Outside

Does anybody know where I can get Sharpie markers in Vienna?

I’m asking because I’ve seen this photo on Flickr yesterday and he’s using a Sharpie Extra Fine Point Marker. It might be a marker I really enjoy (how strange sounds that!?)

I tend to bookmark tons and tons of links on del.icio.us but hardly read them.

Kernel Boot Process
Diary of a failed Startup
Who needs a Computer Science Degree when there’s Wikipedia
Programmer Insecurity
Metaclass Programming in Python

I just did some research with Google Finance. Some facts:

• Did you know that if you would have bought shares from Yahoo at the beginning of 1997 and sold them at the end of 1999, your gain in investment would have been about 13.000%? Even after the year 2000, you would still have a again of 700-1.000%.

• Apple (and about the same for Google): Beginning of 2005 till now: +400%

• Microsoft: 1986 - 2000: +55.000% (okay, that’s lame, 14 years).

Any tips for the next big thing?

When I got my MacBook back in November I initially wanted to buy a license key for iWork. Unfortunately that was not possible back then for Apple IDs registered in Austria (don’t know about other countries in Europe). I called the Apple hotline and the woman told me that she has several requests every week for an online registration but it’s not possible at the moment to do that.

Today I prepared a presentation for some parallel programming lecture I will be giving tomorrow and when I fired up Keynote I discovered that it wasn’t registered. I could remember that it was not possible in November but gave it another try. And, voila, it worked! Cost me some bucks but so far it really paid off.

So Flickr got video. Wait a second… Flickr? Video? Shouldn’t Flickr be just for photos?

Well, for me Flickr is Beauty. Beauty, because there are so many people who are sharing the best and most beautiful moments of their lives with thousand of others. (Whatever beauty is for each individual in detail, I say that everyone will find his own definition of beauty on Flickr.)

Photos are Beauty. But videos can be Beauty, too. I’m not talking about those ordinary YouTube clips (and for me, personally, I’m not talking about everyday photos you can find on Flickr, even some of my pictures are just bog-standard) but about special moments in the lives of people. Seconds of their life which have a special meaning because they are just beautiful.

So video on Flickr might be a good thing, to add another piece of beauty to the lives of all of us.

Opening .pdf files in Safari doesn’t block the machine, nor does Safari complain when I want to close the tab (have you ever opened a pdf on Windows in your browser? You can be lucky when you haven’t installed the full Adobe suite and it blocks your machine for several seconds).

Removing .NET Framework 2.0-3.5 because some software can’t deal with it-experience

Uninstalling the unwanted versions via Add/Remove Programs does not work. Searching the web for some uninstall tool, found some MSDN blog. Downloading the tool, selecting the unwanted frameworks, rebooting. Explaining the guy behind me that it’s okay that there’s an error message popping up every second. Re-installing the not-removed .NET Framework, working.

Updating OS X to version 10.5.2-experience

Starting Software-Update, waiting for the download to be finished, rebooting, done.

Their mailing list finally returns, well, at least an error:

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 16): 550 Denied by policy

Tested with my dreamhost and gmail account. WTF? Is it so hard to get your mailing list working correctly? I wrote the first email to their support on December 6th, they are friendly, but seem to be completely incompetent helpless.

How do you know it’s election time? Election time = poster time!

Most of those posters are pretty lame and they do not bother me. But some really make me think. Is it really useful to tell the people that climate protection looks different? Or that democracy looks different? We all know that driving to our place of work in a car is not climate protection and being stuck in a traffic jam isn’t either.

But what is the alternative? Telling people to boost public transport is fine, but how? Talking about a prohibition of SUVs in Vienna’s inner districts is fine but kind of the wrong signal for workers in Graz, who are manufacturing SUVs to pay for the lives of their families.

McAfee is still not able to opt me out from their Avert Dat Release Mailing list. I wrote the first email to their customer support on the 6th of December, nearly one month ago.