Meine Gedankenhalde // My Braindump

I just retired my old desktop pc and decided to use the free monitor to do “dual monitoring” with my laptop (again).

While it’s really nice how you can arrange and use the second monitor, it’s not as good as I’d like it to be. ;-)

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the choice to use the same functionality like workspaces offer with the second monitor?

Currently you can clone the desktop (which is only useful when you close the laptop and just work on the 2nd monitor or you want to use a beamer or you use the xinerama functioality to expand the virtual screen size. This leads to several problems when both monitors are not build for the same screen resolution.

So, what do I mean by “using the 2nd monitor with workspace functionality”? (BTW: I’m speaking for Ubuntu-Gnome UI here, different windowmanagers would look different of course)

What I’d like to have is something like this:

• independent screen resolution setting without effect on the other screen
• second monitor gets (if wished) his own top “start menu”
• second monitor get’s his own workspace configuration
• the workspaces on the first monitor don’t appear on the second monitor and vice versa (although it would be nice to be able to “send” workspace A to monitor C)
• possibility to move programs from one screen to next in the same way as you move it to different workspaces

You can think of some more things you might like for this. So I’d like the second monitor to be a “first class citizen”. I think that this would be a great addition to current XServers/window managers (not sure if current X would support this without changes).

Important is that it’s not an independent X session on the second monitor. You need to have the chance to move programs between the two monitors, the rest should be fairly isolated from the other monitors.

So if anybody knows how to setup something like this or just thinks that this is a good idea, please add a short comment.

As we all should know by now, VCSs (version control systems) are pretty useful. Not only that you can use it to share and edit files with a group of people, you also have a history which lets you follow changes to your files.

For this you need to commit to the repository. For each commit you should add a short description of what you did, so you can find the apropriate changesets later or maybe generate a history more or less automatically.

One thing I see from time to time are log entries like:

• -
• (nothing)
• $Task_he_is_working_on
• changes
• update
• Bugfix

And many more comments that tell you nothing or almost nothing what changed in this commit.

Arguments like “It hasn’t really changed something” are nonsense. Consider you have not really changed something, why are you committing it? So there is always something that change, so just write it down.

Examples of much better comments:

• capitalization change of xyz
• formatted code
• added first part of $Task_he_is_working_on, now you can save data
• refactored code, switched from x to y
• Fixed bug #1234 (needed to check for null value)
• …

These are of course not the best possible comments but they would help a lot if they would be used instead of an empty comment or “update”.

So I beg to all of you developers out there, when you commit something please write something useful what you did. If you don’t have to say something about the stuff you are committing you should consider to not commit it because it seems to be not useful at all.

Recently suspicious usernames appeared in my new user folder. Now I had the time to delete them. If I have deleted your account and you are not a bot or spammer, I apologise. Please register again and tell me as comment to this blog post.

As I am switching jobs to a job much closer to where I live I’m sure that I’ll have more time to write blog entries more often again.

Stay tuned, I have some interesting IT posts in the pipeline.

Dell ist sehr kreativ in seiner Produktgestaltung. Das zeigt auch die neueste Version des Netbooks Inspiron Mini 9. Es kostet 50€ weniger als die Version mit Windows, das ist nicht verwunderlich, da ja zwischen 50 und 80€ Lizenzkosten wegfallen. (Zumindest gehen die Konkurrenten um diesen Betrag vom Preis runter, wenn man keine MS Lizenz haben will). Interessant ist dann aber die Tatsache, daß gleichzeitig die Kamera mur 0.3 Megapixel hat, statt 1.3 und die Solid State Disk nur halb so groß ist. Mit anderen Worten, alleine die Hardwareänderungen dürften für den 50€ Abschlag verantwortlich sein. Ich hoffe das Ding wird ein Ladenhüter. Dell scheint die Kunden ja doch für selten dämlich zu halten…

heise online – 28.09.08 – Dell-Netbook mit Linux.

