Martin's Blog

“The Story of the Ribbon”

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:36:14 GMT

Yesterday I posted something about the different perception of the Office 2007 user interface. A few months ago I stumbled about a presentation Jensen Harris from Microsoft gave at Mix’08 about how the Office 2007 “Ribbon” came to be. If you have 75 minutes and are interested why the ribbon is like it is, view it. Jensen’s blog entry has some additional links which are worth a look, too.

Paste

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:04:59 GMT

Yesterday evening a few colleagues and I went to a pub for some beer . We couldn’t completely keep our work out and for a few minutes had a discussion about the current Microsoft Office user interface. One colleague mentioned that he needed about an hour including reading the online help to find the function to paste something from the clipboard into Word as plain text, i.e. to get rid of the formatting. First I thought he was kidding me, but he was serious. If you start Word, the ribbon looks like this:

It’s not what it looks like

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 08:49:26 GMT

We all know that magazine covers or advertisements are retouched. This week’s issue of c’t has an article about the small ridge between photo enhancement and manipulation. It contained a link to this website:

www.glennferon.com

Glenn is a Photoshop genius. Look at the portfolio on his website. When you hover the mouse over an image you’ll see the original before retouching. I spent the last half hour clicking through his images and comparing original with the “enhanced” versions.

Diagnosing your PC

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 09:43:09 GMT

Why use expensive debuggers or anti-virus software. Diagnosing PC problems is so much easier:

Paris Hilton for President

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:32:33 GMT

It’s Friday, therefore something funny. In a TV spot presidential candidate John McCain states that Barack Obama is just a celebrity like Paris Hilton and not fit to lead. Paris Hilton responded:

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Have a nice weekend.

A building of bubbles

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:44:00 GMT

The Olympic swim centre in Beijing has been constructed with foam bubbles in mind.

The result is so strong, the engineers say, that the entire building could be turned on its side without collapsing. Furthermore, the remarkable effect is that they’ve designed a building without triangles.

Spectacular.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/34283/description/A_building_of_bubbles

August 8th

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:36:02 GMT

Morton wrote two blog entries related to the 8th of August. Most 08.08 related posts today will probably be about the Olympics in Beijing. I won’t talk about that. Here are two notable examples what happened on August 8 in the past:

In 1952 Jostein Gaarder was born. He’s well-known for Sophie’s World, A Novel about the History of Philosophy.

In 1902 Paul Dirac was born. He was not only a famous theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1933 together with Erwin Schrödinger, but he also held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. That’s the world’s most prestigious professorship. Sir Isaac Newton hold the chair from 1669 to 1702. Since 1980 the holder is Stephen Hawking.

“We Feed The World”

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:51:41 GMT

Heute abend (5.8.) läuft im Ersten ein Dokumentarfilm, den ich 2005 im Kino gesehen habe und dessen Bilder ich auch heute noch erinnere:

We Feed The World

Dangerous Country?

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:28:05 GMT

I’m wondering when the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) will issue a travel warning for the United States. It seems to be necessary. You may not only loose all your electronic devices, but you may end up in jail without charges or legal recourse.

Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.

(Link found here).

Black Hat, No Apple

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:13:14 GMT

On this year’s Black Hat security conference a public discussion was planned with Apple’s security engineering team. Apple is been criticized by the security community for their secrecy. What a great opportunity would that have been to show how they take security seriously. But that discussion will not take place.

It’s done

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 14:52:47 GMT

Finally. I completed my income tax return. Theoretically it’s possible to do that online without any paper involved. Earlier that year I requested a software certificate for that.

Don’t bring your laptop…

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:55:47 GMT

… or use proper encryption when you visit the United States. Reason: The U.S. government can take it at the border, whenever they want, keep it as long they want and share the information with anyone they want.

Last album

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:46:07 GMT

Next month E.S.T’s last album Leucocyte will be released. I’ve already ordered it, of course

They finished it a few days before the tragic accident. Release had been stopped by the two remaining band members. But today I got an email newsletter confirming the upcoming worldwide release to be September 1st. Amazon.de says it will be August 29th.

Their studio albums are great, but cannot compare with their live performances. Fortunately there’s a double album from last year capturing one of their best concerts.

Auto-Update

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:32:34 GMT

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.

Hearsay

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:09:27 GMT

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.

Uncertainty

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:43:10 GMT

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 tell. It doesn’t frighten me.

Have a nice day. I will, because I’m on vacation

Is it real?

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:27:12 GMT

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.

Some rain today

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:46:19 GMT

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.

Keyboard

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:06:10 GMT

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.

It has a disadvantage, though: I sometimes start unwanted programs when I accidentally try the same on Windows XP

Simon’s Cat

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:04:14 GMT

It’s Friday, therefore something funny :-)

There’s more of him here

Unbelievable

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:40:56 GMT

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

He might thought different when his name was Peter Müller.

Web-TV only with License

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:06:41 GMT

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.

Cut

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:51:35 GMT

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.

Stolen Cracker

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 06:42:10 GMT

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?

Swyx Trace Tool Upload with HTTPS

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:37:08 GMT

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.