I have a problem with auto-updaters. They usually install a service or sit as “innocent” icon in the taskbar notification area. That’s a waste of my computer’s resources while they could do better, e.g. using scheduled tasks or checking only when the application runs. Plus it’s not easy to secure such a mechanism so that only your application can be updated and nobody can misuse it, e.g. to install malware.

We have no auto-update for SwyxIt! yet. We probably will do it, but it won’t be a service or another background task.

A lot of people including some of my colleagues think Vista = Crap. Most of them never tried it and just repeat hearsay. Microsoft did an experiment and asked about a hundred people about their opinion about Windows Vista and how they would grade it. They showed them a future Windows version “Mojave”. Most of them gave better grades.

Where’s the point? There is no Mojave. They had been shown Windows Vista. Here’s the website about it: http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

It’s a Microsoft marketing campaign, of course. You have to take it with a grain of salt. But I think there is some truth to it. My own experience is that Windows Vista is is far from perfect, but it’s much better than its reputation.

I hope Tom will forgive me one day, but this was to good to leave out.

Tom posted a link to an interview Richard Feynman gave the BBC in 1981. I especially like this statement of Feynman about living with doubt:

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I thinks it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean.

I might think about it a little bit and if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious Universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can...

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Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers of the 20th century. He rebuilt the theory of quantum electrodynamicsm, and it was for this work that he won the Nobel Prize in 1965.

A lot of photos in magazines and ads are manipulated aka “photoshopped” nowadays to look “better”, to remove unwanted parts, etc. Today I found a great weblog called PhotoShop Disasters showing a lot of more or less obvious examples. Go, take a look.

We had some rain today. Ok, “some” is an understatement. The weather station at the University which is about a kilometre from here measured about 200l rain in 3 hours. The parking garage where I have my car and bike had about 15 to 20cm water.

Morton wrote about Launchy today, a small program to find and start programs fast. It offers similar functionality as one of my favourite Windows Vista features: the Start menu. Just hit the Windows Key. Start menu pops up, cursor is in the search box and you can start typing. If I enter “Windows Key s w y x” I get:













I use that feature all the time. It’s much faster than using the mouse and it finds not only start menu entries, but everything else on my system and in my Outlook mailbox.

...

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After moving the MAC to the Intel platform, Apple has really put some substance to the marketing slogan "5 down, 95 to go" referring to its percentage share of the computer business. In U.S.A Apple is now close to a 10% percent market share.

A year ago Apple shipped 6,4 % off all units sold the states. Numbers for Q2 shows that this number now is 8,5 %, an increase of 38%.

In the rest of the world the market share is 3,3 %.

It will be really interesting to see how the OS battle on the desktop will evolve. At least there is no longer just a Windows/Linux battle, you have to put some Apples in the basket as well.

I have been using a small utility for a couple of months now. It does only one thing, but it does it great and it put credit to the 'Keep it simple' phrase.

I mentioned it more than once here that I am a great fan of Jim Henson's The Muppet Show. I think we all grew up with this fantastic and phenomenal show and Kermit & Co burned them self into our hearts. It is outstanding what one (or many) can do out of some puppets and great talent and inspiration.

I told you already that I love the Muppet Show. Today I have some more brilliant snippets on YouTube for you: Statler & Waldorf

It’s Friday, therefore something funny :-)

There’s more of him here

This evening seem to be about ridiculous and unbelievable things. This German blog has a story about getting your boarding pass when flying with Air Berlin.

You check-in yourself with your passport at a computer kiosk at the airport. That’s not unusual. But the unbelievable thing with Air Berlin is that their system reads your surname and the first three digits of your first name form your passport and lists all matching boarding passes for you to choose and print. Air Berlin spokesman Peter Hauptvogel does not see a problem. When asked about, he asked back for a possible scenario where this could be a risk ...

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You know Bavaria, a German state, sometimes seen as as foreign country from other Germans, because they talk funny and have strange habits? They have a new law requiring anybody to get a license if they offer a live video stream via Internet, if this stream can be seen by more than 500 users at the same time. (found here, Sorry, German language).

That’s ridiculous, but controlling everything is very popular in Germany and gets still get worse every year.

A few days ago “Hulk” with Edward Norton as the green monster had premiere here in Germany. It’s not a film I must  see, but it could be fun for a rainy evening with nothing better to do. But this time it’s probably not a good idea to spend money on it. To get it released for ages 12 and older, the film was heavily cut. (Here’s a link to a German language article about the cutting)

Why bother going to the Cinema, spending money on overpriced popcorn and beverages to see a movie with considerable parts missing? The funny thing is that the reason for cutting was to get more viewers than with a 16+ classification.

Fortunately there are some cinemas fearing the same and therefore showing the 12+ version during the day and the 16+ version on evenings.

I know, we Germans are known as having the worst bureaucracy in the world. And I tell you what: it's true !

These days public opinion often associates Muslims with fundamentalists. That’s a wrong generalization, of course. Irrational, brain-less people can be found anywhere. Here’s the newest example. This time from believers of another kind of myth.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/its_a_goddamned_cracker.php#more

Although it seems to be a satire it’s real. PZ Myers even gets death threats just because he made fun of a stolen cracker. How crazy are those people?

...

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Microsoft has announced that from November, 1st 2008 it will no longer be possible to license Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.

It has been so long since I last wrote a blog article that I nearly did not find Live Writer. The reasons for this are many, but mostly because I had nothing to write about.

I know, it's not Friday yet. But this one can't wait !

We recently added an official SSL certificate to our trace tool upload server bits.swyx.com. Unfortunately it was too late for v6.12. We released the first Trace Tool version configured with HTTP URLs only. All QA tests had been completed and we couldn’t redo them using HTTPS before the release. But you can easily configure Trace Tool by yourself to use HTTPS.

This one is not a new feature but a bug fix. SwyxWare trunks use profiles to adapt to specific SIP provider or ISDN lines. The predefined profiles can be adapted by adding your own special number replacement rules:



These rules always work from the beginning of a number,e.g.

+* –> 00*

changes numbers like +4923147770, which SwyxWare uses internally, to 004923147770.

Before v6.12 a rule like

* –> 123456

did not manipulate an empty number string. That is no big deal most of the time, because as soon as one digit is present, the rule is applied. But there’s at least one scenario where this...

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I’m currently writing some PowerShell scripts to automate parts of our build process. PowerShell has a feature called “strict mode” which is similar to “option explicit” in VBScript. It’s enabled with

Set-PSDebug -strict

It ensures that you cannot use a variable without having assigned a value before. That’s a good idea in theory, but currently it has some drawbacks which limits its use