The BMW R1200 GS Adventure

Been on a weekend trip with my best friend, and we each were riding the BMW R1200 - damn, what a great piece of technology. The boxer ca. 100 hp strong engine comes with 6 gears, with 3 and 4 for the "big push" ;) While it's been rather difficult to handle the ca. 300kg in slow curves, when its "running" the driving experience is unbelievable for an enduro. Full throttle in the 2nd or 3rd gear really lifts the front wheel, and leaves these japanese plastic bombers in a dark dust ;)

OSX Umlaut svn problem

We found a workaround for the OSX svn problem: You might want to add this small pre-commit script to your svn which checks for umlauts before commit and gives the user a warning:

#!/bin/sh

REPOS="$1"
TXN="$2"

SVNLOOK=/usr/bin/svnlook

## NOTE: This is a quick hack! WILL let many "dangerous" characters pass!

if $SVNLOOK changed -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" | grep '^A.*\\195' >&2
then
echo "Auf diesem Server sind nur ASCII-Zeichen erlaubt!". >&2
exit 1
fi

exit 0

MySQL Enterprise support - not that cool

For quite a large project we booked MySQL Enterprise Support. As always when working with 3rd party companies we needed to set up an NDA with them. Unfortunately MySQL germany is not able today to accept our standard NDA - they have to use the american version which allows MySQL to use everything their consultants do not "write down", but "keep in their minds". I've never seen such an NDA up today - and of course we could not accept that ;)

Vista / OSX OpenVPN

Since we got the synchronous DSL in our office, we've set up an OpenVPN - I'm using tunnelblick on the Macbook and the OpenVPN GUI from the HS Esslingen for the Thinkpad. Simple to set up and works good.

Twitter now with ads?

Or is it twitterriffic putting some ads in there... seemd to be mac-specific advertisement so I think its twitterriffic...

Exposè for Vista

Hui, what I like most with OSX ist he exposé – now it's here for Vista – free and works great.

Ideas for seesmic

Loic wanted feedback, so here's mine ;): Loic has just startet his fifth company, seesmic, and it's going t be something like twitter for video. What I like is the idea of quickly recording yourself in a video message in order to express some quick thoughts, like Oli did today. We've done something similar in a kind of karaoke system: on fan-clips.de, which is the football fan community of the 1.FC Köln, you can record yourself, while watching the official club hymn: you can win a prize when the jury has voted you as best singer – see my bad trials here – I definitely won't win ;). But back to seesmic: what I see as kind of problematic is that in video the publisher defines the speed of the reception of the viewer: I can only get the information from the video-message, when the person has "spoken" it, "acted" or whatever. When I read my RSS Feeds, or my twitter feed, I can quickly jump to the next paragraph, kind of "scan" an article for keywords and just read that particular part. So it would be great for seesmic to have a system for comments or viewpoints you can jump to, which have clear tags. They should be able to be set by the publisher in an easy way and extended by the community. When I slide over them with my mouse, I could "scan" the whole movie in advance – maybe a kind of preview picture could be implemented, too. Got some ideas in that direction…

T-Community – thanks for your support

A year ago I wrote about the then just launched T-Community, which was a first step of the Deutsche Telekom in the world of user generated content. Now I got an email telling me "Thanks a lot for all your feedback – but we'll close the community by the end of the year – you may export your data, but you can't use it any longer." (not that I have EVER used it, but anyway…) But it's quite funny, that they offer me to change my account to fussball.de – in case I want to use all of my community features in the future…fussball.de is a t-com driven special interest community in football – quite interesting strategy of them – seems as if they see no future in "global" communities but in special interests…

Used Vista now the whole day – and am still alive…

Well, first of all I have to say, I'm really thankful, that our cat is still alive: over the weekend he must have bitten into the battery charger of my macbook – thankfully into the thinner side of the cable with 12V , not 230 V ;) But I was not able to buy a new one today, so I had to rely on my Vista driven ThinkPad T61. Mh: it's really ugly compared to the black macbook – but: it's fast (basically since I put those 3GB in – Vista DOES NOT WORK with 2 GB or less) and for today I set up some neat features, which makes it really "usable" (I know, these are luxury problems ;) ):

• Thunderbird as my IMAP client works like a breeze: it's really fast and setting it up even with my secondary gmail IMAP account was no problem.
• Of course, Firefox for everything internet.
• Tortoise svn client
• MS Project (basically the reason I own a thinkpad)
• The Last.FM client
• Skylight for the "workflow"
• Skype – of course
• Pandion for AIM and our internal jabber server
• Visio for the drawing
• iTunes
• Command and Conquer 3 (tssssss….)
• And finally WORD as blogging tool (First entry, so let's see if it works ;)

What I really like with the TP is the fingerprint – scanner at the login (and wow, Vista really works with "sleep mode")

Quicksilver for VISTA: skylight

Yes, I apologize, I'm still using my Vista driven thinkpad beneath the macbook... and now found silverlight, which is the successor of Application rocket .. very cool interface and d a m n fast ;)