Flexblog aka Flex Block

Introducing Gigger, a Realtime Javascript Monitoring Framework

2011-09-22T17:17:00.007+02:00

(originally posted here)

Monitoring your web application is essential for professional maintenance and development. Especially if you have a high load on your website and you want to keep the current users on your site, you definitely should stay alert for problems and be able to react fast in case of problems. Monitoring is also crucial for A/B tests, since you have to evaluate somehow which version of your website performs better. Many big players also measure constantly how much revenue the website produces. For them it is important to monitor if a new feature increases or decreases the revenue and take decisions based on that information.

Mayflower is currently developing a javascript framework which provides a smart tool for realtime monitoring and measuring. Read the full article for more information.

The time it takes to get your monitoring results is crucial for many web applications. If reports reach you after one hour or even a day, its almost impossible to react on potential problems in time. Gigger allows you to monitor your web application in realtime. Everything you want to track in the web application is transmitted to the monitor in realtime where it can be processed and visualized.

Most of current monitoring solutions focus on page loads and backend monitoring, but times change: Nowadays more and more web applications are single page websites. This makes the old approach difficult, since the only page load happens in the beginning, afterwards everything is loaded dynamically. Gigger solves this and brings the monitoring task to the javascript and thus to the browser. It allows you to monitor what is going on in the browser that runs the web application. Using gigger you can monitor the web application closely and find out about potential problems users run into.

From a technical point of view, gigger uses Faye to establish a publish/subscribe connection between the browsers where the web application runs and the monitor (which also runs in the browser). With gigger you can specify in the monitor, what should be monitored. The monitor transmits the requests to the web application and the web application hooks into the desired events and notifies the monitor when something happened. Since this approach is not perfect and only allows you to monitor simple things (DOM events), gigger also has an API on the web application side to manually emit signals. This requires some synchronization between the monitor and the web application, it only makes sense if the monitor is listening on the right channels where the web application emits its custom signal. Through this API you have the full flexibility to measure and monitor whatever you want. You could for example measure how long it takes for your ajax requests to return and calculate a mean ajax request time from a browser point of view.

We currently have a monitor running, which monitors simple events on blog.mayflower.de, you can find the monitor on gigger.mayflower.de/monitor.html. We are currently measuring how many hits the blog gets every minute and which topics are hot. There is also a log view which shows a new entry when someone hits the page and also when someone clicks on a link.

DISCLAIMER: It's pre alpha! Don't expect it to be perfect. The project is in a very early stage, this is the first live test and it could happen that there are some problems with the service. It was tested with Firefox and Chrome.

Google+ Advice

2011-09-01T11:41:00.001+02:00

Small advice for all the google+ users out there:

DONT MESS WITH YOUR CONTACTS IN GMAIL-->OTHER CONTACTS

I did and afterwards all my google+ circles were empty!

Feature Branch vs Mainline Development

2011-08-31T15:57:00.004+02:00

Today our CTO at Mayflower pointed me towards Martin Fowlers great article on feature branch development. Since my work with GNOME I was convinced that feature branch development is the way to go, much better than mainline development where every developer is working on the same code.

Some historic background (from my point of view):

Back in the days of svn, mainline development was the most feasible way of writing code in a (distributed) team. Branching (and merging) was not so easy and often made things worse. Working on the mainline was a real pain in the ass: you don't want to commit stuff that could break the build, so your commit grows and grows until all the bits and pieces are there to fully increment the code and reach a buildable state including your feature.

With git many teams switched to a feature branch development, where every feature got its own branch, where you can commit often and early (since it only breaks your local build and does not affect others) and where you merge the branch once the feature is ready to release.

Martin Fowlers article made me realize that feature branch development has its downsides as well. If you work with a bunch of colleagues on one product and you work on that product 8h a day, merge conflicts will be quite common. When you have a branch and work on it for a couple of days, the merge becomes a bigger risk with every minute. But since I cannot tell the story as good as Martin Fowler, read his article.

Desktop Summit 2011 Berlin, Aftermath

2011-08-08T15:25:00.003+02:00

I am sad to leave already, but tomorrow I'll start my internship at the Mayflower office in Munich. I had a really good time in Berlin and enjoyed the talks at the Desktop Summit.

(more pictures will follow soon on googles picasa)

I would like to thank the organizers for doing such a great job. Thanks also to the GNOME Foundation for the sponsorship that allowed me to attend the summit.

If anyone that has not attended the summit wants to look through some of the video recordings, but does not know which ones to choose, I've prepared a list of talks that I liked the most. Videos should be online soon.

The cost of going it alone - Dave Neary

GNOME: the state of the union - Fernando Herrera, Xan Lopez

GNOME Shell version pi - Owen Taylor

Thoughts on Gjs-based development - Lucas Rocha

UI design in a cloud of diverse devices - Claire Rowlands (Keynote)

GNOME Shell: iteration's what you need - Nick Richards (Keynote)

Software with the quality that has no name - Federico Mena Quintero

Ramblings of a retired release manager - Vincent Untz

Desktop Summit Berlin

2011-07-23T20:35:00.003+02:00

Yes, I am going to Berlin! I would like to thank the Gnome Foundation for supporting me financially.

I will be in Berlin from 08/01/11 until 08/08/11. See you there!

Telepathy Support for Gedit-Collaboration

2011-03-31T09:40:00.002+02:00

During the last months I was working on telepathy support for gedit-collaboration, a gedit plugin. The plugin allows you to work collaboratively on files via an infinote server. The idea of giving it support for telepathy was to get rid of the extra infrastructure needed (infinote server) and collaborate directly with your buddies over XMPP.

