By Tom Wellige on Mittwoch, 30. Januar 2008 13:02
Yesterday Martin posted a link to a panorama view of the As this is already quite impressive there some other panorama views from the interior available But I have to admit, that I like the cockpit view most ;-) Allthough there are lots of switches and screens it doesn't seem too complicated to handle once you know a little bit about how to fly jets. That's something you can teach yourself within MS Flight Simulator. Well, at least theoretical and/or simulated.
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By Tom Wellige on Dienstag, 29. Januar 2008 15:14
Sorry, the following is available in german language only.
29.01.2008
Pressemitteilung
"Winterhilfe Afghanistan"
Im Westen und Norden Afghanistans herrscht seit Wochen einer der kältesten und schneereichsten Winter seit Jahrzehnten. Hundertausende Menschen - vor allem Kinder - sind vom Hunger- und Kältetod bedroht.
Die Mintrachinger "Kinderhilfe Afghanistan" hat daher eine umfassende Hilfsaktion gestartet.
Afghanische Mitarbeiter der "Kinderhilfe Afghanistan" transportieren seit gestern mit geländegängigen LKW 15 Tonnen Hilfsgüter, insbesondere Nahrungsmittel, Winterbekleidung und festes Schuhwerk für Kinder, Decken und Heizmaterial (Spiritus-Tabletten und -öfen), in die entlegenen Gebiete im Westen und Norden des Landes. Die Aktion wird in den nächsten Wochen fortgeführt.
Dr. Reinhard Erös wird am Wochenende persönlich nach Afghanistan reisen, um die Großaktion vor Ort zu organisieren. Der ehemalige Bundeswehrarzt dankt den Soldaten der Bundeswehr in Mazar-E-Sharif,... Read More » |
By Martin on 26.01.2008 20:51
I'm subscribed to a lot of RSS feeds. One of them is from Somasegar's weblog. He's head of Microsoft's Developer Division. His recent article got my attention. He writes
"As a development organization, it is important to make sure that a portion of the team’s bandwidth is allocated for incubation or “long-lead” innovation which we expect to take to market in a subsequent product cycle. This means that a business has to plan resource allocation in the following 3 buckets
· Making current customers successful (servicing)
· Working on the next version of the product
· Incubation"
He's absolutely right. If you always work on maintenance and the upcoming version only and don't allow your development team time for learning and trying new stuff, "nurturing incubation" as Somasegar calls it, you won't get real innovations, your staff's knowledge will get stale and motivation will suffer.... Read More » |
By Martin on 26.01.2008 13:27
Threehundredthirtythree days to wait... ... for this
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By morten.rokosz on Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:12:00 GMT
About a year ago Swyx formed a trusted advisory group (T.A.G.). A selected number of persons from the channel (resellers and ditribution) and end users are invited to participate in this group. Swyx will present their thoughts about future releases and the markets and will get feedback from the group. Read More » |
By Martin on 21.01.2008 21:04
All software has bugs. SwyxWare is no exception. To make sure that you not miss something severe before releasing a version you have to test consistently and you have to keep track of all bugs you find. We're using a database to store and track bugs. The vast majority of them are found and fixed internally during development and test, but some of them are reported by customers after the software has been released and will often be fixed in a maintenance pack, bugfix release or a future major version.
For each bug we have to decide how important it is, if and when to fix it. To do that, each entry in the database gets a severity level and a priority. The severity defines the impact this bug has on customers using SwyxWare, the priority is used for sorting them. Higher priority bugs will be fixed before lower ones. We always have to makes compromises, of course, because there is no time to fix all of them. We have to pick the important ones and do the minor ones later.
Severity and priority are related,... Read More » |
By Martin on 16.01.2008 22:24
Last weekend I found a great software to keep track of my DVDs. It's called My Movies. MyMovies integrates into Windows Mediacenter. I can browse or search my DVDs using the remote while sitting on the sofa :-) The media center plugin is supposed to allow playing DVD backups you made on your hardisk. I haven't tried that yet. But considering current hard disk prices it would definitely be affordable to store all my DVDs that way.
There's a client application to manage the stored data. It either works locally on the media center system or remote via the network. I run the client app on my laptop to add DVD information. Adding data can be done manually or preferrably by scanning the barcode on the DVD back cover and get the information from a web service automatically.