Da sieht man wieder wohin religiöser Fanatismus führt… Nur weil es doch glatt Menschen gibt, die nicht blind dem glauben was im Koran steht, werden etliche Webseiten gesperrt. Mir ist das persönlich ja relativ Schnuppe, wenn die türkische Bevölkerung das gut findet. Ich an deren Stelle würde da vielleicht doch mal nachfragen, wie es denn mit der angeblichen Trennung von Religion und Staat in der Türkei bestimmt ist. Sollte die legislative keine Entscheidungen zu gunsten einer Religion fällen dürfen, dann erscheinen mir die letzten Urteile in dem Bereich doch arg fragwürdig. Interessant, daß diese religiösen Fanatiker immer die Menschen vor anderen Meinungen beschützen müssen. Sie scheinen wohl Angst zu haben, daß manche Menschen anfangen könnten zu denken. Das ist in totalitären und fanatischen Umgebungen ja nicht so gerne gesehen…

heise online – 19.09.08 – Türkisches Gericht blockiert Zugang zur Webseite von Richard Dawkins.

Schon komisch, was mit Leuten passiert, wenn sie zuviel Marktmacht haben. Das so etwas auch bei OpenSource Projekten passieren kann sieht man an den jüngsten Forderungen der Mozilla Corporation. Debian hat ja schon reagiert und seine Firefox/Thunderbird Pakete umbenannt, um dem Markenrechtsstreit mit der Mozilla Crop. aus dem Weg zu gehen. Ich hoffe Ubuntu wird ähnlich reagieren, nur um dem Mozilla Vorstand mal zu zeigen, daß man es sich vielleicht doch nicht mit den Multiplikatoren für das eigene Produkt verscherzen sollte. Sonst ist Firefox bald Geschichte und wird einfach durch Webkit basierende Browser ersetzt. Der Ottonormaluser kriegt das eh nicht mit…

Ubuntu muss Firefox-Lizenz anzeigen – Golem.de.

Scientology scheint wirklich verzweifelt zu sein. Jetzt mischen die sich schon mit Hakenkreuzen usw. unter die Demonstranten um das dann später in ihrer Propaganda zu verwenden. (So die aktuelle Theorie)

Das erinnert mich irgendwie an China. Irgendwie scheint da wohl eine ähnliche Denkweise in Diktaturen und Scientology zu geben. Was kein Wunder ist wenn man sich die “glorreichen” Aktionen von Scientology ansieht. Das wäre doch mal ein Aktivitätsfeld für Bush, dann müssen seine Soldaten auch nicht so weit fahren. ;-)

heise online – 15.09.08 – Anonymous vs. Scientology: Unterwanderungsversuche.

Microblogging is “en vogue” now. Twitter started to attract many many users and has a big variety in tools around it. But twitter suffers from the exponential growth. Whale sightings (site outages are displayed as a whale on the site) are a common problem and features get disabled like the jabber interface.

So the people from identi.ca started a distributed microblogging software that works without the monolithic approach. They called their software laconica: Laconica – Trac.

The advantage is that it’s fast, you can deploy it on your server if you like. And the most important feature is that you can “subscribe” to message feeds from microbloggers from other servers. This makes it possible that the growth of one server will not affect other servers.

The disadvantage is the poor tool support for it, but I hope it will be solved in the next time. Shouldn’t be a big problem to add laconica support to existing twitter tools.

Interestingly identi.ca went a really open path. They created a microblogging standard that defines an interface that you can use if you write your own microblogging server. This leads to an openness that may be the key factor in the success for this microblogging standard. Let’s see how long twitter can ignore the standard… :-)

There is also a new competitor to the microblogging stage: http://openmicroblogger.org/
It implements the microblogging standard and is able to connect his users to laconica users and vice versa. I have not tried it, but I really like the way this is evolving.

The current two players in the field are based on PHP, I’m curious when other programming languages are used. I’d be interested in a java version, just to see how it scales compared to the PHP competitors.

Hopefully laconica is able to get a two way twitter gateway working, this would be great.