The branch is not finished yet but its functional. Thus I am looking for volunteers to test it and to give me feedback. Since I'm not a UI expert (more a UI non-expert), I really need some good ideas for the UI part, which right now follows the way gedit-collaboration handles infinote servers. That approach is not really intuitive for direct collaboration. So if you have an idea, please don't hesitate.

You can find the branch with my work here: http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/kaserf/gedit-collaboration.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/add-telepathy-support

I also opened a bug to collect all the feedback and ideas: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646312

A big thanks to Collabora Ltd. for sponsoring this work, to Jesse van den Kieboom (gedit-collaboration maintainer) and Armin Burgmeier (Infinote maintainer)

Folks and its backends

2010-12-21T17:12:00.002+01:00

Listen up people, Raul Gutierrez Segales (rgs) wrote a new backend for libfolks. His backend handles read access to the Evolution Data Server (EDS) which means folks knows about the contacts you have in your evolution address books.

In Rauls blog post you can read that there is also a libsocialweb backend for folks, written by Marco Barisione. The libsocialweb backend allows you to get your contacts from facebook and twitter (and potentially many other social websites and services).

This is awesome work which brings us one step closer to a cleaner contacts future. Rock on folks....

GNOME Hackfest Munich - The Aftermath

2010-12-15T18:40:00.001+01:00

Some weeks ago, a group of old and new friends met in Munich at a secret location, to spend a day working on various ideas but all related to GNOME.

Some of those friends blogged about it. They wrote down what we were talking about and what was the outcome of the Hackfest. Please read about it on their blogs, as they took a lot of time to write it down.

Part 1 - Salomons Blog: https://ssickert.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/gnome-contacts-what-we-really-need/
Part 2 - Daniels Blog: http://www.dgsiegel.net/news/2010_12_15-gnome_contacts_our_ideas

If you have feedback or more ideas you would like to share, please leave a comment on Salomons Blog and not on mine, since that makes it easier for us to go through all your comments.

Thanks to those who attended and those who supported us, especially Murray for coffee and beer!

folks api documentation

2010-11-27T13:38:00.002+01:00

I just generated the folks and folks-telepathy vala documentation.

You can find the folks documentation here:
http://people.collabora.co.uk/~kaserf/folks-0.3.2/

And the folks-telepathy documentation is here:
http://people.collabora.co.uk/~kaserf/folks-telepathy-0.3.2/

The documentation was generated from folks master, which should be the api for folks 0.3.2!

Another GUADEC is over

2010-08-01T10:15:00.005+02:00

Yesterday I've returned from my third GUADEC. It was amazing to talk to all the GNOME people again and get some insights about whats going on and where we are heading.

The most interesting talks for me were:
"Shell Yes! - Deep Inside the GNOME Shell Design" by William Jon McCann
A very philosophical talk about the future of GNOME.
"GNOME: State of the Union" by Comrade Fernando Herrera and Comrade Xan Lopez
Amazing fun talk about whats going on in GNOME.
"Lighning Talks" by the Summer of Code Students
Always good to know whats going on on that front.
"GNOME 3: the Telepathic Desktop" by Guillaume Desmottes
It was nice to see my recent work (Empathy Live Search) as part of the presentation. Nice example applications how Telepathy can be used to connect people (Bookmarks sharing, most recent links posted in any telepathy chat, tomboy notes sharing).
"Inside the Banshee awesome factory" by Gabriel Burt
They are doing an incredibly amazing job. I loved to hear about the Banshee Community Extension, an easy way to contribute to Banshee. I love the "create-extension" script which creates the necessary files, generates autotools magic and also calls git add. The only thing a newcomer has to do is filling the gaps in the files and commit the changes to github.

What I shouldn't forget is the Design Thinking Workshop which was held on Monday and Tuesday (and if I remember correctly also Thursday) by 5 awesome German students. Thanks a lot, it was great fun participating!

A big thanks also to the GNOME Foundation which organized and payed the accommodation, Collabora for organizing and paying my flight and the amazing BBQ Beach Party. Although some Collaborans missed this year, I enjoyed to meet those who could make it at the conference.

Marco waiting for more guests to welcome them, he and all the others helping out did a great job ;)

I've tried to thank as many volunteers and locals personally, but I could never have thanked everyone of you in person. Thanks a lot for doing such a great job, you were awesome!

Party people at the beginning of the Collabora BBQ Beach Party

See you all in Berlin, at GUADEC 2011.

Empathy Live Search

2010-06-10T12:51:00.002+02:00

Amazing Empathy news: Empathy now features a live search for contacts (search-as-you-type).

Could not use HTML 5 for playback. You can download the file as MPEG4/H.264 or Ogg Theora file.

Check out empathy master and try it! Feedback is very welcome, especially on the matching function. Tell me if you would like more things to match, less things to match or if you like it!

Before you start writing bug reports because you miss some stuff, please read the known issues here.

No Google(.de) Day

2010-06-10T10:43:00.003+02:00

I hereby declare today as the "NO-GOOGLE-DAY", since Google forces me to watch random backgrounds on the main page. Hopefully tomorrow everything is back to normal, or I have to make a "NO-GOOGLE-WEEK" out of it...

[edit]: as the first comment pointed out: no google.de day!

TEDxMunich, the most inspiring day of my life

2010-06-07T22:45:00.002+02:00

Today I was at the TEDxMunich conference at the BMW Museum in Munich. It was such a great event that I'm still speechless.

To line up my favorite speakers here a short list, sorted by the order they appeared during the conference:

Magnus Larsson - Creation of Landscape
Shaun Bailey - Child Soldiers in London
Patrick Frick - The power of design process
Marije Vogelzang - How food activated the brain
Chris Bangle - Gina meets pInK
Paul Cocksedge - Light design changes

I really enjoyed the Think Tank session afterwards where we had a nice discussion (it was more an inspiring lecture then a discussion) with Shaun Bailey. Big thanks for that.

