56k@vicious

Es ist mal wieder so weit - und obwohl weder auf der auf der Website der Gallerie noch beim Künstler selbst zu lesen, wird es so sein:

56k zeigt seine Werke - ab 25.10. in der vicious gallery. Man darf gespannt sein - brauch aber wohl erfahrungsgemäß nicht mit Enttäuschungen zu rechnen.

Ubucon

So, even though I thought it will not really work well, I survived my Ubucon talk today :)

I couldn't finish my slides in a new presentation style ( I finally realized, my good old lates beamer style is jsut way too odd, and reading abpout the topic, I tried to get the FAI topic explained in a more Takahashi / Lessig Method style. But starting with that just yesterday afternoon, and also having an hour of Demo to prepare just didn't work out.

I'll try it for my next talk ( "State of open Source Virtualization Tools" at Heinlein SLAC conference) - promised!

Meanwhile, I'm still looking for a good tool to use for this. I'm not content with the handling of OO Impress - but the lessig/Takahashi style will not be possible to achieve with Beamer and a Text editor...

Things I might try:

• Making the Beamer slides with Lyx
• Looking at this(hmm, I cannot even view the demo slides in firefox, and in opera I see the first page, but not laoding anything more) - or S5 in general, but it seems background images are missing there - in general, this seems similar to using pandoc with S5
  
• With a tool in java, I could enhance it my way - just it's not sure if it's a serious project
  
• Checking out magicpoint again
  
• I maybe should try to make apresentation on a mac once, using keynote
• Multitalk also looks interesting - nice concept, interesting features - is stable and easy to use?
  

Surely, the tool I'm lookin for must be open source.
I'm not sure if I like it text-based or rather graphical. With text based tools, I dislike that it's not easily possible to position text and elements wysiwig, gui tools tend to do things that I don't want and cannot always influence.
I dislike Latex more and more, because it has ugly error reporting and checking - sometimes I need an hour just to find out _where_ an actual error is happening...
Text or GUI based - I want a possibility to add my own, totally internal comments for nobody to see, and I want to turn on and off optional slides depending on time, viewer, etc. In Impress it seems, I cannot have private comments (only the handout stuff), and even hiding slides only works for presenting in OOImpress, not for the pdf output.

An article containing some hints on the topic is here.

Red Hat acquires Qumranet - the KVM developers

Bad News for Xen: Qumranet, Developers of the KVM Kernel Virtual Machine, are being bought by RedHat.

Even though Redhat claims to support the Xen version in RHEL5 until 2014 - it seems obvious that with such a step, they won't be putting too much energy in Xen-based solutions, and have much more trust in the KVM technology.

Having worked with Xen since 3.x version where useable, and having written a book about it, I'm not really surprised about this - it was way too long time that there wasn't an up to date Kernel ready to work in Xen dom0's - domU support was also lacking quite sme time.

So, when KVM came along - obviously so nicely written, that it was adopted into vanilla kernel in a rush - it was to be expected that Xen would probably not stay the only real open source virtualization tool to fight for market shares from VMWare.

It seems, an interesting race is going on - and with a major adoption of KVM on Redhat Systems, Xen seems to lose quite some ground...

E-Kondulenz - irgendwo hört's doch auch mal auf, oder?

Schon ein bisschen seltsam, was die Online-Isierung des Lebens für Auswüchse trägt! Nun kann man auch Bestattungen und Kondulenzen bequem online erledigen: http://www.e-bestattungen.de/
Gedenkseiten für einmalig 279 Euro - inlusive Fotos, Videos, E-Cards und allem, was man so braucht. Mit Werbung für's Bestattungsunternehmen wird's ein bisschen billiger...

Presentation tools and formats, google docs and forms

Today, my search for a good presentation toolkit(on the way t prepare my talk about FAI at ubucon) let me stumble around thinks like Pandoc, S5, and miroformats.org
And let me finally discover the Opengoo project - which looks very promising - apart from being written in PHP, which I somehow dislike, even though being my first programming language and admittedly powerful and simple - I just saw too much crap code written in it.

