcut that overrides the Hugo internal one.

Slimming

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 12:02:45 +0100

The Website Obesity Crisis is a wonderful talk about the sheer size that even simple websites have. Thanks to @stilkov for the pointer:

2025-01-06: There used to be a link to twitter here, but somewhere in the last few years since I deployed my blog the twitter API changed/broke/whatever. I have therfore removed the content.

That led me to look at the size of this blog and it was scary:

The weight of the front page of this humble blog is a whopping 5 MB. When looking for the culprits, I came across two problematic areas:

Mama Na Bana

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 21:00:27 +0100

What a nice surprise!

My friend Matthias Reinhard De-Roo read a poem by Enid Madaras, played bass and percussion and made a video to go with it. And then there are sounds that come from me (recorded at a jam session we had sometime last year).

Check out the other videos by Matthias - wonderful!

Travis checks Chaschper

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 17:51:33 +0100

One of these “ohh - that’s a nice idea, I should totally also implement that” ideas. I stumbled upon the Dream Plus Hugo theme, that included a little badge that linked to a Travis CI build status.

Using CI (Continous Integration) to check the sanity of the template seemed like a good thing to me, so I looked around on how various people do this. I found one template by Vicky Lai that included HTML checking. After a bit of fiddling around, to get the correct command line incantations going, and some more fixing of malformed HTML, the Hugo Chaschper template now is tested, the exampleSite is updated to include some “real” content and a number of niggling issues in the HTML have been fixed (missig alt image attributes, a malformed <script</script> tag).

Chaschper Galleries

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 12:32:21 +0100

The new version of the Chaschper template that I’m using to power this blog has gained a new capability: Image galleries.

I started out with a gallery by VickyLai to see how to do that in general. From there I looked at How to Build a Responsive Image Gallery with Flexbox to do some basic layouting and Fluidbox to style the images and load larger versions. I didn’t quite like the way, the galleries were defined in the original example, so I came up with the following scheme:

Scuol 2019-01-12

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 15:26:46 +0100

A wonderful, sunny day in Scuol. Pictures taken during a walk down to the Inn river. (iPhone Xs)

More Indieweb

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 21:58:57 +0100

I wrote about the Intro to Indieweb yesterday. Reading up on it, starting to read the people behind it or using it, I feel a similar rush as I did back in the days when I started blogging. This is the evolution of the Web I remember, this feels right. (And it also feels like a tiny bubble in the huge silo dominated web-simulacron we have around us today). Time to beat the drum, I guess and start on working on making it more accessible for people that aren’t as technology savy as the early adopters.

Intro to Indieweb

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 19:45:47 +0100

You might have seen references to IndieWeb on this site, specifically in the description of the Chaschper Theme. What then is the IndieWeb?

One of the huge problems in todays web-world is that more and more content is a) generated by users (which is good) but b) stored away in Silos like Facebook, Twitter or Medium (which is bad). The IndieWeb movement tries to Take Back The Web and have ordinary people own their own presence on the web (like this site) where they post and control their own content.

Data in, Not Out

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 16:04:48 +0100

While we didn’t have much success a couple of days ago, today we got the lights to work properly. Turns out, that I’ve made the beginner mistake number 1 when dealing with Neopixels — I connected the data signal from the Fadecandy to the DOUT pin of the LED strip (there’s also a DIN pin, at the other end of the strip). The “D” stands for “Data”, while I will leave you to guess what OUT and IN mean… To make this work, the data needs to go to the DIN port of a pixel strip…

Setting up channel

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 17:02:00 +0100

A recent addition to my home studio is the Behringer XR18 digital stage box mixer. It has replaced an old Yamaha mixer. The main feature of it is that it has none of the wonderful faders and buttons. Instead, the mixer is controlled via apps, either from a computer or a tablet or phone.

While researching mixers I came across a video on Setting up a Channel on a Behringer XR 18 - YouTube. Even though it shows the Behringer interface, the general principles shown should transfer to any mixer. I learnt quite a lot about configuring a channel.

I'm a character in a movie

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 14:55:00 +0100

Thread:

2025-01-06: There used to be a link to twitter here, but somewhere in the last few years since I deployed my blog the twitter API changed/broke/whatever. I have therfore removed the content.

Posting from iOS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:46:00 +0100

Having a git based blog makes it slightly difficult to post while on the go. I have read at least two accounts of people who pulled that off, but neither workflow quite worked for me.

Here’s where I’m at:

use WorkingCopy to clone this sites jcfischer/invisible_ch repository
use a Siri shortcut to convert urls to markdown links
use a Siri shortcut to export images from Photos to WorkingCopy by saving it through the Files app in the repository that WorkingCopy hosts
Using iA Writer to edit files that are stored in A git repository (add WorkingCopy as a file provider in iA Writer)

Things I tried that didn’t work:

Now

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 22:47:58 +0100

This is my now page. It is a list of things and projects I’m working on right now (and as times go by) a list of things I’ve done.

Based on the idea of nownownow.com

What I’m doing now

Last updated: 2026-01-16

Building with AI

I’ve gone deep into AI-assisted development. Claude Code combined with PAI (Personal AI Infrastructure) has become my primary way of building software. In six weeks, I’ve co-authored ~135,000 lines of TypeScript—tools that help me work, which in turn help Claude help me build more tools. The recursive joy of it is hard to overstate.

The long Now

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 22:47:58 +0100

While reading up on IndieWeb related stuff, I stumbled upon the Now page of Chris Beckstrom. This page gives an overview what he’s working on right now. The original idea seems to be by Derek Sivers as stated on the NowNowNow Abount page.

I really like this idea, so without further ado, here’s my now page

Lights

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 22:32:17 +0100

My daughter and I have started working on a LED light installation with several hundred LEDs. We are using the wonderful Fadecandy board by Adafruit. A couple of weeks ago, she hooked up their 8x8 Matrix to the Fadecandy and started to explore programming the lights with Processing.

But we have bigger plans. I ordered a bunch of LED strips with 50 WS2812 Neopixels spaced out around 10cm and we started to work on hooking them up with power and data connections today.

Rescue Old Blog

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 21:46:36 +0100

Two days ago, when I resurrected this blog, I thought I’d just start from scratch, leaving the 930+ old blog posts forever gone. Then I read how Amit moved from Squarespace to Hugo using the ExitWP tool to convert a Wordpress XML export to markdown files. I had an old export file lieing around and after just a few minutes with ExitWP I had 936 Markdown files, spanning 10 years (2003 — 2013) of my old blog content.

Privacy

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 22:47:46 +0100

This website is hosted on Netlify. Netlify logs access to this website, including which pages you loaded and your IP address. The data is kept for less than 30 days. (See the Netlify GDPR page).

This website also uses a self hosted analytics tracker Matomo that does not share data with anybody else than me. The data is anonymized and IP addresses are truncated (i.e. the last two octets of an IPv4 address is not stored). You can opt out of this tracking by clicking below.

Setup Matomo

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 21:58:55 +0100

I like Analytics on a website, I don’t want to use Google Analytics. That leaves me with only a few options, one it to run my own analytics software somewhere I control. Previously I used Piwik with good success, so it seems sensible to set that up. Piwik has been renamed to Matomo and I haven’t found a simple complete installer.

Server Setup

I know that I should use something like Ansible to set it up, but I’m doing it by hand for now.

Sideslips

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 15:15:54 +0100

One track on the Crystal Caves album is Sideslips. When I recorded it, I also did a video recording. Enjoy:

Hugo Templating

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 13:38:35 +0100

I spent most of the time setting up this new blog deciding on which template to use. I settled on Casper-Two but had to make changes literally minutes after I started using it. I created a fork, hugo-chaschper and made the following changes:

Cleaned up (HTML formatting)
Removing the ‘caspertwo’ options (Casper-Two contains two ways of displaying single page content. I have started to remove the one I don’t use)
Added support for IndieWeb and IndieAuth. I followed the post IndieWebify Your Hugo Website
Support for Webmentions using code from Amits Blot Template and his description
Re-surrect the original CSS file so that I can change it
Reading time
Better organisation of posts (internally)
DRYed up display of article preview cards

Things to do:

Sun Machines

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 14:51:53 +0100

This is the experimental duo that I have with Dragica Kahlina. We met musically at a workshop for free improvisation, led by Omri Ziegele and have been experimenting and performing a couple of times.

About

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 09:42:46 +0100

Who am I?

Human. Coder. Musician. Artist. Blogger.

What am I doing now?

see my now page

Invisible?

Many years ago, my wife and I each started our own companies. Hers was called visible, mine was called invisible. After some years we merged and formed InVisible GmbH. I used the domain invisible.ch both for personal and business. Right now, it is personal again.

Hello World Again

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 08:53:41 +0100

After a hiatus of many, many years in the blogosphere; after a growing dissatisfaction with the way social media (I’m looking at you, Facebook) is building walled gardens; after the perceived need of having a place for a portfolio of my works, I have decided to resurrect my blog with some new technology and start all fresh.

I have also decided to leave the old content buried in a broken database and in an exported XML file. Most of it is no longer technically relevant, and those personal pieces from the past, they are - well - from the past. May they rest in pieces and 404s.

Choosing a Platform for this new site

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 09:26:08 -0100

I wanted to bring back from the dead my old website, which was running on an old version of WordPress. It probably got hacked, as one day I received a text from a friend, asking about the error message that showed up (instead of the stale content that hadn’t been updated for years)

I also wanted to move away from WordPress and was looking for alternatives. Via a blog post I read (yes, blogs still are a thing, it seems) I found Ghost which looked good. Instead of just diving straight into installing it, I decided to ask the collective wisdom of Twitter for suggestions.

Crystal Caves

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 10:01:18 +0100

Crystal Caves is a concept album I have been thinking off for over a year and started to work on for earnest in late 2018. It is a reflection on my state of mind, as experienced through therapy. I went through a dark phase in my life in late 2016 that led to a form of burn-out.

I was lucky to get to meet a wonderful therapist, who helped me work on finding my way back. To her, Crystal Caves is dedicated.

Scuol 2018-10-25

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 15:26:46 +0100

A wonderful, sunny day in Scuol in autumn. Pictures taken during a walk down to the Inn river. (iPhone Xs)

Ambient Explorations

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 14:57:18 +0100

Ambient Explorations is a series of four instant composition pieces. The only instrument used is an electric guitar, that is routed through a complex labyrinth of effects (mainly delays). The delays mangle and re-texture the guitar sound, creating long and evolving sound-scapes.

Ambient • Exploration by Jens-Christian Fischer

Ambient Explorations

Live at Stall6

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 14:31:09 +0100

In 2017, I played multiple times at Stall6 where Richard Csizmazia organised the Signal Zirkus Zurich meetups.

Most of the concerts weren’t recorded (mostly due to failures of my equipment), but on 2017-07-18 the stars were aligned and I was able to record the whole set.

Ambient Guitar Electronique - Live at Stall 6 by Jens-Christian Fischer

Buy the Ambient Guitar Electronique on Bandcamp. (Name your price, starting at CHF 0.00)

From Prague to Zurich

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 14:48:27 +0100

On a business trip to Prague I brought my iPad and used my time on the plane to and from Prague and at Prague airport to create three purely electronic pieces. Each of them was recorded live and in one take, using a variety of iPad applications.

From Prague to Zurich by Jens-Christian Fischer

Buy From Prague to Zurich on Bandcamp. (Name your price - even CHF 0.00)

I'm still alive

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 08:43:31 +0000

Contrary to what the last blog post was (or wasn’t suggesting) I didn’t die while fasting - I just lost 7kg and the will to finish the 100 day blogging challenge (call it 95% success)

And then a Wordpress update led to me not being able to access the backend, so I couldn’t blog anymore. And then a lot of other things happened in RL that just put blogging on the back burner. Luckily I have a nasty cold these days, so I could start to take care of all the small things that needed attention - like this blog for example.

Rescueing a non booting VM under Openstack

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:03:59 +0000

So we are running an OpenStack installation based on Folsom, but with Ceph as our underlying storage engine for volumes. This is a bit cutting edge. To make matters more bleeding, we run the Ceph OSDs on BTRFS - definitively bleeding edge, as we had various of our servers die with BTRFS related kernel panics. The advice usually given is to upgrade the BTRFS code - so we have started to migrate our Quantal (12.10) servers to Raring (13.04)

5 - fasting day 1

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:41:07 +0000

Almost at the end of day one of the fast - this was both more and less difficult than the last time I remember.

Easier because I’m not actually hungry, there is sort of a constant nagging from the stomach, but nothing that is really difficult to ignore (or to shut down with a glass of water). The family (of course) continues to eat, and that is a bit more difficult to stomach - so to speak - so I have not spent time with them at the table. Still the smell of freshly made Lasagne is a strong detractor.

6 - fast

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:21:07 +0000

Tomorrow I will start a 7 day fast. Today saw reduced food intake (even though I had two social events to attend to) and not-tea instead of tea. The last time I held fast must be around 18 years ago. I remember deeply enjoying the experience (and missing the act of chewing the most) and I have been on the verge of fasting again from time to time. But now, finally, the stars have aligned and I am ready to do it again.

7 - getting git review to work

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:41:46 +0000

Contributing to a large OS project (OpenStack) means to jump through a lot of hoops to get the necessary agreements in place and tools installed.

OpenStack uses Gerrit for code reviews, and recommends to use git-review for easier review workflow.

The installation is explained in the documentation and it could be as easy as:

sudo pip install git-review

However that didn’t work for me - I was stuck with:

~ ⮀ git review
git: 'review' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

I use homebrew to install local packages, so the probable cause was some wrong path. It turns out, that pip installs the git-review binary in a non PATH path:

8 - mikropolis

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 05 May 2013 21:01:02 +0000

My good friend Daniel Frei is embarking on several new exciting projects. One of them is Mikropolis, a “live polit no show” social media political discussion event. Daniela asked me and Dragica Kahlina to come up with some jingles for the show. This has in turn expanded into a live happening with Dragica and me playing live on May 15th and 22nd. I have made some first sketches and yesterday and today worked on a “bigger” soundscape:

9 - recording at home

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:18:54 +0000

As I am slowly winding down the 100 blog posts, another brave soul has started a 61 days blog marathon - but with much longer and more useful blog posts than mine have been.

If you are interested in home recording, then be sure to check out Michael Hollands “Wiggly Toe Music” and his “Recording at home” series. He’s on day 2, has good content and there is a bunch more in the pipeline…

10 - countdown

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 01 May 2013 22:37:52 +0000

The last 10 days of the blogging challenge… Not much to say, really, I have been busy making music and enjoying the day off today.

11 - fifty

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:42:42 +0000

Happy birthday to my wonderful wife - she turned 50 today. Time flies, we grow older, wiser or foolisher, learn to live and love again, now that our kids are starting to grow up. Thanks for the many years with you, hope we will be able to celebrate many more birthdays together!

12 - improvisation

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:37:20 +0000

(Yes, gentle reader, I missed a post yesterday - again! As these 100 days draw to a close, I find it more and more difficult to bring up the necessary quiet time to sit down and write and also I don’t have the urge anymore to write something while totally tired and bleary eyed… It is going to be interesting to see, what cadence in blogging I will reach when in 12 days, when the experiment has ended…)

13 - the unanswered question

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 22:01:29 +0000

Fallout from the Songwriting course was a link to Leonard Bernsteins 1973 Harward Norton Lecture “The unanswered question”. While ironing my shirts today I watched lecture nr 2 about the syntax of music.

If you have just a passing interest in music, music theory, linguistics, the universal grammar and Noam Chomsky and you are delighted by listening to a profound, delightful and humorous lecture, presented in the most extraordinary manner, then spend the 96 minutes to watch this and learn about the connection between speech, lyrics and music and see how Mozarts Sonata in G Minor #40 is constructed.

14 - Tango

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:09:53 +0000

Daniela and I have been taking Argentinian Tango lessons for the past two months. We are soon (like this sunday) finished with the introduction course and planning on taking the next step. Part preparation, part training, part fun saw us go to a Milonga with live music tonight. The mix of people was fascinating - young women and men, middle aged couples and a couple of seniors. There was dancing, listening to music and enjoying the spectacular dancers. We managed to not bump into any other couples, staying in the groove (mostly) and very quickly exhausting our repertoire of figures.

15 - Schaufelberger, Favre, Fuhr

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:50:11 +0000

Tonight at Kammertheater Stok: Philipp Schaufelberg, Pierre Favre and Dietmar Fuhr - a great concert, lots of improvisation and long discussions with Philipp and Dietmar afterwards at the bar.

Nothing more to say, than that it was a really enjoyable evening Daniela and I had. Now that the kids are growing up, we start to live a life as a couple again - and that feels just great after 15 years of handling kids.

16 - Pat Pattisons Introduction to Songwriting (recap)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:27:18 +0000

Why do just one course at a time, when you can do two? The correct answer, of course, is that you should always be learning (I gave up on the third concurrent course though…)

Concurrently with the Music Production course I took Pat Pattisons “Introduction to Songwriting” class. As you know, I have been semi serious about playing guitar the last year, and been singing quite a bunch of the “standard” songs. Why not learn how they are written?

17 - music production

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:05:37 +0000

The “Introduction to Music Production” course has ended and in the next days I will get a certificate stating that I participated in it. All nice and well, but the important thing is the amount of stuff I have learnt. This post is a recap of the last 6 weeks, with the main takeaways of each week (as well as the assignments I recorded)

Week 1 - Sound and Signal Flow

Basics, basics, basics - things that I had “known” for years (decades even) but nicely packaged together. And I picked up quite a few things: Difference between TS and TRS cables (unbalanced mono or either balanced mono or stereo), polar patterns on microphones, difference between dynamic and condensor microphones, the realization, that GarageBand wouldn’t be cutting it for the next weeks and the need to choose another DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) - hopefully without spending a couple of hundred bucks on it.

20 - delayed

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:36:00 +0000

Meta: This was written a few days ago - instead of a longer post. I just noticed, that I didn’t publish it… As I near the end of my 100 days (only 16 days or so to go) I feel that I have less and less to say - I will therefore just post this instead of todays post and go to bed instead - how does that sound? To me, it sounds great…

18 - home studio

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 22:08:53 +0000

The sunday house cleaning saw my wife working on the kitchen while I was in the roof, re-purposing old and new electronics to create a more permanent home studio.

1 2008 MacPro (now that it is not powerful enough to compute BitCoins anymore) 1 22" Monitor 1 old Ikea Desk 1 Sonos ZP100 with speakers (instead of monitor speakers) 1 Logitech Mouse 1 M-Audio Fast Track 1 Yeti USB Microphone 1 1996 Fender Telecaster 1 Norman B18 1 Ibanez Combo Amp 1 Bose ME-70 1 ADA MP-1 Tube PreAmp (No, I don’t play nowhere near as good as this guy) 1 Roland A300 Pro Reaper DAW u-he Zebra and Diva (love those analogue sounds)

19 - online learning

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:33:36 +0000

As I finished my “formal” education at the University of Liverpool in 2011, the MOOCs started to rise. It started with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvigs “Introduction to A.I.” and Andrew Ngs “Machine Learning”. Both Sebastian and Andrew have started their own MOOC startups: Udacity and Coursera. Udacity is focused on Computer Science, Math, while Coursera has courses from totally different aspects of learning.

I have had wonderful learning experiences with both of them, and I’m really enjoying the Berklee college of music classes I have taken (and where I’ve learnt an enormous lot outside of my “regular” topics) and looking forward to the next one on improvisation.

21 - tea

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 20:32:12 +0000

Just a quick shout out to Hibiki-An, a japanese green tea producer, that has a good website, a good selection of great green teas and assorted accessoires and excellent and quick shipping. Alain and I ordered some tea, two Kyusu, matcha bowls last thursday and the nice postman delivered the package yesterday. 5 days for a delivery from Japan is fantastic. Also, with an order value of more than USD 150, the company pays for international express shipping.

22 - fever

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:03:16 +0000

I’ve got a fever - in the morning, fever all through the night.

Time for an early retreat to the bed, and hoping that is over tomorrow…

23 - garden working

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:48:27 +0000

Finally the “garden working” days have started. As the end of the development and deployment of a major feature of the Mobino backend (alas, totally invisible to the users, but simplifying a lot internally), the tech team spent the afternoon in our garden, fixing a few problems (suddenly, the database changed the way it returned data, leading to much joy because suddenly something that in fact was buggy (but worked) turned out to be just buggy) and enjoying the sun and warmth of a wonderful spring day. We are still debating the absolute gain in productivity of garden vs. office work, but in terms of enjoyment, I think garden wins hands down.

24 - gray days

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:57:20 +0000

Finally the sun has come back into our world - the last few weeks have been way to gray for my taste. As you, gentle regular reader of this blog know, I am enrolled in the “Introduction to Songwriting” course. This is one of the songs I have written as part of this course (and no, there is no recording yet that I am happy with)

<code><strong>
Gray Days</strong>

<strong>Am                Em</strong>
Around me seas of gray
<strong>Am              Dm7</strong>
am I loosing my will to live?
<strong>Am                Em</strong>
am I hunter, am I prey?
<strong>Am                 F</strong>
is there anything that I can give?

Surrounded by gray masses
am I loosing my touch in reality?
Seeing lights and flashes
Does this feel like normality?

PreChorus
<strong>   C                F</strong>
No reflections, no lights,
<strong>   C               Bdim</strong>
no affections, no sights.

Chorus
<strong>Am         Am</strong>
insecurity creeping up on me
<strong>F               E7</strong>
as if I haven't had enough
<strong>Am        F                G</strong>
all those people are obliv-ious
<strong>Dm                Am</strong>
to what I suffer through.
<strong>Am          G         F             E7</strong>
Gray days - even rain would make me feel better

<strong>Am                            E</strong>
Sun rays blasting through the gray
<strong>Am                 D</strong>
Is this helping my temperament?
<strong>Am                           E</strong>
Children outside starting to play
<strong>Am                F</strong>
There goes my bad sentiments

reflections, lights,
affections, sights

insecurity dropping away from me
I have had enough of it
People around me are joyous
And I feel totally fit
Blues skies, blues skies - happiness and smiles
</code>

25 - melodyne

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:47:23 +0000

Back in 2008 I read “the most amazing piece of software I have seen so far” by vowe where he described software that was able to do Direct Note Access (DNA) on recorded sound, effectively giving you the tools to change the notes (pitch or timing) of complex pieces of music.

Yesterday I stumbled upon it again and downloaded the demo version of Melodyne and used it to correct some of my horrible singing on a recording (as well as correcting a few wrong notes in the guitar part)

26 - the mega swap

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:48:30 +0000

Today my computer alerted me to no more room on the main disk - strange, because there were over 140 GB free. I fired up Activity Monitor to check for disk and memory and lo and behold - something was very very wrong…

No idea what UserEventAgent was doing - I forgot to check for which files it had open but 50GB of virtual memory seems just a bit excessive…

27 - pirate coin

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:54:15 +0000

What a ride the BTC vs any other currency has made in the last 48 hours. I don’t envy the people that have invested in Bitcoin (and especially those that have gotten on the bandwagon in the last few weeks)

Tonight I was a virtual guest at one of the german Pirate Parties and spent around 2 hours talking and discussing about Bitcoin: “Was ist Bitcoin”. There should be a recording of the event and I will post a link as soon as I have it. The PiratePad contains some more questions and answers that were discussed after my talk.

28 - 14 lessons

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:30:15 +0000

Slept way to little tonight, so no blog post from me. Instead, checkout this list of good advice:

https://siavoshb.tumblr.com/post/47005180661/14-lessons-after-five-years-of-professional-programming

29 - what a wonderful world

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:31:29 +0000

What a Wonderful World | Playing For Change from Playing For Change on Vimeo.

This song never fails to bring tears to my eyes - specially not in a version like this (via vowe who linked to “Stand by me”)

30 - z80

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:00:29 +0000

Thanks to Lutz Korte I have a ADA MP-1 MIDI controlled Tube guitar pre amp on loan (to see if I like it). Unfortunately, the power chord is a fix installed german one, and I didn’t have the necessary connectors or tools handy to change it. But I opened it up and saw this wonderful electronics board (Pic will be replaced with an own picture as soon as I have better light) Pic: https://en.audiofanzine.com/guitar-preamp/ada/MP-1/medias/pictures/a.play,m.68494.html

31 - Freicoin

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:03:36 +0000

Bitcoin is currently all the rage. The last few weeks saw an incredible rise in “value” (as seen by the exchange rate), a rise in problems (DDos against MtGox and Security Breaches at Instawallet and Bitcoin-Central) and loads of good and bad articles. Currently, the most important problem though, is another one.

Hyperdeflation. The constant rise of the value of BTC vs “normal” currencies like EUR or USD makes it highly improbable, that people do anything else than hoard their coins. The reasoning is totally clear: The value of the BTC will be higher tomorrow than today, so it doesn’t make sense to use the BTC to actually buy anything. A currency that is not used to actually buy stuff is kind of useless (and not healthy for the whole ecosystem)

32 - frank doran shihan

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:08:21 +0000

Incredible to not only see, but to work with Frank Doran Shihan, who is in Zurich the 25th time. It’s enlightening seeing a man that is 80 years old have so much energy and presence on the mat, with humour and joy.

I have been to his seminars for 3 or 4 years now, and they are incredibly inspiring. Hopefully we will have the chance to have him as our guest for many more years to come.

33 - pebble in da house

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 21:25:42 +0000

It was Kickstarter payback day today (yet another one) and two black Pebbles arrived (I am still waiting for a red, a white and a gray one)

First impressions (after half a day of wearing it):

Bigger than expected
Not as polished and small as an Apple product, but not bad - not bad at all - for an independent company
The display is better than expected
Communication with an iPhone 4 works relatively painless (seeing phone calls, messages and music control work)

34 - how to blow your interns mind

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:25:44 +0000

Chengchen started his Mobino internship this week and he has been totally overwhelmed by all the information and complexity of the system he needs to learn. I believe that throwing him into the cold water head first is a good thing, and he has been holding up really nicely those last 3 days, helping with navigating while I was driving the pair programming. We will soon put him into the drivers seat as well.

35 - skeumorphism

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:25:14 +0000

Every Apple user will have met Skeumorphism - faux leather in the calendar, tape reels in the (old) Podcast iOS app etc. There is hope, that Jonny Ive will free OSX and iOS from the tired “trying to look like reality” look.

The worst offenders in terms of skeumorphic interfaces however aren’t coming from Cupertino - there are legion of software producers that build interfaces that mimic “reality” down to the shadows on the knobs. Check out these samples:

36 - another day, another Mobino iOS app released

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:00:06 +0000

We had released the first (of many) updates to our Mobino iOS app over a month ago, but got shot down by the droids at Apple for using the word “beta” on our splash screen. The easy way - of course - would be just to scratch the Beta tag, but we spent quite a bit of time on again improving the user experience for signups, signing in with Facebook (in order to pre fill name and photograph) as well as dozens of other small enhancements to the general feel of the app.

37 - long weekend

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:31:08 +0000

This long weekend comes to an end. I haven’t done a whole lot, but enjoyed lots of laughter with my kids and wife. Today we even went for a 29km bike ride - cold, but at least no snow.

No other intelligent communications from me today I am sorry to say.

38 - family whatsapp and other forms of communication

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:49:02 +0000

My kids love their iPhones (My daughter even bought herself an iPhone 5 for x-mas). While I (and my wife) do have some reservations about the quite high usage those phones get, it is none the less fascinating to see, how todays kids are using technology. Instead of them learning from me, I start to learn from them. I still have some geek cred with them, because as a long time online user, I know most of the acronyms they use. But still, they are using the communication technology as easily as breathing. My daughter especially is constantly on Whatsapp with her friends and school mates. Homework, going out - everything is coordinated through a constant chatter in the group rooms.

39 - paypal fees

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 23:16:27 +0000

Just a quick note of outrage. I was planning to send EUR 150 to Germany for some guitar gear.

As this wasn’t a commercial transaction, I choose to foot the bill in terms of commissions. PayPal wanted to take EUR 7.70 (or a bit over 5%) for this transfer. 5% - that is outrageously expensive… Time for someone to step up to the plate and provide an alternative…

Oh - wait…

40 - to rome with love

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 22:48:05 +0000

The weather being what it is, what better to do, than to rent a bunch of movies from the friendly neighborhood video rental (highly recommend if you are in Zurich, we have been customers for around 15 years and Lillian who runs Filmriss is just a wonderful nice person, with a huge film knowledge and a selection of movies that strays from main stream).

Today we watched To Rome with Love, by Woody Allen. We have seen a few of the late Allen moves in the past years (Midnight in Paris and Vicky Christina Barcelona come to mind), so I had a vague feeling of how this film might be. I really enjoyed Midnight in Paris and Vicky Christian Barcelona, the light handed way of Allen telling simple (yet touching) stories. While “To Rome with Love” had some neat ideas (singing in the shower, being famous for being famous), most of the film lacked Allens magic touch. There were a few laughs (seeing Allen play again after so many years was good), but most of the short stories weren’t that interesting (or touching). Young naïve couple from the country side, coming to town, both making sexual experiences outside their marriage? Check. Old man, seeing his younger self making costly mistake by fucking with his girlfriends best friend? Check. Well off older US couple flying to Europe because her daughter fell in love with a native european? Check.

41 - federated rabbits

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:50:09 +0000

This post has to do with rabbits (in a way) and is therefore the perfect start to a long easter weekend…

I have been investigating message queues in quite a bit detail lately. We have switched away from Resque in Mobino a couple of months ago (mostly to problems with the resque processes loosing their connection to the Redis backend) and switched to a simple work queue implementation with RabbitMQ. This has been working rock solid for the last couple of months and we are very happy with that choice).

42 - pirates ahoy

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:48:57 +0000

Thanks to my presentation on BitCoin, I have been invited by one of the German Pirate parties to mumble about my take on BitCoins in one of the following weeks.

This is going to be interesting and I will keep you posted.

43 - godspeed

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 22:09:00 +0000

My friend and partner in crime (rather InVisible) Keith Bingman is leaving Europe tomorrow morning.

I met Keith at Reboot 7 (or 8) in Copenhagen. We met again a year later and talked about working for me. Soon after, he started to work for my then company InVisible, and became a major asset due to this many skills. He turned into a CSS and JavaScript wizard very fast, and helped develop a number of great web projects.

44 - bitcoin

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:13:03 +0000

I have been aware of BitCoin for over 2 years (at a time, when mining with a 8 core CPU still yielded a nice number of coins). I have seen the rise, fall and rise again of the exchange rate between USD/EUR and BTC and I have been able to buy a couple of “real” things with my Bitcoins (no, not on Silkroad. I have bought a projector, Art and mining hardware)

45 - talking stick

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 21:11:37 +0000

My friend and colleague Alvaro (who is responsible for the wonderful Mobino iOS and Android apps) has been working on an application of his own.

Talking Stick launched today. It is a really simple app - that simulates a talking stick - the token that gives one power to speak. The app allows you to select number of participants, a mode for a discussion (several talk modes available) and then tracks the speaking time of everybody (and it also records what was said)

46 - songwriting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:48:36 +0000

I finished week 3 of the Coursera songwriting course. This weeks assignment was to write a verse and chorus that confirms to certain specifications (stable verse, unstable chorus). The effect has to be achieved by using certain rhyme schemes or rhymes. For non-native english speakers like myself this was really difficult - as I have learnt last week, english is actually a rhyme poor language. There are very few “perfect” rhymes (love / above). Much rhyming is thus done with “family rhymes” (where similar sounds t/d, p/b, k/g, m/n/ng are rhymed like cut / mud) or even worse additive / subtractive rhymes ( cry / ride), assonance rhymes ( fool / rude ) and consonance rhymes (friend / wind).

47 - more Tiny Tiny RSS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:33:47 +0000

Feed reading on my tiny tiny RSS instance is quite nice. I had to change a few CSS properties (make the font bigger for my old eyes) and I installed another (more Google Reader like CSS). I have started to look at the options, learnt how to enable the digest plugin (edit config.php to enable it) and actually read through the descriptions of the different features on the TT-RSS home page.

Today I also got a mail from TheOldReader that my feeds had been imported - just around a week after I uploaded the OPML file to them. I think I’ll pass :)

48 - Tiny Tiny RSS on Synology

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:44:48 +0000

In my quest to “own my own data” I spent the last few days to get an alternative to Google Reader going. I decided on trying Tiny Tiny RSS instead of Fever mainly because TT-RSS is supported and in active development, while Fever (while looking more interesting) has been on hold for a few years and Shaun Inman basically hinted that he will not update or support it in the near future at least. Also, Ràmon has endorsed it…

49 - tea and schnapps

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:27:57 +0000

The one thing that my scientific mind likes about having a terrible cold is to experimentally find out, which sort of herbal tea goes together with which kind of schnapps.

Tonights experiment: Mint tea with Raki

50 - how music really works

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:50:04 +0000

I have been ill the last few days, which has given me time to oscillate between reading and sleeping. I have been going through the first 400 pages of “How Music Really Works” that can be read for free. The book is - shall we say - quite peculiar, with long passages about evolution, but it has given me a totally new understanding of music theory. There is a lot of thought that has gone into the description of the components of music, and the last free chapter has an impressive analysis of chord progressions.

51 - own your data

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:39:39 +0000

Yesterday I had a brief Twitter discussion with @halfbyte and @stilkov about “owning your mail” .

I think the issue is much more important than just mail - it is about owning your data (and moeffju has written more about it here - in german though). Projects like Ebend Moglens Freedombox are (or in that case, were) a great idea - but don’t seem to reach enough traction to be viable and realistic.

52 - Stephan Eicher

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 22:50:16 +0000

Last time I was at a concert of Stephan Eicher must have been in the mid 1980s. Stephan was solo on stage with a guitar and a sampler and a box of floppy discs and after each song, he would smile shy and ask what we wanted to hear. He then proceeded to load that floppy disc and play it.

I have heard most of his music since then but never seen him life again. Until tonight.

53 - Infusion

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:18:45 +0000

I have had a blast today, working on my “Introduction to Music Production” assignment and had planned to write something about the learning process.

However, I am drinking “infusion” (rose hip tea with lemon). Anybody knowing me will know that I tend to drink real tea (Camellia sinensis). This can only mean one thing: I’m starting to get sick.

No elaboration on learning today, but here’s the video I made Comping Audio Tracks with Reaper

54 - spot the error

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 08:09:31 +0000

55 - book sprints

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:02:26 +0000

While surfing the Interwebs (looking at private cloud solutions - I plan to give a talk about that later in the year), I also looked at OpenStack. On their blog I stumbled upon the Zero to Book in five days post. A team of people had managed to write a 50'000 word book in just 5 days. As some of you may know, I have written a book too, but it took me 13 months to do so. Naturally I was intrigued and tried to find out more. The people used a process called BookSprints, a facilitated, structured process that takes the group from idea to finished book.

56 - pair programming

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:58:27 +0000

Much has been spoken about the pros and cons of pair programming. I have had the good fortune to pair program with some great programmers (Flöre and Kaspar come to mind) but it has always been difficult in the settings I worked in to actually do regular pair programming. I facilitated a couple of coding dojos (I know, I know - should do more…)

I’m not going to rehash all the pros and cons of pair programming, and this entry is not going to be a learned discussion of it - just my experiences.

57 - music is the best

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:19:07 +0000

My iPhone is shuffling through my 20'000 or so tracks I have in iTunes - every day I get to hear around 30 minutes of music - often stuff I had forgotten I had or not heard in a long time.

Today I got another dose of Frank Zappa - easily my favorite musician.

I absolutely love this part of the lyrics of the song Packard Goose:

Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom

58 - bilan

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:58:20 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we had a photographer coming to our office - the technical HQ of Mobino. The result is the illustration to the current Bilan in an article about “The future of money” (not available online, but I will get a copy on wednesday)

From left to right: Alvaro Fussen (senior developer), yours truly, JF Groff (CEO) and Chengchen Ji (our intern for the summer).

Not only do we move money, we also do it in style…

59 - Tatort

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Es hätte schlimmer kommen können. Til Schweiger als neuer Hamburger Kommisar bringe einen eher unrealistischen, Action geladenen Tatort. Keine Reflektion, kein Seelenstriptease, dafür viel rumgeballere und einige coole Sprüche. Trotzdem ist das bei weitem nicht so schlimm herausgekommen, wie zu befürchten war.

Dennoch - ob der Tatort unbedingt US lastig (was den Munitionsverbrauch angeht) werden muss? Bis jetzt hat mir eigentlich ganz gut gefallen, dass die Tatorte wenigstens in Ansätzen den Anschein hatten, knapp etwas mit der Realität zu tun zu haben. 2011 wurden in Deutschland 36 Schüsse auf Personen abgegeben, davon 6 mit Todesfolge. Der neue Hamburger Tatort brauchte dafür gerade mal 90 Minuten…

60 - life - game - video

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 20:02:34 +0000

Everyone with a teenage son will know that this species spends an incredible amount of time in front of game consoles and computers if left to their own devices. I don’t want to go into the fights we have with our son about his excessive use of electronics (after all, I am guilty of too much electronics myself). One thing however, that I have absolutely no understanding for - and that surprised me, when I found out is the following:

61 - friends

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:32:16 +0000

It has been a long time since I was out in a bar with a friend, talking for 3 hours over a couple of beers.

Walking home, I realized how much I have missed this.

Thank you, friend, for your stories, your insights, your listening, your advice, your cheers.

Hopefully, it wont’t take that long until the next time.

62 - monkey patching

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:25:02 +0000

When I teach my students the beginning points of monkey patching I usually get a gasp or two, a muttered curse and something like “I will never want to maintain something like that”. Being the Ruby and Rails developer I am, I console them and tell them that in practice hardly anything bad happens, that Ruby gives you a sharp knife (instead of the plastic implements the Java people get dealt) etc. I also actually believe that this is so.

63 - learning with a beginners mind

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 07:51:35 +0000

The Coursera Songwriting and Music Production classes I’m taking are being discussed over on the Justinguitar forums.

Here’s the text I wrote as an answer to the bitching about the courses being all wrong, shallow, etc…

I’m taking both the music production and the songwriting class, and so far have been enjoying them (each in their different way). I have been dabbling with audio for 30 or so years, but even so I have still learnt quite a bit on the basics and a few new things that weren’t obvious to me. I am working on a video presentation of how to record an acoustic guitar and I have learnt how different polarities of my mic (cardiod, omnidirectional, stereo) sound (by actually trying them and recording some stuff with that setting). I have learnt more about iMovie and syncing of video and music than I cared for (and I have learnt that iMovie probably isn’t the right tool for that kind of video production). Is it strictly about music production what I have learnt? No. Have I learnt something? Yes.

64 - orange network

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:14:14 +0000

Today I was invited to a friendly talk with two Orange network engineers to talk about - tada - the Orange Cellular network in Switzerland. @Stephtara had facilitated this meetup for bloggers and members of the Orange community and Orange brought in two engineers that are working on the actual network. In a really interesting roundtable discussion, we were able to fire off lots of (technical) questions about cellular networks in general and the Orange network in particular.

65 - sleep

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:19:10 +0000

“I can sleep when I’m dead” and “sleep is overrated”

Those were things a younger me said one in a while. Not anymore. If I find myself at the end of an all-nighter (those have happened lately), I’m toast the next day (at least).

And now something else has come up, the last few days I have slept incredibly bad: waking up in the middle of night, heart pounding, feeling driven. Often accompanied by weird dreams or nightmares. (Tonight I first finished my song outline for the first assignment in the Coursera Songwriting class - sadly I can’t remember it, and then went on a killing spree with bow and arrow in a 100 vs 5 scenario in some medieval setting)

66 - two thirds

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:54:32 +0000

As I have nothing really to say today, I will use this space to make a meta tweet.

I already have made it one third through the 100 day blog challenge. Some days it was easier, some days more difficult - especially when being tired. But all in all, its a lot less work than I thought it would be. Hopefully you, dear reader, have found one or two posts that have brought you something…

67 - the antipope

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 20:47:34 +0000

Tim Bray Out me onto reading Charles Stross with his review Robot Sex-Slave Blues of “Saturns Children”.

In the meantime I have read most (or all) of Charlies books, and I love the different universes he has created (“the laundry”, “post singularity”, “near future” and “parallel worlds”)

Unfortunately, Charlie only writes one book per year, so there’s always waiting for his next book.

Fortunately, Charlie has a fantastic blog, and not only shares his insights into his writings, but also floats good thinking and interesting links. That and a great commenters community make that blog one of my favorite readings on the Internet.

68 - more augmentation

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:32:30 +0000

My post on augmentation a couple of days ago felt kind of unfinished. I couldn’t really articulate how I feel about it - both very against and very excited about the possibilities of something like Google Glass.

Thankfully, there are smarter people out there, and @zapgadget tweeted about this: Mark Hurst has written a good piece on the implications of something like Glass - not for the wearer, but for everybody else, not wearing it:

69 - I like chinese

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:19:06 +0000

With many greetings to our Chinese intern, Chengchen, who spent the last couple of days at our house and was a wonderful guest. Totally amazing guy - he came to complete his studies in CS at the university of Montpelier, France, 3 years ago - without then speaking a word of french. Now he comes to Zurich from spring to summer and he has already learnt the correct pronunciation of Grüezi, something most Germans can’t handle after having lived here for several years.

70 - constraints

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:22:44 +0000

Constraints set us free.

Or at least they can stimulate creative energy and make us try to do things differently. In todays improvisation workshop, Omri had us work with a lot of constraints:

Make 3 pieces of music, 1 or 2 minutes each, where you are not allowed to make a sound that sounds as if it comes from your instrument.

Improvise on the piano (something that is interesting to listen to) using just 2 notes. … using just one note

71 - teaching

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:32:38 +0000

Last year I started to work at the ZHAW (were work means: part time, coaching student teams of two on a semester long software project).

This year, I’m co-teaching a “Web Application Programming” course for the next semester. My colleague Beat kicked it off last week and I had two classes of around 18 students for 90 minutes each today. We went through the architecture of Rails applications (did I say, that the course is based on Rails - how cool is that?), MVC and some Ruby basics. I was worried in the beginning, that this was too little content for a lecture of 90 minutes, but I managed to spend all 90 minutes talking and introducing the students to Rails and Ruby.

72 - a regex puzzle

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 22:59:50 +0000

Via Ned Batchelder comes this wonderful Regular Expression Puzzle

(Click for PDF version)

Each cell is constrained by three regular expressions, and according to the author of the puzzle, there is one unique solution to it.

We spent around an hour at the office trying to solve it, but only managed around 20 or so cells. That is until JF, our CEO, came in. While he didn’t live up to his claim that he’d be able to solve it with his eyes closed, he managed to solve the puzzle at breakneck speed, finishing it at the dinner table. Highly impressive - and good fun!

73 - Kickstarting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 19:13:31 +0000

Kickstarter is a huge time and money sink - all those nifty projects, great ideas, great artists…

Last year I spent way too much money on nice projects, some of them turned out to be not so hot as thought (CordCruncher, I’m looking at you)

But today, coming back from holidays, saw the letter with the Nifty minidrive, and earlier today I got the email with the link to download the beta version of Drifter. Last year I received the gorgeous album by Amanda Palmer (and got to see her live later)

74 - Augmentation

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 20:33:36 +0000

I have a long fascination with augmentation through the use of computers. I fondly remember the evening at reboot 7 where we first watched the mother of all demos and then had a live video conference with Doug Engelbart, where he talked about his work on augmenting humans through computers (and his slight frustration that so few of his ideas had been implemented…)

But my fascination goes back even further. I remember installing the remembrance agent in Emacs, playing with the Autonomy agent software that watched what you wrote and suggested texts and articles that were related to what you were writing. Later, Zementa analyzed what you wrote in Wordpress and suggested similar articles, images etc.

75 - Weisshorn - Molinis

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:03:48 +0000

Today we did the tour from Weisshorn to Molinis, that Adi hinted at earlier this week.

We started around 13:00 and skied almost 9km with around 1700 height meters. The first part was wonderful deep powder, the second part down through the forest (steep and very steep). Zoë had no problems at all, Tobias on the Snowboard managed well but was beaten and tired, Doris skied technically perfect but got tired in the middle and fell a couple of times. Me? I was way over my limit (especially in the steep parts) and had more ground contact with the snow than in the last 10 years combined. But down we came, unhurt and proud.

76 - 46

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:18:21 +0000

0 phone calls (but one intended one that didn’t connect)

1 DM on Twitter

1 message on Viber

2 messages on Whatsapp

3 mentions on Twitter

3 4 5 messages on Skype

3 private messages on Facebook

3 messages on LinkedIn

4 5 emails

4 hugs

5 hand shakes

4 SMS

8 messages on Xing

17 posts on the facebook wall

Thank you all

(And I guess Facebook wins…)

77 - It has been 10 years

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 22:01:22 +0000

10 years ago (actually 10 years and 2 days ago - but Wordpress missed the scheduled release date of this post, so here it is - manually published)

And I had a blog before that (Moveable Type based) and still another one (written in Python). Sadly, they no longer exist…

That makes me one of the older bloggers in Switzerland, even though I haven’t been as active as others (like Steph with her Climb to the Stars blog)

78 - amazing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:43:33 +0000

When we are here in Arosa, we take ski lessons with Adi - a known teacher here. He’s fun, talkative but most of all, he is an amazing teacher. Not so much in what he shows you - I guess many other teachers can do that too. But Adi has a gift of making his pupils believe in themselves.

He spent two hours with Daniela who is on skis for the first time again after 25 years. After those she had a big smile on her face, and skied faster and more secure than before. Today he spent two hours with Zoë and me - and we raced the mountains like I never would have believed possible. He just smiles at you, says “let’s do this” and you are totally confident that it’s a good idea to go straight down the steepest slope (and of course I forgot to track this and see how fast we really went, I enjoyed it way too much). Zoë now skis faster and technically better than me - and she enjoys every second of it.

79 - Ein Wetter um Helden zu zeugen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 19:17:15 +0000

Title inspired by Rubén Parés-Selders and Erhard Karger

80a - really responsive design

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 21:32:01 +0000

Just stumbled upon this gem of a responsive website. It uses your Laptops webcam and a JavaScript headtracking library to determine your distance to the screen. It then adjusts the fontsize of the website to fit.

Great idea - and really neat.

Reminds me of a discussion about an idea I had with someone random at Lift a couple of years ago. We talked about the computer being able to detect if the user was concentrated while working on the computer (determined by face recognition and eye tracking) and fading out all windows expect for the one you are working in. If, on the other hand, you are un-focused, the computer will show more or different windows (not sure, if this would help becoming more focussed, but it seems like a fun idea anyway)

80 - slowed down

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:15:38 +0000

We have arrived, Zoë and I already spent a couple of hours on the slopes (in wonderful weather). Nap in the afternoon, food and wine - now some Tatort and then (if we manage to stay awake) another episode of “Forbrydelsen III”

Only expect light blogging the next few days

81 - The eve of holidays

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 18:43:27 +0000

The family and I will be packing up tonight and heading to the mountains tomorrow for a week of sunshine (promised), skiing (expected), dwelling in the spa (relaxed) and pampered by be the hotel (appreciated)

This is the third time we are heading to the Hotel Altein in Arosa and we are very much looking forward to it. The only thing missing now is to finish the packing, an event that causes endless screaming and shouting and loosing of nerves until finally we have all pieces needed (minus those we forget) in the different suitcases and rucksacks. The most difficult part (and the one that is strangest) is the amount of electronics that the family brings. An unscientific count shows these devices:

82 - Wordpress looses connection to MySql intermittently

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:10:20 +0000

This is more a plea for help than a real blog post.

Those of you that visit this blog with a browser might have seen the “Database connection error” page instead of the content. Usually, a simple reload takes care of the problem, and the you can read my ramblings. However this is annoying. More annoying, that I have exactly the same problem on another server with the same setup. Both servers are stock Joyent Smartmachines (small ones). Nothing special is configured on them, I have used the Webmin tools to configure the domains, setup the database and uploaded the Wordpress folders.

83 - 6502

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 21:43:49 +0000

One of the first programming environments I worked with was the 6502 CPU and its assembler. I liked it quite a bit better than the Z80 (which didn’t hinder me of course to ask for a Z80 programming book as a birthday gift - my parents surely thought I was crazy)

I never, really really, grasped assembler then (although later, one of my first big software projects was to write the DES encryption for 8051. The only source I found for DES was an obscure paper that described the algorithm in APL. I learned to read APL, and started to implement the algorithm in assembler. Of course there was no good tooling available, so I wrote a 8051 Assembler in Turbo Pascal. And while I was at it, I also wrote a 8051 emulator in Turbo Pascal. I vaguely remember if…then…elsif… elsif… end constructions that spanned several 100 lines of code in the inner loop of the emulator - at that time I hadn’t yet heard of lookup tables.)

84 - Working or Tested?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:01:08 +0000

Every web application needs to do things asynchronously. Be it that messages need to be passed to other parts of the app, or tasks that take a non trivial amount of time (sending an email, calling into another web service). Ideally, you spin these tasks off from the thread that services the web request and count on them being done in good time, without holding up the request.

Until recently we used Resque for this. Resque is used in large installations and seems to be battle proof - for us however, it turned into quite a bit of pain. (That is the topic for another blog post). We replaced Resque with RabbitMQ for message passing and girl_friday for sending mails etc. Both choices have turned out to be excellent so far: We are happy with the stability and the ease of use.

