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About two weeks ago I asked for your experience with personal knowledge management tools. David Bächler then pointed me to the company DEVONtechnologies. The product that could be the answer to my prayers (okay, I didn’t really pray for this) is DEVONthink. The tool DEVONagent might be an added bonus. I am currently trying out DEVONthink Pro and it looks extremly promising. It’s basically a document collection application for Mac OS X. It allows you to either create text documents (RTF usually) or import existing documents. Everything gets indexed and is easily accessible. I’ll just comment on my original feature requirements list: ...

The Economist has a short article about the Yasukuni shrine in the current edition. First the article explains the Yasukuni shrine in a few words: Yasukuni, run by Shinto priests, honours 2.4m Japanese servicemen killed in imperialist wars in the 100 or so years after Japan's mid-19th century opening-up. But because 14 executed war criminals, among them General Hideki Tojo, are also enshrined there, Yasukuni has become the site for an exculpatory interpretation of the second world war that plays down or even denies the atrocities that flowed from Japan's militarism, and plays up the notion of Japan as victim not aggressor. Yet roughly 20m Asians died in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks to the Japanese, and many were enslaved, tortured, raped or subjected to medical experiments, including vivisection. The following part was new to me (the quote was slightly edited by me to shorten it): Opposition to a rising mood of nationalism is coming from an unlikely source from within the conservative establishment itself: the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's—indeed the world's—biggest-circulation newspaper. Under Tsuneo Watanabe, the group's 79-year-old chairman and an éminence grise within the political establishment, the Yomiuri came to be the flag-waver for a more assertive Japan, one that argued for a revision of the pacifist constitution foisted on Japan by General Douglas MacArthur in 1947, and that bristled at any foreign criticism of the Yasukuni shrine. Let's hope, that Japan can one day also accept the history. Germany did an incredible job in that area.

Seems that Google Maps got new Swiss photos again. But either I’m missing something or that’s completly irrelevant. I can’t get Google Maps to work for me. Whether I search for “St.Gallen”, “St. Gallen” or “Sankt Gallen” I get the same result - nothing. At least not the beautiful city of St. Gallen. Do I miss something? Or is Google Maps indeed useless?

Im Radio lästert DRS über Weblogs ab. Dann entdeckt Matthias das SR DRS Weblog. Und ich muss sagen, das ist sogar unterhaltsam und beglückt nun meinen Feedreader mit seinen Beiträgen. Angesiedelt direkt unter dem Runden Leder.

I had a few problems with NetNewsWire lately. For one my computer became unresponsive while NetNewsWire was updating all my feeds. Additionally there seem to be a few memory leaks in the application. The problem with the computer becoming unresponsive seems to be resolved now, after I deleted the folder ~/Library/Caches/NetNewsWire as suggested by support. But I still took a few minutes to investigate other feed reader on OS X. Seems there isn’t all that much of choice in that area. I quite like Vienna. Though I found two big blockers for me. It seems to always sort feeds and folders alphabetically. Also it doesn’t provide per-feed refresh settings. I do sort my feeds manually as a way of priorizing them. Also I have a few feeds I use for work and I want to have them updated hourly (actually I’d like to have them updated more often, but NetNewsWire doesn’t permit this). But should NetNewsWire ever have a paid upgrade, I’ll probably have a hard look at Vienna (and it’s source code if there are a few things I don’t like yet). I also tried NewsFire. But somehow during the first two minutes of using it I didn’t get a handle on it, so I stopped using it again. It costs money and it seems that you can’t try out the commercial version but only the light version before purchasing. A big no-no for me. ...

At our Skolelinux network here at the Diego Thomson I installed iTALC yesterday. This is a software for teaching environments which allows a teacher computer to control the student computers. He can block the screen, watch what’s happening on the screens, show his screen on the student’s computers, start programs, send messages, etc. And all of this functions come with a nice (KDE) user interface - though of course it also works in GNOME (where we use it). In order for the demo modus to work, I had to patch the application slightly. Technically the whole thing is based on VNC and SSH - proven protocols. And I distributed the software installation, configuration and teacher public keys to the clients with cfengine. Nice. I will post some screenshots later when I’ll use that in my first Python class. ...

Finally I have one personality and not ten. Or something like that. Track my SuprGlu space if you want to track what I’m posting all over the Web. It currently tracks the following sources: my weblog my pictures (via Flickr) my comments (via coComment) my bookmarks (via del.icio.us my books and movies (via Media Manager Media Manager weblog Recent changes of the Biblewiki (where I'm the only editor) SuprGlu looks like a nice service. Please announce your SuprGlu pages here in the comments if you also have one. (Via Ernscht and Steph)

I just added a few unlisted KAYWA weblogs to the Swiss weblog list. And currently we have 1000 active weblogs listed there. Most of the weblogs are imported from the blog.ch OPML file. Many have been added on list.blogug.ch afterwards. All the current numbers of the blogug list: Confirmed weblogs: 1000 Unconfirmed weblogs: 0 Offline weblogs: 46 Spam, non-swiss, duplicates: 10 Registered users: 171 Claimed weblogs: 98 (list currently not easily visible on the Web put I'll probably implement this) If every one of these weblogs were written by a different person, then about 0.015 percent of all Swiss people would have a weblog (using the current Wikipedia number of 7'415'100 inhabitants).

I found a new apartment yesterday and moved in the evening. The reason I moved again is that the new place is much closer where I work (about 10 minutes by foot) and the air quality and hygiene in general in the old one was sickeing.

What a pity, Japan is going to be a suerveillance state. At least for us foreigners. Mainichi reports: Japan plans to fingerprint foreigners aged 16 or over when they enter the country as an anti-terrorism measure, details of a revised immigration bill obtained by the Mainichi have shown. In addition, people that the justice minister deems likely to "commit crimes aimed at threatening the public" will be deported under new regulations, the revised bill on immigration and refugee recognition says. The bill, which the government plans to submit to the Diet in the near future, does not require fingerprinting for some foreigners, including special long-term Korean residents, those aged under 16, those who come to Japan for diplomatic or public activities, and guests invited by Japan. But in Japan the bill will have some resistance: Fingerprinting at immigration checkpoints has been introduced in the United States, but the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and other organizations are opposed to the same measures being introduced in Japan, and the bill is likely to stir controversy. "Fingerprinting people violates the respect for individuals under the Constitution as well as stipulations on freedom of action banning treatment that is discreditable," a federation official said. Federation officials say that in addition to violating privacy, the measure also hinders the formation of a society in which Japanese can live together with foreigners. Let's hope, the bill doesn't get through. Because I pretty much agree with the stated critisism.