October 2008 Archives

Since a couple years I'm hosting websites on a my own dedicated server. This gives a lot of freedom and flexibility, you can install whatever daemons you like, you have plenty of disk space and you can amortize some of the cost by hosting other (customer) sites on your server or even make a business this way.

What did I read this morning... Kensington locks don't work with the new MacBooks! Bummer. Could Apple really design the Kensington lock slot in a way that it doesn't fit a Kensington lock? I couldn't believe it, so I tried for myself:

It arrived here yesterday: The brick, aka Apple MacBook Aluminum or Unibody MacBook. I'm sure you've read about it somewhere. Isn't it amazing how much press this company gets when they introduce a new product? I mean in relation to their market share. But that's only surprising at first sight, because Apple has been and still is a pioneer when it comes to computers and user interfaces. Even if only few people buy Apple's products, they have a huge influence on other manufacturers' products.

Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel in 2006 was exciting in that their computers got a nice speed-bump and were more competitively priced. But it also made the computers somewhat more PC-like. Not that they got that bad, not at all, but some of the charme of the old times was lost. For example, ventilator noise or waiting for the system to wake up from (hibernation) sleep mode was something hardly known to Mac users until then. But they really made up for this with the great Mac OS X and the beautiful designs of their machines. But Macs and PCs are since then apparently easier to compare.

Since the competition is not sleeping, PCs have improved, too. It was time for Apple to come up with something to set themselves apart from the rest again, and the new Aluminum MacBooks are exactly that. Here's my review.

Here it is, my blog. Who would have thought this day would come. Since a while now I have been playing with the thought of starting a blog, but never did. Some things that have stopped me until now (and you might recognize some):

1. Not enough time
   I guess this is a common problem and I haven't found a solution for it yet, besides slowing down the rotation of the earth. That would make the days longer and probably add the missing hour to the day we need for blogging (or other things?). But in a time when everyone is so concerned about the well-being of our planet, this would be hard to get global consensus on.
   
   
2. Not sure which language to use
   I am German, so German is my mother tongue and it is the language I prefer for expressing myself. Even though there are over 100 million native German speakers (mostly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland), and probably also that many that have learned German as a foreign language, what is that compared to the 1000 million that speak English? The bigger your audience, the better, especially if the topics are of interest to anyone in the world. On the other hand, Germans would probably not read my blog if it was in English and if they can get similar information in their own language. What a dilemma!
   
   
3. Who's gonna care?
   Why should anyone read my blog? It's one in millions (even though most of them were started and then died after a couple of entries - is that gonna happen to me?).
   Can I make it interesting enough? Can I write well enough?

So then why did I start now? Good question and I'm still not really sure myself. But more and more often I have the urge to say my opinion, after reading certain news articles in the mass media, be they of technical or political nature. And more and more often I feel that I should share some information with others that might be useful to them.

The technical side of blogging was pretty clear to me since a couple of years, when I started developing my mobile blog client BlogPlanet. Believe it or not, I had this nice tool available to me and most of the time a state-of-the-art mobile phone, but didn't use it beyond test posts. As a publishing system I'll use MovableType, which I've always been a fan of, even if that goes against the global trend to Wordpress.

Even though I'm usually of few words, I'll try to be more verbose in my blog and I'll try to enjoy it. It might be a good compensation to coding. If I'm boring you, say so, the comments feature will be available. But of course I'll be very happy to receive your positive feedback as well.