85 - Security Engineering

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:07:12 +0000

When I did my Masters in Science, I had to take a number of modules on topics that were wasted time (“Web Programming in XHTML and PHP” being my absolute favorite time and energy wasting exercise), but one module where I learned heaps and heaps was “Security Engineering”.

The course itself was so so (as - unfortunately most of the modules and courses that the University of Liverpool gave), but the book we were required to read was one of the best technical books I ever had the joy to read: Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (Amazon.de) Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (Amazon.com) It is a extremely accessible book, with load and loads of information presented in easy to read format, but with enough depth (and a fantastic list of sources)

86 - Lift recap

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:54:02 +0000

We are almost back to normal here at Mobino dev center, and I wanted to share a video with you, that was made at Lift13 by Charbax and in a few minutes shows you both how the payment process with Mobino works, and some thoughts from our CEO about the product and were we are heading.

Choice quotes from JF Groff include “credit cards are from the 60s” and “sorry, we don’t need you”…

87 - Guitar stand

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:12:48 +0000

To all of you who wondered what the day of woodcarving produced:

A guitar stand for my Telecaster and the Norman acoustic.

As you can see from the detail shot, I made a mistake in the geometry of the stand. The back is angled, so the lower support should have been angled too. There’s also a cut visible, but this one I left in deliberately. It is my rendition of Wabi Sabi. This is my first piece of wood cutting and I’m more than happy to show that (both the roughness of the whole piece and the imperfections that are due to my clumsiness)

88 - Woodcarving

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 19:04:26 +0000

Thanks to @baltasarw I spent most of today with Toni and Anneli Lengen in Stallikon, in their HolzSach Atelier carving wood - with a chainsaw…

Starting with this large piece of poplar:

I ended up with this:

Do you know what it is? Will be revealed tomorrow….

And here are all 4 pieces…

89 - Touch Down

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 21:54:41 +0000

3 intense days (and 2 intense weeks leading up to) of Lift13 are over. I didn’t have a chance to see much of the conference unfortunately, so I can’t say if it has been as good as previous ones - from my limited experience, I’d question that - but maybe some of my friends like @Stephtara who has been live bloging these conferences forever can answer for me.

I have been busy with my colleagues and partners in crime JF Groff, Alex Lampis and Alvaro Fussen to demonstrate how Mobino works, talk to merchants, customers and partners and get a feeling for how our system is received “in the wild” (although it was a very friendly “wild” setting). After our share of problems before the conference, things ran smoothly during the conference, our servers behaved, the apps worked, people got it, the merchants got it (and loved it). Very, very satisfying to see (as I already said in an earlier blog post)

90 - Hackable Sextoys

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:13:33 +0000

Todays takeaway of Lift13?

Hackable Sextoys via the presentation by @PerfectPlum

Besides showing of and demonstrating the current state of the art in vibrator technology, Heather Kelly also showed hackable sextoys (for example a vibrator controlled by an ultrasonic transducer that measures the distance of an object to the sensors and intensifies the vibrations accordingly)

A great presentation, and an interesting topic (especially after Garions talk about themes in the adult industry and his social responsible adult website and his admittance that he didn’t know, what women would be interested in)

91 - post launchem

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:00:38 +0000

Lift 13 started today - early for Alvaro and me, who took the Roeschtigrabenexpress from Zurich to Geneva. Thanks Glenn and stimmt AG for a wonderful ride.

The rest of the day is kind of blurry in my mind. We launched, took money from people, fixed a few small issues, and generally studied how the people reacted to Mobino.

The joyous moment of the day for me was to witness one guy buying a coffee at the bar, paying with Mobino for the first time ever and exclaiming: “C’est super cool” - that makes all the trials and tribulations we went through worth it. We also heard good things from others (merchants and users) - fantastic to see our ideas validated this way.

92 - Stockholm Syndrome

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:17:28 +0000

The Stockholm Syndrome is described as when hostages evolve sympathy or empathy with their captors.

That’s what I felt yesterday evening, hours before an email went out to 1000 participants of the Lift Conference in Geneva where we are showcasing Mobino as the official mobile payment provider - and we found a critical bug in our iOS app that was sent to review to Apple a good week before.

If all goes well, Apple currently takes around 6 days to review and approve an application for the iOS AppStore. We counted on being reviewed and approved yesterday evening, with another day to spare (the conference starts tomorrow). Worst case, we still had the old version in the AppStore that was missing one noteable feature, but still was fully functional and usable. Then however, one of our customer found a problem. And it turned out, that this problem was much much bigger than it first seemed like. In effect, it would have prevented everybody with an iPhone set to regional settings that use a comma for decimal separation to crash. And two countries that have this are France and Germany. Not good. Especially because the crash happened in the version that was available and the one that was in review.

93 - Error and Cause

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:54:33 +0000

One of the things that make me incredibly happy about my line of work is the following: In every case, when things don’t work (there are errors, strange behaviours, weird things) there is a reason. And it is possible to identify the reason, find the cause for the errors and to fix them. I find that very powerful and very reassuring.

There is no such thing as chance or randomness in the errors we encounter. There is a (logical) reason for every glitch, error and problem.

94 - Appreciation

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 20:54:57 +0000

Living a life can be difficult. Many things can go wrong, work different than expected, lead to problems and sorrow.

I’m thankful that I can share all of this with my wonderful wife - and I appreciate how down to earth she tackles all the problems that come our way.

Thank you, Daniela!

95 - Aikido

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 20:26:14 +0000

Every couple of months, we get a visit by one of the great Aikido masters in our Dojo. This weekend, Stéphane Benedetti, the “lazy Aikido” master.

5 hours of Aikido today for me - and I can feel every muscle and bone. Obviously, I’m doing it wrong.

Here’s a video from our Dojo, from 2008 where he demonstrates principles. Enjoy (and I will take it easy the rest of the evening)

96 - Private Communications

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:15:20 +0000

A long long time ago (8 years) three crazy people started a project called Zappata. I was one of them. It started as a super RSS reader (RSS bring hot new technology) and morphed into a peer to peer email server that used authentication via its own implementation of DNS servers with a Public Key Infrastructure, encryption but still was usable by just using a regular email client. Sadly, it never got of the ground - you can - if you are interested - read some of the things I have written about Zappata in the past.

97 - Music

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 22:27:58 +0000

As you may have seen in my post about habits I am practicing guitar daily (and have been doing for a bit over a year now). This is not my first go at playing music, I have a long (and unsuccessful) history behind me.

The last year I studied guitar basics: Open chords, simple strumming, gradually moving towards more complicated stuff. I would consider myself a beginning intermediate player now. I can accompany many songs, I can do 16th strumming, solo over a blues or over a G major song (Wish you were here), have started with some fingerpicking and am revising the “jazz chords”. Those chords, I learnt when I studied Jazz guitar with Philipp Schaufelberger here in Zurich around 10 years ago. I got this as a birthday gift of my wife (together with a wonderful Fender Telecaster). I played with Philipp for about 2 or 3 years and was way, way over my head the whole time.Philipp never bothered to introduce me to the beauty of an open E chord, but began with the Maj7, Min7, min7b5 etc. Oh - and soloing over Jazz standards of course. I learnt loads from Philipp, but never was able to put the pieces together consistently. I think it helps to have a grasp of music theory when playing (jazz) and sadly, this completely eluded me during that time. (It is starting to come together now)

Spam comment of the day

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:38:36 +0000

Notice the size of the scroll bar to the right….

[caption id=“attachment_12106” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Spam Comment of the day[/caption]

98 - Details

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 21:21:25 +0000

Yesterday saw the Mobino team work a 16 hour day to release another iOS version of the Mobino application. What took us so long? An incredible amount of attention to detail.

For good or for bad, JF (the CEO of Mobino) has an incredible attention to detail. Every word is judged, every pixel and color investigated. And those are the easy things. Submitting an app to JF for QA brings us bug reports that leave the development team either shaking our heads in disbelief or banging them on the nearest hard, flat surface.

99 - Habits

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:06:10 +0000

It seems (and I have not done any kind of research on this topic) that the “approved” way of learning things or learn to do things, is to form habits. Starting a habit is easy - everyone that has tried to live through a new years resolution knows that - but ingraining a habit is quite difficult)

There are apps (of course there are apps) that can help you - I stumbled upon lift.do a couple of days ago - but they are only a help. The habit forming has to come from you, and you need to really want to do whatever it is you are doing. Looking at my life, I’m working on ingraining several habits, some with more, some with less success.

100 days

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:42:48 +0000

Readers of this blog (there might be a few left) might have noted, that I haven’t blogged much the last months / years. I spend most of my online time on Twitter ( @jcfischer ) and the rest of the time I tend to work - Mobino is the company I have co-founded with J.F. Groff. and I’m acting and working as CTO. We are building a (nay, the) mobile payment system for 5 billion people, and I can tell you, it’s a ride.

Weihnachtsräumen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 11:33:14 +0000

Wir sind daran, einige Dinge aus unserem Haushalt zu entfernen. Da es sich um noch gut erhaltene Gegenstände handelt, wäre es schade, einfach alles “Hagenholz einfach” zu spedieren. Vielleicht findet ihr ja das eine oder ander Geschenk oder Schnäppchen:

Stuck with read-only SD card on Mac

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:04:09 +0000

I was trying to use my Mac to format a 16GB SD card with the unix tool ‘dd’, but I got a ‘permission denied’ error when trying to write to it - even as root (using sudo). Examining the SD card, the write lock switch was in the correct position, but the DiskUtil tool showed that the card was read only. Weird. Some trawling the Interwebs led to the usual “plz halp me - U good” crap that is all over the forums, but also this forum discussion on the Apple Support forums.

BitCoin button test

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:24:36 +0000

Just a quick test of a BitCoin payment button

You are of course free to pay me ;)

Rubin auf Schiene Entwicklern

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:45:08 +0000

Yesterday saw a lot of german speaking Rails developers receiving recruitment spam for a Rails Job in Zurich - german speaking people preferred.

The “senior recruiter” had the good sense to have his job add translated to german - using a machine. Hilarity ensued.

To make matters better (or worse), he sent the same offer today - and I couldn’t resist to write back to him.

Please find below for ~~posterity~~ your amusement, our current dialogue:

Recondition an SSD

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:34:41 +0000

Yesterday I read the article by Patrick Lenz about his experiences with an external SSD on his iMac. This prompted me to investigate the speed of my MacBook Pros SSD with Black Magic DiskSpeed. Instead of 100 MB/s write speed, I saw a low of 14 MB/s for writing to disks. Searching a bit around led me to the article about SSD Reconditioning which recommended overwriting the disk with empty data multiple times.

Pictures of the training Adrian Kosmacziewski and I gave this week

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:12:28 +0000

We had a blast and we are planning to do this again! More information at the website - or give me a holler. #blog

Reshared post from +Simplificator

Pictures from the [mobile-training.ch](https://mobile-training.ch) course. A new round is in the planning. Signup on [mobile-training.ch](https://mobile-training.ch) or contact us if interested.

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Simplificator and InVisible team up

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:18:29 +0000

Today is a great day! I’m happy to announce that we are teaming up with our friends at Simplificator GmbH and will be part of their team, as of today. Lukas, Pascal and I go back a long time - we have been through some “interesting” projects and learnt how to work with each other. In the process we got to know and respect each other and became friends.

Now that our two companies have become one, we are a Rails development power-house in Zurich with plans to build great software and to extend the software development training that we have been doing over the last years.

It's so easy to be misunderstood as a man

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:18:19 +0000

It’s so easy to be misunderstood as a man

Embedded Link

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											[vowe dot net :: His and her diary from the same day](https://vowe.net/archives/012802.html)  

											vowe dot net :: Volker Weber and Associates

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No Content Found

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:44:06 +0000

Reshared post from +Jenson Taylor

**Why don't people believe in God?**

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Nice music and interesting music video! I like

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:51:18 +0000

And thanks to Napster on my Sonos I can sample the music of the band…

Reshared post from +Andreas Schepers

**Cut Copy - Blink Any You'll Miss A Revolution**
Ich verliere mich ja ganz gerne in der Musik-Blogosphäre. Da finden sich dann so Videos von so Bands wie den australischen Cut Copy, von denen ich bis gerade eben noch nicht wirklich gehört habe. Das Video ist Planet der Affen, der Sound Talking Heads 2011. Catchy irgendwie.

For purely scientific reasons - another reshare...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:21:36 +0000

For purely scientific reasons - another reshare…

Reshared post from +Keyan Mobli

Reshare this post so we can test the new Google+ Ripples! The more reshares, the more interesting the graph.
So please, everyone reshare.

https://plus.google.com/ripples/details?activityid=TupMP3ZjqUg

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Ahh - here's the explanation of how to use the Ripple function before it is rolled...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:19:30 +0000

Ahh - here’s the explanation of how to use the Ripple function before it is rolled out in the UI to everybody

Reshared post from +Fernando Fonseca

**How to test Google+ Ripples before they roll out to everyone**
Google just launched Google+ Ripples, a way to visualize the impact of any public post. Here is how you can test it with your own posts before it rolls out to everyone.

That's one incredible useful feature: Ripples show you how a post of yours ripples...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:48:38 +0000

That’s one incredible useful feature: Ripples show you how a post of yours ripples through the G+verse. I’ve of cause had to reshare this post for scientific reasons.

Reshared post from +Sean McCullough

HOT #dataviz

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+Maximiliano Firtman presented last week in Zurich, curtesy of https://aksoma.com...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:13:43 +0000

+Maximiliano Firtman presented last week in Zurich, curtesy of https://aksoma.com and InVisible. He briefly mentioned this great chart that shows what levels of HTML5 compatibility the different mobile browsers have.

Embedded Link

												![](https://images0-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?container=focus&gadget=a&resize_h=100&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmobilehtml5.org%2Fimg%2Flogo.png)
											


											[Mobile HTML5 - compatibility tables for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, iPad and other mobile devices](https://mobilehtml5.org/)  

											Trying to understand HTML5 compatibility on mobile and tablet browsers. Feature, Safari on iOS, Android Browser, BlackBerry Browser, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, webOS Browser, Symbian Browser. ...

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What I like about Napster on the Sonos: Themed afternoons - one song, dozens of ...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:56:07 +0000

What I like about Napster on the Sonos: Themed afternoons - one song, dozens of interpretations…

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Are you interested in learning how to develop mobile web application in HTML5, jQuery...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:02:35 +0000

Are you interested in learning how to develop mobile web application in HTML5, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch and Phonegap. Application that run “natively” on your mobile devices.

https://mobile-training.ch

We will hold the first training in Zurich, November 15. to 17.

Topics include:

HTML5 / CSS3
Understanding the differences between jQuery Mobile / Sencha Touch and when to use which framework
Building an application with local storage in either of these frameworks (or both, if you are sharp)
Building a “native” app for iOS and Android
Best practices
… much more

Held by Adrian Kosmaczewski (https://akosma.com) and Jens-Christian Fischer (https://invisible.ch)

Getting a Java JAX-WS service created with IntelliJ 10.5

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:17:07 +0000

(These are just notes for myself, if you know anything about this, then feel free to correct, improve)

Use the new project wizard to create a web service (with JAXWS selected)
optionally, select the Tomcat Webserver (so that you can deploy from IntelliJ to Tomcat directly)

IntelliJ creates a HelloWorld class and everything works fine when you use it. However, if you create your own class, Tomcat complains about some proxy classes not being available (failed to parse runtime descriptor: runtime modeler error: Wrapper class bla.fasel.jaxws.CreatePdf is not found. Have you run APT to generate them?
com.sun.xml.ws.model.RuntimeModelerException: runtime modeler error: Wrapper class bla.fasel.jaxws.CreatePdf is not found. Have you run APT to generate them?)
The magic incantation to get this working:

Interesting!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:58:34 +0000

Interesting!

Reshared post from +Volker Weber

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No Content Found

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:44:08 +0000

Reshared post from +Lukas Eppler

This is one update notice to actually read. Put here for you in case your fingers clicked it away before your eyes had the chance to read it.

iOS 5 Software Update

This update contains over 200 new features, including the following:

•	Notifications  
◦	Swipe from the top of any screen to view notifications in one place with Notification Center  
◦	New notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen  
◦	View notifications from lock screen  
◦	Slide the notification app icon to the right on the lock screen to go directly to the app  
•	iMessage  
◦	Send and receive unlimited text, photo, and video messages with other iOS 5 users  
◦	Track messages with delivery and read receipts  
◦	Group messaging and secure encryption  
◦	Works over cellular network and Wi-Fi*  
•	Newsstand  
◦	Automatically organizes magazine and newspaper subscriptions on Home Screen  
◦	Displays the cover of the latest issue  
◦	Background downloads of new issues   
•	Reminders for managing to do lists  
◦	Syncs with iCloud, iCal and Outlook  
◦	Location-based reminders when you leave or arrive at a location for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4  
•	Built-in support for Twitter  
◦	Sign-in once in Settings and tweet directly from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari and YouTube  
◦	Add location to any tweet  
◦	View twitter profile pictures and usernames in Contacts  
•	Camera improvements for devices with cameras  
◦	Double click the home button when device is asleep to bring up a camera shortcut on iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th generation)  
◦	Volume Up button to take a picture  
◦	Optional grid lines to line up shots  
◦	Pinch to zoom in the preview screen  
◦	Swipe to camera roll from preview screen  
◦	Tap and hold to lock focus and exposure, iPad 2 and iPod touch (4th generation) only support exposure lock  
•	Photo improvements for devices with cameras  
◦	Crop and rotate  
◦	Red eye removal  
◦	One tap enhance  
◦	Organize photos into albums  
•	Mail improvements  
◦	Format text using bold, italic, or underlined fonts  
◦	Indentation control  
◦	Drag to rearrange names in address fields  
◦	Flag messages  
◦	Mass mark messages as flagged, read or unread  
◦	Customize mail alert sounds  
◦	S/MIME  
•	Calendar improvements  
◦	Year view on iPad and new Week view for iPhone and iPod touch  
◦	Tap to create an event  
◦	View and add event attachments  
•	Game Center improvements  
◦	Use personal photos for your Game Center account  
◦	Compare your overall achievement scores with your friends  
◦	Find new Game Center friends with friend recommendations and friends of friends  
◦	Discover new games with custom game recommendations  
•	AirPlay Mirroring for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S  
•	Multitasking Gestures for iPad  
◦	Use four or five fingers to pinch to the Home Screen  
◦	Swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar  
◦	Swipe left or right to switch between apps  
•	On-device setup, activation and configuration with Setup Assistant  
•	Software updates available over the air without tethering  
•	iCloud support  
◦	iTunes in the Cloud  
◦	Photo Stream  
◦	Documents in the Cloud  
◦	Apps and Books automatic download and purchase history  
◦	Backup  
◦	Contacts, Calendar, and Mail  
◦	Find My iPhone  
•	Redesigned Music app for iPad  
•	Hourly weather forecast  
•	Real-time stock quotes  
•	Wireless sync to iTunes  
•	Keyboard improvements  
◦	Split keyboard for iPad  
◦	Improved autocorrection accuracy  
◦	Improved Chinese and Japanese input  
◦	New Emoji keyboard  
◦	Personal dictionary for autocorrection  
◦	Optionally create keyboard short cuts for frequently used words  
•	Accessibility improvements  
◦	Option to light LED flash on incoming calls and alerts for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4  
◦	Custom vibration patterns for incoming calls on iPhone  
◦	New interface for using iOS with mobility-impairment input devices  
◦	Option to speak a selection of text  
◦	Custom element labeling for VoiceOver  
•	Exchange ActiveSync improvements  
◦	Wirelessly sync tasks  
◦	Mark messages as flagged, read or unread  
◦	Improved offline support  
◦	Save a new contact from a GAL service  
•	More than 1,500 new developer APIs  
•	Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 2
• iPad
• iPod touch (4th generation)
• iPod touch (3rd generation)

Bundle update causes havoc

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:26:16 +0000

You know the feeling - you do a quick “bundle update” and all hell breaks loose? I knew you do.

I updated rspec from 2.5 to 2.6 in one of my projects, and it also updated the nifty faker gem we use for generating test data.

Of course, this broke a couple of hundred tests with the following message:

<tt>
NoMethodError:
       private method `rand' called for ["DE", "FR", "IT", "AT"]:Array
</tt>

I used to select a random country from an array, like thus:

Some thoughts on the iPhone 4S

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:25:52 +0000

tl;dr: Apple does evolution and keeps its old iPhone 4 customers happy

Crossposted on Google+: Some thoughts on the iPhone 4S

After yesterdays announcement, the blog-/twitter/G+ and most of all the comments to articles “sphere” exploded with disappointment. Disappointment that Apple choose to do an incremental update of their iPhone product instead of boosting its version number to 5.

Of course, most of the disappointment is home-grown. Apple never announced anything, so all the pundits that clamored for an iPhone 5 with (insert favorite feature that the iPhone 4S doesn’t have) were mostly just disappointed that their dreams or desires didn’t come true.

Some thoughts on the iPhone 4S

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:19:39 +0000

tl;dr: Apple does evolution and keeps its old iPhone 4 customers happy

Long shot: I'm trying to gauge the quality of some "random" numbers...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:56:55 +0000

Long shot: I’m trying to gauge the quality of some “random” numbers that I have generated. I’m using the “dieharder” https://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/dieharder.php library to analyse the data I have (in a file)

I use a file for my data (even though that’s not recommended) and give that data to dieharder:

dieharder -g 202 -f my_data.input -s 1

(where -g 202 tells dieharder to use the input file) and -s 1 is the test to run.

MakeOpenData zeigt an, wofür meine Steuerfranken in Zürich verschwinden

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 19:53:13 +0000

Kann ich mit leben.

Embedded Link

												![]()
											


											[Where Did My Taxes Go?](https://wheredidmytaxesgo.nelm.io/)  

											Where Did My Taxes Go? City of Zürich 2010. Civil Status Single Married. Income. Assets CHF. Annual Taxes. CHF. This Money Lasted The City For. sec. Tweet. What is this? This was done during the MakeO...

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No Content Found

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 06:55:24 +0000

Reshared post from +Joseph Lee

Here's my Star Trek post of the night, it's related to my previous red shirt post: [https://plus.google.com/106176762220398854458/posts/2QC5CyWJuQU](https://plus.google.com/106176762220398854458/posts/2QC5CyWJuQU)
Here we can see they really earn their reputation as they die, a lot. My favorite death is the one where they get turned into cubes, and then even the cubes are crushed! I need to watch that episode again. Redshirts, I salute you!

Star Trek: Redshirts

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I just love the way the TopGear guys test cars (where the definition of "car"...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:36:17 +0000

I just love the way the TopGear guys test cars (where the definition of “car” is quite widely interpreted)

Another great thing is how close to reality the tests are done: Shopping center, Drive-In at McDonalds and being blown up with explosives.

A treat - as usual

Reshared post from +Maciej Stachowiak

Jest piątek więc pozwalam sobie na odrobinę off topic ;) Warto obejrzeć filmij - Hammond jeździ Marauderem po RPA - tym razem wydali trochę pieniędzy na dewastowanie!
BBC’s Top Gear has introduced the ‘world’s most unstoppable and indestructible vehicle’ ever – the Paramount Marauder
https://dailypicksandflicks.com/2011/06/27/marauder-worlds-most-unstoppable-vehicle-on-bbcs-top-gear-video/

This is an absolute genius idea - I have boxes full of cables that are but a tangled...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:23:24 +0000

This is an absolute genius idea - I have boxes full of cables that are but a tangled mess…

Reshared post from +Alida Brandenburg

**[The "G" Clearly Stands for "Genius"]**
Oh, wow. On top of the last two posts (https://plus.google.com/u/0/103765013042311928518/posts/cfwYX5ACG99 and https://plus.google.com/u/0/103765013042311928518/posts/RqsXwoH9Xs9) +Patrick Dorr just shared with me this novel use for toilet-paper rolls! Keep ’em coming! The OCD-nerd in me is looooving this. :D

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looking through those 100 books I see a lot of old friends - and I guess some new,...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:34:17 +0000

looking through those 100 books I see a lot of old friends - and I guess some new, in the waiting, friends…

Reshared post from +Colin McMillen

Brilliant: a flowchart to help you choose the next fantasy/sci-fi book you should read. Based on NPR's list of the top 100 sci-fi/fantasy books of all time.
https://www.box.net/shared/static/a6omcl2la0ivlxsn3o8m.jpg

Hat tip: +Mary Johnstone.

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Oh - nice!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:36:30 +0000

Oh - nice!

Reshared post from +Frank Stratmann

Passend zum Papst-Besuch:

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Nochmal ein Reshare (und ja, irgendwann kommt dann auch wieder mal eigener Content)...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:12:33 +0000

Nochmal ein Reshare (und ja, irgendwann kommt dann auch wieder mal eigener Content) - unsere Erde aus der ISS gefilmt

Reshared post from +Tom Anderson

Usually I like to say something about the stuff I share. I think this pretty much speaks for itself. Looks better than sci-fi, but it's "real" :-)

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No Content Found

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:03:53 +0000

Reshared post from +Kristian Köhntopp

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Wunderbare Bilder von unserem Planeten...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:58:26 +0000

Wunderbare Bilder von unserem Planeten…

Reshared post from +Andreas Schepers

**Heimatplanet**
Lehnt Euch zurück und schaut Euch unsere Heimat an. Aus 800km Höhe.

(Ein Video, dass meine Kolleginnen für das On Board-Entertainment der Lufthansa produziert haben: jetzt für online. Auch für Nicht-Flieger.)

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so geht's!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:22:20 +0000

so geht’s!

Reshared post from +Sean Bonner

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wonderful!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:10:04 +0000

wonderful!

Reshared post from +Michael Lee Johnson

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Another company that want's to the cloud storage thing - with a twist: Infinite...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:03:28 +0000

Another company that want’s to the cloud storage thing - with a twist: Infinite storage… IBIWISI, but I have signed up of course - you can too: https://www.bitcasa.com/beta-signup?share=1098369610

Let’s see if this can contest dropbox…

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											[Bitcasa :: Infinite Storage On Your Desktop](https://www.bitcasa.com/beta-signup?share=1098369610)  

											Bitcasa. Why Bitcasa? Blog. Somebody really likes you, they think you should get infinite storage! We'll be launching our beta soon. Sign up if you would like to be included. Register for the beta...

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süss - und genau richtig, was Zeitmanagement angeht...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:06:41 +0000

süss - und genau richtig, was Zeitmanagement angeht…

Reshared post from +Markus Felber

Aus der Reihe
Zeitmanagement für Eilige

Ein Blick aufs Tierreich kann beruhigend wirken…

(Ganz ursprünglich gepostet von +GUNGA Gernot)

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No Content Found

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:36:58 +0000

Reshared post from +Flemming Funch

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Some of the first SF I read was from Isaac Asimov, 35 or so years ago

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:02:42 +0000

I think this os the first time I have seen him in an interview and talking.

What a great mind he has! As someone who currently is “learning” and studying, his comments on personal learning strike home. I have so much joy from re-learning mathematics, thanks to the Khan Academy, for example.

Reshared post from +KENNETH UDUT

Isaac Asimov predicts today's Internet years before there was an http - 1988 interview - you'll love it. [Isaac Asimov on Bill Moyers World of Ideas pt 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJAIERgWhZQ)

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The week is officially over, but there's still so much to do

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:12:59 +0000

117 days left before I have to hand in my Msc thesis, a bit more than a month before the https://ai-class.com starts (that I still hope to be able to take, in order to actually learn something new and be challenged - unlike the Masters course I’ve been taking the last two years). Also - as if not enough - there’s work waiting to be done. Long night and long weekend ahead, I’m afraid.

Zweites Coding Dojo erfolgreich

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:10:03 +0000

Das zweite Coding Dojo fand am 7.7. in unseren Räumen statt. Wieder waren 4 Leute dabei, die sich diesmal mit BDD in JavaScript versuchten. Ein detaillierter Bericht findet sich auf der Seite des Dojos.

Am 15. September findet das nächste Dojo statt - Thema ist noch offen - um Ideen wird gebeten.

Bericht vom ersten Zürcher Dojo

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:30:03 +0000

Das CodingDojo vom 16.6. war ein Erfolg. Mit vier bis fünf Teilnehmern ein kleiner aber feiner Start. Einen Bericht findet ihr auf der Seite des Dojos.

Das nächste Dojo findet am 7.7.2011 zum Thema “JavaScript Testen mit Jasmine” statt. Anmeldung via Dojo.

Zürcher Coding Dojo eröffnet

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 07:32:28 +0000

Seit ein paar Jahren beschäftige ich mit Coding Dojos, also Orten, an denen Entwickler ihre Fertigkeiten und ihr Handwerkszeug verbessern können. Nachdem ich letztes und dieses Jahr an der RailsWayCon in Berlin jeweils ein solches Dojo durchführte, ist es jetzt an der Zeit in Zürich ein regelmässiges Dojo durchzuführen.

Das erste Dojo findet am 16.6, von 18:00 bis 21:00 in den Räumen der InVisible GmbH statt. Weitere Details findet ihr hier: https://zurichdojo.ch

Daily Log, 2011-06-03

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:18:10 +0000

Short week this week. The InVisible crew (Keith, Richard and myself) went to Berlin to RailsWayCon where I held a presentation about “Testing distributed / complex applications”.

Testing distributed, complex web applications

View more presentations from jcfischer

We had a great time, meeting many people and listening to quite a few interesting presentations. We had ample time to talk over future projects and came up with some interesting ideas. Stay tuned for hearing more about them.

links for 2011-02-22

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:01:12 +0000

Bliki: TradableQualityHypothesis

fowler on why quality in software development can’t be traded

(tags: software quality)

links for 2011-02-20

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 16:00:50 +0000

Forschungsmafia » Blog Archive » Noch ein Lacher zu X-Pire! und Professor Backes gefällig?

link to pdf about formally examining security of protocols

(tags: thesis protocol)

links for 2011-02-18

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:00:44 +0000

pg_search: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PostgreSQL full-text search

rails plugin to use the Postgres fulltext search

(tags: rails postgres search)

Ist die zu-Guttenberg-Plagiatsaffäre ein Kanzlerkandidaten-Mord?

links for 2011-02-08

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:00:46 +0000

JPEG canaries: exposing on-the-fly recompression

(tags: security printing)

revealing the ActionController callback filter chain

(tags: rails filter callback)

links for 2010-12-16

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:10:49 +0000

Invaders from Mars

we have been invaded and we lost. Charles Stross on what went wrong with our socio-political system

(tags: politics economics)

links for 2010-12-15

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:01:16 +0000

Magic Scrolls of Code: Behavior Trees by Example. AI in an Android game.

(tags: game ai programming algorithms development)

TMUX – The Terminal Multiplexer (Part 1) | Hawk Host Blog

Introduction to tmux

(tags: tmux terminal)

links for 2010-12-14

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:10:57 +0000

In the beginning, there was the flowchart… • The Register

(tags: humor charts software-engineering)

links for 2010-12-08

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:11:09 +0000

Debugging Rails Applications With ruby-debug - Intridea Blog

(tags: debug rails3 ruby howto)

Creating the missing Instagram web interface

Mislav explains how to sniff HTTP traffic from an iPhone and create a web app that talks to the Instagram servers. Lot’s of nuggets (json formatting library)

(tags: api instagram ruby http json)

links for 2010-12-07

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:01:51 +0000

Pardon My French, But This Code Is C.R.A.P. (2)

A simple measure to measure the quality of code: Cyclomatic Complexity and code coverage

(tags: code metrics)

What is “elegant” code? - Stack Overflow

Good question and some good answers

(tags: programming definition elegance)

links for 2010-12-06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:01:56 +0000

boilerpipe

web service to exctract content from a web page. looks useful for our scraping needs

(tags: web-scraping java service extraction)

J-_-L | Use fresh Ruby as your shell!

(tags: ruby shell tool)

links for 2010-11-29

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:00:59 +0000

Building iPhone Apps using Titanium and CoffeeScript « Rigel Group

(tags: coffeescript titanium iphone)

Transparently Cache Network Calls in Titanium « Rigel Group

CoffeScript Library for Titanium development

(tags: titanium iphone coffeescript)

Daily-Log, 2010-11-22, Passenger 3, iUI and authenticity tokens

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:47:59 +0000

An update of our production server to Passenger 3.0 worked without problem - kudos to the guys at Phusion! We have changed several parameters and expect our large Rails apps to run faster and better. The main change was that we keep one passenger running for the most used apps, regardless if the app has been idle or not.

We’ve had an iPhone layout for StellenAnzeiger for a long time. Intermittently we got Rails “Invalid AuthenticityToken” errors but were never able to pin them down. Of course, when we tested it, it “just worked (tm)”. We had a breakthrough today, when we noticed that the authenticity token we received on the server had spaces in it. It turns out, that the iUI framework we are using for the iPhone like layout changes “+” to " " in input fields. The authenticity token can contain pluses, so iUI mangled it - and the server promptly complained. The fix is a one line patch to iui.js - we weren’t the first people to run into the problem…

Daily Log, 2010-11-17, inode blues

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 06:55:31 +0000

A few weeks ago we upgraded the RAM on our main server. At that point, I discovered that the external backup drive we use to backup our hosting users home directory was full and no data could be written to it. I never discovered the problem, because df -h always told me that there was plenty of space left. However when I tried to create a file on the drive, I got a `

Daily Log, 2010-11-15, Capybara & Callbacks (with some phony thrown in)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:44:01 +0000

Preparing for the public demos tomorrow in Lyon…

Florian Hanke is here and has been furiously working on his great phony GEM. Phony handles phone number strings and can format them, parse them and do other fun stuff. After this days work, it will be able to tell us, if a phone number is a mobile number, a landline number or a service number. And we need that.

Here’s an example of what Phony can do for you:

Daily-Log, 2010-11-11 - Cucumber & APIs

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 18:02:30 +0000

We are using a lot of distributed Sinatra and Rails3 applications in our Mobino project. They speak HTTP-REST and JSON with each other. Because we are using Cucumber and RSpec, we also have some high level integration tests for the APIs.

Today I started on cleaning up an API in the Rails app. I wrote a cucumber step to invoke the API. It took me a while to figure out the magic incantation to make the controller retrieve the parameters as JSON: Here’s the relevant part of the step_definition:

Daily Log, 2010-11-10

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 09:43:23 +0000

Much planning done today, little programming. Our “secret” project is starting to look good and will be unveiled to selected companies next week in Lyon at the Game Connection. There’s a splash page for it too: Mobino

University wise got to write about the Liskov Substitution Principle.

Daily Log, 2010-11-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:05:38 +0000

Thanks to you commenters. The Rails 3 function I18n.transliterate('some String with ümläüts') #=> some String with umlauts (or even ‘uemlaeuets’ if you specify :locale => 'de' as an additional parameter to transliterate) works beautifully.

In other news, I think I have the old retro 700 character format nailed down - let’s see if the organisation can handle the test files we are going to send tomorrow.

Other than that - a lot of private meetings, not much of real work done. Now writing a summary and critique of Kanban for the university. We have utilized some Kanban features (namely the WIP limitation on the taskboard) in the enterprise Rails project I was involved in in Munich to good effect. There’s a lot of very good literature around about Scrum / Kanban / Scrumban. Very interesting reading - might change our current style of development to Kanban after the next iteration.

Daily-Log, 2010-11-08

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:54:36 +0000

Daily-Log, 2010-11-05

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:11:53 +0000

Almost no programming today, but meeting with people, discussing the future. Also looking into the cost of doing business and re-calculating our hourly rates (We need to stop subsidizing too many projects….)

In the end, we have decided to hire two new developers. If you are looking for a job in a great little company and are either a Software developer or a Web developer (or the combination of the two) then head over to our Job Page and take a look at our offering. Be sure to forward to other people that you might know.

Daily Log, 2010-11-04

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:19:06 +0000

The monit saga from yesterday continued - and was solved. Somewhere deep in the monit documentation, it is stated that monit calls the start and stop programs with a very very minimal environment, and certainly not the full environment that for example the deploy user has.

So the following code will not work: check process some_process with pidfile /path/to/process.pid start "/path/to/executable start" as deploy stop "/path/to/executable stop" as deploy

You can do the following to create an environment for the program: check process some_process with pidfile /path/to/process.pid start "/usr/bin/env PATH=/usr/local/bin HOME=/home/deploy RAILS_ENV=production /path/to/executable start" as deploy stop "/usr/bin/env PATH=/usr/local/bin HOME=/home/deploy RAILS_ENV=production /path/to/executable stop" as deploy

Daily Log, 2010-11-03

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 18:13:11 +0000

Yesterday, one of our Amazon EC2 servers “spontaneously” rebooted, leaving the production environment of our new secret project in shambles. The problem was that we hadn’t yet written monit scripts that watched over if the different database and application servers were restarted as they should have been in such a case. So I spent today writing monit scripts for our unicorn servers and testing them. One thing leads to another, so I also did the same thing for our Postgres server. This in turn led to the realisation that Postgres 9.0.0 (which is current now) doesn’t read database files written by 9.0beta4 (which was installed due to the non-availability at that time of 9.0.0). So back to 9.0beta4, dumping all databases, re-installing 9.0.0, re-creating the databases (as per these instructions). Fun and joy!

Daily Log, 2010-11-02

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:52:04 +0000

Spent quite a bit of time with Keith getting a Cross Site JSON call to work in jQuery and Sinatra. The problem (or security feature) is that a browser will not make an XMLHttpRequest to another domain than the one it’s currently displaying data from. We are building a widget that is going to be embedded on other servers, and we wan’t to make such a call… Luckily, there’s JSONP which “pads” the response by the server in a JavaScript function call and thus bypasses the problem. jQuery supports JSONP natively in it’s $.ajax request and we tried hard to get it to work with a POST request (as the docs suggested would work). It doesn’t however, and we had to change to a GET request (using the handy $.getJSON method. So we sacrificed the purity of our REST API (we are really creating a ressource) by allowing that ressource to be created and retrieved by a GET request. Still that beats using iframes for our widget - at least in our book.

Daily Log, 2010-11-01

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:48:34 +0000

Little work done due to hospital visit and lot’s of talking.

Working on secret project (to be released soon) and getting fed up with this message when running the cucumber features (Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0, Cucumber Beta 0.22): “warning: regexp match /…/n against to UTF-8 string”. It turns out, that others have had that too: Crimpy Code and Openhood have the solution.

We are looking into providing support for login via Facebook. OmniAuth seems to fit the ticket nicely (and it also handles a bunch of other authentication systems based on OAuth, OpenID, LDAP and many others). We’ll see how this works out.

links for 2010-10-07

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:01:41 +0000

gist: 566725 - How to use Rails 3.0’s new notification system to inject custom log events- GitHub

How to extend the logging / instrumentation of Rails 3

(tags: notification rails3 logging)

links for 2010-10-06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:04:40 +0000

xkcd: Online Communities 2

The follow up to the online communities map that hangs on our office wall

How Google works [Infographic] | The Wall Blog

Great infographic on how Google finds, indexes and displays search results

(tags: google)

links for 2010-09-26

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:01:14 +0000

Lunch over IP: Reboot8: How to be a Renaissance man, and help Google eat itself

Notes on the famous Ben Hammersley Reboot 8 talk about Renaissance man

(tags: reboot8 renaissance)

You’re cuking it right

Hints & tipps on using Cucumber

(tags: testing cucumber howto)

A few git tips you didn’t know about

Advanced git tips

(tags: tips git)

Vimcasts

More screencasts

(tags: vim video)

An Introduction to Vim Macros - video tutorials for introduction, python, vim, screencasts, blog, tutorials, installing, install, select, features

links for 2010-08-29

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 16:01:14 +0000

Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development

Sounds (at least) partially true

(tags: agile humor enterprise)

Fast user switching with Devise

how to use devise and rails3 concerns to implement a “sign-in as” functionality

(tags: Devise rails3)

Deploy first!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:58:45 +0000

I’m in the middle of starting a (potentially) huge project with a couple of friends. Having just finished (well, technically, almost finished) a large enterprise Rails project, I am really looking forward to working in a small agile team, on an extremely tight deadline, but doing stuff that is relevant and interesting.

The enterprise project was an interesting experience, partly because of the technology stack we had to use: Rails on JRuby, developing on Windows machines (which is so painful, you just want to give up) and deploying on Websphere (bad) on zLinux (think IBM big iron) with a host DB/2 database. Lot’s of challenges right there, and lot’s of learning.

links for 2010-08-23

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:00:51 +0000

JRuby: Rails console direkt aus einer gewarbleten .war-Datei heraus starten | LessCode

(tags: jruby ruby console)

links for 2010-07-27

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:01:17 +0000

Adequately Good - JavaScript Module Pattern: In-Depth

Description of how to build a JS module

(tags: design javascript coupling)

links for 2010-07-23

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:01:24 +0000

bernerdschaefer’s akephalos at master - GitHub

Headless HTML Browser for use in full stack testing (with Cucumber, cabybara)

(tags: testing html cucumber rails)

links for 2010-07-18

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:01:06 +0000

Finding Leaks in Ruby Apps with Eclipse Memory Analyzer

using eclipse and jruby to find leaky ruby cose

(tags: ruby jruby eclipse memory profiling)

links for 2010-07-10

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:01:50 +0000

Browsing Memory the JRuby Way

lots of information on how to use java memory tools to check on jruby / jrails applications

(tags: jruby jvm profiling)

links for 2010-07-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:01:12 +0000

Cocoa with Love: Tips & Tricks for conditional iOS3, iOS3.2 and iOS4 code

(tags: ios iphone)

links for 2010-07-08

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:01:12 +0000

pivotal’s cedar at master - GitHub

BDD style testing framework for Objective-C, Cocoa and iPhone

(tags: bdd objective-c cocoa)

links for 2010-07-03

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:01:25 +0000

AdhearsionConf – An Event for Ruby’s Leading Telephony Framework – August 14 & 15, 2010

conference for the adhearsion framework that inrerfaces ruby and asteriks

(tags: ruby asteriks voip)

links for 2010-07-02

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:01:30 +0000

Getting Started with Shef - Chef - Opscode Open Source Wiki

(tags: ruby chef howto)

Erlang Factory - Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2010 - Talks

(tags: erlang papers)

links for 2010-07-01

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:01:35 +0000

InfoQ: RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws

(tags: rest webservices programming erlang yaws)

paperplanes. Vim - A Never-ending Love Story

I need to update my VIM configuration after reading this. And maybe, just maybe, try VIM again for Rails development. Right now I’m madly in love with RubyMine by Jetbrains. On the other hand, I do all my other editing in VIM…

(tags: vim article ruby rails)

pathogen.vim - Easy manipulation of ‘runtimepath’, ‘path’, ’tags’, etc : vim online

links for 2010-06-28

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:01:54 +0000

sanity’s Athena at master - GitHub

Ian Clarke (of Freenet fame) with an algorithm that allows for the search in tagged documents across large datasets - interesting

(tags: algorithms data performance tagging search algorithm datastructure)

links for 2010-06-25

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:01:14 +0000

Your App’s Website Sucks » Matt Legend Gemmell

List of common sense advice on what to put on a website to actually sell stuff :)

(tags: marketing business design webdesign)

iPhone Background screens

Very nice, grid paper like, iPhone 3 and 4 sized background screens

(tags: design background grids ios ios4 iphone)

The Open Source iPhone Game Engine Comparison | iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News

List of open source engines for iPhone game development. (Just for these days when I have absolutely nothing else to do)

links for 2010-06-23

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:02:09 +0000

Operating at Scale - Esoteric Curio

Excellent presentation on operations and scaling of web applications

(tags: operations scaling)

links for 2010-06-21

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:01:25 +0000

Nexenta Project - HA NAS with Nexenta OS - The Nexenta Project

(tags: solaris nas HA)

links for 2010-06-20

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:00:52 +0000

C4I.org - Strong Cryptography Links on the Internet

(tags: crypto resources)

links for 2010-06-19

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:01:09 +0000

Mike’s RailsConf Tutorial

iphone app with REST rails backend tutorial/workshop

(tags: rails rest iphone)

links for 2010-06-18

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:01:11 +0000

BDD-style testing for iPhone projects

(tags: bdd iphone)

links for 2010-06-17

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:03:51 +0000

Completely remove a file from all revisions - Guides - GitHub

(tags: git history howto tips delete)

links for 2010-06-14

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:01:22 +0000

Enabling LIMIT and OFFSET in DB2 9.7.2

putting DB2 into some kind of compatibility mode

(tags: db2 sql)

Accessorizer 2.0

add on for xcode that makes writing accessors easy

(tags: xcode mac)

links for 2010-06-13

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:01:38 +0000

My development stack

list of ruby (and vaguely rails) related development tools

(tags: ruby rails tools)

IEEE P1363: Standard Specifications For Public Key Cryptography

(tags: standards crypto cryptography ieee pki specification)

about this new thing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:03:29 +0000

You may have heard about it. The iPad. As a card carrying gadget lover, self-proclaimed Apple lover I knew I had to have one - as soon as it came out.. I’d worry about the use case later. But alas, things turned out slightly different. My wife, who is highly skeptical of all things electronic, came to me the day after the iPad stevenote and said: I’ll have the first one in the house, thank you very much.

links for 2010-06-11

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:02:14 +0000

Evocam Remote Buffer Overflow on OSX

interesting read on how to create an Buffer OVerflow and an exploit

(tags: security osx hacking exploit bufferoverflow)

links for 2010-06-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:01:28 +0000

Safari Extensions

Lots of Safari5 extensions

(tags: apple development plugin safari addons extensions)

links for 2010-06-07

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:01:55 +0000

Karsten Nohl, PhD: University of Virginia, C.S. Dept

Long list of security related issues with RFID

(tags: crypto hack research mifare rfid)

links for 2010-06-06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 16:02:09 +0000

Hybrid one-time authentication on Ubuntu Server

Interesting concept of integrating 2-factor authentication with a Yubikey for server logins

(tags: authentication otp)

links for 2010-05-21

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:01:15 +0000

The GitHub Stoplight - Ideas For Dozens

Cool idea for a build stoplight

(tags: build computing diy electronics github hardware arduino build-system continuousintegration)

links for 2010-05-20

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:01:11 +0000

Installing Java 5 Back on Snow Leopard

If you compile Nokogiri with the JDK 1.6, it will not run on a Windows machine with JDK 1.5 installed. Took me literally hours to figure that out.

(tags: java development installation leopard mac nokogiri)

links for 2010-05-10

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:01:18 +0000

PRX’s apn_on_rails at master - GitHub

Use Apple Push notifications from a Rails app - nifty

(tags: apple iphone notification push pushnotifications rails)

RSpec presentation

Lot’s of goodies in RSpec - a lot of syntax that I didn’t know about (let, anyone) - good reading, and will improve my Rspec code a lot

(tags: bdd rspec ruby testing)

Census: Rails Demographics Collection « Envy Labs

Sounds like something that can be used in a variety of projects

links for 2010-04-29

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:01:43 +0000

CyberDojo « Mike Long’s Blog

Blog post about a cyber-dojo - sounds like great fun for a geek hackfest. Includes link to Rails app that runs the whole kata system

(tags: kata dojo rails)

links for 2010-04-28

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:01:17 +0000

jQuery HTML Table Toolbox - Noupe

Need to know how to handle HTML tables with jQuery - here’s a roundup of lot’s of plugins to get you started

(tags: jquery table plugins tables)

links for 2010-04-22

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:01:26 +0000

sitaramc’s gitolite at master - GitHub

An alternative to gitosis - very well documented, interesting features

(tags: git gitosis server hosting development gitolite)

links for 2010-04-16

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:01:34 +0000

Headius: Nokogiri Java Port: Help Us Finish It!

homework ;)

(tags: java jruby nokogiri)

GPG Mail under Snow Leopard

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:02:01 +0000

For an upcoming project I needed to set up secure communications using GPG. It’s been a few years since I used this, and I have never used GPG on the Mac before… Turn out, that it’s not trivial to get it running… Here’s a bunch of links that helped me get things working:

https://macgpg.sourceforge.net/index.html - the main MacPGP website
it includes this readme to compile under SnowLeopard. The important part is this line: ./configure CC="gcc -arch i386"
You will at least need the GPGKeychain and the GPG Preference Pane from the page above - it’s precompile and “should just work”
The GPGMail plugin for SnowLeopard - you can download a ZIP file with the .mailbundle

Then generate your keys (follow the instructions found at Zeitform)

links for 2010-04-06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:01:14 +0000

Introducing Phat, an Asynchronous Rails app

(tags: rails ruby asynchronous performance rubyonrails)

michaeldv’s awesome_print at master - GitHub

(tags: ruby plugin)

links for 2010-04-02

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:02:56 +0000

botanicus’s rango at master - GitHub

(tags: development django rango gems webframework gem)

Pro Git - Smart HTTP Transport

(tags: git http sysadmin)

Story Mapper by Carbon Five

(tags: agile development ideas pivotaltracker project scrum stories)

Taking a Backup Using Snapshots

(tags: admin storage backup filesystem lvm)

What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? - Stack Overflow

(tags: article vim productivity editor philosophy)

Debian / Ubuntu Linux Connect to an iSCSI Volume

(tags: admin debian initiator iscsi open open-iscsi sysadmin storage howto)

links for 2010-04-01

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:01:36 +0000

Redirecting Java Output Streams in JRuby (and ANTLR Unit Testing)

(tags: java jruby streams)

links for 2010-03-22

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:01:30 +0000

The Complete iPhone Development Toolbox

Lots of iPhone development resources

(tags: iphone development)

links for 2010-03-21

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:01:47 +0000

Craig Stuntz’s Weblog : What is Homomorphic Encryption, and Why Should I Care?

