So if you thought that the last post dates me, see here. This is from the mid eighties, magnetic stripes to save stuff on. One stripe held all of 1.2 kb. What fun to remember!

Cleaning up the basement (because we had some water leaking in, but that is a different matter entirely), I found stuff that practically makes me feel ancient …

Steve Jobs demos NeXTstep.

[tags]Steve Jobs, NeXTstep, video[/tags]

Wo ich schon dabei bin, schreibe ich auch gleich noch auf, was ich derzeit an Extensions so in meinem Thunderbird sitzen habe:

• Enigmail
• MinimizeToTray
• Signature Switch
• View Headers Toggle button
• header scroll extension
• Mail Redirect

[Tags] Thunderbird extensions software [/tags]

Auch, ums für mich selbst zu dokumentieren, hier die Liste an Firefox-Extensions, die ich derzeit verwende:

• Google Toolbar for Firefox
• Greasemonkey
• Performancing
• ScrapBook
• Colorful Tabs
• Separe
• Reveal
• Firefox Showcase
• Web Developer
• del.icio.us Complete
• Google Safe Browsing
• View Source Chart
• Aardvark
• Platypus
• Google Bookmark Button
• FootieFox
• Furl Tools
• keyconfig
• coComment!
• Google Browser Sync
• Blogger Web Comments
• FireBug
• Javascript Debugger (Venkman)

[Tags]Firefox extensions[/tags]

Listening to Engadged Podcast 47.5 and the discussion about the strategy Apple is following with video on both the iPod and the iMac, I am slightly surprised about some of the theories not articulated.

If you are a company that is highly identified with digital media, that – even with a certain understatement – is constantly on the technical edge, would you really want to integrate a dying technology like analog TV into where you develop your media hub? I see Apple as a company that rather takes its time and invests effort into doing things both right and in style. Analog TV wouldn’t make the new iMacs display look good.

To me, Front Row has HDTV written all over it. With Video in the iTunes Store, Apple even already is laying the groundwork to have HDTV transport in their hands and put some pressure on cable operators and broadcasters. They have a display more suited to 16:9 material than 4:3 TV. And of course, they can do all the wonderful things with the digital media that the iTools and Front Row allow.

I’m not at all surprised that there’s no TV in the mix … yet.

Replacing writers block with total silence.

Coming via an article on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog to reading Getting MyWeb, I find it hard to bring it in line with what I do not like about my personal experience with the product. I admit that I was hooked by the idea and have been thinking long and hard how I would like to organize my bookmarks – or rather, what tools would make it easier for me to organize my web surfing and helping my informational needs.

What made me give up on using it was, in fact, the speed of the thing. I’m mostly well-connected, but if I want to externally remember something in my browsing, I do not want to wait for a window to enter my data in for thirty seconds to a minute. I want tight integration, I want to see quickly how things go. To me, it seemed to be more of a proof-of-concept than an actually usable application.

So when will we be getting the real thing?

Why is it that most every application on this planet on the operating systems I’ve used so far is either not doing any decent spellchecking (we’re not even talking grammar checking yet), or brings along dozens of megabytes of dictionaries and then can’t handle multiple languages gracefully? Looking at my blog you’ll see that I write in two languages, and that’s true with almost any writing I do, from email to internal notes. My editor (emacs) can handle multiple languages. My email application on Windows can (The Bat!). And often enough I have to use Word for Windows, that can also do it. But they have separate dictionaries, so all the words I teach them, I have to teach all of them. And at the same time, I do more and more of my writing in web browsers, and those don’t spell-check at all.

Come on! There’s so many smart things user interfaces can do. Why can’t they do something that basic? It would certainly improve many peoples lives.

(By the way, my offline blog editor can handle english, but not german. Sigh.)

