2005 May : technozid

Archive for May, 2005

I'm miffed…

May 31st 2005 Posted at Typo3
1 Comment

My paper for a lecture during the first Typo3 conference was declined!

Your paper(s) got the following voting:

not accepted: Typo3 and Search Engine Optimization / Friendlyness

In total, we had more than 60 proposals to select from, but due to limited time and space available only 24 could make it into the conference. We want to mention that due to these constraints we had to reject many interesting proposals. However, we are sure we have compiled an interesting mix for the benefit of all speakers and visitors of TYCON3.

With only 60 proposals I had wished for a more personal answer instead of this standard-letter. Yes, I’m hurt!

Obsessed by email?

May 28th 2005 Posted at Internet
1 Comment

Mark writes about Americans being obsessed by emails. I am a bit surprised that this is an issue at all. Email is so normal for me. When I first hooked up my phone to my 300 baud acoustic coupler back in the mid-Eighties to dial a BBS, I started to email, and I haven’t stopped since then. It’s just so normal! I really can’t understand how somebody could live without it.
SPAM is a problem though, but in our office we use a sophisticated system of Bayes filters, different RBL’s and – and this really annihilates most of what came through the previous filters – greylisting. This reduced the daily SPAM to about 1-2 undetected messages – compared to a typical 200-300 incoming emails per day (including internal mails) a pretty good efficiency.

I prefer emails instead of phone calls – both for incoming and outgoing. Phone calls get close to harassment sometimes: you are unprepared as to what the caller wants (or the callee is unprepared as to what you want) and usually in the middle of some work (and often stuff where you need to concentrate). You then need to switch tracks quickly, try to focus on what the caller wants, and the chance is good you end up with some extra work to be finished ASAP!

In contrast to that, email is much less intrusive. If I concentrate on something, I don’t check my mail so I can finish my task much more efficient. If I read the mail, I have a better understanding of what my counterpart wants. I can prepare, and on most occasions I can give a precise and helpful answer in short time. And I expect the same if I SEND emails!

A problem arises if there are multiple recipients listed in an email containing a question or call for action. Chances are 50:50 that either NONE of the recipients responds/acts or ALL of them. On second thought, chances are rather 75:25 that no one will react…

New cheat-sheets

May 27th 2005 Posted at Internet
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Dave Child of ilovejackdaniels.com has two new cheat-sheets for MySql and mod_rewrite. They complement his previous cheat sheets on CSS and PHP very nicely.

I just grabbed a copy of Christopher Schmitt’s CSS Cookbook, which presents a few common web tasks and their solution with CSS. I am especially interested in the printer-friendly formatting for the commercial pages I care for. Anybody got the book already and can (hopefully) confirm it’s worth the money?

WordPress and Typo3

May 20th 2005 Posted at Typo3
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Nuclear Moose has a bad hair day because of WordPress:

WordPress is a tremendous tool. It’s being developed by an outstanding group of people but it is the master of the community, not the servant like it should be.

Actually I never heard of Nuclear Moose before, and I only came across his blog because of one of the many “wonders” which blogging has to offer to me. This time it is pubsub’s, something I came across due to a hint of Mark. Again.

I wrote before about the striking similarities between WordPress and Typo3. What Nuclear Moose now pointed out in a rather disappointed way are the dissimilarities between those two open source projects.

Yep, there’s the Codex, and drDave’s plug-in site, and the developer-friendly-but-user-unfriendly-official-wordpress-plugin site, not to mention some avid community members who have extensive lists on their own sites.

This is actually the single most obvious thing which occurred to me during my first few days with WordPress. In Typo3, you have the TER (Typo3 Extension Repository), a single resource where all public extensions reside. The extensions in the repository can be accessed from within a Typo3 installation with a simple click. Everybody is invited to create new extensions. If they are intended to be public extensions (or may become public at a later stage), you need to register an extension key, which allows you to upload the extensions into the TER. Extensions get assigned alpha/beta/stable status flags as well as version numbers. The documentation to each extension is available online inside the TER and can be annotated by any user. The TER automatically creates a forum for each extension, and registered translators can start translating any newly uploaded extension, so that the extension author can use the translations for the next release. When I wrote my first own extension it got translated into Finnish within the same day.
Of course this centralized TER has its drawbacks too: the server load increased tremendously over the last year, so that the bandwidth needed to be increased and a concept for synchronized decentralization needed to be developed. And we are talking about an unfunded open source project!

How very different for WordPress! What comes closest to the Typo3 extension repository is the WordPress Plugin Database by dr Dave. He actually made the attempt to create a plug-in manager for WordPress, but unfortunately the project is on hold for the time being:

People… sorry if I may sound a bit crude, but WPPM is currently off-download and off-support (has been for the past month): the latest version had many things broken, and I simultaneously realized that I just didn’t have the time to take care of it any more.

