Immer wieder:

http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/anthropomorphized

http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/ditty

Ok, so as far as I understand, the Wired Magazine is some kind of mag for the techno-savvy Info elite, for those techno geeks that knew about the segway long before every other person on earth.

Tonight I tried to make a subscription, through two different subscription forms on their website (Form 1 Form 2). It didn't work. Why?

Because like most of those American companies (sorry) they simply think that nothing outside of the US exists. Of course they only list their 52 states and something outside the world. They are kindly enough distinguishing between Africa, Americas, Europe, Canada, Asia, but as soon as you type in a european (in this case Austrian) postal code, you'll receive the error

"Please enter your zip or postal code.
Your city, state and zip did not match with postal records."

Ehm. Ok. So lets go to the contact form and tell them about it. I did. And wrote the following:

Hi!

I mean WIRED is a very techno-savvy magazine, with a clearly technological set of readers, most of them bleeding edge.

Why can't you guys manage to make a online subscription form that accepts international Postal Codes and Cities?

I would love to subscribe (to be precise: renew my subscription) but can't get through either one of the two registration processes. It always says

"Please enter your zip or postal code.
Your city, state and zip did not match with postal records."

Ehm, right. Because it is an Austrian zip code, matching an Austrian city. Actually the capital of Austria, Vienna.

Here is my address, please get me a subscription

Knallgrau New Media Solutions
c/o Michael Schuster
Pezzlgasse 7/1
1170 Vienna
Austria
Europe

Thanks.

Yours
Michael


What happened? You guessed it. It didn't work.

We're sorry, a problem has occurred.

Invalid Characters In Request


Completely off topic: I just noticed that this is story number 1.001.734 published on twoday.net. Wohooo! Still rocks.

In letzter Zeit war ich ziemlich häufig in Deutschland unterwegs. Oft genug um einige Dinge zu bemerken, selten genug um immer noch den Blick eines Fremden darauf zu haben. In Deutschland wird Politik gemacht. Sagt man. Auf jeden Fall wird gewählt. Weiss man.

Wahlen sind generell ein seltsames Ding. Christoph Chorherr von den Wiener Grünen steht dem Wahlkampf zu Recht skeptisch gegenüber. Ein temporärer Ausnahmezustand, eine Zeit der Versprechen und des offenen Schlagabtausches. Dabei geht es in den meisten Fällen nicht um Meinungen, Ansichten und (Zukunfts-)Perspektiven, sondern um Phantasien, Utopien und Phrasen.

Ganz klar, Deutschland braucht Arbeitsplätze. Ganz klar, jede Partei hat das richtige Rezept dafür. Wohlstand ist für eine Wohlstandsverwöhnte Gesellschaft das Zauberwort. Doch kann ein/e Politiker/in in der heutigen Zeit überhaupt noch eine Lösung für das Arbeitsplatzproblem versprechen? In einer Zeit in der tausende Menschen in Beschäftigungsoffensiven in staatlichen Aus- und Weiterbildungsprogrammen "geparkt" wird, einfach um aus der Statistik zu verschwinden?

Eindimensionalität regiert. Es ist die Zahl an sich, die zählt. Auch im Wahlkampf. Ob der allerdings noch wirkt? Im Fernsehduell soll sich die Wahl angeblich entschieden haben, man wird es sehen. Wüßte man nicht, wer Schröder und Merkel sind, man hätte nach Ende des Duells auch glauben können, es wäre ein Schulsprecherposten zu vergeben. Statt Irakkonflikt, Arbeitsplätzen und Steuerpolitik würde man halt über den Raucherhof, die Hausschuhordnung und Schulsportwochen diskutieren. Das Niveau wäre wohl ähnlich.

Unlängst in Alpbach, ein hervorragendes Kamingespräch mit DDr. Huber, von der Bioethikkommission. Sehr interessante Person, sehr interessantes Thema. Es ging um Medizin, das Leben, Ethik und auch das Alter. Das Alter. Und Einsamkeit. Gute Verbindung.

Im Frühjahr musste ich feststellen, dass meine sonstige Freude am alleine sein, differenzierter zu betrachten ist. Es ist ein Unterschied zwischen dem alleine sein und der Einsamkeit. Ich hatte immer grosse Freude daran stundenlang alleine zu sein, alleine ins Kino zu gehen. Bitte nicht falsch verstehen, Gesellschaft ist wunderbar, gerade nette Gesellschaft. Es geht um gewünschte Verneinung von Gesellschaft in gewissen Momenten.

Einsamkeit ist erzwungen und ist, so meine Erfahrung, etwas furchtbares. Zermürbendes. Enttäuschendes. Schmerzhaftes.

