Make a diff!
One of the about 30 something new books on my bookshelf – and a truly great one I just finished reading. Gosling gives a systematic insight into the matter of design and innovation. A very inspiring and useful, yet very concise framework!
“Realising Dreams – strategies for deep design” by William Gosling
“The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki. Not the latest, but a courageous and entertaining presentation worthwhile watching.
Due to a technical issue with a wordpress update, this blog hasn’t been available for quite some time. Now it’s back.. stay tuned for more ;)
A truly great (unfortunately last) lecture indeed: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Wisdoms to always keep in mind. Never give up your dreams and don’t miss opportunities to enable others’ childhood dreams!
Finally, Apache 2.2 is running fine on this server! :) Upgrading, i.e. manually merging all the changed configuration files, recompiling old Apache modules (unfortunately, Gentoo doesn’t care about this automatically) was quite an effort though. The “silent” upgrade was thus not silent at all but rather just silently ended with a no longer working Apache and the according web server downtime. Conclusion: I should really rethink whether I want to stick with Gentoo for this server or rather switch to something more administrator-friendly like Debian, SUSE or Fedora.
Unfortunately, my mobile phone broke during my (nice :) vacations and therefore, I can’t be reached by mobile phone currently. Please use e-mail (mettlerd “AT” numlock “DOT” ch), skype (‘mettlerd’) or instant messaging (see below) instead:
Skype: mettlerd (most likely reachable, preferred)
ICQ: 196122009
MSN: h2o_ch@msn.com (don’t use this account for sending mail)
AIM/Groupwise: dmettler (business account)
Google: daniel.mettler@gmail.com (don’t use this account for sending mail)
Jabber: mettlerd@swissjabber.ch (don’t use this account for sending mail)
I intend to buy a new mobile phone the upcoming weekend (If the Apple iPhone was available in Switzerland I’d buy one. Unfortunately it isn’t.. too bad for Apple and myself. Any suggestion for another decent mobile phone to buy?)
Don’t miss the rollout of the new Boeing 787 ‘Dreamliner’: http://787premiere.newairplane.com/
I wonder how long it will take until there will be a supersonic airliner[1] again? I don’t know of anything like a “new Concorde” in the mid-term pipelines of any of the few major manufacturers of commercial jetliners (there are a couple of ongoing “low budget” studies though). Supersonic travel is not so à la mode due to its historical association with high fuel consumption, environmental pollution and high operating costs. However, supersonic commercial travel has distinct advantages from an economical point of view and I can hardly believe that the world can do without it for a long time. Further, technology has made quite some progress since the development of the Concorde (more than 40 years ago!) which may enable future supersonic airliners to overcome some of the deficiencies and disadvantages of their predecessor(s).
Some nice videos about the Concorde:
Concorde : Thank you for 27 supersonic years
Concorde breaking the sound barrier
Adieu supersonic, good bye Concorde!
[1] Commercial “space trips” for fun don’t count ;) They’re certainly a great personal experience, but their importance to world economy is probably negligible.
It’s amazing how well Alinghi is doing in the first race of America’s Cup! Proof that the team’s spirit didn’t suffer from missing challenges during the Louis Vuitton Cup. And the new SUI 100 indeed seems to be a bit faster than NZL 92, particularly downwind. Well done, grats! And grats to Team NZ for a great performance too!
I’ve just discovered the new ajaxified, PHP-based MODx Content Management System. It looks and feels great (test it here!). If there wasn’t any need for a dedicated admin interface (i.e. instead, content editable in-place for privileged users), it would be even more userfriendly. Maybe that’s the next step to take?
Another not-yet-ajaxified but nonetheless cool CMS (JEE based, supports JSR-170) I already mentioned before: Magnolia CMS (live demo, currently out of duty).
Further, a nice JEE based Open Source DMS/CMS/ECM supporting JSR-170: Alfresco.
For this site, I might switch to MODx instead of keep using WP (which basically still fights with the same problems it always did). The more as I’ve been dealing with AJAX professionally for a while now (but focussed on JEE as the enterprise server platform). As a DMS, Alfresco would come in handy. Now all I need is enough spare time to realize my plans ;)