I’m currently teaching Python to a few teachers at the Diego Thomson. I originally thought we would progress much faster, but it didn’t work out too well. Most of the teachers didn’t have very good knowledge in the languages they are currently using (mostly Visual Basic 6 and VB.Net). So there was not much knowledge to build on. Also there was at least one profesor who had not programed at all in his life. Today is the fourth course and so far I have only covered: ...

As I pre-announced in my State of the Swiss Blogosphere article, I created a new Web site to keep track of the numbers in the Swiss blogosphere. The site stats.blogug.ch currently tracks: Number of weblogs (total and active) Number of posts per day Software or platform used The data for this comes from the weblog list and Planet Switzerland. Additionally historical data has been imported from a blog.ch database dump that Matthias kindly provided. Have fun with this new application. If you have questions or additional numbers you'd like to keep track of, please tell me. And site translations (French, Italian, Romansh) are of course welcome (contact me if you're interested and I'll tell you how to do it).

It’s now possible to query the Swiss phone book of search.ch with Jabber instant messenger. Add tel.search.ch@swissjabber.ch to your contact list and send him a message containing just the name and location of the person you’re looking for. I have now added this to my Adium client and it works fine. What’s missing is looking up the name for a phone number. And the output doesn’t format the phone number very nicely. (Via 2ni, search.ch CTO)

Nach der Banner Panne mache ich jetzt mal beim Experiment von Jürg Stuker mit. Er will rausfinden, ob Weblogs zu mehr Referern führen als Banner Werbung und verschenkt dafür 10 Tageskarten an die SBAW (Swiss Blog Awards). Klickt also folgenden Banner an, falls ihr denkt ihr habt an einer Intranet Fachtagung Interesse. Ein Intranet der namics wurde in die jährliche Intranet Top 10 der Nielsen Norman gewählt, also sollte namics doch etwas zum Thema zu sagen haben. Disclaimer: Ich habe einige Jahre für namics gearbeitet.

That a report like the following makes it into the newspaper says quite a lot about crime rate in Japan: Popular novelist Mariko Hayashi had her handbag stolen by a street snatcher in central Tokyo, police said. Hayashi, 51, was on her way home in Shibuya-ku, on Sunday, when a man snatched her handbag and fled. The handbag contained her purse holding 90,000 yen. The handbag was found on that night in Tokyo's Suginami-ku, but the cash was missing from it, police said. Seems that in Japan there are no crimes more serious than handbags stolem from novelists. Good for the Japanese. And indeed I always felt very safe in Japan, quite the contrary to Peru.

The next Skolelinux release will soon be released. This will finally be based on Debian Sarge. For me one of the major advancements is the language support. The installation and most of the system can be used in Spanish. This was not the case with Skolelinux 1. In the past weeks we have translated the default Apache homepage (for the server installation) and the LDAP user admin in Webmin. Also parts of the installation suddenly were in English again, but with help of the mailing list we fixed that as well. So it seems to me that we have a nice Spanish Skolelinux system. A few parts are not translated yet, such as the Netgroup administration. I hope to address that in future Skolelinux upgrades. And here at the Diego Thomson we already use the Sarge-based system. We installed it from the release candidates and it works just fine.

Unless I am very much mistaken, Swissinfo is currently offline because of DNS problems. Or so it seems. I noticed a few minutes ago that NetNewsWire reported some error for the swissinfo.org domain. Tried to surf the site with Firefox and indeed, I got a “Server not found” (or rather “Servidor no encontrado”) message. So I used dig to verify that no DNS record is returned. Some more debugging showed, that the domain is still active and points to the two DNS servers NS1.IP-PLUS.NET and NS2.IP-PLUS.NET. But those domain servers don’t return anything for swissinfo.org queries. It seems, that IP-Plus has somehow misconfigured their DNS servers. Or maybe Swissinfo didn’t pay… I will notify the technical contact for the domain by e-mail, just in case he doesn’t know about the problem, yet (very unlikely though). Update: Definitely some IP-Plus problem. Checked swissinfo.ch, which lists the two name servers leo.srg-ssr.ch and ns1.ip-plus.net. The srg-ssr.ch one returns the names correctly (194.6.181.128 for swissinfo.org and a CNAME to www.swissinfo.org.edgesuite.net. for www.swissinfo.org). The IP-Plus one doesn’t return any data for any of those domains. Update: As Matthias noted in the comments, Swissinfo was online again a few hours after my post.

I reported a few days ago, that I was trying out DEVONthink. I have also had a look at Tinderbox. But after looking at the price ($192 per year) I was not very motivated to have a deep look. A quick look I took and it didn’t seem to provide what I’m looking for. Meanwhile I imported most of the articles from my personal Wiki into DEVONthink and I also had a look at the export function. While it’s not a world-class export function, it’s reasonable. It can spit out a file hierarchy with all the RTF, PDF, etc. files in it (but the links are not preserved). It’s also capable of exporting as a Web site where all the links will be preserved and the RTF pages are converted to (ugly) HTML. All in all I am very impressed. It’s indexing capabilities are great and it also integrates very nicely with the Web. I especially like the features of clipping text directly from Web sites. If you open a Web site in DEVONthink (or DEVONagent) you can add the whole page or a selection to the database as a rich text document. I currently use that mainly to add clippings from Wikipedia or The Economist. I guess I’ll report some of my tips for using DEVONthink in the future. Meanwhile I’m waiting until it presents me with a “buy now!!!” message and will most probably purchase it then. Correction: Tinderbox costs $192 to buy for the first time and comes with one year of free updates (that’s where my $192/year came from). But the update “only” costs $90. Update: As you can see in the following picture, there is already quite a lot of stuff in my database.

As probably most of my readers know, I used to work for namics for a few years (including a 4-year apprenticeship). Today I started a new experiment, the namics.blogs. On that planet a few weblogs and Flickr pages by current and former namics employees are collected. The software used is the same one as for Planet Switzerland and was kindly provided by Chregu. Thanks! If you work at namics or used to work at namics, you can contact me by mail to get listed. Or, if you’re also Swiss (or live in Switzerland) just add your blog to the Swiss blog list and add the tag “namics_alumni”. And now I’ll end with the legal disclaimer: this site is not officially endorsed by namics but is a private project.

This is the English translation of the original German article Status der Schweizer Blogosphäre 2005. Introduction In this post I'm presenting you the state of the Swiss Blogosphere in the year 2005. In order to come up with this numbers and statistics I analyzed the blog.ch database. This report is part of a project I'm going to present in a few days. This report is of course inspired by David Sifry's "State of the Blogosphere" reports. ...