current affairs Archive

From the back yard. Pity it is too cold to sit there with a beer.

I decided to disable comments alltogether on this blog. The amount of time required to manage the ip banning and deleting the spam comments is getting too much in comparison with the small scale blogging i do over here.

I just dont have the time to go to war on this and keep securing the blog, while giving others the opportunity to comment on the postings. My apologies to the serious commenters. Please use the trackback facility to be able to refer to the postings which you want to comment on.

Microsoft granted patent on button click timing
Microsoft Corp. has been granted a patent relating to the use of buttons on hardware devices that form part of a user interface. U.S. patent 6,727,830, granted April 27, is described as a “time-based hardware button for application launch.” The patent abstract goes on to explain that the patent relates to how different functions can be invoked depending on whether a button is clicked once, clicked and held down for a period of time, or double-clicked within a short period of time. [MacCentral]

Mind mapping seemed an attractive concept to bring some order into my chaotic thoughts, so i spend an afternoon looking for a program running on OSX to give it a spin.

The first thing I noticed all these programs assumed (with the exception of PersonalBrain which is not available on OS X) that my thoughts are organized in a tree like manner. At some point someone must have decided that a tree like organization for creative thinking is appropriate.

I am probably not a creative person

The leading mind mapping software on OS X does not even support quick linking between one part of a tree and another part. Yes, you can draw a line between two leaves, but that’s not exactly what i had in mind.

The PersonalBrain mentioned above comes quite close to what i was looking for, taking each idea as a possible starting point for organizing. So, i played with it for an hour, deleting it from my PC right after that. I managed to make a mess out of it immediately. Instead of stimulating navigation and organizing thoughts I found the program chaotic itself. It created links for me which i didnt want with no obvious feedback when I did that. (and i got dizzy from the UI too)

There must be something wrong with my brain.

If i understand all the involved techniques right, i need a very graphically oriented and very fast RDF editor with lots of attention to keyboard shortcuts and screen organization, which hides the horrendous details of RDF graphs and how they are specified. There are some RDF editors out there, mostly java based, but they are exactly that: RDF editors, nothing more, nothing less. Not very imaginative about making RDF being a storage format for semantical relationships and abstracting the interface around it.

I must have misunderstood the semantics.

Will the Ebay2RSS Feed help me to get the best prices on the expensive electronics i would like to buy?

I hate shopping for lowest prices. Once i decide what i want to buy, it must be available near me, with good service and i don’t want to wait.

Unfortunately my wishes do not correspond to the size of my wallet, so to make them fit you dig and dig the internet to get good bargains for stuff.

This used to take a lot of time. Being able to construct an RSS feed from online auctions (eBay in this example) It should be a matter of minutes to check whether there is an item in the search i want to bid on, or not

My hopes aren’t that high set, but i tried it out anyway. (Searching for a digital SLR camera body below a $1000,-)

Last week i got myself a 17″ Apple Powerbook. I’ve been wanting to check both hardware and OS X out for a long time. The combo of a Free BSD like core and the interface reputation of Apple seemed like an attractive combination.

Not sure if it is yet, but so far I haven’t been able to concentrate much on work ;-). Two things which stand out:

1. There is much more to play out there than is healthy for a person
2. I completely underestimated the way you set your machine to your hands to work efficiently, i feel completely disabled using the new machine.

Let’s see if that changes over the next few weeks.

Always hated blogs, weblogs or whatever those things are called. So I decided to install one ;-) . No deeper thought behind it, just wanted to try MT out, it might even help Xaraya become a better weblog tool. I was however looking for a diary kinda thing and this might help to get things organzed and published at the same time. We’ll see.