March 2008
1 post
Hacking Status
Today I rolled a first release of the URI_Template package in PEAR. As the name suggests, this is a parser for URI Templates. I wrote the code around Christmas as a finger exercise and to become familiar with what URI templates are, but unfortunately only found time today to get it into PEAR’s CVS and prepare a release. Documentation including installation instructions can be found over...
February 2008
4 posts
Slides about Social Graph and XFN →
On Monday I gave a talk at the third installment of Web Montag Aachen where I talked a bit about Google’s Social Graph API and the XFN microformat. The talk was held in German and so are the slides.
“TimBL ignored the entire body of theory and pasted together the simplest...”
– Tim Bray on HTML.
10 Years of Markup
On February 10th, 1998, XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation. This means that as of today it has been with us “officially” for the past 10 years. Happy Birthday, bitch! Great to have you around.
Some thoughts on MSFT's offer for Yahoo!
Microsoft has placed an offer to buy Yahoo!. Some initial, mainly unsorted thoughts below: My first impression is that Microsoft is really despaired for not being able to catch up with Google on their own. How else can they justify a 62% premium over Yahoo’s stock price from Thursday night? $44.6 billion dollars is a whole lotta money. Microsoft and SAP AG once cancelled their plans for...
January 2008
28 posts
“How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while...”
– Sam Garfield
“Not only do everything you say you’re going to do, but do more. Offering...”
– Seth Godin
Drawing The Curtain
Yesterday evening I rolled out a new incarnation of martinjansen.com incorporating some things I had been wanting to do for quite some time. Most importantly, the site does not have any sort of administration interface anymore but only pulls content from other sites. This is what’s called a Mashup these days. The sources are: Tumblr for texts, photos, and quotes. Last.fm for some numbers...
Canon EOS 450D / Digital Rebel XSi →
So happy I did not get myself an EOS 400D late last year.
Coins
In the past four days I have found a one-Euro coin on the outer window sill of the shop that is on the first floor of my place three times. I live by the rule “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves”, so naturally I have taken the coins and put them to good use by buying something. However I’m wondering who semi-regularly puts coins on the window sill...
Biofuel not so good
There is an interesting news item on BBC NEWS talking about a recent report by the European Commission on the increasing proliferation of biofuel in Europe and especially Great Britain. Essentially the report states three problems with biofuels: Planting for the production of biofuel has a huge impact on the environment. Think of all the machines that are required to farm the cropland. In order...
Time Capsule: Good deal
I’m considering to buy an Apple Time Capsule when it hits the streets next month because I need a backup appliance for my MacBook Pro. What I was wondering today was if getting one is a good deal or not. So I did a bit of investigation and some math. (Following I’ll be looking at prices in US-$, but my fellow citizens in Europe will likely get similar results.) The 500 GB Time...
“Being a programmer must be great — little bits of satisfaction from problem...”
– Ricky Van Veen being right
HD support in Apple TV
At yesterday’s Macworld keynote, Steve Jobs announced a new version of the Apple TV appliance which includes movie rentals in HD quality. This last fact, ladies and gentlemen, is huge news. Instead of forcing consumers to enter the compatibility hell that is HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, Apple extends the proven iTunes infrastructure to support high-definition movies and at the same time gives people...
Random Flickr Places
Flickr Places has this cool feature where you can surf to http://flickr.com/places/random/ and get redirected to a (surprise, surprise) random location in the world. I’m not sure if the redirects are exactly totally randomized because very often Flickr has taken me to places in North America so far, but this might as well be coincidence. Still this is one of those “a lot of bang for...
“You can’t build a full web crawl in one day. You’d be blocked...”
– Kevin Burton
Address Book Hell
I’m majorly annoyed that there is no way to automagically keep my contacts in Thunderbird (my mail client of choice) and the Mac OS (my operating system of choice) Address Book in sync. Theoretically I can hook up both of them to an LDAP server but neither Thunderbird nor Address Book are capable of actually editing contacts in LDAP. But there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel....
December 2007
10 posts
“If you can’t reliable point to a resource you can’t join it to other things on...”
– Tom Scott
Getting rid
This summer Paul Graham wrote in length about him owning too much stuff. I don’t agree with all of his arguments and I certainly don’t intend to move from my current way of living to the Steve Jobs style, but at least Graham’s bits inspired me to make a list of junk things that I own but don’t use. Most of it are gadgets, electronic devices and other misc tech stuff that I...
Peanuts Update
Until today my little currency converter did not keep historic datasets of the rates it was using for calculations. Instead it threw away the previous data when it fetched an update from ECB. I changed this today by adding a little database mojo in the background. Let’s see if this turns out to be useful in a few months from now. Having some numbers to crunch on won’t hurt in either...
The jacket I wrote about last week has been sold. The guy who won the auction intends to give it away as a Christmas present, but at the time of writing this, he either hasn’t transferred the money or it has not been processed by the banks yet. I feel sorry for him because he won’t get the jacket in time for Christmas eve, but at the same time I won’t send him the jacket...
“The result [of GROUP_CONCAT] is truncated to the maximum length that is given by...”
– Gotcha!
1 tag
“Centralization of content is dangerous for the same reason that centralization...”
– Mark Pilgrim on Knol.
On eBay auctions
I put up an item for sale on eBay yesterday. No bids so far, but two people already asked for buying the jacket directly. I don’t regularly sell stuff on eBay, so I’m wondering if this happens commonly? I can think of a number of reasons why people do this, but none really convince me this is a good strategy.