Deshalb konnte ich die Ausführungen in oben erwähntem Kamingespräch nur verstehen.

Die Aufgabe der Medizin ist es, das Alter lebenswerter zu machen um es den Menschen zu ermöglichen das Problem der Vereinsamung zu lösen. Denn hier versagt die Medizin, hier braucht es andere Lösungen.

I have been blogging for over 4 years now (well, 2001 and Antville), but never someone replied in that depth to one of my entries like Ben did. So I think here is the Reply to the Reply. If you want to grasp the whole thing, you should read my first post as well.

if we are talking about operating systems here, I totally agree. But platform is one of these "usemeforeverything" buzzwords (actually, I think it is THE usemeforeverything buzzword right now).

Probably platform is _the_ word for everything, because it is what every developer wants to build. You want to make something that _everybody_ uses, something that is close to world domination. That is fine. But platform means nothing but something rock solid that you can build other things on. If you ask Google, you will see that Eclipse is a platform, Java, Dotnet, Oracle for sure, but also LAMP, Flash, Skype, Google Maps and OS X. Just to name a view. If Java claims to be platform independent I wonder what platform is meant? I guess using platform in the context I meant, was not precise enough. But where I'm rather confident, is the fact, that your platform might have an impact on the success of your application (building a Windows Desktop application offers radically more potential users, than building the same application on, let's say, OS/2).

But when it comes to Web applications (which is the case here), I doubt that the Operating System you build your application on, has a large influence on the success of your app. The diversity of environments present in the current web shows that.

Whitespace is rally a bad example here, because it is a pure fun language that was not designed to be used in real world applications.

Yes, whitespace is a bad example, but was the only choice where almost no one I know would have complained.

But isn't its lack of popularity a big no for using helma? There are only a few companies that use helma, and development with helma is very different from most other popular web frameworks out there.
However, companies like knallgrau are still using it, because they think that the advantages of the platform outweights the learning curve for new employees in the long run.

Definitely. And that was the whole starting point for my thoughts. If you would start a company that builds Web Applications right now, you would definitely go for Ruby on Rails or Python. Some decisions are surely made out of considerations, that conclude in the statement above. But the truth is, that choosing a framework (or environment) to work with is also a lock-in, because you (or the company) develop(s) knowledge about the technology, you get better in using it, know the pitfalls and limitations.

But we never outpace our masters that way. Learning by imitation means that we also copy errors, and then we produce memes of bad pratices that are copied over and over by each generation.
Humans learned by imitation to avoid fire for millions of years, but they did not advance before they broke that meme and tried to control it.

That is probably true. Learning by imitation is one part, there are many other parts. Learning by imitation implies recombination, resampling of existing memes. It is like in music: sometimes by taking samples out of old songs, you create something new, sometimes something better than the original. We _can_ outpace our masters, because everyone has different backgrounds, knows different people and holds different memes.

Counting on imitation is also the reason why in the 90ties, hundrets of search companies where focusing on storing large amounts of websites, instead of focusing on ranking the results.

Please don't compare having no strategy (because doing what the others do can be viewed as a strategy to survive, but can't be considered a strategy in a business sense) to learning from others by imitation.

The reason why I'm trying to learn a new language at least once a year is because I think that knowing many different language designes is a neccessary step to write good code in the few languages I will end up using at work. It is also important to learn by imitation, because a lot of interesting concepts in software programming is written in languages other than Java or PHP.

And that is fine! Because one part of the learning thing is curiosity! Learning other things to grasp their nature, to understand their strengths and weaknesses is very good. But then the question is, why programmers are not very keen on learning Helma (at least in my past experience), I'm sure it has some interesting concepts as well. And just to make it clear: I'm not making the case for Java, PHP or some other language/framework/platform/whatever.


You have a strange way to mix languages together here. I guess most people would put PHP and Perl together in their own "produce fast to write, hard to read code" box. And javascript is somehow even more confusing than these two, but I think I need to write another blog entry for that topic.

The "strange way" is, as everything in this weblog, just the way of my personal viewpoint. I don't care what most people would put together, because the whole entry is about my own perception.

No, its not easier. It's just that PHP and Javas's C-like syntax (i think this is the algol family) look familiar to you at first, because you had expirences with other languages that use that style. If you had studied at MIT where they use Sheme as an introductory language, you would probably have a better start with Haskell than with PHP.

