Raphael Schiller

Windows Vista will be available to the general public starting of tomorrow (2007-01-30). I (early adopter ;)) got my copy from Amazon.de last Tuesday, seems as if they were shipping it a bit early. Good for me

Ok, so far, so good. Vista’s really a great experience, at least concerning the UI. But what happens if you want to connect to an ordinary webdav folder like you did it a thousand times without any problems on XP?

Well, not very much. It won’t work, at least on my Home Premium. It just aborts with an error message. However, it’s possible to connect to a webdav drive, you just have to know how:

Following are the steps an experienced XP user would expect (and which don’t work):

1. Go to “Add a Network Location…” (you have to press ALT on Vista’s Explorer in order to find it! Yeah, I searched, too…)
2. “Choose a custom network location”
3. In “Specify the location of your website: ” you’d enter something like “https://mywebdav.server/dav”
4. “Connect”
5. You get the error message: “The folder you entered does not appear to be
   valid. Please choose another.”

Great. Same process on XP works like a charm. So what to do:

1. Go to “Add a Network Location…”
2. Insert your webdav ressource in the following format: “\\mywebdav.server@SSL\dav“, insert (if applicable) your username by “Connect using a different username” - and now, your shared folder should appear

Well, we’ve just done a Wordpress upgrade from 2.07 to 2.1 (Ella). As it seems it wasn’t as straightforward as we thought because all written pages are gone now…

Update: Wordpress included upgrade script did obviously convert all pages to posts…switched it back and everything’s ok again

Heute morgen, als ich nach dem Aufwachen aus dem Fenster geschaut habe, schlug mein Herz höher! Endlich Winter (im Sinne von “endlich Schnee”)!

Lange genug habe ich darauf gewartet. Und ja, ich liebe Winter, zumindest immer eine Zeit lang. Auch, wenn es bedeutet, Schnee zu räumen (was mich gleich eine halbe Stunde beschäftigt hat heute)
Habe mich so gefreut, dass ich gleich ein paar Fotos geschossen habe…

Hoffentlich bleibt der Schnee jetzt ein bisschen liegen!

A few days ago a friend of mine posted about a new beta service called Zweitgeist, which enables you to see people who are on the same webpage like yourself. Those people are shown as little avatars right to the bottom of the page you are actually reading. And they aren’t only shown, you can even “talk” to one another.

While being on a megasite like Google’s, the benefit of such a service isn’t too obvious to me because people aren’t on this site because of a similar reason (ok, they want to search, but there’s usually no common subject). On the other hand if I’m browsing on a more specialized site on the net it could be very interesting to virtually meet those other people because they have something in common: a subject/interest/intention, whatever the site is about. And that’s the value of such services: get to know people which are looking for the same kind of information at the same time like you are!

While the concept of making people on same websites visible to one another isn’t entirely new (odigo offered a comparable service about six to eight years ago), these times of Web 2.0 those business models look significantly more promising because of all the public focus on “social content”.

Me.dium is a start-up which offers exactly that kind of functionality to its users. However, compared to Zweitgeist it doesn’t show other users right in your browser by showing fancy little avatars (which imho could be pretty annoying on the long run) but in a sidebar, so it’s completely unobtrusive. Further advantages of the sidebar implementation: messages you post on a certain webpage to other visitors aren’t distributed all around the bottom of your browsing screen but chronologically sorted in one place. Me.dium’s service is based on the xmpp protocol stack (that’s the same that Jabber IMs like Google Talk are built on), so you can not only use it as a website meeting place, you can even use it as instant messenger with your friends (which you could have met on any page ). And even better: you get the best of two worlds: you can see, which pages your friends are actually on.

Unfortunately Me.dium users aren’t able to message users of other jabber networks right now, but because of the xmpp protocol that should be only a matter of time.

At the moment, Me.dium still is in closed beta with not too much users on other websites, but they are slowly opening up: here’s a special link where you can easily sign-up.

See you @ Me.dium

DeltaCopy - Rsync for Windows

“What is DeltaCopy
In general terms, DeltaCopy is an open source, fast incremental backup program. Let’s say you have to backup one file that is 500 MB every night. A normal file copy would copy the entire file even if a few bytes have changed. DeltaCopy, on the other hand, would only copy the part of file that has actually been modified. This reduces the data transfer to just a small fraction of 500 MB saving time and network bandwidth.

In technical terms, DeltaCopy is a “Windows Friendly” wrapper around the Rsync program, currently maintained by Wayne Davison. “rsync” is primarily designed for Unix/Linux/BSD systems. Although ports are available for Windows, they typically require downloading Cygwin libraries and manual configuration.”

source: http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

As I’m developing some kind of web application, using cascading style sheets (css) is a must. On my research for the syntax of a certain expression, I stumbled upon a nice CSS Cheat Sheet which certainly can be of some use for those of you who are like me

CSS Cheat Sheet