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The jQuery Camp 2008, which has been held today at the Stata Center at the MIT, is over. It has been organized by the creator of the library, John Resig - who did a great job - with the library and with the conference!

While John opened the day with news about the current jQuery status, planned changes, internals and not-so-well-known features of the core he also mentioned:

"I haven't done any serious Web development in a long time..."

Which obviously nobody in the crowd believed.

Afterwards other speakers talked about scalable applications, jQuery UI and jQuery Plugin development. At least in the advanced track the quality of the talks was pretty high, except for one exception, where downloading and installing the framework would have had the same effect... completely wrong for an advanced audience to just explain the basic samples delivered with the framework. Punished by typing noise (80% MacBooks, 20% others).

One of the highlights was the talk about processing.js, a port of the Processing visualization language, which clearly showed what is possible with todays JavaScript and current browsers (including IE!).

Overall a great day together with the jQuery community and the jQuery developers at the MIT! Looking forward to next years conference!

(Photo source)

Labels: conference, english, jquery, travel, web

John Resig announced today that the jQuery library is going to be integrated into new mobile phones by Nokia and into Visual Studio by Microsoft.

Microsoft and Nokia aren’t looking to make any modifications to jQuery (both in the form of code or licensing) - they simply wish to promote its use as-is. They’ve recognized its position as the most popular JavaScript library and wish to see its growth and popularity continue to flourish.

This is great news for the future of the jQuery library! Congratulations!

Read the full announcement.

Labels: english, jquery, news, web

Pretty interesting and a slightly different approach that Google is taking with their G1 phone... the next year is going to be interesting!

(Original post and copyright: joyoftech.com)

Labels: apple, fun, google, iphone

mike: Also ich hab das Notebook von meiner cousine zum neu aufsetzen bekommen, und neugiereig wie ich bin schau ich halt so die ordner durch und...ich fass mich kurz... das ist das beste was ich gefunden hab:
mike: Im ordner "I love my daddy" erwartet man ja Fotos von ihrem vater usw...was finde ich aber vor? eine Datei: Ein Foto von seiner Kreditkarte

(via German-Bash, Achtung, Popups!)

Labels: deutsch, fun

Eepybird, the same company that brought you a series of professional level Diet Coke and Mentos clips, have created an equally if not more remarkable video of 280,951 Post-its submitting to gravity while simultaneously creating some sort of new genre of office art. It's worth a click...and then another.

(via gizmodo.com)

Labels: english, fun, video

Since the Apple AppStore launched I was looking for a ToDo application - the iPhone itself does not synchronize iCal ToDo's and it also only offers a simple list. No way to implement GTD with iCal. Until now all free applications in the AppStore turned out to be very basic and a one-way solution. Enter task on the iPhone, view them there, that's it. But it would be great to have a Desktop app to also manage my tasks, synchronization and an open interface to my data.

Finally there are two canditades which I'm going to review - Appigo's Todo and Things from CulturedCode. These candidated have been chosen because of their price tag and because they had a lot of positive reviews within the AppStore. Please note that I did the review without actually buying the apps as only the winner will make it onto my iPhone.

Things (CulturedCode)
According to the screen designs a very clean, iPhone like interface is offered; not like some free apps which hinder the workflow and look... Java based. More important, what else is offered?

• Things stores its data as XML which allows to re-use it easily.
• CulturedCode offers a native desktop application for the Mac to sync the data with.
  
• The data is synced locally and not stored on an external server.
• The costs for the desktop application are pretty high - 49 USD.
• The application is Mac only right now.
  

Todo (Appigo)
The screen design of Todo looks very similar than of its competition - it's "just" a Todo application, so there is not a lot of room for innovation (but a lot can go wrong - check out the Freebies!). Lets talk about the unique features of Todo:

• Todo is able to sync its data to Remember The Milk (pro account only) or Toodledo.
• Syncing is done over the air, so it's not as secure as a local synchronization.
• I had a deeper look into Toodledo - even in its free version it offers a lot of features including a simple, open API, a Firefox plugin, Dashboard integration etc.
• Toodledo is free, the Pro account is reasonable priced ($14.95/year!), but not needed.
  

Whom to choose?
Based on the bullets above I'm going to invest my money into Appigo's Todo application. The main reason is the synchronization with Tooledo, which offers an API and seems to have a larger community behind it. Yes, I cannot store confidential information there, but in days of social networks a secured Todo account with a strong password is not that much of a problem compared to public profiles at social networking sites. And I can access my Todos whenever I have a browser available, no need for a Mac. Let's see how it goes!

I'll blog more about Todo, GTD and Toodledo in the future, just subscribe to the RSS feed to stay up to date. And another wish for Apple - would be great to test apps out of the AppStore for i.e. a day without any payment!

Labels: english, gtd, iphone, mac, tech

Everyone is writing about the new 2.1 firmware that Apple released for the iPhone - about improved battery life, increased 3G reception and so on. It is definitely a fine release with a lot of good improvements. But more important - what's still missing in the 2.1 firmware? Here is my (incomplete) list of items that Apple should add to the next iPhone firmware:

• Copy & paste across applications (see comic)
  
• Synchronize Notes and TODO items with iCal and me.com
  
• Push notification service for applications (promised for September!)
• Usage of the phone as modem ("tethering")
  
• Allow developers to talk about iPhone development in the public
• 3rd party syncing through iTunes
• Access to the iDisk through the iPhone
• Support for stereo Bluetooth headsets
• Real navigation (and a Bluetooth GPS extension for the first generation iPhone)
  

Don't get me wrong - the 2.1 release is the best iPhone software they have delivered so far, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Not only for the iPhone but also for me.com, which is insecure and lacks features like the iDisk sharing.