I tried a couple of languages in my short life. I started with Basic on my Atari 1040 STFM (which was by the way _the_ Midi Computer at that time), then used PHP for a while, got introduced to Java, did some things in Javascript, used Actionscript in Flash (which is definitely no language), did VBA in Excel and Access. I never tried a Scheme- or Lisp-like language, but after seeing quite a few lines of code in various languages, in my opinion PHP and Java are pretty nice to read.


As a fact, what you write down in these languages is often very different
from what you where thinking of in the first place:

You rarley think like this:

"I want to create a variable that starts at zero and increment it by one and
multiply a variable n with 25/100 as long as that variable is smaller than the
number 10000000000."

You would rather think "I want to increment that number by 25 percent, 10 million
times", and the Ruby solution is much closer to that than what one would do with
PHP.

In common programming examples I never saw something like this. Sure it is appealing to use simple english language terms to do things. SQL tried something similar, nevertheless it is not really intuitive in my opinion.

The reason I like Ruby is not because it is a language that many people don't know about. In fact I wish the language was more popular, so I could use it at work more often.

I try to use Ruby in many situations because I believe that it shortens the time It takes to produce, modify and explain the code, so I have more time to focus on more interresting things.

What amazes me most about the current uprise of Ruby on Rails is in fact what you state here. The fact that you can develop applications really fast, because the framework focuses on your exact needs when developing Web applications is obviously a big advantage.

Es begibt sich also im wunderschönen Monat September des Jahres 2005, dass Herr smi eine kleine aber feine Deutschland Tournee 2005 durchführt. Groupies galore!

Ein kleiner Zeitplan:

3.9. - 5.9. Dresden beim Martin Röll
6.9. Berlin
7.9. Kaiserslautern (abends)
8.9. - 9.9. München

Hauspostfach für etwaige Vorschläge: smi at twoday dot net.

For quite a long time I have been thinking about recent developments in the development of Web Applications. About the different paradigms and technologies that are currently arising, partially transforming how we think of the Web in general and Web Applications in particular.

So I decided to write some thoughts down, that have been hovering in my head for a while. This should be a series of three articles, this one being the first and dealing with

Choosing your weapons

Platforms, Programming Languages, Frameworks and all the other stuff that you really don't wanna know about but can't stop reading in all that tech blogs.

Ok. First things first. Talking about Platforms is really not necessary. One of the fields where we can truly stick to is that no application in this world needs a specific OS to perform well. There are other reasons, such as scalability, security or existing environments to choose platforms wisely, but don't believe anyone who wants to convince you that you can only build great applications using, let's say, BeOS. Those days are over.

So assuming you found your environment of choice (I hear techies in our office argue for different Linux distros every day, so the paradox of choice definitely pplies), you can focus on the other parts of the mixture. But how to decide on those parts? Well, the term "mixture" seems highly appropriate. You want it to taste well, you want every single ingredient to be in place, leading to a simple yet elegant and matchless taste. In other words: you want it to work.

I wrote somewhere else about the recent hype around Ruby on Rails, a classic Web Application Framework and came to think what criteria such a mixture would involve. Not an easy one. (Nota bene: I won't talk about databases or datastorage here. There are others that can write a lot more and better about that topic.)

We here at Knallgrau use Helma every day, for several reasons, but wait, we said first things first. The question in my head was: "What would one search if she/he had to choose a application framework for a specific task?". And I think that the following criterias work for both, programming languages as well as whole application frameworks. Some points apply to both, where necessary I will make some distinctions.

Here are my considerations, others are (as always) very welcome:

1. Popularity: Sure, you don't want to use something nobody uses. Using a programming language like Whitespace may be fun first, but as soon as you want to move your personal boundaries you might run into problems. We humans tend to learn by imitation (at least half of the time), by just copying things of others that help us to understand how the whole thing works. We have to nearly "touch" it, to grasp its nature.
   So that is one reason why popular things get more popular and unpopular things stay unpopular. Because imitation is what we are designed to do.
   But don't underestimate the Geek Factor. No matter if you are a techno Geek or a English literature Geek, there will always be people that prefer using some unpopular language, just because they can. Just to be different.
2. Ease of Use: Having to download 10 libraries, unpack and compile is in most cases not considered ease of use. You want to start quickly, understand quickly and get quick results. Why? Because if this is not the case, then this is considered work. If you get into something quickly, you impose it is fun, because you get positive feedback early on.
   Of course there are exceptions to every rule. Who ever tried to use Oracle and wondered how complicated SQL can get might agree on that. But in this case almost always one of the other points mentioned clarifies the why.
3. Adequate to your task: Trying to develop a large enterprise application with numerous connections to other systems and a complex architecture in, let's say, Perl would be pretty inaccurate. Sure, it would probably work in the end and I am sure that there are some applications out there that come close to this connection, but you won't consciously do that.
   Many issues support that viewpoint, from bugfixing to the ongoing support and changes you will have to make.
4. Powerful: No matter if you think of programming languages or frameworks, you'll almost always would want to have a powerful tool. Something that eases the tasks you have to perform. Be it the object relational mapping of Helma or Ruby on Rails. Or the special mysql functions that PHP provides. Power is relative to your task, but you definitely want it.
5. Maximum Overview: Also no matter if it is a framework or a language you have to choose, you want a maximum of overview about the architecture and the individual code. Why? Because you want maximum control over it. Thats one of my objections against Ruby or Perl or Haskell and a point for Java, Javascript or PHP. If you read a little bit of source code you'll grasp the what in a minute. Sure, one can argue after a little bit of programming you'll know the language anyway, but I suppose that this doesn't count as ease of use having to use something for a while, or reading through manuals for hours, just to grasp what it does. I managed to use PHP within days in a productive matter without great skills in programming a few years ago. I would say my skills haven't radically improved, but reading PHP or Java code is definitely easier than reading Ruby or Rebol.

