So I went to our local electronics shop, which sucks regarding customer service, and – I wasn’t disappointed. After finding a responsible sales guy, this already took me two tries, he was okay-friendly and looked up the status of the headphones I wanted. Out of stock, for sure. Delivery data? Nobody knows. Awesome.

Next try: Austrian online shop of the retailer. MySQL error – 1045 : Access denied for user ‘atheas’@'localhost’ (using password: NO) (it’s still there, btw).

Ultimate try: Manufacturer’s website. Found my headphones, went to their online shop (which is on a different domain in a different web application, so I had to search for my headphones again, but that’s okay), put the headphones I wanted in the basket and clicked to checkout. Filling out my address data, I noticed that Austria wasn’t in their list of possible countries. Clearly an error, because they say they ship to the whole EU. Contacted their support stating my problem and got a reply within five minutes. Awesome. They fixed their website within some minutes, I proceeded my checkout process and was quite happy. Then I got the next email of their sales person, saying that the headphones I’ve ordered were out of stock and wouldn’t be available before end of March. Really seams that nobody wants my money.

I have to say that the sales person was really friendly and helpful – but still: How can you keep a product in your online shop and make active advertisement for it if it will not be available within the next three months? And regarding the local electronics shop: Why need I even pay for some guys who have no clue, are completely unfriendly and unhelpful?

Delicious really eased the thing and made it possible for us to quickly inform the other about new maritime products or interesting news, keeping the bookmark in a well-defined place at the same time. And now comes the interesting question: What should we do with documents from within our company? Of course there is the possibility to also store local paths within delicious (and make them private, so nobody else can see them), but the interface is of course not made for this (copying paths around is really not the thing I want to do).

Additionally, what about meta-information we want to store. Descriptions, comments and guidelines which have no place in a normal document, because they are either updated on a regular basis, should be accessible for everybody within our company and/or where maintaining a word document is not really appropriate and useful. Yeah, I know, the best thing would be a Wiki, and we actually have one within our company. But unfortunately it’s a Sharepoint wiki, which sucks completely. For sure, it integrates into our IT infrastructure just fine, but editing and maintaining your pages is horrible. Everybody can format their text as they like (I haven’t seen two pages with the same font, text size or color), attachment handling is even worse (scrolling through dozens of pages to get to your directory – fun!) and once you’ve pasted a linked to your page, you cannot edit the location, you can only delete it and define a new one.

Our current solution is to maintain an offsite-wiki which works for us pretty fine but has the disadvantage that it’s not integrated into our IT infrastructure, so for example users need to be added manually.

What’s your company’s solution to this problem? Where and how to you maintain information, bookmarks and documents? Is your company even aware of the fact, that it looses traction and money with non-existing information and knowledge management?

New year is just around the corner and traditionally it’s now the time to make resolutions for the new year. Well, here is one of mine: I will write more blog posts in 2009 and make this place a more vivid one. Part of this “initiative” will be some information about my current job and what I do (as far as I’m allowed to tell you about), some geekish – I recently got an iPhone and started developing Cocoa applications – and not so geekish things – purchasing a sewing machine and constructing some small furniture are other resolutions for 2010.

So, the first step into the right direction was changing my old blog theme (Tarski) to something new (Grid Focus by Derek Punsalan), spicing it up with some Flickr and delicious badges, and, of course, adding some fancy social media icons. I also updated Wordpress to the newest version and noticed that installing plugins and themes is now a lot easier than it was last year, thanks to the plugin and theme directory. No need to ftp’ or ssh’ to your server, just click and install. Nice.

Unfortunately this code will not work for WPF (and I doubt that it will even work for Silverlight, considering the strange GetCapabilities parsing and the missing formatter information when parsing floating values). Anyway, I had some time at work and fixed the code for WMS version 1.1.1 and 1.3.0 (I didn’t test other versions, but will do so along the way to some fancy, internal prototype).

Have a look at the code on Github.

But: Couldn’t Google, the great data and information cruncher, tell me which items are of greater interest to me than others? I starred some 100 items so it should be fairly easy for them to find a general pattern. Would you do that for me, Google?

What do you do with more than 25 gigabyte of compressed AIS data? You play around with it, load it into databases (and wait over a day for an index to get generated), do some funky .kmz files or you generate heatmaps, like this one to the right.

It shows AIS traffic for the UK and northern Europe during 24 hours. You can clearly see the high traffic zones. The original algorithm is not by me (and unfortunately the whole code is in the office, so the attribution will follow tomorrow) but I tweaked it a little bit.

The whole thing is quite memory consuming (the original rendering size was 4000×2000 pixels) and at the moment the .NET Garbage Collector and I are not a good team. I would re-implement it in C (maybe even with proj4 support?) but I first need to read about some drawing algorithms.

• Take more photos
  No. In fact I think I took even less photos than in 2007. But I’m looking forward to spring and some holidays!
• Launch at least the two projects I’m working on
  No, although I invested some time into some pretty cool thing, it never went live. But I will restart it in 2009.
• Spend a few days at the seaside with my girlfriend
  No, space for improvements.
• Get my degree
  Yes, with distinction.
• Spend a weekend in at least one European capital
  Only one capital and no weekend, but I’ve been to Madrid, Hamburg and Bergen.
• Move to Vienna
  Yes.
• Go to the theatre, at least once twice
  No, not a single time. Shame on me.
• Go running, two times a week minimum
  Went running quite often during the summer (4 to 5 times a week) but only once a week or two since I’m living in Vienna.
• Get a job (in the web industry)
  Not in the web industry, but a cool job.
• Plant herbs
  Not until now but will do it tomorrow.
• Do a painting together with my girlfriend
  There are still three days left, right?
• Contribute to some Open Source projects
  If two lame bugfixes count, then yes.
• Learn another programming language
  Got pretty fluent in Python, yes.
• Learn Cocoa
  No.
• Find a flat without a pre-installed kitchen
  No, the kitchen was pre-installed, but is nevertheless quite cool.
• Learn Swedish again
  No.
• Spend more time cooking and baking
  Yes, your own flat really helps!
• Watch ARTE more often (or quit my subscription)
  No, but I won’t quit my subscription.

Is there any reason why Google names Vienna, the captial of Austria, Vienne? May I suggest an adjustment?

So I ordered that 24 inch Samsung monitor a few weeks ago. Amazon said that they shipped it but never arrived here. I called the Austrian Post, which is the contractor for Amazon here in Austria. A lady told me that the monitor was received at my place last Thursday.

Well, the only problem is that I wasn’t at home last Thursday because I was on a business trip in Hamburg. After some calls to Amazon and the Post it was pretty clear to me that they gave the parcel to some stranger and I will most likely never see it again (they even told me that it’s not the job of the Austrian Post to look for parcels they did not deliver to the correct address because they simple refuse to admit that I did not get the monitor).

The whole thing is now at Amazon again, they’ve sent me a new monitor which is at the post office right now and which I will pick up tomorrow (just to make sure that it’s really there, I wanted to check the Tracking & Tracing status of the parcel and I got this nice looking error message at the right: “The creator of this fault did not specify a regionreason”).