Interesting!

(tags: code homomorphic security algorithms)

links for 2010-03-16

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:01:28 +0000

How I develop Clojure with Vim : :wq – blog

(tags: clojure editor vim repl)

John Goulah » Node.js, Websockets, and the Twitter Gardenhose

(tags: javascript node.js programming websocket nodejs html5 twitter)

links for 2010-03-15

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:01:49 +0000

eagain.net Git - gitosis.git/summary

the official gitsosis repository

(tags: git server gitosis)

Gigism: Install Git/Gitosis on a server (Debian) - Part 2

Errors that could happen when installing gitosis - in my case, the /home directory in NOEXEC, so I moved the git users home directory to another path

(tags: git gitosis howto)

scie.nti.st » Hosting Git repositories, The Easy (and Secure) Way

Another good gitosis how-to

(tags: git gitosis howto tutorial)

gitosis

sweet short gitosis documentation

links for 2010-03-14

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:01:36 +0000

TunTap - Frequently Asked Questions

Another part of the puzzle

Caught in a Web » HTC Hero USB Tether on Mac OS X

something that “just works” with the iPhone takes around 4 hours to get working with a Android phone… This instructions + liberal installation of Tunnelblick and Viscosity finally got the HTC Hero to work as a modem for the Mac.

My guess is that the Viscosity tap/tun drivers made the difference - but I’m not sure… Anyway - lot’s of dinking around - let’s see how long this setup keeps working :(

links for 2010-03-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:02:37 +0000

mite.blog. Facts & figures: The first 20 months of our small SaaS start-up going for premium-only instead of freemium

Facts and Figures from a SaaS startup only on number of users, conversion rates etc. Extremely interesting and encouraging reading.

(tags: business entrepreneurship startup statistics)

links for 2010-03-05

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:02:10 +0000

Finding related documents - without algebra

(tags: ruby datamining lsi algorithms tagging programming data python)

SVD Recommendation System in Ruby - igvita.com

And a detour on SVD in Ruby

(tags: ruby programming rails datamining learning rubyonrails recommendations algorithms)

Practical text classification with Ruby « the zen machine

Some more information on how to fix the LSI classifier

(tags: ruby classification bayesian programming tagging data lsi)

Classifier - Xavier Shay’s Blog

some notes on the Ruby LSI classifier (and getting it work with rails) - might be interesting for a certain project that could use semantic searching

links for 2010-02-10

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:01:18 +0000

BashFlash - A different kind of Flash blocker for Snow Leopard

Kill flash processes that use to much memory - nice addition to ClickToFlash

(tags: mac software osx safari flash)

links for 2010-02-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:00:54 +0000

News: International OpenOffice market shares - Portal - Tutorials, Tipps und Tricks für Webmaster auf Webmasterpro.de

Interesting study about the market share of different Office suites

(tags: marketshare office openoffice)

links for 2010-02-06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:02:33 +0000

HdM ePub - Micropayment für Content-Anbieter im Verlagswesen - Hlozanek, Mark

interesting comparison of different micropayment offerings (german)

(tags: ecommerce micropayment)

persistence.js: An Asynchronous Javascript ORM for HTML5/Gears « I am Zef

Just what the doctor ordered for HTML5 offline applications

(tags: javascript database html5 sqlite)

links for 2010-02-01

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:02:41 +0000

{ :copypastel => ‘A Maglev Store-y’ }

Persistable module for Ruby objects. Works in Maglev

(tags: ruby maglev objectdb persistence)

links for 2010-01-30

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:02:41 +0000

Why Arel? « Magic Scaling Sprinkles

The reasoning behind the new Rails 3 API for generating SQL

(tags: ruby rails3 db sql rubyonrails design database arel activerecord)

The new Actionmailer API in Rails 3

Introduction to the new API

(tags: rails3 ruby rails rubyonrails actionmailer)

gist: 289467 - GitHub

Evolution of a python programmer - could easily be substituted with Ruby.

Wonderful showing, that programming languages matter, and by using one (and it’s idioms) you gain power.

(tags: programming software code fun python geek humour)

links for 2010-01-29

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:01:41 +0000

Vanity — Welcome to Vanity

A/B Testing framework for Rails

(tags: rails ruby conversion abtesting testing)

Notes: Merging two unrelated repositories

(tags: git howto merge repository)

links for 2010-01-28

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:02:45 +0000

Bayesian Classification on Rails | Logan Koester

(tags: ruby rails statistics bayes datamining bayesian classification)

links for 2010-01-27

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:03:53 +0000

Bayesian Classification on Rails | Logan Koester

(tags: ruby rails statistics bayes datamining bayesian classification)

links for 2010-01-22

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:01:40 +0000

/dev/null : Weblog

Eight theses on why “startups manage to pull things off, that enterprise IT doesn’t”

(tags: software architecture entrepreneurship enterprise)

links for 2010-01-21

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:01:21 +0000

nvie.com » Blog Archive » A successful Git branching model

A very good Git Workflow for developing, managing, releasing software

(tags: git workflow release)

Shuttle Discovery

Beautiful Pictures of the Space Shuttle performing a “flip” manoeuver over Switzerland

(tags: photo schweiz space_shuttle)

Magnus Holm - Continue that exception

And an expansion of the idea - continue after an exception

(tags: ruby programming rails lisp smalltalk exceptions continuations)

Hammertime: An interactive error console for Ruby | Virtuous Code

Drop into an interactive console when exceptions in Ruby code are raised. Memories of Smalltalk (from which it was inspired)

links for 2010-01-20

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:03:41 +0000

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures

I have found my next 20 hours of watching videos :)

(tags: programming video lisp education learning lectures)

links for 2010-01-17

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:03:00 +0000

Net::HTTP Cheat Sheet

Should save some time sometime in the future

(tags: ruby programming reference http cheatsheet net-http)

links for 2010-01-16

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:01:35 +0000

OtherLinks - Private Public Chat

handy commands in s skype chate

(tags: skype private_chat)

Solaris 10 & OpenSolaris p2p, p2v, v2p : mrj’s Weblog

Move a running Solaris Server from one box to another (or virtualize it on the way). Cool!

(tags: howto solaris opensolaris zfs virtualization p2v)

links for 2010-01-14

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:04:07 +0000

Stack Overflow Network Configuration - Blog – Stack Overflow

Schema of how StackOverflows servers are clustered and loadbalanced

(tags: server configuration HA)

links for 2010-01-12

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:01:08 +0000

jspdf

Generate PDF from JavaScript (either in the browser or on the server)

(tags: programming javascript pdf generator jspdf)

links for 2010-01-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:02:53 +0000

Europe Internet Usage Stats and PopulationStatistics

(tags: reference research statistics europe usage)

https://www.ribeeziemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/DMScott_Interview4.mp3

Great rant (mp3) on ROI and marketing

(tags: socialmedia roi)

links for 2009-12-30

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:02:49 +0000

jimweirich’s re at master - GitHub

Nice Ruby library to construct regular expressions

(tags: ruby regexp library)

links for 2009-12-29

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:01:07 +0000

The Master, The Expert, The Programmer

Another great write up by Zed Shaw

(tags: programming code inspiration mastery interesting expert)

links for 2009-12-25

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 16:01:20 +0000

The Passive Splice Network Tap - Home of Janitha Karunaratne

Simple way of sniffing Ethernet traffic (provided you have physical access to the cable)

(tags: howto security network technology hacking networking ethernet tap splice sniffer sniffing hacks)

links for 2009-12-23

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:02:30 +0000

gitextensions - Project Hosting on Google Code

In some companies, some people still have to use windows. This could help them

(tags: git windows programming scm development software opensource versioncontrol)

Qanban 0.1 Released!

(tags: agile beta web kanban)

links for 2009-12-19

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:01:27 +0000

Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks // RailsTips by John Nunemaker

Seems like it’s finally time to look into this…

(tags: database rails nosql)

links for 2009-12-18

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:03:59 +0000

EtherPad Blog: EtherPad Open Source Release

This looks like a weekend project :)

(tags: opensource collaboration etherpad wave)

DB2 Error Messages Finder

Handy to have around when you don’t know what SQLCODE -913 means (some deadlock fwiw)

(tags: sql db2 reference)

links for 2009-12-17

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:02:49 +0000

Maintainable Software: Rails Logging Tips

Lot’s of great tips for Rails logging

(tags: rails rubyonrails ruby howto logger logging)

chriseppstein’s compass at master - GitHub

This looks like an absolute amazing way of working with CSS - semantic CSS instead of spaghetti CSS. Let’s see what our designer has to say about this

(tags: css framework development programming layout grid webdev ruby sass)

links for 2009-12-11

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:02:26 +0000

Network Management: Multi-Node Cluster Shared Nothing Storage

More OpenSolaris Share Nothing HA stuff

(tags: Opensolaris solaris high-availabilty)

Whitepaper-OpenHAClusterOnOpenSolaris.pdf (application/pdf-Objekt)

Create a HA cluster on one machine with 2 virtual box systems. Step-by-step guide

(tags: solaris, high-availabilty , howto)

Shared Nothing Storage in Open HA Cluster - Augustus Franklin’s Blog

Description of a HA architecture with no dedicated disk system

(tags: zfs solaris high-availabilty cluster)

links for 2009-12-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:04:53 +0000

EWD1165.PDF (application/pdf-Objekt)

Edgar W Dykstra on the battle between science and managment - a good read and good thoughts. Blends in nicely with my current studying for a Msc in IT…

(tags: programming management engineering software philosophy university science)

Real time online activity monitor example with node.js and WebSocket @ Bamboo Blog

Great article on a monitoring solution with node.js - potentially usefull for later

(tags: javascript node.js http network monitoring code realtime nodejs websocket monitor)

Edge Rails (pre-2.2), iconv, transliteration and Solaris - Blog - Notes from a Messy Desk

links for 2009-12-06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:01:16 +0000

Vaporware To Awesome

Another presentation on Rails 3 by Yehuda Katz. Awesome, indeed!

(tags: rails rails3)

links for 2009-12-04

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:04:14 +0000

Debugging Ruby

Some nifty low level tools for tracing Ruby performance

(tags: ruby debug performance)

links for 2009-12-01

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:01:34 +0000

Sun xVM Hypervisor (System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System) - Sun Microsystems

(tags: virtualization xvm sun opensolaris)

Create a fully virtualized ubuntu-9.04 DomU on Sun xVM Hypervisor : Divyen Patel’s Weblog

(tags: xvm sun hypervisor ubuntu)

links for 2009-11-24

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:04:00 +0000

The State of XML Parsing in Ruby (Circa 2009) | Engine Yard Blog

(tags: ruby xml library performance nokogiri hpricot rexml libxml parsing jaxp jruby)

node.js

and this is the main site of node

(tags: networking nodejs concurrency v8 programming server webdev performance framework)

Node.js is genuinely exciting

This looks like a replacement for some of the stuff that doesn’t quite fit the Rails model - intriguing

(tags: programming development javascript node.js node serverside asynchronous events server framework)

links for 2009-11-20

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:05:17 +0000

Apple’s Mistake

“Why are programmers so fussy about their employers’ morals? Partly because they can afford to be. The best programmers can work wherever they want. They don’t have to work for a company they have qualms about.”

(tags: apple iphone business software culture development)

Clients From Hell

some of the things read sound just plain… true

(tags: design humor blog funny)

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Video on TED.com

unbelievable

(tags: ted technology future inspiration information sixthsense)

How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave - Google Wave - Lifehacker

links for 2009-11-19

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:03:42 +0000

25 Tips for Intermediate Git Users : Andy Jeffries : Ruby on Rails, MySQL and jQuery Developer

(tags: git tips tutorial programming reference howto versioncontrol github)

IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines by AP: Yahoo! Tech

IBM simulates the cortex of a cat… The singularity is near

(tags: brain ai neuroscience)

JPolite V2

Demo of the jPolite Portal

(tags: jquery framework javascript ajax download netvibes portal)

Wayne Lee On jPolite : Lightweight jQuery Based Portal Framework | Open Voice

Interview with the creator of jPolite

links for 2009-11-13

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:01:31 +0000

Dr Nic ’s Dead simple JavaScript Unit Testing in Rails

(tags: javascript testing rails tdd bdd video js)

How To Start A Rails Edge App The Easy Way | Ariejan.net

step by step on how to clone rails edge and start a new app. Learnt a trick or two about git submodules

(tags: rails edge git)

links for 2009-11-11

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:02:52 +0000

Official Google Blog: A tale of 10,000,000 books

(tags: google books copyright blog google-books book)

Pamela Samuelson: Google Books Is Not a Library

(tags: Goog google books internet copyright digitization)

Methodic approach to CSS coding: Four Bubbles Model – woorkup.com

(tags: webdesign tips webdevelopment bestpractices css tutorial)

links for 2009-11-10

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:04:16 +0000

How to test file uploads with Cucumber « /* CODIFICANDO */

(tags: cucumber rails ruby bdd file)

Testing PDFs with Cucumber and Rails | upstream agile - software

see how to download files

(tags: pdf rails testing bdd cucumber rspec)

links for 2009-10-28

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:03:56 +0000

Jeppe’s Unicode page

Handy to have around when you download a MySQL database and all the utf-8 characters have turned into gibberish

(tags: utf8 unicode characters latin1 charset)

links for 2009-10-25

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:03:33 +0000

Winograd - Thinking machines

(tags: programming ai philosophy terrywinograd article)

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript

Programming the iPhone only with Web-Apps - open Book by O’Reilly

(tags: programming iphone html css javascript)

Video on the Web - Dive Into HTML5

Mark Pilgrim on HTML5 and video

(tags: development howto reference tutorial html video html5)

» 7 Ways to Avoid Buying New Stuff | mnmlist.com

I’m really bad at this - should take the 7 items to heard

(tags: inspiration minimalism lifehacks lifestyle simplicity)

ynd’s genetic-drawing at master - GitHub

links for 2009-10-15

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:02:36 +0000

lenary’s ginatra at master - GitHub

Sinatra based replacement for Gitweb

(tags: git sinatra gitweb)

plateau09-hannenberg.pdf (application/pdf-Objekt)

Study that shows that strongly typed programming languages increase the programming time

(tags: programming typing strong weak empiric study)

links for 2009-10-10

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:01:06 +0000

Exploding Software-Engineering Myths - Microsoft Research

(tags: programming research agile analysis engineering software-engineering management)

Re-mixing Images

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:32:24 +0000

One of the assignments I have to write for the Masters Programme I’m working on now, had me thinking about re-mixing. I had written about the presentation by Cornelia Sollfrank at Tweakfest a couple of years ago on this blog. It prompted me to use the net.art generator to create the following image:

[caption id=“attachment_750” align=“alignright” width=“480” caption=“The net.art generator asked to generate an image for "citation", "academia" and "cultural"”][/caption]

iPhone interface for Stellenanzeiger

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:53:22 +0000

The project we are working on for a job-search box in Switzerland ("stellenanzeiger.ch") has started nicely and we have already reached the “visitors per month” goal, our client had for the end of the year. We are constantly applying small fixes, reading more jobs (that would be a blog post all by itself), recognizing duplicates, handling very very weird internet sites etc. As a “fun” project, Keith wrote an iPhone web interface for the site:

Rails 2.3 and Nested Forms within Nested Routes

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:32:55 +0000

Last week I finally got a chance to use the new nested routes in a small rails app, managing invoices for one of our clients. Each invoice belonged to a school and both schools and invoices had an address. It seemed (and was!) the perfect oppurtunity for nesting some forms. I whipped up a sample for the schools and wow! It worked. Automagically.

Perfect. So onto the invoices. Now, logically, the invoices belong to a school, so using another bit of Rails magic I had nested the routes. This was great, as it gave me access to the school and kept everything neat and clean. But… the nested forms within the nested routes (lots of nesting going on around here, I know, but bear with me) exploded. They just refused to work.

Blog moved and updated....

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:17:47 +0000

We just moved this blog to our own servers and updated to Wordpress 2.7 in the process. While it seems that everything went smoothly, there sure are bound to be problems… I think that the Umlauts got messed during the move - but I’m not going to chase UTF-8 conversions….

Any other problems, missing stuff - let us know!

Materials for BDD workshop

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:28:56 +0000

The BDD Workshop I held at RailsWayCon in Berlin went quite well. I bombarded the 30 or so people with a lot of new and unfamiliar technology - not all of which is RSpec or Cucumber related.

Using a Twitter App as an example, we cucumbered, speced, stubbed and mocked around for a whole day and in the end, we had a simple but working Twitter application running. On the side, we talked about the Pomodori method, HAML, used the great RubyMine IDE (I might end up using it for all my Rails development). There were a lot of things I couldn’t get into, maybe next time.

Speaking at RailsWayCon in Berlin

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 May 2009 07:20:25 +0000

Only a few more days, and the Rails World will converge on Berlin for RailsWayCon, an alternative conference to the cancelled RailsConf Europe.

I will be teaching a workshop on BDD on monday, 25.5 - including working with Cucumber.

See the complete Schedule. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of good presentations and meeting old and new friends. The lineup of speakers is impressive: Ola Bini, Steven Bristol, Neal Ford, Michael (Koz) Koziarski, Yehuda Katz, Jan Krutisch, Mathias Meyer, Maik Schmidt, Stefan Tilkov, Jonathan Weiss, Heiko Webers and others.

Amazon S3, Heroku and the Paperclipped Assets Manager for Radiant

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:38:38 +0000

Well this is my first post since joining Jens-Christian and Daniela here at InVisible, but the topic is an old one. About a year ago I released the Paperclipped Assets manager for Radiant, which started rather slowly, but has recently taken off and become quite popular. Thanks to the magic of github, I have received numerous patches and improvements and it has begun to take shape.

With last week’s announcement of pricing by Heroku and their recent blog about installing Radiant, I decided to give it a try. And, much to my surprise it works really well. Getting used to the read-only file system is certainly something new, but it is surprisely easy and very fast. I love being able to push and pull the database at will, which for small sites in Radiant is a real must to keep everything in sync.

scaling twurli

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:03:46 +0000

twu.li starts to grow. We track almost 8000 twitterers for their updates and collect the URLs. This takes more and more time (there is quite some potential for optimizing it by requesting things in parallel). Right now, that’s about 3 hours to do a full scan (and it will get worse). New URLs can therfore show up with quite a delay. To alleviate that, we implemented a simple priority queue system. The result? The more URLs someone tweets, the more often we will read your timeline. Tweeting less drops the priority for this user and we will use longer intervals. So twitterers like timoreilly will get scanned more often than the huge bulk, that doesn’t tweet as often.

twur.li - days 4,5 ...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:56:32 +0000

I haven’t written the last week, and I guess the suspense is killing all 3 of you, that read this blog.

On day 4 (the day before [Cruise](https://twur.li>twur.li was going to be written) I set up the continuous integration and deployment server. My goal was to use <a href=) instead of cc.rb, but after much fiddling with XML configuration files and Rake tasks, I gave up and returned to cc.rb. It works, is relatively easy to set up and suits our needs fine. Why bother?

InVisible Rails Sprint Day 3 - twur.li comes alive

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:28:31 +0000

Today was spent setting up infrastructure. Part of this sprint is to learn new things, so we took the opportunity to play around with some of the new features of Rails 2.3.

The best thing so far is the templating system, that allows you to define which gems, plugins and other files for your rails app. See below for the template we developed. It’s based on the Rails Template Post by Pratik Naik.

InVisible Rails Sprint, Day 2

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:42:42 +0000

Not much news today. Most of the day was spent on client work. I had the fun task of calming down everyones nerves - there are still two deadlines to meet this week, before we can fully embark on building the Twitter app that I need for my day to day work.

I thought about features and design while on the train today and had tons of ideas. I think I have pared them down enough to actually being able to deliver something on friday. This turns out to be a really difficult task, there is so much that we “could” do (and things that would make the app really shine). I have decided on the bare minimum of features (with an eye towards extending them)

Zermatt Soundz

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:30:42 +0000

A new web site, that we developed launched today: ZermattSoundz.ch, the companion site to Europe’s highest open-air concert, April 18/19. It features Eisblume, Ich + Ich, Materia and Die Fantastischen 4.

It was designed by our partners CrÃ©ation and developed with Radiant on Ruby on Rails.

Well done, team!

InVisible Rails Sprint, Day 1

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:35:10 +0000

The last few months have been furious. Not only have we moved to the new offices, but Keith Bingman has joined us as on a regular basis, and Andrea Szabo is our intern for the next 18 months, while she’s becoming an application developer. Quite a few projects have been made, a new website is on it’s way. We’ve had a lot of client work and more is yet to come, but we thought, it might be fun to do something for ourselves for a change.

Hosting fun

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:43:26 +0000

We have been moving our clients websites to our own co-located server over the last few weeks and have had mostly good experiences doing so.

Yesterday however, there was trouble in InVisible hosting land, and we had a couple of hours downtime on one of the websites (of course the one with the most traffic…)

So - here’s a short post-mortem and the things we did to keep this from happening in the future…

The PDF is available for purchase!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:53:47 +0000

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)…

Somesso

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:21:27 +0000

On Halloween Friday was the Somesso conference on social media in RÃ¼schlikon. 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:

Es waren einige Agenturen darunter und einige davon waren bereits Ã¼ber 5 Jahre alt. Ob man sich dann noch als Startup bezeichnen darfn?

(ricdes)

more privacy on the net

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:07:52 +0000

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. Might it be, these people speculated, that US agencies had an interest to get Skype under US control?

the private net

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:28:49 +0000

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. To make a long story short: It doesn’t work! A reasonable successful website (500 - 1000 unique users per day, on iphone-essentials.ch) brings in 1 to 3 USD in AdSense commisions per day. In my experience AdSense earnings scale very linearly with number of visitors, so I could have made maybe 20 USD if I had 10'000 uniques per day.

links for 2008-09-23

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:58:59 +0000

When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals at @media Ajax 2008

(tags: javascript ajax web security presentation csrf json)

DelSolr â€“ 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)

simple perl / php /mysql based web search engine for Samba Servers

(tags: server samba search php perl)

Debian Etch auf einem Rootserver mit Raid-1 und LVM at dysternis

Web 2.0 Expo - Interview with Lee Bryant

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:56:12 +0000

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.

links for 2008-09-16

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:58:42 +0000

Schweizer Landeskoordinaten â€“ Wikipedia

convert gps coordinates into Schweizer Landeskoordinaten

(tags: algorithms gps map coordinates conversion)

links for 2008-09-15

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:57:33 +0000

Data Noise: ActionWebService is back

using AWS with Rails 2.1.0 (use the nmeans-actionwebservic fork for 2.1.1)

(tags: webservices rubyonrails webservice actionwebservice plugin rails)

Performance Tuning Guidelines for Single-Server 100-500 User Systems - Zimbra :: Wiki

(tags: zimbra tuning)

Performance Tuning Guidelines for Large Deployments - Zimbra :: Wiki

(tags: tips performance optimization zimbra tuning)

The Obvious?: It’s only an hour ….

Digital Ethnology of YouTube - 1 hour presentation

(tags: socialmedia youtube)

links for 2008-09-14

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:08:29 +0000

patrick collison - an offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch

(tags: iphone programming howto wikipedia)

Get a PDF of my Rails book

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:35:20 +0000

It took a bit longer than we wanted too, but I’m happy to announce that the PDF version of my Rails Book is now available.

The book is getting excellent reviews (which I am very grateful for) and has been selling quite well on Amazon, thank you all

You can buy the PDF version directly from the publisher: Professionelle Webentwicklung mit Ruby on Rails 2 (PDF). The price is 28 Euro, a discount of 20%

links for 2008-08-28

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:58:14 +0000

notes - Research in Software Development

…and ain’t that the truth?

(tags: wisdom programming development)

Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : RE: Forward Agent

forward mail while keeping sender information

(tags: notes mail)

CodeProject: TrackEye : Real-Time Tracking Of Human Eyes Using a Webcam. Free source code and programming help

(tags: programming eyetracking webcam vision eye analysis tools development software graphics video)

links for 2008-08-21

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:28:41 +0000

Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store has launched - All Things Distributed

(tags: ec2 services amazon ebs s3 distributed cloud storage)

Why Amazonâ€™s Elastic Block Store Matters Â« RightScale Blog

(tags: ebs amazon aws ec2)

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store

(tags: howto database tutorials ec2 amazon ebs mysql)

In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism | Lambda the Ultimate

(tags: scripting education pragmatics programming)

Work on Side projects

Work on side projects all the time to - learn? thrive? improve? all of it

links for 2008-08-19

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:05:42 +0000

Willkommen beim EidgenÃ¶ssischen Institut fÃ¼r Geistiges Eigentum

(tags: schweiz markenschutz property Business patent)

links for 2008-07-23

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:28:20 +0000

iPhone FAQ - Wie kann ich die Autokorrektur deaktivieren?

disable stupid german autocorrection on iphone

(tags: iphone hack spelling)

Finally. Ruby on Rails gets internationalized - artweb design

(tags: gem i18n rails ruby rubyonrails web rails2.2)

The Ruby on Rails I18n core api - artweb design

(tags: gem i18n rails2.2 rubyonrails api localization l10n)

Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

(tags: Tutorial web2.0 socialbookmarking video)

links for 2008-07-15

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:31:42 +0000

Paul’s complete guide to installing OSX Leopard on your MSI Wind / Advent 4211 - MoDaCo

hmm - I think I need a new subnotebook :)

(tags: diy mac osx wind)

re-booting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:06:34 +0000

Time passes. You wait.

More time passes.

It might seem to you, dear reader, that nothing really happened the last few weeks. The truth - of course - is different.

Just the most important things:

Henriette and Thomas got married - check out the flickr pics
I presented at rails-konferenz.de - Patrick Lenz made wonderful pictures
The web site for my book has gone live: rails-praxis.de
I coerced my publisher to actually release more than the introduction of the book as PDF: I give you the chapter on RSpec and Userstories
I am now part of the headshift family
My company is looking at expanding: We are looking for larger offices, and interesting people - apply within
Lot of exiting work signed up
My grandmother died at the age of 89 - funeral tomorrow - just before:
reboot

Technorati Tags: book, denmark, reboot10, rails-konferenz, rubyonrails

links for 2008-06-15

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:32:31 +0000

TENORI-ON

new take on music instrument. reminds me of the computer music program Presto by Guerino Mazzola, many many years ago

(tags: electronics hardware music)

InfoQ: Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Released

why you shouldn’t develop for Sharepoint - opinion

(tags: sharepoint programming anti)

links for 2008-06-14

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:29:41 +0000

stephencelis â€” Bashfully Yours, Gem Shortcuts

open gem documetation directly from the shell - neat

(tags: programming gem ruby tips bash shell)

Star Guitar | indie music, film and video on demand - sputnik7

Wonderful synchronized music video by the chemical brothers

(tags: music video)

links for 2008-06-01

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:30:23 +0000

dancroak.com

Collection of MagLev related blog posts

(tags: ruby smalltalk maglev vm)

links for 2008-05-28

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:35:31 +0000

Designing Tag Navigation

Presentation about designing tag navigation

(tags: navigation tagging web-design web tag)

links for 2008-05-27

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:33:55 +0000

Well-formed data | Elastic lists | Nobel prize winners demo

Wonderful way of filtering and navigating data

(tags: cool data design flash visualization interface visualisation navigation)

links for 2008-05-21

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:36:58 +0000

Hello World and Fibonacci - Stefan Tilkov’s Random Stuff

awesome implementation of Fibonacci in a Ruby Hash

(tags: ruby fibonacci algorithms)

links for 2008-05-20

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:39:47 +0000

Apple - Support - Discussions - Time Machine on the network is a dog, …

fixing TimeMachine shortcomings when saving on a network

(tags: apple timemachine network)

links for 2008-05-18

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 18 May 2008 16:38:25 +0000

Cubescape

Play with isometric perspective

(tags: fun design javascript game programming jquery ajax)

Ajaxian Â» Wii Darts: Powering Ajax applications with Wii controllers

Having fun with the Wiimote and an Ajax application…

(tags: wii ajax wiimote java games javascript webdev)

links for 2008-05-16

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:47:43 +0000

Developing an accessible slider | Filament Group, Inc.

wonderful jQuery design with explanations of work process

(tags: ajax code css javascript slider jquery)

Filament Group Lab Example From Page from: jQuery Interactive Date Range Picker with Shortcuts

impressive Datepicker component

(tags: jquery datepicker javascript calendar date ui)

links for 2008-05-15

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:41:43 +0000

faker-0.3.1 Documentation

really useful to generate sample data to play around with your application

(tags: ruby testing fake library rubyonrails data gem database)

gchart-0.5.0 Documentation

friendly Ruby interface to the Google Chart API

(tags: api gem library programming ruby reference chart google graphs)

links for 2008-05-14

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:36:02 +0000

Web at ABB

The head of the ABB intranet blogs

(tags: blog web2.0 abb)

links for 2008-05-13

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:43:16 +0000

js-hotkeys - Google Code

jQuery hotkeys. seems to work very well (even special keys)

(tags: ajax code event javascript jquery plugin keyboard hotkeys)

links for 2008-05-12

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:37:57 +0000

TidBITS Blog Post: Time Machine Exposed!

command line interface for Time Machine. Looks nifty - and so much better than the space UI

(tags: backup timemachine mac utilities leopard tools)

TidBITS Blog Post: Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively

Find large files in Backup sets (VM Harddisks anyone) ant erase them

(tags: timemachine mac backup leopard tips)

tms [fernLightning] - timemmachine cli

Download and help for tms tool

(tags: timemachine osx mac backup cli leopard tools)

links for 2008-05-11

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:32:05 +0000

SwissASP AG - Dienstleistungen - Vereinsverwaltung - Virtuelle Vereinsverwaltung online

(tags: vereinsverwaltung)

VereinsAssistant

fat client

(tags: vereinsverwaltung)

GRÃœN Software AG

Deutsche Vereinsverwaltung

(tags: vereinsverwaltung)

Vereins-Verwaltung.ch - Eingang

(tags: vereinsverwaltung)

Umfassende online Vereinsverwaltung

(tags: vereinsverwaltung)

links for 2008-05-09

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:42:35 +0000

InriaGforge: Sapphire

Squeak Smalltalk without the toy character

(tags: smalltalk squeak)

Inter-Sections Â» Blog Archive Â» 13 Tips for creating a successful new online product

simple rules, and not rocket science. still seen projects get all 13 wrong….

(tags: blog development howto inspiration online startup business)

links for 2008-05-08

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:43:49 +0000

HoboFields

Makes the model master of the database structures and creates migrations

(tags: database gem plugin plugins rails migrations rubyonrails)

links for 2008-05-07

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:35:01 +0000

Workstreamr | Work Made Social

Stowe Boyds new gig… Looking forward to seeing it, after having participated in his great workshop at Lift 07

(tags: collaboration socialmedia workstreamr Business web2.0 social)

Bertrand Russell : In praise of idleness (1932)

Everybody works 4 hours a day and the world will be a better place…

(tags: essay philosophy social writing russell economics)

A List Apart: Articles: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow

Lessons from the flickr people about building a community

links for 2008-05-06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:38:16 +0000

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2

Sweet - and an alternative / extension to the Joyent accelerators we are using

(tags: solaris sun ec2 joyent)

Overview - Seaside Tutorial

Great introduction to Seaside. Some familiarity with Smalltalk or Squeak required.

(tags: development documentation free smalltalk programming tutorial squeak seaside web framework)

WikiMatrix - Compare them all

Compare Wikis. Use a wizard to choose from available Wiki engines

(tags: business wiki comparison Collaboration Tools)

Wysiwyg Wiki

(old) list of wysiwig wikis

(tags: wiki wysiwyg editor)

links for 2008-05-05

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:42:03 +0000

Bowled Over by RubyCocoa

(tags: cocoa code development howto leopard osx programming rubycocoa ruby tutorial rspec)

Picolena - DevjaVu

(tags: gem library pdf rails rubyonrails search ferret fulltext document ruby)

ongoing Â· Multi-Inflection-Point Alert

Things are changing - new paradigms coming up

(tags: business culture programming linux future technology rails-konferenz)

Amateur hour at Techcrunch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:47:28 +0000

no comments…. https://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/amateur-hour-over-at-twitter/

Shell Meme

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:12:07 +0000

I did this before…

jcf@Arwen:amazon: history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   191	git
    58	rake
    48	cd
    40	cap
    25	mate
    24	jruby
    16	ruby
    10	ssh
     7	script/plugin
     6	rm

Done

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:49:43 +0000

Actually, it has been done since Tuesday night at 03:00 in the morning and I’m still recovering…

I wrote, indexed, checked and - most importantly - handed in 22 Word documents, 101 pictures (believe it or not, in BMP format, 20 drawings (EPS). I heard from my editor, that it’s in typesetting right now and will run to around 600 pages in print.

Wheew - glad I didn’t know that when I started writing this book.

The Flow (2008-03-19)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:51:52 +0000

History

have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

From the International Association of Time Travelers: Members’ Forum Subforum: Europe - Twentieth Century - Second World War

via Stefan Tilkov

Atari

Ah - fond memories about the Atari ST. And the account of how it got developed

Brain Surgery

Someone that actually understands the limitations that Apple has imposed in the SDK.

Administrative Debris

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 06:33:10 +0000

Following the cartoon to Erik Burkes ‘Simplicity’ I stumbled upon (sorry, I forgot via what blog) on Ryan Tomaykos article Administrative Debris which in turn was inspired by Edward Tuftes critique of the iPhone.

The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface - not computer administrative debris.

Let that sink in. Content is the interface. Nothing else. When you watch a photo on the iPhone nothing else is visible. The adminstrative debris only shows up when you interact with the picture, otherwise it’s just not there.

IntlDateField

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:24:11 +0000

As promised in the last post, here’s my tiny plugin…

and this is the readme:

IntlDate

Date or DateTime Columns are usually show in forms with the date helpers. However, often you just want a textfield, instead of the multiple combo boxes. This will work, but dates are displayed in the database format (2008-03-13 14:55:44). While that is readable, it’s usually not what your users expect.

To display dates, you can define formats used in the to_s method of the Date objects

Github

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:18:57 +0000

Hello Lazyweb:

I have written a small Rails Plugin to handle DateTime values in text fields. I would love to release it, but I’m not using Subversion any more. Can anyone arrange a login on Github for me?

The Flow (2008-03-14)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:13:35 +0000

Choose

Words fail me: Stroke of insight (if you only follow one link in todays flow: follow this one)

Fez

2D Plattform game with a difference. Wow!

iPhone Future Apps

12 iPhone Apps of the near future - we are going to live in interesting times. Evernote is almost there in a lot of areas. I am sure, they are going to have an iPhone client too. A really cool application. I have a couple of invites left to give out. Leave a comment to request one.

The Flow (2008-03-12)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:57:18 +0000

Simplicity

via Labnotes

Lisp

Interesting read about using Lisp in a large and complex Application

The Flow (2008-03-11)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:56:36 +0000

Don’t send

Don’t use a method named send in your Rails Controllers. Trust me.

Obsoletion

Do you know the Hayes AT command set? What the difference between X-, Y- and Z-Modem is? (and which one rocks) Can you adjust the tracking on a VCR? Operate a rotary phone? Without dialing the dial? Yes? You my friend are a master of Obsolete Skills. Now go weep in the sweet memories.

The Flow (2008-03-10)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:34:24 +0000

Noise

Ben Poole brings back musical memories to me: Art of Noise:

Community Anbieter wissen zu wenig uber Communities

Ganz erst gemeinte, wissenschaftliche Studie uber Web Communities, ihre Aufzucht und Pflege. Spannend! Ich denke immer noch, dass Hughs Ideen uber soziale Objekete sehr viel Wahrheitsgehalt haben.

The Flow (2008-03-08)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 08:12:47 +0000

Waiting at the airport in London for the flight back to Zurich. Had an interesting and enjoyable day with a really good meeting, a walk in beautiful Regent Park with my friend Michael and lovely Thai dinner.

Been sifting through the iPhone SDK information and videos. Ideas swirling through my head…

Random Links of interest

If Version Control Systems were Airlines - so true
Ruby Debug Cheat sheet - needed that recently while trying to figure out, why an integration test failed

The Flow (2008-03-06)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:20:41 +0000

Smoke on Japan

via vowe

Git Backup

Using Git to backup directories: gibak. I couldn’t get the OCaml files compiled (but I didn’t try that hard)

Apple iPhone SDK released

Server down

MS Word 2008 - got 2.5 Gigs?

My friend Benno writes a book in MS Word 2008 - he’s not happy…

The Flow (2008-03-05)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:53:08 +0000

Wonderful unobtrusive jQuery Gallery

A photo gallery that just consists of an unordered list? You got it. Example

jQuery

The next Rails project I start, I will be using jQuery.

Err the blog intro to jQuery

The Flow (2008-03-04)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:59:13 +0000

Flowing with the ebb

Ebb aims to be a small and fast web server specifically for hosting web frameworks like Rails, Merb, and in the future Django.

And it seems to be really fast: Ebb

Google Gears go mobile

Windows Mobile for now, others presumably coming too (iPhone, anyone?). Interesting blog entry about the whole thing.

The Flow (2008-03-02)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:37:32 +0000

Not really getting much done at the moment, but busy nonetheless. Here’s what crossed my newsreader:

try-ing made easy

Did you ever write this in your Ruby or Rails code?

person.name rescue ""

wouldn’t it be nicer to try to to it easier?

person.try(:name)

Chris thinks so too….

I improved on this (spectacularly) and now try supports fail:

person.try(:name, :fail => "no person")

The extension is trivial:

Toyota Prius zu verkaufen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:15:21 +0000

Wir haben seit Februar 2005 einen Toyota Prius, der uns zuverlÃ¤ssig gedient hat. Wir benutzen ihn aber nicht sonderlich, leben gut erschlossen mir Ã¶ffentlichem Verkehr und das Wallis ist dank der NEAT mit dem Zug schneller zu erreichen als mit dem Auto.

Deshalb haben wir uns entschlossen, das Auto zu verkaufen:

roter 2004 Toyota Prius 1.5 Hybrid
In Betriebnahme 2/2005
38'500 km gefahren
letzer Service 4.3.2008
Sommer und Winterreifen
Unfallfrei
Ausstattungspaket II
- 6 Fach CD Wechsler / 9 Bose Lautsprecher (
- GPS / Navigation
- Keyless Entry (nie mehr nach dem SchlÃ¼ssel fummeln)
- Bluetooth Freispecheinrichtung (iPhone kompatibel)
- Sprachsteuerung (toller Demoeffekt)

Laut Eurotax hat der Wagen einen Wiederverkaufswert von 28'150 Franken. Soviel hÃ¤tten wir auch gerne dafÃ¼r…

The Flow (2008-02-27)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:58:15 +0000

Not much flow today, due to things happening that I will qualify (in due time, when I have more distance) as “lessons learned in life”. Still a small morcel:

Rails on Git

koz talks about what is needed before Rails can move from SVN to Git. Interesting! (We have moved to Git exclusively at InVisible, and enjoy the power)

Out of that blogpost:

Braid - svn:externals with git

One of things git doesn’t handle are externals… braid looks like a solution to that problem. There’s an example of installing RSpec with braid

The Flow (2008-02-26)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:21:40 +0000

Another one of my ideas that I don’t need to do, because someone else did it: Hiveminder. A wonderful presentation and introduction over on SlideShare by pjf:

| View | Upload your own

The Flow (2008-02-25)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:19:32 +0000

Scripting Screencasts

Castanaut is a DSL and library to script ScreenCasts in Ruby. Nifty!

while_saying "To install it, drag it to your bookmarks bar." do
  move to_element("a.button")
  drag to(88, 106)
  pause 0.5
  hit Enter
end

Scripting the Shell

What if you could use Ruby instead of the shell? You can

local_dir = Rush::Box.new('localhost')['/Users/adam/server_logs/'].create servers = %w(www1 www2 www3).map { |n| Rush::Box.new(n) }
servers.each { |s| s['/var/log/nginx/access.log'].copy_to local_dir["#{s.host}_access.log"] }

Rush - the Ruby shell

The Flow (2008-02-23)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:04:09 +0000

Opera Kestrel Mac Blog

Opera used to be my favourite Web browser. That is until they started Kestrel (9.5) alphas. A lot of crashing… The advent of the new Opera Mac Blog also marks a new release… I have been using Firefox 3.0 beta 3 for some time now and actually have started to like it (unlike the old versions, that I generally hate)

Family

My father would have turned 98 today. Happy birthday. Tobias cried in your memory yesterday.

The Flow (2008-02-22)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 07:31:39 +0000

Free Memory

I have too many applications open all the time, and only 2 GB of memory. The memory management of OSX just doesn’t seem to be able to handle this, without regular reboots. iFreeMem seems to be the solution. Downloaded trial today, let’s see, how good it it.

Current status:

Arwen:files jcf$ uptime
8:26  up 4 days, 23:59, 8 users, load averages: 0,41 0,70 0,76

Twittery iPhone

Have your iPhone twitter its current location every now and then, in case it’s stolen (or you want to track someone?). iPhone LoJack does this for you.

Zollinger Samen Website launched

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:24:31 +0000

Today we launched a new website for one of our customers: Zollinger-Samen.ch. Zollinger Samen is a family owned business, that cultivates more than 200 plants (vegetables, flowers, herbs) and sells the seeds. They have operated over 20 years and have been pushed into the internet age by their sons.

The website was built with Rails and and a heavily extended Radiant for the catalogue and the shop. The wonderful design was inspired by the 20 year long history of printed catalogs and implemented by HTML and CSS wrangler Keith Bingman. We spent a wonderful time working with Zollingers on transferring catalogue and brand from print to the web. Personally, this was one of the most rewarding projects to work on, because I believe that the work Zollingers are doing on keeping genetic diversity up and cultivating the old, non-hybrid plants is very important. I have trouble with seeds that will not reproduce, so that they have to be bought again and again.

In memoriam Viviane Schwyter

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:03:33 +0000

meta note: I sure hope this isn’t turning into a regular feature

I got the news from a friend this morning. Viviane, my girlfriend before I met and married my wife, decided to end her life yesterday. We spent a bit more than a year together, including a wonderful 4 week vacation in the US and Hawaii (including a very memorable hike to Hipuapua Falls with no guide, the sunset in Grand Canyon, Mr. Gottschalks Restaurant in Flagstaff, Vegas, Monument Valley) and many weekends in her families house in Brissago.

In memoriam Florian Germersdorf

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:35:44 +0000

Today at 12:35, Florians Brain Tumor finally took his life. Florian died in his sleep. I am so sad that he has left us.

In September 2006 I visited him in hospital and left very thoughtful. That day I said I’d write a book, if I knew I only had a year left to live. I actually do hope, I have a bit more time, but it turns out, I got my chance. All going well, my book on Rails development “Ruby on Rails in der Praxis” will be published in January 2008.

Rails Stack on Leopard

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:29:52 +0000

Yes, Leopard is that great, but getting a full Rails Stack working again is a lot of work….

(work in progress)

Ruby / Rails

Ruby and Rails are bundled with Leopard. Be sure to read about the Apple modifications What’s new in Leopard
The rails command defaults to sqlite as it’s database. Use:

$ rails -d mysql project_name

MySQL

Download 10.4 package from MySQL and install both the mysql and the startupitem.
Start/Stop doesn’t work, use these instructions
apply the fixes from AngryFly

MacPorts

Download and install MacPorts 1.5.0-10.5.dmg

Git

$ sudo port install git-core

SSH

I have strange errors when the MacPorts version of SSH was being used (no connections, git didn’t pull from remote servers). I “solved” it by renaming it:

Sharpening the saw

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:25:38 +0000

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”

“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”

“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”

“Well why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire. “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”

sheep-shirts

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:11:19 +0000

There’s an ugly political campaing running in Switzerland at the moment… Our right wing party is running ads against “criminal foreigners” and pictures them as black sheep… The implication of course is, that all criminal activity is from foreigners and all foreigners are criminals.

Carole, Keith and I have done something about that:

Get your sheep-shirt and show that we all are black sheep :)

Technorati Tags: sheep, schaf-shirt, svp

new pet project :)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:17:26 +0000

While we wait for the iPhone in Switzerland:

Go yonder and spread the link love!

Workshopping

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:14:39 +0000

My next public speaking - or rather workshopping - event will be on 13.9.2007. CH-Open is holding their annual workshop days and I’ll be holding Workshop number 13 with the title:

Ruby on Rails - Hype, “Business as usual” oder “The next big thing”?

It’s going to be a one day workshop and my plan is to have the participants walk through the building of a complete (simple) web app, touching different issues (ease of development, test driven, scalability, enterprise ready) and giving them a feel for how Rails is handling those issues.

PCdenzfall - oder Flugzeuge im Bauch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:44:44 +0000

Wunderbares Lied - mehr davon bei Bodo Wartke selber

via mac-essentials.de

Technorati Tags: caberet, lyrik, mac, microsoft

How to get things done

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:40:39 +0000

Forget your mobile phone in the bedroom, go to the office (which is conveniently located in the floor above under the roof) and get a full days work done without any distractions…

Of course, now I have to deal with the 10 missed calls from yesterday

Technorati Tags: work

Our dreams

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:19:50 +0000

thanks to Adrian for this reminder

HAML 1.7 and Gettext

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:08:12 +0000

If you are trying to use HAML 1.7 and Ruby Gettext, you’ll have problems extracting the string information from the HAML files.

While [teamschnitzel][1] has a solution that almost works, there was a change in HAML 1.7 that will render it useless. HAML deprecated the :precompiled accessor which the GetText Parser needs. Luckily, it’s really simple to add it back to HAML:

Open vendor/plugins/haml/lib/haml/haml/engine.rb and

  class Engine
# Allow reading and writing of the options hash
attr : options, true
attr_reader :precompiled

add the attr_reader line. Then scroll down in the file until you see the following code:

Slides for Rails-Konferenz Presentation

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:16:06 +0000

It seems, that everybody is using Slideshare - here am my presentations (some more coming)

And here’s the deck I used at rails-konferenz.de - enjoy

Technorati Tags: presenting, slidehare, rails-konferenz, slides

Photos of Rails-Konferenz

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 12:59:58 +0000

I have spotted the first photo-set of rails-konferenz.de - look who’s talking:

by dbloete

Technorati Tags: egosurfing, rails-konferenz

Forward to the past

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 06:36:51 +0000

This post is a follow up and an expansion to my presentation at rails-konferenz.de on the topic of “offline Rails applications”. If you are not interested in lessons from history, technical details about replication etc. feel free to skip this…

The rage these days is twofold: The “Rich Internet Application” (RIA) and the ability to go off-line. There are a number of ways coming up, that promise you, that you can take (rich) web applications offline. A slew of products are coming out (AIR, Google Gears, Slingshot, …) that are tackling this problem.

unlimited mobile

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 19:34:31 +0000

I have been using my mobile phones as a modem for the Mac Power/MacBook quite some time now with mixed success. While the different Nokia phone I used (Commuicator 9500, 9300 and the E61) generally work fine, they regularly just crash or drop the connection - sometime requiring a reboot of the phone. And, while I’m online via the phone, I can’t be reached - which sometimes is difficult.

So - after seeint that Swisscom Mobile has PC Express cards that supposedly work on my MacBook Pro, I decided to try that.

When the outsourcers outsource

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:08:46 +0000

While going through my spam folder, I happened upon this gem:

I find it sad, that the off-shoring country no 1 is trying to off-shore their work… At least, from what I’ve heard, the west is paying the east for offshored work. Doesn’t seem, like this guy has heard of that concept…

Technorati Tags: offshoring, outsourcing

Presenting at Rails-Konferenz.de in Frankfurt

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:30:53 +0000

Next week, rails-konferenz.de is taking place in Frankfurt, Germany on Friday, 22nd of June. I will be there and present on “Working offline” using Joyent Slingshot.

It’s going to be my second appearance at Rails-Konferenz, and I’m very much looking forward to being there. Be sure to say Hi, if you are there too.

Technorati Tags: joyent, presenting, rails, rails-konferenz, slingshot

flow @ reboot

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:04:14 +0000

talking virtually

While most of the added value of a conference is coming from the face to face meetings with a bunch of different people, the tech-crowd can do amazing things when given WiFi and some tools.

I witnessed this power the first time at reboot 7.0 when spontaneous collaboration emerged.

I’d like to give something to the reboot crowd - an experiment in chatting. chat.invisible.ch is a chat system without rooms, but with tags - where discussions can focus and defocus - not in rooms, but in connected ideas.

flow @ TweakFest

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 24 May 2007 09:19:14 +0000

Today, Tweakfest 2007 starts. Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak will be holding a keynote, and the rest of the festival program looks really exciting!