So what is this all about finally? It is about choosing the right environment for a Web Application, getting the state of the art. So probably you would choose to use Ruby or Phyton or PHP. Probably you would use a ported version like Jython. You might also get into a framework like Rails, Seagull, Twisted, Django or Helma.

So far for the first part. What I still want to write down in more detail is the question, how modern web applications should work at the interface. What technologies to incorporate and what to leave aside.

Einfach so, weil schon ewig ein paar Bilder herumliegen und keine Zeit ist für Textcontent.















Alle Bilder 2005 von smi aufgenommen, in München, Kopenhagen, Ungarn.

Im Auto wird bei Herrn smi meist Radio gehört. Der Einfachheit halber. Mir war es immer schon zu mühsam die gesamte CD Sammlung im Handschuhfach zu verstauen (was schon aus Platzgründen nicht ginge) und der iTrip ist unlängst bei einem unbeabsichtigten Sturz zu Schaden gekommen.

Also Radio. Gestern war Freitag, die netten Damen und Herren von Ö3 sagen bereits um 7.40 Uhr "Willkommen im Wochenende!". Naja, fast. Dazwischen werden Menschen mit dem Hubschrauber nach Klagenfurt geflogen, denn es ist ja gerade Beachvolleyball Zeit. Die Dame vom Wetter erfrischt das Programm mit Tratsch und Klatsch aus Hollywood. Wie spannend. Also anderer Sender. Dort wird gerade wieder per Telefon nachgefragt, was Carina oder Sabrina beim Sex denn so überhaupt nicht mag. Es ist 7.43 Uhr. Wieviele Freundinnen ihr aktueller Lover denn schon hatte, will der Moderator wissen. Antworten soll die beste Freundin. Wie das mit dem Betrügen steht und überhaupt. Das Leben ist ein Hit. Oder nein, wir spielen die Hits. Nein, doch Hitmusic only.

Durchzappen ist sinnlos, überall wird über Belanglosigkeiten und Befindlichkeiten diskutiert. Unterhaltungswert = 0. Die kurzen Nachrichteneinsprengsel auf allen Radiosendern sind dabei nicht wesentlich erfrischender. Wer (so wie ich) zum Aufwachen Radio hört, hat im Auto schon alle "News" drei mal vernommen, meistens werden die Kurzmeldungen mit persönlichen Wertungen und Meinungen gewürzt, was nicht unbedingt für eine objektive Betrachtung spricht. Und wenn der Nachrichtensprecher unerwartet einmal keine Wertung durchführt, dann kann das ja der Morgenmoderator noch nachreichen, sofern nicht Personalunion besteht, ist ja dann "nur eine persönliche Meinung".

Radio ist überholt.

Nicht umsonst entwickeln sich tragbare Musikabspielgeräte so sprunghaft, es hat gute Gründe warum Podcasts allerorts gehypt werden.

Doch eigentlich ging es mir ursprünglich gar nicht um diese Beobachtung. Sondern vielmehr um die Frage, warum gerade Radio begonnen hat, bereits Donnerstag Nachmittag das Wochenende auszurufen, Montag und Dienstag damit zuzubringen schon wieder auf Donnerstag (=Wochenende) hinzuweisen und auch dazwischen jedem Anrufer der zugibt gerade zu arbeiten zu empfehlen doch lieber ins Bad zu gehen oder sonstetwas anderes zu tun, nur ja nicht zu arbeiten.