In issue 31, the german magazine "Der Spiegel" has an interesting article about the impact of copyright on the book market in the 19th century. The copyright was originally invented to protect the author. It was said that no author would write anything without his copyright being protected. But it turned out the copyright protected the position of the publishing companies much more than the ones of the author. The books in england (where copyright existed) became a luxury good because the publishing companies sold them for very high prices. In germany, without copyright, books were very cheap and the publishing companies focussed on making printing cheaper (inventing the paperback). During this time, germany produced way more new content than england.

Interesting analogy to today's situation in the music industry, IMHO...

Seit Jahrzehnten gibt es das Internet jetzt schon. Und in all dieser Zeit war es immer so, dass Dienstanbieter für das Einstellen ihrer Inhalte Geld bezahlen mussten. Und die Konsumenten mussten für den Zugang zum Netz Geld zahlen. Dazwischen werden über Peering-Abkommen Bandbreiten "getauscht". So wurde das weltweite Netz in Rekordzeit aufgebaut und ausgebaut. Inzwischen kann jeder sich einen Zugang und fast jeder sich einen eigenen Server leisten. Ist das nicht großartig?

Aber jetzt wollen große Netzbetreiber von Anbietern bandbreitenintensiver Dienste extra kassieren. Das klingt erstmal als ob es ja nur die "richtigen" trifft. Im Endeffekt sorgt es aber dafür, dass es in Zukunft im Datennetz flächendeckend privilegierte und weniger privilegierte Anbieter geben wird. Das ist heute schon so: Große Anbieter können sich eine weltweite Verteilung ihres Contents via CDNs wie Akamai, Limelight oder CDNetworks leisten (die wiederum Geld an die Netzbetreiber zahlen). Und "dicke" Anbindungen für ihre Rechenzentren in der Nähe von zentralen Knotenpunkten, um den Weg auf die Datenautobahn so vielspurig wie möglich zu halten. Aber wenn die Daten einmal im Backbone angekommen sind, werden alle mit dem gleichen Recht überall hin befördert.

Wie soll das nun in Zukunft aussehen? Wird jeder größere Dienstanbieter Verträge mit jedem wichtigen Backbone-Provider weltweit brauchen? Muss man wie in grauer Vergangenheit für jede Brücke, jedes Königreich am Rande des Weges auf der Datenautobahn, Wegzoll bezahlen? Vielleicht schließen sich die Netzbetreiber zu sowas wie der GEMA zusammen und erheben pauschal Beiträge für jede IP-Adresse? Und wenn z.B. die Telekom bestimmt, welche Pakete wie zu Kunden vermittelt werden, wird sie dann nicht die Pakete ihrer eigenen Inhaltsangebote massiv bevorzugen?

Ich glaube auch die Telekom denkt nicht wirklich, dass man die globale Ökonomie des kabelgebundenen Internets noch umkrempeln kann. Aber im Mobilbereich, da ist noch alles drin. Da kann man abrechnen, da kontrolliert man die Netze. Ich schätze in diesem Bereich wird sich die Auseinandersetzung um Netzneutralität mit anders verteilten Karten abspielen...

UPDATE: Über Isotopp's Blog gefunden: Google's caching and peering strategie. Bei Google hat man die Ökonomie des Internets wohl besser verstanden...

Since i am open source minded, i would like to use Mozilla Thunderbird for eMail and the Lightning plugin for Calendar functions (instead of Outlook).

It works great so far. Actually i think Thunderbird is among the best IMAP clients one can get. But it wouldn't process .ICS files sent in invitations by many outlook users. I searched on google and found that it should support it but it simply didnt. After digging a little deeper, i found the reason: In order for Lightning to process the .ics attachments and display the Accept/Decline buttons, Thunderbird needs to be configured to display attachments inline. It seems like the default is to not display attachemnts inline.

Just go to "view" menu and activate "Display attachments inline"  (Ansicht:Anhänge eingebunden anzeigen) and voilà it works.

The iPhone 3GS has new accessibility features basically meant to help make use of the iPhone possible for everyone. However, my wife somehow unwillingly enabled the "ZOOM" accessibility feature. This lead to a 5x zoom of the complete display including the start screen. Unfortunately with zoom enabled, the sliders to unlock the phone or to accept a call were not usable anymore. She could not use the phone anymore (in the meantime i know that "tap with three fingers" would have helped). After a couple of hours trying restore and some other tricks we found in google, i became desperate enough to randomly click through iTunes searching for hints. And there it was: Under the iPhone menu option (where "update" and "restore" are available) i found a button called "Accessibility settings" (german: "Bedienhilfen konfigurieren") at the bottom of the screen. This opens a small dialogue containing switches for the different features. Disabeling the "Zoom" feature, then syncing solved the problem. Again something learned...

Lars Jankowfsky machte mich heute auf einen sehr schönen Artikel in "Fefes Blog" aufmerksam. Er ist eine Reaktion auf einen Artikel auf IX über neue coole Standards in der Java-EE 6 Spezifikation und spricht mir aus der Seele (wenn auch etwas druckvoller als ich es formulieren würde). Danke Fefe! 

