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The besst Swiss immo search seems to be out of beta. When I go to immo.beta.search.ch it redirects to the new location. How uncool, it was only in beta for a few weeks. A real company has to have a service in beta for many years nowadays. Or so it seems. ;-) Anyway, the search.ch team has done a very nice job. They fixed my issue with the beta version and it now also works on lower screen resolutions (while i do have 1024x768 most of my windows don’t run maximized). And there is one big thing that sprang to my attention and really got me grinning and jumping and wowing and all the rest. They remember your last search when you left the application and zoom back into your search. For example last time I looked for apartments in Wigoltingen. Now I returned to the application and it zoomed the map back to Wigoltingen. While this is technically not a big thing (at least from my point of view) it gives a huge productivity boost to the user. The general immo use case is a person who looks for an apartment in the same place over a certain period of time, checking out different apartments or houses. If that place happens to be Zurich, this may go on for several months. So whenever that person returns to the platform, he will generally want to run the same search again. And they provide RSS feeds of new ads in the given map region. I hope I have to look for an apartment soon, I want to use that Web site… Great job dear search.ch. Should you people responsible for this incredibly cool product ever show up near my location, give me a call and I’ll invite you to a beer. ...

There is currently a row going on in Europe about a few cartoons which show pictures of Mohammed. The Muslims complained because apparently they believe that Mohammed must not be drawn. Later newspapers in other countries printed the same cartoon in support for the Danish newspaper and now Muslims worldwide are angered. Make take on this is quite clear: freedom of speech wins over religious feeling - as long as religious freedom is guaranteed. This cartoons do not take away the right for religous freedom from anybody. They maybe mock the Muslim religigion a bit. But it’s not like Muslims would be killed like Christians still are in Saudi Arabia. And by the way, my point would also be valid had the cartoon mocked the Christian religigion. And I’m a pretty devout Christian. I have been ridiculed a few times for my believe (for example during the Civilian service conscience test) but have never felt any restriction in my rights to believe in the Christian faith. ...

The World66 has computed a Globetrotter index. This index lists countries by the number of countries it’s people have visited on average - at least according to their World66 member profiles. The Swiss leads the table with a stunning average of 24 countries. The list is: Switzerland - 24 Greece - 23 Belgium - 23 United Arab Emirates - 22 Thailand - 21 South Africa - 21 Egypt - 21 Denmark - 21 Netherlands - 21 Austria - 21 The average American on World66 has visited 11 countries. All these numbers are probably above the real average. For example the normal American who never leaves the country wouldn't care about the World66 Web site. Personally I am way below average having visited just 13 countries. But I am probably below average with having lived in four of them (I count living as six months or more). So far I lived in Switzerland, England (about 8 months as a child), Japan (6 months in 2003/2004) and Peru (will be a bit more than 6 months in mid-April when I return). And this reminded me to update my map to add Bolivia.

Claro Perú, the mobile phone company, again gave me a few minutes of free talks with other Claro mobile phones. That’s nice. What’s not so nice is that their SMS to communicate arrived at 5:47am. I don’t know about other people, but I have my mobile phone sounds fully enabled at night because I use the phone as an alarm clock here. So had I been asleep, they would have woken me up with their promotional message. How awfully considerate of them… ...