I’m happy to provide a little piece of the Tweakfest Puzzle with flow@tweakfest, a backchannel application that will collect users, visitors, spectators feedback and be projected next to the presentations.

While I have been doing quite a few Ruby On Rails applications over the last year, I always had the luxury of working on in-house solutions. This is my first public facing application to go live, and to say that I’m nervous is just understating it.

Reading

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:07:15 +0000

I’m back from vacations in egypt. It wasn’t quite the vacation we planned, and due to various illnesses, I got to spend more time than I would have liked in an egyptian hospital, caring for my 7 year old daughter.

But we made it back, and caught a lot of sun-rays.

I have been reading extensively during the vacation, and I’d like to share some of the books I read and my thoughts on them:

of the grid

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:15:47 +0000

I haven’t been very active here the last few weeks, due to an enormous amount of work that needed to be done.

And I won’t be very active the next two weeks either. I’m going of the grid for a while…

When tables are a bad idea

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:10:18 +0000

Remember my plea for help a couple of weeks ago? I haven’t really had any success with this (even though nice people tried to help me).

But then things picked up in the last few days: I browsed through the “Agile Web Development with Rails” book and found a note that basically said, that Internet Explorer is borked when you try to manipulate the DOM of a table. It seems, that it’s not able to handle the innerHTML attribute of table rows or table cells.

Joyent Slingshot

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:49:55 +0000

One thing that has always made Lotus Notes stand out above any other application development environment, is it’s ability to replicate data and design to different servers and/or laptops. This has made the development of online / offline versions of applications trivial. In general “it just worked(tm)”.

While the Web (2.0) applications are taking the world in storm and SaaS is what everybody is talking about, there’s still a wide gap, when it comes to working offline. A lot of people need to work offline: On a plane, on the train or in a secluded chalet in the mountains. All of the fancy on-line browser apps fall very very short. Even though there are more and more places that are connected, these connections (through mobile phones for example) are slow and quite expensive. So offline functionality is (and will likely be for quite some time) a very important proposition for applications.

assert_select and url_for

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 06:02:06 +0000

In the Extreme Testing presentation, I have a slide with assert_select examples, some of them lifted from the assert_select cheat sheet. All fine and dandy, except that this

assert_select "form[action=?]", url_for( :action => 'foo' )

just doesn’t work. url_for is a method of the controller, not the ControllerTest class.

So in order to overcome that limitation, you’d need to

    assert_select "form[action=?]", @controller.url_for( :action => 'foo' )

which doesn’t throw an error, but doesn’t work either, because url_for insists on adding https://test.host/ to the generated URL. Of course, that’s not what’s in the form you have generated. What you need to do, is to add the parameter :only_path => true to the url_for call:

human? - reboot 9.0

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:35:26 +0000

reboot 9.0 is happening on May 31st and June 1st this year. I attended both reboot 7.0 and reboot 8.0 and both have been wonderful experiences (reboot 7 being the proverbial “kick in the ass”).

reboot 9.0 has a wonderful feature on it’s website: After registering, participants are asked to tag themselves with up to 10 keywords. Later they can relate to other people, talks, ideas that share those keywords.

Moritz blogt

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:00:33 +0000

Trotz aller Politikmudigkeit und “die Politiker kummern sich nicht ums Volk”…. Die Zeiten andern sich. Bundesrat Moritz Leuenberger blogt!

Bravo Moritz, das gibt mir ein klein wenig mehr das Gefuhl, dass es Politiker gibt, die mich tatsachlich reprasentieren.

Weiterhin viel Erfolg und gutes Gelingen!

Technorati Tags: moritzleuenberger, politik, bundesrat

Joyent, Strongspace and my Samba Server

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:04:50 +0000

We use Joyent (affiliate link) for our mail (born out of Textdrive). Last weekend, the Joyfolks updated the application to a new version (and had quite a few problems in the process). One of the new features is Strongspace integration. Strongspace is a secure storage on the Net (accessible through SFTP, SCP and the like) that I have used for online backups for quite a while.

At first I didn’t think much of the integration, but then it dawned on me, that I could sync our companies shared folder (which lives on a Samba server) to Joyent to get access to all our data when not in the office. Turns out, that this is really easy to do:

SwissRug Meeting Notes 1.3.2007

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:38:17 +0000

Just 9 people met this time for the SwissRug meeting, but we had some really interesting demos and discussions….

Florian Hanke started of by showing a little application he had thrown together to get his computer to speak to him (a childhood dream). It’s called “James” and based on the speech recognition and synthesis of Mac OS X, couple with the ruby cocoa bridge. In just a couple of lines of Ruby. He’s planning to build an extensible open source application for interacting with the Mac. In his demo, he was able to get a time table for the train through the SBB website. Impressive!

9 Beet Stretch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:12:40 +0000

What happens if you play Beethovens 9th Symphony, strech it to last 24 hours (instead of the one hour it usually takes to perform it)?

You get 9 Beet Stretch. Interesting music!

Technorati Tags: music, beethoven

Keeping tradition

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:25:36 +0000

This day has been good to me:

Morning:

Afternoon:

Technorati Tags: pentax, k10d

PR Blogging

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:34:21 +0000

Was fur ein Schwachsinn! Der PR Blogger gibt Short Tipps fur die Blog-Promotion - etwa einen “Blog Karneval”, “Blog-Schnitzeljagd”, “Blog-Advent” und ahnlichem Unfug (“Promoblogging”).

Irre ich mich, oder vergisst Herr Eck etwas ganz entscheidendes?

Na?

Keine Ahnung?

Wie ware es mit … Inhalt?

Blogs wie der Turmsegler leben durch die liebevolle Aufbereitung von Lyrik. Nja.ch durch treffende Beobachtungen aus dem Berufs- und Familienalltag.

Blog-Advent! Und wenn schon (Blog-)Marketing, dann sollte Herr Eck vielleicht mal bei Gapingvoid vorbeischauen - da wird Marketing fur richtige Produkte gemacht.

fourty

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:44:36 +0000

in a way, similar to 39. In a way not.

traveling - not at home

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 04:43:06 +0000

We have safely returned from our holidays in the mountains. Both weather, snow and skiing was terrific, thanks for asking!

On the last day, while gliding up towards the ski slopes, I solved a particular puzzling aspect of my life. I don’t really like to travel. I have nothing against sitting in a train (actually I love that), a plane and going some place, but I don’t like to travel through a country without a base where I can stay.

One: A space odyssey

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 09:15:45 +0000

Quite a bit quicker to watch than the original epos :-)

Lift 07 - connecting the dots

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:11:01 +0000

The big moment for me - and the reason for going to these conferences - is to get into a state, where I “connect the dots”. Meeting people, listening to talks, sharing ideas, talking, thinking. Mostly about seemingly unrelated topics (“Technology and Society” is a fairly broad description. And then, all going well, something happens. A common theme emerges, and it connects the dots.

It has happened to me an around lunch today.

OpenID gets a push

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 08:08:21 +0000

One of the decisions we made for a new project, was to use OpenID based authentication, instead of the normal username/password. This has led to interesting discussions - mainly about usability. ~~Most~~No people that have tried our new application, had an OpenID identity and so had to log on to one of the OpenID servers, get an Identity, get back to our site and login. Confusing, confusing. And a constant source of comments about getting rid of OpenID.

Lift 07 - Day 1

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:03:11 +0000

Lift really started today and had a bunch of very different talks that I attended. I’m not even going to try to summarize them - Stephanie and Bruno are doing a wonderful, wonderful job with their notes. (I wonder how Bruno manages to attend (seemingly) every talk and publish a concise recap with pictures and links within hours. Must be that journalist thing :) - or a couple of ghost writers maybe? )

Lift 07 - Workshops

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:56:57 +0000

The first day of the Lift conference - the day with the workshops - is over. I was close to not attending, and boy am I glad, that I changed that decision two weeks ago.

The day started of with a visit to CERN and their building of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). It started with a superb presentation on why CERN is doing all of this research (“finding out how the universe works” seems like a great reason). The vision, dedication, passion and fire of the researchers, that are looking for the answers to questions about the start of the universe can be felt at all times. Somehow, I’m always close to tears, when I hear about works of that scale, that are truly beneficial to humanity. And the humility, those people have: “Come back in 50 or 100 years and see if anything has been made out of the research we are doing” (meaning - any practical use)

You are coming to a sad realisation...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 17:52:33 +0000

Technorati Tags: apple, security

Usability Testing for all

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 12:10:44 +0000

Now that’s a really great idea:

HallwayTesting.com is a small scale usability lab. You post a website for scrutiny and a bunch of people can take a gander and criticize you. I have submitted my new web application - it’s going to be interesting to see, if there’s any good feedback coming from this!

Technorati Tags: usability

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 17:43:25 +0000

A wonderful short video that explains what this Web 2.0 thing is all about. Wonderful concise. The right way to start the week in preparation for next weeks conference, that I’m sure will touch on some of these subjects.

[via C0T0D0S0.org]

Technorati Tags: lift07, antropology, puppy, web

Complain with a song

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 06:22:17 +0000

Technorati Tags: choir, helsinki, complaints

no more snap

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 13:25:23 +0000

The blogosphere doesn’t seem to like Snap Previews. After reading a couple of laments (including the one by Bruce Sterling) they now are gone from this blog….

Apache vs. IIS - IIS wins!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 11:01:37 +0000

Only of course, if you look at the pretty picture of the call graphs that the two systems have.

Technorati Tags: apache, iis, security

worthy / not worthy

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 17:16:46 +0000

I’m taking after my late father, who loved photography, cameras and taking pictures. I lust for a DSLR (like the Pentax K10D for example). However, I’m not sure I’m worthy… The skill of good photography is not due to the size or the quality of the camera, but the eye of the photographer. And I have the feeling, that my dinky point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix would do just fine. People like Dannie Jost make terrific photos - even with a cell phone.

I could need some help with Javascript and IE debugging

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:23:40 +0000

I’m working on an AJAXy application that works just fine and dandy with Safari, Firefox and Opera. And it works so so on IE6 and IE7. I have tried to come to grips with IE and script debugging but given up in disgust. Is there anyone out there that

a) understand Javascript b) has a script debugger environment setup for IE6 or IE7 (I guess that fixing the bug for one browser fixes it for the second one as well) c) has about 10 minutes of time to diagnose the problem

skype 2.5 for mac does 640*480 video

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:50:21 +0000

Skype 2.5 has been released and it can do near DVD quality video chat. If you meet the necessary hardware requirements that is. And have a decent internet connection. I’ll have to try this later, not while I’m on a GPRS dial up with my mobile phone.

Technorati Tags: mac, skype

Copilot does Mac!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 15:53:56 +0000

This is for you out there supporting relatives, friends or customers… Trying to get a computer non-literary person to describe something over the phone (“now what does it say on your monitor?” “Dell”) or even have them do some tasks is an exercise in pain.

There are of course solutions, like VNC, but even setting them up is a pain. Copilot wraps up a VNC client and server, adds some Fogcreek server magic to work around firewalls, NATs and other barriers and allows almost instant, no-setup over the wire help.

Getting ready for production

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 17:17:50 +0000

The secret project I’m working on is taking shape. And because of the looming deadline (Liftconference coming up fast), I had to give some thoughts on the hardware, I’m deploying this application on…

I have been a Textdrive (affiliate link) customer since ever they existed. I have seen them grow from a small hosting company with only a couple of servers to being bought by Joyent (of which there will be talked more soon). Joyent/Textdrive has spent the last couple of months moving their complete hosting infrastructure from Dell Servers running FreeBSD to Sun Servers running OpenSolaris. They have told numerous tales about how much their hosting experience has improved.

babysteps

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:42:00 +0000

While talking to my friend Henriette about the problems of getting things done, we came up with the following 6 word story:

babysteps will get you there too

It’s a life philosophy - and true

Technorati Tags: philosophy, projectmanagement

Rails 1.2

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 05:45:42 +0000

Yes - new year, new rails!

Rails 1.2.1 has been released… Get it through the ususal

$ sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

There’s a summary over on DHH’s blog. On to new borders… And I guess it’s time to get to work on updating the Rails reference - stay tuned, this will take a few days.

Technorati Tags: rails

London Adventure

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 21:02:53 +0000

Vor allem fur die des Deutschen machtigen Personen:

Mein Freund Michael und seine Freundin Monica sind vor ein paar Monaten temporar nach Lodon umgesiedelt um sich Fortzubilden. Ihre Abenteuer dokumentieren sie auf witzige Weise im Web (und dank wiederholtem drangeln meinerseits auch) als Blog.

Bitte sehr: London Adventure

Technorati Tags: blog, london

This is one crazy month

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:48:25 +0000

It seems like January has barely started, and already I’m more than waist deep in work:

A not yet announced secret project, that I honestly started with today. Something I have never done before, and something that I’m both excited and scared about. You’ll read more about it, in the months to come.
Another secret project, that you will (if all goes well) see at Lift Conference
regular work
A small Lotus Notes maintenance project (my first go at Notes 7.0 - and boy does the IDE still suck)
Another potential project coming my way with a tight deadline
Some rails mentoring
and all the other ideas that I’m floating constantly - there’s one that I’d really like to make happen - and I have to make it happen soon, because of the elections in switzerland this fall.

I have retreated to our flat in the mountains - thanks to my family who have let me go (and will let me go for a couple of days almost each week for the next few months). Without you I wouldn’t be able to pull this off. And I have started martial arts again: Thanks to Dannie Jost I started Aikikdo just before x-mas, and had my second lesson this week. After a long absence from the martial arts (I studied Karate for a couple of years) it’s wonderful to be doing something with my body again. And it’s absolutely fascinating to experience the smoothness and fluidity of it - in stark contrast to the movements and techniques of Karate.

Looking for an illustration program

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:06:31 +0000

A friend of mine lent me a Wacom Intuos2 Tablet for a couple of weeks. I’m looking for a Mac program (preferrably shareware) to do some illustrations. I need a vector drawing program, that can output EPS.

I have looked at Inkscape and it kind of works (X11 layer and all), but I’m sure there must be something else out there.

Any hints?

Technorati Tags: illustration, mac, tablet, wacom

Building SSHKeychain as an Intel binary

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 19:45:01 +0000

Yeahhh - the last Rosetta program to go away (safe for the few times I have to use Microsoft Office) - Mike West shows how to compile SSHKeychain as an Intel binary. Great!

Technorati Tags: intel, mac, sshkeychain

Burning Feeds (Part 2)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:24:15 +0000

I did use Feedburner a long, long time ago - and switched it off again.

Not being happy that I haven’t done any significant changes to my blog in a long time, I decided to move my RSS feeds back to Feedburner again. This has happened, and you should be getting the new feed automatically. The only exception are those two people that use a URL like this

/?feed=atom

to retrieve my feeds. I haven’t been able to coerce mod_rewrite to handle that nut-case yet.

Betabitch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:49:55 +0000

Henriette and I have launched a new blog: blog.betabitch.com - a site where we will share our frustrations with all the beta software and applications and websites that we are experiencing.

Feel free to join us in suggesting bitch-worthy sites, agree or disagree with us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Technorati Tags: beta, betabitch

five things

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:49:33 +0000

Oh joy. The first day in the new year, and Dannie sees fit to tag me with the “5 things you didn’t know about me” meme.

I was very introverted As a kid and youth, I was extremely introverted. I played with Lego, read a ton of books and couldn’t bear to talk with other people. Luckily this has changed in the last 20 years and I find it easy to talk in front of people (actually, I really like giving presentations). However, when I meet a lot of new people, I have a hard time getting to know a lot of them. I have enough after two or three. (People like Laurent, Henriette and Dannie make up in quality for the missing quantity)

Two greatest Mac Apps

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 15:29:42 +0000

I’m hopelessly behind my RSS reading. I’m trying to catch up, reading really fast, skimming and unsubscribing from a lot of feeds.

Merlin Mann’s 43Folders however, is going to stay a little longer - in part because he brought my attention to two really great applications for the mac:

Backdrop and
Menushade

Backdrop just puts up a big window (in any colour you like - I take black, thank you) that you can use to block out all the other windows and the mess on your desktop. Menushade dims the Mac menubar (or makes it completely black). It springs back to life, when you mouse into it…

ZFS in Leopard

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 23:07:04 +0000

We knew that Solaris DTrace would be included in OS X 10.5 (Leopard). And of course there was much speculation, that some other Solaris technologies would make it into the next OS X version.

It seems that ZFS is going to be included. This is great news. I’ve been reading about ZFS for quite some time, and notably my favorite hoster, Textdrive/Joyent has been using ZSF for quite a bit. benr (Ben Rockwood) has blogged quite a bit about the positive aspects of ZFS.

Mugshot Galore

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:28:33 +0000

Who’s that trying to hack my Mac?

use authsight and the built in iSight camera of your mac to grab a photo of anyone trying to log in with a wrong login/password.

Technorati Tags: apple, isight, mac, login

Better living through technology

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 22:12:39 +0000

I have been having this idea for quite a while: I have lot’s of technology in my house and in the office. Starting with 3 Macs (including the iMac for my wife, that we got this weekend), a decent Home Theater with HD Beamer, lot’s of cell phones, and the robot cleaner. I use dozens of web sites to coordinate, share and keep track of things. I use a lot of software.

Radio Tyrus Calling

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:01:26 +0000

Via Jan Fullemann von novamedia hat mich auf ein spannendes Projekt seines Vaters aufmerksam gemacht:

Ein fiktiver Radiosender bringt Reportagen aus den biblischen Zeiten. Die Horproben tonen spannend und die CD’s konnten fur einige aus meinem Bekanntenkreis interessant sein. Auch fur Atheisten sicher spannend :-)

Tony vs. Paul

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 07:35:36 +0000

via Ned

Technorati Tags: film, stopmotion

Java, C#, PHP or Ruby?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 23:33:42 +0000

My presentation at tekzone went well. I found it very difficult to introduce this panel discussion in just 15 minutes. Based on the comments I got, I seem to have succeeded… The presentation will be available for download. I tried to show that there were a lot of languages before Java that have a strong influence on the languages that will come after Java (Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell were the prototypical examples). The key point (one I also tried to bring up in the discussion) is that programmers should always look beyond the language they currently are using.

Der Turmsegler

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 23:22:51 +0000

Mein guter Freund Benjamin hat erst aufgehort zu lesen bevor er aufhorte zu schreiben. Um diesen Verlust wettzumachen, hat er begonnen auf dem Turmsegler ausgewahlte Lyrik mit seinen Kommentaren zu veroffentlichen.

Schon, dass du wieder angefangen hast zu lesen - ich werde dir uber die Schulter schauen!

Technorati Tags: lyrik, turmsegler

Rails on Synology CubeStation CS-406

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 08:43:41 +0000

Preparing for my workshop

Enable Telnet Access

see Oinkzwurgels page, download ‘syno-telnet-r3.zip’ and install it in the Synology Web Admin panel. The installation will stop at 99% - that’s fine

Now you can telnet to the CubeStation:

$ telnet 192.168.x.y
CubeStation login: admin
Password: 

BusyBox v1.1.0 (2006.08.06-13:52+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

CubeStation> ls

You can login as any user you created. For the following steps, login as root (same password as your admin account)

Speaking

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 21:35:25 +0000

Next week, I have two speaking engagements:

On monday, the 27. I will be speaking at tekzone and sitting in on a panel about “Beyond Java” and speaking on the virtues of Ruby and Rails. If you are in Zurich at that time, drop in (free registration required).

On Wednesday and Thursday (29.11 and 30.11) I’ll be holding a workshop about the Synology products.

I look forward to both. Writing presentations is something I really like to do. And I simply love presenting - even though I will be nervous.

Deploying with Capistrano

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 17:09:20 +0000

Capistrano is the tool of choice to deploy Rails applications. However, it depends on the servers having access to the code repository (like SVN). In some companies, that’s not an option.

Luckily, Capistrano is very flexible… Jim Morris has a solution that works wonderfully.

Technorati Tags: capistrano, rails

CSS Reference from the CulturedCoders

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 12:40:18 +0000

Culturedcode.com, the makers of Xyloscope (a program that I use for CSS work, as described earlier) have released a CSS reference guide in one HTML file. Through clever use of CSS, DOM Scripting and JavaScript, the complete reference is browseable in one windows. Nifty, helpful and in my bookmarks!

Technorati Tags: css, reference

Did I mention that I love Ruby?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 18:18:17 +0000

I’m busy coding an application, and I needed to find out if some value is included in one of several arrays:

a = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
b = [ 2, 3, 4, 5 ]
x = 5
y = 6

Now the question is: Is x in either Array a or b?

arrays = [a, b]
arrays.inject(false) { |is_in, array| is_in or array.include?( x ) } # => true
arrays.inject(false) { |is_in, array| is_in or array.include?( y ) } # => false

Beautiful! (or is there a better way?)

Back from rails-konferenz.de

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 09:15:25 +0000

Yesterdays rails-konferenz.de was quite a success. Almost 100 particpants showed up for a one day, information packed day.

My presentation on “Extreme Testing” went very well. The slides should be up in a couple of days on the rails-konferenz.de web site.

I had a chance to reconnect to people I met at other conferences and make quite a few new acquaintances. The personal hightlights for me were a comment about Capistrano in the Q&A section of the Capistrano talk by Ralf Wirdemann (which will allow me to use Capistrano on a server that doesn’t allow access to the SVN repository), Patrick Lenz’s take on Rails scalability and of course Rany Kedos plan for getting out of a boring job (not that I would need that, thankfully):

lifting off in 07

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:13:43 +0000

Laurent Haug has done it again: Lift 07 is ready to rock your mind!

I’m really looking forward to going to Geneva in February 2007 and getting my mind lifted - before it will be rebooted in June

Technorati Tags: ballpark, conference, geneva, lift07, reboot8

Flattery or rip-off?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:26:18 +0000

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… However, I don’t find any imitation in this Rails Cheat Sheet Collectors Edition but only a blatant rip-off of my Rails Reference.

What is disappointing about this is, that Benjamin Gorlick has been granted a Google Summer of Code grant for Rails documentation (also mentioned on the rails blog). The license I have released the reference under specifically allows for derivative works (even commercial ones) but requires attribution to me as the original author.

Rails, Content - Type, RJS and filters

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:47:58 +0000

Again - one of these “it takes several hours” to find it things:

In an inherited application that I’m expanding, I was using RJS actions to handle inserts:

page.insert_html :bottom, 'info_list', :partial => 'info'

Because of some non-showing Umlauts, I switched on a filter to set the content type:

<code>
    class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
      before_filter :set_charset

      def set_charset
        headers['Content - Type'] = "text/html; charset=8859-1"
      end
    end
</code>

with the result, that all my RJS stuff stopped working. Finally I diffed against a working copy and found the line enabling the filter. I rewrote it like this, and things started to work again

first swissRUG meeting success

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:15:29 +0000

The inaugural meeting of SwissRUG / Zurich.rb / bunch of geeks was quite a success, with 16 people turning up. Due to some communications gone bad, the restaurant only had reserved a table for 10, but by grabbing the employees table, we managed to squeeze all in.

Quite a mixed bunch of people: The operating systems seemed neatly divided into 1/3 Windows, 1/3 Mac OS X and 1/3 Linux. About half of the people earn money using Ruby and/or Rails. There were quite a few “Ruby only” people.

One of theses memes

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:53:00 +0000

Straight from my shell

$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
 121 rake
  71 cd
  49 ruby
  29 ls
  24 mongrel_rails
  23 tail
  21 svn
  16 mate
  15 sudo
  15 ps

via Anarchaia

Technorati Tags: meme, shell, unix

Textmate Footnotes and RJS render calls don't mix

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:10:33 +0000

Maybe this saves you a couple of hours of frustration:

def syslog_progress
  if request.xhr?
    worker = MiddleMan.get_worker(session[:host_info])
    progress_percent = worker.progress
    render :update do |page|
      page.call('progressPercent', 'progressbar', progress_percent)
      if progress_percent >= 100
        page.assign 'stop_polling', true  
      end
    end
  else
    redirect_to :action => 'list'
  end
end

The RJS calls didn’t execute at all and the excessive use of “alert()” to debug neither. Finally, looking at the response in FireBug I saw that the TextMate Footnote plugin was adding it’s links to the response, rendering the Javascript invalid.

signed the Agile Manifesto

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 13:51:39 +0000

As of today:

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

signed - Jens-Christian Fischer for InVisible GmbH

Technorati Tags: agile, manifesto, work

SwissRUG / zurich.rb meeting 28.9.2006

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 12:33:07 +0000

The first meeting of the swiss Ruby Users Group (and/or zurich.rb) is next thursday, 28.9.2006 at 19:00 in Restaurant Reithalle near the main train station in Zurich. (see details)

So far we have 11 people coming, if you are interested in joining, please send me an email, so I can update the reservation at the restaurant.

Technorati Tags: zurich.rb, swissrug, zurich

(Not) productive

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:18:15 +0000

Yesterday was one of these days where nothing seemed to happen. Actually a lot happened. I visited my friend Florian in hospital. After a brief stint in a recovery clinic he’s now back in hospital where he’s head was drained of excessive water. He slept while I was there, and I don’t think he realised that I was in the room, even though he briefly looked at me. Humans are so fragile.

learning Ruby

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:27:49 +0000

I’m sitting and watching an amazing screencast that shows, how Ruby Quiz 84 (computing and printing Pascals Triangle) is solved, using a test driven development approach. Not only is it a good show of how TDD works, but it also shows the power of TextMate (THE editor on Mac OS X) but also the beauty of Ruby code.

It’s long (about an hour), but worth watching!

Technorati Tags: textmate, ruby, testing

Auf zur Rails-Konferenz

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:07:28 +0000

Am 3.11 findet in Frankfurt die rails-konferenz.de statt. Ich werde dort sein und einen Vortrag uber “Extreme Testing - oder wie ich lernte aufzuhoren mich zu sorgen und Änderungen zu lieben” halten in dem ich aufzeige, dass automatisches Testen weit mehr ist, als nur ab und zu ein die UnitTests ablaufen zu lassen.

Ich wurde mich freuen, einige von euch dort zu sehen.

Technorati Tags: conference, rails-konferenz.de, rails

Flying has been more expensive

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 08:54:34 +0000

Maybe I’m going to go to the german Rails conference in Frankfurt in the beginning of November. I just looked at the prices for the flight from Zurich to Frankfurt and saw theses quotes for the return flight:

The world is coming to an end…

Technorati Tags: conference, flying, rails, swiss

Free music, free books

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:47:02 +0000

Sounds to good to be true - well it is in a way. But it ain’t that bad…

Prompted by Magnatune - freie Online Musik by Martin Roll I (re)discovered Magnatune, a online music store that sells music with a creative commons license. I promptly bought the album Big Dipper that Martin recommended. If you like a copy of it, leave a comment here - the first two commenters will received the code to download the album (as per their generous license agreement).

Living on the RailsEdge

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 21:08:18 +0000

I have started a new Rails project for a colleague of mine. Time to live on the (rails)edge again for this project.

As usual, it’s fun to get into the freshly developed mode again, after having finished two large Rails projects. The feeling of building something out of nothing is great.

And of course I’m taking the opportunity to update my Rails Reference to Rails 1.2

Is there anything in particular you’d like to see covered in the next release of the reference? Let me know!

interviewed

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 17:53:09 +0000

Satish Talim from the Pune Ruby User Group conducted an email interview with me about Ruby. I have the honour of being in company with people like Bruce Tate, James Edward Grey II and other true gurus.

You can read it here

Technorati Tags: interview, india, ruby, rubyonrails

zurich.rb forming

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:41:46 +0000

UPDATE: I have disabled comments for this post, because I’m getting spammed with hundreds of messages on exactly this post. Feel free to comment somewhere else :-)

Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) are slowly picking up steam in Zurich (and Switzerland) so it seems to be a good time to start a Ruby user group. Anyone that want’s to start this with me is invited on Thursday, 28.9.2006 in the evening to meet, eat, drink and chat about Ruby (and Rails).

Ruby on Rails Training / Workshop in September

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:09:09 +0000

After one public and two internal workshops, it’s time to announce the second public Ruby on Rails Workshop in Zurich, Switzerland. Details are on the webpage, here’s the management summary:

Date: 27-29. September 2006
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Cost: CHF 1450.–
Number of participants: maximum 6
Language: German or English

This is a more of a workshop, than a frontal training and the participants will get a complete web application up and running. Inquire at .

Where will the madness end

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 20:58:17 +0000

Interesting read: On the implausibility of the explosives plot - an analysis of why the removal of shampoo bottles from planes is just a mad farce. And then some tips for budding terrorists and the proposed counter measures.

Technorati Tags: bombs, terror

Back on Track

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 14:41:01 +0000

The good news first:

I’m back from a week of vacation in Copenhagen where I had a chance to visit my 87 year old grandmother (who is in great shape), meet Henriette and her lovely family, show Copenhagen to my family. We were stopped in our travels by a lunch-box-mistaken-for-a-bomb on a train station, by a piece of left luggage on the airport and the going missing of a train-driver. All in all a really nice week
My back’s back in shape - I have started the regularly scheduled fitness training again
There’s a lot of work waiting to be done - both for clients and I have one or two ideas of my own. I’ll probably only be able to manage the clients projects though - too bad
We have two new members in our house: Lucy and Kitty are sibling cats, just 12 weeks old and oh-so-cute. I have allergies against cat’s, but have been taking Schwarzkummelol / Albaracka Oil capsules for the last 3 months and I hardly feel any reaction to the cats (we’ve had the mother of the two cats as a frequent guest the last few weeks. Here’s hoping that this really helps against the allergies. Oh - and be warned - there might be cat content on this blog in the future.
Florian is doing much better and has been transfered to a rehabilitation clinic

Bad news:

if not today...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 12:29:54 +0000

Yesterday I visited my friend Florian. He had a shaved head and a slightly swollen face. His eyes were closed during most of my visit. He was neither asleep nor quite awake. Probably due to the multiple drugs he was taking at that time. But he recognized me and held my hand firmly, pressing it rhythmically.

He had a brain tumor removed a couple of days earlier. Actually, his second brain tumor. He just turned 30 and his wife gave birth to their second child only a few weeks ago. We weren’t sure if he would make it, he was in coma until the day before I visited him.

Painfully quiet

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:38:14 +0000

This blog hasn’t seen much activity the last couple of weeks, due to not only a lot of work, but more back pain. It seems - so the doctor diagnosed - that I have developed Diskushernie. I have massive pains in my left leg (the Ischias nerve) and have to go to therapy 2-3 times a week.

Combined with the hot weather and the soccer world cup, there’s not much time for blogging…

Dont. Use. MonoLingual.

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 05:25:50 +0000

Believe me, you don’t want to. At least, head the warnings about not removing the different architectures (specially if you are on an intel Mac). I just spent the best part of the night, reinstalling Mac OS X and piecing my setup together from various backups.

How I found out? Ecto, a PowerPC program, crashed when I tried to post the last post. Monolingual had removed all traces of PowerPC executables and libraries from my system - including Rosetta…

re-booted - re-birthed version 8.0

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 21:31:17 +0000

Sunday, Copenhagen airport, waiting for the plane to take me home to Zurich. Reboot8 is over. (and parts of this text written after the weekend)

Reboot feels to me like a drug trip (having some limited experiences in that matter, I think the comparison is valid). While smoking (and inhaling!) I usually came up with a slew of wonderful, intelligent and breathtaking ideas of pure genius. Unfortunately (well maybe fortunately for the rest of the world) I always forgot them when the effects of THC had subsided.

908

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 30 May 2006 21:49:50 +0000

Technorati Tags: art, switzerland

36 more hours...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 30 May 2006 16:42:52 +0000

…until reboot 8 starts. I just saw the detailed program and I’m feeling like a kid in a toy store. So much to see, so much to hear, so much to learn…

Until I’m flying for Denmark however, there’s a few things to get done:

install a new version of one of the rails projects I’m working on
Watch the soccer match between the current world champion Brasil and FC Luzern on TV with my son
Meet a potential new Rails client
Work at an existing client (replacing the RoboSource Control system they use for RoboHelp with Subversion)
Answer a bunch of questions from other clients
See the Jon bon Jovi concert in Bern
get some sleep
pack

Technorati Tags: reboot

a fire in the sky

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 May 2006 21:14:24 +0000

Technorati Tags: visperterminen

Links 2006-05-26

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 May 2006 19:46:46 +0000

Emacs Versors - Context sensitive cursor movement. Can we have that in TextMate plase?
Searchable Ruby and Rails documentation - Good stuff
Boompa Launch Post Mortem - 2 guys, 2 months, 1 Web 2.0 startup
Pyro - a Mac App that wraps Campfire - simple is beautiful (be sure to check the InVisible Campfire)
rcov - ruby coverage - helps you write tests - I will have more to say about that soon

Technorati Tags: campfire, chat, coverage, markdown, rubyonrails, startup

getting there

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 23 May 2006 22:00:24 +0000

The lack of updates here are due to a variety of reasons:

having my wife in hospital to have her gall bladder removed
having one of our rabbits disappear (either as part of a stroll in the wild or becoming a valuable member of the food chain - valuable for a fox, that is. Probably both, because we didn’t see any signs of a fight in the cage)
Starting construction of a new, bigger, better, bolder cage for the remaining rabbit (and it’s two new friends, that are waiting to become a part of our family)
The delivery of a 15 page project description for my education to become an Organisator (business analyst)
The finishing touches to two rails projects (I still continue to provide those touches)
The usual mid-year release of 2 Notes projects I handle
The continuing writing of the (successful beyond my wildest dreams) Ruby on Rails Reference (Now including both a TOC and a section on ActionMailer)
spending 2 days a week as the liaison between Notes admins and Notes developers at a large Notes customer (and responsible for maintaining the import process from a host system to the NAB that controls access rights for 20'000 users)
Preparing for reboot (if you are a OpenBC member, please join the reboot group (via Martin Roll)
Fighting chronic back pain (due to some inflamed muscles in my lower back)
setting up my wife’s new MacBook (what a gorgeous little machine)
I’m sure there’s more…

Technorati Tags: apple, arbeit, ausbildung, business, conference, [lotus notes](https://www.technorati.com/tag/lotus notes), mac, reboot, rubyonrails, sgo, travel

for her

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 May 2006 15:28:23 +0000

Programming links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 08 May 2006 19:25:29 +0000

There’s so much to do and so little time, so I leave you with a few links to recently discovered gems:

We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work – a look at extreme - ahh - batting by Ron Jeffries?
Start-Up lessons – as always excellent reading by Paul Graham
observe OS X filesystem events – looks useful
Signs you are a bad programmer – I plead guilty to having had some of those attributes

Technorati Tags: mac, programming, startup, xp

Ruby On Rails Reference

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 May 2006 15:41:37 +0000

Tomorrow marks the start of my third Ruby On Rails course. It’s going to be a 3 day course with a (somewhat lengthy) introduction to Ruby (and some of the joys of programming in a very dynamic language) with the rest of the time devoted to Rails. I firmly believe in hands-on training, so the amount of lecturing is minimal. And there are only 5 or 6 participants in the class. They will build an application from scratch - either something from their domain (or if they don’t have any idea) an application that I have thought out.

Listen to my Audio Signature

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 14:21:19 +0000

Via the Yojimbo trial: the iTunes Signature Maker. It creates an audio signature based on what you listen to in iTunes.

Here’s jcf-audio signature- enjoy.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, mp3, yojimbo

Does your company need a new head of information or communication?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 12:14:48 +0000

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.

Notes on XP on Mac rocks

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:39:39 +0000

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…

Da Vinci Code

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:28:23 +0000

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”.

More than a week in Review: Back to Domino

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:14:07 +0000

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…

Skip Bockoven

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 04:05:11 +0000

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.

The week in review

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 03:56:05 +0000

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

Configuring X and Domino Server on Debian Sarge XEN

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 20:55:26 +0000

Installing Lotus Domino 6.5.4 in Debian XEN

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 22:27:37 +0000

Get the 6.5.4 TAR file from notes.net and copy it to your Debian server.

Here’s my /etc/xen/notes.cfg:

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-xenU"
memory = 384 
name   = "notes"
root   = "/dev/sda1 ro"
vif    = ['mac=00:00:00:00:00:01, bridge=xenbr0' ]
disk   = [ 'file:/home/xen/domains/notes/data.img,sda1,w',  'file:/home/xen/domains/notes/swap.img,sda2,w' ]

To distinguish in which environment to type the following commands: host # means the “physical” host machine while notes # means that you are in a shell in the virtual domain.

Shocking - no - shock absorbing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:32:08 +0000

With many options, fully configurable… Try it out!

Technorati Tags: absorber, fun, shock

Installing XEN 3.0 on Debian Sarge

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:50:41 +0000

Sauron, my faithful basement server got another 512MB of RAM, and I plan to virtualize it to run multiple servers on it (most notably a Lotus Domino Server).

This is the “step by step” account of how to install XEN 3.0 on it

Fixing the size of the root partition My root partition was just a tad too small, so I was stuck with the installation. The solution is rather simple:

It's the cables, stupid

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:46:02 +0000

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's Live Clipboard

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:17:56 +0000

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.

Is Campfire going free?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 11:30:58 +0000

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…

Pages - Word - Markdown

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 11:00:36 +0000

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.

It depends

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:15:25 +0000

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.

Thirty Nine

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 05:22:54 +0000

My - time flies.

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

Still open places for Rails Training in Zurich

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:28:26 +0000

On February 27. and 28. I will be hosting Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich, Switzerland. There still are open slots, so if you want to learn hands-on how to build web applications using Ruby on Rails, now is the time to sign up.

Details:

Venue: Badenerstrasse 585, 8048 Zurich

Cost: CHF 750.–

Language: German

Content

Introduction to Rails
Database to prototype in 15 minutes
Building an attractive, performant and secure web application
Using AJAX for dynamic user interfaces
Testing using unit and functional tests
Using agile development techniques

Send an email to info@invisible.ch to sign up for this seminar.

Join the campfire

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:42:08 +0000

37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Ruby On Rails have launched their next application: Campfire. Campfire is a chat application, that shares some traits with Internet Relay Chat but runs inside a web browser. There are some added benefits like searchable transcripts, file sharing. Plus, it looks really nice:

I’m running on the 30 days trial account to see, if it solves enough problems that it’s worth to shell out $12 per month for a regular account.

Ajax to do more stuff?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 06:49:32 +0000

Tim Bray over at Ongoing talks about AJAX Performance. His point being, that we should use AJAX to offload heavy computation from the web-server to the users browser.

I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there onto the clients. In particular, when you’re personalizing a page, assign all the work you can to the personal computer sitting in front of the person in question.

CoComment

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 07:38:08 +0000

One of the really bad things in the blogosphere is keeping track of all the comments you made around other blogs. And if you use a news reader to aggregate the RSS feeds, it’s even worse, because you don’t even see any comments - unless you visit the blog in your web browser.

Enter CoComment by a team of Swisscom Innovations. Laurent Haug also has his fingers in it somehow. This application keeps track of the comments you posted and comments to your comments. It integrates as a bookmarklet, but Firefox users can take advantage of a Greasemonkey script to handle the really difficult taks of hitting a bookmark prior to posting.

Open Sourcing - what next?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 15:04:00 +0000

After talking to quite a few people about my idea of open sourcing the course materials for my Rails course I decided to go ahead and just do it. The advantages outweigh the drawbacks as far as I can see them:

Advantages

Giving something back to the community -> Good karma
Having other people look over the documents could lead to ideas for improvement (what Scoble has had happen to his “Naked Conversations” book)
Having other people actually see that I’m doing something (Cory Doctorow commented that he was more worried about obscurity, than about people downloading his books)
Showing potential customers about what they can expect from the course

Drawbacks

Open Source Course Materials

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:28:37 +0000

One of the things I’ve been thinking about ever since announcing the Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich is if I should “Open source” the course materials (maybe even making the development process open, so everybody could see where I am, what I’m doing)

Today I attended a talk by Cory Doctorow who talked on “Digital Restriction Management (DRM)”. One of the analogies to protected content he gave was as follows (paraphrased)

Going to Lift06

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:49:43 +0000

In true geek tradition (reboot7, then Tweakfest) I’m heading of to Lift06 today. Lift is organized by Laurent Haug whom I met at reboot. Kudos to him for taking on the task of organizing a conference that pulls together a really impressive set of speakers. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing those people:

Cory Doctorow
Bruce Sterling (whom I first saw at Tweakfest in ZÃ¼rich)
Marc Besson about Digital Identity
Regine Debatty - we make money, not art
Stefan Mastrogiacomo about Organizational Design
Xavier Comtesse about the internet and the other peoples revolution
Chris Lawer on co-creation of knowledge
Sigurd Rinde who finally talks about Thingamy
Euan Semple about Knowledge Management (yep - that word is still in use)
Hugh MacLeoad - global Microbranding
Robert Scoble - changing Microsoft, one blog posting at a time

Of couse I also look forward to meeting all of the people I met in Denmark: Henriette Weber Andersen, Geoff Jones, and all the others)

Work your PC

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:59:09 +0000

Still working on a PC? Here’s something to take your mind of the frustrations…

Technorati Tags: computer, flash, pc, game

Ausbildung zum Organisator

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 21:16:11 +0000

Im Rahmen meiner “Ich will nicht nach Indien offgeshort werden” Weiterbildung, ein paar Notizen zur Ausbildung in Organisation die ich derzeit bei SGO durchlaufe…

Technorati Tags: ausbildung, organisation, organisator, sgo

Change of development methodology....

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 21:11:40 +0000

I was wrong all these years. I should repent and go to the Waterfall2006 conference

Technorati Tags: agile, conference, waterfall

Comparing Apples and... Apples?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 16:03:09 +0000

Macworld has a performance test of the new dual core iMac vs. the old G5 iMac. They are saying, that the new Dual Core iMacs don’t perform twice as fast, and seem quite a bit disappointed.

I think, they just aren’t comparing Apples to Apples. Let me explain:

The old iMac is a single processor G5. The new iMac a Dual Core Intel chip. The applications they are testing (iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, creating a ZIP file, iDVD and BBEdit) are most likely (correct me if I’m wrong, please) single threaded applications. That means, that the raw work of converting, compressing, searching and whatnot is running on a single core. Only applications that are built to be multi-threaded would be able to share the work on both cores. So what the test results are showing us (imo) is that the Intel Dual Core processor running an application on basically one of it’s core is a wee bit faster than the G5.

libgd and ruby-gdchart on Mac OS X

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:32:28 +0000

Trials and tribulations:

Installing libgd

Use Darwinports to install GD

$ sudo port install gd2

(it seems that you need to install gd2, and not gd because otherwise the linker will complain about a function not being defined:

Arwen:/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ruby-gdchart-1.0.0/examples jcf$ ruby bar_example.rb 
dyld: NSLinkModule() error
  dyld: Symbol not found: _gdImageCreateFromGif
  Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ruby-gdchart-1.0.0/./GDChart.bundle

it might be a good idea to update your installed darwin ports:

$ sudo port upgrade installed

Installing ruby-gdchart

Thanks to the Pickaxe book and _why for the explanation of the extconf configuration.

Worldwide Rails Training

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:48:19 +0000

RubyOnRailsWorkshops.com is a web site that tracks all Rails workshops around the world. So if you’d rather go to Los Angeles than to Zurich, that’s the place to look.

In related news, it looks like my Geneva Rails Workshop won’t be happening. So far I have one interested person (coming all the way from Denmark) but none from the Geneva area. I need at least 8 people and I need some form of interest by Wednesday 18th.

Magic? Of Course

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 06:10:58 +0000

I once read (in Hickman / Weiss: The Death Gate cycle) a very simple explanation of magic - here it is paraphrased:

All things are possible, even the seemingly impossible ones. Magic is the act of changing the probabilities of making the impossible happen.

That’s not only happening in fantasy books, but in real life as well. By acting in certain ways, doing certain things we influence the world around us so that things happen with a higher probability than not happening.

Start postgres with launchd on OS X

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:27:41 +0000

The startup item for Postgres on OS X always fails on Tiger. Launchd (the launch daemon) to rescue:

PostgreSQL launchd on Tiger gave me the starting point and my /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgresql.PostgreSQL.plist looks like this:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "https://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">


    GroupName
    postgres
    Label
    org.postgresql.PostgreSQL
    OnDemand
    
    ProgramArguments
    
        /opt/local/lib/pgsql8/bin/pg_ctl
        -D
        /opt/local/var/pgsql8/defaultd
        -l
        /opt/local/var/log/psql8/
        start
    
    RunAtLoad
    
    ServiceDescription
    PostgreSQL Server
    UserName
    postgres8

Technorati Tags: mac, postgresql, launchd

Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL Schemas

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 09:11:51 +0000

I’m working on a Rails application on a Postgres DB Server. Our client has decided to change the database so that it uses db-schemas in order to simplify administration of rights on the database. However, he has also introduced tables with identical names in different schemas.

Our rails application was already fairly well underway, so there were some substantial changes to be made. Here’s what I’ve learned in the process:

Beta Ruby On Rails workshop in Geneva, 31.1 - 1.2.2006

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 20:32:23 +0000

Keeping the tradition of getting real and the beta books by the Pragmatic Programmers, I have decided to host a beta version of my upcoming Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich workshop. The plan is to host a beta version of the training on 31.1 and 1.2.2006 in Geneva, just before the Lift06 conference.

Here’s the deal:

I’ll be hosting a “beta-workshop” of the upcoming Ruby On Rails seminar. In two days, participants will learn how to develop web-application in Ruby On Rails (bring your own Laptop) and work in an agile fashion with elements of Extreme Programming. The beta workshop won’t be quite finished in terms of structure and presentation, and will have beta documentation. All the major pieces of things to learn will be in place though, and the schedule will be roughly the same as the finished workshop/training taking place 27.-28.2.2006 in Zurich. Language is english.

Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:27:22 +0000

After having worked with RubyOnRails for over a year, with several successful projects done or in progress, I’m happy to announce the first Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich (german).

This two day workshop in Zurich covers the basics of Rails development with the participants building a complete web application from scratch. They will use techniques from Extreme Programming (XP) so that the participants get the most practical approach to learning and using the things learnt.

Where Plugin

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 20:37:53 +0000

UPDATE: I had to disable comments, because I was getting spammed with hundreds of “cool site” messages. Feel free to contact me in any other way.

Working with RubyOnRails is a really wonderful way of developing applications. The plugin system allows extensions without modifying the core of rails.

Here’s my second plugin: WherePlugin

It’s based on some code by Ezra Zygmuntovic extended by me, further extended by Ezra and packaged as a plugin.

Brauchsam

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 16:17:18 +0000

Meine Tochter bastelt fur ihr Leben gerne. Fur jedes erdenkliche Alt-Material findet sie Verwendung, denn die Sachen sind “brauchsam”.

Und beim Skifahren ist sie sehr “getrauig”.

Und bald wird ihr die Schule diese wunderbaren Wortkreationen austreiben.

Technorati Tags: kinder, sprache

Happy new year

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 16:33:07 +0000

Snow covered trees in Visperterminen

Technorati Tags: visperterminen

7 things

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 16:27:09 +0000

Time for looking back at the year that was, and the year that’s coming, the good and the bad. Mezzoblue tipped me of, Ben Poole paved the way.

Apple 2005 is the year I made the switch. I’m using a 15" PowerBook for nearly all my work now. This Laptop is the single best investment I ever made in IT technology. Everything from the beautiful design, the quietness, the tactile feel, speed, display and of course OS X make me happy. In my wake, another 5 or 6 people have switched to Apple and all of them (including my mother, who got a Mac Mini for X-Mas) are happy with it. Personally, I’m hoping for an Intel based Apple Laptop next year, that allow me to run Lotus Notes through something like Darwine or some secret Apple Technology. Then I could drop my old PC Laptop for good.

Merry X-Mas

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 21:32:12 +0000

I wish you and your families a wonderful x-max, a happy new year and some well deserved days of peace and quiet.

I’ll be gone for a couple of days, hopefully to sun and snow, skiing and drinking wine.

Expect light to no blogging.

Oh and yes - This blog has moved to Wordpress. Please update any necessary links etc. Layout etc. will change over the next couple of days, this is just the start.

Can I crash you?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 06:48:27 +0000

Can I crash is a list of bloggers giving room to fellow bloggers when traveling. Initiated by Henriette Weber Andersen. Cool idea. I have added Zurich, Switzerland, when will you add your place?

Technorati Tags: blog, crash, travel

Learning SQL

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:59:37 +0000

Yep, I can manage the occasional SELECT * FROM some_table; and even one or two constructs more. But I haven’t had a formal education in SQL (me being a Lotus Notes guy. (“Redundancy is good”).

The GalaxQL program is a wonderful introduction to SQL and covers quite a bit more than just the WHERE statement. It’s fun, it’s visual, it’s free and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Go get it, if you need a brush up on SQL.

Moving the blog to Wordpress?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 21:24:24 +0000

Even though you haven’t seen me post on this blog recently, I have been busy deleting comment spam all the time. My MoveableType installation is pretty old, and the SpamFiltering solution is quite old too. Everything runs on a creaky server out of my office. Also I’m not to fond of fiddling with the layout of the blog (although web visitors might have noticed some changes) because it means I have to republish the complete site.

