[blog.schreiter.info]

February 2008: The OMG releases version 1.1 of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Almost nobody really took notice of it, though. There wasn’t even a news entry on one of the relevant news tickers - not even on the news of OMG itself!

Anyway, despite the bad marketing the BPMN community seems to have noticed the finalization of this revision of BPMN by now.

But seriously, what’s this new version all about? An official changelog is nowhere to be found. So, who is keen on screening a 318 pp. specification for differences to the old version? We did it for you and compiled it into a compacted whitepaper summarizing the delta between the new and the old version.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you would like to add your thoughts about the new version and/or the whitepaper.

I’m more than pleased to announce the link to my freshly published Master’s thesis in the field of Business Process Management. It was written in cooperation with SAP Research, Brisbane Australia.

If you are interested in a thorough look at semantics of data flow, message flow and process instantiation in the context of an executable version of BPMN you should definitely check out this thesis (or parts of it).

Please also take a look at the abstract:

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has recently become very popular amongst business analysts as an easy-to-use yet powerful modeling notation for business processes. However, BPMN is not able to capture all the details necessary for automated execution by an engine.
The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), on the other hand, is directly executable by business process engines but lacks an intuitive graphical notation.

In order to extend BPMN 1.0 towards direct executability, the thesis presented enriches the revised control flow concepts of xBPMN (by Alexander Grosskopf) with an orthogonal data flow perspective. Sophisticated and carefully defined data flow semantics are essential to enable orchestration on execution level.
In the course of this thesis we describe use cases and introduce formal definitions of the following concepts: data object lifecycle, data scoping, data assignment, mediation and transformation, streaming/buffering, correlation, and process instantiation for xBPMN++.

You can download the thesis from here or from the publications page.

Being part of the alpha testing crowd and having access to the all new Trillian Astra, I’d like to spend some words on this already quite mature version (build 66) of the once extremely popular instant messenger. I personally have been using Trillian since the very early v0.71 back in 2002. However, since my migration to Vista pretty much 12 months ago, I almost completely abandoned Trillian (v3.1 Pro) in favour of Skype for different reasons.

Almost all of my friends are also on Skype and I needed it for telephony anyway. Spend some time abroad and you know that need…
Additionally, Skype features filetransfers that actually work anywhere (unlike ICQ and others)! Finally, the sophisticated mood messaging facility is really a nice thing to give your buddies a hint where you’re at and what you’re doing.

In fact, now that I’ve been playing around with the new Trillian for some time, and reporting a number of bugs (alpha testers only), I’d like to give a short summary especially with regards to performance and a possible Skype integration. There are quite a number of short intros to Astra already out there in the blogosphere - so I won’t bother you with the very basics…

The guys at the Studios mention the “Performance” as one of the key improvements to Trillian v3.1. And I have to say, that already in this alpha version they managed to keep their word. I’m running Astra on a 2 year old single core Pentium M running Vista w/ Aero. The new Astra is extremely reactive though looking deliciously fancy (transparency effects everywhere…)! I still can’t believe the numbers as well: running for the same time as an instance of Skype (v3.6), Trillian consumes about one third of the memory consumed by Skype (Trillian: ~10 MB, Skype: ~30 MB).
Moreover, the CPU time at similar usage of both of the messengers is also in favour of Trillian since it only uses less than half of the CPU time as Skype. And you need to keep in mind, that Trillian manages three IM services for me (ICQ, MSN and Yahoo) whereas Skype only goes for itself…

But in a way the point of this post is a different one: Astra looks extremely promising to me. It’s also a good thing that the basic concept (multi-IM with great look) remained almost unchanged since the old versions with a zero-dot-X version more than five years ago. But thing is though: There is one more major player in the field of instant messaging compared to 5 years ago, who has more than 10.000.000 active users and was bought for more than 3.3 billion US-$ some time ago.

I simply can’t believe how insistently people in official forums and even the Studios’ Bugzilla try to point people to Skyllian. This plugin has been catastrophic since its very early versions. The plugin is more than poorly supported and its usability is near absolute zero! Everybody recommending this poor piece of software can only be out of his mind or never even tried to access the plugin’s site which has been poorly accessible all over the time…

But it can’t be too difficult to grab the Skype API from http://developer.skype.com/ and build an official plugin that is actually working, can it? Are you an Astra alpha tester? Then vote for this in Bugzilla at bug #4572 and drop a line, please…

In my opinion, it is a massive mistake trying to ignore Skype from the Trillian point of view. You guys at Cerulean have the chance to build the first messenger alternative to the original Skype that is actually working. So, please go for it as part of the otherwise tremendously nice Astra!

