Most recent blog entries

From Ian's posting in the forum you might have noticed that Morten and I do not have many hairs populating our fabulous heads. Clearly speaking: we are getting bald !

But we are in good company. Many great men have been or still are bald as well. One of my favourite actors is bald as well, so lets listen to what he is saying about baldness (and he is also able to talk about it in the 24th century):

Patrick Stewart on "Baldness"

The Swyx Forum Team, that is me (Tom) and Morten wishes all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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Remember ? The other day I linked two videos here in my blog that could lead to the conclusion that education is not one of the strongest attributes of the US. The first video showed a blond girl in a TV show assuming that Europe is a country. The second video showed a guy playing around with statistics on how clever americans are (or not). Well, especially the last one could have been biased as it was just the voice of one strange guy.

So, is it true what he said ? Are americans dumb as hell ?

Americans are NOT stupid

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100% ...

This is a strictly mathematical viewpoint... it goes like this:

What makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wondered about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here'sa little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

then

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K

8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E< ... Read More »

(Sorry, the following is in german language available only!)

Die Kinderhilfe Afghanistan, welche durch Teile der bisher eingenommenen Sponsoren Gelder durch Swyx Forum unterstützt wird, hat eine Zusammenfassung ihrer Aktivitäten im Jahr 2007 zur Verfügung gestellt:

Jahresrundbrief der Kinderhilfe Afghanistan

... you find this on your desk in the morning: 

Some kind of ignorance of knowledge can't be related to certain countries of the word, allthough it most definately looks like...

But listening to youngsters in a bus or underground (in the USA, in Germany, in the UK, in France, ...) really get's you scared of the upcoming generation and what they will be with the world ! Stupidity is not related to a certain country but is a result of the way we are living today, of the mass media, the gaming industry, MTV, or what ever.

The following is a really nice example. Maybe there are some relations between "not knowing" (not to say "stupidity") and the color of the hair ... 

While reading myself through a couple of articles on the most hip CMS systems I found a very usefull site which compares all currently availalbe systems in a matrix.

This site is maybe also of interest for you, so here is the link:

• The CMS Matrix

(BTW: Swyx Forum uses DotNetNuke as CMS)

Some time ago the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has started to release their lectures/courses to the public as so called OpenCourseWare. The idea behind is to open up the world of today's knowledge to everyone.

There are more than 1800 course available online, many of them translated into other languages or even available as audio/video presentations.

The content of the courses touch a huge variety of topics from Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Health Sciences and Technology, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Management and Science (Biology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemistry, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Mathematics Physics).

The MIT has also just laucnhed a program to deliver special courses for high school pupils.

If you are interested in any of the above mentioned topics it is worth a look !

... Read More »
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After my vacation is over and my evenings and weekends are fully booked my hoster finished setting up the root server for Swyx Forum. Setting up DotNetNuke (incl. database) is up to me, but this will take some time now

Actually there was a reason why I ordered the server one week before my two-weeks vacation...

Anyway, there is a light at the end of the tunnel now

Yesterday I found myself in a time machine boosting me back in time into the year 1991. It was the year where I had to do my 12 month military service at the german navy. I was sonar operator on a so called mine hunter. We searched see mines (ground mines) by using sonar and then used a small remote controlled submarine to dop a bomb directly beside the mine to simply destroy it.

In 1990 Sadam Hussein invaded Kuwait and dropped hundreds of mines into the persian gulf as a barrier to make sure no military vessel or oil tanker was able to approach Kuwait.

A number of NATO countries as also germany sent their mine seachers / hunters down into the gulf to get rid of these mines. During this time I was stationed on the MHC Koblenz (M1 ... Read More »

Randall has just started his new project Swyx WebCDR.

It is a web based CDR (Call Detail Record) tool. Please take a look onto the project pages for more details.

The current version is written in PHP (Apache Webserver) but we are also looking to provide an ASP (Microsoft IIS Webserver) version. So, if your are willing to help on this, feel free to join the team !

Ok, Morten has promised that I will write about my norwegian experiances, so here they are. At least in terms of "having a traditional norwegian dinner".

Friday night we went out to a quite nice fish restaurant in the newly build shopping and restaurant area Aker Brygge in down town Oslo, directly at the harbour. The name of the restaurant was "Lofoten" which clearly indicated that we were not going to get some nice english style steak (if you don't know about the Lofoten you should read about them here).

As I already promised weeks before to give taditional food a try the waiter didn't provided me with a menu. In fact most of us (we were nine people at all) skipped the part with the menu, except Morten and his wife, the other ... Read More »

The weekend is close and therefore it's time for something to smile about

Being David Copperfield isn't that difficult as it seems. Everyone can do such magic things. You, me, eveyone !!!

See for yourself !

Over the last two weeks the down times of Swyx Forum have increased as you might have noticed. Unfortunately it always takes some time to get it up and running again as I do not have direct remote access to the machine to restart the webserver by my own but instead need to ask my hoster to do so.

The reason for these downtimes is, that the web framework Swyx Forum is using (DotNetNuke) is somewhat unstable in virtual environments, which is in fact a problem of asp.net, the web layer of Windows itself. After updating to the new forum version the downtimes have increased dramatically. Obviously this version touches unstable functions of DotNetNuke / asp.net more often than the old one.

But, good new is, HELP IS ON THE WAY !

Swyx Forum will definately move to it's own server machine which brings two major advantages:

• more stable environment
• direct remote ... Read More »
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Usually the following chain reaction is not possible in online stores, but you never know...

http://producten.hema.nl

"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!"

That's the title of a set of books, written by Richard P. Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of our century. Not only was he brilliant in his profession, theoretical physics (which won him the nobel prize), he was also a remarkable lecturer, story teller and finally also bongo player. He died in 1988.

His lectures where crowded with students, everyone wanted to learn from him. He had the ability to explain the most complex relations in simple words giving even "outsiders" of physics a chance to understand what's going on.

His "Feynman Lectures on Physics"  (three volume books on the basics on physics) are still the most popular books for students.

Last year I was happy finding an Read More »

Snowball is a medium sulphur crested Eleanora cockatoo and he loves to dance and sing.

He loves the Back Street Boys. No one taught Snowball to dance... he just heard this song and suddenly felt like dancing. When he's really in the mood, he dances and sings.

And at the end of the performance he takes a bow or two or twenty !!

But see for yourself:

http://birdloversonly.blogspot.com/2007/09/may-i-have-this-dance.html

After Sebastian started his new project Swyx IM on his own pages, the Swyx Forum project pages are availalbe now as well.

Swyx Forum provides community services for the project, mainly the forums. For