Dear Microsoft, when updating to Office 2008 SP1 for Mac I am asked to download a 180 Mb update file. While I appreciate you continuous improvement of software through the release of service packs, I must object to the poor implementation of the automatic update handler.
Building your own Twitter client with Fluid and jQuery
Like many before me, I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a decent twitter client. There are many, but most seem to be ad sponsored or based on a rather hefty framework like AIR (which by now, I guess, has been silently installed on my computer anyhow).
Reducing distractions, increasing productivity
I have been trying to reduce distractions in my computing environment lately. Apparently, our brains aren’t wired properly for task switching:
In the Soviet Union in 1978…
…soviet dissident Yuri Orlov is sentenced to 7 years hard labor for distributing counterrevolutionary material. Also, some distant, mostly unknown relatives of mine decided to go on the trans-siberian railway. I found the photo album while helping my mom move some stuff in her old basement. Most of the pictures were too blurry but some turned out OK.
Feature requests for a vocabulary editor
I have been searching for quite a while now and apparently there is a missing piece of software waiting to be made. If you are working with RDF data in any way you have probably created a vocabulary using OWL and/or RDF schema sometime. This works well for all technologists out there but in my world vocabularies should be created by domain experts rather than developers. Domain experts do not know OWL or RDF schema.
Beta testing the Ballmer Tee
My son has the dubious pleasure of being the primary beta tester of T-shirt messages. This time it is the first draft of the model that will be called “Ballmer”. Turned out pretty OK…
Standards require reference implementations!
First, some people bash Microsoft for not implementing DIS 29500 (OOXML) in Office 2007. Then, someone discovers that OpenOffice 2.4 does not create proper ODF. (Update: The test procedure was wrong). And then, Microsoft announce that a coming Office service pack will add native ODF support to Microsoft Office ahead of OOXML support. And, South Africa appelas OOXML adoption. Will Microsoft Office 2007 become the first Office suite to support ODF?
At the heart of the issue is the lack of reference implementations. ISO is way behind W3C in this area. Could someone please tell ISO that open source reference implementations are an absolute necessity when working with standards for information exchange?
From the W3C technical report development process section 7.4.4:
Preferably, the Working Group should be able to demonstrate two interoperable implementations of each feature.
It is simple really. The benefit of a standard is created when it is used. Open source reference implementations shortens the time to market for everyone implementing the standard in their products and also disambiguate interpretation of the standard specification.
Tim, please tell me you know someone at ISO that can fix the process.
Defining Characteristics of a Successful Software Project
Lately, there has been some really interesting presentations and articles on agile methods and how they fit into the big picture of software development. One that was particularly interesting was Scott Ambler’s 2007 IT Project Success Rates Survey (also see the Javapolis presentation).
Discovering the Family Acrobat
From a performance at the Schumman Theaterin Frankfurt am Main. Unknown date, probably after the war?
Dear lazyweb, please pimp our balcony
Spring is in the air and it is time to start using the balcony. Currently it is in a state of decay and mainly used to store old furniture. I am out of ideas what to make of it. Can you help? Measurements below.
Does your webserver give HEAD?
In the process of constructing a crawler that finds and checks PDF documents on a website I discovered a lot of sites that don’t return information for HEAD requests. A HEAD request should return the same set of HTTP headers as a normal GET request only without the actual payload.
The typical response seem to be status 500 (internal server error) on a lot of IIS sites. So, now is a good time to check your own sites to see what you get back from a:
curl --head http://www.mysite.com
Microsoft Word 2007/2008 Interoperability
Opening a particular Word 2007 document in Word 2008 can yield this error:
Seriously? Can’t Microsoft get their own implementations to cooperate better? And this has just been approved as an ISO standard?
What’s your history|awk…
Via Bill de hÓra. Run this from the command line:
history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
I get:
108 ls
78 cd
53 sudo
29 python
13 cap
9 django-admin.py
9 ruby
8 vim
6 easy_install
3 bzr
1 ex
1 python2.5
1 ln
1 mksir
1 cat
1 cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc
In short:
- I have trouble with my default python installation.
- I am trying Django for small project.
- I was hit by the Leopard keyboard repeat freeze bug.
- I am poor at spelling simple commands.
Building a Wiimote glove for virtual card sorting
Thanks to Johnny Chung Lee, everyone and their mom seem to be setting up their own Wiimote whiteboards these days. I tried it too but disliked the pen-based interaction. So, I built a simple glove that allows you to pinch an object to drag and drop it somewhere.