Thanks a lot also to all those who participated and especially to the organizers and staff around Sonny Klawitter.

Some last words: Met the core team for TEDxRheinNeckar and also a lot of people with nice ideas for other TEDx events. Very interesting and inspiring students, I'm really looking forward to meet you again!

Guess what...

2010-05-25T09:16:00.000+02:00

TEDxMunich

2010-05-12T13:48:00.003+02:00

I just registered for the TEDxMunich conference which will be held June 7th at the BMW Museum in Munich. I was totally excited when I discovered the TEDxMunich website. I love the talks they have on their website.

Here are some of my favorites:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/michael_specter_the_danger_of_science_denial.html

Hopefully I will get the possibility to be there and experience some amazing talks.

One Laptop Per Child at the TU München

2010-04-26T16:20:00.003+02:00

My message is short: we have two awesome students (scholars to be correct) at our University for the next few weeks, doing a sort of internship at the TU. They will be working with the OLPC (to be specific, one of the two XO1.5's we've got) and develop a game activity for sugar.

My part in this was to inspire them to use the XO. They see it as a wonderful opportunity to participate in such a big project and I hope its a first step towards more open source at the University. Björn and Max are working like maniacs to progress as fast as possible.

They are writing a blog, where you can follow their progress and give them feedback if you want to. I would be happy if they can get as much feedback as possible, because they can learn a lot from it.

Read about what they to, why they do it and how far they are here: codingforolpc.blogspot.com

Thumbs up boys, you are great!

Zombie Empathy

2010-04-13T23:55:00.003+02:00

Today something very funny happened! I was working on empathy - to be honest, I was chasing a segfault I introduced myself :/ - and after I made empathy crash and terminated the gdb session I thought: empathy has to be DEAD!

...

WRONG! Empathy came back to life when a friend of mine sent me a message!

I couldnt believe what I saw, so I checked again and again...there was no empathy process running after empathy got killed, although running mc-tool showed that there are all my accounts still available (online). I guess mission-control restarted empathy once I got a new message!

What this means: If you do not shutdown empathy nicely, you may be online without even knowing it! You can see whether you are online or offline, running empathy-accounts which lives in its own process now.

GNOME Release Beer in Munich

2010-03-31T00:46:00.002+02:00

As Daniel already blogged, we are meeting today (31.03.2010) at the faun restaurant to get some food, beer or wine and talk about how awesome gnome 2.30 is and what we can do to make the next release even more amazing.

We have the table reservation at 19:00, so just come by if you want to join us! I suggest to make this the GUAD(EC) way, which means GNOME Users and Developers are invited!

see you there...

Today is a good day

2010-03-15T18:21:00.003+01:00

Two good things happened today:

I handed in my bachelor's thesis and the shipment with the XO's arrived.

Time for some holidays!

Vodafone Italy FAIL

2010-03-11T12:01:00.002+01:00

A week ago I reported a problem on the site www.vodafone.it, because my SIM card was broken and the service to order a new one online was not working. Today I got a response from them: "In order to find the problem, we need some information from you, including your username, password, cellphone number and a detailed description of the problem. Please send us the information to our email address."

My first thought: what the ****? I really got an email from the customer care to send them MY PASSWORD?! The rest of the email does not make sense either, because I had to fill in a form online which included my username, cellphone number and a description of the problem (when the site simply says: "error during execution, service not available", how more detailed can I be?).

My response to them: you are mad, please send my a new SIM card and I will forget this. If I don't get a response by them in the next week I'm changing operator. Since I use prepaid cards only in Italy, that wont be a problem at all! I think I can keep my number too.

The most frightening VODAFONE FAIL ever. This is sad and makes me angry!

XO's incoming

2010-03-08T09:11:00.002+01:00

Although I'm in the final days of writing my B.Sc. thesis, I took some time to write a project proposal for the sugar contributors program. The project I proposed will be the first of its kind for my university. Hopefully the collaboration will continue and maybe some time there will be a full blown "computer science students develop sugar activites" project.

Retrieved from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program

The full project proposal can be found here. I have to admit that I had not the time to write down *all* the ideas we (my supervisors at university and I) had and all the plans we have with sugar. My personal goal is to give the people at university a taste of what sugar is and how important it is to contribute.

me with the XO during a talk

In the meeting last Friday, it was decided that the two devices we requested are appropriate and we will get them. At this point I have to thank everyone who helped me bring this proposal through. Thanks to Stefan Unterhauser from the OLPC project who will be our mentor and to Dennis and Damir from the university which are the real heroes behind the idea of the project.

Stay tuned...

Notion Ink Adam

2010-02-16T23:47:00.002+01:00

Its been quite a long time without any post from me. The reason for that is that at the moment I have a lot of stuff to do for university and not much time for anything else.

Anyways, what I just found (thanks to Facebook and Patrick) is worth a (short) blog post! The Notion Ink Adam, a tablet developed in India powering Android. At the first moment I thought: "huh...this has to be a joke!" But no, seems like this thing is R E A L! It was shown at CES and now at MWC in Barcelona as well. It should be available in June 2010 for a price starting at $327...

(picture from engadget.com: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/16/notion-ink-adam-hands-on-with-video-at-mwc-2010/)

For those of you who have ever seen an apple keynote (or at least the short 110 sec. version of it): This is really amazing...beautiful...wonderful!

I'm not sure how the trackpad on the back of the device is supposed to be user friendly, but whatever, finally something new (*) and innovative!

Thunderbird --> Evolution

2009-11-22T23:43:00.003+01:00

I finally decided to migrate all my mails to evolution. I like Thunderbird, but the problem there is the poor integration into gnome and some bugs in the calendar (especially with google calendars). I hope that the Thunderbird development will continue and maybe put some effort in integrating Thunderbird into gnome.