About two years ago I started a personal Wiki with MediaWiki. I used that Wiki for my learning experiences, project notes, diary, scribbling, to-do lists, etc. I also started to store project-related documents in it. And it has served me very well. But I’m now looking for something better. So first I’ll write my requirements here in the hope that somebody out there has the answer for me. Requirements Lets me write articles and easily edit them as well Easy linking between articles Basic formatting (bold, cursive, quotes, source code, lists, tables) Can store uploaded documents and index their contents (PDF, ideally also the OpenOffice.org documents) Very quick search Open source and/or open document format (I want no lock-in on my most valuable data) I'm willing to pay Programs I'll write here about the programs I already know and have tried out. This part will get updated over time. MediaWiki Does very well against my requirements. It's very easy to write and edit articles, hyperlinking works great, the formatting is sufficient for me and I can upload files. Also has a search (but does not index files). But generally the application is very slow on my local laptop and I don't want to move it to a server because I need it offline as well. It is free software and using a nice MySQL database layout counts as open format for me as well. So basically if I could get it to be a lot faster and to index files it might actually be enough for me. VoodooPad Is a Wiki application for the local (Mac OS X) desktop. Has some nice features, for example I liked the fact that names automatically get linked to the Mac OS X address book. The formatting is too basic and for example tables seem very fragile. Linking works easily enough and creating and editing is also quick enough. I worked with it for a short while but then switched back to Knowiki. One concern is, that the application only works on OS X. And I might well switch to another operating system again in a few years and don't want the lock in. That's the list for now, I'll keep you updated with other applications I try. And of course I'm glad about any suggestions about how my readers manage their stuff. 12:06 - Now who would have thought that. Personal knowledge management is a term that actually exists. It's abbrevated as PKM and there is a whole PKM movement (and people who think that movement is wrong, too). How nice. I have therefore now tagged a few documents at del.icio.us and am using the PKM tag for that, if you want to follow me in this quest.

The tool Doodle can be used to find the best time for an event. You create a poll which you then send to all invited persons. In that poll you ask them to cross a number of dates where they could attend the meeting/party/whatever. Thus in the end you get a nice overview of when most people (or most of the most important ones) can attend. Looks like a very useful tool to me. (Via Medienpraxis) ...

Apparently a guy was arrested in Germany for playing Lego Mindstorms in the train. Read the story over at pasta and vinegar.

This Sunday after church I met with a couple I got to know during my vacations down in Puno. They arrived in Lima from up north on Sunday and left again on Monday to down south. So we went sight-seeing with a tour bus which cost five Soles and left from near the Plaza de Armas. The tour was hardly impressing. But they drove us up a mountain from where we got a nice view over the city. Though I’ll probably have to go again on a nicer day with less clouds. And in the evening I finally had a Japanese meal again. It was extremly expensive for Peruvian prices. We paid 140 Soles for the Sushi & Tempura offering. That was said to be for two people but it was enough for the three of us. Of course we had to have a Miso soup first, because that just belongs to a Japanese meal for me. Pictures are available on my Flickr account as always. ...

Last Thursday and today I held two more courses in my series of teachers schooling. Things have been going quite well and the Linux administration course has been completed now. I’ll continue on Thursday with network administration. You can download the presentation I used for the three-day course here: Administración de Linux. Update: The third class was blogged by Juan. The fourth was blogged by Juan and Richard. Isai blogged them as well (third course, permissions and fourth course but his Blogger.com design seems to be broken at the moment. Great example of how weblogs can be used in a learning environment. ...

There are a few Mail.app features and plugins that make this application much more usable to me. Many of them are hidden. So let me list them here for yours (and my future) information. Smart folders are your friend: Especially the hint Emulate Gmail's conversations in Mail.app helped me a lot to have a better overview of my mailbox. I also have a smart folder with all unread messages (to get a quick overview over new mailinglist messages) and one with all flagged messages (to remind me of to-do items) Keyboard shortcuts for jumping to top and bottom of message list. This is a serious design flaw in Mail.app because it doesn't behave like I usually expect it on Mac. But thanks to this hint I know the solution: Press Option+Up (or Option+Down) for one second. Also Option+Up/Down (without waiting one second) jump to the previous/next related message. Use Mail Act-On to get keyboard shortcuts for some actions (e.g. moving a message into a specific folder) Use rules. The ones I use are Marking spam as read (so Mail.app doesn't notify me about new spam in the dock icon) Mark people from my address bock with a color in mailing lists. This doesn't have any real use but I find it interesting to quickly spot new messages by known people. And I do sometimes add people who provide very good information on a list into my address bock. And of course I move mail for different mailing lists into different folders I also have the following extensions installed: Mail Type Select to quickly select messages by keyboard. GPGMail for GPG support in Mail.app (unfortunately rarely used because not many people use GPG/PGP) This list may get updated if I find new stuff. Update 01:33 Document the plugins GPGMail and Mail Type Select