Auch cool der Link in Fefe's Artikel zur Fremdwahrnehung vs. Selbstwahrnehmung der unterschiedlichen Programmiersprachenanhänger.

Ich sehe das so: Programmieren ist in den allermeisten Fällen Handwerk (in ganz wenigen Fällen auch mal Wissenschaft und in einigen Fällen Kreativarbeit). Es gibt Leute die können es gut, andere weniger gut. Am Schluss kommt ein Gebrauchsgegenstand dabei heraus, dessen Nutzen am besten die Nutzer bewerten.

Dependency Injection finde ich generell eine gute Sache (wie ja schon hier und da beschrieben). Aber was auf dieses einfache Konzept zur Entkopplung von Komponenten an Architektur draufgesetzt wird, ist erstaunlich. Es ist wie in der Politik: Am Anfang eine gute Idee, dann 200 Leute in Gremien und heraus kommt eine 500 Seiten starke Verordnung, die alles viel komplizierter macht als je zuvor und durch die nur noch einzelne, hochbezahlte Berater durchblicken. Nicht weil das Problem so komplex wäre, sondern weil die Lösung so allumfassend und abstrakt ist.

So etwas kann man in letzter Zeit genauso in PHP (Frameworks) beobachten. Ich bin mal gespannt, wohin uns das führt. XML-Config Files für PHP-Anwendungen? Strong Typing? Plugin-Architekturen? Dabei - und das finde ich besonders zum Schmunzeln - wandert Schritt für Schritt ein komplexer Teil der Anwendung, nämlich die Steuerung des Benutzerinterfaces, auf den Client und wird in JS gebaut. Normalerweise sollte der Server dadurch ja einfacher werden. Mal sehen...

After reading some very interesting books on project management, lean manufacturing and SCRUM and a very expensive 2-day workshop with Ken Schwaber, i am now proud owner of a "Professional Scrum Master I" certificate (which is basically like CSM, but cooler according to Ken). This enables me to resopond to people talking about scrum over beer more accurately. It will not change the way i do projects though (maybe a bit) but it will give me more arguments. 

I had a very interesting discussion with a funny guy on the train today. We discussed about efficiency of information technology from an energy standpoint. He said that all energy put into any computer is 100% converted into heat. So therefor, computers work with 0% energy efficiency. Now we are all working very hard to move everything to the cloud. And there, we try to use the resources (including energy) as efficient as possible because it matters in the dimension of a cloud service.

But why are computer cases still so inefficient in terms of energy re-use? Of course for my desktop at home it makes no sense to attempt to re-use the energy (unless i really stress my graphics card). This just works in bigger scale.

But couldnt we concentrate computing power in one room per street so that it makes sense to collect the energy back instead of blowing it into the environment? One datacenter could probably heat a block in your favourite city. If there was one in every street, we could re-use all the heat they produce for hot water, swimming-pools, etc.  ...

Recently i searched for a quick solution to store some information and found ErfurtWiki. It is very simple, small and easy to embed. So i used it.

After some experimenting i got it to work for me. There was just one thing that annoyed me: When on https, it produces "bad request" after a page is edited.

I located the problem on line 972 of ewiki.php: the url for the redirect is built from some components including the server PORT, but not the protocol. So ewiki generated a URL with port 443 and method http. It can easily be fixed by replacing line 972 ($url= ...) with the following:

   if($_SERVER['HTTPS']) $protocol = "https://";
   else $protocol = "http://";
   $url = $protocol.$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]. $port . $url;

Other than that, ErfurtWiki is really cool. And extremely fast.

I had Vista on my Portege R500 and wanted Windows 7, so i cleared the 2nd partition on my hdd and installed 7 there. After solving a couple of minor problems, everything worked fine. Next thing would be: Get rid of the Vista partition and make it free for all my data, that had to move out on a USB drive to free space for Win7. Unfortunately, the Vista partition was still listed as the "system partition" and thus could not be deleted. So i googled a little and finally moved the /boot directory from the old Vista partition to the Win7 partition and used bcdedit.exe to modify the drive letter of the bootmgr (see howto).

When the system stopped with a "bootmgr not found. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart", i also used bootrec from the windows CD to make sure my MBR and boot sectors were in shape. Didnt help. I tried the automatic repair options on the Boot DVD, also without success. 

Finally, i found the problem: i did not copy the bootmgr file over from the vista partition to the win7 partition because i thought win7 would have installed it anyway and because i thought the repair routine would have repaired that. After making it visible (attrib -s -h O:\bootmgr), i could copy it over to my Win7 partition. Reboot- works!

Today i experimented a bit with MogileFS. The concept is simple and good: Upload and Download files via HTTP PUT/GET. No posix file system, no kernel manipulation, no raid needed.

So i thought i play with it a little. It is all Perl, so i treid to install it with CPAN. You need MogileFS::server, MogileFS::Client and MogileFS::Utils for a start.Unfortunately, the server was not built automatically with CPAN, so i needed to find CPAN's temp build dir and build it manually by typing "make" and "make install".