The migration took me some days...the first step was to get all my pop mails from my main freemail account into gmail where I can get them via imap. Gmail is really nice to aggregate various mail accounts because it can get your mails via pop from every server you want!

Just be careful not to forward all the messages you get on gmail to the account you want to import :D You will get some nice messages from google that they are sorry, but they have given up because of a mail loop. I guess the message is worth doing it anyway ;)

Some thoughts about evolution:
What I like about evolution is the build in calendar and how Evolution integrates into gnome. Thats really great.

But I'm a little bit disappointed by Evolutions ui. I am used to Thunderbird and it could be that I just need some time to get used to Evolution, but as a "first user" the ui and the menus are quite confusing.

One example is the creation of a new appointment. I've never seen a bigger button-salad: The "Save", "Print" and "Close" buttons are somehow "grouped" together. There is a toggle button ("Show time as busy") in between of some normal buttons and the "Alarms" button opens a new window which uses 7/10 of the space for the "custom" alarm which is only one of the options in the dropdown list (and maybe the most rarely used one).

Another example is the compose mail window: half of the space of the window is used for other things then the text of the email, which should be the central part of the ui.

The notification area at the bottom of the main window is confusing too, when there are more things going on you can watch the buttons and labels fly around like in one of the good old videos of the 90's.

I really don't want to piss someone off: I respect the work everyone did for Evolution and I do understand as well that it's not easy to design complex ui's.

Sketch2Photo

2009-10-22T23:49:00.002+02:00

Researchers from several Chinese universities and research projects have developed a new approach to combine various images freely available in the internet to one composed image. What the image should look like can be specified in a little sketch.

Photo: www.crunchgear.com

Read a detailed report here or visit the website of the researchers directly.

Google Wave Preview

2009-10-15T17:30:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I got access to Google Wave Preview. I've tested it a little bit now, but for the moment I have only one other friend that uses it. That makes testing a little bit pointless ;)

I was really excited when I got the invitation, now I have to say that it's not that awesome as it seemed in the presentation. It's nice but still work in progress and you can see that a lot. It seems a little bit buggy to me.

Now to the big question: will it be the new email + im + everything in one?

I guess it will never substitute email as it was originally intended nor will it substitute IM between two persons. I see a big advantage in Google Wave when more than two people are involved in a discussion. Mailing lists are really a pain in the ass to read, so are Skype chat sessions with more than 2 buddies. Google Wave could be very nice even for two people to write wiki-like documents or to brainstorm, but not for a solid conversation.

Google Wave has some potential with the widgets you can use. For now there are not many widgets included (only Map, YesNoMaybe and Sudoku ;)), but that will change in future and there are a lot of people out there with good ideas for widgets.

For now: let's wait and see what comes next and how people accept it!

[EDIT]: Please don't comment on it wanting to get invited, I already used up my invitations.

Flashmob

2009-09-13T23:34:00.002+02:00

greatest flashmob ever :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1fvk4GhKoQ

Corsica

2009-09-12T08:43:00.002+02:00

I've spent the last two weeks with some friends in Corsica. It was a great holiday, I really enjoyed it. Our plan was to hike around for some days, we did two one day trips and one three day trip (planned for four days, but somehow we've been faster than we thought). After the hiking we spent another week at the beach on the west coast which was great for the legs to recover! :)

Corsica is a wonderful island, after striking it out from my to-go-list I have to put it there again: I'm definitely going to visit Corsica again! I liked the combination of mountains and beaches. In the center of the island there are some nice and high mountains (the highest mountain, Monte Cinto, is 2.706m high) to climb and after an hour drive you can enjoy the beach and the sea.

On our way back we stopped at Prato, the hometown of Cosimo Cecchi, to eat a pizza. We've been there only for two hours, but I have to say: Prato is worth a visit! (The pizza and the ice cream afterwards: great!)

The pictures can be found on my web album.

GCDS Videos

2009-07-27T09:51:00.002+02:00

Thanks to Andre and Facebook I got the news that the GCDS-Videos are online.

You can find all of them here.

This is a good time for my personal gcds wrap up. Here are only some of the talks I enjoyed the most:

There are also others I really liked, but not all of them appear on the site.

At this point I would like to thank all the people who helped to organize such a great event! The local team was awesome, they did a great job! Thanks guys...

Reading C

2009-07-26T17:55:00.004+02:00

Reading C declarations (with all the magic) is easy...

A (good looking) friend of mine pointed me to this nice article, after reading it I had to ask: why isn't this the first thing you learn when learning C?

enjoy:
http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/CS652/How+To+Read+C+Declarations

(of course the "good looking" was his suggestion...)

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth during GCDS

2009-07-14T08:37:00.002+02:00

Andreas Proschofsky (derstandard.at) had been able to interview Mark Shuttleworth during GCDS. Now he printed (as far as printed is valid for web-news) the interview.

The english version of the interview can be found here: http://derstandard.at/fs/1246541995003/Interview-Shuttleworth-about-GNOME-30---Whats-good-whats-missing-what-needs-work

for the german readers of planet gnome who don't prefer english I suggest: http://derstandard.at/fs/1246541995646/WebStandard-Interview-Mark-Shuttleworth-zur-Linux-Desktop-Zukunft

Icecream Eating FAIL

2009-07-07T12:00:00.003+02:00

It really was a nice party yesterday, thanks a lot Igalia!

Sadly some ended up having more icecream AFTER the icecream deathmatch than before...

Some GCDS Stuff

2009-07-06T18:19:00.003+02:00

I'm really excited about GCDS. Great talks, great people, overall great fun...not to say awesome :)

The first party was good, other parties will follow! There are a lot people talking about GCDS and blogging about it this times, so there is not much left open :)

What I really miss this time is the GUADEC love and hate wall. The local team is really great, what they are doing to make life easier for us is great! Like getting us free public transport to the university. Thumbs up, you're great guys!