So, additionally to the “not development related” podcasts, I’d like to present my podcast list that deals with my favourite topic: Software development

OnSoftware (Video + Audio)
http://www.informit.com/podcasts/index_rss.aspx?c=7
OnSoftware is one channel of InformIT. The casts are audio and video and deal with topics from Refactoring to trends in software development. I like the interviews with important persons in the software industry, for example Joshua Bloch that give you a pretty good insight why certain things are done in this way and not in another way in Java. This is my second favourite channel. (~5-30 min.)

Parleys.com
http://parleys.libsyn.com/rss
Parleys is pretty new in my channel list. It consists of many audio casts. They also have many video casts but they are only available via their website, because the use a system that has 2 video streams for talks, one for the speaker and one for the projector. This simply doesn’t work very well with plain podcast rss feeds. (~ 5-20 min.)

IT Conversations
http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itc
The guys from IT Conversations are producing several audio podcasts. Some are interviews and some are called StackOverFlow where they talk about the website-project and they answer questions from users regarding software development. (~15-50 min.)

YouTube :: Videos by googletechtalks
http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/googletechtalks/videos.rss
The google techtalk channel offers really nice talks that deal with software development and some “normal” technology topics. There are for example talks about eclipse features where one of the developers talks about his project. This is my personal no. 1 channel. (~45-60 min)

UI and us (Added 11. Sep. 08)
http://uiandus.libsyn.com/rss
Userinterface design related casts. Pretty new feed. We’ll have to see if it’s really a good cast.

SE-Radio.net (Added 23. Sept. 08)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/se-radio
Software engineering (audio) podcasts. Audio quality seems to be much better than the parleys quality. Also the most guys come from germany, so I can understand their accent much better than the parleys guys accent, which seem to be located in belgium. The casts consist of interviews with certain qualified people about SOA, Agile development, patterns etc. As far as I have heard some of the casts, they are really interesting. Definitively worth a try!

PM-Podcast (Added 17. Oct. 2007)
http://podcast.mikrotechnik.net/?feed=podcast
German Audio-Podcast that deals with project management. (Starting to catch up on this feed now)

Sun Media Channel
Sun Microsystems, Inc: Software|java
http://public-xml.feedroom.com/public_rss/sun_podcast_rss.xml?channel_id=409f35f1c68aa6d511c3d1ba644822596d3a7245&format=video
Sun Microsystems, Inc: Developers|developer Tv
http://public-xml.feedroom.com/public_rss/sun_podcast_rss.xml?channel_id=34dee3766f3569ced1fbbfe72c53180c49b5f061&format=video
Sun Microsystems, Inc: Featured Media
http://public-xml.feedroom.com/public_rss/sun_podcast_rss.xml?channel_id=afb2d17c6a2a7468d873c001d3fd228d7bb587ee&format=video
Sun Microsystems, Inc: Inside Soa Tv
http://public-xml.feedroom.com/public_rss/sun_podcast_rss.xml?channel_id=f6f1c01180760c0781c85cf9ce6cdf5f3f0e0403&format=video
Sun Microsystems, Inc: Announcements/events|javaone 2008
http://public-xml.feedroom.com/public_rss/sun_podcast_rss.xml?channel_id=016d81e8b2e024d120bc932213dff5450d787f47&format=video
The Sun Channels are obviously all centred around java. There are a lot of channels available. These are only a small part of it. The interesting stuff is for me for example the JavaOne channel, where you can watch a lot of the talks from javaOne 2008 and 2007(which has it’s own channel). Also there are a lot of small casts that are useful to get an overview about the technologies that evolve around java. You should not expect a “howto build a XAZ application” here. The feeds that I am checking have not changed in the last months, so this can be considered as “not very active”. ;-) (~5-50 min)

These are my favourite podcasts. You can add them all for example to Miro, and watch/hear them there. Do you know any development podcasts that you like? Post them in the comments and I’ll add them here.

I’d like to present my favourite podcasts (audio+video), because many people still got no grip at the whole podcast stuff, so maybe the like some of the casts I view/hear. I am splitting the list in two blogposts, because I’d like to handle the development related casts in a seperate posting.

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