It claims to be a gerat online/web desktop - similar to the thing the exo platform wants to offer as WebOS. and the thing that might be available one day as Liferay Social Office.
Anyway, opengoo is nice, It even has a quite nice presentation editor for creating S5 Slideshow in the browser - using Slimey. Admittedly, it has some quirks, at least in the only demo. Similar to eyeOS, another impressive web desktop solution - sadly, presentation creation and spreadsheat also don't work in the demo currently.

Which finally made me look at Google Docs again - they are closely followed by the others, but still, they do interesting stuff.

Like this:



Looks a bit stupid with the not too enlighntened type of questions I wrote down, right.
But what is it? A web questionnaire builder that directly stores the data you enter into a spreadsheat I created with my own options. I can look at an edit the results as in a normal spreadsheat, apply macros to them, and whatever - and there is even a report view showing some nice graphics of the data. Quite impressive job.
So, in the end, google seems to be still best in these systems, but there are good choices for people willing to own their data themselves, and they are getting better...

As of me - I'm still searching for a presentation tool that fits all my needs:

• Being graphical in creation and output
• While giving me full control over all the layout where necessary
• I want internal comments for my own notes only
• Have a good usability and being easy to learn
• Be able to easily exclude pages not needed for a specific conference or course
• Very cool would be to have it in a format that is suited for presentation and textual docs as well
  

There are a bunch of tools out there, and each of them fulfills some of my points - but I didn't see one that fits them all. Any ideas?

null isn't always null...

The difference of printing and object, or printing an object's toString output...

If you have a Todo() class with a toString() method like this:

String toString(){
return description
}

This code:

class BootStrap {

def init = { servletContext ->
println "bootstrap init start"
def mytask = new Todo(name:"testtask")
assert (mytask != null)
println "mytask is " + mytask
mytask.save()
println "bootstrap init end"
}
def destroy = {
}
}

will always return

bootstrap init start
null
bootstrap init end

and it's not possible to see the difference if the value of mytask is actually null, or the mytask is an object that has a description being null, and therefore this toString output.

Because of this I just ended up debugging for quite a while.

Getting into Grails

I started to port my little Todo-Manager application that helped get my things sorted from rails to grails.

As I realized I don't like ruby as much as Java, and Groovy/Grails brings me very similar functionality, I want to base all my small management apps on Grails - when a useable toto manager is done, a timetracker, contacs management and calendar will defintely follow, and hopefully be integrated into a liferay portal at some point in time.

What I can say about grails already: even though I do Java for many years now, and already used comparable frameworks, groovy/grails is a new style of working and new things are there to learn. What I like is that the developer and user community are professional developers from the Java field - people who know what software architecture means - not like in the rails community(when I've been looking at it about 2 years ago, at least), where web designers just starting to program met - and the resulting architectures and code quality, as well a the style of questions on mailing lists was according to that.

I'm already playing with my own partial templates and my own taglib elements these days - you can expect some small howto's here as soon as I got my stuff solved and find time to write down my experiences.

hässlich wie Katzenfutter...

Jaja, das gibt es wirklich - zumindest eben gerade im Tatort bei NDR und auch hier.

Ich zumindest musste ein bisschen lachen, als ich es gerade das erste Mal gehört habe. Und neue Schimpfwörter kann man immer mal gebrauchen.
Google denkt derweil immer noch, wer danach sucht, der wird sicher auch irgendwie Katzenfutter benötigen - oder ein Terrarium:

IT Didaktik für Dozenten

Komme gerade von einem hervorragenden Kurs! "It-Didaktik für Dozenten", wo ich auf freundliche Einladung von Heinlein Support teilnehmen durftte!
Es kommt, wenn man IT Schulungen oder Vorträge macht, ja doch auf etwas mehr als nur korrekes vortragen der technischen Inhalte an. Es muss auch so präsentiert und gelehrt werden, dass bei den Zuhörern und Schülern auch möglichst viel hängenbleibt.
Eine gute Portion der dazughörigen Theorie, und eine Menge dabei hilfreicher Methoden hat uns der sehr kompetente und freundliche Christian Niemczik bei diesem Kurs gezeigt und üben lassen. Alle Teilnehmer waren begeistert! Eine Sache, die man jedem Dozenten nur wärmstens empfehlen kann - auch fortgeschrittene und erfahrene Leute lernen hier einiges dazu.