Tag: me

New hairdo

it’s been a while since i pondered hair styles. what to do? friend google may help. first i came across this advice

  • Who’s the sexiest of them all? Men wearing short, front-flip hairstyles (think Brad Pitt and Matthew LeBlanc) are perceived as most confident and sexy. It is not surprising that men with this hairstyle are also perceived as the most self-centered.

  • Why Wall Street men walk tall – Men with medium-length, side-parted hair are viewed as the most intelligent and affluent – great for that job interview. However, men with these styles are also seen as the most narrow-minded.

  • Fabio ain’t so fab after all – Bad news for long-haired Fabio types. The study validates the myth that men with long hair seem to be all brawn and no brains. They are perceived as least intelligent and most careless. But all is not lost – they are also seen as the most good-natured.

ok, time to go style shopping. maybe software can help? turns out its very hard to find decent hairstyles online, at least for men. for women there is a lot of choice, and even some software to morph hairstyles. i tried that program, quite entertaining. are there any good cuts out there? maybe these:1, 2 another alternative would be to make a fashion statement and go with a mullet.

Charango!

What a great, great concert. Morcheeba came across as a band that has found their style, has found success, yet still was able to connect to the crowd without the airs and graces that normally beset rock stars. I had some reservations at first when I heard that they were gonna play in the biggest venue in Zurich, which normally only sees mediocre bands (read: ones with mass appeal). They were not able to fill it completely, but apparently they were quite surprised at the turnout. I now need to check out their new album Charango for real. I wish I had my md recorder with me, would have been an excellent foray into audio blogging.

Refreshingly tasteless

i’m in that mood again. when everything tasteless has a mesmerizing quality, and the mind yearns for relief from the onslaught of facts that is also known as prepping. lucky me that i rediscovered a book that i had never opened so far. here is a sample.

Louis XIV of France (1638-1715)
During the French Revolution the tomb of the French king was wrecked and plundered. His heart was stolen and sold to Lord Harcourt who later sold it to the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend William Buckland. One night at dinner, the Dean, who liked to experiment with food, ate the embalmed heart.

if only i could remember who gave me that book as a gift. must have been a kindred spirit.

Dear diary

It’s healthy to see some criticism on a friends blog. Discourse invariably involves dissent, and having friends take you up on your writings is a nice change from blogging into the void, “dear diary” style. I would expect to have more and more conversations over the blog instead of email. blog death matches as spectator sport? Deciding issues by a public poll? Spreading memes?
2002-12-20:

Quite a list for someone with major depression isn’t it. I missed out on a lot more than that party for someone who really wasn’t good for me! I read a lot more than I listen to music. I read a lot of diarists who also read my toothbrush chronicles and I find such comfort in that 😦 I didn’t want to do this because it seems to cut-and-dry but this is for people who don’t know me or haven’t read a lot of this diary so they know what’s going on : I didn’t want to give because it could all be taken. I didn’t want to buy any of them but that didn’t stop me from staring at em and wondering who the heck thought up this stuff. It didn’t stop me from getting this wacky record player.
There seems to be nothing that will stop me from protecting the earth and my furry friends. There seems to have been some confusion about my probation 😉 There’d have been some serious fisticuffs if he had done that. I’m so glad i wasn’t there i would have told her lady you have some serious issues and need help. But you didn’t and i would have rather you walked away than destroy every last memory even the good ones they’ll be tainted now like our marriage was it just this once dillon. Normally i would have felt really bad but he looked like he had been hit before.

2004-11-10:have your diary entry written

Xaraya

I tested the new smartphones last night. I had to check into this site, of course, and it rendered not bad at all. I’m inclined to do a simpler, one column layout without the sidebars if I ever decide to buy one of those. I still think their GUI sucks ass (its based on tiny buttons with illogical function mapping). I’d much rather have a phone with a touch screen, but they are very bulky. So I guess I will skip this generation of mobiles. The picture is almost original size. It’s highly alarming that every mobile device is demoed with sports scores. Who gives a fuck about sports scores?