So richtig robust ist das Motorola Razr 3 nicht. Meines kam Anfang November, als es endlich bei T-Mobile im Programm war. Mittlerweile musste ich es schon einmal tauschen, weil eine Taste nicht mehr funktionierte — just jene, die in fast allen Dialogen die Funktion “Ja” oder “Bestätigen” hat. Und gestern ist es mir das Austauschgerät auf einem Parkplatz aus der Hand gefallen und physisch gebrochen. Jetzt fehlt ein Teil. Die Siemens-Geräte, die ich vorher hatte, haben solch rüde Behandlung durchaus ausgehalten; ich bin leider so ungeschickt, dass elektronische Assistenten, die ich öfter mal bei mir habe, sowas aushalten müssen. Nun bin ich etwas verunsichert, ob ich mir das dritte Razr nehmen soll, oder vielleicht doch auf ein anderes Handy umsteigen soll. Aber so richtig wichtig ist das nicht.

After spending entirely too many hours debugging the thing, I just found out that just setting the language domain with setlocale is not enough. At least with apache-1.3, you also have to set the environment variable “LANG” with putenv. Now, the localized applications show their beauty in all languages.

Die vorhin abgebildete Frickel-Konstruktion konnte wieder abgebaut werden. Es fand sich dann in den Vorräten doch noch ein Switch, der genug Kabelenden aufnehmen konnte. Damit sind wieder alle Kabel gebändigt und der Schrank wieder geschlossen.

Ich habe mein Blog-Schreiben etwas umgestellt: Anstatt wie bisher immer direkt in die Maske meines WordPress zu tippern, habe ich jetzt einen lokalen Clienten auf meinem Notebook und kann so schon jederzeit Texte vorbereiten. Ausserdem ist das Editieren so eine Spur einfacher geworden. Die ersten Eindrücke sind auf jeden Fall angenehm. Heissen tut das ganze w.bloggar und ist gratis zu haben. Auch hier: definitiv fürs Erste empfohlen.

Gibts vermutlich schon länger, ich habe es aber gerade erst für mich entdeckt: Von Google gibt es jetzt Software, um die Bilder am lokalen Rechner zu katalogisieren und auch schon die ersten einfachen Änderungen daran vorzunehmen; vermutlich ist es sowas ähnliches wie iPhoto für den PC. Heisst sich Picasa und ist gratis. Definitiv eine Empfehlung wert.

Ich habe gerade einige Zeit damit verbracht, SuSE 9.2 am Notebook zu installieren. Die fremden Betriebssysteme verwende ich unter VMware; 9.2 hat sich aber unter meiner normalen Installation kräftig gewehrt. Auch die Lektüre diverser Foren war nicht hilfreich.

Geholfen hat dann, mein VMWare von 4.5 auf 4.5.2 zu aktualisieren. Dann klappte die Installation; ich musste nur den USB Support im Guest deaktivieren. Ich habe die Installation auch im Text-Modus durchgeführt, das erschien mir am robustesten. Aber jetzt tuts.

Coming in via Joi Ito’s blog, I just read a funny text on The need for reform on the Internet. I’m somewhat amazed on how wrong this text is in many respects.

There have always been central agencies that were quite important to the Internet. The text even makes a reference to it: Jon Postel is featured prominently. He, personally, and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority shaped the network in a big way. The Internet Engineering Task Force has been instrumental as well. The text speaks of the quality of RFCs as the defining documents of what the Internet is today — but it requires a lot of dedication, editing and work to have a collection of standards in such a high quality. Then, there’s the local RIRs: ARIN, RIPE, AfriNIC. For all practical purposes, they’re centralized structures as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m for the power to innovate on the network. Innovation is a good thing. I’m also not against making money on the Internet; heck, I’m trying to make my living off networking stuff, too. But I’m against such innovations like SiteFinder by virtue of which Verisign broke the DNS because they want to make more money. I’m against reforms that would remove any form of netizen-based democracy on a global scale that can ban VeriSign from implementing that service again.

Also, it seems that all the text is concerned with is the domain name system. It’s true that it is an important part of network infrastructure — and a publicly visible one at that — but it shouldn’t be equated with all internet policy. There’s other interesting policy decisions around; how to switch from IPv4 to IPv6 for instance. But that has nothing to do with registries or registrars.

Maybe the author needs to do a little more research?

Via PC World’s Techlog: Winplosion, ein Tool mehr, um gute Features von Mac OS X unter Windows zu haben.
Explosion, Miniaturen von allen Fenstern auf einen Blick.

Definitiv empfohlen.