December 31, 2004
Happy New Year
A Happy New Year 2005 and the best wishes to all of my friends and everyone reading this!
I also wanna take the last chance (in the old year) to thank my friends (you know who you are!) for helping me through some of the not so happy times in 2004. 2005 is going to be a super year - thanks to you!
Günter
BASIC (Nostalgia Included)
Cringely writes about REALbasic and sees it as a real alternative to .NET for those on a low Microsoft diet.
Mentioning BASIC brings some nostalgic memories to my mind. I started my programming career 20 years (20 years, really!?) ago, first on a borrowed C-64, later on MSX (Philips VG-8020) and MSX-2 (Philips VG-8235) computers. As those were the days when the first thing you saw after turning on the computer was the BASIC interpreter, naturally BASIC was the first programming language I learned. Assembler (Z80) was next. As I did not have an assembler back than, I hand-translated my first Assembler subroutines into machine code myself. The resulting machine code was then put into DATA statements in a BASIC program that POKE'd it into the memory to run it.
Learning BASIC as the first programming language turned out to be somewhat unwise later on when I turned to Turbo Pascal 3.0. It took some time to forget my bad habits of using GOTO. (BASIC dialects of the day had no loop statements beside FOR .. NEXT, which made excessive use of the GOTO statement unavoidable.)
Anyway, my relationship to BASIC was severely damaged in the late 1990s. As part of my job back then I took over maintenance of a "historically grown" Visual Basic application (fortunately, that lasted only for a few months and I also had a parallel C++ project to save my sanity). Needless to say the requirements for the application by far exceeded that what VB was designed for, so half of the code consisted of obscure work-arounds and dirty hacks (in the negative sense of the word). I stayed away from any kind of BASIC ever since.
December 30, 2004
2005 Predictions
Predictions for 2005 from Scoble, Pirillo, Battelle and Box. I'll spare you mine...
Update: Tim Bray and Dave Winer have some, too.
December 29, 2004
The 80/20 Rule, Again
Found in the PML Specification:
3.2.8 80/20 rule
Description: The design of PML Core should provide 20% of the features that accommodate 80% of the needs.
Rationale: As mentioned above PML Core should have a simple design. By including special needs that only a very few users require, the vocabulary would become rather complex and difficult to use.
Damn, I wish others (WS-*, anyone?) would consider this rule, too. Life would be that much simpler...
December 28, 2004
Of Diarists and Novelists
A nice essay written by Sean McGrath.
December 27, 2004
English Lessons
Maria giving English lessons to her niece.
December 26, 2004
My Giftmas Present
Maria gave me a djembe as gift this christmas. A really fascinating instrument. No more drumming on tabletops and jam glasses ;-). I am not sure my neighbors will like it, though.
We got the instrument from a craftsman in Nötsch (a small village in upper Carinthia; thank you Angelika for the tip!), and I could choose it out of a collection of about 12 instruments, all sounding and feeling different. It was really quite interesting how different skins and woods (and size, of course) can affect the sound of such an instrument.
Corporate Food Chain
A sad story of what happens when Big Company eats Small Company.
December 25, 2004
Christmas in Vienna
Maria and I spent a wonderful day in Vienna on December 23. We had great fun walking along the shopping streets and watching other people rushing from one store to the next, looking for christmas gifts. We also enjoyed a great coffee at the local Starbucks. Starbucks really managed to combine the Starbucks business model with the strong Viennese "Kaffeehaus"-Tradition. I could sit for hours in the first floor of Starbucks on Maria-Hilfer Straße and watch the busy life on the streets below. In addition, the whole place is non-smoking only, which even more improves the experience for me. I wish more restaurants would follow this model and at least offer non-smoking areas. I really hate coming home from a public place with all my clothes awfully smelling after cold smoke. Anyway... Other highlights of the day were the Italian lunch at barbaro and the "Christkindlmarkt" at the Rathausplatz in the evening.
December 24, 2004
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas, peace and happiness to all of you out there!
December 10, 2004
December 08, 2004
Architecture Astronautics
Found an interesting essay by Joel Spolsky discussing what happens when software system abstraction just goes one level too high. In other words, you start with a useful solution to some practical problem and then abstract from it until you end up with a "superior" software architecture that, unfortunately, does not actually solve any problem whatsoever. Reminds me of what's happening at various XML standardization committees...
Data Redundancy Not That Bad After All
Data redundancy (that is, non-normalized data) may not be such a bad thing after all. Sean McGrath wrote an entertaining article for ITworld.com discussing the advantages of redundant data. He might have a point.
December 02, 2004
Technology Management in the 90's (and in the new millenium)
Just found this older essay titled "Technology Management in the 1990s" (including a funny but all-so-true extension of the ISO OSI 7-layer model). Unfortunately, nothing has changed in the eight (or so) years since the essay was written.
Mind Management
In mid-November I attended a five day seminar on mind management in Kitzbühel, held by Dr. Manfred Winterheller and organized by the Danube University Krems. Besides Kitzbühel being a really nice place to be at this time of year - the first snow of the season had just fallen, putting a nice winterly mood all over the region, the seminar was a real eye opener. Despite the attendance of about 170 people (most of them attending as part of a University course), the course was one of the most intense experiences I ever had, thanks to Dr. Winterhellers over-the-top presentation skills. The topics of the seminar can coarsely be described as self motivation and leadership training, but the actual content was far more than that - hard to describe in a short post like this one. Should you ever have the chance to see Dr. Winterheller live, just take it, you won't regret it.
Long Time No Post
Well, I've been pretty busy the last couple of weeks setting up my company and doing a couple of other project and haven't had much time for maintaining my weblog. Following are a few posts that have "accumulated in my queue".