WordPress reality is, that every extension author hosts his work on his own site. There are a few sites which try to host copies of the plug-ins or at least keep a concise linklist, but they are all far from the Typo3 TER and – as Nuclear Moose said:

What an utter waste of time and energy this has become. WordPress has become the choice of personality types who live for *nix operating systems. If you want to spend all of your time trying to get something to fucking work, then fine, fly at it.

As a final comment of reconciliation let me point out again, that Typo3 and WordPress are in fact very similar. To me it seems that they are cousins, maybe even brothers. The WordPress community may gain quite a lot from the professionalism of the Typo3 community. And in return, Typo3 may benefit from the living proof of the word-smiths who use WordPress because of its simplicity – something Typo3 has not quite mastered. Yet.

So why not profit from each other? I’m sure Kaspar and Robert and all the other core guys from Typo3 would be more than willing to talk to whoever wants to do a WPPR (WordPress Plugin Repository). I’m sure the source code for the TER is not a Danish state secret. I’m sure whoever feels inclined to invest time and work only needs to ask politely to get a copy. Go for it! Profit from each other!

Finally MSN

May 20th 2005 Posted at Internet
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Just a quick note that after Yahoo and Google, finally MSN has listed :tz: in its index too. Took them surprisingly long.

I'm really pissed off!

May 17th 2005 Posted at General
1 Comment

A colleague quit today on very short notice. While quitting is not that unusual – coworkers come and go – the very short notice is, at least here in “old Europe”. What I’m pissed about is that he is going to work for a close competitor. Again this might not be unusual in other parts of the world – here it is highly unusual. He’s been with the company for about 3 years and I kinda liked him, but I feel deeply betrayed. I – as well as my other colleagues – worked hard to make a difference, to give us a competitive edge. And he was part of it. And now MY WORK and the work of my coworkers gets served to the competition on a silver platter. That’s just not fair!

I hear those voices out there: “That’s globalization” or “It’s the way it goes today” or “Trust nobody”. But I believe in ethics. I believe in righteousness. I believe in honesty. I believe in ‘live and let live’. And I just got treated dishonest and I feel exploited.

Think big, print bigger!

May 17th 2005 Posted at General
1 Comment

What a week! I really really needed that Pentecost Holiday. Last week, Canon introduced its new imagePROGRAF large format inkjet printers and I was pretty involved in that event. On top of that, I had to run our international support since our English speaking support guys were on a week long training. I can tell you I had quite some fun…

As usual with Canon-events, it was a great show with lots of bells and whistles. It took place inside an old factory building, and quite a lot of stage illumination and sound was installed. Canon tried to connect its large format printer business to its successful camera and video business, so they hired a professional photographer, equipped him with the newest and finest digital camera, and he took photographs of a really cute model which were then printed on one of the imagePROGAF printers. My colleague and were responsible for two workstations with an imagePROGRAF W8400 (44 inches printing width) and a W6400 (25 inches printing width), and those machines ROCKED! We printed full size posters and images, and the files which came from the digital camera were just unbelievable! You could actually see each and every pore on the models face, and every single hair on her skin. Great!

We had a lot of attention from the press, as well as from retailers and end-customers. I had a long talk with a photographer, who specialized in architectural shots. She was quite impressed with the printers, but she had just spent the equivalent of a middle-class car for a digital camera so that she was on a budget for the next few months.

So anyone out there looking for a photo-printer with “slightly” bigger size, take a good look at the Canon imagePROGRAF units. Their quality is astounding!

I’m a bit tight on time, but I hope to make a new contribution on “getting” older still this week. Thanks, Mark, for the trackback – that’s actually the first I got.

P.S. Yes, I know, I messed up the CSS. I fix it any time soon…

Addendum: Official press release and some pics can be found here: http://cweb.canon.jp/newsrelease/2005-01/pr-w8400.html

Coming of age in Cyberspace

May 9th 2005 Posted at Getting older, Music
1 Comment

I’m seeing the potential danger that this blog becomes yet-another-searchengine-blog. That’s not what I have in mind, even though search engines play an important role in my (business) life. This blog is about getting older in cyberspace. Its working title was actually “coming of age in cyberspace” – but that sounded a bit silly for someone well in the second part of his Thirties.

Runner up: Google!

May 8th 2005 Posted at Internet
2 Comments

OK, :tz: is listed in Google as well. They are cheating a bit because the date says May 6 – which is actually what they have in the cache – however the results can’t be more than 2-3 hours old because that was the last time I checked (yeah, call me a Nerd – I deserve it).

Congratulations, Yahoo!

May 8th 2005 Posted at Internet
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Yahoo is the first search engine of the Troika to show technozid.de in its index. Recently technozid.de has been spidered by all three and also by Ask Jeeves – Yahoo beat them by listing the site first. I wonder if this blog will have to go through the Google sandbox – the domain is rather old after all, but never had any content on it.

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