Today I am facing several down times 

It seems, that the new forum version causes somehow more problems in the virtual environment than the previous version.

I am already working on a solution to get Swyx Forum on it's own root server which promises much more stability. If this will work out as expacted/wanted, I will be able to move the site in one or two weeks from now (fortunately I have vacation during this time...).

If you feel like wanting to support me on this you can do so by becoming an official sponsor of Swyx Forum. It is just a question of money... (as always). At the moment the costs are not yet secured.

This week someone brought my attention to a british artist that make some incredible pavement chalk-drawings.

By distorting the image he is drawing, when seen from a certain viewpoint, they will appear as beeing 3D.

Please have a look at his webpage, and be amazed: Julian Beever

As I am going to update the forum module the following weekend, you won't be able to access it from saturday morning  presumingly until sunday afternoon. All other areas of Swyx Forum (projects, downloads, wiki, a.s.o.) will stay available during this time.

Hi everyone.

Due to a massive hardware failure in the datacenter of my hoster Swyx Forum (and lots of other pages) where down far about half a day. As Murphey tells us: everything that could fail will fail, it took some time to get the datacenter back to life.

Swyx Forum is available now again and I am looking forward to the weekend to update the forum module.

November is close and with it the Leonids, a meteor shower related to comet Tempel-Tuttle. It is visible in November each year. But there might be other reasons than comets for this phenomenon:

"Far out in the uncharted backwarters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

This is the beginning of the first book of the only existing triology consisting of five novels:

Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

If you grew up being somehow connected to technology this is for sure a very well known story for you. In fact I hardly know anyone not knowing it.

The story is from easy to complicated, from funny to bizzare. Over the last 20+ years it became nearly a religion to many people. Of course my bookshelf is the home of five paperbacks as well !

While spending some nice days in Reykjavik for an SwyxECR Developers Training the other day I found a complete...

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Well, do not worry. I am not leaving the Swyx-scene, but I have been leaving Dortmund after a very pleasant stay at Swyx HQ this week. And no, I did not eat all the fish! But do you have any idea about how difficult it is to think of some funny headlines?

First of all, I want to thank Tomer Welligson a lot for taking excellent care of us these days, and also all the others putting all their effort into this as well. Thanks to Uwe, Martin, Sebastian, Stephan, Michael (all of them), Dirk, Rolf and all the other I managed to meet running around in the corridor. Yes, we even had a glimpse of Günter Junk, but we did not dare to disturb him from his telephone call ;)

Tom Wellige and myself outside the Swyx HQ in Dortmund. 

We learned a lot about what is going on at the moment. Hosted Swyxware is coming along and also the Beta of 6.10. We will try to make some reviews about the MEM (Mobile...

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Over the last days you might have exerianced this site to be very slow or not responding at all. My hoster just informed me that he had severe trouble with DoS Attacks on lot's of his machines slowing everything down. He told me that he "fixed" this now (I wonder how to fix DoS Attacks anyway... ).

So, if the page is slow please be patient, this is most likely because some stupid guys think they have to do stupid things.

If your daily conversation contains a lot of LOL, BRB, CYAS and similiar expression, then this is the book you should bring to church this sunday....

I just upgraded my favourite mediaplayer to version 5.5. A new skin is available and some neat features. I just noticed than when Winamp 5.5 jumps to the next track in the playlist, while in the background, it will notify me with a pop-up in the down right corner. Just like when new e-mails arrives. Cool.

I have not used this blog for very much personal stuff. But this time I just want to write about something I am looking forward to a lot. Even if I have worked with SwyxWare for almost three years soon, I have just been to Dortmund once, and at that time I knew nobody at Swyx.

That has changed, thanks to the forums and the T.A.G. meeting I have met some Swyx employees and I have contact with Tom (the forum admin) almost every day. Uwe I met at the T.A.G meeting and then again when he visited Oslo this summer.

So I am really looking forward to visit Swyx HQ next week. I will come to Dortmund on monday evening and leave thursday evening.

I expect it to be some nice mix of business and pleasure (you know, doing business can be a pleasure ).

So all Swyxies, you are warned. If you see some crazy Norwegian running around in your offices next week, do not worry, it will only be me trying to shake hands with all of you.

...

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Today I had lunch at Vapiano, a self-service restaurant chain. Their concept is to have restaurants at prime locations, modern design and nice ambiente, fresh, high-quality food limited to pizza, pasta and salad. They just save on waiter and waitresses. Prices are reasonable.

You get a kind of debit card at the entrance. Everything you order is stored on that card and you pay when you leave. You order at a bar and your meal is prepared in a few minutes while you wait. I had pasta with cherry tomatos, basil and parmesan. It was delicious.

This was my first visit, but definitely not the last one.

This morning the Swyx Forum web server (i.e. the web application framework) hang and it took some time to get the IIS (web server) restarted. So please accept my apology for this. I will try to make sure that these kind of down times will be prevented in the future.

If you're wondering why some old blog entries are listed in the "recent entries" list. That happens if I edit them. I try not to do that, but sometimes there are errors or bad verbalizations I need to correct. The blog software lists blog entires sorted by modification date and therefore edited old entries show up at the top of the list again. Sorry for that.

If you use SwyxIt you know this message which pops up whenever you want to close the program:

To get rid of this annoying message add the following registry value:

Path: HKCU\Software\Swyx\SwyxIt!\CurrentVersion\Options
Type: REG_DWORD
Name: NoCloseDialog
Value: 1

Now SwyxIt! terminates without question when you close it.

George Takei who played Lt. Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek has an asteriod named after him: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=7307. The International Astronomical Union approved the name change of asteriod 1994 GT9 this week. After Gene Roddenberry and Nichelle Nichols he's the third "Trekkie" to get this honor.

Congratulations.

I just learned this really nice prank. Try this on one of your co-workers and enjoy.

1. Make a screenshot of the desktop of the machine.
2. Use this screenshot as the desktop background image
3. Move all the real icons....
4. Enjoy when your co-worker tries to launch a program clicking on the background image....

Works best if the user has a looooooot of icons on the desktop.

Is your daily work every day the same ? Did you get tired of it and want to learn and do new things ?

Maybe this one is of inspiration for you:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=p4cP2oy4ebE

BTW: tomorrow is a national holiday in Germany (German Unity Day), so this is nearly like Morten's regular weekend starter blog