Category: General

easyJet has plastered the following ad all across Basel:

my alternative spelling suggestions:

• fussball Team
• or even better: fussballTeam, in line with their company logo

Sitepoint on the “new thing” in search engine optimization.

It looks like press releases to services like prweb.com are going to go the same way that comments to blogs went…

Some of my regular readers may remember that a while back I used to regularly post links to news about Malawi. One of my initial blogging ideas was to be a news aggregator for interesting internet articles on Malawi. Nchenga’s low-budget approach to crossing the digital divide.

In the past months – actually since I moved to this new domain – I have stopped my news postings. I’m still following the news at The Nation and BBC Africa, but somehow I don’t feel I can continue postings about current affairs in Malawi.

Recent political developments have been very surprising and may also include a turn for the better. I’m certain that one year ago, nobody could have predicted or even imagined a similar development.

Yet, somewhere within me I feel a continuous sadness for my home country, and there’s something that is blocking me from following through. A layer of sadness.

Living in Switzerland where some people are *very* nationalist, I’m strangely aware of the fact that nationality is one of the few things that you can’t choose. The other thing you can’t choose is the kind of family you are born into. I’m lucky in both ways. Cos I have the best kind of family you can imagine (intelligent, caring, tolerant, funny, and international) and I don’t feel the need to nurture nationalist feelings. Rather I’ve been blessed with the positive aspects of 3 cultures and more. And counting. Cos there are a lot of things that I like about Switzerland.

This past week has been a sad one in my family. Last Friday my uncle passed away. He lived in Africa for over 42 years. In Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, Swaziland, and for a long time in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. And he loved Africa.

He was very ill and his passing is in many ways a relief from years of sickness.

I have happy memories of picking him up at Chileka Airport. Unpacking his presents. Biltong and peppermint chocolate. Stopping in Masvingo on our way to Johannesburg. He had a very South African way of dressing. Pink shirts with red ties. He was my closest relative outside of my immediate family while growing up, as all my other relatives were in Germany or Australia. And I believed some of the wild stories he invented to entertain my sister and me.

He moved to Africa during a time when there were high hopes for a brighter African future. And I guess that’s my silent wish for Malawi. Hope. Suffering leads to perserverance, perserverance leads to character, and character leads to hope.

Maybe my sadness is not linked to Malawi as much as I think it is. Maybe it is linked to my awareness that our lives are so fragile and finite. And yet we spend so much of our time destroying and hurting others. With words or weapons. For our own gain.

I have some new ideas for this blog, but I don’t know when and how and if I’ll put them into practice. So far it’s been a great technical playground and lots of fun. Topics will continue to reflect aspects of software development, travel, linguistics, as well as personal thoughts and ideas that cross my digital paths. Meanwhile, feel free to leave a comment. I’ve been sending round my favorite Dilbert of the week. And needless to say. I’m addicted to email and comments.

via 43folders:

1. Shut off auto-check – Either turn off automatic checking completely, or set it to something reasonable, like every 20 minutes or so. If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach. I’m sure that some of you working in North Korean missile silos need real-time email updates, but I encourage the rest of you to consider ganging your email activity into focused (maybe even timed) activity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work. (See also, NYT: You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention)
2. Pick off easy ones – If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Remember: this is about action, not about cogitating and filing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t permit yourself to get caught up in composing an unnecessary 45-minute epistle (see next item).
3. Write less – Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop trying to be Victor Hugo, and just smack it over the net—especially if fear of writing a long reply is what slows your response time. N.B.: This does not mean that you should write elliptically or bypass standard grammar, capitalization, and punctuation (unless you want to look 12 years old); just that your well-written message can and should be as concise as possible. That saves everyone time.
4. Cheat – Use something like MailTemplate to help manage answers to frequent email subjects. Templates let you create and use boilerplate responses to the questions and requests to which you usually find yourself drafting identical replies over and over from scratch. At least use a template as a basis for your response, and then customize it for that person or situation. Don’t worry—you can still let your sparkling prose and winning wit shine through, just without having to invent the wheel 10 times each day.
5. Be honest – If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it. Guilt will not make you more responsive two months from now, otherwise, you’d just do it now, right? Trust your instincts, listen to them, and stop trying to be perfect.

today is just one of those blogging days, when I say to myself there are other hobbies out there… like fishing, or knitting! Hobbies which are less affected by intruders.

Woke up this morning to find a MySQL error displaying… somehow I managed to resolve that.

Sun is shining and I’m sitting here trying to figure out ways to stop comment s*pa&m. For some reason I can’t install either spam-karma or wp hashcash. Followed the instructions, but I can’t get the plug-ins to work. Don’t know yet what I’m doing wrong. Any suggestions are welcome. Maybe I’ve customized my comments php file so that it doesn’t run with the above plug-ins? Maybe my webspace provider has some restrictions? Maybe I really am ready for a new hobby?

