Gerd’s Blog

Most people writing about books in the Web are linking to amazon.com nowadays. I like it because the reviews there give you some clue about the book and if it is worth buying it. The only problem is that I normally order my books on the German amazon website. To add an book to my wish list or at least to find it there I always had to copy the ISBN number, to open the German site and search there for the product. This was really anoying for me. Therefore i decided to write a small Greasemonkey script that adds an link to other amazon sites (at the moment only the german site) and shows me the price they offer the book there.

This is the first version and it is not looking very fancy at all but it works and saves me time. If you also want to use it you can download the version from my website.

I just mentioned that Google Reader got several new features. I was just trying them and mentioned some issues.

1. Notes
   I think this was a feature that had to be added to the reader. Not being able to add content links to your shared items feed that is not available in form of an RSS feed you subscribed was just annoying. On the other hand there was Google Share i just found about 2 weeks ago. You can do the same there just there is an other RSS feed your consumers had to subscribe to. With FriendFeed this wouldn’t be tat big problem but at the moment aggregation services are rarely used.
   On the other hand i read some posts that in my opinion interpreted Notes wrong. Maybe the name is misleading.
2. Adding comments while Sharing
   I like the feature but once again there are several issues. First of all the content is added of the original post. I wonder what useful services like AidRSS are doing with that. On the other hand the GUI for adding messages is far to small. you can just read two lines
3. Change shared item content
   I really think this is going too far. You as creator now can not be sure that the content you publish is shared in the same way. Maybe someone is just changing one word an the whole message get an totally different meaning. You even wouldn’t find the difference if you are not reading the whole message. I suggest most of the user want to get the original content. Now i have to check every shared item if it has the original content because there is no information that it was edited by the persons who shares it.
   I hope they rethink this feature because in my opinion it just brings confusion and distrust.

If you have shared an commented or edited Item there is no relation to the original post in your reader. So you can’t see while you browse the feeds which items had been shared.

I think some of the ideas relate to one of my older postings “Meta RSS Feeds sharing“.

I just fond the photo form 1921 in one of my news feeds and thought about some other pictures I saw about demonstrations in the past. Don’t get me wrong I don’t want to say that everything was better in the past.

Demonstration 1921:

Demonstration 2007:

© Timo Vogt / www.randbild.de

I wonder what has changed?

I Just read an very interesting comment in one of my colleagues Skype status message. It was written in german so here is the translation:

Live is like a bicycle, you have to ride the whole time, otherwise you will fall.

I wish i would have teachers or professors that are able to explain complex topics in an way like he does it. Once again an amazing presentation on TED.

I was playing around with the Java Web services Developer Pack and BPEL nearly the whole evening now and some stuff really drive me crazy. Dealing with all the different Namespaces and the strange handling of the NetBeans IDE. I can’t understand why you close an wizard and just print an error message if there where something wrong with the input. You have to change step to the whole Procedure again and again.
I have not developed much in Java for some time now and most of the stuff was just straight forward but today I found something really interesting. You can put Annotations on parameters of methods. I never saw that in C# but you can do it there too. There are some advantages to use this technique but - is this readable anymore?

I don’t think so. An other thing I really don’t understand is why you have to use the @WebParam Annotation with the name Attribute if you want to see a parameter name different to ( par1, par2, …) in your WSDL. I mean who on earth likes that generic form of information where you have to search an api documentation again or in my case where i develop the services in parallel to the Process switch back to the service implementation to see if the first Parameter is the Address or the Packages? No IDE or program that uses the WSDL will be able to give you this information back. Thanks

I was posting about the JAOO 2007 several time ago and would like to share an other experience i had there. On Monday I had lunch with Wayne Fenton from ebay where he explained their deployment strategy to me.

The concept they use is very easy but if you take a closer look it fits perfect into an agile website world. The whole strategy is based on the concept of trains. Trains are going every two weeks to the website and have only a couple of seats left. Think about seats in the manner of complexity which makes sense to reduce the complexity of the deployment to a oversee able amount. Every team can decide which train they would like to catch. If they have decided to take one, they have to ensure that every required QA is done until departure. If they can’t finish their work - there will be an other train in two weeks. After the train started it’s way to the website there is an other QA done before the deployment goes life to the portal.
Deployment is done in three Phases. First of all the Databases are updated if they need to. The second phase deploys the new version on the application servers. important here is that no new feature is enabled while the deployment. After all servers have the new version the system starts to enable the new features. It is important that for every deployment step there must be the possibility to role back to the old state.
With this strategy one server farm after the other is switched to the new version. Internationalized versions of their platform role out the new versions normally about one to two months later. In the end this results in nearly 24/7 deployment in the production environment. For me this strategy is really impressive and I would like to see such a deployment in real.