It also has a feature to scan barcodes with a web cam, but I couldn't get it to work. The built-in cam in my notebook seem to not have sufficient quality. I tried an old Philips ToUCam Pro, but... Read More » |
By Martin on 15.01.2008 22:00
What differentiates good from bad programmers? This article lists some valid criteria. Here's the short version
Positive indicators:
Passionate about technology
Programs as a hobby
Will talk your ear off on a technical subject if encouraged
Significant (and often numerous) personal side-projects over the years
Learns new technologies on his/her own
Opinionated about which technologies are better for various usages
Very uncomfortable about the idea of working with a technology he doesn’t believe to be “right”
Clearly smart, can have great conversations on a variety of topics
Started programming long before university/work
Has some hidden “icebergs”, large personal projects under the CV radar
Knowledge of a large variety of unrelated technologies (may not be on CV)
Negative indicators:
Programming is a day job
Don’t really want to “talk shop”, even when encouraged to... Read More » |
By Martin on 13.01.2008 20:54
The 2007 Darwin Awards: http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2007.html "Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it."
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By Martin on 13.01.2008 20:19
Yesterday I read a blog post about what happens if you not cancel the famous Windows Error report dialog, but hit "Send information" instead. If you're the first one having this problem, a new entry in Microsoft's bug tracking database is created. each subsequent report from other people for the same bug increments a counter. When deciding about which bugs to fix first, among other things they rely on that counter.
Why I'm mentioning this? Because I would love to have the same for SwyxWare. However, that will not happen soon. And I doubt that our customer base is big enough to derive bug severity from the number of reportedly affected installations. We have to use other criteria for the time being. However, it would still be very useful to get such error report information.
Even if we will not have such a feature in the foreseeable future, we will do something in this area for the next version (after v6.1x). At least it's planned to do so. It was already planned for v6.10, but we had to postpone it. We get complaints from our partners and from our own support stuff that the process of getting trace files is too difficult and requires too many round-trips between customer, Swyx partner and Swyx support to get the right trace files.
... Read More » |
By tla on 12-01-2008 16:48
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.
The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.... Read More » |
By Martin on 12.01.2008 11:52
I just spend the last 45 minutes to write a blog entry about the SwyxWare Trace Upload Tool we want to realize in the next SwyxWare version. I tried to remove something I pasted into the editor and hit backspace. That triggered the browser's back function instead and the whole text is gone.  I can't wait for this blog software to get blogging API support so that I can use Windows Live Writer.
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By morten.rokosz on Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:15:00 GMT
When I noticed that my last blog entry was almost one month ago I just had to write something, if for no other purpose than showing you all that I am still alive....
Reading Tom's Blog you have a clue already about my absence. Moving into a new house takes time, and even more so if this house is located in the Norwegian wilderness.
Well, this wilderness is actually 15 minutes away from the placed I lived before in Oslo. But here is my findings so far:
1) The location of the house is in the shadow of everything transmitted in the air (or so it seems). I was going to get my TV signals from the new digital TV network that is transmitted in the air. But, no, no. Not coverage at the location of the house. Got to order a satelite dish and subscribe to a satelite provider. So today I will try to install the 3 meter long steel pole to the outer wall of the house to get the dish high enough to get good signals. This means climbing a ladder, something usually done by my stunt-double. So if anything happens, my will is like this: Tom will receive my swyx-forum account and the rest goes to my familiy.
... Read More » |
By Tom Wellige on Freitag, 11. Januar 2008 23:03
A little bit late for a lazy friday afternoon in the office, but not too late for the next week 
Have you ever played "Rock Paper Scissors" (Schnick-Schnack-Schnuck) ?
Here you will find some professional hints to make sure you will become the champion in your office !
VideoJug: How To Win At Rock Paper Scissors
... Read More » |
By Tom Wellige on Mittwoch, 9. Januar 2008 09:27
What are we going to do once all existing silicon on the world is already used in our computers ? Well, one possible solution would be to go back to the good old vaccum tubes. This at least would give us the chance to build our computers by our own again instead of using all this highly integrated stuff. You don't believe it ? Check out this ! Ok, you're right, one would need silicon for the glass bulb of the vaccum tube as well... But the video is really amazing, isn't it ?
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By Tom Wellige on Dienstag, 8. Januar 2008 12:59
As Morten has moved into the norwegian wilderness (no phone, no dsl, no tv) it is up to me to post his fun-blogs every once in a while... Well, this is not a fun link but a very nice and informative one: the Sience Education Company. Here you will find lots of videos with simple but astonishing sience experiments like how to make an emergency glass from a leaf.
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