Mac OS X Services

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:35:41 +0000

R. had told me about this strange “Services” menu in OS X, but I never really bothered to look deeper into it. The article “Mac OS X Services (the menu you never go to)” told me a bit more about the things possible, when text is selected…

Let my Mac read some text loud
Open the selected text in an editor
Call someone on Skype when their name is selected

Swiss SkypeIn number

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 15:03:11 +0000

Now that Skype allows for swiss SkypeIn numbers, I have added one. You can call me on : +41 44 586 91 30.

Technorati Tags: business, phone, skype

Del.icio.us PlayTagger

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:17:25 +0000

A tiny Javascript include allows you to play mp3 files directly on your website and to tag the file on del.icio.us.

Nice, simple, practical.

Technorati Tags: delicious, music, mp3

Real Viagra Spam

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 17:18:06 +0000

It’s not enough that our mailboxes are overflowing with Viagra spam. Now Pfizer has started this add campaing in Zurich:

Somebody please tell them the wrong’s of their ways

Technorati Tags: advertising, viagra, spam

Tweakfest - The Bruce Sterling speech as mp3

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:27:00 +0000

Both Bruce Sterling as well as the organizers of Tweakfest have allowed me to publish a recording of the speech that Bruce Sterling gave at this years Tweakfest.

It was recorded using my Powerbook and it’s built in microphone, so sound quality is, let’s say “challenged”. Still, Bruce can be understood without problems.

Enjoy: Bruce Sterling at Tweakfest 05 (24 MB, mp3, length 57:10)

Technorati Tags: conference, brucesterling, switzerland, tweakfest05

Foldershare Customer Service

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 19:28:33 +0000

After the question about “what happend to Foldershare” got answered (Microsoft bought it), the Mac version is back online, the only thing left, that left me wondering, was the question what was going to happen to the US$ 100 I spent just a week before the acquisition on the Foldershare professional service.

Now that also has been answered:

You will be receiving a refund for your subscription at a pro-rated amount. Changes will go into effect early November; FolderShare subscribers will be refunded the pro-rated subscription fee in the week of Nov 7th.

Well done, thank you Microsoft / Foldershare. You earned back quite some goodwill with me again.

Tweakfest - Gedanken zum Schluss

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 10:22:22 +0000

Tweakfest ist gestern zu Ende gegangen. Ein paar Dinge sind nicht in voller epischer Breite gebloggt, aber ich finde die Zeit dazu nicht mehr.

Nur kurz zum Panel uber “Copy Right”, das eine Diskussion zum Urherberrecht versprach. Obwohl die Panelisten einiges zu sagen hatten (ein PJ Wassermann hatte sogar eher zu viel zu sagen und wurde von der Moderation nicht immer rechtzeitig gestoppt) blieb es bei einer unbefriedigenden Debatte. Eigentlich waren sich alle in den Grundzugen einig, lediglich Details differierten (Hat die SUISA nun Creative Commons umgesetzt oder nicht). Ich hatte mir (wie schon bei der “Big Brother” Diskussion) mehr Diskurs gewunscht. Ein Teilnehmer aus z.B. der Musikindustrie hatte sicherlich auch fur mehr Stimmung gesorgt. So blieb das ganze langatmig und leider eher banal.

Tweakfest - Net Art Generation

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 16:27:59 +0000

Cornelia Sollfrank, Netzkunstlerin

Net.Art Generator

sucht Bilder im Internet (Kunstler / Stichwort) und baut neue Bilder zusammen. Wer ist der Autor eines solchen Bildes?

Das Programm? Der Computer auf dem das Program ausgefuhrt wurde? Juristisch ist dagegen erstmal nix einzuwenden. Leider scheidet Software / Computer aus, weil nur Menschen Urheberrechte erwerben konnen.

Der Programmierer des Programs? Daher soll auch der Programmierer als der Autor der erzeugten Werke gelten, denn seine kunstlerischen Werte fliessen in die generierten Werke ein.

Tweakfest - Open Source is not enough

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:06:23 +0000

Georg C. F. Greve, President, Free Software Foundation Europe

A long presentation that covers the basics of free (as in freedom) software, touches Open Source Software, and moves on to show that proprietary software is a danger to society, because code (software) forms the basic structure of an (internet based) society. By using proprietary software (and out of the same reasoing) Digital Restriction Management (DRM), the users put themselves UNDER the control of software or media monopolies.

Tweakfest - The Human Roboter Hand

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 11:00:53 +0000

Gabriel J. Gomez, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich

Talks about the work on designing a robotic hand that mimic the human hand. Exploring the concepts of grasping. Very high degree of freedom. Pressure sensors. Different movies of the hand opening, closing, grasping things (spheres, cylinders).

The hand is controlled by a neural network, fed by the the sensors (pressure and bending sensors) and the output is fed to the actuators that control the hand. This leads to the hand trying to “explore” objects when holding them.

Tweakfest - Robots are better Dancers

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:42:20 +0000

Fuminori Yamasaki, CEO iXs Research Corporation

Shows a small ECO Robot KHR-1, that is sold for $1'000. He shows that it can walk, stand on it’s arms, somersault and make a cartwheel. It is used for example for battle competitions between humanoid robots. There are 100 competitors that match their robots every 6 months, so they have to make new robots every 6 months.

The hardware has become very good, but nobody knows about a purpose or usage yet (unlike the car, which has a purpose and high infrastructure needs (roads, gas stations)

Tweakfest - Future Life

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 09:52:13 +0000

Walter Hehl, IBM Research Center Ruschlikon

Gives a broad overview on the progression of computer processing power and storage and how this influences “pervasive” computing.

Interesting points:

“What was once private is now public”, “what was once hard to copy, is now trivial to duplicate” and “what was once easily forgotten, is now stored forever.” (Ron Rivest)

IBM sees the nexus of “intelligence” in a household in the various incarnations of PlayStations, X-Boxes. Supposedly they started 5-6 years ago to design the (cell)processors that power or will power these devices.

Tweakfest - Random Observations

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 09:51:34 +0000

Things to do at a conference:

There shall be drinks and food. Preferably free. Preferably drinkable (coffee in the shape of dark water is not enough - especially if it costs CHF 1.50). I don’t mind paying for a beer or something solid to eat. But water/coffee/fruits have to be available.
There shall be Wireless LAN and electricity. Collaboration at a conference is not possible without. (it seems though, that there should be wireless access - it’s just not working)

Tweakfest - Big Brother und ein Ende mit Schrecken

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 20:08:53 +0000

Das “Big Brother” Panel

Die Debattierenden waren wirklich nett zueinander, sagten nicht viel neues und sind meiner Meinung nach am Thema vorbeigeschrammt. Neben dem Datensammeln im Namen der nationalen Sicherheit, das a) zur Sicherheit notig ist (Peter Regli) aber b) nicht transparent ist und deshalb gefahrlich (Matthias Leisi), dem Hacken von Krankheitsgeschichten durch WLAN lauschen vor dem Krankenhaus (Dominik Flammer). Wirklich gefahrlich scheint mir etwas ganz anderes zu sein: Das Datensammeln in grossem Stil wird durch die Firmen betrieben. Sony hat mit dem CD Debakel vorgemacht, was passieren kann, wenn Firmen um des Profit willens zu unlauteren Methoden greifen. Google ist zwar “not evil”, aber wie lange noch? Die Datensammlung, die Überwachung von uns wird freiwillig geschehen. Der Staat mit seinen Überwachungsanforderungen wird eine geringe Rolle spielen als die Firmen, die den glasernen Konsumenten mochten.

Tweakfest - Bruce Sterling

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 17:21:04 +0000

**Update: **The mp3 recording of the speech is online

Professor, Dr., Cyberpunk (What would William Gibson say) Bruce Sterling gave a speech called “The Hacker Crackdown”, a reference to his 15 year old book about “hackers” and how the ideas and ideals have changed over time.

Starting off by comparing the original motivations for “romantic computer hacker”

Anonymity, Pseudonymity or a stolen identity.
Took place in another space - cyberspace
Hacking involved gangs. Loose, laterally organised networks, smart mobs.

Tweakfest 2005 - What / Why

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:32:27 +0000

Elmar Ledergerber, the mayor of Zurich, greets the - not to many - visitors and wishes “happy tweaking”

The team behind tweakfest, explains the reasoning behind Tweakfest and what awaits us. The agenda and the goals of tweakfest look impressive. 10 things are going to be premiered, a lot of speakers. Art meets commerce. I’m probably going to blog in german for the rest of tweakfest, because the constant translation between german and english is getting difficult.

Tweakfest - no infrastructure

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:33:53 +0000

Tweakfest takes places in “Museum fur Gestaltung” in Zurich. Interestingly enough, at a conference that is about “visions of the digital lifestyle”, there is neither electricity for the audience, nor wireless LAN. So there won’t be a backchannel, collaborative note-taking, heckling, background checking of the speakers or all the other fun stuff that would be possible.

Could it be, that “reality of modern conferences” haven’t arrived in Zurich yet?

**Update: **Just before I left, there was a WLAN available. Unfortunately, it seemed that it did not allow connections to the internet. Maybe tomorrow will be better

Going to Tweakfest

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 08:11:04 +0000

Today, Tweakfest starts in Zurich. It’s a conference about “visions of digital lifestyle”. The program reads like a mixture of really boring (“Die Kreativwirtschaft als strategischer Erfolgsfaktor”) to the political interesting (“Totale Überwachung: im Namen der Sicherheit?” - featuring Matthias Leisi on the panel ) to the one I’m looking forward to (“From Science Fiction to Science Facts” by Bruce Sterling ) and then a lot of other presentations that might or might not be of interest ( the new digital home, future of the mobile phone, dancing robots, etc, etc)

Lift Off

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 20:48:36 +0000

Laurent Haug of ballpark.ch is organizing a conference called Lift06 in Genva in the beginning of February.

The roster of speakers looks promising, the price (CHF 295) looks right and Geneva is only a train ride away.

I think I’ll be there (Laurent still needs a Ruby on Rails demo)

Technorati Tags: conference, lift06, refactoring, geneva, ballpark

What has happened to FolderShare?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 09:13:01 +0000

After a couple of weeks of having FolderShare installed on a variety of Windows and Macintosh Computers, I decided to upgrade to the paid, professional version of their service. Foldershare allows you to keep multiple folders in sync across multiple computers. It works beautifully and flawless.

Today I wanted to put it on my Mac Mini which I got back from repairs (it’s harddisk had died) to sync back files from my Mac Laptop.

Brief an EMI wegen Un-CD

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:58:52 +0000

Neulich im Postausgang:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren
ich habe mir die Un-CD “thelonius monk quartet with john coltrane at carnegie hall” gekauft. Diese ist zwar per “copy contol” geschutzt, aber laut Hulle kompatibel zu Mac OSX. Nachdem ich die Un-CD in mein Apple 15" Powerbook eingelegt habe, ist die Un-CD nicht erkannt worden. Es ist mir auch nicht moglich die Un-CD wieder auszuwerfen. (Mac muss dazu neu gestartet werden)

No interoperability on USB sticks

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 05:36:57 +0000

Stupid! I needed a 200 MB database file to do some work with it. I had been doing design changes to the database which were deployed to the productive system late in the evening. Then the last changes were done later in the evening by the content owner. The system admin who did the deployment staied so long and then copied the file to his USB stick. We had agreed to meet this morning at 06:55 in Zurich main-station for the transfer of the data.

Long term strategy

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 10:50:27 +0000

That’s what I thought when I read the ongoing announcments (and the howling of the frustrated pro-users) over at Mac Essentials yesterday.

Of course it would be nice to have new multi-core PowerMacs or PowerBooks. But few people would care. The announcements of the new iMac with it’s gadgets, FrontRow and of course the iPod (with video) and iTMS with video and TV-shows appeal to more people. A lot more.

I think Apple is executing a long term strategy that seems to work just really, really nice.

Ikea meets the Matrix

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:06:54 +0000

Dream Kitchen

Technorati Tags: ikea, kitchen, matrix, advertising

Back-up

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 12:38:37 +0000

This is one of the things that I should have been setting up a long time ago, but haven’t. Yesterday was the day. Remote Backup of my PowerBook.

Goal:

Continuous off-site backup of the most important files (my home directory) on my laptop

Ingredients:

Strongspace (I got a 4 GiB account for $8 / month)
rsync (comes bundled with OS X)
Ruby (comes bundled with OS X)
SSHKeychain

Setting up a Strongspace account is easy. Strongspace gives you secure offline storage that you access through SFTP or anything with SSH (like rsync). The cost is negligible if you care about what you have on your laptop.

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:19:42 +0000

There are things in the life of an IT engineer that are likely to drive him insane. Not the installation of PostreSQL on OS X. Not writing multithreaded Ruby code. Not looking for performance problems in Java programs, running on Sun Solaris using vmstat, iostat and truss. Not even working with RoboHelp X5 and RoboSource Control

Table of Contents. In Word (or in OpenOffice - the two have similar approaches)

Don't be a bozo when producing XML

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 14:56:02 +0000

“Saw it on the net and will need it at some time”-dept:

HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML is a nice writeup of things to do and not to do when creating XML.

[via Ned]

Technorati Tags: bozo, wellformed, xml

Tracking comments

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 08:30:37 +0000

One of the Blogosphere’s biggest claim to fame is the ability for conversations to emerge. The readers have the ability to respond back, creating a living two-way environment of interaction. So far so good. Unfortunately, there are a few problems.

First the ubiquitous amount of spam that percolates the blogs. I regularly have to clean between 2 and 60 spam comments per day, even though I have anti-spam measures on my blog. Hopefully it will become uninteresting for spammers to spam blogs in some distant future - I’m not holding my breadth though.

Onlife remembers what you were doing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:58:16 +0000

This is too cool:

Onlife looks at what you do in several programs (Safari / Firefox, Mail, iChat, iTunes) and stores all kinds of information about the interaction. You can then tag it (or leave it) and search for it.

For example, I’m installing PostgreSQL on my Mac and I found some info on the Apple Developer Connection website about this. If I need this page again, later, I can search for “Postgres” and “I looked at it longer than 2 minutes” and “Safari”

Paper Based Planning

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 09:20:11 +0000

Just a collection of links to paper based organization systems:

Pocket Mod: Flash based creator for small pocket agendas. Drag and drop layouts, print, fold: ready
PigDogPDA: Use a Moleskin notebook for your GTD processing. Looks like it could actually work
Moleskin Notebooks: From 43Folders -tips and tricks
More Moleskin stuff: also from 43Folder

Technorati Tags: arbeitstechnik, kreativ, gtd, planning, reduce, zeitmanangement

Refactoring Rails Applications or why tests are a good idea

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:43:48 +0000

Somewhat of an add-on to the post “Lotus Notes is not agile”.

The project I’m working on with the good folks of sourcepole, is a network monitoring tool. We are using Ruby on Rails to build a web frontend to some Ruby Network monitoring-fu. The network topology is stored in a database, and in our first delivery we got the fundamental database design wrong. So I spent half a day thinking about a new database model and spent the remainder of the day to build a quick spike to test if the new database model would be able to sustain the requirements. This remaining day was spent over the weekend with much cursing and muttering, but finally it seemed to work.

I did do nothing, mr lev

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 11:36:44 +0000

Technorati Tags: mac

Lotus Notes is not agile

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 05:38:24 +0000

Julian Robichaux has a recent article “Agile Development is not for me”. As you can guess from the title, he’s not in the agile camp:

What's worse is, the "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it" mentality doesn't take into account that there's a certain kind of butterfly effect with software design. A tiny change in architecture at the beginning can have huge impacts later on (for better or worse). Likewise, having to make a seemingly tiny change to core functionality or design later on down the road can be a major undertaking.

I have been doing agile development for the last couple of years with good results and experiences, both for me and my customers. There is one big caveat though: You will need to work with a technology that supports agile processes.

Active Timer

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 13:24:00 +0000

What a nice little program! Active Timer keeps track of where you spend your time, while working at the computer.

[via TUAW]

Technorati Tags: mac, zeitmanangement

Saving the screen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 07:56:20 +0000

Do androids dream? Is there a world out there?

The answer lies in this beautiful screen saver “electric sheep”. It runs on both Windows and Mac computers and all the computers running this screensaver communicate, exchanging DNA of new “sheep”, the wonderful creatures that show up on the screen

[via bsag]

Technorati Tags: engineering, kreativ, mac, music, remix

Mail Tools

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 22:30:34 +0000

MailTags for Apple Mail, adding Spotlight Meta Information to mails. Looks good, I’ll try it out. From the same people that gave us Mail ActOn (a plugin that I uses extensively)

Technorati Tags: mac, mail

Google knows more

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 05:47:46 +0000

This may be old news, but I just saw that Google does know quite a bit more about a website: Check out the “Blog”, “Screenshots” etc. links in the following screenshot.

Is this something that is standard? It’s the first time I’ve noticed that in a Google search result

Technorati Tags: google, adium

Unseen Video

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 14:03:04 +0000

You haven’t seen this video yet (that’s why it’s called the unseen video, I guess). And the next time you see it, it will be different again. Today and maybe next hour, it looks similar. Check again in a few months… Ingenious way of randomizing the video, check it out - you will see it, when it loads.

via Porn Happy (that link will give me an additional 50 viewers each day trough google ;-) )

Disinter-mediate the intermediary

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 15:16:14 +0000

The usual stuff - cut out the middle man. Been there, done that (at least if you ever bought a Dell computer). What about banks?

Zopa is exactly that. A place where people can lend and borrow money. If you lend money, it get’s split up into a number of different “money-parcels” and as a borrower, you get your money from 50 different lenders. That way, risk is spread to a very acceptable level. The lender specifies the interest rate, the borrower decides if he wants to borrow it to those conditions.

sqlite3 on Mac OS X -- trials and tribulations

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 13:10:59 +0000

For an upcoming Rails project, the plan is to use the sqlite database. On Windows, the whole process of getting this installed was easy. Download the DLL, do a gem install sqlite3& and be done.

Not so on OS X, where I plan to develop.

sqlite3 is installed by default, but trying to install the gem, I get a complaint about a missing sqlite.h file. Fair enough, it’s probably not there. So I download the tarball and do the “./configure && make && make install” dance.

Can a spam filter play chess?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 11:06:38 +0000

A really interesting question. Can a Spam Filter play a game of chess? Matthias might be interested to try this at his job ;-)

The tale of the spam filter that learns to play chess is very interesting. It shows, that seemingly simple algorithms can produce interesting results.

via indy blog

Rank 99

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 07:26:29 +0000

Bitflux has compiled the Top100 list of swiss blogs. This humble blogs comes in at rank 99 (only a couple of ranks behind my blogging friend tanja) Interestingly, the Muga-Blog, one of the top business blogs in Switzerland doesn’t make the list. Is the Technorati ranking reliable? And when will our invisible business blog make the ranks?

Technorati Tags: blog, switzerland, puppy

50%

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 05:18:51 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, we moved to a house. A beautiful house, a lot of rooms, a huge garden, cellar - everything needed. This weekend, the kids were out of the house (on vacation or with grand-ma). Instead of just enjoying life doing nothing, my wife and I spent saturday and sunday going through the boxes, sorting the books, installing shelves in the cellar, opening boxes, rearranging furniture, hanging paintings and all the other things necessary to make an area, that was looking like the beginnings of a landfill area to something habitable for a family.

Where's the fish?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:19:41 +0000

Where indeed? Check this puzzle, reportedly by Einstein.

And yes, I know who own the fish, but I’m not going to tell you….

Technorati Tags: einstein, fish, puzzle

Music, music, music

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:15:15 +0000

We like the moon via Don Dahlmann - ahh - interesting

Pleix via vowe - disturbing

Web Guitar via babo - fun

Technorati Tags: music, guitar

The cult of the mouse

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 18:02:53 +0000

It’s absolutely unbelievable, how little it takes to make a good design. Actually, it’s unbelievable, how much it takes to make so little.

The Mighty Mouse is such a thing. While I haven’t seen it yet, or actually laid hands on it, it seems to me, reading the descriptions, that the designers have put a lot of thought into this. Items like the left/right finger detector. The built in speaker for audible feedback. The roll-thing (I wonder how this compares to the IBM version of old, where a tracking-point was used instead of a wheel – I never got the hang of that and didn’t like it). The squeeze buttons.

Lotus Domino Server with ODBC connection

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 21:57:10 +0000

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.

Earth

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 07:06:20 +0000

This will cost me many, many hours: Google Earth

Unfortunately, no Mac version yet. Luckily, I still have a PC.

Technorati Tags: google, earth

CopyCats part II

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:42:45 +0000

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.

CopyCats?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 04:55:41 +0000

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?

We are not.invisible.ch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 11:55:05 +0000

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.

Moving, moving, moving

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 20:36:17 +0000

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.

Europeans unite

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 07:04:50 +0000

The European Internet Project (EIP) that was founded after reboot7 tries to bring together european people working on or for the internet project. It is trying to counter balance the US domination that has been the way of the internet for the last decades.

While I applaud the idea, I think there are larger things in the making. The talk that Ben Hammersley ( pdf ) gave at reboot has got me into thinking:

Wrapping up the Engelbart demo

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 08:54:20 +0000

There is both a video and audio recording of the Q&A session as well as a transcript of the complete event available. Also Ross Mayfield has some more background information on the demo and the reboot7 event that we witnessed.

[via crueltobekind]

Technorati Tags: reboot7

Excellent summaries of reboot presentations

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 07:32:46 +0000

There are lot of echos on the blogosphere about reboot. The best summaries I have seen so far are from Laurent Haug, who blogs at bohellz. Check them out!

And sorry Laurent, that I didn’t manage to show RoR to you - are you in Zurich any time soon?

Technorati Tags: reboot7

Thinking on three levels

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 08:44:05 +0000

reboot is over, I missed the party last night, but I’m almost on the plane back to Zurich with a couple of hours of sleep.

reboot was a great experience and I there was enough food for thought there to keep me occupied quite some time. What would be needed now is a couple of days quiet thinking time. Unfortunately my family and the pending move to a new house next week will make that impossible.

reboot pains

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:44:44 +0000

The thing that pains me most about this conference, are the chairs. There are three different models in each of the halls, and they compete in the “which is the most uncomfortable” category.

There is no clear winner, all of them are extremely uncomfortable in the long run. They therefore can’t be of danish design because danish design not only looks good, but serves their intended purposes.

These chairs clearly don’t.

It's not Bill Gates fault

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 14:27:05 +0000

Ben Hammersley delivered a great presentation. He spoke about the history of blogging – all the way back 300 years ago to The Tatler as the proto-blogger.

A very good and entertaining presentation with lot’s of food for thought. One patter of though is, that our society must come up with new social norms and acceptable behaviors to cope with the rapid change of technology. We even aren’t used (as a society) to the walkman - a 25 year old technology.

A near religious experience

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 20:03:48 +0000

We were promised the “mother of all demos”, the complete Doug Engelbart demo done in 1968, that preceded so many technologies that we are working with today. The video can be seen partially on the net, but we got 90 minutes of raw footage.

Foto by Michael Heilemann

And boy - this really is called “the mother of all demos” for very good reasons. Not only were there the occasional bloopers in the demo, that Doug skirted around nicely, but the stuff showed was and is so far advanced, that even today, it looks modern. There was hyperlinking (not only to documents as we know it, but down to individual objects - word, code, etc), instant messaging, email (or predecessors of it), sharing of screens between workstation and much much more. Watching the demo unfold, seeing how much fun Doug had doing it, one understands that this truly was a near-religious experience for quite a few people.

set them people to work

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:09:49 +0000

Here’s an idea that occured to me here at reboot. Why not set up a special session with all 400 people and have them produce a product / a service during a time period of say 4 hours.

There are so many intelligent, smart people around here that have all kinds of skills.

Why not give them a task and let them rip at it? There are visionaries, philosophers, artists, writer, marketing gurus, VCs, programmers, designers, project managers and so much more.

Tech-Conference

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 09:03:12 +0000

I may be the last person to enjoy a conference with a hi-tech factor. And that is probably because the last conference I’ve been to was back when having a modem line in the hotel room was considered high-tech.

Here at reboot, 50% of the people lug and operate a laptop. I guess a lot of them use it to check on news feeds and mail, but there is spontaneous collaboration happening all over.

The score is even

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 23:29:05 +0000

Sitting in the breakfast lounge at reboot, I made two interesting observations:

The ration between PC and MAC’s is roughly 1:1 (and I was thinking that the ration would be like 1:2)
The Apple power adapter takes a normal 2-prong small 220V power cable (and no, danish 2 hole wall-outlets don’t like the swiss 3-prong power-plug)

Continuous images through flickr’s reboot7 tag

People met at yesterdays meet-up include.

off to the north

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:29:15 +0000

I’ll be leaving for reboot7 tomorrow morning.

I’m looking forward both to return to the city where I lived for 4 years as a kid, to visit my grandmother (who is very sick unfortunately) and to see/talk/listen/discuss with the luminaries that are going to be there.

Of course, I will try to get one of the things of my 43things off the list too. This one will take care of itself ;-)

Ruby Spotlight Plugin

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 06:20:41 +0000

Spotlight continues to be useful: With the RubyImporter Plugin it understands Ruby Code… Neat

Technorati Tags: mac

Dangerous things

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 05:52:12 +0000

The list of the 10 most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th century disturbs me no end. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss it by looking at the organization that created that list, but I wonder how influential that institution really is.

Of course “Mein Kampf” is in there, “The communist manifesto”, “Das Kapital”. But books like “The Kinsey report”? Nietzsche? John Maynard Keys?

And of course in the runners up section there is Darwin and Freud, Skinner and Margaret Mead, Club of Rome, Simone de Beauvoir

Some telemarketers....

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 08:33:49 +0000

Lately, I have been the target of telemarketers. Wine, interesting and money-saving business ideas, investment ideas, what not.

Today another phone call with a suppressed number:

“Fischer” I answer (that being my name).

“Good morning, this is so and so, from the company this and this, do I speak with ”

“Do I sound like her?” I ask

Telemarketer fast forwards in her script

_“I’m sorry for taking up your time…. yada yada yada - goodbye” _and hangs up

Lotus Notes server on unix: Waiting for a shell command

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:15:38 +0000

LotusScript allows you to execute a OS command by using the rc = Shell( “command” ) command. The problem with this is, that Notes starts the command asynchronously and returns 33 as the return code, meaning “it’s started”.

There is no way to actually wait for the command to finish and - gasp - even get the return code from the command back.

This was the sitatuation with a client. We needed to run unix commands and react to their outcome in LotusScript.

EMacs on OS/X for Rails development

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:00:29 +0000

Being a step-by-step guide as an aide for the failing memory. Inspired by the screenshots of Dee Zsombor

Get a Tiger compatible Emacs
(unfortunately Aquamacs does strange (i.e non-emacs) things with it’s windows, so ECB falls on it’s face)
Install RubyMode.el (from the Ruby distribution)
Download ECB
Download supporting libraries (eieio, speedbar, semantic) and install them (usually make, make install and an entry in .emacs)
Download MMM (Multiple-Major-Modes) so you have support for both HTML and ERB in those .rhtml files

Spores of life

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 26 May 2005 09:03:38 +0000

R. sent me a link to a transcript of Will Wright’s presentation of Spore, an evolutionary game, a couple of months ago.

I was stunned by the descriptions. Today I found a link to a video of the actual presentation and demo of Spore.

While I sat and watched in amazement, my wife and our female co-worker watched too and commented on it. Interestingly enough, both of them weren’t that compelled. They commented on the strange creatures, the way they walked, etc. They didn’t see the beauty of the procedural way of doing things, the way the game evolves from single-cell creatures to “war of the worlds”

A CSS microscope

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 23 May 2005 07:29:14 +0000

If you are sometimes looking at a wonderful CSS design and wonder, how this was achieved, you could look at the HTML and the CSS code and start to figure out how to achieve things. This could take quite some time.

Enter Xylo Scope.

Xylo Scope loads all CSS files, and displays the relationship between the different tags and styles. It sports something similar to the DOM explorer that browsers like Firefox have but is geared more towards the CSS aspects.

HD Trailers

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 21 May 2005 15:20:30 +0000

Download the QuickTime High Definition Trailers directly (and save them for future viewing, for example on a HD capable projector - thanks Michael ;-) )

Technorati Tags: mac

More trays?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 20 May 2005 16:19:53 +0000

Our office got a new HP LaserJet 2420dn printer yesterday to replace an old LJ6 (that was woefully inadequate for office use).

Installation of the printer drives went fine (as long as you call a 67% success rate in the first round fine - now we are at 100%)

Today the additional 500-page tray arrived and was installed. On Windows it was a snap to tell the printer driver, that there is another tray to be served from. On OS X (the Tiger variant) - no such luck. I can print no problem, but the drivers insists on only having 2 trays. And the place where I can select memory and duplex option has no little checkbox for selecting the additional tray. What is the wisdom out there for these kind of problems? Google is no help. Can it be, that Windows is better than Mac OS X?

20 things in Tiger

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 15 May 2005 19:49:24 +0000

20 cool things in Tiger - and I haven’t heard about most of them…

The best hint for me, was the hint for Keychain Access. I know that there is something that is called keychain, but I didn’t realize that it’s a full blown application that not only stores all your passwords (duh), but also allows you to retrieve them (what a concept). It also stores encrypted notes (think credit card numbers).

Ruby on Rails Article in Infoweek.ch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 15 May 2005 19:30:04 +0000

Last week my article on Ruby on Rails came out in Infoweek.ch. It briefly describes Rails, Ruby and gives a very high-level overview over the development and the advantages of Rails over other development frameworks.

Thanks to the guys at Infoweek, I’m allowed to give you a PDF version of the article. Enjoy (and beware: it’s in german):

Technorati Tags: [ruby on rails](https://technorati.com/tag/ruby on rails)

**UPDATE: **

The PDF has disappeared from my server, but the original article is still available online.

To synchronize or not

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 13 May 2005 12:47:28 +0000

The tale of the joys of asynchronous vs. synchronous processing.

In one of my application users edit rich text in a web browser. This has been working well for 2 years, but all of a sudden problems have appeared. When the users edit very large portions of text, it sometimes is cut off at an arbitrary position. Time do do some debugging…

**Insert:** One thing I like about my job in IT - and I mean really like - is the fact, that all strange behavior can be traced back to a cause. The cause may be hidden, it may be beneath several level of seemingly wrong things (that turn out to be correct) but it's there. Always. It may take some time to find it, but I have found each and everyone in the past.
This fact gives me a lot of confidence and my clients hear “that’s the way it is, and I can’t solve it” a lot less than earlier in my career.

iTunes Music Store Switzerland is online

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 10 May 2005 01:32:15 +0000

It took a while, but now it’s online: The swiss (and the scandinavian) itunes music stores. The price for a track is CHF 1.50 ( around 1 Euro or 1.2 US$ - quite expensive, but this is Switzerland, where the money comes from).

Also, version 4.8 of iTunes itself is available, and it’s playing videos now.

Now if only the quality of the downloads would be better - allofmp3.com is much more advanced in this regard. (I’ll leave the legality discussions for the moment)

Heavy Metal

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 07 May 2005 20:46:52 +0000

Because we moved our TV from our home to our vacation flat, the only way to watch TV is to go on vacation. And here in the mountains, we have satellite TV. Most of the stuff on TV is crap. But there are a number of documentary channels that bring really interesting stuff.

Like the documentary on the “Eirik Raude”, a mobile oil rig. Seeing how this gigantic piece of machinery is being constructed and built is amazing. Many ten-thousand tons of metal that are swimming, not tethered. It’s computer controlled 6 rudders can keep the colossus in a position of +/- meters in any kind of weather, with a drill reaching down 3000 meters through the ocean.

iSyncing with the Nokia 9500

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 May 2005 11:54:15 +0000

After reading a bit about iSync & Tiger at vowe, I decided to give the solution outlined a try. However, I managed only to create a Kernel Exception on the phone, and to wipe out all my calendar entries.

Yes, I had a backup (through the excellent mobical.net service, which allows to sync the phone (and a lot of others) through GPRS.

Not giving up so easily (though it is tempting to drop the Nokia 9500 on Ebay and get a Trea 650 instead), I managed to export both contacts and calendar entries from mobical.net and import them into iCal / Address-Book on the Mac. One stumbling block was that the Addressbook only imported about 70 of 370 entries. Looking at the contacts.vcf file that mobical created, I noticed two entries with a PHOTO tag. Deleting those entries from the vcf-file got the import running.

There really is nothing to see

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 08:08:16 +0000

I was visiting Benno, my friend who got both a PowerBook for himself and an iBook for his wife. When I looked at his running applications, I noticed “Norton Antivirus for Mac” running on his computer.

I laughed and said, that he wouldn’t need it. To this he answered, that there were indeed viriii for the Mac. I challenged him to name one. He googled and the very first entry said “Why there are no viruses for the Mac”.

Technical Tiger Background

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 08:01:53 +0000

A most excellent article on the technical details of Apple’s OS X 10.4. There’s a lot more changes than meet the eye. Interesting reading on kernel locks, file meta-data, Quartz architecture and loads of other things. And a pleasant difference to the many “Spotlight/Dashboard, so-what’s really new” articles that I’ve been seeing the last weeks.

Invasion

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 15:19:30 +0000

I’m still sitting in the train from Bern to Zurich, in the business compartment (the one sporting electrical outlets). As usual there’s a deluge of laptops (mostly Dell). But within 2 meters of me are two other 15" Apple Powerbooks.

That’s the highest density I have witnessed in the last 8 months that I have travelled this route. Is the secret plan for world domination starting to work for his Steve-ness?

The NSA secures your computer

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 05:55:14 +0000

Something good is coming out of the NSA – a guide to secure various operating systems. I have cursorily glanced over the XP and the OS X guides and learnt quite a bit. This goes to my reference stack and will be thoroughly reviewed soon.

Very interesting reading!

Operating System Security

[via vowe]

Trying out offline editors

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 07:26:32 +0000

One of the things that bugged me about writing the blog, is that I usually have time to write when I’m not online (in the train). Recently, this has changed due to the availability of fast (and expensive) GPRS/EDGE, but the prices Swisscom charges for internet access are prohibitive high.

I was toying with the idea of running a Lotus Domino based blog, but inertia has kept me from going down that route. While I’m not that happy with my current MT setup, a change is a lot of work.

This Mac thing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 19:21:26 +0000

I admit it. I have switched. The Mac Mini was just the beginning, since last week I have a 15" PowerBook. I really, really like it. I will not bore you to death with all the details of why the Mac is better – you have heard those things before.

I have to keep my trusty Dell Inspiron for the Lotus Notes development I’m doing, but most of my work day is spent in front of the PowerBook.

Living on the EDGE

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 19:23:28 +0000

This is the view I’m enjoying right now. Looking out living room window of our holiday-flat in a little village in the mountains south-west in Switzerland. This is a really small village, some 1300 inhabitants and almost non-existent tourism. But there are sheep and goats and this village happens to have the highest vineyards in Europe, so the supply with cheese, meat and wine is endless and excellent. And the people are extremely friendly. Great area for quiet holidays or working days.

Notes / Domino Server crashes and fixup woes

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 21:15:42 +0000

I’m sitting in front of two clustered Notes servers that have died on me when I tried to diagnose a problem using the OpenLog log database. I added some unsupcious looking code to circumvent a problem that of course failed. In order to get more informtation on what failed, I decided to use OpenLog to pinpoint the error.

The moment, the agent ran with OpenLog enabled the Domino 6.0.4 server died. The following restart had it hanging on a consistency check. Killing the server with nsd -killand a subsequent nfixup -j -S c:\domdata brought up a lot of “interesting” error messages:

Learning through testing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 10:32:39 +0000

Mike Clark has an incredible powerfull idea: Learning through testing. He describes how he uses unit tests to learn a programming language (Ruby in this case). Each unit test encapsulates a bit of language knowledge he has aquired.

Writing the unit tests, he explores a bit of the language. Also, there’s a written trail of things he has done and explored.

I find this an extremely compelling way of learning a language and keeping track of what you know, so I guess this will go into my: “Things to try out” stack.

It is done

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:21:11 +0000

2600+ pages….

It is over – I want more

Web services

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:53:13 +0000

I have successfully avoided a lot of the web based tools, aggregators, services, demonstrations of technology and general doo-ahhs. But I have come across two (and I’m probably the last person in the blogosphere to do so) that really have helped immensly in how I read, digest and store information.

Let me introduce bloglines and del.icio.us. On second thought though, I don’t think they need introductions.

Because I roam from computer to computer, having those resources on a central server, makes it totally easy and practicable to read >160 feeds. And on every computer I have the up-to-date list of subscriptions and read feeds. Just fantastic. Same for del.icio.us - having a handy way of keeping track of bookmarkable stuff is great.

SkypeIn

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 21:13:17 +0000

Skype has started the SkypeIn Beta (Windows only at the moment). Sign up & set up is skype like easy and it calling my new number worked 30 seconds after paying for it.

At the moment I have a 3 month subscription, paying EUR 10. This is more of a test, than a real number - but who knows - that might change.

You can call me on +1 (415) 367-3772 - I might be online…

connecting from a X-client to a cygwin X-server

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:31:33 +0000

from the my-outsourced-brain-dept:

Install cygwin. Be sure to select the X11 base package
open a cygwin shell
start X: $ startxwin.sh
you will get a xterm window on your Windows box
type $ xhost + to disable host security, so that other hosts can connect to your server
Enable X port forwarding in PuTTY ( Connections / SSH / Tunnels )
connect to the remote machine and start the program that requires X

If all goes well, it will show up on your screen. If you get a “Xlib: connection to “:0.0” refused by server” error message, you have forgot to disable the security by typing xhost +.

This morning at the train station

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 10:16:31 +0000

Early in the morning, almost at the end of my 105 minute commute, I have to switch trains at Bern. Sometimes I pick up a Brezel as a kind of breakfast.

That’s what I did today. As I was standing in the queue I noticed a man, about 50-55 years old, worn out, looking ragged, leaning his crutches against the wall and smoking while he was waiting for his order to be filled. I noticed his pack of cigarettes dropping to the floor. All the time while waiting, I debated if I should pick it up for him or just deprive him of the fags.

What is the blue ball?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 06:54:40 +0000

Today when Frodo, my Mac Mini woke from it’s sleep, I found this:

a blue ball, that I can drag around on screen and that reacts to clicking on it – by becoming even more blue.

What the hell is this?

Typographie

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:23:14 +0000

Blogger verstehen was von Typographie: URLAUB IN VERSALIEN

via Tanja

GrÃ¤nn' nid

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:01:48 +0000

Gefunden bei Tanja’s MÃ¼gablog:

Und wenn mein vierundneuzigjÃ¤hriger Grossvater meine Grossmutter trÃ¶stet, weil schon wieder einer aus dem Freundeskreis gestorben ist, sagt er halt: “GrÃ¤nn’ nid, es hettere no. U es chÃ¶mere nache.”

Nicht nur, dass die Sprache wunderschÃ¶n ist (ich wÃ¼rde gerne diese “Fremdsprache” sprechen kÃ¶nnen), auch die Weisheit die darin steckt:

Weine nicht, es hat noch davon Ã¼brig. Und es kommen wieder welche nach.

Automated Testing of (Domino) Web Applications

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:32:39 +0000

Developing web applications is one thing, testing them another. Sure there are Unit tests, functional tests but in the end, the application also needs to be tested as the clients and users see it. And too many times, a seemingly simple change in an application breaks down parts of the application that weren’t regression tested.

Unfortunately, testing an application in a browser is difficult at best, sometimes impossible. As soon as JavaScript functionality enters the picture, there doesn’t seem a way around long clicking exercises. The testing frameworks that have been available so far, aren’t really suited to the task. Enter Selenium by a couple of Thoughtworks engineers.

Death of a Digital Identity

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:24:20 +0000

Actually - I’m not sure if he’s dead yet. I have an aquaintace that I met online and that I have seen in real life maybe two or three times. We share one common interest, but not much more (as far as I know). Yesterday I talked to a good friend of mine (met through the same on-line channels, sharing the same interests). She knows my aquaintance much better than I do. And she told me, that he has severed all connections to our online community. He has deleted his email accounts, deregistered from the forum, quit the chat. There is no online identity any more.

MS buys Groove

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:38:59 +0000

Microsoft has aquired Groove Networks. There are some more details on the website.

Does this mean that Ray Ozzie has more time to blog?

And does that mean, that Groove has been lost for the Mac community forever?

I have been using Groove right from the start, before the 1.0 version (and wrote about it on the Heise Newsticker back then). We used it extensively when we were building Ivorix. I think it was way ahead of it’s time then. Unfortunately, the 2.0 release was slow & bloated. I have been using less and less of it over the years - also due to the fact, that basic features like search and printing were missing. So it has disappeared from my Toolset - unlike the other brainchild of Ray, Lotus Notes.

Mind on Multitasking

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:24:00 +0000

Kathy Sierra writes a wonderful blog all by itself with thoughtful and interesting short essays on how to create passionate users. The current entry on multitasking your brain is as good as ever.

If you want to get more done, be mindful. If you want to have more time, be mindful. Mindful means one thing at a time.

Something to put on my 43 Things list: be mindful

openNTF Log

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 20:43:16 +0000

Of course I know about the openNTF website that collects open source Notes applications. Also I read about the OpenLog template, but I haven’t used it - until 2 weeks ago when I needed some information why my agents were failing suddenly after a Domino 5 to Domino 6 migration. I remembered about the OpenLog database and decided to give it a try.

What can I say: I’m a fool that I haven’t used this much sooner. The installation and implementation into my applications was a snap and within minutes I had the exact error message and place of where the code failed. Fixing it was pretty easy. In the last weeks I have OpenLog enabled all the Notes applications I currently support and I expect that this will make my life much easier in the future.

SMTP Cheat Sheet

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 20:54:38 +0000

From the “my external memory dept”:

One of the simplest way to debug SMTP problems is to talk directly to the SMTP server using a shell (Telnet):

Frodo:~ jcf$ telnet smtp.domain.ch 25
Trying xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...
Connected to smtp.domain.ch.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 smtp.domain.ch ESMTP ready.
MAIL FROM:name@domain.ch 
250 OK
RCPT TO:joe@doe.com
250 Accepted 
DATA
354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself

and then the message you want to send (including the headers)

Find out which process is listening on a port

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:02:56 +0000

If you need to find out which process is listening on a certain port, use the following:

Linux netstat -natp | grep :80

Solaris lsof -i | grep :80

On Solaris, you need to have compiled lsof that you can get from Sunfreeware.com

burning Feeds

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 11:20:58 +0000

Taking a cue from Gadgetguy, I have burned the most requested feed by running it through FeedBurner. This will massage the feeds, making them easier accessible to people using a browser and various other nice things (like giving me statistics on who is reading this blog - similar to Statcounter, who does an excellent job for tracking the web-usage of this blog.

Also it inserts links to “relevant” Amazon books. This of course in a constant effort to offset the cost of me running this blog. If it doesn’t work out (as I suspect it will), this part will be removed again…

Gone

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:49:33 +0000

I will be gone until February, 28th…

Don’t expect (m)any updates during that time

Installing Lotus Notes on Mac OS X

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:46:33 +0000

I won’t have time to do this for another 2 weeks (see above for the reason), but I googled around for the problem of a crashing Lotus Notes 6.0.3 for Mac OS X and found … Ben already has it licked:

Notes 6.5 on OS X. Also Nini seems like a good thing to have.

Subversion Cheat Sheet

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 00:37:59 +0000

Thanks to Ned for the Subversion Cheat Sheet

Programmieren mit dem Mac?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 00:34:51 +0000

Ups - alle Sonderzeichen liegen auf der Mac Tastatur an vÃ¶llig anderern Stellen. Vor allem Dinge wie eckige und geschweifte Klammern scheinen auf einer Schweizer Tastatur unauffindbar. Zum GlÃ¼ck gibt’s Tastatur-Tipps.

New Toys

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 00:18:41 +0000

Boys need toys… but the wife likes them too, so it’s OK:

Pictures taken with a Nokia 9500 - all complaints about quality to Nokia please.

Mini's here

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 12:54:58 +0000

My MacMini arrived yesterday and I was playing the better part of the evening and a small part of the night (yawn) with it.

First impressions:

It’s small
It’s quiet (unless it get’s really busy, at which point the fan kicks in - and that’s one noisy fan)
Setup was very, very painless. I let my wife do it, and she went through the whole experience in a couple of minutes.
the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is immensely high
the kids loved the included games (which led to tears when it was bed-time)
connecting to sauron was a breeze
iTunes was about 5 times faster re-importing my 12000 tracks on a Samba fileserver, than the Windows version on my Dell Laptop
Connecting my iPod just worked - now I have to redo my smart playlists
Fast User Switching (or whatever it’s called on OS X) works very well
Installing / Deinstalling Software is easy
a 1024*768, 15" screen is just a tad too small. A 17" wide screen would be nice - why doesn’t Apple have one?
the “dead-slow”, “braindead”, “old piece of junk” graphic in the Mac Mini is absolutely fast enough
Amazing that the whole thing cost just 20 swiss francs more, than my 30GB iPod about a year ago
OS X is - just nice
thanks to byteborg, rsz and vowe for initial support

Open Questions: feel free to comment, I haven’t done much research on those yet

One of these weeks

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 17:16:32 +0000

This is quite an up / down week, with all kinds of – let’s call them – interesting things happening.

On the negative side:

The air is so dry, that I wake up every night with a mouth so dry that my tongue feels like rasping through death valley
At the same time my nose is regularly clogged too, so the open mouth is a necessity to survive the night
My laptop died while trying to go from standby to hibernat mode. It managed to screw up it’s registry and boots immediately to a blue screen. Luckily the also installed Ubuntu Linux booted fine, and I was able to copy all of my files to an external firewire harddisk. (Note to self: Try to figure out why Ubuntu treats the harddisk of the Dell Inspiron as a VERY slow hard disk. The ususal hdparm tunings (-c1 -d1 …) didn’t increase the speed above 3 MB / s, which is just almost unbearable slow)
My Linux server had a fit yesterday and crawled along with a load of 9000. A mercyful turning of the BRS brought it back to life.

On the positive side

Remove Bush

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 09:57:38 +0000

No - this is not a political statment - although it could be construed as one…

via rsz by mail

utf-8 table

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 15:03:59 +0000

Mixing ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 characters on a webpage, encoding Umlauts 16-byte ISO representation and declaring them to be UTF-8 - no wonder, some pages with Umlauts look like shit, or make the rendering application throw exception (complaining about malformed UTF-8).

Such is the joy of i18n development. And a joy, if the people doing the development have no real clue of what they are doing in the first place.

So - with a swing of the clue-stick: Here’s a Unicode Table that contains the UTF-8 table, the ASCII, the HEX and a descriptive text.

No Comments

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 12:22:23 +0000

The comments on this blog are turned off, due to various major problems with the comment script sending out spam. I’m not sure if my vintage MoveableType installation has a problem, but I want to play this safe. Also, I don’t have time for redoing all the layouts at the momen, so I have just renamed the mt-comments.cgi script and removed the executable bit.

You’ll see 404’s if you click on Comments or if you try to post one.

Too tired

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 16:00:51 +0000

You know that you should get some more sleep if you

instead of working on the train during the commute, you read the last 60 mails on the RubyOnRails mailinglist
you fall asleep doing so, and give up with the computer, closing
more or less sleep for 40 minutes during the train ride
wake up to the announcment of arriving at the destination train station
falling asleep again, just 1 minute before arriving
waking up while the new passengers arrive and take their seats

But then, I was awake very quick and got out of the train in record time…

Ta-Da Lists

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:45:12 +0000

Everybody is doing the Ta-Da-List dance, and rightly so. Ta-Da lists is a nice, clean, simple and useful application. Kudos to David - but then what do you expect from the guy who gave us Rails.

As a service to the public, I have created a list of things that I plan to blog about some time when I have time in the future.

Bloglines counted

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 17:02:56 +0000

I use Bloglines to read my daily dose of RSS. My work is spread around multiple places with multiple computers, and the thought of synchronizing 140+ feeds (what have I read, what haven’t I read) over those computers just doesn’t jive with me. And I’m not even sure, it this would work at all.

Anyway: Bloglines has a nice feature, that tells you, how many people have subscribed to a particular feed. Of course, the ego-maniac in me has subscribed to my own feed (the Atom feed of course, me also being modern). There are 4 subscribers to that. Coupled with a lot of people coming here to search for ASCII porn (my number 1 Google search term), I thought that I had a relative small audience. Then today, I subscribed to my RSS2 feed also – and behold – there are 46 subscribers to that one. My regular readership just 10 folded, my ego got boosted to new heights.

XP Practicing Group Zurich

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 15:47:29 +0000

No, we’re not talking Windows XP, but eXtreme Programming. (Small but important difference) Jim Weirich is doing an interesting thing in the Cincinnati XP Users Group. They meet once a month to not only talk about XP, but to actually practice it. Doing this, they write software for a children hospital and learn XP (and they probably have fun too)

As a practicioner of ExtremeHacking (that is working alone, using some of the XP methods) I’d be extremely interested in starting something like this in Switzerland (and maybe even in Zurich). There is a XpAdoptersGroupSwitzerland and I have posted the same on the mailing list, but I’ll repeat it here:

Rails 0.9.4

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:27:12 +0000

Damn - David & the assorted crew are so fast. I have the development timeline of RubyOnRails in my Bloglines and it’s almost always the feed with the most new entries. Now Rails 0.9.4 has been released and there’s a lot of stuff, that again will make my life easier.