All along I’ve had visions of wading through digital junk. The information revolution is killing itself.

Anyway I hope there’s an upward learning curve and I’ll be able to find an adequate solution.

On a more positive note, I’ve installed the Debian distribution on my old laptop. I’ve still got a couple of settings (sound card, display, ADSL) to do, but the basics are up and running. And I’m moving to a cheaper ADSL service…

p.s. is there a wordpress user group in Basel ?

I installed Picasa2 this week. Cos I am curious. Curious what Google is up to.

So far I like it… It visualizes those long forgotten .jpgs deep down in the backwater of my hard disk across all directories. It’s like IrfanView but with a better user interface. I haven’t tried the basic fixes or tuning options.
But I’ll probably stick to my oldish versions of Fireworks and Photoshop for those.

Canoo’s UltraLightClient has been nominated for the Java Developer’s Journal Reader’s Choice Award in the Category
“Best Java Rich Client Platform”.

To vote:
http://www.sys-con.com/java/readerschoice2004/vote.cfm

(I really don’t like the JDJ web site. IMHO, it’s too cluttered. The print layout is a lot better!)

and offshoring, work means much more than doing your job.

6 tips to keep you working:

1. Do not plan to write code for your entire career – code is a commodity and can be created by others for much less money
2. Learn to communicate effectively – develop your public speaking and writing skills
3. Develop people skills – the person that can pull teams together, support communication is very valuable
4. Move into the “people” part of the business – learn how to deal with customers, work with vendors and interact with management
5. Learn how to sell – bringing in new business is part of an employee’s responsibilty in a highly competitive market
6. Consider consulting

Source: Viewpoint, Save Your Job, Howard Adamsky, Software Development Magazine, January 2005, page 14

Linguists, however, are slowly coming to discover the joys of a free and searchable corpus of maybe 10 trillion words that is available to anyone with an internet connection: the world wide web.

I took part in last week’s STC web seminar on pre-emptive project planning by John Hedtke.

Found it practical and useful.

His main points:

Plan ahead
The real problem is the projects you don’t know about that land on your desk suddenly and without warning.

Keep it simple
Use a simple excel sheet to track your current and upcoming projects instead of project tracking software.
Project tracking software depends on clear, stated dependencies that do not change frequently.
Technical communications has multiple interconnected dependencies that can change daily, sometimes hourly.

Gather information about projects that officially don’t exist yet
Use informal and formal ways to find out what projects might become real.

Distribute your project plan to everybody except sales.

Communicate
Talk to everyone at all levels. Ask probing questions. Don’t believe the official pronouncements. Check them out with the folks in the trenches

stumbled across this entry at Language Log:

[…] The Elements of Style offers prejudiced pronouncements on a rather small number of topics, frequently unsupported, and unsupportable, by evidence. It simply isn’t true that the constructions they instruct you not to use are not used by good writers. Take just one illustrative example, the advice not to use which to begin a restrictive relative clause (the kind without the commas, as in anything else which you might want). But the truth is that once E.B. White stopped pontificating and went back to writing his (excellent) books, he couldn’t even follow this advice himself. or should he; it’s stupid advice). You can find the beginning of his book Stuart Little on the official E.B. White website; and you can see him breaking his own rule in the second paragraph. That isn’t the only such example.

recommends the following 2 books:

• Proper Grammar by Ronald Wardhaugh, published by Basil Blackwell in 1999 – about grammatical correctness
• Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage – alternative to S & W

it’s sunny and cold. just right for jogging in the woods. did about 3km. it feels good to have the cold fresh air rushing in. Maxwell is right: Motivation comes when you get started.

i’ve started cleaning up my olde laptop (4+ years old). there’s no space left on the hard disk. it doesn’t shut down on its own. and crashes every so often. i’ve made a backup of all my files and emails. next step: re-install the os. or linux. i’m thinking of trying to install linux instead of sm windows. but i don’t know if it’ll recognize the olde hardware components.

At times it is useful to send a text message…
Some friends keep asking how i manage to send text messages to their cell phones even though i don’t have one myself.

Well, here’s the secret… (oh nooo, i can see all of my faithful geek readers yawning)

I use the text services at sms.de and web.de.
Both sites are also useful to store telephone numbers and addresses.

I’m not a power user ( = 1-2 text messages per day) and I don’t know how the rates compare with T-Mobile, Swisscom and Co.

History of text messaging: 1

SMS was supposedly invented by engineers at Ericsson that needed a way to communicate on the network while they were working on the voice channel.