Hopefully I can get to the beach this days to get some sun, sand and sea! Of course I hope I can change my skincolor a little bit. My color of choice: brown (!red) :)

GCDS

2009-06-30T10:19:00.002+02:00

On Friday I'll be leaving for Gran Canaria to attend Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. This is only possible because I got financial help from the Gnome Foundation and it's sponsors. Thanks a lot to all of you, especially the Gnome Travel Committee which organized the travel and accomodation subsidy.

I'm really looking forward to meet some great people and of course to play at the FreeFA tournament. Last year was great fun! Hopefully we have a lot of water this year...

I'll arrive Friday night, so I'll miss the first party. If someone else is arriving around 11PM, drop me a line. My flight departs from Munich at 3:50 PM and stops at Madrid. From there the journey continues at 8:35 PM to Gran Canaria.

See you there :)

Android Scripting Environment

2009-06-16T09:26:00.002+02:00

With the ASE (Android Scripting Environment) which Google released recently, developers get the possibility to run scripts on Android.

At the moment ASE supports Python, Lua and BeanShell, there are plans to support Ruby and JavaScript in the future as well!

Why use scripts instead of programs? The explanation can be found on their site:

You may ask, why write scripts instead of real Android applications? Admittedly, Android's development environment makes life pretty easy, but you're tied to a computer to do your work. ASE lets you develop on the device itself using high-level scripting languages to try out your idea now, in the situation where you need it, quickly.

On the website where you can download the ASE you'll find some example scripts as well: One example script mutes the ringer of your Android phone when the phone is face down.

Opera's announcement to reinvent the web...

2009-06-16T09:09:00.002+02:00

Today Opera announced Opera Unite, a webserver in the browser. Opera Unite will come with Opera 10, and reinvent the web, at least Opera says so. For some days there has been a site announcing the reinvention, now it's out!

Definitely some good and fresh ideas, but how well it will be adopted and how it will change the web is open, just like Google Wave is told to replace email!

It would be great to have an open protocol just like Wave, so other users (firefox, epiphany, chrome and so on) can use opera unite with some add-ons or something. Let's hope they don't build a opera only thing...

Sounds a lot like a revolution is going on here and there, lets see what comes out! At least its a peaceful revolution...

Watch HOME on YouTube

2009-06-05T09:30:00.003+02:00

Maybe some of you already know this film, I discovered it today.

First watch the press conference, it a nice idea to spread the film with all possible ways to reach as much people as possible! Thats why the film is on YouTube, take some time and watch it, its full of wonderful images!

Press Conference Inline:

Google Wave, the Email Revolution?

2009-05-29T09:40:00.002+02:00

Google revealed their latest project at their developer conference Google IO, it's called Google Wave and will be open source!

(news.cnet.com)

Read more about it here, I'm not a journalist :)

Giro d'Italia again...

2009-05-13T20:21:00.002+02:00

These days the giro d'Italia passed through South Tyrol, the northernmost province of Italy.

Again a lot of people where attending to watch a spectacular sports event. One of them a friend of mine I've already dedicated a blog entry in the past.

The viking has striked again... :)

www.gazzetta.it

Mitico Jones!

PS: For those wondering whats written on his skin, on his chest: "no, non sono pazzo!" (No, I'm not crazy) and on his back: "sono alto-atesino" (I'm from South Tyrol)

Update on Gnome-Format

2009-05-07T12:57:00.003+02:00

There were some things going on in the past few weeks.

Michael Kanis, Developer and Maintainer of Gnome Format has summarized whats going to happen with gnome format.

Long version short: we probably will stop working on gnome format.

Read Michaels Blog entry...he explains the whys :)

http://damumbl.byteholder.de/blog/?p=203

Obama Townhall Meeting in Strasbourg

2009-04-03T15:23:00.002+02:00

I've been able to catch the last 10 minutes of the townhallmeeting with President Obama in Strasbourg which has been broadcasted on different TV channels.

I think this has never happened before: a President of the United States is taking some time to answer questions from European students. The questions have not been pre-selected by some PR guy, Obama selected Students from the crowd which then had the possibility to ask him questions about everything. One question (the last one) was: "do you regret having candidated for presidency?", rather a personal question to which President Obama gave a long answer about how he felt during the campaign, not seeing his wife and doughters very often.

Overall Obama talked for 25min and took 35min to answer the questions from students. This was a brilliant step, I would like to see more such events from our heads of state as well.

Sugar Labs Talk and Gnome Three Dot Love

2009-04-02T23:25:00.004+02:00

Today Walter Bender and one of his Italian colleagues (sorry, I didn't get the name :( ) from Sugar Labs had a talk about Sugar and Sugar Labs in Bozen at TIS innovation park (right there where the Speck Hackfest has been some months ago).

(me on the left and karl on the right checking out Sugar on the OLPC)

It was exciting to hear what the ideas behind Sugar are and how the project evolved. The talk had some classical FOSS elements in it as well, education and voting machines have to be open source!

It was sad that there haven't been many people. Lets make some publicity for the next FOSS event in South Tyrol, probably some folks from South Tyrol (and surroundings) are reading this or some other folks are willing to combine a vacation in South Tyrol (beautiful, I promise ;) ) with a FOSS event.

The FOSS event I'm talking about is called Open Source Success Story NAGIOS and is going to happen on April 29th :). You can find more information on the homepage of TIS innovation park or here.

One thing that made me go to Walter Benders talk was Vincent Untz mail earlier this day about Gnome 3.0! Will Gnome follow Sugars example and build a "activities based" desktop? One key element of Sugar and the OLPC is the Journal. Its pretty much what we've heard in a keynote during last years GUADEC in Istanbul...remember?