Mange Tak, David!

Working with Rails has been an incredible ride, I have learnt a bunch and I’m getting closer and closer to actually deploy and use Amuda for real. Developing in Rails is refreshing simple. Many times, one single line of code does what in Java would have taken dozens.

Apache 2 not coming up?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 10:33:34 +0000

If you have this: httpd: could not open document config file /opt/apache2/httpd.conf when you try to start your Apache 2 with a different config file, then do this:

/opt/apache2/bin/httpd -f /opt/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

It looks like Apache doesn’t like relative paths when it’s called with a different config file.

Audiophiles Einkaufen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 23:01:23 +0000

Solche Leute wÃ¼rden gerne einen Plattenspieler haben, der auf Luft schwebt, der von einem Riemen angetrieben wird, den ein blinder, 89jÃ¤hriger Franzose in einem Bergdorf aus seinen Achselhaaren gedrechselt hat

Boxen kaufen

Zum niederknien, Herr Dahlmann! Und wie es dass trifft. Siehe dazu auch AV Fetishism (Nicht dass es qualitativ mit ihrer Schreibe vergleichbar wÃ¤re)

Markov Entry

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 20:38:40 +0000

So, how does a [markov chain entry] 1 look like?

Thanks - but you thought, that my sheltered existance, in my business model is in a matter rest. After almost never end. So far 76% copied, next line of these programs would fail. No - do you?

Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a markov chain that has been trained by all my blog writings.

Markov Chains in Ruby

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 16:45:39 +0000

Writing text and playing with text is all good fun. Using Markov Chains one can generate text that is almost readable, almost understandable, but not quite. Markov Chains analyses the frequency of words in relation to another.

Analysing text basically means counting which words follow each other. Producing text is done by picking a word and then looking up which word has come up after that in the text samples, picking one and then using this new word as the basis for determining the next one.

MacMini

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 23:42:52 +0000

I was very, very interested in reading about what Steve Jobs would come up with earlier today. And when I saw it, I ordered one. I got the small model (1.2 GHz, 40Gig HD), but added memory and bluetooth.

Unlike vowe I think the mini hit’s a very sweet spot. If this mini works out the way I hope it will, it won’t be the last one I will buy. I can see minis at the following locations around me:

SmallWare

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:48:08 +0000

SmallWare is a collection of small, simple programs that do one thing and do it right.

Quoting time

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 19:52:29 +0000

I was reading through the IMDB Discussion on Koyaanisqatsi when I stumbled upon this gem

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meanings. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. Stanley Kubrick, 1968

The soundtrack to life

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 19:32:12 +0000

The soundtrack that best fits my current mood? Phillip Glass: Koyaanisqatsi

Life out of balance

crazy

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 15:23:11 +0000

Here's to the crazy ones... the misfits; the rebels; the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do, is ignore them; because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. **Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.**

Found on a page at IT&W;

The threshold of caring

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 08:28:53 +0000

I haven’t watched much news lately. Yesterday was an exception. The pictures of destruction and death that I have so far been able to keep outside my attention have been haunting me since. I realize that I’m not capable of even trying to begin to understand what has happened. As the death toll rises, the pain and suffering becomes more and more abstract. We are hearing about 9 dead swiss citizens and as much time in the news is spent on them compared to the tens of thousands of natives that died or lost everything they have. The cynic in me tries to calculate the “importance” of a swiss citizen versus an indian, a tamil or a thai but gives up.

Comment spammers empty the site

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 09:20:16 +0000

You might - if you have come here through the normal web address - have wondered why the site was empty, except for a lot of links.

Well, I have had a lot of comment-spam and while it generally was easy to get rid of it, it has rebuilt the site. And I have specified that only the last couple of days of entries are displayed. So - after each rebuild, more content was removed.

XML Problems

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 09:00:06 +0000

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use XML." Now they have two problems."

Nice summary. This comes from an article: Python is not Java that has some other stuff that people coming from Java need to unlearn.

You are welcome

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 13:24:46 +0000

Every country gets the government it deserves.

**How do we contact you?**
Donate or send email to info[a]yourewelcomeeverybodyD0Tcom. If it’s hatemail, don’t waste your time. The email is formatted to reduce spam, make sure you replace the bracketed “a” with the at sign and the D0T with an actual period. If you cannot figure this out, ask a smarter friend.

Right.

[ via Don Dahlmann ]

OpenBC.join()

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 16:07:29 +0000

After vowe has done it, here’s my invitation to join openBC.

OpenBC seems a lot more complete than LinkedIn and it has a distinct european touch. And that sounds kind of sensible when you do business mostly (ok - exclusively) in europe.

Join in!

What is amuda?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 08:30:07 +0000

What is Amuda? Where is it? For whom will it be? Why is it?

The only thing we know, is that it’s only 5 days away.

Coming December 1st

Feeding the GoogleBot

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 17:18:09 +0000

Wenn ihre Firma psychologische Coaching benÃ¶tigt und im Raum Basel ist, dann ist Altai eine gute Adresse.

Im Raum ZÃ¼rich empfehlen wir natÃ¼rlich InVisible

doing some nasty stuff with java and logging

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 17:14:40 +0000

Remove all .debug stuff in existing java files:

a handy SED reference

` #!/usr/bin/sh

find . -type f -name ‘*.java’ -print | while read i do

echo $i

echo "" » $i sed “s/^..debug(.)\s*;.$/{;}/” $i > $i.tmp sed “s/(..isDebugEnabled()/(false/” $i.tmp > $i.tmp2 cp $i.tmp2 $i done `

Don’t ask.

Incremental Backup with RSync

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 09:23:54 +0000

Rsync snapshots for future reference

[via Jeremy]

New ZAPPATA release released

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 18:01:49 +0000

whew. After quite some time debugging, working, sweating and swearing, we are releasing the new beta build (525) of ZAPPATA today.

More IMAP tweaking in this release, and ZAPPATA now can run as a Windows Service. (Be sure to read the ReadmeWin.txt for some snags in this build)

You can get it here zappata-0.4.525.exe (Windows Installer) or as a regular ZIP file here: zappata-0.4.525.zip (multiplattform)

The blue packet

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 22:09:32 +0000

No, the tale of the blue packet is entirely a work of fiction and there is no, absolut no way, that something like this could happen in real life.

AV fetishism

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 17:23:13 +0000

Did I mention that I have fetishes? Keyboards, some that I’m not going to talk about on this blog ;-) and then AV.

Last weekend, my friend Michael and I went to to visit the AdVanced04 high-end exihibition that displays the best in Audio and Video high-end. Visiting feels a lot like visiting a toy store when I was a kid. Lot’s of cool toys, and most of them priced way outside anything I’d ever be able to afford. While things have changed, and I can afford most of the toys in a regular toy store (but my son can’t - something that causes enormous grief every time we visit), I won’t be able to afford 90% of the devices for audio and video reproduction we’ve seen. At least not in this life.

invisible web site launched

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 11:11:30 +0000

In between all the work that is heading our way, we found time time to launch our companies website: Head over to www.invisible.ch and check it out. (German speaking only)

If you are looking to hand out consulting work with Notes/Domino, Unix, Java, Intranets in general, maintenance of infrastructure give us a call - especially if you are in Switzerland…

Hope it works out

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:55:08 +0000

The last couple of days were quite a ride: Crashing applications on production servers, family woes after 25 years of not talking to each other, my server that died on saturday, a DNS move, a business critical application that stopped working at the customers site on friday and we got it working again at noon today.

And last but not least I finally saw Fahrenheit 9/11 which came on TV today.

Moving, moving, moving

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 11:15:59 +0000

Access to this site has been flaky for the last couple of days. I apologize. First of, my server decided to act up and hat to get the BRS treatment.

Then I moved my primary domain www.invisible.ch to TextDrive, something I have been planning to do for a long time. There isn’t that much content there yet, but it will come.

Sorry for the interruption, back to normal business

Silktide

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 10:02:10 +0000

A very helpful site Silktide Silkscore. It evaluates your website and gives suggestions on how to improve it. There’s a marketing ploy there (Silktide offers consulting services) but I think this is brilliant and how the web is supposed to work - IMO.

Silktide gives something valuable for free. They offer additional services - that’s fine and the service they offer adds to their credibility. A win-win for all involved.

[via Ben Poole]

Mobile Needs

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 19:14:28 +0000

What a timely coincidence (actually, there are no coincidences, there is only synchronicity, but that’s a different entry):

Prelude

Tim Bray on mobile needs was quickly followed by Jeremy’s mobile needs to which Russell responded.

Being pda-less after my vacation and T610-less after a roller coaster-ride, I have reverted back to my trusty SonyEricsson R520 and no PDA.

The thing I miss most? My calendar and all my addresses. That’s why I need a PDA again soon. Phone and SMS is handled well by the R520 (and I actually like it’s large size and protruding antenna because I can pull it out of my coat pocket by the antenna).

LED Porn

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 00:35:31 +0000

Did I mention, that I can’t fall asleep? LED Porn doesn’t help either

TAR

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 00:32:55 +0000

TAR?

Which File Extension are You?

I can’t fall asleep - does it show?

The world is coming to an end

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 21:31:28 +0000

Brain Dish is the description of an experiment at Florida University. 25'000 brain cells from a rat brain, “living” in a Petri dish are hooked up to a flight simulator and “learn” to fly a F-22 jet.

In a way, I’m thrilled by this. I have been working with neural networks in the financial world and we have quite some experience with what neural networks can accomplish. That a organic neural network can master flight is somehow the logical conclusion and somewhat expected.

Music Memorabilia

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:25:14 +0000

Today it hit me - a memory from a life long past, from music bizare: Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick

In the deserts of Sudan And the gardens of Japan From Milan to YucatÃ¡n Every woman, every man

Hit me with your rhythm stick Hit me! Hit me! Je t’adore, ich liebe dich Hit me! Hit me! Hit me! Hit me with your rhythm stick Hit me slowly, hit me quick Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!

50 BÃ¼cher

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 11:51:52 +0000

Ich habe zumindest den Schluss gesehen. Die Idee habe ich von Don Dahlmann geklaut (der sie auch geklaut hat) (und das ist ja auch ok). So lustig wie Don kann ich nicht, trotzdem: Hier ist sie:

Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel - Der Herr der Ringe Ja - zweimal komplett. In Englisch (natÃ¼rlich). Nachdem wir in der Schule “Der kleine Hobbit” gelesen hatten (damals war ich jÃ¼nger als 12, weil es in DÃ¤nemark gelesen wurde). Also hab ich mich irgendwann zwischen 12 und 16 zweimal durch Mittelerde gekÃ¤mpft. Und es geliebt (ausser den ausschweifenden Genealogischen Abhandlungen). Die Filme waren auch gut.

I have seen the future and it's....

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 09:25:39 +0000

choppy.

And blocky.

And something you will hear a lot about (at least in Switzerland) in about three weeks (in time for the holiday spending season).

Yes - the technology is neat. Yes - it works.

No - I don’t think it’s going to be the big hit, the marketing people think it will be. But I could be wrong.

What it is? I’ll tell you, when the time has come. Hints: Small, wireless.

Secure Email

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 13:03:56 +0000

R. stumbled upon Jeftel that promises (among other things) an end to Spam. They do it by using a proprietary, peer-2-peer email system. That’s great news actually, beacuse it shows us, that we haven’t been the only ones having this idea. (And as Simon Garfinkel notes, P2P comes clean and can be used for other purposes than sharing music).

So how does it compare to what we at ZAPPATA are doing. I have outlined how ZAPPATA solves email problems (not just Spam). And we don’t do anything proprietary either: We use known and trusted protocols: SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS.

Foreigner in a foreign land

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 09:03:25 +0000

I returned from a long weekend (or rather, a very short vaccation) from the south of France, left the family behind to do some more vaccationing and resumed the task of earning money (as every caring family father should do).

It was difficult at best to get back.

We had a wonderful lunch in La table d’Emilie (13 points Gault Millaut) and even the kids got their share of Foie Gras and other good stuff. They managed to sit through almost 2 hours of lunch and really enjoyed the food (well, most of it). Highly recommended (and for Euro 90 for the four of us with complete menus each, not expensive at all)

Install Java on Debian

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 16:53:09 +0000

That’s a bit of a pain (because Java is not free software), but Martin Fowler has a method for installing Java on a Debian system

New Beta of ZAPPATA released

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 23:21:08 +0000

We have released a new build of ZAPPATA today. You can grab it from the Download page.

We spent a lot of time polishing the IMAP server and it should behave nicer with a wider variety of clients.

The IMAP RFC 3501 is not exactly lightweight, and the protocol is very powerful and very chatty. There are a lot of things that can go wrong in IMAP transactions between email clients and servers. It’s been interesting to see how different clients talk to the server. Each client I have observed (Outlook & Outlook Express, Opera, Thunderbird, The Bat!, Mulberry) handle the task in a different way. Demanding.

Notes Agent FAQ

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 09:03:30 +0000

I needed the Notes Agent FAQ at a clients site, and had to hunt for it…

Now, I have it at my fingertips ;-)

War

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 14:43:25 +0000

Joi links to a video from a massacre on people in Falluja.

This is not only disturbing. It’s sickening and makes me want to puke. This is NOT the way to create peace. It’s an atrocity in an illegal war.

Subversion

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:25:48 +0000

I have installed Subversion on my main development server and it was much easier than anticipated.

This document (german) helped me getting it to work within a couple of minutes. Recommended.

Now I need to convert my CVS repositories over to SVN….

Handy Unix commandlines

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:12:53 +0000

It’s hard to memorize all the fun things you can do with the shell on a *nix system.

Here’s my crib-sheet: Find all files containing string in the current directory tree

find . -type f -exec grep string {} ; -print

In all files in directories dir1 and dir2, replace “aaa” with “bbb”

#!/bin/sh

for i in `find ./dir1 ./dir2 -type f`; do
    sed -e"s/aaa/bbb/g" $i> $i.$$
    mv $i.$$ $i
done

tbc

I hate to break it to you guys

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 21:55:49 +0000

Today a mail passed my spam filters. Let me quote a couple of things from it:

Hello Jcf,
I visited invisible.ch today. I am with Family Safe Web and I think that your site could be of interest to our web site visitors. Family Safe Web would like to invite you to trade links with us. Please visit our site at “https://www.familysafeweb.net/".

[…] Here is a description and a link to Family Safe Web to place on your site:

Local Web Server for Windows with search

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:29:04 +0000

from the Use-your-readers-as-knowledge-base dept:

I have a client that has the requirement to have an intranet application available offline and make it available on a CD. Basically it’s just a bunch of html files (that originally live in Notes).

So far, we have exported all the relevant documents using the Midas Richtext LSX and stuck them on a CD.

But now, the client wants search too.

I’m looking at the options now. One thing is to use Domino Offline Access. But that would mean major changes to the environment, the application is installed in. (greetings from the IT department). Also it actually does too much – I just need some browsing and searching.

DIY iPod Battery Pack

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 07:25:13 +0000

Ingredients: some batteries, a deck of cards, glue & a firewire connector: The instant iPod Battery Pack

Bento Blog

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 07:22:03 +0000

Bento Blog - or food can be beautiful

Which Nethack monster

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 07:20:11 +0000

Ahh - brings back memories of me playing NetHack on my trusty Atari ST…

|!/[)[)
+.@%/])
|)?+%))

If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a mimic. I can be whatever I think you need me to be - it might look like I’m here to help you, but really you’re here to help me.

Which NetHack Monster Are You?

Perlearning

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 16:01:09 +0000

I have to do some things on a Sun Solaris box where the only scripting languages available are sh and perl. No python, no ruby, no … well you get the point.

I don’t like PERL a lot, even though the monks are chanting it’s praise. Granted, it can do amazing stuff, but then a horde of monkeys typing away on their keyboard would probably sooner come up with a syntactically valid PERL program, than with a Shakespeare sonnet or even a simple haiku.

Happy Music

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 17:25:13 +0000

When everything is gloom, when your mood is dark, when work seems to much like work and to little like fun. When the sky is gray (or at least when it seems so), there is only one Cure.

You have to listen to Happy Music. I continued to rip my CD collection and got to rip all the BÃ©la Fleck CD’s I own. They went on the iPod and I cheered up to pieces like UFO TOFU or my favorite one Sinister Minister which comes with a gorgeous bass solo by Victor Wooten on the Live Art [US | DE ] CD.

Some EMACS stuff

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 08:17:33 +0000

No mention of .txt files could go without the mention that Emacs is my favorite editor.

Tim Bray gives us a glimpse into his .emacs and there are a number of things that I will try out to see if they fit my style of working.

.doc vs .txt

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 15:46:10 +0000

WunderschÃ¶n: Mein Leben mit .doc und .txt und besser kann man’s nicht sagen

[via bronski.net]

Welcome to ...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 22:25:10 +0000

In this technological mess, that we tend to call home, there’s a new addition to the machinery:

He’s big, he’s black, he’s ugly and he’s loud. My wife already hates him with a vengeance. Right now he sit’s in the living room, but he will find a new home as far away from the civilized parts of the flat as possible:

Welcome SAURON, our new home-file server. He has 480 GB in RAID 5 array, dual P3 processors (who will bore themselves to death), a new network card (that, and plugging in the ethernet cable into the new card (!) helped with my network problems).

Internal YES, extneral NO

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 29 Aug 2004 21:40:18 +0000

I have struggled to install Debian on my new file server. With the new installer disk this was a breeze - until it tried to download additional packages from the internet. Turns out that I had access to my internal network, but no access at all to the external world.

I checked the things one checks in this situation: ifconfig: OK, /etc/network/interfaces (OK - and I tried both DHCP and static), route -n (route to the internal network and to the ADSL router as gateway: OK), /etc/resolv.conf (had the DNS servers of my provider, but I couldn’t ping them), IPCHAINS - emtpy table), network cable (changed several times), router ports (plugged it in into one port that I know worked)

Well, but what is ZAPPATA?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 11:09:52 +0000

A lot of people have been asking: What is it, that ZAPPATA does?

The technical answer: It’s a personal mail server that uses it’s own peer to peer, secure infrastructrue to exchange mail

But there’s another answer: Michael Sampson has written an excellent report with an overview over different collaboration technologies. In it, he lists, the pros and cons of the different tools (email, IM, Presence, RSS, Shared Workspaces).

Email has a list of whopping 11 negatives, cited below:

Links: Installing Debian on Dell Poweredge 1400

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 09:55:26 +0000

I have salvaged a Dell PowerEdge 1400 SC with dual P3 / 800 MHz CPUs. It is going to serve as my home file server (with a 3Ware RAID Controller and 480 GB of RAID 5 disks).

So far, it has booted with a Knoppix CD, so I know that it will work (eventually).

Here are the links, that will hopefully help me get this beast (god - it is loud - that will be a problem for the WAF) up and running.

ZAPPATA Beta is released

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:53:10 +0000

It took quite a bit longer than expected, but R. and I have managed to release the first public beta of our vision of Personal Groupware: Please feel free to download the beta version of ZAPPATA and abuse it.

T610 Tricks

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 10:49:25 +0000

I have a Sony Ericsson T610 and happened upon these nifty tricks that increase the fun factor.

The T610 is a nice little phone, with a bad camera but otherwise it’s full featured. As usual with SE phones, it’s bluetooth implementation just works and it does all the stuff the mobile professional with too much money (GRPS on holidays to work and surf) needs.

At first, when ompared to soemthing like the Sharp GX20 which I have been seeing a lot lately, the GX20 (or it’s successor the GX30) win hand down. (The screen on the GX models is absolutely stunning (240*320 pixels)). But Bluetooth is only enabled for handsets. There is no modem that can be used (even though the GX20/30 uses GPRS for it’s WAP / Web stuff). In short: It’s totally useless for me.

Spot the difference

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 13:05:24 +0000

Version 1:

su bea -c “cd /opt/local/somewhere && ./runSomeShellScript.sh”

Version 2:

su - bea -c “cd /opt/local/somewhere && ./runSomeShellScript.sh”

It took me about an hour to figure out why my installation package (which used version 1) didn’t work. Stranger because it worked flawlessly from the commandline. All *nix geeks will already have spotted the difference and LTAO my mistake.

For all others: the “-” parameter to su specifies that the user should get his own correct environemnt. Without the “-”, the new shell process will inherit the environment from the calling process (which – as it was in my case – lacked some ENVIRONMENT variables that the script excpected)

Fremdsprachen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 00:00:20 +0000

styg dry, bis drby

10 Punkte fÃ¼r den, der die Sprache errÃ¤t

Comment Spam

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 15:59:10 +0000

It’s great to see how popular my website has become. And of course I received about 60 comment spams while I was on holiday. Deleting them manually using GPRS was slow and will cost me a fortune.

Now I have implemented the MT-Blacklist by Jay Allen.

Hopefully this time, comment spam will be a thing of the past….

Quick Links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 15:12:07 +0000

I’m back, the holidays were great. Work has me back with a vengeance. Here are some quick links:

Freeware NT/XP programs - quite some useful stuff here

XP SP2 Installation instructions - I managed without, but maybe it helps you

A better Notes Wiki

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 23:09:26 +0000

Ben Poole has improved upon my NotesWiki I did a long time ago, and come up with this wonderful NotesWiki.

The joys of Open Source Software ;-)

Thanks Ben!

Gone...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:17:34 +0000

… reading
… relaxing
… playing
… sleeping
… viewing modern art
… visiting relatives
… enjoying the family
… listening to music
… swimming
… walking on the beach

See you in 2 weeks

Summer in the city

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 22:20:05 +0000

Now that summer finally has arrived, there are some tough decisions to be made before you take a walk in the city:

Either you don your personal music bubble (iPod + Koss PortaPro) and then miss the duo (she plays saxophone, he the chapman stick) playing music by Michael Brecker.

Or you don’t.

And then you have to dodge the people from Amnesty International, Pro Natura and Tele 2 (in order of annoyance)

Fern. Weh.

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 20:11:35 +0000

Fern.Weh and more

World Music is in the air

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:22:40 +0000

I’ve been in a project that eats a lot of time (4 hours of commute being one of the “killer features”) for a while now. Unfortunately that has not really helped me on my guitar playing.

The internet to the rescue: Indian music at your fingertips.

[via Don Dahlmann]

rm -r is dangerous

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 10:58:59 +0000

Uh oh.

Executing rm -r with root permission is dangerous (as others, unnamed persons know). Luckily not in / and not on a production server.

Learn this lesson: When testing scripts that delete files, do an echo instead of a rm until you are sure, that you are in the right path.

Waiting for the restore crew…

Update: The directory is back - time to leave for the weekend, I guess.

Quick Links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 01:02:26 +0000

In the my-external-brain dept.

What happens when Microsoft designs an iPod clone
Creating validating XHTML forms with Notes
Praise the SMTP designer at Lotus (actually, that’s more like: slap them for not implementing this sooner)
Five steps to implementing GTD (Getting Things Done) with Lotus Notes
Eric Mack on using Notes for Action management

The Tao of Keith

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:29:09 +0000

some good advice for all of us

Amazon bottom up

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:21:53 +0000

What happens if you sort Amazon reviews bottom up? You get classics.

"I found Mr. Davis' playing to be laughable at best. Finally, it's irritating; and confusing that so many people laud it." "It's full of bland harmonizing by guys that could barely swim." I must admit I was misled from the beginning, I thought that this book was actually "The Guide to the Galaxy." However, I was disappointed to find that Adams's book is only referring to a made up book that explains useless knowledge to ficticious characters. Therefore making this book even more useless! and many, many more

[via Photo Matt]

Skype does normal phones

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 14:13:34 +0000

I have been using Skype for a while now and been very satisfied. Recently, Skype has expanded to include calls to POTS (Plain Old Telephone Systems).

You have to buy credits (minimum €10) and then can call. Interesting rates! Calling Germany from Switzerland is about 50% cheaper than using my discount telephone carrier. Voice quality is excellent.

And P2PVOIP continues to be free. Sounds good to me!

GMail Invites available

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 11:36:53 +0000

You want one? Send me an email - first come, first served

[update: they are all gone, stop asking… ]

Repair the repair function please

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 21:12:16 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop running Windows XP decided to have a fit. After the application of generous amounts of TLC, chanting secret mantras and threatening to accelerate it with 9.81 m/s^2 , I got it working again. It decided to re apply about 73 security patches and service packs and booted.

However I have since lost the ability to access my wireless network and the boot process sometimes takes even longer than usual.

Typography for Writers

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 18:18:24 +0000

Read it: Typography for Writers by Dean

(I’m reading through his old stuff - disturbing, entertaining, thoughtful, not boring)

Kids never know when they are disturbing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 16:35:50 +0000

The answer to Doc Searls

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 16:32:38 +0000

I stumbled over Doc Searls “re-mail” entry, where he reflects on an earlier entry, about RSS is opt-in authenticated Email and the answer he’s gotten on that.

Interesting! ZAPPATA started out as a collaboration tool that would use the technologies from the syndication world ( RSS/Atom, polling ) to build a decentralised collaboration tool. And we built it and it worked.

Doc Searls says:

Can those three verbs (notify, subscribe, syndicate) from RSS give us the relationship-support tools we need to solve both the identity problem and the email problem along with it? Is Really Simple Email someting RSS can make possible? I dunno. It just has me thinking.

We found, that it can’t. Well maybe it can, but not with todays tools. The problem being, that there are no client programs available that really allow you to get work done in the syndication world. And we didn’t believe that ZAPPATA could provide the world with the client to do the work.

Trying to emulate OS X

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 15:37:21 +0000

Engadget has an article on how to turn XP into a Mac OS X lookalike.

I like the dropshadow effect on the OSX windows, so I added YzShadow (it seems like it’s difficult to download this, a little googling brings you to a danish page that has all the Yz utilities). So fine, I have dropshadows.

What I really miss though is a desktop extender (virtual desktops) like the Mac has. I think I have tried all those that are availble on Windows, and not a single one of them even comes close to the one you can get for the Mac.

The BuzzPhraser

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 14:45:54 +0000

In need of some interesting sounding text for your next presentation?

Try the Buzz Phraser by Doc Searls

Paper prototyping

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 14:42:37 +0000

Why you should use paper to protoype a web site:

Prototyping tips

Not enough do to?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 14:35:59 +0000

try this cute game and watch the relativity[1] of time become a reality…

[1] Time passes much quicker when you are engaged in the game

Textdrive hosting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 16:23:31 +0000

The last weeks must have been a frenzy for Dean and Jason over at TextDrive.

They managed to get 200 people to sign up for a hosting package that enabled them to start a company. I have bought into it, and have so far received tremendous good support from Jason and Dean. Even special DNS configurations whishes were executed in “near-real-time”. Sending an email to Jason (who does the sys admin thing) resulted in modified DNS record in less than 10 minutes. Impressive!

Web based Mac SE

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 May 2004 22:47:09 +0000

Back in the old days[1], I worked at a company that imported Mac Emulators for the Atari ST and sold them. We had all kind of fun stuff to deal with, the most notorious being to find old Mac ROMs for the emulators.

Anyway - today, it’s easier: Use the Web Based Mac SE without a ROM …

[1] and with old, I mean OLD – I just tried to find references on the web to the company, but it’s difficult… The company was called Trillian, and googling for Trillian is a bad idea (if you’re looking for that specific old, Atari ST distribution company. Searching for Marvin (which was one of the related companies yields a bit better results, and if you actually happen to know the name of some of the products that Marvin developed and Trillian distributed you will find one or two references ;-)

The Google Software Principles

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 May 2004 22:08:59 +0000

Software Principles by Google:

We believe software should not trick you into installing it.
When an application is installed or enabled, it should inform you of its principal and significant functions.
It should be easy for you to figure out how to disable or delete an application.
If an application collects or transmits your personal information such as your address, you should know.
Application providers should not allow their products to be bundled with applications that do not meet these guidelines.

Oh yes! This is something that I will sign immediately. These are good rules, and it’s interesting to see that Google is not only saying “we’re not evil”, but saying it in different tongues.

TextPattern to offer webhosting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 May 2004 16:44:09 +0000

The offer that Dean is making is quite good.

The business model is intersting too - instead of opting for VC funding, Dean is searching out 200 customers to start with. Each pays $199 and get’s lifetime (of Deans new company lifetime that is) webhosting. 1 GB of disk, 10 GB / month of traffic. Good technical specs.

I have signed up for TextDrive and will be migrating my web sites to it peu a peu.

Fuck you very much

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 May 2004 11:18:21 +0000

Thank you very much, Eric Idle. Thank you for singing it out loud.

(Oh - and I know this will attract the comment spammers – so be it – after all, it’s for a good cause)

[via vowe]

Webdesign day

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 21 May 2004 18:02:35 +0000

Today has been a web design day…

Here are some of the tools that have helped me (or would have helped, had I found them earlier):

The Bookmarklet DOM inspector – absolutely fantastic. This saves me from starting Mozilla to use the DOM inspector
The DOM tree chart – also from the SlayerOffice
The Listamatic – convert regular lists to nice menus

Remembering

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 May 2004 16:23:31 +0000

The older I get, the more I remember

I have noticed lately, that I remember more and more things from my past. While I have been busy the last years on building a family, career and one or two businesses, I didn’t have much time to remember things. Everyhing felt fresh, new and interesting.

But in the past couple of months I have noticed something strange. I remember.

I remember how the face cream of my mother smelled. I rememeber the first day in school after we moved to Denmark from Switzerland. I remember my room when I was 6 years old. I remember my first Notes class 13 years ago. I remember jumping into the swimming pool with clothes on at a very early Notes conference in Arizona. I remember how my boss reacted when I quit my first Notes job. I remember the first girl friend I had (and that we went to the Barclay James Harvest concert). I remember the first kiss. I remember the “first time” (no, don’t remind me). I remember the PDP-11 in the flat I rented. I remember the “Spaghetti con Vodka” cooking experiment we did in the WG. I remember the first time I listened to Jimi Hendrix at the tender age of 10. I remember my first music teacher. I remember how it feels to be drunken and stoned at an open air concert when it rains at night and we didn’t have a tent. I remember how it was to be drunk when our teacher at high-school invited us all home and I puked into his garden (sorry Mr. BÃ¼chi). I remember the Fido BBS I ran on an Atari ST. I remember how I wrote my first editor (to be used on said BBS) in Modula-2. I remember how I designed it on the train home from Lloret-del-mar where a couple of my colleagues from university spent a week drinking, jassing (swiss card game), going to “miss wet t-shirt” contests. I remember my first real program (a 8051 assembler, simulator and debugger written in Turbo Pascal). I remember how that rally driver drove me to the train station after a day with a client. I remember catching the plane from GÃ¶teborg to Copenhagen, when we left the clients office across town 30 minutes before departure. I remember how the swiss alps look from a plane from Zurich to Geneva when the sun goes up. I remember Florence and the french girl and the scottish guy that worked for DEC in Geneva and Paris. I remember how cold it was new years eve in New York, when I was alone after I had broken up with my girlfriend a couple of weeks earlier. I remember the perfect day when the plane from New York to Florida took of and made it’s way around Manhattan. I remember the PolarBar and the 25 year old MacAllan at ColoradOS/2. I remember the anatomically correct sheep that Wayne Kovsky got from the Aidon at the last session of the conference. I remember the companys house in San Mateo and how it was to stay there completely alone. I remember how Stu took me out in his Mazda MX-5 over the San Andreas fault down to the pacific and how the pumpkin pie tasted. I remember sitting in the garage of Mark Brassfield, listening to music from his high-end audio system for 5 hours straight. I remember how I couldn’t cry at my half-sisteres funderal, because I already had wept for her, when I learnt that she had cancer 2 years earlier. I remember whom we had for dinner, when my mother called and told me. I remember how Christines friends and I helped her through her depression, staying with her and watched over her every single day for months. I rememeber how the spices of the indian food smelled at the “Christine is well again” celebration dinner when I couldn’t eat anything because I was fasting.

Color matching

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 May 2004 13:42:16 +0000

Generate matching colors:

Colormatch 5k (doesn’t work well in Opera)
ColorMatch Remix (works fine both in Mozilla and Opera)

Inspired my current experiments in designing a website with orange as a dominant color and David Sheas entry on Colour Schemes

The link harvest

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 17 May 2004 09:24:59 +0000

Here’s today’s interesting stories:

[Doing Extreme Programming
P-P-p-powerbook – or how a scammer get’s what he deserves
Leo – a programmers editor, browser and literary programming tool
David Shea on when Tables are OK – CSS is good and there still is (some) room for tables
not long now – a nano future

The civilised world is coming to an end

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 14 May 2004 13:10:57 +0000

And it’s the same old song that has been played for centuries. The civilised world is going down.

No – I’m not talking about the torturing in Iraq. Not about the boneheadedness of some of our politicians. It’s not about Six Aparts controversial new licensing scheme for Movable Type (me? I’m planning my move to Textpattern)

I’m talking about GÃ¼nther. [ link via vowe ]

It seems that the music industry sees it fit to produce garbage like the one I linked to (and I urge you to click on the link, so that the bandwidth bill of the Warner Music explodes). This is what they have money for. On the other hand, the music industry (and of course also Warner) cuts jobs left and right, stops production and distribution of local music and sues people that are listening to “real” music.

Dani @ /dev/null

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 May 2004 09:17:56 +0000

Another get’s bitten by the Blog Virus (although Dani at the moment only seems to have a light blog-flu.

Welcome to the club, and please write more ;-)

ZAPPATA forum

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 12 May 2004 15:52:06 +0000

ZAPPATA has it’s own forum now

The main website isn’t updated yet, but RaphaÃ«l and I are proud to present to you the ZAPPATA forum

Expect more information soon. In the meantime - join our forum and discuss with us

When the test is wrong and other Microsoft stupidities

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 11 May 2004 18:12:48 +0000

If you provide an option to test something, make sure that it tests the right thing

The ZAPPATA crew was doing some spike testing today with different technologies, and due to the nature of the OS market, we did the tests with the tools most widely in use: Windows XP and Outlook.

The Microsoft-Way is a Wizard-Way. Unfortunately, some of the wizards need wizard like skills to operate or make sense of. One task that is automated by a wizard is the setting up of a new email account in Outlook. The friendly wizard takes you through different questions and sets up the mail account. We were trying to set up an account to a simple POP / SMTP server - but one that requires authentication. So we clicked on the correct options (“My outgoing SMTP Server requires authentication”, entered name and password) and then proceeded to click on the big Test Settings button provided. It found the POP server, it found the SMTP server, it checked of various other items as successfull and then failed the test of sending a message. Ok - wrong option, or so we thought. We went back to the advanced options. Changed settings. Tested. Fail. Changed settings. Tests. Looked at server logs.

Most stupid URL

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 10 May 2004 10:32:07 +0000

Having clear URLs on your page or in your web applictation not only is a help to users, but make you think about structure and usability. And - I was wrong

I just happend to come across an email on the Prius Mailing List that had a number of links to Prius ressources.

With great pleasure I present to you the most outraegous URL I have ever come across (and as a Domino Developer, I have come across nasty URLs, believe me!)

Thoughts from the cellar

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 09 May 2004 12:28:17 +0000

Shirt origami really works
Even long-sleeved turtle-necks can be folded neatly (do as described, turn it around, fold longer sleeve inwards at the end of the other sleeve, final fold as usual)
kids clothes work too, but the bigger the easier
Even though kids clothes are smaller, they aren’t faster to process – and there’s more of them
How come kids can’t wear one set of clothes per day?
Grant Green is better for folding than Massive Attack
Shriekback did some very good music and lyrics back in the 80’s. Faded Flowers being my all time favorite melancholic song)
A neatly folded t-shirt feels as good as well factored code
Black socks look very worn out after a lot of washing
When it rains, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the cellar, folding clothes
I want a combination of “computer, log entry” and a SenseCam

Shirt Origami

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 08 May 2004 16:36:05 +0000

The weekend is my reserved for washing. A family with two small children brings together quite an impressive array of dirty clothes during one week. In our family unit, I’m the one tasked with the weekly fight againt entropy and dirt. It’s not my favorite pastime, but I actually enjoy being down in the cellar and folding our clothes. It’s a quiet hour, good for thinking, listening to the iPod and calming down, after a weekend with two very active kids.

20 Questions

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 08 May 2004 16:06:06 +0000

What is this? The 20 Questions A.I. couldn’t guess it…

I am guessing that it is astrology?
 Yes ,  No , Close 
	
29.	  	I guess it an equation? No. 	
28.	  	Would you use it in the dark? No. 	
27.	  	Can you eat it? No. 	
26.	  	Can you control it? No. 	
25.	  	Is it comforting? No. 	
24.	  	Can it be used for recreation? Yes. 	
23.	  	Does it have cash value? No. 	
22.	  	Do you use it at work? Yes. 	
21.	  	Do most people use this daily? No. 	
20.	  	I guess it an MP3 file? No. 	
19.	  	Can you read it? Yes. 	
18.	  	Can you play games with it? No. 	
17.	  	Was it invented? Yes. 	
16.	  	Can it cheer you up? Yes. 	
15.	  	Can it affect you (cause an effect to you)? Yes. 	
14.	  	Can you get information by using it? Yes. 	
13.	  	Is it involved in movies? No. 	
12.	  	Is it useful? Yes. 	
11.	  	Is it used by the police? No. 	
10.	  	Do you hold it when you use it? No. 	
9.	  	Would you find it in an office? Yes. 	
8.	  	Does it come in different colors? No. 	
7.	  	Is it flexible? No. 	
6.	  	Can it be washed? No. 	
5.	  	Would you use it daily? Yes. 	
4.	  	Is it hard? No. 	
3.	  	Does it use electricity? No. 	
2.	  	Was it used over 100 years ago? No. 	
1.	  	It is classified as Other.

Delicious

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 01 May 2004 23:26:03 +0000

Birthday dinner

Hors d’oevres chauds

La nouvelle facon

Foie gras et chutney maison

Ris de veau frit

Filets de sole Prince Murat

CrÃªpe aux champignons des bois Eden

Petite variation d’entrements

Fromages sur assiette

happy birthday to you

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 09:18:14 +0000

My wonderful wife celebrates her birthday today. Happy birthday to you - thanks for the time I can spend with you and our kids.

I hope, we’ll never end up like this ;-)

T - 10 months

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 10:12:08 +0000

Today I signed the contract for our new car. Now the waiting time begins. If all goes well, we’ll receive the Toyota Prius in February 2005.

I saw the Prius 2 months ago at a car show and liked the technical data. It’s a hybrid car with two engines: a regular gas-engine and an electrical engine. Computers contol how the engines work together. The gas engine is used to recharge the batteries and to help the electrical engine when more power is needed.

Matthias online

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 11:48:23 +0000

Of course Matthias Leisi has been online for quite a while. Now he has his own braindump on the web.

Welcome to the club!

Memery

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 11:44:23 +0000

Requiring this kind of confirmation is as draconian as it is futile

According to this meme about grabbing the nearest book and looking up the 5th sentence on page 23.

(the book is The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin)

[ via FrozenSkies, via the Textpattern Support Forum]

Textpattern links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 10:08:02 +0000

Getting ready for some changes to this webiste:

Blogger meets real life reader

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 23:19:25 +0000

This evening I had this strange experience that a lot of my blogger colleagues probably have had already…

I have met the first reader of my blog in flesh.

I knew Tanja through the web and mail and tonight we were at her place for dinner for the first time. Suddenly she said “you are the invisible guy, right?”. And then she talked about stuff I have blogged about: my kids, my company and so on.

Fun with mod_rewrite

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 14:01:31 +0000

I don’t like people deep-linking to my images. And neither do others. Some quick mod_rewrite rules helps…

I noticed an increased activity on my blog and a lot of referres from an italian site recently. Today I had time to look at the logs and I found a site that linked to my Gicaometti image.

I didn’t like that too much, so I googled a bit and found ChaosReigns cure. He excluded everybody from deep linking, but I only wanted to make the point to this one person.

Boycott the music industry

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:29:37 +0000

It’s time to show the music industry who their customers are – by boycotting them. (like vowe)

After Germany the swiss IFPI has announced that they are sueing “music pirates”.

Well, dear music industry: You are alienating your customers. I have bought > 800 CDs, a couple of 100 LPs (back in the old days) and a handfull of singles.

Music is part of my life (both listening and making) and I fully understand the need for artists to make a living. However, YOU, the music industry, are not helping. I would gladly buy music over the internet (ITunes music store), but you haven’t been able to make that available to me.

Pop-up scenes

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 13:57:05 +0000

When the weather is bad, the day is grey and the kids have watched too much TV already, IÂ´m going to fire up the search engine on this site and search for How to make a pop up scene by Ned.

Penis-Owners Manual

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:20:42 +0000

fun! Penis Owners Manual

Certifiying an expired Notes ID

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:41:53 +0000

Dept. My-outsourced-memory

When you move past the expiration date, here’s the procedure to recertify a user ID

You have a user ID that has expired and you would like to manually recertify it.

The ID can open Notes, because the password is valid, but the user cannot do anything else, as the end date has expired. If the user selects File, Tools, User ID, Certificate, Request Certificate, a message is generated indicating the certificate has expired.

Looking for a all-in-one office printer/scanner/fax

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 12:20:21 +0000

And boy does this seem to be difficult… Here’s what I need:

b/w printing (color nice, but not fundamental)
duplex printing a big plus
Color scanner (good, but not pro quality)
Fax - manual and from computer
Network enabled (wireless plus)
Postscript plus

I don’t care about ink / laser. Price is secondary, I want a high-quality experience. This for an office with 2-3 people and small-medium volume. No high-end machines please.

Gone skiing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:20:11 +0000

I’m off to a week of snow and skiing… See you on March 8th

Finding side effects with IDEA

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:59:10 +0000

I was on a bug hunt the last couple of hours. When I looked at a web page served by our application server, it’s content showed up. When I pressed reload, only the summary of the content showed up. Somehow, someone changed my ( my! ) private variable somewhere. I sprinkeld the code liberally with print statements (ahh - nothing goes over a good dose of those) because the app would be quite cumbersome to run in the debugger.

T minus 3.5 days

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 16:53:05 +0000

Finding a URL in a text

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 10:13:49 +0000

How do you find a URL in a normal text and turn it into a HTML link using regular expressions? That was the challenge I faced recently. Oh - and of course not only well formed url’s (with the https:// in front of them, but any kind of url.

Why invent something, when there’s google to search? I found Ben Forta’s “How to match a URL” but unfortunately it was way to forgiving in what it parsed, so I had to expand it a bit. Here are the results of a couple of hours of labor: UPDATE: There was a nasty bug, that truncated all urls where the host started with the letters of one of the TLD’s to the reminder … www.invisible.ch got truncated to visible.ch. The code below is corrected and simplified a bit (removed a couple of unneeded groups) ([\s]|^|<p>) (https?://)? (([\w]+?[-\w\.]+?\.)+ (a[cdefgilmnoqrstuwz]|b[abdefghijmnorstvwyz]| c[acdfghiklmnoruvxyz]|d[ejkmnoz]|e[ceghrst]| f[ijkmnor]|g[adefghilmnpqrstuwy]|h[kmnrtu]| i[delmnoqrst]|j[emop]|k[eghimnprwyz]| l[abcikrstuvy]|m[acdghklmnopqrstuvwxyz]| n[acefgilopruz]|om|p[aefghklmnrstwy]|qa| r[eouw]|s[abcdeghijklmnortvyz]|t[cdfghjkmnoprtvwz]| u[ugkmsyz]|v[aceginu]|w[fs]|y[etu]|z[amw]| com|edu|mil|gov|org|net|int|info|biz|name|pro |museum|aero|coop){1})+ (:\d+)? (/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)? ([\s]|</p>|<br />|$) and then replace it with: $1>a href="$2$3$6$7"<$2$3$6$7>/a<$10

Pesky Deletion Stubs

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 09:15:15 +0000

I’m watching over a Notes based Faxserver at a client. There is a lot of personel data imported daily from a SQL database. The process has been taking longer and longer and longer, not finishing and occasionally crashing the server.

Babysitting the process, dropping in occasional log messages (something the original developers didn’t do) and doing some educated guesses shows me, that the refreshing of a view is taking in excess of 4 hours.

WebDevelopers Toolkit for Mozilla/FireFox

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 06:51:00 +0000

Here’s collection of a lot of useful bookmarklets / links for the webdeveloper. Allows you to change the way forms work, view headers, outline your pages, validate your html/css and much much more.

Works with Mozilla and Firefox.

Webdeveloper Plugin. Get it!

Optimizing FireFox

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 11:33:39 +0000

In Mozilla FireFox: type “about:config” in the adressbar and the hunt those settings and change them accordingly:

user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true); user_pref("network.image.imageBehavior", 0); user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48); user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16); user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true); user_pref("network.http.pipelining.firstrequest", true); user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 100); user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true); user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 100);

by Geek Styke via Simon and his blogmarks

Attention: Don't look at this game

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 21:08:55 +0000

I said: Don’t! Don’t go to CrazyMachines. Don’t download the demo. Don’t play it. Don’t rush out and buy the game… [1]

[1] If you do and live in a country other than “Deutschland (Deutschland)” (like “Deutschland (Schweiz)” you will get errors when installing (An error about “Transform” and “Transformpfade”). Just switch to the “Deutschland (Deutschland) scheme and you’ll be fine for the install)

Also if you do: prepare to spend a couple of hours in front of the computer, not working

RAID 1 - easy as pie

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 18:46:13 +0000

This server was down a bit during the day when I installed the new 3Ware RAID IDE Controller and moved a couple of directories to a mirrored disk. The process was more or less painless but I learnt a couple of interesting tid-bits.

Computers don’t turn themselves on, when they don’t have power. That means - if nothing happens on pressing the BRS, check that the connector from the power supply is firmly seated in the motherboard. (Turns out that I partially unplugged mine when fumbling with additional IDE cables.

Announcing merger: InVisible GmbH coming

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 06 Feb 2004 16:29:01 +0000

invisible is not only the name of this blog, but also the name of my company “invisible Jens Christian Fischer”. I do consulting, Lotus Notes / Domino mainly, intranets, web development and so on. (If you need a consultant in this area, send me an email)

My wife’s company is called “visible”.

Both are what is called “Einzelfirmen” - they are companies that belong to individuals and as such, the company is me, and I’m the company.

All MT Blogs must die

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 18:49:16 +0000

Oh - I learnt something today…

**You are all pretentious twats **
Every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky.

Espresso (double), Windows, city, primary, atheist…

You decide on the rest ;-)

read rant [ via hannes]

New address of this blog

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 12:48:13 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, please update your bookmarks:

https://invisible.ch

The old adress will work for some time, the /archives link will work indefinitely, but please go to the new adress in the future.

I need this address for something else soon.

Preparing update

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 11:50:45 +0000

The server you are hitting is about to undergo some major surgery. First of all, it will get a 3Ware 2 Port RAID Adapter together with 2 Samsung SpinPoint 160 GB disks, serving in a RAID 1 configuration.

Next, the aging Red-Hat 7.3 system will be updated to a Debian Woody Stable release. I have googled around, and there are a number of “How-To’s” - Emma’s one has links to installation notes, HOW-TO’s and the works.

venture.ch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 21:37:49 +0000

We were at the handing out of prices for the best business idea at Venture 2004 this evening, held in the Auditorium Maximum of ETH Zurich. My new venture, ZAPPATA Networks had entered with their business idea in the beginning of January, and today the best 10 business ideas were awarded CHF 2'500.–

Not surprisingly, we weren’t in the top 10. We weren’t even in the top 43 - but somewhere between place 238 and 44. Actually there was no “real” IT company in the top 10 and only 3 or 4 in the runners up. Could it be that the sponsoring companies were favoring their interests.? Novartis and Roche and 6 winning projects that are developing either drugs or their products are usable in the pharma / life-science industry? Or that 8 of the projects are coming from a university? But that would probably be pure conjecture on my part.

Server ist ausgelastet...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 11:23:49 +0000

And while I’m at it… What the heck is that?

This pops up from time to time, and sometimes it goes away, sometimes it doesn’t…

Anyone out there seen this and know what program causes this? (I have the urge to remove that program from my system ;-) )

UI gods @ work

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 11:18:52 +0000

Confession: I don’t run a virus scanner. I had one and it brought my system to a crawl. I deleted it. But then I don’t use Outlook, I don’t use IE so I think I’m pretty safe… And so far, that seems to hold true.

With all the MyDoom brouha going on, I thought it was a good idea to scan my PC for this worm(s), so I used the Symantec scanner that they offer for free download. After a couple of hours trashing around on my harddisk, it finally completed, resulting in the following screen:

120 Gig died

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 22:55:42 +0000

So I have this small, self-built, fan-less (thus silent) server that has been backing up my laptop, serving my music and video and generally been a nice chap, and easy going.

That is until a couple of days ago it stopped responding. Today I had time to hook up a monitor and a keyboard to it, and booted to an emergeny linux root prompt. Seems my disk is kaputt in a major way. I get a lot of non-recoverable IDE / DMA and god knows what other errors.

Belle du Jour with Atom Feed

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 11:33:59 +0000

A cool blog it is - Belle Du Jour Diariy of a London Call Girl but until now you had to wander to the site to do the reading.