P.S.: Check out my “Trillian Mini”:

We managed to hit the million in 2007…

(* about half of it has been crunched by disk- and headless machines running BOINCpe…)

(complete up-to-date stats)

I have to admit that it’s been a while since I published the last update to BOINCpe. However, the new version v0.5.0 now comes with an all new style adapted to the new design coming from Berkeley and some other new improvements. Hope you like it…

Additionally, the old scheduler used for the persistency service has been replaced with Gerhard Kalab’s cron. You can now easily modify the time when files are backed up to your network share. Please see the BOINCpe FAQ for further information on this.

Of course, BOINCpe includes the latest BOINC client v5.10.28. Download BOINCpe now…

BOINC undoubtedly had style since its early days. But rather in a scientific, maybe even inspiring way than in a visual way. Now check out this official new and - best of all - cool logo by Michal Krakowiak:

It happened only recently that projects like QMC@Home or entire BOINC-based frameworks such as Gridrepublic came up with stylish versions of the standard BOINC UI. Now, even the official site became kind of neat with a conservative but yet unobtrusively stylish look.
Also the useless but skinnable simple GUI variation available since BOINC v5.8 improves BOINC’s sweetness. And as a big fan of Trac I almost gave a party when BOINC development switched to use it as new platform for configuration and version management. Those guys even skinned it in a custom way! (which is remarkable… )

What I meant to say: functionality is crucial for a distributed computing application such as BOINC. But guys: if you want to make BOINC mainstream you simply have to make it look cool and make it work as it does.
BOINC lives and dies with its users. In times of fancy-looking Mac OS X and Vista you cannot afford losing users because of websites in late-90ies Frontpage-style and GUIs making you think you’re back in Win 3.1.

So folks in Berkely, even though this whole post sounds a little superficial (it’s meant to be ): get it on and get us some cute stuff.
(Ever thought of Ajaxification of the BOINC server software…)

A while back I started using v0.95 of the WordPress Picasa Viewer plugin by Dieter Leibold for this blog. However, the plugin had a couple of issues which I fixed. I tried contacting Dieter in order to publish the updated version on his site. Unfortunately, I did not receive any reply so far.

Therefore, I publish an updated version of the Wordpress Picasa XML Gallery Plugin with the following new features and bugfixes:

Installation

Please refer to the instructions taken from the original plugin site.

1. Copy WP-Picasa-Viewer.php (and view.php) to /wp-content/plugins
2. Activate the plugin using the admin interface
3. Create /wp-content/galleries/ and make sure it is readable by your web server (chmod 755, public read and execute permission)
4. Export a Picasa gallery using the XML template — Select the images you want and use the Folder->Export as Web Page menu item, but you can also right-click on a folder name in the folder view and choose “Make a Web Page”.
5. Upload the entire exported gallery directory to /wp-content/galleries/GalleryName/
6. Create a new post, or modify an existing one and add

   { gallery [GalleryName] }

   somewhere in it. (GalleryName is the name of the directory that you uploaded in the previous step)

Demo

See the latest version of script in action together with the Lightbox2 plugin on any of my photo posts. Here is a sample gallery of my trip to Ayers Rock, Australia:

Most of you may have noticed the fancy little galleries on my blog. Basically, these are the result of serious photo management using Google’s free tool Picasa. Since a weekend of traveling produces between 2 and 6 gigabytes of pictures, it needs a little more than simple put-them-in-a-folder-and-use-Windows-Picture-and-Fax-Viewer to keep track of all those beautiful pictures.

After having used Picasa2 for more than a year now, I believe I can definitely say what I think is great about it and what pretty much sucks when managing a massive amount of pictures.
Please don’t get me wrong. I still think Picasa is a great tool for photo archiving. Otherwise I wouldn’t be using it all the time. However, there are still some improvements possible that could make it a lot more comfortable.

10 Things I love about Picasa

1. Ease of use
   There are few tools that are as easy to use as Picasa. Many sophisticated features in few controls help to achieve this. For instance the constant-speed-scrolling-control helps you to let your mousewheel chill while admiring your photography skills. Simple, but great…
2. Fancy visual effects
   Every time I start Picasa, I once more fall in love with those awesome visual effects. It starts with the smooth scrolling through the thumbnails and ends with the very cool spinning star when starring a photo.
3. No originals are harmed
   Thanks to (proprietary) incremental storage of edits to an image no originals are harmed unless you want them to be changed. And even if you decide to persist the changes, the originals are still available.
4. Storage of the caption right inside the image file
   Picasa utilizes the non-proprietary IPTC standard to store the image’s caption (and keywords) directly in the JPEG file. Many other graphical editing software or online gallery tools are able to read these values (only Windows Explorer can’t )…
5. XML and plain HTML exports
   Simple and effective. The basis for my galleries inside of my blog posts. However, custom theming as well as support for semantically flavoured picture XML (some kind of RDF) with support for Geotags would be great.
6. One overview of all your pics
   Sounds incredibly trivial. But being able to scroll through all of your pictures is simply great.
7. Thumbnail caching
   Thanks to cached thumbnails, Picasa is really quick in displaying a fair amount of pictures on the screen. However, I’d love to be able to select the drive where the cached thumbnails are stored.
8. Locate on disk command
   Another one of those features that you probably start to miss if they disappeared for whatever reason… Only multi-selection of files would be nice to have in addition.
9. Nice looking histogram & camera information
   I got no idea why it’s the symbol of a propeller hat but the basic camera information hidden behind this button is quite useful if you want to find out who of your mates took this particular picture.
10. Comprehensive printing options
    The print contact sheet option in particular lets you print your favorite pictures on glossy paper very easily.