I think its definitely time for the desktop to move on. That was a part of Walter Benders talk too, that the desktops we use nowadays have been build/designed/inveted to fit the needs of some office workers in the 80's or even earlier! Things have changed, the desktop has to change as well! We have to develop solutions for the problems we have, and not fight with old solutions to fit our purposes as well. Thats exactly what Sugar has done. They wanted to create a simple user interface which helps kids to learn, to explore, to have fun and they have done exactly that. I've heard some people say: "Sugar is not intuitive at all". Well that might be right, but Sugar has been developed to be explored by kids. It's part of the deal to find out alone how it works. If kids can handle it, our parents and we will be able to handle it too don't we?

Future traveling plans

2009-03-19T10:39:00.002+01:00

After some really busy weeks which (thanks god) are behind me now, I'm enjoying my holidays at home and I'm already excited about my future traveling.

First of all on Saturday I'm heading off to Schladming, a town or village in the Austrian alps, where some Friends and I have booked a hut for 14 people right in the middle of the skiing area! It's going to be a legendary week of snow and fun :)

Afterwards back home for some days, enjoying my hometown, my friends and family.

Then I'm heading back to Munich, but not to study...I'm going directly to the airport and fly up in the north to visit my sister in Oslo! Maybe we will go to Stockholm as well for some days. It's going to be fun, definitely.

The next big journey will bring me to Gran Canary Islands, to the "Gran Canaria Desktop Summit". By the way: GNOME 2.26 is out! Go and get it!

Cheers
Felix

New social networks

2009-03-01T13:00:00.002+01:00

I'm now in Facebook and LinkedIn...

two new networks im in ;) there are still some sites or better web 2.0 stuff I'm not ready to join, like twitter! Sorry twitter guys, but thats definitely nothing for me :D

(I've said that about facebook too some months ago :P)

cheers
felix

PS: damn this blog entry is quite short...looks like twitter... :D

gnome-format available in Gnome SVN

2009-02-22T13:47:00.004+01:00

Today I've made a module in Gnome SVN for gnome-format.

You can find the repository on http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-format, like other modules in Gnome SVN you have to check out the project with a valid gnome svn account to have write permission. If you don't have such an account, check out the code like any other svn repository and mail me or michael (email adresses can be found on http://live.gnome.org/gnome-format) the patch (svn diff >> patchxy.patch).

I've also requested a bugzilla product for gnome-format, hopefully we will get it in the next few days. When the bugzilla product is set up you can send us your patches via bugzilla too.

cheers
felix

UPDATE: bugzilla product has been set up and can be found here! Thanks a lot for the fast work!

gnome-format in Linux Magazin 03/09

2009-02-06T14:43:00.002+01:00

I just got mail from a reader of Linux Magazin (german linux magazine). He told me that he read about gnome-format in the actual issue (03/09 Page 65) and that gnome-format is something he's been searching for some time now. He managed to download the code and build it without problems on Ubuntu 8.04.

It was surprising for me to hear that gnome-format made it into a magazine even if the current relaease version is 0.1.1! Thats great news!

Thanks to everyone who contributed so far, please don't stop helping us to make something small and easy but really useful to the people! Hopefully gnome-format will make it into gnome 2.26 so it can be used by every gnome user. But there is still some work to do, most of all switch from libparted to DeviceKit-disks.

Last but not least I have to thank all of you who wrote comments on my "gnome-format-0.1 release" blog entry. It's good to see that we are working on something useful!

cheers
felix

TMobile G1 = Debian + Android

2009-01-16T19:23:00.004+01:00

As I just read, now it is possible (and quite easy) to install debian on the TMobile G1! All you need to know:

UPDATED VERSION!!!I have created and installer and bootloader fo getting Debian running on your Android (G1 at the moment) device, the whole install process will take you about 30 mins, and leave you with access to the full plethora of programs available in Debian and let's you continue using your phone as it was intended to be: as an Android device with all the capabilities thereof.

(Quote from http://www.androidfanatic.com)

I use the Android Dev Phone since one week now and for now I'm happy with it....but I miss some essential parts (VPN Client). I think I know what I'll do this weekend ;)

Cheese - Integration - Call for help/feedback/ideas

2009-01-14T19:01:00.002+01:00

Some weeks ago I met Daniel and had a nice talk with him about Cheese. It was kind of a "whats done, whats next" talk while sipping on a hot cup of punch.

One of the topics we discussed was the integration of Cheese. I've worked on that during last years summer of code and wrote some code which was not fully integrated for Cheese 2.24 because it would have needed a feature freeze break. Over the last months not really much happened from my side (I've been busy with other things), but now the release of Gnome 2.26 is coming close and we need to have a decision here.

About the idea I had:
Integrate Cheese across gnome would be great! Thats quite simple with a dbus-backend. Apps like empathy, pidgin, evolution, gnome-about-me and so on could use the backend and implement some cool features (empathy: take a new avatar picture with cheese). Then I came across social networks like facebook and thought: "Hey, it would be so cool to have the possibility to go to facebook and set the avatar picture directly by choosing "take a new one with cheese" somehow!" That was the point. Why not having one single interface which can be used by both parties: desktop apps and web apps (browser). The key part of the story is the gtk-file-chooser. The idea was to make some kind of plugin system for gtk-file-chooser that makes cheese part of the "places" bar on the left, just like search.

Decisions:
During Guadec in Istanbul I've talked with some people and there the decision was made to use the upcoming media-manager (gsoc project of Cosimo) to integrate cheese into gtk-file-chooser. But now it looks like media-manager is not going to be used any more. That means I would have to make my own plugin-structure for gtk-file-chooser to achieve my goal! The other possibilty would be: forget about file-chooser, browser and web-apps. This would mean: integrate cheese over dbus in some of the applications I mentioned above.