(Image from Geek And Poke)

Labels: apple, english, iphone, mobileme, rant

This morning I discovered that I have more than 1000 contacts in my "Personal Address book" within Thunderbird. What the he*k? Why are there so many duplicates, addresses from spammers, mailing lists etc. I definitely never added to my Personal Address Book? Seems to be mixed with the "Collected Addresses", where Thunderbird collects all this crap for me. But why?

I'm using the Sync Kolab plugin to sync my addresses between various computers using IMAP - a smart way of using the protocol to keep contacts in sync. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup Sync Kolab on a new computer - I mixed up "Collected Addresses" and "Personal Address book" which caused the mess. Not a big deal to fix - just change the settings, remove unwanted addresses and sync again. But wait - Sync Kolab does not really sync! It just adds addresses, but it never removes them. It also does not seem to detect obvious duplicates (same name, same address, same fields!). As soon as I start the sync process the locally removed addresses are added back to my Address Book. Not very smart. Resetting all the IMAP data does not work as well - the other computers will again add all the addresses.

So what are the alternatives to Sync Kolab? One option is to wait until Thunderbird 3 is released (end of 2008), as it supports the usage of the Mac Address Book. Which syncs itself using me.com. Which does real syncing including deletions and works flawlessy so far. There are costs involved, but that's fine as the syncronization between the Macs and the iPhone is really worth the money. Of course then switching to the Mac Mail application is an option as well, unfortunately it does not support everything Thunderbird does - Mac Mail seems to be more "basic" - but I'll leave that open for a future blog post. In the meanwhile feel free to research on your own.

Labels: english, mac, rant, sync, tech

Do you regularly create backups of your data? Just in case the harddisk decides to die? Or anything else happens to your computer?
I sort of do. "Sort of" means that I used to run a backup only about once a month - then I started iBackup and waited for about 3-4 hours until it finished the backup to my NAS system (which I bought exactly 2 1/2 weeks before Apple announced its TimeCapsule :( ). Way too long for just an incremental backup. The reason for this lengthy incremental backup is that iBackup uses SMB to connect to the NAS - which means it transfers too much data to just check if it has been changed since the last backup.

Time to create my own script - a bit of Bash scripting, rsync with an exclude file and an Automator workflow - voila, my incremental backups are now executing in about 5 minutes! Perfect for daily backups via cron and way better than the old backup "process" which took a few hours!

Here is the script: rsyncbackup.sh.txt. Feel free to adopt it as needed!

So my recommendation to everyone - review your backup process, it has to be simple, painless and fast. Otherwise you are not going to use it! Which brings up Mozy - why not using this great, unlimited online backup service? My personal reason is that I don't want my Mac to be running to do the uploads - that's what my NAS does in the background - and that I already own a me.com account as well as a 50GB Bingodisk account. No need for another service...

Labels: english, mac, security, tech

Last week I had a lot of fun - imagine me sitting in the same room with 24 project managers, talking about how to manage projects, risks, scheduling, sizing etc. All other attendees have been project managers, I was the only specialist who just wanted to learn the basics. And get a check mark. But that's another story.

Nevertheless it turned out to be a lot of fun - our instructor Darryl (who reminded me about Matt) teaches project management since he is literally 3 years old and he is really (and I mean really really) good at it! So even "the programmer" in between the serious project managers learned something about how projects *should* be managed.

In the evenings we went out for some beers - actually and unfortunately the only sightseeing I did. No time for anything else, one evening it was too late for a walk, the other day it was raining... no luck this time. At least I had a great view out of my hotel room.

So there are many valid and good reasons to come back to the beautiful city of Amsterdam, maybe in spring next year?

Labels: english, ibm, travel

Innerhalb von 10 Jahren hat Bechtolsheim aus 100.000 Dollar durch eine gezielte (?) Investition über 500 Millionen gemacht. Durch eine Investition in die damals noch unbekannte Firma Google. Wozu ich ihm und auch Google zum Geburtstag herzlich gratulieren möchte!

Google hatte mit dem 2002 eingeführten Adwords die immer noch schlanke Suchmaschine zu einer Gelddruckmaschine umfunktioniert und legte einen fulminanten Börsenstart hin. Bechtolsheim war um 500 Millionen Dollar reicher und "googlen" wanderte als Synonym für die Internet-Suche in die Lexika und Wörterbücher.

Der ganze Artikel auf Heise Online ist sehr lesenswert!

Labels: deutsch, news, tech, web

The jQuery Conference is going to take place on September 28, 2008, in Boston. Finally the Conference Agenda was posted - containing a beginner and an advanced track, great speakers and interesting topics. To be able to choose tracks at the event just import this iCal agenda file and synchronize it to your mobile device. I'll update the file as updates are released.

Labels: conference, jquery, usa, web