10 Things I hate about Picasa

1. Album labels are not stored inside the directories / No tagging support
   I tend to organize my pictures using the “albums” option. However, when moving the folder containing the pictures to my external harddrive or a network share, the albums are completely lost. This workaround describes a pretty bad way of moving labels between different machines requiring the path not to change.
   Honestly, I don’t understand this. The keyword feature in Picasa is somewhat redundant to albums. They are much more like tags and stored inside the JPG file. Why does the UI support for keywords suck like this? Come on guys, get us a cool tagging approach using the already implemented “keywords” with a nice UI. We know that you can do great UIs…
2. Some annoying UI bugs
   Occasionally, when deleting a picture the view changes to the last picture in the album. The Photo Tray sometime behaves unintuitively. The HTML Export is based on the selection and not the folder even though this is the name of the menu. Stuff like this…
3. Consolidated display of subdirectories
   Sometimes I’d wish to have the pictures of the subdirectories merged into the upper directory inside Picasa. Of course, one could do this with albums, but this pretty much isn’t very nice.
4. No dual monitor/multi screen support for slideshows
   Ever wanted to show some pictures on a party using a projector? There’s no way of getting Picasa to show the slideshow on the secondary monitor (the one without all icons on the desktop)…
5. Primitive folder manager
   It’s damn slow. The icons in the tree view sometimes do not correspond to the list of watched folders. Could be much better…
6. Issues with the export functionality
   • no support for PNG/GIF export (when originals have this format)
     This is especially interesting for screenshot management.
   • malformed XML in XML export
     Ampersands (&) in the path of a picture are not properly escaped
   • no quality options for HTML export and email export
     Why is it there for the normal export, but not for the other types of export?
7. Cached thumbnails of photos on removable media/network drives are not displayed when disconnected
   The entire photo collection seems to “shrink’ on disconnect of your external HDD or a network share. However, the nice thing is that the thumbnails remain cached. Would be nice to have the thumbnails and albums displayed partly transparent or something to at least be able to see what’s there…
8. Very rudimentary movie player
   There are no controls at all for starting, stopping, pausing, etc. of a movie clip.
9. No 5 star rating
   Wouldn’t an iTunes-like 5 star rating be much cooler than the simple starring of photos?
10. No full EXIF support
    Would be nice to have all EXIF values displayed. Ever wondered what your cam stores? Check out ExifTool…

Please note that all this stuff is based on v2.7 (Build 36.40) of Picasa.

Als Brillenträger gibt es beim Schnorcheln (wie bei so vielen Dingen) natürlich auch etliche Probleme. Doch auch mit meiner an Maulwürfe erinnernden Sehstärke wollte ich das Schnorchel-Erlebnis im Great Barrier Reef nicht verpassen. Natürlich war es aber keine Option, eine Taucherbrille mit Stärke zu kaufen. Und leider könnte ich bei -10 Dioptrien und einer fiesen Hornhautverkrümmung auch nur sehr teure Spezial-Kontaktlinsen tragen (die ich nicht habe).

Dank brillantem Erfindergeist und ingenieursmäßiger Umsetzung bin ich für knappe AU-$ 10,- doch noch in den Genuss des Schorchelns gekommen. In eine Taucherbrille hab ich direkt auf das Mittelstück mit Sekundenkleber einen kleinen Plastikhaken aus dem Baumarkt eingeklebt. Und das so herum, dass die Brille von unten in den Haken geschoben und somit nach oben hin gesichert wird. Nach unten sichern es die Nasenbügel auf der Nase.

Es muessen also lediglich die Seitenbügel abgeschraubt werden (das ist das einzig Knifflige am Strand) und die Brille einmal eingeklipst werden.
Ich habe nun schon 2 längere Schorchelgänge damit hinter mir und bin mehr als zufrieden.

Sorry fuer das (un-)huebsche Handtuch…

Vielen Dank auch an meinen Mitbewohner Chris, der die Idee mit mir zusammen entwickelt hat.