I followed a nice quickstart to initialize a database as needed. (i needed to provide additional --dbrootuser and --dbrootpass also to initialize the DB with ./mogdbsetup but the rest went as described there).

It showed my which config files were needed and how to set them up. I could start the tracker deamon as described.

I also could start the mogilestorageD as described and it accepted connections, but i could not make it answer requests properly. Therefoe i replaced it by lighty+mod_webdav and it worked (MogileFS can work with normal WebDAV servers on the Storage nodes).

Now i was in search for a good PHP client. Since i did not expect too much overhead in the client, i did not go for the PECL version, but checked out some PHP classes. i first tested one client but it appeared somewhat over-engineered. So i went back to an older version (with half the lines of code) i found on the danga site and patched it a bit to throw exceptions instead of returning false.

Over all, the system seems simple, stable and scalable. In one of my next projects, i will try to use it.

UPDATE: Ubuntu Version available [here] for installation via apt-get including perl 5.8.8 (5.10 does not work). mogstored also works there.

UPDATE: If you upload files with empty key, you will not see an error anywhere. It just deletes the files after upload...

Just finished reading this "agile war story" by Henrik Kniberg. A very pragmatic description about how agile methods are deployed in real projects. A lot of the learnings i went through in during the last years are summarized very well in the book. Plus a lot of extra ideas and experience. If i had read this book 2 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and pain. Now i can say: My learnings are the same as Henriks so it seems that we are not so far away from "good" practices (who knows "best practices" in this area?).

Some of the statements that i found most interesing in the book were:

- TDD was the real game changer. Scrum and XP are great tools for making a project more efficient and  transparent. But what really made a difference to their whole approach of coding and quality was TDD.

- Even if you invest huge amounts of time in automated testing, you still need manual acceptance tests before shipping a release.

- There is no real best practice on how to deal with bug fixing for previous sprint results during following sprints. There are a couple of options, but none of them work perfect.

Also in other areas he writes that there is no recipe how it has to be done. Scrum gives a good direction, but it is not a 100% solution for all problems that may occur. The gaps need to be filled with experience and creativity...

I like this book a lot. It gives me the "you are not alone"-Feeling regarding the situation in real-life project work. There is so much talking about the theory and rules behind Scrum and XP in conferences and other books. But here you see how relevant all your small daily issues are that come up in your project. And that they dont mean "you are doing Scrum wrong", but "you need to figure this one out for yourself".

I recently set up an eMail-server on a system managed with Plesk 9.3 (i know, real men use the command line and text editors to configure their servers, but i am old and lazy).

Now i added DNS blacklisting to fight spam more effectively. And suddenly i could not send emails anymore. I must explain, it was a couple of years ago that i set up mail servers. After a little research i found out that DNS blacklisting comes in effect before the authentication of the SMTP connection can be tested. And i understand why this is. The workaround is easy: Don't use port 25 for email submission, but use the submission port 587 instead. And configure this port to not do DNS blacklisting. Cool. Plesk supports that but it appeared that nothing was listening on that port on my machine. After some hacking i found the reason: in /etc/xinetd.d there is a config file called submission.psa but this file should have the name submission_psa.

After renaming it, and restarting xinetd i can now email again! Why do i post it? Maybe this is a general problem in Plesk 9.3 manages servers, and if so, here is my workaround...

This page will soon become the home of 100 DAYS software projects GmbH again. After three inspiring years inside Zend Technologies, i have decided to re-start this business with new focus. Please stand by...

Yesterday i spent some time installing Windows 7 on my Portege R500 Laptop. Most of it went smooth:

Putty, OpenVPN, Truecrypt, most Hardware: No problem.

However, two problems persisted:

Novatel Wireless broadband device (UMTS modem) and Fingerprint Software.

Forums say, the Vista Version of the Novatel Drivers supplied by Toshiba would work. So i downloaded them but unfortunately, they refused to install. Now Windows Troubleshooting told me to check this URL.And at least this one installed. I do not see anything in my system yet. Will reboot and then report more...

UPDATE: Driver now works. But now i keep getting the Message "Radio Off" ("Funk aus") when starting the Mobilink application after the prompt for a PIN. Some research brought up this Link. I have the suspicion, that my Vodafone SIM card is not supported with my current configuration and i need some firmware patch. Update of the firmware however also did not help. Next step i will search for the files named a the bottom of the post linked above.

UPDATE: After browsing through a thousand forums and installing/deinstalling different driver versions over and over again, i finally found the solution: UMTS modem is switched off after Boot. Need to activate first with FN-F8. Now it works!

Jedes Jahr zu Weihnachten ist es soweit: Bei Aulkes ist Großreinemachen. Unter anderem werden alle Mobiltelefone gewaschen. Anliegend Beweisfoto: Sony-Ericsson P1i, 40° gewaschen, geschleudert mit 1400 Umdrehungen und danach 1 Stunde im Trockner. Akku aufgeladen, geht. Puh...