2002-11-05: Xaraya is now public. Initial reactions are very positive. I’m glad we didn’t do any forums, because forums attract scum. In other news I did an interview with internet intern, a german mass market internet rag (some 400k circulation). I talked about the reasons behind Xaraya and why Xaraya will succeed where other php cms will fail:

  • skilled developers
  • a real architecture
  • no incompetent advocates

The article should be up in 2 weeks.
2002-11-09: I opened a whoopass can’o’worms when I outlined my plans to implement workflow for Xaraya early next year. I want to start very simple (actually the work would be done for a client project) because I knew from preparing the web services talks that workflows are a very complex topic. Gary suggested I look into wfmc which is the industry standard for workflows. Very nice, but I guess implementing it would keep me busy for a year. Workflows might be a topic for oscom too. Both wyona and zope already implement some support for xml-defined workflows.
2002-11-28: I created my first WSDL file today, with the help of some tools. I’m pretty sure my WSDL is invalid. Scripting languages with their weak type systems and WSDL don’t exactly mix well. I hope to eventually enable web services to call into the APIs that Xaraya offers. At this stage, it is merely a nice idea, but I’m slowly making progress.
2003-01-25: I took the plunge, and am now running a current Xaraya snapshot again. Lots of new toys to play with 🙂

Yeah I know I have been slow with updates, but a) live has been hectic b) Xaraya is not yet very convenient for blogging.

On the bright side, comments should now be fully functional, with a nice tree view.
2003-02-12: Another one joins the MT love. Marcel is a buddy from the Xaraya PMC, and the 2 of us should really be using our own dogfood, but alas it is not there yet re: blogging comfort. One day soon, though.
2003-02-12: Xaraya Usability Recommendations is probably one of the more extensive studies about usability in the open source field. And we are not even at 1.0 yet. Kudos to Doug and Drew for this fine doc. If we follow through with this one, good things are in store for the web layman.
2003-02-21: This feed validates as RSS. I took the plunge, and fixed the RSS feed for Xaraya. Unlike postnuke, Xaraya will ship with a rich feed that makes use of the 2.0 format. We now also have SOAP support. Mike pushed a changeset that enables to call Xaraya API methods over SOAP. Here is the relevant part from the WSDL.
<wsdl:arrayType=”xsd:string[]” />
<xsd:complexType name=”wsModAPIFuncRequest”>
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name=”module” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”func” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”type” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”args” type=”xsd:xsdl:myelement0″ />
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

2003-02-27: Aye, Kevin, we will work extra hard on usability.

The PN user registration process is plain silly. It is one of the things that I was hoping to see the last of in eventually moving to Xaraya. I have a suggestion for anyone working on the end-user (non-admin) aspects of the core modules. Pretend that the typical user is my mother who gets very flustered when web site processes aren’t as easy and straightforward as possible. And Mom cries when she gets flustered. Please folks … don’t make my Mom cry.

2003-04-21: congrats team.

It is my pleasure to announce the first Beta Release of Xaraya (.900). This release is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of hard work and undying dedication to creating. All of the developers on the project have devoted many hours to reach where we are today. The first Beta release for Xaraya is intended to capture a baseline of what needs to be accomplished before the final release. This is merely another step in the long journey that began with PHP Nuke, and then PostNuke for many of us.

2003-06-25: My friend John Cox is being interviewed about Xaraya:

With the articles system combined with the dynamic data system (both written by Michel), a webmaster no longer has to wait for developers to dream up new modules. All a webmaster has to do is dream up what they want to display, and from there it’s just a matter of adding 2 templates into the system and creating a new publication type to gather the data.

I just installed Xaraya again after neglecting it for a while, and I must say, very impressive. Time to mop up the nuke market with their silly systems.
2003-06-30: Looks like everyone and his dog is converging on XML pipeline processors these days. With more powerful XSLT editors, maybe the time for these technologies to appeal to a more mainstream audience has come.