Now she sports RSS feeds (and more importantly) an ATOM feed as well…

Time to update ZAPPATA to handle xhtml in a <summary> tag…

Using ZOE for accounting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 11:28:19 +0000

I have a raved about Zoe before because it’s just a very handy tool to have. It (of course) archives my email and I can access it from remote sites as well (fascist firewall/proxy combos not being in the middle).

Today I learnt that Zoe helps me with accounting. It’s the time of year where I have to give my accountant all bank and credit card statements with attached receipts. After the first big bill from the account I have taken to hand in the stuff in a more organized form than usually. That meant that I had most of my stuff parat.

Empty Blog? No - the ZEN of working

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 11:27:36 +0000

Just noticed that my blog has been empty for a couple of days. I have been so busy during the last couple of weeks, that everything else in my life has taken a seat on the backseat. It’s a pleasure to work for 12 hours in a stretch, fully concentrated, no distraction necessary or allowed. The “being in the zone” for so long time is an experience that I haven’t had for years. It’s extremely satisfiying and I wonder how long it will last…

Develop with Pleasure

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 15:44:28 +0000

That’s what IntelliJ claims that you have, when you develop with their upcoming Aurora release.

Take a look at what I get as a result from my UnitTests:

Now that’s really what I call: “developing with pleasure”

Virtuoso Neuston MC-500 & Linux Server

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 21:02:54 +0000

I recently got a Neuston Virutoso MC-500 streaming media client. A nice box that really does what it’s supposed to to: Stream music and videos to my TV and living room amplifier.

The only drawback: It requires a windows PC as a server. I have moved all my media to a little fanless Debian box and was hoping to stream my media from there.

Enter the OpenShowCenter which is for Pinnacle streaming systems but works equally well for the MC-500.

Fake Paypal mails

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 17:48:37 +0000

People without a good browser will not see this - they will be lured into the traps…

What can I say - don’t use IE

Atom feed available

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 07 Jan 2004 10:25:45 +0000

I’ve been busy working on an Atom parser the last couple of days. Time to also publish this blog in ATOM 0.3 format..

Thanks to Mark for the MT Plugin.

And now back to work. After the joys of Atom, now is the time for the dreariness of RSS 2.0 and it’s ugly parents.

The ZEN of skiing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 06 Jan 2004 11:04:33 +0000

Sometimes you don't fight the skis. You don't fight the weather. You don't fight the mountain.
In rare circumstances, your body flows down the mountain in fluid motion. You don’t have to think about the at of skiing. Your body just does it. You become part of the mountain.

Excellent.

All in all I achieved this state for a total of about 2 minutes during the holidays. It was worth it.

What flower

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 28 Dec 2003 18:34:32 +0000

Yesterday I understood the lyrics of a song by Laurie Anderson that I have been fond of for about 20 years. Sometimes I take a while longer…

The man walks into the flowershop and asks:
What flower best expreses the passing of time, days go by endlessly, pulling you into the future…

And the florist says: White Lily

The ZEN of driving

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 25 Dec 2003 23:07:05 +0000

My wife learnt to drive a car about a year ago. We tend to talk about driving, styles of driving, how to drive etc.

Almost every time you drive, somebody will make a mistake or be deliberately rude on the road. My wife usually get’s nervous and upset when that happens and starts to shout, curse and sound the horn, raise the finger - stuff we all do. However, I have practised something else for many years: I just let it pass.

Life is a snapshot

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 25 Dec 2003 22:48:38 +0000

Phil mobloged his trip to asia. 1066 pictures - 21 days, every 30 minutes

[via Joi]

Opera 7.50 Preview 1

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 20 Dec 2003 21:29:00 +0000

It’s getting better all the time…

RSS Reader
New GUI
self learning categorisation of mail
IRC client
lot of bug fixes
lot of new bugs

I like it so far.. Sure it has a couple of warts, but knowing how those guys in Norway work, Opera 7.50 wil mature fast. I just wondered, when the last feature upgrade for IE came out - 2 years ago? Thank god there are alternatives…

F(l)ight Patents

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 23:34:40 +0000

Another thing found 100 Years Of Turbulence by maciej who hangs out on #joiito.

This article beautifully links the history of flight with patents - and gives a very good example of why patents are a bad thing. Also a blog to put on the read list

Widgetopia - a look at the web GUI

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 23:09:45 +0000

This is a really usefull collection of different solutions to common web navigation problems. Finding out what works and what not, and why is kind of left as an excercise to the reader - but I like the many examples and the non-in-your-face “This is wrong” useit style.

Widgetopia

Stu's CSS magic

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 23:00:56 +0000

Surfing, I found Stu’s CSS site, don’t remember who had the link.

Take a look at what can be done with CSS

I'm Crush

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:28:23 +0000

What Finding Nemo Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Confessions of a fetishist

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 08:15:37 +0000

I confess - I have a fetish (well actually, a couple of them, but I’m only going to talk about one that is for public consumption).

I am into keyboards. Computer keyboards. I don’t know when it started, but I was always fascinated with keyboards. I learnt touch typing at the tender age of 12 (going to a course and possibly being the youngest in that school to learn to type).

Setting up Debian for ISP use

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:45:30 +0000

Good guide on installing and configuring Debian to be used as an ISP server. Has some good information on configuring various interesting stuff…

The Perfect Setup

3 Computers and a WLAN

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 02:13:22 +0000

from the “it-just-works” dept:

three people, three computers, three operating systems - one new WLAN access point in my office.

Installing the access point (D-Link AP2000) and finding the DHCP setting for it’s IP adress: 5 minutes (D-Link could use some help designing the web interface for their access point… Good: You have to change the default admin password to use it)

Mac OS/X: online without intervention
Windows XP: online with one manual intervention (select to connect to insecure WLAN)
Linux: online with severe manual intervention (and writing obscure stuff in some configuration files)

All in all - a really enjoyable experience…

FileSystems in Python

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 12 Dec 2003 12:46:47 +0000

Simon always has interesting reading, and the Python Filesystems article is no exception.

CSS - lower right text & Mac

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:29:57 +0000

What a joy… coding a simple website with some text on the lower right, independent of browser window size. No, no JavaScript please. And no - no tables, they are so 90s. So - because it’s “Ã la mode” it’s XHTML and CSS.

And because it’s commercial, it should look good on a number of different systems. Also on a Mac. With IE on a Mac.

A couple of hours later - I give up. IE/Mac is so broken, that there are websites that deal with a lot of annoyances.

Languages and Syntax

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 10:12:46 +0000

I know and write in way to many languages. Specifically in computer languages. Over the years I have written code in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, LotusScript, LotusFormulas, Smalltalk, Perl, Python, Ruby, Pascal, Modula-2, APL (read only, thanks god), 8051 Assembler and probably a couple of things I have hidden from my conciousness. I love languages.

But I hate writing them. I’m constantly switching between languages (at the moment: LotusScript, JavaScript, Java and Perl) and I always get the small things wrong:

New Toys and time to remeber

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Dec 2003 23:52:17 +0000

I moved my Linux Home Server from a Sereniti 2000 case (which is a hopeless piece of crap, cheap metal, had to hammer one screw through the aluminium because it was stuck and the screwdriver literally screwed it, and noisy as hell) with a smaller Morex 2688 which sports a lot less space inside but has no fans! Ahh - a quiet server - unless it’s accessing the harddisk… This will go in a closet soon and serve my music and my videos and backup my Windows PC’s here at Chaos Central.

Simple File Sharing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 23:52:27 +0000

The first backup with BackupPC has finished - faster than I expected. When I checked the backup set, I saw, that the /Windows and /Documents and Settings directories didn’t get backed up….

Hmm - looking at their properties, I found that there were not shareable because “the operating system needs them”…

What?

A bit of searching on the mailinglist of BackupPC found someone with a similar problem and with the solution: There’s a “simple sharing” option in Windows XP - a dumbed down version so to speak. Switching it off is described in the MS Knowledgebase.

On Keywords

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 22:25:01 +0000

A while ago, I was listed on the Swiss Weblogs Wiki and had a chance to update my profile. Stephanie who runs the list, mailed me and asked me to provide some keywords to go with my entry. I couldn’t think of any, so I let the matter rest. After a couple of weeks, she caught up with me on IRC at #joiito and insisted ;-) on me providing keywords. So I did - and I’m unhappy with the result.

Debian Reference Manual

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 20:59:33 +0000

While installing BackupPC I found the Debian Reference Manual which I didn’t know…

Handy to have laying around

BackupPC installed

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 20:57:08 +0000

I had a go at installing BackupPC on a smallish personal server I built for a project that didn’t take off. The machine is a Via Eden board (with a high-performance C3 500 Mhz CPU :-) ) and a 120 Gig Harddrive. There’s a Debian Woody installed and I used this lazy afternoon to convert it to my home server. It already has 40 Gigs of my music and now it’s backing up 30 Gigs of data from this laptop.

BackupPC

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 26 Nov 2003 11:37:50 +0000

I have been thinking about how to reliable backup my different computers and laptops. One solution that I favoured was to use rsync to synd all my stuff to a central server (and use rsync again to sync the backup sets between two servers on different locations).

I thought about a neat frontend for, that would allow me to select the directories that would be backuped and a webfrontend for restore.

Pragmatic Books

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 02:01:33 +0000

I have enjoyed the The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and the Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide books by Dave and Andy

Now they have written two new pragmatic books with a third on the way: The Pragmatic Starter Kit with books on CVS and JUnit already available. I’ll be buying them after I finish this entry… (PDF or printed version? hmm - PDF is faster satisfaction)

(oh, and here are the Amazon.de links for the “real” books):

Conference Presentation Judo

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:45:13 +0000

It’s been quite a while since I have been doing long presentations, actually trying to teach things to people, but nonetheless, Conference Presentation Judo was a good read, and got quite some head nodding from me… “Yeah - I remember making that mistake”

If you give presentation, take a look, and you might learn a trick or two. Be sure to read the detailed notes…

Interesting things happening on the AI front

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 14:50:33 +0000

Here I am, innocent and all, when all of a sudden a new Yahoo Messenger window opens…

The transcript might not be suitable for younger persons that are influenced easily but fun nonetheless… Bot technology has improved quite a bit!

Read on for the conversation:

kraziekookiegurl: hi…. anyone there? jenscfischer: yes kraziekookiegurl: oh your there hi… jenscfischer: what can I do for you? kraziekookiegurl: a/s/l (age seex location)? jenscfischer: 36/m/switzerland kraziekookiegurl: im 27/f/USA. was lookin at your profile. thoughtt you might like to chat. kraziekookiegurl: so what have you been up to jenscfischer? jenscfischer: then you should have known the anwers to all of the a/s/l question already kraziekookiegurl: cool. i was just hangin out watching tv. i wasgetting kinda horny (*blushes)
jenscfischer: you are a bot, right? kraziekookiegurl: bot? whas that? some kinda insult or something? kraziekookiegurl: feel like a little cyber fun with me ? plrase please…
jenscfischer: what on us tv made you horny? kraziekookiegurl: i think ill just take that as a yes… being as that im starting to get real horny hrre.. lol ok? jenscfischer: what are your perversions then? kraziekookiegurl: alright how bout i get down on my knees in front of you and help you oout of your pants? jenscfischer: that’s not perverted at all - that’s normal behaviour. do you have a kinkier side than just giving head? kraziekookiegurl: ;-) jenscfischer: I take that as…? kraziekookiegurl: tell me what you want me to do with you while i slip out off my panties jenscfischer: I’m nasty and have a bad breath… I hope you can handle that kraziekookiegurl: oh yeah babe.. dont stop. while i slide my hhand down between my legs and part my moist lips jenscfischer: cute bot jenscfischer: but very vanilla kraziekookiegurl: oh you mean one of those aito talk things or something right.. lol. well if you were in my apartment right now id lift up my skirt for you and i think youd be convinced real quick
jenscfischer: aito? kraziekookiegurl: oh it feels so good. Im holding your pulsing cock in my hand, my shiny red fingernails dig ently into your balls, while my full, soft lips engulf the mass of your meat kraziekookiegurl: open my website so you can look at me while im sucking you. uuse the link in my profile! jenscfischer: today we had really nice weather jenscfischer: some sun jenscfischer: not too cold kraziekookiegurl: whhat do you think of my pics? kraziekookiegurl: shit the phone. dont stop stroking it. hhold on… jenscfischer: beautiful jenscfischer: unfortunately I had to work kraziekookiegurl: sorry, I have to take this call, probly take bout five minutes. If you want, come to my page and lets finish this. I have my cam on there cyberfungirls dot com look for me on there jenscfischer: impressive - quite impressive - you might want to work on the context sensing logic a bit though

Ask Igor

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 13:18:50 +0000

We had a good laugh at this one - people who know me personally and know what I did in the beginning of the year will know why…

AskIgor is a service that will automatically test faulty programs and tell you why they fail. (Limited to C/C++ Linux86 programs at the moment - but hey - some would argue that exactly these programs would benefit the most)

Interesting also is the work, that the people behind the AskIgor service are doing for Eclipse. They are developing a number of plugins that analyze why your Java programs are failing. The first one, that is available already can deduce faulty input.

Made it through the OLE filter

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:40:23 +0000

Ole had this to say…

In a few cases, the blog was still there, the blogger was still active, but I didn't see anything interesting. And if I don't find it interesting, I'm not going to link it. Your mileage may vary!

And - I’m still on his extended blog-roll… Feels good, somehow ;-)

ProFont

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:27:22 +0000

Catching up on my reading of Joel pointed me to ProFont, a rendition of the Mac 9 point font for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’m a sucker for big screens with small content, so I downloaded it and I’m using it on the 1600x1200 display. People will cry that it’s too small, but I’m the one in front of the computer all day, and I wear glasses - so don’t bother me about that ;-)

What happened to LinkedIn?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 23:50:54 +0000

Raphael of Zoe fame invited me to connect to his LinkedIn network.

“Great”, I thought, “pushing 20 connections” and clicked on the supplied link - only to be thrown a 404

Hmm - going directly to LinkedIn brought me this strange page . Whois GoDaddy?

Registered through: GoDaddy.com Domain Name: LINKEDIN.COM Created on: 05-May-03 Expires on: 02-Nov-03 Last Updated on: 12-Nov-03

Maybe someone forgot to pay the bill? Or is it just imcompetence? I’ll try again tomorrow ;-)

Tired

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 23:39:53 +0000

I travelled to Munich today for a very important meeting about my company. Due to the strike of the strike of the railroad workers in Austria, I traversed a tiny part of Austria by bus, curtesy of swiss railroads. Unfortunately that prolonged the trip by 45 minutes. In the afternoon preparations for the meeting that took place at 6. A quick coffee with an old friend in a Biergarten, and then almost 4 hours of meetings with shareholders and investors.

Time flies

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 10:34:49 +0000

Almost two weeks without an entry on the blog - oh god. My faithfull readership (yes - I know that there are some out there) must have turned away in disgust.

I have had way to much to do the last couple of weeks, and my “hair turning gray ratio” has accelerated at an uncomfortable pace.

While being on the blog-o-pause I have thought a lot about why I blog, what I blog about, why I should continue to do it (and of course about the meaning of life). The last question - thankfully - has the simplest answer: 42 (although, when reading about Danielle and her trial, I think there must be more….)

Store Notes Attachments with the correct filename

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:43:27 +0000

Amazing that something as simple as detaching an attachment from a Notes Document can be so complicated:

Post on notes.net that explains how to retrieve the filename of the attachment…

DocBook XSL

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 10:53:07 +0000

Did I blog this before? Doesn’t matter, it’s an important link…

DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide

Blogging break

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:51:55 +0000

In case you hadn’t noticed… I’m on a blogging break. I have been very busy the last weeks and I had to cut down the time I read other peoples blogs. It seems that the act of not reading a blog leads to also not writing a blog.

I have a couple of new things to talk about (Tungsten T3, SonyEricsson T610, Posting Multipart/form-data from Perl to Notes, the SMTP server in Domino 5.0.11 and it’s handling of CRLF on inbound mails, the wild success that I’m having with Ben’s Midas LSX and a couple of other things - or rather - things that shouldn’t be talked about (*)) but I’m just to tired…

No more comment spam

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 19 Oct 2003 22:33:17 +0000

I have had one too many comment spams now. I have implemented James Seng’s MT plugin that displays an image with some numbers that you have to type in the box below. Only humans are supposed to be able to do this ;-)

On a side note: On a Redhat 7.3 system, you need to get the current version of GD before using the perl GD module that you get through CPAN… I spent quite a bit of time tracking that down… thanks to a FAQ on GraphDefang for pointing me in the right direction.

CSS Layout-O-matic

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Oct 2003 15:38:19 +0000

Great stuff:

Layoutomatic will create cross-browser compatible multi-column stylesheets…

[via Zeldman]

Do you want a refurbished P800?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Oct 2003 14:38:00 +0000

Well - you know what happened to my P800. While it was getting repaired (actually it got a new screen and parts of a new case) I lived with my old R520 and the Tungsten T3 came out.

I broke down and now have the T3 - and in combination with my R520 it beats the P800 in almost every discipline.

it’s fast, really fast
The screen is gorgeous
Dialing a phone number is at least 3 times faster with the combination T3 -> R520 -> HBH-15 (bluetooth headset) than with the P800
It runs HourzPro and LifeBalance - two programs I can’t live without

Do you want a refurbished P800 on ebay?

The Frontend of the application is wrong

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 06 Oct 2003 14:29:07 +0000

The Problem with many web applications is the frontend by Asterisk* - well put, well written and I ruefully take my part of the blame.

But I’m learning….

80% new Laptop

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 06:08:55 +0000

After the switch of the graphicscard last week, the problems with my laptop persisted. That meant that the friendly technician went out of the door and came back a day later with a new mainboard for my computer. After exchanging that - the weirdness on the screen was gone - finally.

So I’m left with a 80% new computer: The case, HD, DVD and battery are old, the rest is new ;-) I think that Dell is working on their support processes to minimize the occurence of another case of changing three components before their computer starts working again - a call from their service center an hour after the technician left, leads me to believe that.

There goes the productivity

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 15:12:23 +0000

Uh - oh… so much for my productive streak today…

The Lock On: Modern Air Combat demo is out…

See you later

Oh and download of the 123 MB file was done in just about 30 minutes - thanks to my 1024/256 ADSL and BitTorrent

Saving a Dell, part II

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 15:04:27 +0000

After all in all one hour on the phone yesterday with Dell support, flashing of the BIOS, unplugging and plugging the LCD cable and other chant and incantations, today a technician arrived with a brand new LCD panel and switched it for the old one. After switching on the laptop - the same display problems persist….

So it’s not the panel, but the graphicscard that is faulty.

I’ll get a new one tomorrow morning - sigh…

Free the last mile, part II

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 12:53:01 +0000

I grudingly accepted a change in ADSL plan last week and was looking forward to 512/512 soon.

Until 5 minutes ago, when I got a call from my ADSL ISP. The lady told me, that my phone lines wouldn’t be able to handle 512 upload, so I had the choice of staying (staying? You sent me a letter last week that told me I had to change) at 1024/256 - but for an additional CHF 100 per month. Or I could go to 512/280 (which seems to be the best upload speed I can get) for - get this - the same price as they are offering 512/512.

Identify a font

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 21:46:06 +0000

This is great: Answer twelve questions about a font you see, and Identify a font tells you what you are looking at.

[via Pieter]

Saving a Dell

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 00:33:34 +0000

The display on my Inspiron 8200 has gone from slightly flaky to totally unusable in a matter of only two days. It started with odd colors during boot - it looked like the red has gone. Then some syncing errors cropped up. After a couple of seconds it would be ok… Now the display has gone compeletely nuts and the beautyfull 1600x1200 pixel display just displays white, out-of-sync lines.

Couple that with an increasing number of Windows XP blue screens - and it means you are looking at a lot of trouble. XP blue screens right after booting - and I can’t read what went wrong. The secure startup mode still works, but network, USB and FireWire don’t work.

Elevator moods

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 13:52:18 +0000

Ever been in an elevator? You know that there are security camers? See ElevatorMoods for what could happen in an elevator.

The Caves of HTML

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 13:27:48 +0000

Welcome to Caves of HTML!
You are in a dark cave scattered about with fragments of HTML and graphics. You think you saw a domain name go scuttling along the wall where the light from the entrance just reaches. It’s cold.

? Make pop-under

You can’t do that now.

Welcome to the caves of HTML

Mobile Phone Decisions

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 13:16:30 +0000

Last week I dropped my P800 3 meters onto a concrete floor. The screen broke so I sent it in for repairs. Today I got a call that the repair is going to cost over CHF300 - a new P800 can be had for about CHF 900.

While I like the P800, it has enough warts that I’m considering an alternative. Right now I have re-lived my Handspring Visor and my old R520. I really, really, really liked that I had all my adresses on the phone and being able to call any number without further syncing.

Sort HTML tables Client-Side

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 11:14:02 +0000

Sort a Table using Javascript.

[via design media]

52 ways to getting things done

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 21:06:55 +0000

The book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen is one of my all time favorites. David has helped my productivity enormously with his workflow process and most of all the idea, that you need to get all of the things you need to do out of your head and on paper so they will stop nagging you.

Now he has written a new book, “Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work ans Life”. It’s a collection of thoughts that he has been sharing on the mailing list of his DavidCo web site, organized and rewritten. The very first chapter, “Cleaning up creates new directions” had me scrambling to do a full brain dump of all the things and projects that I need to be working on. Getting them out on paper (or in my case into LifeBalance has helped me on getting a few things done right away and a much better understanding of what I need to do during the next days and weeks - and boy - there is a lot of things that need to be done.

Master Geek

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 07:16:51 +0000

So I’m a master geek! I scored 70% on the Geek IT Test which ranks me as master geek. Take the test, but don’t forget your Mailinator email adress when you do.

[via Duffbert ]

Demo of the Zooming User Interface

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 06:55:03 +0000

Jef Raskin commented on my mini-review of his book “The Humane Interface” and provided a link to the demo of the zooming interface.

It’s a interactive flash movie, that shows a Zooming User Interface at work. I’m not sure, if the ZUI realy is THE way to represent a large amount of data or not. It seems to be easy enough, but I wonder if this is the right metaphor? On the other hand, Jef has quite a bit more experience with this than I do, so I bow to his expertise. Oh - and in the demo, the missing screenshot of the humane editor is included (and it’s also on the website)

Free the last mile

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 23:45:47 +0000

Today I got regular mail from my ADSL ISP (Econophone): Swisscom is changing ADSL speeds and I have to choose my new connection speed.

At the office, I currently have 1024/256 which I find is a great ratio for downloads and for keeping all my servers running and responisve. (This blog is served through that line). I pay 145 CHF / month which I find a reasonable price. Now Swisscom obviously thinks, that this speed is cutting into their leased line business, so that speed combination is no longer after October 1st. I have two choices: Downgrade to 600/100 for CHF 74 / month (which is unacceptable for servers) or downgrade/upgrade to 512/512 (for CHF 195 / month). The more interesting speed 1024/512 is priced at 245 / month.

Coming back

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 23:32:30 +0000

I managed to close two projects last monday, successfully deploying a new release of a Notes based manual (remember the 15'000 links that needed to be changed) and the productive release of a relational database (with a Notes backed - no, don’t ask) on a corporate intranet. Almost everything went smooth, I have two rather satisfied clients, the two databases link together as they should - life is good!

I have some more time to play around, thinking about what to do next. I’m juggling with a couple of ideas, there are some really interesting things that seem to develop - it’s going to be interesting times ahead.

Musik Motz

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 20:28:06 +0000

DonDahlmann uber die Musikindustrie

YES! Ich besitze 800 CD’s - ich habe jede einzelne davon gekauft. Ich hore viel Musik (dank dem IPod kann ich jetzt auch einen kleinen Teil meiner Sammlung mit mir rumtragen). Aber ich habe keinen Bock mehr jede CD ungehort zu kaufen. Ich mag die EMules und Kazaas dieser Welt. Aber wenn ich einen KÃ¼nstler, einen Musiker hore, der Musik macht, der meine Seele beruhrt, der mir etwas gibt - dann kaufe ich mir seine CD - mit Sicherheit.

More Skype

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 20:55:27 +0000

After over a day where no-one called me I finally persuaded two friends of me to give Skype, the “internet telephony program” a try.

Installed, made a connection, started talking and nearly fell out of my chair.

I use a Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop with the built in mic and speakers. And the voice connection was absolutely clear, brilliant. No echo, no lag, no funny compression artifacts. The first call was with someone with a headset / mic and it was just gorgeous - better than ISDN.

VOIP

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 22:08:47 +0000

Do you want to talk to me? Call me using Skype from the makers of KaZaa. Peer to peer Voice over IP (P2PVOIP - what an unwieldy acronym)

My username on Skype: jenscfischer

Erster Sex und SM Kontaktanzeigen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 10:12:53 +0000

Nur mal kurz auftauchen um zwei Links zu platzieren, uber die ich mich kringelig gelacht habe: Mein erster Sex und Was bedeuten SM Kontaktanzeigen wirklich

Und jetzt zuruck zu Buchhaltungshandbuchern

EMail heaven

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 12:24:48 +0000

I have dabbled for a long time to set up my perfect email environment. Now it slowly comes together… Here are the advantages of my setup:

access to my complete email from everywhere where I have internet access
Fulltext search and auto classifiying
Almost spam free
virus free
Managment free

Interested? Here’s what you need:

A Linux server under your control (mine is a redhat box)
Zoe
Popfile
Opera 7.x

Read on for the setup

Fixing links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 07:26:31 +0000

As mentioned yesterday, I had to do a bit of work on an application that included the possibilty of redoing some 15000 links.

Here’s what’s happened: I’m maintaing a Notes application for a corporate manual. This manual get’s revised every 6 months, with new versions being put out. The revision coming up is major, so we decided to fork the manual (i.e. creating a new copy of it to work on) instead of using the built in workflow process to handle the changes with draft documents.

Quick Links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 06:53:59 +0000

Raggle, a RSS aggregator written in Ruby (via Jeremy)
Brainstorm & Raves on Opera
Opera 7.20 Beta 7 (which I use for 95% of my browsing

Teletext Porn

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 02 Sep 2003 08:37:29 +0000

I already rank nr 3 on the google search for ascii porn, so I figured I could top this of with a link to a view on teletext found via marc’s voice: Teletext Porn.

Oh – and those that have been waiting for some update on new HTML designs - bear with me. A project has been hitting the fan - and I’m facing the task of redoing some 15'000 links manually in an application, if I can’t find the cure to do it programatically…

A happy life

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 16:35:43 +0000

Yesterday on TV: A 82 year old swiss lady, looking not one day older than 60. She must be the happiest person on this earth.

She is doing day-care for 10-14 children - ranging from toddlers to kids going to school. Getting up every day at 5. Firing the stove with wood. First kids arrive at 6:30, last kid leaves at 18:00. Every day.

Her last holidays were in 1971 when she visited her mother in the US - but didn’t quite like it.

How-To: Install Lotus Domino Designer on Debian

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 16:08:03 +0000

I have bought and installed Crossover Office to run IE 6 and Lotus Notes on Linux. There is an installation option for Lotus Notes by default, but it failed me when I tried to install the Domino Designer and Adminstration clients. This is what I did to get it to work and to have a shared Windows / Linux Installation of Notes: I assume that you have a working Notes installation under Windows. Also you must be able to mount the filesystem that this installaiton resides on Install the Lotus Notes client only in CrossOver Office. Run it, and be sure that it comes up. You can try to configure the client but we will kill that installation in a minute. Exit Lotus Notes Drop to a shell and go to

Compiling Debian on Inspiron 8200

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 19 Aug 2003 23:24:24 +0000

I installed Woody (the “stale” release) on my Inspiron 8200 and followed both the link mentioned below and Stephan Wehrheims Instructions and got a running system fairly soon. After compiling the kernel (and flipping options rand^h^h^h^h with care and deliberation) I was left with a kernel that booted but didn’t have network connection. The ping command claimed: sendto: Network not reachable. Digging around on Google convinced me that my kernel compilation experiments had gone astray. After some consultation with working .config files, I ended up with this file:

Where's the user-friendly text system?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 19 Aug 2003 12:01:56 +0000

My wife just called me - all up in rage. She just lost two hours of work. We are using Groove extensivly to distribute documents between ourselves and the different locations (at home, in the office, on the various laptops) we are using. After she had worked on a document in Word that she had opened from Groove she saved it. Groove detects the changes and asks you if you want to save the change to Groove as well. Now by mistake, she said “No” - and presto - everything was lost. Of course it’s easy to blame everything on the user. “You didn’t read the message when you clicked on No, so it’s all your fault”. But is it really that easy? Jef Raskin stipulates in his book The Humane Interface that computers should treat the users input as sacred - never putting it in jeopardy. That means, that a computer can undelete deletions at all times. To restore things, even - or maybe - in spite of - the user making the wrong decision about which button to press. We are humans, we make mistakes. So the question: Which programs are humane? Which text editor has unlimited undo/redo - even across sessions? What environement already has these features? Do you have any suggestions?

Consultant Speak

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 13:42:09 +0000

Yesterday one of my clients called me several times in a very short time to ask a couple of questions. The last time he called, he said: “Sorry for bothering you again, I guess you will kill me”. My reply: “Don’t worry - instead I will bill you!”

Debian & Dell Links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 11:48:30 +0000

Original Debian Install Manual
Install Debian Woody the “pure” Debian way on a Dell Inspiron 8200 Anyone notice a pattern?

PIO or DMA?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 18:08:08 +0000

I’ve had my share of slow down’s on this Dell Inspiron 8200 (read about the adventures with the taskmanager in Windows XP). Yesterday I installed Red Hat 9 on the same machine and it seemed incredibly slow - especiall loading stuff. Talking to my colleagues,

hdparm

was mentioned… Maybe the harddisk was in PIO mode? Well - it turns out - it isn’t - nevertheless I tweaked the parameters a bit. Here’s my current setting:

XXE - the Docbook Editor

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 08:27:09 +0000

When I write documentation I use DocBook to write structured text. DocBook is either in SGML or XML and can be - shall we say - interesting - to write in Emacs, my tool of choice for text processing. Enter XXE by french company XML Mind. XXE is written in Java, does WYSIWIG editing of DocBook (or other XML schemata), uses CSS to format things on screen, can convert to HTML, RTF and PDF. It’s extremely fast, very full featured and generally a joy to use. If you need to write DocBook - go and check it out. Oh - the standard version is free too - and has a very liberal license for use. And XMLMind just released version 2.4

More humane interface

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 08:15:33 +0000

uh-oh… Hugh noticed… Also, Guido van Rossum reviews The Humane Interface

Meanwhile, I have been busy sketching UI ideas for use in the browser (and that means, that I have to revisit my opinon on browsers not being able to handle all UI needs. I’m piecing together some DHTML / JavaScript technology to handle some of the new ideas I’m going to try out.

On another note: don’t seem to be such a bad idea after all…

Säntis, 14:05

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 09 Aug 2003 14:04:28 +0000

Säntis, 12:51

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 09 Aug 2003 13:36:30 +0000

Renate "Bulldozer" Ratlos SIGs

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 08 Aug 2003 08:35:07 +0000

I was googling for something totally different, when I stumbled on Die Deutsche Amalgam-Page, La Bulldozer’s Sig Page.

It’s a collection of usenet .sigs from a lady that posts/posted regularly on de.alt.naturheilkunde (so the .sigs are more interesting for german speaking people I guess).

She is/was very controversial, biting, sarcastic - the .sigs are a joy to read..

-- Linux is like a wigwam: no windows, no gates, apache inside. (Sig von Daniel Aubry)

-- Gerade das Fehlen einer naturwissenschaftlich abgesicherten Wirktheorie ist ein herausragendes Qualitatsmerkmal unserer Lehre, denn das macht ihren Parameter "hochstes MaÃŸ an gesundem Menschenverstand" aus. (Eberhard Schutze in d.a.n.)

-- > ich rede von dummheit... leider ein Wort zuviel: *von* solltest Du streichen... (Christian Howorka in d.a.n.)

Reading: The Humane Interface

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 08 Aug 2003 01:25:08 +0000

Jef Raskin was the man responsible for the Macintosh. I stumbled on his website a couple of days ago and read about his explorations on Interface Design. Intrigued about THE (The Humane Environment), a new paradigm for interaction with the computer. Interestingly enough, I haven’t been able to see THE yet - the screenshot image is not showing, and THE only runs on Mac’s. But I was intrigued and ordered the book. It came, I read and I learned. Raskin talks about consciousness and non-consciousness when using interfaces, locus and focus, modality and so on. He has a deep understanding and knowledge of the subject, his theses are supported by empiric studies. And he’s able to bring across so many important points in interface design in an easy to grasp manner.

When do documents change their UniqueID?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 07 Aug 2003 11:15:20 +0000

I’ve been chasing a bug for a couple of hours now…. “Entry not found in index” seems to be a classical @DbLookup that fails… Well, wading through the form, removing blocks of fields, testing again, and again and again and never getting rid of the error on one specific document (but on other everything’s fine). The Domino developers know the drill - it’s frustrating.

The I looked at the URL - I was opening a doc by it’s UNID. I searched for that doc in the database but couldn’t find it by that UNID. So I looked at the code that creates the URL. It takes the UNID from a computed field that contains @Text(@DocumentUniqueID).

Note To Self: Check out SyncML and MESS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 17:47:50 +0000

MESS An emulator of old, old computers. They emulate almost every computer I ever owned (ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Oric1, C-64) or used (the “ur” commodore and the TRS-80)
SmartSpace - SyncML for the P800
SyncML Reference Toolkit (Sourceforge)
Implementations of the SyncML protocol
Synchronisation von Terminplanern mittels XML
PHP Implementation of SyncML

CPU at 100% (Part 2 - final)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 07:54:02 +0000

The friendly people over on Joi’s IRC channel #joiito helped me by having me look at the Task Manager “Show Kernel Process” option. Then I wandered through the options and saw that the update frequence of the graph display was set to to “stopped”. Still wondering why it continued to show 100% CPU even when there was nothing going on.

Setting the graph to update regularly, showed me that my system is in a normal state… Pheeew

CPU pegged at 100%, Who to blame? (Part 1)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 01:33:05 +0000

In preparation for the project ahead I decided to install IIS and the latest fixes on this Windows XP SP1 machine. Then I got ActiveState Python to work as a handler to .py files (something that Microsoft Knowledgebase helps you with.

I was rewarded with a working IIS con Python server and an unbelievable slow machine. Bringing up the Task Manager shows my CPU pegged at 100% - but none of the processes running seem to be responsible for it. Firing up ProcessExplorer by SysInternals shows a lot more information about the running processes, but no culprit.

Choose the right technology

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 23:00:13 +0000

I have a “filler project” coming up and I need to choose the right tools to get the job done.

There’s a bit of infrastructure in place: MS SQL Server, IIS and a couple of databases on the SQL server.

I need to write a web enabled front end for those, containing two forms to enter information. Also I need to be able to create reports from the database (also in HTML).

Excel Galore

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 07:04:54 +0000

I’m working on a large spreasheet that builds a trackrecord of my other companies financial product. Without a formal education in Excel (and not being one of those people that read books about standard products ;-) ) my use of excel formulae was limited to the mere basic stuff.

Then I needed to reverse the contents of a column. Googling a bit, I found the article Working with lists and a whole lot of related stuff.

Mailinator

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 00:45:38 +0000

Need an email adress - NOW? enter : “whatever@mailinator.com” then head over to Mailinator.com and pick up the information you need.

Perfect for those sign-up services that you will be using only once. And the best thing - mailinator needs no sign-up. Just by sending an email to that adress, creates the mailbox.

The Anti-Bloggies 2003

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 00:35:23 +0000

The Antibloggies 2003 show you some of the most stup^h^h^h^h interesting pieces of Blog culture

Rocky Horror Ring Show

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 00:20:28 +0000

vowe how could you… bringing the Rocky Horror Ring Show to my attention… I’ve seen the movie (several times), I’ve been in the theater, I’ve been to an open-air movie showing, dressed up in my wife-to-be’s underwear (I had met her the night before and invited her to a night at the open-air movies, and - oh - could I have a look at her sexy underwear drawer please and help me to some of the stuff). Also I’ve read the LOTR book (as a teen - in english) twice and I’ve seen the movie.

P800 woes

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 11:57:13 +0000

This morning my trusty P800 wouldn’t let me work at all. Programs weren’t starting, couldn’t open contacts (Disk Full message). I switched it off and then on - and was greeted with “your disk is corrupt - I will format it to fix the problem”. GREAT Really great - after formatting the disk, my phone started working again but was back to pristine conditions - no contacts, no calendar entries, no nothing. I’m wondering over the stupidity of the Symbian OS to treat a disk full condition with this harsh reaction. Luckily the P800 software let’s you backup your phone - unfortunately my last backup was almost one month old. And as avid readers know, I’ve had problems syncing with Lotus Notes for a long time now. I took the opportunity to download the newest PC software for the P800 (german) and then noted this answer to my query on Notes.net helped me to get Synching of the p800 with Lotus Notes working again: I had to remove every trace of the old PC Suite from the system. I also removed all traces of it in the registry, re-installed the 1.5.1 software, set up the synch options - and voila - it worked. Incredible. Technology at it’s best. Grmpfl

Kids & the river

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 11:23:18 +0000

Query by Humming

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:38:06 +0000

An intersting audio application: Query By Humming from the inventor of the MP3 format allows you to hum a fragment of a tune and the computer tells you the name of the song.

Test it at Musicline (server seems to be down)

[via heise.de ]

Position is Everything CSS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 09:25:59 +0000

Complex CSS Layout with 3 colums is a beautiful demo of what can be accomplished with CSS alone.

[via Simon Willison]

Twisted Python

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 11:48:32 +0000

For a small project coming up, the Twisted Framework in Python seems like an intersting foundation. Twisted handles all kinds of network stuff for you and allows you to write the top level stuff without having to worry about the gory details of the network. An Fake SMTP server only takes 136 lines of Python code (and that includes extensive docstrings)

Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 10:22:12 +0000

Thanks to Nat for the link to the [Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait gallery

etoy Debian Party in Zurich

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 10:04:00 +0000

I’m running Debian on my Laptop (thanks to Knoppix), so I guess I’m entitled to go to the Etoy Debian Party in Zurich…

[Via BitFlux]

Darwinism in Poetry

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 13:04:26 +0000

eyes closed illumines
love

shield to words

Hmm - I guess it could be a lot worse than that - and the Darwinian Poetry project has generated worse poetry.

I’m specifically interested in this kind of research, because my company Ivorix - evolving software builds software that relies on some of the same mechanisms to generate trading strategies for trading stocks.

Out of the work, we’ve done, I know that genetic algorithms have to power to come up with solutions to really hard problems. Poetry seems to be one of these….

XP on Domino

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 18:54:25 +0000

Ben Poole mentions Testing 1,2,3 in the Notes/Domino context (of course taken from the Xtreme Programming school of thought. He links to Duffbert’s XP experiences.

Let me chime in with my experience on TestingFirst with Notes. I worked on a large Domino project last year with a team of 5 other people. I tried to get some XP into the group (but failed - there just wasn’t enough interest from the other team members… another story).

Reading: Pattern Recognition

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 11:32:30 +0000

I’m a big fan of Willam Gibson. I was heavily influenced by the Neuromancer series and I (think) I have read all of his Sci-Fi novels over time. So when I started reading again (instead of sitting at the computer all the time) it was time to pick up his (not-so) new book: Pattern Recognition (Amazon.de) Pattern Recognition (Amazon.com)

As a non-native english speaker, the language used by Gibson is difficult at times, unfamiliar terms, (no - not the use of google as a verb) - but the language conveys images, feelings. London a familiar city, when viewed through the eyes of CayceP - the protagonist of the book - turns into something different. Gibson is a master of this - his way of using language is masterful and sets the mood. The story? Hmm - a great start - the idea of having a person sensitive to corporate branding and logos is great. The footage - the central element of the book - the snippets of a movie that turns up on the internet and is dissected and discussed by a steadily growing fan base, is intriguing - interesting by how it’s described. There are up’s and down’s as we move with Cayce through London, Tokio and Moscow. I’m not quite finished with the book, so I don’t know if the resolution of the story works or is interesting or not. I’m enjoying this book so much because of the way Gibson models feelings with language - and that can be quite enough reason to read…

The browser - the one user interface?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 07:40:21 +0000

Tim Bray makes a case for not being a “sharecropper” and developing for the browser only or rather - to code to open standards, XML, RPC etc. and so on. I agree 100% - that’s a good thing to do. But he makes the case, that the browser is the best thing that happened to interface design and application design since sliced bread:

But it's especially good for the customers to be on the Web platform. The notion of routing everything through the browser (with one significant exception, which I'll discuss below) is incredibly user-centric, user-friendly, and user-empowering. Because once they know how to use the "Back" button, to click on highlighted text, and to fill out a form, then they don't need much training in how to use your application.

and

Finishing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:36:03 +0000

I’m in the finishing phase of “the” project, I’ve been working on for the last 6 months or so… On friday we deployed my web solution to the productive environement and it ran (almost out of the box). Today is the day where a couple of small corrections are being made. Tomorrow I’ll start to look for something new to work on…

Childs sleep

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 10:16:32 +0000

Tobias, 07:10

Adding Myriam Leisi Ohoven to Google

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 06:53:55 +0000

Yesterday while going out with friends we talked about what Google knows about us. Myriam said that she had googled for her Matthias before going out with him in earnest. We then wondered what Google might now about Myriam…. I checked - it knows nothing at all. Time to change that… Ohh - you wanted more information on Myriam? Where she lives? The pictures from her marriage? Private details? Ahh - but you have to know her better to get to know these things… _Update:_Try this search to see how fast Google can be: Less than 24 between entering it and Google being aware of Myriam…

Linked in!

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 06:27:37 +0000

I recently wrote about the LinkedIn Locked Out problem I was having. Well - LinkedIn changed a subtle thing: You can opt in to receive requests directly from people that are more than 4 degrees away from you. I wondered how I came to suddenly have 60+ people in my network that I didn’t know about. Then it dawned on me, that these 60 people must be the first ones to opt in for the direct contect feature. I opted in too - and the very next morning I had a mail from a Swiss/American guy who was busy patching up the disparate networks. He knew either Joi or Reid himself - so when he invited me to his network, BAM, I suddenly was connected to 1500+ people. This morning, I’m up to 2200+ connections - and boy, some of them look interesting. I haven’t made my own request yet, but this afternoon, I’m meeting Tom, who invited me to his network for some business talk… Good stuff, LinkedIn ;-)

It's on it's way

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 06:15:47 +0000

Only two days after I ordered it, it’s already on it’s way from the factory at Taiwan. Wonder how fast it’s going to be here… My first piece of Apple equipment - ever since I had to program Modula-2 back on the Mac’s at the technical university. Now this little piece won’t do any computations, but it will keep me entertained…. Joy!

Hide when - show them in color

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Jul 2003 17:18:08 +0000

I’m doing a lot of quite complex Domino development at the moment. I’m using Hide-When functionality to hide/show pieces of HTML based on various conditions of the document I’m working with. It’s a pain to maintain, because it ain’t clear what lines are hidden under what conditions. Then it hit me: Why not use color-coding in the form to show what’s hidden when:

Red Bold: is hidden when editing (it’s bold because otherwise I don’t see it as a color blind person) Green is hidden for reading Blue is hidden with a formula Grey for stuff that is always hidden

Warum wir den Irak angegriffen haben - eine Gutenachtgeschichte

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:34:55 +0000

Finally an explanation of the world at large - and parts of it detail. Sorry - german text - but I have a feeling, that it’s coming from an original english source… Does anyone know for sure?

F: Du, Papa, Warum muÃŸten wir den Irak angreifen? A: Weil sie Massenvernichtungswaffen hatten.

F: Aber die Inspektoren haben keine Massenvernichtungswaffen gefunden. A: Weil die Iraker sie versteckt haben.

F: Und deshalb haben wir den Irak erobert? A: Ja. Eroberungen funktionieren immer besser als Inspektionen.

Need this

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 08 Jul 2003 15:01:40 +0000

The Martian NetDrive is exactly the kind of gear I need - both at home and in the office.

It’s a small fanless Linux box with a 120GB disk and both wireless and wired LAN capabilities. It acts as a SMB fileserver and the claim is that you unpack it and then plug it in. Sounds like a plan.

And because it’s Linux based it should be easy (according to the a How to turn a Martian NetDrive into another OpenAFS file server document) to hack it. I want two of those machines to rsync their contents over the internet. Perfect distributed backup!

Changing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 08 Jul 2003 07:06:52 +0000

While on holidays, I thought a lot about my life and what I can do to improve it. I wrote a couple of pieces that I will post during the next few days. Consider them as personal ramblings. I have decided to to change a few things in my life, and those thoughts reflect on these thing I am trying to change.

Maybe they strike a chord with you - maybe they don’t. I post them anyway ;-)

On Sleeping

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 08 Jul 2003 07:03:51 +0000

I will sleep more!

I’m on the second day of our holidays on a camping ground near Venice in Italy. I have just woken up from a quiet nap around noon, at the time where the heat brings all life to a crawl. I feel refreshed and awake - what a difference to this time a week ago, or even three days.

This night I slept 7 hours. I went to bed at 23:00 and got up at 6:00 when the alarm clock on my mobile phone woke me up. I spent the first hour of the morning at the beach, running a couple of kilometers along the shore.

Quick Links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 07 Jul 2003 15:45:21 +0000

coming home

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 21:23:06 +0000

GPRS coverage in Italy I didn’t bother with. I am back in switzerland and will be in my bed in two hours. Joy! A bed without sand in the sheets…

SwissMiniature

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:15:27 +0000

on the road (really)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 08:51:22 +0000

we really managed to get out of the door!

Gone in two hours

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 05:17:03 +0000

Ahhhhhh - yesterday was hard: Getting up at 5 in the morning and working more or less straight until 20:00 (for clients that is). Then get home, ready the car and start packing. We planned on leaving really early (like 04:00 today) but only got in bed after midnight so getting up time was pushed back to 06:00. I’m up an hour earlier - putting the last touches on a minor release for one my clients.

Text Processing in Python

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 16:37:20 +0000

David Mertz has written a book on Text Processing in Python. Read it online, then buy it!

The right thing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 13:56:50 +0000

Halley has an interesting blog and the 18 step program for alpha-males

Do the right thing strikes a chord…

Quick Bookmarks

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 08:35:25 +0000

I’m really busy getting ready for the holidays. Here are a few bookmarks that I need to look at later:

8 Days and counting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 11 Jun 2003 09:16:18 +0000

Not that more longer until I see this…

ASCII Porn

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 09 Jun 2003 20:39:35 +0000

Deep Throat… err ASCII - the classic - in case you’ve never seen the classic movie, here it is…

Random Bookmarks

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 09 Jun 2003 13:55:48 +0000

Question to the Notes guys: sending encrypted mail to Notes via SMTP

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 13:48:26 +0000

Does anyone out there know how to send encrypted email to a person using Lotus Notes using SMTP to send it? (Preferrably using a PERL script or somesuch). Is this possible at all? How?

CSS Bookmarklets

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 15:01:47 +0000

Simon Willson does it again: (or rather he links to the right stuff): The CSS Bookmarklets let you for example edit CSS and see the changes while you edit the stylesheet. Or they show you the ancestors hierarchy of the styles. Way cool and this will help me in my development efforts!

The needle in the haystack

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 14:56:00 +0000

Over at the MIT, the researchers are looking for needles in the Haystack. The blurb reads interesting:

_the universal information client_
Our research seeks to bring modern information management and retrieval technologies to the average computer user in order to make computers a more compelling place for users to interact with their information. Haystack looks into the use of artificial intelligence techniques for analyzing unstructured information and providing more accurate retrieval. We also deal with the modeling, management, and display of user data in more natural and useful ways.

Trepia - IM your neighbourhood

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 14:43:31 +0000

Trepia is an instant messenger with a twist: It supposedly knows where you are and populates itself with people from your neighbourhood.

Hmm - I have people nearby from Dover, Massachuset (?), Dresden, The Nederlands - interesting… All in all: 28 people in my area… Wow - a big area!

CSS / JS Style Switcher

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 May 2003 21:25:04 +0000

Over at What Do I Know there’s a great feature, that allows you to switch CSS on the fly - never seen that before - I like it! A List Apart show’s how this is done.

Webbing the Blogs

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 May 2003 19:12:44 +0000

While meandring through the blogosphe I stumpled across Mark’s Recommended Reading which finds blogs that might interest you based on the blog you are reading. I had a similar idea a while ago. It’s good to see that I don’t have to implement it ;-)

Hiring - made easy

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 May 2003 15:01:00 +0000

Note to self: if Ivorix is hiring, here’s the Job profile to emulate.