Yesterday I was out with two friends and we talked a lot about the computer industry. Of course on of the topics we discussed was the social web we are living at the moment. I mentioned that we have to maintain several profiles on the different social sites and that it would be nice to have just one centralized profile where you can decide which information goes to which channel. Of course Google did some step in this direction about two months ago when they introduced Open Social but for me the ’standard’ they introduced is far away form what we need. After some discussion we identified two main fields we need to have in the future to be able to maintain just one profile and distribute the information.

1. Authentication
   There need to be a mechanism for Single Sign on to different Social Sites. I mentioned OpenId some posts ago which would provide such functionality
2. Centralized Data Management
   At the moment User don’t care that there information is distributed over several Sites and Content providers but if you have to maintain more than one profile (e.g. you change your job or your hometown) things become difficult. First of all you don’t remember all the sites you signed up for but believe me some of your friends will and will complain that the couldn’t find the information that you have changed your job. On the other hand maintaining your profile is fare to much work (in my opinion).

An other important point for centralized data is that you can’t trust ever provider to take care of your data. And some have build up amazing profiles on websites they don’t want to loose. The amusing part here is that I read about this issues we discussed yesterday in an posting from Robert Scoble about ‘Facebook disabled my account‘. Of course they just disabled the account and he will get his profile back, I’m sure about it, but in the end there can be situations where you will not. The nice thing about it is that he point’s in his post to DataPortability.org an community that tries to use protocols and ’standards’ out there to give user the possibility to use an system I described above.

Let’s see what the future will bring, I am just tired to maintain my profiles:

Blog, Website, Xing, Google Profile, Facebook, StudiVZ, …..

I was reading the last blog entry form the Official Google Blog and was a little bit supprised what google is plaing now. They are trying to provide some knowledge base where user can contribute content and discuss it. I think this concept is not new and nearly eveyone knows a site wikipedia that tries to solfe this problem alrady and does it very well in my oppinion.
Google was growing very fast in the last decade and where they invest there is nearly no space for any competitor. Take Google Analytics as an example. Until now Google alway says don’t be evil and as far as we can see it they aren’t. Never the less this situation can change easily in the future. Exactly this situation is discussed very loudly in the community. Going into a direct competition with wikipedia isn’t a very good idea in my oppinion. Several people believe in the project and i would say love it. Just evil person try to “destroy” someone you love.

I was a big fan of google and it’s projects/services never the less I’m also sceptical about using some services. For example I never used Gmail as my primary mail system or Checkout the not so much known payment system they offer. I think they should not know everything about me. On the other hand i use the search history, analytics and several other services.

Our team is using the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for nearly 2 Years now and I have to admit that its handling still surprises me sometimes. The application we are developing uses the database heavily for some scenarios and last week we had to recognize that some concurrent situations take the Server into an undefined state. At the moment we are developing on an Vista 64-Bit but we had tested it on Windows XP too. The interesting part was that some machines run into some kind of endless locking on the database and some didn’t. We invested hours analyzing the situation, when the locking issue occurred but we couldn’t find the problem. We tried lock hints, optimizing the SQL  statements - all the stuff you can imagine but nothing worked out. In the end after several hours of searching through the web we found some Feedback in the MS Sql Server Connect site. I really like the term Feedback here - it does not speak about Bugs which most of them are. In the end it came out that the KB928365 Security Update for .NET Framework was the initiator of our problem. After de-installing it from the XP ad Windows 2003 Machines everything worked correct just on some Vista Machines we still have the same problems. The Security Update came out about 2 weeks ago so it was hard to find the problem - 2 weeks early everything worked correct.
Don’t get me wrong I like C# and the CLR and all the possibilities you have but in this situation you like self controlled environments where nobody other than you decide which version is used by you product.