The question:
My question now is: how much people would like to see this implemented? Is this feature wanted or do you think this is nonsense and people should use the normal way of making new pictures, saving them and open them as avatar in empathy? Are there some ideas to have a plugin structure in gtk-file-chooser?

Please help me deciding whats best: give me your feedback! New ideas are wanted as well. Either write a comment or write to the cheese mailing list.

Cheers
Felix

EDIT: PS: For those of you who have some spare time and want to look into the (cheese-dbus)code, contact me! I have it on my computer and would need some time to bring it into a "lookable" version.

Announcing gnome-format 0.1.0

2009-01-08T08:54:00.000+01:00

I have the honor to announce the first release of the new gnome-format. gnome-format is a tool to format devices such as sd-cards, usb-sticks and so on. I know, we already have such a tool: gparted. But the idea of gnome-format is to provide a *simple* formatting tool for small devices. gparted is really good to format hard disks and make partitions and so on, but if I have a *non-formatted* usb stick and plug it into my system, the system usually does nothing at all! And thats the field for gnome-format! It's easy to use, simple and small. For bigger tasks such as making partitions there is gparted!

gnome-format is written in vala and the idea (and name) comes from Paul Betts. A friend of mine, Michael Kanis, began to work on gnome-format because Paul was too busy to continue this project. Thats when I came into play. He knew I've been doing some stuff for gnome and he needed some help.

This release is the first one and we must expect some bugs. We've done our best but as you know, there are always some bugs. We hope a lot of people will try it and give us their feedback. The plan is to make a module proposal and get gnome-format into gnome. At the moment the repository is on http://geoclipse.org/svn/gnome-format, it would be great to have a gnome-svn (or git or bzr or whatever) repository and a bug tracker for the project.

Questions, ideas, feedback, critique and everything else to Michael or me per mail or something else.

PS: The website is only a first draft, I would like to rewrite Paul Betts old gnome-format page if he agrees ;)

Giro d'Italia 2008 Joke

2009-01-04T17:41:00.006+01:00

Jonas Rass, a friend of mine, is a quite famous runner (orienteering) who participated at various big orienteering events all over the world (e.g. O-Ringen, JWOC, ...). He's also a big fan of the Giro and joins thousands of other spectators at one of the most exciting mountain stages. Thats where he got filmed during one of his well known jokes! It was a spontaneuos action which brought his images all around the world! A guy of the Belgium national orienteering team recognized him on TV and called the local news. They reported the whole thing in the evening news, probably someone has heard it. Now we finally have the possibility to watch Jonas "run" during last years Giro on "Eurosport Watts Best of 2008" (for everyone who missed the live coverage).

Enjoy it

Sign of life

2008-12-26T18:32:00.002+01:00

It's been nearly a month I haven't written anything. Time to change that and send out a sign of life! ;)

There has happened a lot but I've been too busy to write something. Now the Christmas stress is over and I have some time to write a few words.

First of all: Oliver started a blog. :) Though his first post was not really nice regarding my blog, he's still a friend of mine! :D

Project 10 to the 100: Some time ago I've written something about this project, it's a call for ideas to change the world. People have submitted over 100.000 ideas and on January 27th, 2009 the voting starts. Vote for the idea you like the most!

Christmas: Merry Christmas to everyone! I know I'm late, sorry, but I had a bunch of things to do before Christmas and the last 3 days I've been busy with family stuff! Have some nice holidays and a happy new year everyone!

University: I've been busy (like I already said ;) ). Some days before Christmas I've had a talk at a presentation (system design review) with 4 other guys from my university. It was about a project we work on during this winter term. It was fun! :)

Thats it for the moment, I'll try to be more active writing tech stuff instead of private stuff.

Ah by the way: I've ordered a Android Dev Phone 1! I've started doing some stuff with the api, just to see how it goes. It's easy! Hopefully we see some interesting applications from the open source community soon! The thing I miss the most at the moment: A vpn client!
Did anyone try to build vpnc (or something similar) for android? Technically it should be possible to build native (c-)code for android, but I have to wait for the phone (is it a phone???) to check that.

Thats it (definitely)!

Happy holidays!

Snow Snow Snow

2008-11-30T22:31:00.002+01:00

Last weekend I spend some days at home (not far from the location where the speck hack fest has been earlier this month). I've arrived Thursday night and on Friday morning I was surprised by a beautiful view out of my room:

I spend the whole Friday afternoon to scoop our entranceway free of snow! But it was snowing and snowing and snowing so I decided to use my time otherwise. This is the result:

(ok, its not my work only, the whole thing was started by my aunt and we built it together)

Can you believe this happened only few weeks after the speck hack fest only 30km from the venue? I've not been there but I think nobody would have expected snow fall in the cities some weeks after. You can find the pictures here.

After the exhausting creative snow art in the city I had to go out into the forests and mountains of our country :D Enjoy it.

Quantum of Solace

2008-11-06T19:14:00.002+01:00

Quantum of Solace...I think the most of you know what I mean, it's the newest James Bond film.

Don't be afraid, you can read to the bottom of this entry, I won't tell you the finish :D

What I liked:
It begins like a real bond film, with a lot of potential to become a great film.

What I didn't like:
Plain characters, there are some people in the film which play a more or less important role but you simply don't know who they are.
Too much Bourne, more Bond would have been nice :D
Sequel in a sequel? James Bond is already a sequel, why begin a new intern sequel? Sequel means: open end, thats not what belongs into a bond film.

Overall:
Its quite a good action thriller, but if you want to see a real bond film, go and watch James Bond Goldfinger :D (Bond: "Do you want me to talk?" Goldfinger: "No, I just want you to die!" - epic dialogue!)

