Parallax Living Blog

It took a loooooog time. But I'm finally bringing my little blog back to life. As a first step I've finally found the time to upgrade to the last version of Confluence, and moved the virtual server away from my old employeer. (Thanks for the hosting local.ch, btw!)

While Confluence is not the perfect solution for a personal blog, it's still my favorite choice since I'm also working a lot with it on my job. The RSS Feeds are a bit of a mess, since they also show up diffs of the changes. Hey, it's a Wiki after all, but I'm working on a solution for this. Stay tuned.

The 10 Users for $10 Starter Licenses that Atlassian is offering are a great value. You should consider them if you want to start your own wiki or blog. I'm pondering a private Jira instance for my shopping lists and other mundane task. Hey, how about investing another 10 bucks for Greenhopper? Agile Lifestyle with Greenhopper? Two week sprints and all that? Pig or Chicken? Okay, that would be a *bit* over engineered

Getting the visual voicemail to work can be tricky. It usually means you have to call your provider, in my case Swisscom, and ask them to convert your combox to a Visual Voicemail combox.

Once this hurle is taken, and you can access your VoiceMail, you still need to setup your iPhone to actually forward call to the voicemail. Again tricky. There is afaik no graphical user interface to this. You have to use the GSM codes.

Here is the cheat-sheet from Swisscom:

Didn't get that? Let me run you through an example:

1. Click on "Phone" on your iPhone
2. Click "Keypad"
3. Enter the following number **61*+4186xxxxxxxxxx# (replace xxxxxxxxxx with your mobile phone number. e.g. 0791234567
4. Click on "Call"
5. You will get a large status message back, telling you what services (voice, data etc.) will be forwared if are not answering.

Now you can test it. Call your number from another phone, don't answer for 20 seconds, and the caller should get your voicemail.

To see the current status, call *#61#
To disable the forwarding, call #61#
To re-enable the forwarding to the same voicemail, call *61#
To disable the forwaring, and forget the number, call ##61#

Now you can repeat the exact same thing for "On Busy" or "Off/Unreachable". Just replace 61 with 62 or 67.
This works for Swisscom, but since these are standard GSM codes, it should work for any GSM service.

Btw: If you've setup the "Busy" forwarding, then if you get a call, and don't want to answer it right now, just click on the red "Decline" button on your iPhone. The caller will then get the chance to leave a message on your voicemail.

Enjoy.

Was machen die bei local.ch eigentlich so den ganzen Tag? Wie wird der Inhalt eine Suchabfrage zusammengetragen?
Dieser Film erklärt all dies und noch einiges mehr:

Genial, was? Wenn du uns also rumhetzen willst, dann einfach auf www.local.ch gehen und ein paar Suchabfragen starten

In the laptop market Solid State Drives (What?) are all the rage this year. They have been around for some time already, but only the announcement of products like the Apple MacBook Air or the Lenovo Thinkpad X300 might have put them onto the radar of a broader public.

Simply put a SSD is a big flash card, that replaces your traditional disc drive. It's similar to the technology you might already use in your digital cameras, music players and mobile phones.

The marketing speak goes like this:

Use less power: increase battery time of your notebook
Cool: generates less head, reduces noise level of your notebook
Silent: No moving parts, no noise, further reducing the noiselevel of your notebook
Enduring: No moving parts means that it is very unlikely that a dropped notebook cause a data loss, etc.
Fast: faster boot times, and generally improved working expiriance
Capacity: A feasible SSD is at 32 or 64 GB, traditional notebook drives are at 300 GB
Price: F@*ing expensive, a 64 GB SSD is above a $1000

Now you might look at the steep price and think: But all those advantages might be worth the high price, right?

Nope, because the for Speed is actually more of a . Here is a snippet from a recent Dell Blog Post:
Performance - most first generation SSDs perform near 5,400 RPM drive levels

Ouch... Dell is saying that SSD's are about as fast as one of the slower models of the traditional drives.

Ars technica seems to second that finding, by comparing a SSD and a HDD model of a MacBook Air SSD:
I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences

But the Dell Blog post has good news. The second generation of SSD will change the performance situation.

Our labs benchmarked this [new] drive in a Latitude notebook and saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase over a standard 2.5-inch 5400rpm notebook hard drive using SYSmark 07. That's even more impressive when you realize that the difference between standard 5400 rpm and performance 7200rpm drives (in the same generation) is 10 percent on average. And just for fun, we did a shootout between the new SSD and a few desktop drives and, well, let's just say that the performance gap is becoming a thing of the past. Preliminary tests showed that this drive outperformed a 10,000 RPM desktop drive in overall system performance

That is good news, especially, because of the next bit:

Now you're thinking... "Great, but how can anyone possibly pay more for these ultra performance SSDs than current ones?" That's the best part, the drive got a lot smarter, not a lot more expensive. Dell and Samsung engineers optimized the way data is handled and drastically improved performance to an "awe-worthy" level without adding much more cost to the drive.

