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Pay-TV hat seinen festen Platz unter den Fußball-Fans in Deutschland. Wenn dann jedoch die Pay-TV Betreiber anfangen, das reine Fußball-Interesse auszunutzen um dem Kunden überteure Bundles mit dem Heimatkanal aufzuzwingen, kann einem Fußball-Fan schnell der Spaß vergehen…

Die Aktion “Wir wollen nur Fußball”, ins Leben gerufen von den Machern der Sandkastenliga, versucht genau dagegen etwas zu tun. Für die Petition gegen den Fernsehsender Sky benötigt er auch eure Stimme. Also bitte schaut dort vorbei…

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”:

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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…)

Auch wenn ich mit dem günstigen Hosting Paket von HostEurope im Grunde sehr zufrieden bin, gibt es ein kleines Manko: Es gibt im KIS keinen Zugriff via WebFTP…

Da ich aber hier im Office hinter einer sehr restriktiven Firewall sitze, kann ich wirklich nur per HTTP meine Dateien auf den Webspace laden. Was also tun? Die Lösung liegt eigentlich sehr nahe: einen eigenen WebFTP Client innerhalb des Webspaces installieren und per SSL-Proxy darüber Dateien hochladen.

So weit so einfach – glaubt man zumindest. Allerdings ist das Angebot an (Open Source) WebFTP-Clients erschlagend. An vielen der Projekte ist die letzte Änderung ein paar Jahre her. Die besser aussehenden Clients sollen meist etwas (wenn auch nicht viel) kosten.
Wenn man auch noch eine Funktion zum ZIP-Upload von vielen kleinen Dateien haben möchte, bleibt einem fast nichts anderes übrig als zu einem der kommerziellen Clients zu greifen. Ich war auch schon kurz davor, einen davon zu kaufen als ich auf net2ftp gestossen bin.

Auf PHP basierend bringt net2ftp alles an Features mit was man benötigt (sogar die genannte UnZIP-Funktion). Es läuft ohne Einschränkung in der WebPack-Umgebung von Host Europe. Einzige Einschränkung ist die maximale Dateigrösse von 8 MB für den Upload.

Ich habe das Gefühl, dass das doch recht aktive Projekt von net2ftp nicht sonderlich bekannt ist. Ich kann es jedoch nur jedem weiterempfehlen. Zwischenzeitlich hatte ich noch 2 andere freie WebFTP-Lösungen installiert und net2ftp schlägt diese um Längen.

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.

Nachdem der Kommentarspam in meinem Blog in den letzten Wochen stetig zugenommen hat, war es an der Zeit etwas mehr zu tun. Dank einem aktuellen Google PageRank von 5 für unseren Blog ist der tägliche Spam auf weit über 200 Spam-Kommentare pro Tag angewachsen.

Wie bereits erläutert, schafft es Akismet recht gut die Kommentare zu filtern. Allerdings habe ich mir angewöhnt trotzdem noch einmal durch die Spam-Kommentare durchzuschauen um die wenigen aber fiesen False Positives zu retten. Weiterhin ist es in der letzten Woche vermehrt aufgetreten, dass Spam nicht immer zuverlässig erkannt wurde. Um dem wiederum resultierenden Email-Spam an meine Adresse Herr zu werden war klar, dass eine weitere Hürde fuer die Spammer her muss. Zuerst dachte ich da logischerweise an Captcha. Weil das aber nicht wirklich elegant ist, hab ich noch etwas gesucht und eine Alternative gefunden: WP Hashcash.

Da steckt ein schlaues Prinzip hinter: ein kleines JavaScript lädt beim Abschicken eines Kommentars dynamisch einen verschlüsselten Hashwert nach (AJAX). Der Hashwert wird lokal durch Javascript entschlüsselt und im Form mitgeschickt. Nur wenn die Werte passen, wird ein Kommentar akzeptiert. Und das Beste: Es ist für die Benutzer völlig transparent!

Warum funktioniert das? Weil Spambots in den wenigsten Fällen eine JavaScript-Engine implementieren und somit den Wert nicht berechnen können. Alle gängigen Browser können das aber natürlich und machen es im Hintergrund. Die ursprüngliche Idee hinter Hashcash basiert übrigens auf den Kosten für die Berechnung auf Seiten des Spammers. Nicht zwangsläufig auf der Annahme, dass keine JS-Engine vorhanden ist…

Anscheinend gibt es aber doch schon ein paar Spammer, die auch das umgehen können. Knappe 20 Spam-Kommentare kommen nämlich pro Tag immernoch durch. Aber solange es vorerst in dem Rahmen bleibt, bin ich sehr zufrieden. Die zwei Schichten aus WP Hashcash sowie Akismet scheinen also für den Moment recht effektiv zu sein.

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