Hopefully they learn something and begin to think about what a James Bond film should definitely have (something happens, bond gets called to M, he gets a job, he goes to Q to get some fancy new stuff, bond meets a nice girl, he gets caught by the bad guy, somehow he manages to escape and fight against the bad guy, bond wins the last battle, even if one of his girls is dead he finds a new one, last scene: bond with his girl somewhere nobody else is ;) )

In casino royale this sequence of scenes gets interrupted when the film continues after bond and his girl are on the boat in Venice! If the film would have finished there, it would have been quite a good bond film (with some escapades).

In my opinion, for those of you who have seen casino royale and quantum of solace: They should have finished casino royale on the boat in Venice and started quantum of solace in Venice when bond finds out that his girl plays against him, then she gets killed and the story goes on.

Dell Support

2008-10-29T11:45:00.002+01:00

Last week, on Friday, my dell xps m1330 broke (again...I had problems with the graphics chip some months ago). Luckily I purchased a support upgrade (2 more years of next business day support), so the technician came today to repair my notebook (well, not really next business day but it was my fault, I was busy on Monday and Tuesday).

Picture from http://www.codinghorror.com/

I've got a new power supply and motherboard, now everything works fine again! No data loss at all.

Thx dell, even if your products may not be the best (2 support issues in 1 year), your support is really great!

Powerful synaptics

2008-10-24T17:01:00.004+02:00

I just discovered how easy it is to set up some simple multitouch gestures with synaptics. I heard some rumors that you can have multitouch gestures with (nearly) every notebook touchpad you want, but I never tried until now.

(Images from http://www.hy-tech.de/)

I followed this tutorial, it's german but I think everyone will be able to find a tutorial in english. If not, just read the "man synaptics", you'll find the synaptics options for xorg.conf with good explanations.

What I don't like is: why hiding these things in xorg.conf? Its powerful but only for power-users. I think we should have this in mouse preferences to! (probably the feature does already exist, I don't have the latest version of gnome yet)

Fancy fancy :) Try it out...

UPDATE: With the new Xorg coming with Ubuntu 8.10 and others, the settings I talked of are banned from xorg.conf. Now hal is the part that controls these things. If you want to set up synaptics via hal, you have to put a *.fdi file under "/etc/hal/fdi/policy".

Touchless SDK

2008-10-09T09:57:00.002+02:00

Some days ago, Microsoft released a SDK called Touchless to develop multitouch-alike applications but instead of using a touch-screen you can use your webcam and colored markers!

They made a nice demo video showing the new technology! (The two guys are talking crap for the first minute, but then they show whats possible with the sdk...great!)

Watch the video here!

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

2008-10-06T09:46:00.002+02:00

Last Saturday I wiped out one of my cult / classic film deficits! I've seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show (the film, not the musical). They show the film every Saturday for more than 30 years now in a small cinema in Munich. They hold the record for the longest permanent movie shown in a cinema (the premiere in Munich was 1977).

To everyone who hasn't seen the Rocky Horror P. S.: watch it! And take some gadgets with you ;) e.g. some rice, a news paper, toilet paper and water pistols :D it will be great fun....

Happy Birthday Google!

2008-09-27T08:11:00.003+02:00

Google celebrates it's 10th birthday today! You've probably seen todays doodle on www.google.com!

I loved to hear is that Google is celebrating its birthday by making a call for ideas to change the world! This project has the great capability that people all over the world begin thinking of changing the world and a big company offers the money to realize the best ideas! So people, think about it and participate at http://www.project10tothe100.com!

By the way, I like the video ad of the project a lot!

UPDATE: updated video link

Zarro Bugs!

2008-09-23T12:56:00.003+02:00

Cheese 2.24 is totally bug free! As daniel promised cheese is bug free for 2.24! Well did not only promise zarro bugs but he even made a competition out of bug fixing! Good idea daniel!

Thanks daniel for the nice "german tank post"! But you made a really really bad mistake! You forgot to present the most important cheese developer!

May I present to you: Daniel, the one who had the great idea to begin this project and to motivate other people to help him with this task! He really runs like a german tank, so kudos daniel, our german tank! Keep on running!

Cheese 2.24

2008-09-22T12:17:00.002+02:00

It's time for Gnome 2.24! And with the new gnome comes also a new version of cheese with a lot of new, exciting features to discover!

Daniel recently updated the tour page for cheese, check out the new features and enjoy it :D

Picture taken with the newest version of cheese!

new banner, shoutbox

2008-09-16T17:43:00.004+02:00

I exerimented a little bit with some widgets! I found a really nice one! Its a shoutbox... I had to make an account at www.shoutmix.com and then got a free shoutbox widget! the best part: you can configure nearly everything (colors, fonts, css ...)!

And I made a new banner, with the name of the blog. I used gimp and inkscape for that, I must say: inkscape is great! The picture I used for the banner has been taken by a friend of mine, on a summer vacation (in 2007 I think) at the beach at rimini (Italy)!

Problems with the layout

2008-09-15T20:30:00.002+02:00

I wanted to change the layout of the "random picasa picture" widget! Somehow blogger has some problems with saving the html code! I hope the issue will be fixed soon, i don't like the white background behind the pictures!

And another thing: does anyone know how I can "disable" the dot-line around the picture when you click on it?! it destroys the layout! check it out, just click on the picture on the right...

artwork and widget

2008-09-15T14:58:00.001+02:00

I changed some things in the artwork! feel free to comment if you like it or not...

Remote Post Test

2008-09-15T14:21:00.001+02:00

This is a test of a REMOTE post, written by email!

8-)

list
blub
:D

First entry

2008-09-15T14:06:00.000+02:00

So lets start this crappy blog ^^

I don't have much to say, first entry blabla whatever :D