Mind you, this is Dell speaking, and Dell wants to sell some of those drives to you in the near future. So big pinches of salt needs to be applied here. But the basic bottom line is this:

Don't spend your hard earned cash for one of those ultra expensive notebook with SSD's right now. Hold out a few months, until the second generation SSD become widely available, and hopefully the prices get a bit more affordable.

Links:

Direct2Dell: Improved SSD Performance Coming Soon
ars technica: No spin: Ars reviews the MacBook Air with solid state drive

Some years ago I saved some DV tapes from being thrown into the trash. This year I used lots of those tapes again for all the 4 wedding I had to attend. While capturing those weddings videos from those tapes, I also found this little gem by pure chance:

Some of the old Obtree folks might remember this one. The Obtree CEO showed this at the Obtree Kick-off (or shall we call it turn-around) event in 2002.

I'm using Vista now for quite some time, and I'm actually happy with it. It's all shiny and sparkly with its new Aero theme.
But then, sometimes you stumble upon some GUI components that may have the fancy transparent border and the cool shadow, but the content of the windows hasn't changed a single bit since at least Windows 3.0

So here it is, the Windows Vista Font Dialog:

Can't make it to this years Buenzli party in person?

Don't be sad, you can still be part of the action. Just tune in to http://www.demoscene.tv/.
They will cover the whole duration of the party with a live feed.

Are you using Swisscom Unlimited on Windows XP?
Do you know the following message?

Well, then you know that this message is a real pain. Once you are seeing this, for example during a train ride, then the Data Manager will longer be able to create a new connection. It will try endlessly, but will always fail, and hence drive the user utterly mad.

I did some investigation into this, and found a possible workarround.

Whenever you see the evil redial message, just execute the following lines:

@net stop "UDM Service"
@net start "UDM Service"
@start "UDM" "C:\Program Files\Swisscom Mobile\Unlimited Data Manager\GuiDashboard.exe"

The path in the last line might be different on your system of course.

Once the service is restared, your should again be able to connect.
Tip: You can configure the UDM to automatically connect on startup. I even went as far as to disable the PIN on my SIM Card. (Do this at your own risk). Now, if I execute the script, the UDM goes away, shows up again, and connects automatically.

Buenzli 16 takes place August 17/18/19 as usual in Winterthur.
(Can it be true, is this really the 16th Buenzli? I'm gettig old indeed)

I could now write a lot about why you should consider to attend this years Buenzli Demoscene party. But our little Invitation Intro just do a much better job.
If you own a Windows PC, have a go, and watch it. You can get it here

In any case, make sure you visit our gorgeous website at http://www.buenz.li for more info.

But what the heck is a demoscene party???

Well, why don't you look it up on Wikipedia. Heck, even the Buenzli Party has an Wikipedia page.
Too lazy to read? Well, here is a good movie about the demoscene. (it's in german):

But when should I visit the Buenzli?

The Buenzli party takes 2 1/2 days. But of course it's totally fine if you just visit us for a couple hours. There is a reduced entrance fee for short time visitors.
Make sure to check out the timetable to plan your visit. I personally recommend you to start your visit on Saturday at around 17:30. This way you can enjoy (or compete in) the now famous Overhead Project Competition.

See your there

Thanks to Chicken for his invitation for this years Firework show on his balcony. And thanks to Diana for the nice dessert!
This year the Basel Firework Folks really went all the way and had two boats that launched two fireworks at the same time.

Here is a short sequence:

Hint: Wait for the end of the sequence for a funny comment from Axel

I'm currently in the market for a new video editing software. While toying with some trial versions I stumbled upon some old footage of myself cooking a pumpkin soup for some friends of mine.

Well, the footage is looong and rather boring, but thanks to the time streching function, that can be changed
So here is a pumpkin soup how-to on speed:

This weekend Dorian is getting married. Of course we had to organize him a proper stag night, or as it's called in Switzerland a "Polterabend".

Here's a short, rough video about that:

Thanks to Patrick who did go a great lengths to organize this event!

This summer we'll have FOUR weddings at local.ch, and I plan to attend all four of them.

Sylvain and Beatrice start the series, with a very lovely day in Jougne.

Sylvain btw. is responsible at local.ch for most of the back-end functionality of the market space, and as well for all the goodness that is in our association engine.

Here is a rough cut of some of the footage I took.

Congratulations, Sylvain et Beatrice!