Changes are that as a geek you have already heard of the book Getting Things Done by Dave Allen. It’s been a buzzword on the blogosphere for quite a while now. Recently I gave in and finally read the book - and I can heartily recommend it. Getting Things Done (or GTD for short) is set of basic principles about how to get work done more effectively. I’ll just describe the ones that I found most interesting. ...
About two weeks ago I did a slight adjustment to my mail reading approach. So far it has served me really well and thus I’d like to document it. The basic approach is that I want a clean inbox. My inbox it should only include known good mail. This is opposite to the traditional approach which is to have mails in the inbox which are not known to be bad. A slight but important difference. ...
Saw an interesting presentation on Google Video about data mining in the TV world at Rentrak. They talk about how they mine lots of data and get real-time reports from them. Basically it comes down to using a patched/extended PostgreSQL plus a simplified query language that they convert to SQL. In that context it might be interesting to check out Bizgres, though it was not mentioned in the presentation. The Bizgres web site says: bq. The Bizgres Project aims to make PostgreSQL the world’s most robust open source database for Business Intelligence. ...
Apparently I’m in ranting mode today. Or just unlucky. I’ve used the Yahoo! search for a long time. But today I noticed what might be a bug or a deliberate change. The URLs are no longer communicated in full. See for example this search result: The link which is shown as just “wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails” actually goes to “http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Plugins”. That’s a big difference and one I care about. Anybody else having this problem? ...
Disclaimer: This is a rant. You may want to skip it. A lot is being written about the new Plazes. They have gone from beta into public. In that they have taken a solid, robust and good application and destroyed it. First, they stopped the existing API from working. The Plazer (the client application which automatically saves your current location to the server) stopped working for a few days. Then the single most useful feature is gone from the Plazer. So far there was a list of friends currently online. And for every contact I saw where he is. That’s all I ever wanted from Plazes. It now adds some more stuff like groups and twitter-style-what-am-i-doing-messages. But it does not offer the existing feature anymore. ...
I recently stumbled over Dasher. It’s a text input method which can work without any keyboard. It can be controlled with mouse, touch pad or even an eye tracker. It would be very interesting to try out the same approach for source code. Basically you could use source code - e.g. your current project - as the learning source. And then by having a more efficient input method than the current demo it might actually be an efficient way to re-use code. ...
Maarten’s post at Tillate finally brought the motivation to document the PHP testing approach we use at local.ch. First let me give you a short introduction to our architecture at local.ch. We have a clear separation of frontend (presentation, user-visible parts) and backend (search logic and database accesses). The frontend is written in PHP and XSLT. The PHP-part basically only orchestrates queries to our Java-based backend and passes the XML responses to XSLT. The bigger parts of the system are the XSLT stylesheet. All this means, that traditional unit tests don’t have a big value for the frontend as there isn’t much traditional logic. But we need to do functional/integration testing. ...
Am Tweakfest werde ich am Freitag einen kleinen Ajax-Workshop halten. Während dem Workshop zeige ich, wie mit einem kleinen API von local.ch wie in einem Formular die Schweizer Ostschaften autovervollständig werden können. Es geht darum eine kurze Einführung in Ajax mit einem praktischen Beispiel zu zeigen. Vor meinem Vortrag stellt Marcel Vogt Apollo vor. Der Workshop findet am Freitag, 25. Mai um 14:30 im Raum Newton 1011 im Technopark Zürich statt, Daniel Vogt beginnt um 13:30. ...
I spent three days last week in Amsterdam at the ApacheCon. I never realised how big the Apache project actually is in terms of projects. Just look at the Apache project list. The conference was a bit disappointing for me, as it was way to Java heavy. That’s great for the Java guys of course, but not so good for me wearing my two hats of system administrator and frontend developer (PHP/XSLT for now). ...
I recently had two problems with the Apple suite of applications. Mail.app regularly marked mails I had read on the IMAP server as unread again iCal doesn’t allow subscribing to SSL-encrypted calendars. That’s bad because our mail and calendar (Zimbra) runs on HTTPS. For the first problem the cause was the GPGMail plugin. There is a FAQ entry about the problem. Short answer: deactivate automated decription/verification in the GPGMail settings. The second one is a big worse. There is a hint on macosxhints.com. The idea is to set up a HTTP server which redirects to the HTTPS URL. iCal actually can handle HTTPS but it doesn’t allow you to enter it. The problem is that the security of this workaround is probably not guaranteed. Or in other words it may be possible that iCal sends out your password clear-text over the wire. ...