(and no, due to the current economic situation, Ivorix is not hiring)

via hugh

Switch made

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 May 2003 13:13:53 +0000

It worked ;-) I had to fumble a bit to get LILO to work with my harddisks, but I found a helpful description over on the Knoppix Formums that did the trick for me…

More small things that needed fixing:

Can’t access my other harddisk as non-root

Fixed:

sound is garbled in hd-install, works fine when booting Knoppix from CD
add “alsa” to the linux kernels boot options

Switching - blogging it

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 31 May 2003 12:30:11 +0000

I’m working on a Dell Inspiron 8200 with Windows XP. When I bought it a couple of months ago, I alos put a copy of RedHat Linux 7.3 on it, but didn’t use it much. Prompted by vowe about his installing RH 9, I decided to try that too. 3 Diskimages and an hour of installation later I had an updated system that hung forever on starting sendmail and canna (whatever that is). It displayed in 800x600 during install and not at all after I booted from HD.

Backpedalling at it's best

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 30 May 2003 12:55:29 +0000

Over at the whiskey Bar, there’s a series of quotes…

What a tangled web we weave by Billmon

Read them and weep

Munich chooses Linux over Microsoft

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 May 2003 14:42:40 +0000

I haven’t seen this discussed widely yet - but TDNBW (This does not bode well) for Microsoft: The city of Munich, Gemany decided on 2003-05-28 to migrate from Windows NT to Linux and OpenSource based solutions for their 14'000 desktops.

Sources: Microsoft kann in Munchen nicht “fensterln” (heise.de) Suse Press Release

While this is only a small dent in Microsoft’s bottom line it’s good to see that there are institutions that don’t rely on a monopoly for their IT needs. Interestingly enough, IBM is in the pole position to realize this project. This jibes with what Joel writes in his Strategy Letter V:

Added Technorati Links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 May 2003 11:43:06 +0000

Implemented Kalsey’s Technorati Plugin - you can see the last couple of inbound blogs in the sidebar on the right.

Kata Coding

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 May 2003 00:14:20 +0000

PragProg features Dave and Andy who wrote two wonderful books…. Dave has some thoughts about Code Kata’s.

I’m a student of Karate myself, so this rang a bell for me. I will think about this some more, when I’m more awake than right now ;-)

Oh - Andy is blogging too

Martin Fowler's Bliki

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 29 May 2003 00:05:09 +0000

Not content of just having a blog or a wiki, Martin Fowler rolled his own Bliki.

Back when I started my blog, I used Steve Pikes PikiePikie, which was a wiki with blog functionality. Sadly, Steve seems to have given up on development. His server has been down for a loooong time.

Update: There seems to be life in PikiePikie yet: Go to the newHomePage of PikiePikie

You can still check my Pikie out here

TAR parameters

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 28 May 2003 10:53:46 +0000

This list of TAR parameters comes in really handy…. thanks vowe

tar.gz -> -xvzf tar.bz2 -> -xvjf tar -> -xvf

To create some archives, just replace the ‘x’ with a ‘c’ and add the files you want to pack as additional parameters So ’tar -cvjf mytar.tar.bz2 whatever/’ will create a file named mytar.tar.bz2, containing all the files and subdirs below (and including) the directory ‘whatever’.

Tabs in CSS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 28 May 2003 00:13:35 +0000

Reminder to self: Check these out

Please advise me on new gadget

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 27 May 2003 11:43:21 +0000

The project I’m working on is coming to an end. I have promised myself, that I’ll buy a portable MP3 player when it’s over. I was in K55 - the MP3 shop yesterday and had a look at the (old) Apple iPod and the Archos AV140.

I have a hard time deciding. The interface of the (old) iPod I looked at beat everything else I touched hands-down. The iPod also looks much nicer. It should work with the Audigy Firewire port on my Home Theater PC (HTPC) and Mediajukebox 9.

Matrix XP

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 26 May 2003 00:25:39 +0000

Go. There. Now!

Hilarious

Quick Links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 25 May 2003 19:42:37 +0000

Joe Litton’s Blog Paul Graham on Hackers and Painters via Ben Langhinrich’s Blog

Learning to bike

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 25 May 2003 11:42:25 +0000

My son is almost six years old and one of the last kids on the block to bike. Even the three year old kids could do it.

We didn’t understan why … Then my wife had the idea to go to a “real” cycle shop. We came out with a new (and expensive) bike. That was yesterday. This morning we went out to try it.

It took him 15 minutes before he drove on his own, another 5 min to learn how to get off without falling, and 10 to start on his own.

La fille du limmatquai ist umgezogen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 May 2003 23:03:00 +0000

Aus dem Leben einer fille du limmatquai

Domino 5 -> Textfields to Textareas

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 May 2003 22:37:15 +0000

One of the really cumbersome things in Domino development is the constant struggle to get Domino to do what I want it to do.

Case in point: I have a textfield, but I want to let the user edit the text in a textarea. Domino only displays textareas for RichText fields - which is not at all what I want.

On Notes.net there was a partial solution…

Here’s the complete one…

SpotMe

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 May 2003 19:44:40 +0000

Reading Joi on SpotMe. I didn’t know we had such cool companies in switzerland. Go to Spotme.

(and it’s even running Linux ;-)

LinkedIn LockedOut

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 23 May 2003 10:27:05 +0000

One week after I found out about LinkedIn and promptly started to invite a number of my business contacts.

So far, this hasn’t led to me being part of a “the total is greater than the sum of it’s part’s” network. In fact, I’m part of a 5 person network with me being the most well connected person in it.

So what’s wrong, what went wrong?

During the first two days of being a LinkedIn member, I sent out 38 invitations with an indivdual text, describing in my words the benefits of such a system and links to the Many-to-many list and to my homepage. Most of the people are regulars of mine, some of them I dug up for the occasion (People I’ve been in school with for example).

minor changes in CSS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 22 May 2003 21:21:58 +0000

You may notice that the site looks slightly different. I’ve started to play with the CSS that makes this site appear as it does. Nothing fancy yet…

mobile blogging with the p800

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 22 May 2003 06:32:33 +0000

I saw the moblog gallery on Joi Ito’s site. “I can do this too…”. So here is a picture from my P800, shot last weekend, uploaded to MT through the wonders of GPRS and Opera for Symbian.

CSS Tutorial

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 21 May 2003 16:17:27 +0000

Simon Willson has a great tutorial on CSS and how to emulate table based html designs with CSS.

Starship Sizes

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 21 May 2003 16:02:14 +0000

Finally: the Jeff Russels Starship Dimensions allow you to compare the size of - let’s say Babylon 5 to a Star Wars Death Star… Scary :-)

[via Ned]

Icebergs and Screen Design

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 21 May 2003 15:33:29 +0000

Doing the “creative break” routine after spending hours of debugging a complex interaction between all kind of different servers and wondering why things didn’t work (because nobody had allowed the standard user to actually do anything in the system) - I stumbled upon The Iceberg Secret, Revealed by Joel which talks about why the impression of a product is better than the product itself - at least when you work on it and have to demo it to your clients.

LinkedIn - a network of professionals

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 May 2003 09:06:30 +0000

Updated with more links

I like networking. I like the idea, that everybody is connected to everyone else through not more than six other people. I was a member of sixdegrees.com - but never got much use out of it. Anyway - there’s a new company, LinkedIn, Ltd that offers this kind of networking. It’s aimed at realizing networks of professionals - and it has a number of safeguards against spamming, and unwanted contacts.

The Future is Then

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 20 May 2003 06:02:20 +0000

Ever wanted to make a prediction about the future? To bet on it? Head over to Longbets.org to do so.

One of the bets:

The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be someplace other than on a planet or on a satellite of a planet

Betters include “ordinary” people like Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Dave Winer, Ray Kurzweil, Mitch Kapor, Danny Willis, Nathan Myhrvold and many more

Frank Zappa Quote of the day

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 19 May 2003 18:57:57 +0000

Surfing the referres, I happend upon Rant Central where a link to me was. The entry below was link to the Frank Zappa quote of the day. Thanks for making me aware of this. And yes:

Frank, we really miss you - and here’s todays quote

Social Software Blog

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 19 May 2003 12:15:44 +0000

I stumbled over the Many-to-many blog when I dug into the background of LinkedIn Network. I’ve since started to read more on the blog and - well - it’s interesting reading.

I have been working with Lotus Notes for over 13 years now - and I think Notes defined some of the aspects of “social software”. I know that I spent many hours battling perceptions about “the dangers of open communications” in the early days of Notes.

George W. Bush Resume online

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 May 2003 20:39:59 +0000

Looking for a new employee? Take a look at this Resume by Dubya

99 Bottles of Beer

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 May 2003 14:56:55 +0000

Just ran into this again, when we discussed programming langues here in cubicle world… How many languages do you know? 4? 10? 42?

Try 515 - and see how to write “99 Bottles of Beer” in all of these languages. Brainfuck? Anyone?

ZenGarden - a study in CSS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 May 2003 14:01:05 +0000

So you thought, that designing with HTML and CSS would lead to boring designs? That you don’t have enough control over the layout of the page?

Head over to the ZenGarden, sit down to look, change the designs and learn.

[via Tom Coates]

Newbie Guide to CPAN

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 16 May 2003 10:38:46 +0000

In my current project I have the pleasure (?) to work with Perl. I found out that there are hundres (thousands?) of useful modules out there. Before they can be used however, they have to be downloaded an installed… Grief!

Here’s the dummies guide to doing it: (Assuming a Cygwin installation on a Win32 box)

Locate the module on Cpan
Download the module.
You have a module-version.tar.gz.tar file which is useless (or so it seems)

Back from the Past

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 15 May 2003 05:28:27 +0000

Vowe discusses the value of “WikiWiki in Domino. (Because people are starting to do that). Well - I’ve done it a couple of years ago - and I’ve had mixed joy from it. The lack of a regular expression parser in Notes has led to some quite ugly parsing code and not all of the Wiki features are available. Still - as a “gift” to the community: Here’s my NotesWiki for your pleasure. Do with this code whatever you like, feel free to laugh at me - whatever.

Useful P800 applications

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 14 May 2003 15:50:00 +0000

Here are applications for the P800 that I really like:

ActiveDesk: When you flip open the phone, a summary of your calendar entries, tasks and messages appears. I like it better than Handy Day, YMMV
Tipic is a Jabber chat client that supports AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger. Cool!
SymIRC is an IRC client

Both are written in PJava and perform really nice. A fully connected phone, good GPRS coverage and connectivity applications are a great thing. I’m reconsidering my sceptisim on “mobile connectivity”.

TikiWiki - this looks interesting

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 14 May 2003 15:25:50 +0000

When (If?) I find some time, expect me to try TikiWiki.

It looks absolutely amazing…

P800 stopped syncing

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 14 May 2003 06:30:57 +0000

Hmm - my P800 stopped syncing with Lotus Notes. It just doesn’t work anymore. I have the latest sync software, I have the latest Notes 5 version (5.0.12) and nada happens. I get the informative message, that the sync finished - but it doesn’t do anything. Of course there are no log files. There are no settings to fiddle with. Let’s see how good the SonyEricsson support is… .

First impression: Their knowledgebase is useless. First of all, it doesn’t recognize Opera (but a quick CTRL-ALT-I in Opera to make it identify as IE fixed that ;-) then the answers are not very helpful (“Yes, there is software to sync with Notes”)

LotusScript Snippets

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 13 May 2003 10:38:52 +0000

Browsing through the referrers, I found this site with LotusScript snippets. This looks really useful - specially the MsXML and the string classes… Notes is a fun coding environment - so every bit of help helps ;-)

Mozilla for Webdevelopers

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 13 May 2003 10:21:24 +0000

While I use Opera as my day to day browser, for webdevelopment there’s no way around Mozilla.

Gemal has an article about development with Mozilla and talks about the DOM inspector, the HTTP Liveheader viewer (which I needed this very moment to debug an interaction between a browser, an authentication server and a PeopleSoft application server) in order to script a transaction with curl.

I know Opera is great - do you?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 09 May 2003 17:39:45 +0000

I’ve been an on and off Opera user back in the Opera 4, 5 and 6 days. Ever since Opera 7 came out however, Opera is the single browser I use. Today Opera 7.11 is released. I cam across this 30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover (TnTLuoma.com) 30-days guide to Opera (the 6 version) and learnt a few tricks along the way.

If you aren’t an Opera user yet, go over and read it, and then convert.

Arial? I'm Arial - ahhhhhrrrrgggg

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 05 May 2003 16:09:09 +0000

Arial - You’re pretty normal. That’s certainly not
a bad thing, as a lot of people like you.

What Font Are You? (Standard Fonts)
brought to you by Quizilla

And what's your quest?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 05 May 2003 16:04:58 +0000

Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who!

What Monty Python Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

One date down - more to go

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 05 May 2003 10:49:41 +0000

I’ve been quiet the last few days, I know. My time has been unevenly split between work and family (and guess which part got more of my time…) I’ve had the most unnerving experience yesterday when I moved my Domino application from my development server to the production cluster (two domino servers).

My tests all ran. Everything looked the way it should. I was happy. Getting up at 3:30 in the morning was worth it - or so I thought…

testing weblogs.com ping

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 26 Apr 2003 16:37:51 +0000

1 2 3

The World is a Blog

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 26 Apr 2003 15:24:29 +0000

Watch the blogosphere in (almost) realtime: GeoBlog shows you when and where it happens.

This site sped up

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 24 Apr 2003 14:07:42 +0000

Regular visitors know about my problems with the speed of this site. There always was a delay of several seconds for every request made to the webserver (apache).

Thinking out loud with my colleague and friend Matthias led me to play with the configuration of my named deamon. Lo and behold - there was an entry for an unknown DNS server in resolve.conf. Replacing that with 127.0.0.1 for my caching named made all the difference.

ups - more p800 applications needed

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:15:34 +0000

I just realized that this search on Google lists this humble blog on number two position. Hmm - should I start to do more about this?

Try them, list them, review them? (Yes - I know I also could write one…)

What do you think?

Flight Risk

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:47:53 +0000

Is it for real? Is it a fantasy? I don’t care - this has to be one of the most grabbing blogs I’ve ever read: "… she’s a flight risk"

Copied from the comments below - with links intact

Wired News does a good job of recapping the events so far, and the author of the blog “Isabella” stopped by Collective Detective’s discussion (free reg. req’d) and candidly answered many skeptics questions. The blog of a drunken animated puzzle piece has even begun spoofing it, a true sign of meme status.

Not dead yet - and talking

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 11:33:24 +0000

Oh my - work is backing up again, and the precious easter holidays were nice but too short (and I spent one day doing my accounts instead of spending it with the family). Also - there always seems to be something happening: if the work situation is good, then problems on the private front creep up. Spent the easter weekend having long and good talks with my wife.

Something that I have learnt during my life (and old relationships gone bad) is that you need to talk about your feelings, about your concerns. Earlier I always was afraid of saying what my thoughts, wishes, desires were. Fear of “not being loved” anymore, fear of hurting the other. That this not talking led to much more pain in the long run… well it took a while to learn that.

Movie Posters that you haven't seen yet

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 14 Apr 2003 15:39:15 +0000

Thanks vowe for this little gem…

Lawrence of her Labia? or rather shaving ryans privates?

Google Search of the day

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 12 Apr 2003 19:31:57 +0000

Try the following search on Google: allintitle:unititled document.

Via: Bitflux

P800 emulator working again

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 12 Apr 2003 19:18:11 +0000

There were two things that set back my P800 development last week:

My Symbian emulator crashed right after startup - making debugging of my application just a bit problematic
Way too much work - three clients, three deadlines

While I can do something about the second point (work, work some more, and then work at night), there’s nothing much I could do about the constant crashing. The helpful people on the forums weren’t being helpful so my app is sitting on the backburner at the moment.

Atropin - don't try this at home

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 10:58:51 +0000

One of these funny stories - looking at them retrospectively:

I have been wearing glasses since I was 4 or 5 years old. I’m so used ot them, that they don’t disturb me the least. Until now I thought that my two kids (aged 3 and 5) wouldn’t need glasses because we always had the impression that they had great eyesight.

But: My older son complains about headaches a lot - and that is a symptom of bad eyesight. So of to the ophthalmologist for a check with the two. And indeed - they have problems. The doctor want’s to do a more thorough check after a couple of days. In preparation for that, the kids have to have atropin drops applied the night before. Ever tried to give small kids drops into the eye?

Decapitating

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 04 Apr 2003 13:08:14 +0000

Check out the Sidney Morning Heralds Story about the checkpoint incident that cost 7 to 11 civilians their life.

Now we know what decapitating in war means.

Bring on the spanners.

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 04 Apr 2003 09:46:59 +0000

Via vowe: Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates by Arundhati Roy is a strong text that sums up a lot of the problems we, the people, have with this war.

A must read!

(and while you’re at it, read [The algebra of infinite justice posted on 29. September 2001)

Notesapi.com

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 02 Apr 2003 11:21:59 +0000

Lee has released an electronic version of his book LotusScriptor’s Plain Simple Guide To The Lotus Notes C++ API. .

Thanks - this might come in handy sometime

Programming the P800

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 17:10:12 +0000

I’ve been playing around programming my P800. (BTW: This is by far the best mobile phone I’ve ever used - and it’s PDA capabilities are impressive.) There are a couple of things missing - that’s why I’m looking at the programming side.

I have coded with Java and my first application is coming along nicely. Stay tuned for more info.

In the meantime, here are some links to get you started:

What's next?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 12:57:24 +0000

Several of the war blogs quote this article on praying for Bush. What’s next? The little black book of Dubyah?

Evolution

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 29 Mar 2003 21:27:31 +0000

Unbelievable P800

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 14:53:27 +0000

I got it - today I got a call, that my SonyEricsson P800 was waiting for me….

What a nice phone! I’m playing around with it and trying to get it to sync all my adresses and calendar items. I managed to get my addresses over from Outlook, but no go on the calendar front. Also some program complains all the time that Outlook is not the default mail client - by god - NO of course not. Now I’m in the process of moving my adresses and calendar entries to Lotus Notes - the adresses synced perfectly - let’s see how the calendar goes.

New mobile on the way - links

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 12:19:39 +0000

My old mobile phone is starting to break down - time for a new one. After some thoughts, I decided to buy the SonyEricsson P800 which got a good review on Geek.com and not too many complaints on the Usenet. All going well, I should have it tomorrow (but then, most of the time, things don’t go well…)

What I like about the P800, is that it’s possible to develop your own apps - I’m planning to take a look at doing some Java coding on it… (time permitting).

Cook's resignation speech

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 09:21:03 +0000

I haven’t had a chance to read until just now - and I’m deeply impressed how Robin Cook expressed his views on the war, on Britains role and on some of the background. Read the speech, at BBC’s site.

Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.
We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

War Blogs

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 01:15:27 +0000

No - you and I don’t have to agree with all they write, but I feel that there is more meat here in the virtual spaces of the internet, than what we get served on TV:

Krieg ist nicht chirurgisch

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 00:50:30 +0000

Jetzt ist es also passiert: Die ersten Bilder von toten und gefangenen Amerikanern tauchen auf. Klar, dass die amerikanische Ã–ffentlichkeit solch grausiges nicht sehen darf. Klar, dass ein Aufschrei des Entsetzens losgeht und sich Herr Rumsfeld auf die Genfer Konvention beruft, die es einzuhalten gilt.

Wann wurde die Genfer Konvention eingehalten, als in Guantanamo Gefangene gemacht wurden? Ach ja - das waren ja keine Kriegsgefangene - stupid me.

Wieso erlauben es sich die USA sich moralisch darÃ¼ber zu entrÃ¼sten, dass man ihre Soldaten tÃ¶tet und gefangennimmt? Behandelt sie die irakischen Soldaten besser? Und die ZivilbevÃ¶lkerung? Im ersten Golfkrieg wurde die Wasserversorgung gezielt zerstÃ¶rt. Entsprechen Genozide denn dem VÃ¶lkerrecht?

Danke PrÃ¤sident Bush

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Mar 2003 21:21:18 +0000

Das habe ich heute in meiner Mailbox gefunden, einen offenen Brief an PrÃ¤sident Bush:

Danke, dass Sie der Welt gezeigt haben, welch tiefe Kluft zwischen den Entscheidungen der Machthaber und den WÃ¼nschen des Volkes liegt. [...] Danke, denn ohne Sie hÃ¤tten wir nicht erkannt, dass wir fÃ¤hig sind, uns zu mobilisieren. MÃ¶glicherweise wird es uns diesmal nichts nÃ¼tzen, aber ganz sicher spÃ¤ter einmal.

“Danke, PrÃ¤sident Bush”: Offener Brief an das Weisse Haus von Paulo Coelho Danke, grosser Staatsmann George W. Bush. Danke, dass Sie jedem gezeigt haben, welche Gefahr Saddam Hussein darstellt. Viele von uns hÃ¤tten sonst womÃ¶glich vergessen, dass er chemische Waffen gegen sein eigenes Volk, gegen die Kurden und die Iraner eingesetzt hat. Hussein ist ein blutrÃ¼nstiger Diktator und eine der augenfÃ¤lligsten VerkÃ¶rperungen des BÃ¶sen in der heutigen Welt. Aber nicht allein dafÃ¼r wollte ich Ihnen danken. WÃ¤hrend der ersten zwei Monate dieses Jahres 2003 haben Sie der Welt eine Reihe anderer, wichtiger Dinge gezeigt. Ich mÃ¶chte mich daher in Anlehnung an ein Gedicht, das ich als Kind gelernt habe, bei Ihnen bedanken: Danke, dass Sie allen gezeigt haben, dass das tÃ¼rkische Volk und sein Parlament nicht kÃ¤uflich sind, auch nicht fÃ¼r 26 Milliarden Dollar. Danke, dass Sie der Welt gezeigt haben, welch tiefe Kluft zwischen den Entscheidungen der Machthaber und den WÃ¼nschen des Volkes liegt. Danke, dass Sie uns vor Augen fÃ¼hren, dass weder JosÃ© Maria Aznar noch Tony Blair ihren WÃ¤hlern die geringste Achtung und WertschÃ¤tzung zeigen. Aznar bringt es fertig, darÃ¼ber hinwegzusehen, dass 90 Prozent der Spanier gegen den Krieg sind, und Blair ist die grÃ¶sste Demonstration der vergangenen dreissig Jahre in England schlichtweg egal. Danke, dass Sie Tony Blair dazu gebracht haben, mit einem Dossier, das ein Plagiat einer Arbeit war, die ein Student zehn Jahre zuvor geschrieben hatte, vor das Britische Parlament zu treten und es als vom Britischen Geheimdienst erbrachten schlagenden BeweisÂ vorzustellen. Danke, dass sie Colin Powell gestatten, sich selber zum Narren zu machen, indem er dem UN-Sicherheitsrat Fotos vorlegt, die eine Woche spÃ¤ter von Hans Blix, dem Chef der UN-RÃ¼stungskontrollkommission zur Entwaffnung des Irak, Ã¶ffentlich angefochten werden. Danke, dass Sie mit Ihrer Haltung dafÃ¼r gesorgt haben, dass bei der UN-Vollversammlung der franzÃ¶sische Aussenminister Dominique de Villepin mit seiner Anti-Kriegsrede Applaus geerntet hat, was meines Wissens vorher nur einmal in der Geschichte der UNO, im Anschluss an eine Rede Nelson Mandelas, geschehen ist. Danke, dass Sie mit all ihren BemÃ¼hungen, den Krieg voranzutreiben, dazu beigetragen haben, dass die sonst untereinander zerstrittenen arabischen Nationen sich bei ihrem Treffen in Kairo in der letzten Februarwoche erstmals einstimmig gegen jedwede InvasionÂ ausgesprochen haben. Danke, dass Sie mit Ihrer rhetorischen Behauptung, die UNO habe nun die Chance, ihre wahre Bedeutung zu zeigen, sogar die zÃ¶gerlichsten LÃ¤nder dazu gebracht haben, sich gegen jede Art von Angriff gegen den Irak auszusprechen. Danke, dass Sie mit Ihrer Aussenpolitik den britischen Aussenminister Jack Straw zu der ErklÃ¤rung verleitet haben, im 21. Jahrhundert kÃ¶nne es Kriege geben, die sich moralisch rechtfertigen liessen, wodurch Straw seine ganze GlaubwÃ¼rdigkeit verlor. Danke, dass Sie versucht haben, ein Europa auseinander zu dividieren, das fÃ¼r seine Vereinigung kÃ¤mpft. Es wird ihm als Warnung dienen. Danke, dass Sie geschafft haben, was nur wenigen in diesem Jahrhundert gelungen ist: Millionen Menschen auf allen Kontinenten im Kampf fÃ¼r dieselbe Idee zu vereinen, auch wenn diese Idee nicht Ihre ist. Danke, dass Sie uns wieder fÃ¼hlen lassen, dass unsere Worte, wenn sie vielleicht nicht gehÃ¶rt, so zumindest ausgesprochen wurden. Das wird uns in Zukunft noch mehr Kraft geben. Danke, dass Sie uns missachten, dass Sie alle marginalisieren, die sich gegen IhreÂ Entscheidung stellen, denn die Zukunft der Erde gehÃ¶rt den Ausgeschlossenen. Danke, denn ohne Sie hÃ¤tten wir nicht erkannt, dass wir fÃ¤hig sind, uns zu mobilisieren. MÃ¶glicherweise wird es uns diesmal nichts nÃ¼tzen, aber ganz sicher spÃ¤ter einmal. Nun, da es keinen Weg zu geben scheint, die Trommeln des Krieges zum Schweigen zu bringen, mÃ¶chte ich wie ein europÃ¤ischer KÃ¶nig einst zu seinem Invasoren sagen: “MÃ¶ge dein Morgen schÃ¶n sein, mÃ¶ge die Sonne auf den RÃ¼stungen deiner Soldaten strahlen, denn noch am Nachmittag werde ich dich besiegen.” Danke, dass Sie uns - einer Armee anonymer Menschen, die wir die Strassen fÃ¼llen, um einen Prozess aufzuhalten, der bereits im Gange ist - erlauben zu erfahren, wie man sich fÃ¼hlt, wenn man machtlos ist, und aus diesem GefÃ¼hl zu lernen und es zu verwandeln. Also, geniessen Sie Ihren Morgen und welchen Ruhm er Ihnen auch immer bringen mag. Danke, dass Sie uns nicht zugehÃ¶rt und uns nicht ernst genommen haben. Doch Sie sollten wissen, dass wir Ihnen sehr wohl zugehÃ¶rt haben und Ihre Worte niemals vergessen werden. Danke, grosser Staatsmann George W. Bush. Herzlichen Dank.

Tyranny of email - and warping

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Mar 2003 13:10:06 +0000

Thanks to Ned for sharing this link to The Tyranny of email. It contains some good thought - like the three hour rule:

I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows.Â It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into "right brain mode", and really focus on a problem.Â Effective programmers organize their day to have at least one three-hour window, and hopefully two or three.Â (This is why good programmers often work late at night.Â They don't get interrupted as much...)

Patterns in the Enterprise

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:16:21 +0000

One project I’m working on has me working with different databases and Java objects. I needed some pointers on design and was given this incredible great link: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler, the guy who brought me into the ExtremeProgramming world via his book Refactoring.

Back to the Handspring Visor (from old blog)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:11:43 +0000

After almost a year with an Ipaq3870, I’ve dusted off my old Visor Deluxe and reinstalled from a backup. Synched with Outlook to get back my calendar and adresses and I’m back in business. Two programs that I have missed so much during the PocketPC days:

Lifebalance HourzPro

Nothing on the PocketPC comes even close… I’ll still use my Ipag in the car, using the very nice GPS Navigation Software I have.

IRC through a web interface (from old blog)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:06:15 +0000

I’ve been quite active on IRC lately (my friends know where to find me ;-) - and while I use Mirc for regular sessions, it can be handy to have a web-based alternative. I found it at IrcNet - thanks Sascha!

IE 6 != IE6 (from old blog)

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:03:26 +0000

What’s the difference between IE6.2800 on WindowsXP SP1 and IE6.2600 on Windows2000? 6 hours of finding a workaround for what seems to be a bug in IE6 on Win2000. In the application I’m writing I had to edit richt-text (using eWepEditPro). I did that in a child window and triggered a saveAndReload function in the main document. (Because I’m working with a Domino backend - things have to be saved from time to time ;-) Anyway - on my machine it worked. On my customers machine, the trigger of the function in the parent document didn’t work (window.opener.saveAndReload(); ). Spent hours figuring out where the problem was. Another couple of hours spent to find a workaround that works on both machines and gives me the same functionality.

New version of Freenet is out

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 08:15:50 +0000

A long time in the coming: Freenet, the secure and anonymous P2P plattform, is out in a new version.

New features include:

FEC - Forward Error Correction: Large files are split into many small pieces that contain information that allows freenet to reconstruct pieces that have gone missing.
Support for dynamic IP adresses
more

Get it, install it, make freenet grow!

Annotated transcript of Bush's speech

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 06:10:22 +0000

I found this annotated speech of Bush over at Back to Iraq in the commentaries. A terrifiying read early in the morning…

The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. [Why are they so much better at it than I am? I want time and advantage, too!] It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions demanding full disarmament. Over the years, U.N. weapon inspectors [the ones that ?we? sent, right?] have been threatened by Iraqi officials, electronically bugged, and systematically deceived. Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again ? because we are not dealing with peaceful men. [Why did my Poppy send them those biological and chemical agents in the first place?]

A transcript of George Bush?s war ultimatum speech [and thoughts] from the Cross Hall in the White House Monday, March 17, 2003 My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision. [Events in the United States were decided months, if not years, ago.] For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war. [?because Poppy stopped short for some gol-durned reason.] That regime pledged to reveal and destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War in 1991. [I can?t believe my own Poppy fell for that line of horse pucky.] Since then, the world has engaged in 12 years of diplomacy. [12 years is more than a decade, right?] We have passed more than a dozen resolutions in the United Nations Security Council. [?a dozen?more than a decade?] We have sent hundreds of weapons inspectors to oversee the disarmament of Iraq. [Yes, ?we? sent weapons inspectors?not the United Nations.] Our good faith has not been returned. The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. [Why are they so much better at it than I am? I want time and advantage, too!] It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions demanding full disarmament. Over the years, U.N. weapon inspectors [the ones that ?we? sent, right?] have been threatened by Iraqi officials, electronically bugged, and systematically deceived. Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again ? because we are not dealing with peaceful men. [Why did my Poppy send them those biological and chemical agents in the first place?] Intelligence gathered by this and other governments [Memo to self: find out what other governments have intelligence.] leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq?s neighbors and against Iraq?s people. [Don?t remind them Poppy was behind this, back when we all hated Ayatollah Khomeini?HEY! I remembered why Poppy sent them that stuff in the first place! YEE=HAW!] The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. [Iraq has been recklessly aggressive too?why didn?t they put that in the speech?] It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. [Gosh, they were talking about Iraq. Though there were terrorists here. And I guess I should forget about all those black ops CIA agents we?ve got. Classified information. Can?t tell the American people. They can?t handle that kind of information. Memo to Ashcroft: outlaw screenings of The Bourne Identity.] The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other. [I wave this magic wand over Iraq, and the audience will ignore North Korea?wave the magic wand?ignore North Korea?wave the magic wand?ignore North Korea!] The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat. [Maybe no one knows about what Poppy and his friends did in the ?80s?] But we will do everything to defeat it. [I?ll make it right, Poppy, I swear I will.] Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety. [Poppy will like that sailing analogy?though it sounds kind of wimpy. Why couldn?t they have made a rodeo analogy instead?] Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed. [Day of horror?September 11th?wasn?t that bin Laden? Didn?t I say I?d remove him, too? Hmmm?I wonder if the American people know that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are the same guy? That?s what Dickie and Donny told me?.] The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security. That duty falls to me, as Commander-in-Chief, [as supreme commander of the universal united space ranger forces,] by the oath I have sworn, by the oath I will keep. [Though loyalty to Skull and Bones comes first?.] Recognizing the threat to our country, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to support the use of force against Iraq. [What was that resolution number? Does anyone care?] America tried to work with [bully] the United Nations to address this threat [the use of American force] because we wanted to resolve the issue peacefully. [Fistfights at the U.N., especially with Powell there, would NOT have worked!] We believe in the mission of the United Nations. One reason the UN was founded after the second world war was to confront aggressive dictators, actively and early, before they can attack the innocent and destroy the peace. [Will anyone recognize that the UN is confronting ME??? That I am the aggressive dictator??? ?Cause I sure as heck am gonna attack some innocent Iraqis and destroy THEIR peace!!! Heh heh!] In the case of Iraq, the Security Council did act, in the early 1990s. Under Resolutions 678 and 687 - both still in effect - the United States and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a question of authority, it is a question of will. [You will NOT question MY authority. I WILL attack Iraq, no question about it. Heh heh!] Last September, I went to the U.N. General Assembly and urged the nations of the world to unite and bring an end to this danger. [That was supposed to stop the public opinion slide?but it didn?t! What happened???] On November 8, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations, and vowing serious consequences if Iraq did not fully and immediately disarm. Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power. For the last four-and-a-half months, the United States and our allies have worked within the Security Council to enforce that Council?s long-standing demands. [Within? That should say ?without the Security Council, I sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq?s backdoor! Don?t need no Security Council to do that!] Yet, some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. [Oh good?phew?they took out the words, ?the disarmament of Iraq by military force.? Makes those other guys look bad.] These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it. Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace, and a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world. [Hey, we got Limeys AND Spics. And some of them are broads!] The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours. [Memo to self: start new world club next week.] In recent days, some governments in the Middle East have been doing their part. They have delivered public and private messages urging the dictator to leave Iraq, so that disarmament can proceed peacefully. [Thank God those Godless Turks want to kill those Kurds as much as I want to kill some Iraqis.] He has thus far refused. All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. [Thanks, Roger Morris and the New York Times, for teaching me about Saddam?s beginnings?that it was John Kennedy?s fault, 40 years ago, and not all Poppy?s, 20 years ago. No one around here would tell me the true story.] Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing. For their own safety, all foreign nationals - including journalists and inspectors - should leave Iraq immediately. [Because we didn?t send all those troops to play tiddly winks! It?s WMD time, American style!!!] Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. [Cover your heathen asses or die! Heh heh!] If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. [So if you get in my way, it?s your fault, not mine. I warned you.] As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. [?Cause after we bomb the bejeezus out of you, yer gonna be sick and hungry!] We will tear down the apparatus of terror [Wait! I thought I had two more years??!!!] and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. [We?ll move all that over to Ashcroft?s place!! Heh heh!] The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near. [Death is liberating, right?? Your souls will be liberated from your bodies!] It is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain in power. [I made up my mind about that a long time ago, as soon as Poppy decided that I should be president, too.] It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honor and protect your country by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. [Desertion and disloyalty to the commander-in-chief is honorable, as long as it?s not me, heh heh!] Our forces will give Iraqi military units clear instructions on actions they can take to avoid being attacked and destroyed. I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life. [Fight for me! I WILL rule the world! Heh heh!] And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your action. [Hey, wait, I thought I just told ?em NOT to act?.] Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, ?I was just following orders.? [This does not apply to American troops who may use weapons of mass destruction or commit the murder of innocent civilians, right?] Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, [like sending all those troops to the Middle East?we did that to avoid a war in Iraq] and every measure will be taken to win it. Americans understand the costs of conflict because we have paid them in the past. War has no certainty, except the certainty of sacrifice. [So forget about coming out of this recession. And they say I don?t address economic issues at home. Stick that in yoursewer pipe and clog it.] Yet, the only way to reduce the harm and duration of war is to apply the full force and might of our military, and we are prepared to do so. [It will be so much easier rebuilding Iraq if we turn it into a sheet of glass first.] If Saddam Hussein attempts to cling to power, he will remain a deadly foe until the end. In desperation, he and terrorists groups might try to conduct terrorist operations against the American people and our friends. [Because even though we are waging war, he will always be a terrorist. He is not allowed to wage war. Isn?t there a UN resolution against him waging war? What?s its number?] These attacks are not inevitable. They are, however, possible. And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail. The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed. [Our threats and blackmail WILL succeed. Saddam WON?T live! Heh heh!] Our government is on heightened watch against these dangers. Just as we are preparing to ensure victory in Iraq, we are taking further actions to protect our homeland. [We know what you?re watching on TV now, too. And what you bought at the grocery store. And what kind of gas you put in your car. So WATCH OUT! Don?t raise your voice against me, enemy combatant ex-citizens!] In recent days, American authorities have expelled from the country certain individuals with ties to Iraqi intelligence services. [We also sent 120 agents to Idaho to harrass a college student?that makes me feel better!] Among other measures, I have directed additional security of our airports, and increased Coast Guard patrols of major seaports. The Department of Homeland Security is working closely with the nation?s governors to increase armed security at critical facilities across America. [However, 98% of all cargo containers entering this country will NOT be inspected?God help the longshoremen, the Commie union bastards?.] Should enemies strike our country, they would be attempting to shift our attention with panic and weaken our morale with fear. [Just as I am seeking to shift your attention from my failure to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.] In this, they would fail. No act of theirs can alter the course or shake the resolve of this country. [At least 50-someodd percent of them think we should use force?screw the other 40-odd percent!] We are a peaceful people - yet we?re not a fragile people, and we will not be intimidated by thugs and killers. If our enemies dare to strike us, they and all who have aided them, will face fearful consequences. [Did they steal that line from one of Saddam?s speeches?] We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. [I can?t say what those risks are, because that would mean you would know I?m afraid of being voted out of office in 2004, or impeached, whichever comes first.] In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. [Again?magic wand, Iraq?forget North Korea?wand, Iraq?forget Korea?.] With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. [God help us in July when those gooks have more than several nukes?gooks?nukes?I made a rhyme! Heh heh!] We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities. [Like those North Korean ICBMs?gol-durn them North Koreans! I?ll really be in trouble in July?.] The cause of peace requires all free nations to recognize new and undeniable realities. [I WILL be responsible for the second coming of Christ!] In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war. In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth. [So don?t even THINK of trying to appease ME! Heh heh!] Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations - and responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide. [Do ya suppose the American people have forgotten about all that anthrax we had running through our mail? What was the CIA thinking?] The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now. [At least, that?s what my astrologer says?.] As we enforce the just demands of the world, we will also honor the deepest commitments of our country. [Note to Ashcroft: make it legal to commit peace activists against their will.] Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation. [Dead folk look so peaceful?.] The United States, with other countries, will work to advance liberty and peace in that region. [Guam and Puerto Rico are countries, right?] Our goal will not be achieved overnight, but it can come over time. The power and appeal of human liberty is felt in every life and every land. And the greatest power of freedom is to overcome hatred and violence, and turn the creative gifts of men and women to the pursuits of peace. [The pursuits of peace through violence and destruction and death and bombs and KABLOOEY!!! YEE=HAWWW!!!] That is the future we choose. Free nations have a duty to defend our people by uniting against the violent. [Because violence united can defeat the violent! Even without England! And especially without the UN!] And tonight, as we have done before, America and our allies accept that responsibility. Good night, and may God continue to bless America. [All hail the new King George! Long live the King! It?s good to be King?.]

War - huh - what is it good for

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:20:01 +0000

So it seems that tomorrow is the night the war begins (full moon rising, one day after the “ultimatum”). I didn’t grow up when the saying was “Make love, not war”. When I was a young adult, we watched war on CNN and heard that making love was dangerous (AIDS). “Make War, not Love” seemed to be the motto.

And now the time has come again… I’m saddend by this, angry.

The right tools

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 15 Mar 2003 15:05:36 +0000

I had to drill a couple of holes today to hang a picture and a piece where the kids can hang their clothes. We have solid concrete walls and my old power-drill just didn’t cut it. So today I went out and bought a new one: 750W instead of 400W. A second grip in front to hold the drill better. A distance measurment device that prevents deeeeep holes.

It took about 4 seconds to drill each of the four holes.

Kinder Philosophie

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 15 Mar 2003 15:01:21 +0000

Tja - da hab ich also zwei wunderbare Kinder. 3 und 5 Jahre alt. Ein Quell stÃ¤ndiger Freude. Das Ende meiner Nerven. Die Ursache meiner grauen Haare.

Aber ab und zu darf man die Perlen des Elternseins erleben…

Mein Sohn Ã¼bt im Kindergarten das TheaterstÃ¼ck: “Schneewittchen”. Er wird einen der sieben Zwerge spielen. Als ich ihn fragte, wie ihm das StÃ¼ck gefalle, sagt er sinngemÃ¤ss: “Das StÃ¼ck ist blÃ¶d und dann bin ich traurig”. Ich hab ihn gefragt wieso er denn traurig sei. Da meinte er: “Der blÃ¶de Prinz kriegt die Prinzessin und nimmt sie uns einfach weg.”

How to start a linux server

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 05:49:01 +0000

What happens when you have uptime of over 200 days and you need to reboot your linux machine? You forget how to do things. And if you don’t have the documententation handy….

Here’s how the Notes server on linux is started:

su notes cd /usr/local/notesdata /opt/lotus/bin/server

or for a more detailes script, check out this entry on notes.net

Spoiled by Speed

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sat, 08 Mar 2003 10:49:28 +0000

Here I am at my Wife’s Sisters computer, trying to fix a printer that no longer prints black. (Google tells me that the printhead probably is clogged with dried black ink)

Anyway - I’m accessing the Internet to diagnose this problem - nothing special there. But I’m doing so, using a 56k Modem. God - how can anybody bear that kind of slowness? Have I really drooled back in the old days, when I got my first 2400 baud, my first 14'400 baud modem? Nowadays, anything under 512kb speed just seems unbearable… (and then you also have to wait until the modem has dialed, negotiated, etc. - I’m so used to being always on)

Starting to move stuff from old blog to this

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Fri, 07 Mar 2003 10:32:21 +0000

Interestingly, my old blog (on the Wiki) doesn’t work when I access it with my browsers, from my computer. But when working on a different computer, it shows up fine (minus CCS, minus images) - well, time to move the more interesting entries to this new format.

les jeune filles de...

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 02 Mar 2003 15:46:46 +0000

ein Schweizer Blog gefunden: Limmatquai von - eben - einer fille du …

Barix Exstreamer and Streamsicle

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 02 Mar 2003 15:01:11 +0000

I’ve had a Barix Exstreamer for quite a while. It has been sitting in my bedroom, mostly not playing. One of the reasons was the the server software (zServer) that Barix provides isn’t quite to my liking.

Barix has since made zServer open-source and I have started to work on it (something that unfortunately I don’t have too much time for at the moment).

But on the Exstreamer Mailing list, someone mentioned Streamsicle as an alternative. This piece of software is a streaming server that jukeboxes through my mp3 collection on my home theater PC. Re-configuring the Exstreamer was a snap and now it sits and happily plays through my collection.

US spying on UNSC members

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Sun, 02 Mar 2003 14:55:10 +0000

It doesn’t really come as a surprise: The Obsverver has an article that shows, that the NSA is snooping on phone and e-mail conversations of the members of the UN security council.

Land of the free - ehh?

Moving to RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds in MoveableType

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 16:34:01 +0000

I have been using ZoÃ« for a while now (as a kind of Google for Email) and I’m more than happy with it. Recently RaphaÃ«l included the possibility that ZoÃ« also handles RSS feeds like email. When using this feature with this Blog, I noticed that the RSS entries that come from this site are truncated to 15 characters or so - not really much meat for an indexing engine. Thanks to Andrew Dunn my blog now outputs both RSS1.0 and 2.0 feeds with the full text of an entry - just like it should be. Get his instructions and implement them!

Support Horor Stories

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 26 Feb 2003 14:38:19 +0000

You have heard about the DAU’s (DÃ¼mmster Anzunehmener User) - but you have dismissed the tales as fantasy. Well - one guy working support has fotographic evidence, that everything said and told is simply not true - because the real truth is, that it’s even worse!

Stupid Computer tricks

Found trough: Industrial Technology & Witchcraft

GeoUrl - who's next to you?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 25 Feb 2003 06:20:11 +0000

By clicking on the icon below, you can check what other websites are physically close to this one… Go and try it out:

Freightening Web Development

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 22:57:55 +0000

Thanks to DominoGuru for sharing this priceless find of well thought out web development…

Presenting: The Buffy Pages

Should they have acted up lately, you might want to check what message they gave to their users by opening the dialog box.

Somebody report this to Jakob Nielsen

Blush - the movie

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 15:34:59 +0000

Another one thanks to Anke: A commentary on the Bush - Blair relationship…

Yes! This mean, that this blog not only covers technology, art and design but ventures into poltitics as well…

This Is A Magazine

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 15:00:37 +0000

Thanks to Anke for this gem:

Webmail on stereoÃ¯ds

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 15:35:12 +0000

OK - I’m easily impressed. But what this company has been doing to webmail is simply astounding: Oddpost creates a Outlook like environment in the browser. Complete with type-ahead, drag&drop; and whatnot. It’s fast, easy, nice. Unfortunately you need IE5+ to use it…. (Can we have Opera 7 support, please? Or Mozilla at least?)

Very, very impressive

Yam! Bam! mon chat Splash

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:14:54 +0000

Flash from the past… Reading A List Apart on flexible layouts, following to the A donkey on the edge blog of the author of said article the song below hit me… Oh yes! I remember “Plastic Bertrand”. Unfortunately, Dug’s blog doesn’t seem to have Permalinks, so I copied the text of the song here…

Enjoy!

Yam! Bam! mon chat Splash GÃ®t sur mon lit a bouffÃ© sa langue En buvant tout mon whisky quant Ã moi Peu dormi, vidÃ©, brimÃ© J’ai dÃ» dormir dans la gouttiÃ¨re OÃ¹ j’ai eu un flash Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! En quatre couleurs Â Allez hop! un matin Une louloute est venue chez-moi PoupÃ©e de Cellophane Cheveux chinois un sparadrap Une gueule de bois a bu ma biÃ¨re Dans un grand verre en caoutchouc Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! Comme un indien dans son igloo Â Ã‡a plane pour moi Ã§a plane pour moi Ã‡a plane pour moi moi moi moi moi Ã‡a plane pour moi Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! Ã‡a plane pour moi Â Allez hop! la nana quel panard! Quelle vibration! de s’envoyer Sur le paillasson LimÃ©e, ruinÃ©e, vidÃ©e, comblÃ©e You are the King of the divan! Qu’elle me dit en passant Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! I am the King of the divan Â Ã‡a plane pour moi Ã§a plane pour moi Ã‡a plane pour moi moi moi moi moi Ã‡a plane pour moi Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! Ã‡a plane pour moi Â Allez hop! t’occupe t’inquiÃ¨te touche pas ma planÃ¨te It’s not today Quel le ciel me tombera sur la tÃªte Et que l’alcool me manquera Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! Ã‡a plane pour moi Â Allez hop! ma nana s’est tirÃ©e S’est barrÃ©e enfin c’est marre Ã tout casser L’Ã©vier, le bar me laissant seul Comme un grand connard Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! Le pied dans le plat Â Ã‡a plane pour moi Ã§a plane pour moi Ã‡a plane pour moi moi moi moi moi Ã‡a plane pour moi Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou! Ã‡a plane pour moi Ã‡a plane pour moi Ã§a plane pour moi Ã‡a plane pour moi moi moi moi moi

I'm an OS

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 09:58:01 +0000

I’m
Which OS are You?

Reversible.Org

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 09:43:18 +0000

Reversible looks like an interesting idea

Securing a Domino Application

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 09:26:21 +0000

Found this through vowe: Baiscs for secure web applications. 5 Steps to secure a Domino application.

Thanks!

Notes: Modify fields from view

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 16:31:20 +0000

Why hasn’t anybody shown me this before? Modify fields from a view level without creating an agent

This little formula allows you to edit any field with any type in a notes document. This is so handy when developing….

Is Jakob Nielsen's UseIt column still the "de-facto" standard?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 16:17:45 +0000

I just received my bi-weekly email from Jakob Nielsen that told me about his new usability column, over on Use It.

Is it just me, or are his columns getting more and more irrelevant? I remember finding his site, a couple of years ago and reading every single column he published - and I have been doing so ever since. I bought the book. I almost went to a conference of his. I sent countless people to his site. But lateley I only gloss over his columns. To me they become less and less interesting and relevant: Either he’s trying to sell me a report or he talks about some esoteric applications (or both, as in the current column: Investor Relations Website Design (Read the column, buy the $248 121 page report).

Referrer Script by Stephen

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 15:09:27 +0000

Always trying to copy vowe I also wanted to have his Referrer list show up on my page. Thanks to a little googling I found Stephen’s Web ~ Referrer System and had it implemented in about 5 minutes.

Thanks Stephen

Fix Error Handling First

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 02:10:03 +0000

Thanks to Hugh I found this article Ned Batchelder: Fix Error Handling First on error handling and fixing handling errors.

A good read and something to keep in mind (Of course I do already - but you should too ;-) )

Blogging Bookmarks

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 01:52:24 +0000

vowe dot net

Now is this cool or what? Clicking on link and I get a Blog entry for vowe? And it even works in Opera

Apache slow down solved?

jens-christian@invisible.ch (Jens-Christian Fischer) — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 00:36:47 +0000

It seems that something with my dynamic execution of cgi’s causes the slowdown on Apache. Now that the Blog is static, everything seems to move quite fast (except for the fact that it takes me ages to edit the pages - but hey - that’s ok, isn’t it?)

Check out a slow apache server on: My old Blog done with PikiePikie (of course that link now is broken - hmmm)

The link doesn’t work anymore? Though - it turns out that either Python or the Python Apache handler or god knows what else was the culprit… This site is now as fast as it can be ;-)