2003-07-02:

KAYWA
No anagrams found.
WYONA
AN YOW
NOWAY
NAY OW
ANY OW
YAW ON
YAW NO
WAY ON
WAY NO
XARAYA
A RAY AX
LENYA
LAY NE
LAY EN
AN LEY
AN ELY
AN LYE
ANY EL
NAY EL

2003-07-20: Xaraya goes new ways again. They now use phing, a php clone of ant, to maintain build files for the distribution. Very neat. The more standardization, the better. Apache Lenya is using ant more and more for various scripting tasks too. This nicely leverages the very good ant documentation and literature, and means you have to learn fewer concepts.
2003-08-02: Xaraya is now bitkeeper project #6 by number of change sets.
2003-11-04:

Trolling through the Bitkeeper tree on the site, looking at the change sets, the different names, the comments, it just sort of occurred to me this is beginning to look like a factory, chugging merrily along I’m noticing more and more people on the public mailing lists wanting to take the bk plunge. The collective consciousness has apparently reached a critical mass conclusion and internalized that this is the normal way of life around here. Quick rewind to 8 months ago, when most everyone (me especially) were still trying to figure out how to do a merge… You’ve come a long way, baby.Marc

I am very happy that we made the decision to establish sound processes, use bitkeeper instead of cvs, and aim for quality. It took longer than the usual crappy php project, but then again it is of much higher quality. We are now the number 3 user of bitkeeper, only surpassed by MySQL and the Linux kernel. Amazing.
2003-12-12: This post led to an avalanche. Wow, 19 months later, the repercussions are still working its way through the php cms community 🙂
2007-06-20: linux.com is now running on Xaraya, a CMS I co-founded

thriving in the downturn

i saved over a 1000 franks annually by switching my insurance company. my new one has a philosophy of saving money wherever possible and fighting against the explosion of cost in healthcare. i like their stance very much, such as: “use generics whenever possible”, “pay annually to save recurring costs” etc. as people get more aware of the wasteful way of doing business of many companies, companies that save money for their customers will thrive. clueless companies like viseca that insist on spamming me with unwanted “customer magazines” in a helpless effort to build a brand (how 90s is that?) will get emails from me like this one:

ich möchte sie bitten, mir ihr “kundenmagazin” nicht mehr zuzustellen. sie werfen mit diesem magazin mein geld zum fenster hinaus. ihre aufgabe als firma ist es, meine transaktionen so kostengünstig wie möglich durchzuführen, und mir dies via internet seite anzuzeigen. jegliche andere korrespondenz ist nicht von interesse, besonders nicht im bemühen einen “brand” aufzubauen.

thanks google

google came to my rescue yesterday when i scrambled to access information about the exam i had today. due to a screw up on my part i had been locked out of my apartment, and hence my study materials. i went to my parents, and used their cable modem to query google about the subjects of my exam. not only did i get 10s of papers for each keyword, those lecture notes were often much better than the one provided by my university. i was thus able to understand many key concepts at the last minute, because i was able to pick the lecture note that explained it best for each topic. applied more broadly, this means that lecture notes from one university have to compete with 100s of others because i can instantly compare them. more empowerment for me, and the incompetence of most faculty members becomes obvious.

Blogging beyond text

some people are experimenting with audio or video blogs. while totally a venue to explore for expression, i’m not sure about longer term viability. both audio and video are just too opaque, and until we have decent search algorithms that can penetrate into these files they are pretty much a 1-way street. a cool way to expand on this would be to SMIL-enable weblogs. (interesting fact: MMS, the next-generation SMS, is based on a subset of SMIL. convergence?) this could also be a very interesting topic for OSCOM IV in Tokyo.

Asset stripping @ home

i love getting rid of physical property. i’m constantly going through my belongings, pondering what i could do away with. most of the things i care about these days are virtual (the fruits of my labor are all virtual), and having to maintain to much stuff gets on my nerves. besides taking away living space and attention, many physical items do have little or no purpose. i’m thus very happy to report that i parted company with ~10 kilograms of stuff yesterday. in my opinion, our apartment is still full of useless crap, but most of it isn’t mine so i (unfortunately) cannot just go ahead and reclaim that space. maybe some education will help 🙂

writing a business plan

i’m currently writing a business plan for my new venture, which will be based around weblogs. its a great way to focus my always-wandering thoughts into a coherent concept. i already invested $300 of my own money, and will invest a considerable amount of time on this venture. of course, it ties in with my other plans at my employer 🙂 more as i flesh it out more.