Many of you already mentioned that setting up BOINCpe is really easy with v0.4.0. With the latest version 0.4.1 it now becomes even easier. One of the previously 4 steps is now obsolete - remaining only 3 steps to set up a BOINCpe machine (thanks to the global_prefs_override.xml file).

Furthermore, BOINCpe now comes with the latest BOINC client v5.8.15 fixing several bugs of the previous version. Download it now…

Durch die starke Englisch-sprachige Frequentierung (in den letzten 2 Wochen nur noch 12% aus Deutschland) gibt es nun dank dem Polyglot Multilingual Plugin für Wordpress ein paar hübsche Landesflaggen zum Umschalten einiger Artikel.
Insbesondere wird aber auch die (meisten) Meta- und Navigationsbeschriftungen übersetzt…

Hi there,

just wanted to give you short notice of how impressed I am about BOINCpe spreading in the BOINC community even though this is the prototype of a niche product.
BOINCpe made it to the blog of Rom Walton (a lead developer of the BOINC client at Berkeley). There are about a dozen threads in the largest BOINC forums on BOINCpe (simply stress Google). Then, BOINCpe made it to the official BOINC news. And finally, someone (not me - I swear ;)) even put a link to the German Wikipedia article on BartPE.

That’s awesome! I really wasn’t expecting any of this. Just keep giving feedback, please. Thanks guys…

Anyway, I will provide a version with the new BOINC client v5.8.15 in the next days.

I’m happy to announce that I finally got the legal rights to make my project BOINCpe available to the entire BOINC community!

The latest version (v0.4.0) is available for download. Feel free to test it out. However, I will need some more days to finish the documentation…

Please read the details about the project at BOINCpe: Live-CD for BOINC.

Currently, we are using BOINCpe for about 7 crunching machines and everything runs smoothly.

Platial has a very cool feature called MapKit. With this you can add a map directly to your site or blog. However, the options for customization are still very limited. This is what it looks like originally.

Apart from the “advanced options” which are “coming soon”, there is a little hacky but simple way of customizing your mapkit in order to match your needs. Let me just recommend the great tool Firebug which is in fact a plugin for Mozilla Firefox. It was a big help in investigating the dynamic HTML structure constructed by the Platial JavaScript code.Essentially, this is the HTML code generated by the script “http://platial.com/mapkit/load?…”:

<div id=”platial_mapKit” style=”border: 2px solid rgb(81, 125, 218); padding: 0pt; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; width: 160px; min-width: 160px; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”>

<div id=”platial_mapContainer” style=”margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; position: relative; background-color: lightgrey;”>

<div id=”platial_widgetHeader” style=”border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(107, 148, 231); padding: 7px 0px 5px 10px; background-image: url(http://platial.com/images/top-gradient-blue.png); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-position: left center; font-family: arial,sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”>

<div id=”platial_maptitle” style=”text-align: left; margin-right: 2px;”>
…
</div>

</div>

<div id=”platial_mapimage” class=”platial_mapimage” style=”margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; height: 200px; font-size: 7pt; font-family: arial,sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); position: relative; background-color: rgb(229, 227, 223);”>
…
</div>

<div id=”platial_links” style=”border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); padding: 3px 0pt; background-image: url(http://platial.com/images/silversliver.png); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-position: left bottom; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); vertical-align: middle; position: relative;”>
…
</div>

<div id=”platial_itemDetail” style=”padding: 0pt 2px; z-index: 999; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); margin-right: 10px;”/>

</div>

As you can see, there is a set of divs having IDs. These IDs can be used in order to customize the appearance of the MapKit. Please note, that all style attributes are set directly in the tags (which is necessary when using dynamic code w/o further stylesheets). In the following, we will override these style attributes using CSS’ !important rules. This is a mechanism to override style attributes with a lower priority such as the ones locally defined in the MapKit.

Example #1: Removing the header line

In my case I wanted to get rid of the light blue header line including the map’s title “World Tour ‘07″. So what to do?

As explained above, we can do this using CSS. This is the code:

#platial_widgetHeader {
display: none !important;
}

Example #2: Removing the blue border and changing the width

Almost as simple as this is to change the default width of 160px for the sidebar version of the MapKit. It broke my sidebar since it has to be 150px at largest for this theme.

And of course, we would like to get rid of the annoying blue 2-pixel-wide border. Just include the following CSS statements into your stylesheet.

#platial_mapKit {
width: 150px !important;
min-width: 150px !important;
border: none !important;
}

You can see the result of the two examples in the sidebar of the main page.

Hint: Customizing multiple MapKits on one page

If you have multiple MapKits on a single page, then you might put a div with a unique ID around each of them and then format your CSS like this:

#mymapkit1 #platial_mapKit {
width: 300px !important;
min-width: 300px !important;
}

and

#mymapkit2 #platial_mapKit {
width: 150px !important;
min-width: 150px !important;
}