November 2007
0 posts
3 tags
eZ Components Book
Since roughly the end of October, a book by Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann about the eZ Components PHP framework is being shipped. I was honored when Tobias asked me several months ago if I not only wanted to be their technical reviewer but could also write a foreword for them. I’m so glad he asked. Doing book reviews (I’ve done several before) is first and foremost more work than...
October 2007
1 post
Google Notifier Download Link →
I spent a few minutes Google’ing for the download location of Google Notifier for Mac. There are a gazillion sites talking about it, but all point to various URLs that do not work anymore. Redirections FTW!
September 2007
8 posts
Sagrada Família →
I suppose it’s an indication of Gaudí’s genius that mankind has still not managed to complete the cathedral even though work on it started > 120 years ago.
“Average number of frozen pizzas consumed in Germany per person, per year: 90”
– I don’t eat frozen pizzas at all, so there must be someone else in Germany who compensates for my absence by insane frozen pizza consumption. (via Mareen)
“good code is not exacted by language. Good code is exacted by mental discipline.”
– Andrei Zmievski
“[T]alking to women involves a Diffie-Hellman key exchange where God forgot to...”
– Terry Chay
“Twitter’s success will be defined by it’s growth and that means they need to...”
– Rands
2 tags
Naming Change?
We have seen quite a few cases in the past where meanings of acronyms for technologies in our little niche of the world commonly known as the Internet have been dropped for one reason or another. Sometimes this happened explicitly and sometimes people just stopped thinking about the meaning and only use the acronym. I hereby suggest that we do the same for JSON and drop its meaning...
2 tags
The NTP Pool
The NTP Pool Project is an amazing piece of infrastructure on the Internet. Most people don’t even realize that they are making use of it, but in fact a huge number of Linux distributions (amongst others Fedora, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS) and Internet providers all around the world use the pool to synchronize system clocks in computers, routers and other devices with...
2 tags
Imperfection
Last Friday, Guido van Rossum released the first alpha version of Python 3.0 aka Python 3000. Judging by the changelog, the Python developers got rid of a number of annoyances and inconsistencies in order to make the language more cleaner (again). And prominent Python users don’t seem to be afraid of adjusting their code to work with the new version. Go figure. Maybe it is time for PHP to...
May 2007
0 posts
2 tags
Student Technology Conference 2007
I will be spending Monday and Tuesday at Microsoft’s Student Technology Conference. If things converge towards the worst case, it will be mainly sales pitching with a barbecue plus free beer at night. If things go well, there will be interesting talks, hopefully good discussions and a barbecue plus free beer at night. In any case, there will be a barbecue plus free beer at night, which...
2 tags
Yahoo! Photos soon to be gone
Yahoo! has finally decided to get rid of their current Photos property and to only support Flickr for photo hosting from now on. There is an article about this on TechCrunch and the Photos FAQ also offers advise regarding the topic. What I’m wondering is how people who were used to the internationalized version of Photos will react to this move? Flickr is available in English only at the...
April 2007
0 posts
1 tag
File upload progress bars with PHP
There is a nifty example by Rasmus Lerdorf about using file upload hooks in PHP 5.2.x to generate a progress bar while uploading a file through a HTML form. The source code is pretty self-explaining regarding all the things that happen on the client side, but unfortunately Rasmus does not mention what is required on the server side to make the magic work. In order to make it possible for...
2 tags
Services_Yahoo 0.2.0
Some minutes ago I rolled version 0.2.0 of Services_Yahoo, which sports a brand-new fluent interface for the part that implements the web search API. Also the package now uses the serialized PHP data that is provided by Yahoo! instead of parsing their XML output. I’m not yet 100% satisfied with the fluent interface, but I think it comes pretty close to what I want it to be. It will take...
3 tags
GPS cont'd
Apparently the readership of my small niche of the web has no interest in GPS at all, because I received zero replies after my recent inquiry. Oh well, I don’t mind, really. So today I went on a GPS unit foray with the intent of getting an eTrex Summit, which costs about EUR 220 in Germany, but came back home with something significantly better for a smaller price: At their fantastic...
3 tags
GPS
Dear lazyweb, I’m considering to get myself a GPS unit, but I am not really sure what to buy. Looking around it seems that most shops (in Germany) offer Garmin products and I currently think I’ll go for one of their models, most likely one from the eTrex family. eTrex Summit has this nifty compass/barometic altimeter thing and comes at a reasonable price, while eTrex Legend is even...
March 2007
0 posts
3 tags
Candidature
Today I threw my name in the hat for the upcoming PEAR Group election. I have been thinking about whether to run for another legislature or not (I am a member of the current Group) ever since it became apparent that there is interest in the PEAR developers community to form a new organizational structure for the project. In the end I decided in favor of a candidature because I couldn’t...
1 tag
Five Things
During the time when this site was dead, two or three of my virtual buddies pinged me about the “n things you didn’t know about me” meme that spreads around the blogosphere. Today Thomas (German only) also tagged me and thus I have finally given in. There you go: I used to know quite a lot about seismology. Sadly I have forgotten most since then. I appeared on TV twice,...
2 tags
YellowBot
Today YellowBot went in public beta mode. The site is brought to us by Ask Bjoern Hansen of Perl fame through his (new?) Solfo venture. I accidentally stumbled over YellowBot back when Solfo was still in stealth mode frightening Ask a bit along the way, probably making him suspicious about me being an industrious spy. Suffice to say I was not and as a result I can call myself an early...
2 tags
Starting Clean
Today I am relaunching martinjansen.com once again. The site has been stale for a long time and for a number of reasons, but I feel really sorry about that and I hope that things will improve from now on. The main reason for not writing more here in the past months was the lack of a decent user interface. Back when I designed the previous interface, I had high hopes for it, but it did not work...