The Economist on software development.

the problem:

30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated them, and nine out of ten come in late

the solution:

better software tools and processes

The three big industry trends—lifecycle management, testing and open source—come together in a movement known as “agile” programming. This approach to software development was codified in a meeting in February 2001 in Utah when a group of programmers declared its allegiance to doing things quickly, using common sense and simplicity.
[…]
The main principle of agile programming is that developers must talk to each other often, and that they must talk to the business people setting requirements equally often.

via http://www.j2eegeek.com/blog/

It’s Sunday evening and I can’t think of anything blog-worthy to write. Feel tired and restless.

Weather has been unusually warm for January. Yesterday felt a bit like spring. Beautiful sunshine and about 15 degrees warm.

For those of you that are waiting for snow, here’s a snow photo I took 3 weeks ago:

or maybe it’s a snapshot from my recent journey to the moon? Small step for man, a giant leap for mankind…

Stuff I did this weekend:

• Upgraded my WordPress installation to 1.2.2
• Went jogging for the first time in 2005 – about 3 kms.
• Did usual weekend chores like washing, shopping, cleaning.
• Paid bills.
• Talked on the phone and sent lots of SMS.
• Answered emails.
• Watched the relief effort in SE Asia.
• Spontaneously decided to visit a friend only to find out that nobody was at home.
• Surfed aimlessly thru the net and read online articles at Weltwoche, Spiegel and Focus.
• Developed chronic back pain to the point that I think I might go to the doc tomorrow.

interesting read:

Joe Winchester’s JDJ article, Who Needs “Hardship Programming”?

quote:

Let’s take cars, for example – my attitude is that when they break I take them to the mechanic; what’s fun isn’t so much tinkering with the engine myself and gaining some kind of machismo pride in doing so, it’s the journeys I take in it and what I do when I arrive. Likewise with writing software – the purpose is to create a good user experience for someone else who wants to solve a particular problem in a more efficient way. I once had to explain to a customer why we were late shipping a particular software release and he replied that we were just polishing the inside of a tin can and he didn’t care. He was right – we were upgrading operating system releases and migrating to a new language version mid-release cycle. However, there was no business value to it and we’d just taken our eye off the target and onto our navels.

Is the problem with software and tooling one of a master craftsman with his favorite chisel and simply that people are reluctant to change something that makes them most productive, or is it just that people have a built-in desire to belong to a herd and gain social acceptance from their tribal peers from where they can collectively mock progress and other languages and technology changes as being for the folks on the other team? Is the super-league of programmers occupied by folks who take apart game boxes and have wireless networks in their kitchen, or is it by those who would rather play some fun games on the box it was designed for and then enjoy a nice meal in the kitchen afterward?

Massimo Rocchi will be performing at the Tabourettli from 11th Jan to 12th Feb.

The CD “äUä” is great… and it was at the same time my first formal introduction to Swiss German, when I was still staying far away from the Swiss German Kantons in southern Switzerland.

I particularly like his observations on language and culture as he compares French, Germans, Swiss and Italians.

Insiders will recognize:

“auso”
“Kopfhörer”
“Der Daniel aus Bern”

I’ll update you on the show. If I get round to going that is…

• UK deports Zim asylum seekers – one million Zimbabweans are estimated to be living and working, some of them illegally, in Britain.
• English version of Spiegel.de available at spiegel.de/international
• What is your favourite African song? Nominate your favorite African produced song here.

And I didn’t notice a thing…

Epicenter: near Waldkirch / Emmendingen.
Measured 5.4 on the Richter scale.
See also: Spiegel

Report your earthmoving experience. Fill out the form at:
http://www.seismo.ethz.ch/networks/macroseismic/macro_form_eneu.html

They’re also interested to hear from you, if you did NOT feel the earthquake.

Visited the Monet exhibition in Zurich. It focuses on his garden paintings.
Monets Garden

I really enjoyed the ArchiSkulptur exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation.

Today’s gospel concert at the Theodorkirche was great.

Wer sich dennoch mit den neuen Gepflogenheiten
näher befassen möchte, dem sei Canoo.net ans Herz gelegt:
Einfach ein Wort wie z. B. Gämse eintippen und auf
«Suche» drücken. Das Wort wird nun der entsprechenden
neuen Regel zugeordnet. Im Falle der Gämse wäre dies die
Schreibregel «Stammprinzip-Umlautbildung».
Diese Regel wird nun leicht verständlich und mit
Beispielen erläutert. Canoo.net nimmt dabei sogar auf
regionale Gepflogenheiten wie Schweizerisch oder à”“sterreichisch
Rücksicht, deren Schreibweisen ja in gewissen
Fällen abweichen dürfen.