Welcome to zerokspot.com, the personal website of Horst Gutmann.

Archive for 2008/11

  • Bye bye Twitterstats.at

    Seit ein paar Monaten habe ich nun Statistiken zu österreichischen Twitter-Benutzern gesammelt, um daraus einfache Rankings zu bauen. Leider musste ich das Ganze auf einem Server betreiben, der ohnehin schon arg am Limit läuft (weil ich derzeit einfach kein Geld habe, da mehr RAM reinzukaufen). Das zweite Problem war, dass ich überhaupt keine Zeit hatte, das Ding zu warten, folglich habe ich nicht wirklich mitbekommen habe, wenn Twitter mal wieder Mucken gemacht hat und der Dienst folglich wieder keine Updates beziehen konnte.

    Zum aktuellen Zeitpunkt gibt es jedoch bereits jede Menge Alternativen wie zum Beispiel twittercharts.at von MountainGrafix, weshalb ich mich dazu entschlossen habe, meinen Dienst derzeit einzustellen. Die meisten dieser Dienste werden (soweit ich das sehen kann) händisch gewartet, während meiner versucht hat, automatisch österreichische Twitterer über die öffentliche Zeitlinie zu finden. Naja, vielleicht kommt mein Dienst ja auch irgendwann wieder. Ne Daseinsberechtigung sehe ich da allemal, da er deutlich mehr Statistiken bietet als zum aktuellen Zeitpunkt twittercharts.at, jedoch ohne aktive Betreuung (ich brauche echt mehr Zeit) bringt das alles nichts.

    Sorry, dass das relativ abrupt kommt, aber da der Dienst nicht wirklich einen aktiven Dienst bereitstellt (ich schiele hier auf dich, Stikkit), sollte diese Abschaltung hoffentlich nicht allzu tragisch sein :-) Ansonsten, einfach eine e-mail an ich :-)

    2008/11/29 at 10:50:45

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  • Finally FireGPG

    GnuPG is a great thing if you have some mails or data that should be shared confidentially and I used to love Enigmail back when I was still using Thunderbird for all my emailing. But since I've moved exclusively to GMail some months ago, I only rarely used GnuPG anymore since it wasn't as convenient anymore.

    Then I found FireGPG, an extension for Firefox that helps you sign, encrypt and decrypt text right from your web-browser and even comes with explicit support for the GMail web-frontend. Sadly, for some reason I could never get it to work. It never could find my gpg commandline client even if I told it its exact location. And from what I can tell, I seem not to be the only one with this problem. Seems like I always missed the whole "Mac not support" notice, but luckily I gave it a try again today and since FireGPG now supports Intel Macs since version 0.6.2, it finally seems to work :D

    There still seems to be a small problem with GnuPG recognizing encrypted messages in GMail, but nothing all that serious.

    2008/11/29 at 00:21:07

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  • Bye bye Stikkit

    Back in January 2007 I was totally impressed by Stikkit. It offered a clean and to me very intuitive way to manage notes and my schedule. But it seems like most of my complaints from back then are still valid now. For example "Thinking" is still limited to English strings and there is no localization at all besides the timezone setting.

    Well, this is all mute now, since Value of n will be closing doors on December 8th. This means, that Stikkit as well as I Want Sandy will be shut down. While I would like to say that this was unexpected, I honestly thought they had left the stage some time ago. Only marginal updates on the blog not all that much going on with Stikkit after building I Want Sandy from what I can see.

    Also, I wholeheartedly agree with some of the more critical comments on the above blog post: It's first of all quite a short notice for closing down a service, in my opinion; and this is definitely a warning sign for people relying too much on Web2.0-services to manage their work and life. At least they give you the option to export your data using for example iCal for events and an Atom-feed for your stikkits.

    2008/11/25 at 10:26:24

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  • My Social Software Graph

    It's been quite some time since I participated in the last meme, but the whole social software graph idea was just to tempting. The graph as you see it represents the connection between all the social services I'm using right now. The arrow means "references". Sorry for the mess, but that's the story of my internet-life ;-)

    Social software graph

    Big thanks to Arthur for pointing me to NodeBox. This is a really amazing tool.

    2008/11/23 at 21:57:38

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  • GMail's new look ... meh

    Now this was weird. When I first heard about GMail getting some official alternative themes, I thought: "Great, I'm growing tired of its look anyway right now". In the past I've sometimes used Globalxdesign's "GMail Redesigned" to dive through such occasions.

    New Desk theme for GMail

    But then I tried those themes Google provided in the first round (I can only assume that this is just the beginning) and somehow came away a bit disappointed. None of them looked as great as GR and actually most of them for my taste suffered under some low contrast. Also, styles like "Planets" and "Ninjas" while being funny are IMO kind of pointless and should really be left to community to provide. In the end, the only theme I really like is the new default one, although it took a couple of days getting used to it, and up to some degree "Shiny" and "Desk". The ugliest ones, in my opinion, are "Beach" and "Mountain".

    Perhaps I'm a little bit picky, but I hoped for more. Definitely something at the same level as GR would have been great. What's your favorite? Btw.: Mashable today had a nice write-up of some of the community themes out there :-)

    2008/11/22 at 22:20:21

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  • State of the German Django documentation (IMO)

    OK, first of all: The German translation of the Django documentation is not dead. While the start late last year saw some great results, the whole movement got a little slowed down over the time and right now it's still just proceeding on a more slow way right now. When the last major refactor in upstream took place (some time before PyConUK 2008) I started looking through it and it became quite clear, that it would be quite hard to save some of our work from before. The structure and most of the content was just too different to save even a single document completely. So I started building a little bit of the foundation (style-port, main menu, etc.) during my train-trip back home.

    Read more about "State of the German Django documentation (IMO)" ...

    2008/11/20 at 23:37:17

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  • Monty Python officially on YouTube

    "For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube" but now Monty Python strike back and come after you ... with high quality versions of their greatest clips. A couple of days ago, Monty Python opened their own channel on YouTube with a short clip explaining what they want in return from you: "click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years."

    [via medienrauschen.de]

    2008/11/19 at 22:59:04

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  • First real Star Trek XI-trailer

    Seems like the first real trailer for Star Trek XI is out. Gizmodo has a link to a bootlegged version that seems to have been shown in the pre-program of the latest 007 movie. And honestly? This is the first trailer (or anything in general) that makes me want to watch this movie. I'm still not sure, how much confusion this will cause in the timeline, but at least it seems to be quite action-focused. Judging from the trailer, though, it will be quite hard to sell this as a real Star Trek movie.

    2008/11/15 at 13:01:33

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  • Want to convert me to Dojo?

    Since I first heard about jQuery back when the discussion started if it should integrated into Drupal's core distribution, I've been using it on nearly every website I've been working on since then. At the recent Barcamp in Munich Wolfram Kriesing presented some of the features the Dojo toolkit has to offer that might make me a switcher. I still like jQuery quite a lot, but I simply wanted to take a look at some of Dojo's features and found a couple of them that I really enjoy using on a project right now :-)

    Read more about "Want to convert me to Dojo?" ...

    2008/11/08 at 20:57:14

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  • Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru

    The adventures of the crew of the NX-01 continue with Kobayahi Maru) as the first novell set after the final episode of the TV-show. Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin tell the story of Archer trying to proof for Romulan attacks on Coalition Freighters, Trip still playing spy-games and T'Pol and Reed going totally nuts. But is it worth all the madness?

    Read more about "Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru" ...

    2008/11/02 at 22:30:02

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