November 22nd 2006 Posted at Internet
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A fellow member of WebmasterWorld came up with a clever marketing idea. He (she?) hid US$ 200 on the website, and the first visitor who finds it will receive the amount in cash. Of course this is a shameless attempt on getting links to the site, but I appreciate the smart idea. So here’s the link from me.
November 12th 2006 Posted at Internet
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I reached legal age in Second Life. Which means that I am signed up for 30 days now – a crucial date for n00bs because after this time the money trees are not working anymore.
Money trees? For those unfamiliar with Second Life this term might sound odd. Money trees “grow” bills and fruit worth between 1 and 10 Linden Dollars (L$), the currency in Second Life. And though it is true that you can use Second Life free of charge, and though it is true that you receive a few L$ upon signup, sooner or later a user needs money. And if you are not willing to sign up for full residency (and in consequence pay a monthly, quarterly or yearly fee), the money trees are an easy way to getting some extra cash. For the first 30 days.
Sometimes it was hard to spot the fruit and bills hidden in the tree. But I came up with a technique to harvest the trees a bit easier. All you need to do is reduce the detail level of the trees, and familiarize yourself with the camera pan/tilt/zoom commands.
So now it seems I have three options:
Since all aspects of graphics design are an important factor in my real life (or RL) job, it seems natural that I should consider this in Second Life too. But even though clothing and skins are very important in SL, I am always depressed on the multitude of empty malls with theit abundance of clothing stores. Let’s see.
Apart from an abundance of empty malls, there is also an abundance of adult entertainment and casinos – more often than not in combination – inside SL. If I pick a random spot from the map and teleport to it, chances are good I end up in a casino, an adult spot or an empty mall. Sometime its depressing.
But there is more to Second Life than that. There’s fantastic architecture, freed from the restraints of gravity or statics. Lovingly created landscapes, dream beaches, fun parks. There’s interesting people, and everybody seems to be very friendly and helpful. There’s quite a lot of good music, and those folks surely know how to throw a party. I haven’t yet had a chance to join an event – probably due to timezone issues. But so far it’s quite impressive as it is.
No worries of addiction though – First Life is still more interesting 
October 30th 2006 Posted at General, Internet
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I’m sorry, this only works in German. But maybe you get the joke when I tell you that the German word for ballpen is “Kugelschreiber”.
Thanks to Jörg who came up with this spontaneously when he saw the pen lying around at my desk. If you ever need a translator English/German/German/English get a quote from him!
October 10th 2006 Posted at 3D graphics, Internet
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I learned about Second Life quite a while ago, not the least due to the coverage by BoingBoing. Being involved in 3D design myself, I was curious to see how an interactive 3D world actually works. But on the same time I was reluctant as well, recognizing the potential for addiction in such a community. After all I have a “First Life” which feels sometimes as if it consists of a handful of seperate lifes already, so what would I need an additional virtual life for?
Probably because I am on vacation right now, curiosity won and I signed up with Second Life. I was a bit disappointed because the selection of names was limited. You could pick a first name yourself, and then select from a list of last names. I tried “Technozid Link” but that was refused.
Once you sign up, your (then blank) Avatar goes through a few training stages, where you can do basic customization and learn your first steps – including flying around – in the virtual world. Thus “graduated”, the character is set loose to explore the new world. My first steps were a bit erratic. I enjoyed flying pretty much, but I wasn’t sure what I was allowed to do and where to go. After some stumbling around I found a “money tree” – a gift for new users equipping them with some cash since basically Second Life is a virtual economy of its own. In the course of my exploration I found some more trees, so my purse now holds almost 300 so called “Lindon $”. As of this writing, I am reclining in a seat watching a tabledance and get paid 2 L$ for each 10 minutes.
All the characters I talked to were very friendly. One gave me a whole wardrobe of clothing, so that I could get into something decent instead of the “newbie look”. I stumbled into three mature neighboorhoods with explicit graphics and Avatars. I didn’t mind, but I was very surprised since I have not expected this in a mostly US-based community. In one neighboorhood my Avatar got offered paid intimacy (which – even if it would have wanted, it could have not offorded anyway), and I found out that the owner of the place gets 25% revenue from all the “transactions” taking place. I mentioned to the character offering it to mee that – as far as I have seen – my Avatar wasn’t properly “equipped” for this. And without hesitation my counterpart beamed the necessary tool into my inventory…
Apart from that, it runs a bit bumpy. Textures seem to be a major problem – a lot of characters are dressed into “Texture missing” images. The world freezes a lot, teleports are often blocked. To me it looks like the server hardware can’t quite cope with the user requests.
I’m still hesitant. It looks like some fun, but I don’t know what to make of it yet. Nevertheless, if YOU are in Second Life too, drop me a line.
August 29th 2006 Posted at Internet
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Today, the new version 1.0.11 of Joomla! was made available for download:
Joomla! 1.0.11 [...] is being designated a Critical Security Release. All existing Joomla! users MUST UPGRADE to this version, due to several High Level vulnerabilities that affect ALL Previous versions of Joomla! [...] If you are using ANY previous version of Joomla!, you need to upgrade to 1.0.11 as soon as possible.
Just in time, because also today, Secunia found security issue #20 with this software (admittedly in Joomla! 1.0.10):
A vulnerability has been discovered in Joomla!, which can be exploited by malicious users to conduct SQL injection attacks. The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 1.0.10. Other versions may also be affected.
Seems the developers are actually taking security a little less lighthearted. At least the security advisory sounds pretty straightforward.
Via Andreas
August 27th 2006 Posted at Internet, Typo3
11 Comments
What do you do if you are promoting a piece of software which had – partly due to its popularity and partly due to inherent design concepts – several security issues more or less since its initial release?
