My résumé of BASTA conference 2013

Right now I’m on the train on my journey back from BASTA 2013. Time for a small résumé. Making it short: The BASTA conference was great. Especially of course meeting friends and colleagues you usually just see at conferences. It’s quite interesting to see some of the guys you know from other conferences like EKON or Delphi Live! that are now also here at BASTA (especially from tool vendors that have their origin in the Delphi space). Continue reading

I'm Speaking at EKON 17, too

Nick started the “I’m speaking at” campaign for EKON 17, and so I thought I’d team up and join him, not only on this campaign but also going to support his Unit-Testing session with some automation tips & tricks in my own CI session. I’m giving two sessions at EKON 17, 04. -06. November 2013 in Cologne: Both talks will be held in German, but since I keep my slides in english you should be able to follow, and I’m also happy to explain things in english when asked to do so. Continue reading

Why is everyone using Disqus?

Recently I discovered that more and more Blogs I visit start to use Disqus. And I don’t understand, why. As Tim Bray said: " Own your space on the Web, and pay for it. Extra effort, but otherwise you’re a sharecropper". I read it as this is not just about owning your own ‘real estate’ on the web, but also owning your content. There is a saying going through the net (I couldn’t discover the original source, but it’s quoted like hell out there): " If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product". Continue reading

Ask a Ninja: Is the "Googlevelopment" approach bad?

I stumbled upon a recent and very interesting blog post from Rick Strahl: " The Search Engine Developer". Rick in turn was motivated by a post from Scott Hanselman who asked " Am I really a developer or just a good googler?". That inspired me to write this post, too. Mostly because this topic has to do a lot with self-improvement, learning and attitude. What is it, what Ninja calls Googlevelopment? Continue reading

Scheduled downtime in September

My hosting service provider just informed me that my server will have a scheduled downtime next month. They need to physically move some machines into a new data center, and my (virtual) server Gallifrey is running on one of these. Of course in times of cloud and virtualization that should not be a reason for a downtime, but since I’m only paying 30€ / month for a 4 core, 4 GB RAM, 200 GB hdd virtual machine (to compare: a single azure small vm would cost twice as much), I think I am not in the position to complain. Continue reading

Horrendous cool software

Devices should work together. All devices. Also from different companies. They don’t. A good example is the feature ‘USB Tethering’: When I plug my iPhone in my Macbook it works. When I plug my iPhone in my Windows notebook, it works. When I plug my Google Nexus in my Windows notebook, it works. When I plug my Google Nexus in my Macbook Air… I’m screwed. I didn’t find a way to make it work. Continue reading

Re-activated my performance monitoring with Rackspace

In my last blog post about my Rackspace monitoring solution I described why I deactivated the performance tracking: I measured the wire and not my blogs performance. I was totally surprised that my post got an answer to that problem in three comments one and two days later. And those comments came from Rackspace employees. I never thought about contacting them about this. First of all, this was not on my high priority list and second, since I’m only using the cloud monitoring stuff for a dollar and a half per month, I never thought about bothering them with a request about that. Continue reading