Make a joint effort with core- and add-on developers to educate the user base and get rid of those issues once and for all?
No, way too much effort. Instead Joomla! activists seem to prefer to come down on anyone who dares to mention those issues like the wrath of God! It is now the third time I came across this type of immature reaction from Joomla! supporters, and I’m really sick about it.
If you are interested in the facts, and a distinctive yet critical point of view, read on. For those of you just wanting to flame me because I dared to mention “security issues” and “Joomla!” in the same sentence, save yourselves some time and proceed directly to the comment form.
Read More…
August 18th 2006 Posted at Internet
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With an almost 3-week delay we finally switched on our fibre-optic link today. The delay was caused by the electrician of our landlord (do you say landlord also for office buildings?), who has the exclusive right to do all wiring in the building. Fact is he broke the cable the first time, but it cost him more than a week to borrow(!) the measurement equipment to confirm it himself and then another 10 days to get a new pre-confectionated(!) cable. That’s Mr. I-installed-many-fibre-optic-networks-before for you 
Our ISP and myself were righteously furious at this guy and his exclusivity deal. I hope the accounting from our ISP check his invoice really thoroughly…
Along with the fibre link came a tripling in speed for our connection (from which this blog benefits too since it is hosted on one of our servers). Once the link was established, we experienced a short but fascinating speed rush as our connection worked at stunning 100 MBit/sec. Just for the fun of it I downloaded a long movie from archive.org with some impressing download rates. However 15 minutes later the router was throttled to regular speed, but even the tripling is quite nice. Probably ISP’s should occasionally switch high bandwidth on for customers, so that they enjoy it and are more likely to upgrade next time.
August 15th 2006 Posted at Internet
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A couple of years ago my company bought the software package QuarkXpress from someone at eBay. Recently we tried to upgrade that version to the most current one, but Quark declined the upgrade saying the version was already upgraded. This upgraded version is registered to the person who sold us our old version, which is a clear violation of Quark’s licensing policy. But even though this person – who is known to Quark – is using a pirated copy Quark still declares this as not being their problem…
So it’s up to us – or more precisely to me – to try and resolve that issue so that we can upgrade the package. So I browsed my old email archives (glad I still had them) and finally found two mails between the vendor and myself. Unfortunately there was no address and not even a name, but I had the eBay auction number.
Next I tried to access that auction within eBay, but since it was older than 90 days it wasn’t there anymore. However I still found the rating and by this I could access the vendor’s profile. He’s still active in eBay. Since I intended to write a (snail mail) letter to him, I needed his name and address. So I set out to contact eBay regarding that issue.
Have you ever tried to contact eBay?
First attempt: footer navigation, imprint or contact address. Nothing!
Second attempt: “My eBay”, contact link or contact form. Nada!
Third attempt: Help center, contact form. Hooray, it’s there! Oh… category selection. None really fits. Ah… this form might do it. It requires the auction number. Duh! It rejects my 3 year old number. Well, I randomly selected one from the current auctions to make it submit.
Once I got the email-CC of my request I thought that I’d only had to wait for an answer. Ha-ha!
The answer came half a day later and said that they could see no association between me and the auction in question. Well, of course there was none since I randomly picked an auction to make the form submit! But the REAL auction number was inside the text. I politely pointed out this fact and repeated my question. The answer came the next day, saying basically ‘Who are you and why are you emailing us?‘.
Er….Pardon? So I repeated the whole issue, gave auction numbers, mentioned account names and again asked for the name and address of the vendor. The answer came half a day later, saying again basically that they don’t know who I am. It turned out that the email address registered with eBay was an internal mailing list inside my company along the lines of ebay@… – never meant to SEND email, only to receive it. My own emails were sent under my regular account – so there was an address mismatch. And some eBay policy somewhere says that in this case – even if correct names and passwords are quoted – no information may be disclosed. Not that there was a unique tracking code attached to each email, and the initial email originated from eBay’s own form center.
It took me a couple of more and more irritated emails to find out about this policy. One of the customer reps (I got a new one upon each mail exchange – despite the tracking ID) hinted that I could of course change the eBay mail address in the “My eBay” area. Which I did.
So, finally, I made everything right, and finally I was eligible to ask the question I intended to ask all along: name and address of the vendor! I shivered with anticipation as I hit Enter…
… only to get the answer half a day later that they couldn’t find the auction because it’s older than 90 days, and that I “should contact them earlier the next time!”. The question for the vendors name and address was studiously avoided.
Epilogue:
The vendor in question is listed as an eBay PowerSeller. He’s still selling similar software packages and he is posting a sales tax identification number alongside with his auctions – not easy to find – but present as required by national law. It cost us 10 € for a database query to get the name and company address associated with that ID number. Tomorrow’s mail will deliver our letter to him. We’ll see what happens.
August 1st 2006 Posted at Internet
3 Comments
I was reluctant to upgrade my WordPress 1.5.x to the most recent version because there were quite a lot of warnings given on the official site. Especially the part about backing up the SQL database made me postpone. However Brian just posted a reassuring explanation with a handy script, promising a painless WordPress update in 35 seconds. Well, it took a bit longer for me since I had to adjust a few paths but – hey – it worked just fine! Welcome to WordPress 2.4! Thanks Brian!
August 1st 2006 Posted at Internet
3 Comments
I just got an email from my ISP NetCologne saying that they just upgraded me from 2 MBit to 6 MBit without extra charge. I immediately made a speedtest and reached ~550 KBit KByte/sec upon downloading a 10 MByte file. The theoretical maximum would be 768 KBit KByte/sec but with all the overhead a realistic value would be ~650 KBit KByte/sec. Maybe I should check the settings to see what those ~100 KBit KByte/sec fricitional loss attribute to. Anyway, thanks NetCologne!