I very much like the german word Tagewerk – it’s a bit of an oldfashioned word (of course that’s why I like it) that literally translates to “a days work”. What it actually means is a man-day, or a billable day, and opposed to that other kind of day (chronological) it has only eight hours, which means that a freelancer like me can work a couple of days per day, provided he doesn’t attach great importance to mundane things like e.g. sleeping, eating or generally recreating.
I worked a number of Tagewerke over the weekend, and the coming week isn’t going to be much better (so still no merge feature for the place here module, I’m too busy). If you have asked a question about the module and haven’t received an answer yet you better ask again, chances are that I forgot about it.
As you may have noticed, especially if you’ve sent a support request, things are currently going slowly here – I lag behind in answerings questions (this concerns, among other things, the reported problem with recent versions of Joomfish) and the 1.5 version of the module is still not feature complete.
Thing is, I’m not only swamped in work (that would be nothing new), I’m also caught in one of the nastiest traps for programmers – I work against a spec that does not actually make sense, so I have to try to mangle sense into the chaos by careful interpretation. That means I’m working or four or five hours, call the client to look at my work and spend the next four or five hours tearing everything down again. This is the kind of job I usually try to avoid, because even if they wanted to none of my clients could actually afford to put me through this kind of ordeal. But sometimes I have to put other things into consideration apart from money; even a one man shop sometimes needs to employ a certain degree of diplomacy.
Still, this means that at the moment I’m both overworked and underpaid, and this is not a good prerequisite to gather motivation for open source programming. Plus the modules mostly work, so there is no need for immediate intervention. I think (I hope!) that by the middle of the next week the worst will be over and I can get back to do a bit module developement.
I’m a science fiction fan with a lot of surplus education (you don’t exactly need a background in social sciences to build websites), and sometimes I like to share my – well, it’s not really “wit”; I’m not a clever person, it’s just that I’m quite perseverant when I get interested in something. So when people let me I enjoy to share what I found out in my studies by doing public talks at smaller SciFi Cons. I just have received word that the funding for another such event has been approved, and I will talk about the way apocalyptical scenarios have been utilized over the years in SciFi-Novels to advance certain ideological points – working title is Das Ende der Welt im Wandel der Zeit (The End of the World in the Course of Time). The event will take place in December 2008, so there is plenty of time for me to prepare and who knows, maybe there will be stuff for a few blog posts.
Today I was renting “Transformers” on DVD – I managed to watch about half the movie before I gave up. It’s not that I haven’t been warned – after all it said “A Michael Bay Movie” on the box and frankly, when it says “ACME” on the parachute you don’t expect a soft landing, do you. I really liked the fancy CGI work, but the coming-of-age and first-love stuff managed to bore me and annoy me at the same time (not even to mention what was probably supposed to be comic relief). I have never been particularly interested in juvenile romance (that is other than that I’ve been a juvenile romantic at an earlier point in my life, but that wasn’t part of any movie I know of) but like most genre fans I could easily put up with bad SciFi movies, if only because there are so few good ones. Not anymore, it would seem.
A few weeks now and I will be thirty-eight. I have no children of my own, but a couple of nieces and nephews. The oldest one is eighteen by now and does not seriously believe the world existed before there was an internet. He liked “Transformers” – except for the romance parts obviously, but he was easily able to ignore that. I envy him for that.
On the other hand I have 20 years more education and experience, my own job, my own money and most of my pimples have cleared up. I might not be able to enjoy a kids movie, but other than that going on forty beats being young all the time.
I will be away from Dec. 21 to Dec. 28. I will stay in a very rural (shudder) area of Brandenburg with no internet connection, so there will be no posts, updates and bugfixes during that time and I won’t be able to moderate or approve any comments. Unfortunatley this means I won’t be able to clear my backlog in the FAQ-Section. However I will at least try to respond to those who sent me Emails about the Content Item Module and to whom I have already promised an answer.
This afternoon it wasn’t raining for a change, so I brought out the motorbike for a quick ride around the block. That proved to be so much fun that I went for a rather larger tour – which meant that I had all the wrong clothes, since it was several degrees centigrade below zero. When I came back home I was frozen blue, but it was worth it.
Brandenburg is not the best country to ride a motorbike – it can largely be described by the words “flat” (the country) and “straight” (the streets) and sometimes I find I miss the hills and small curved streets of southern Germany. But autumn in Brandenburg has it’s own kind of beauty, what whith the scarce landscape and the trees that extend their leaveless branches to the sky. And the autumn sun is fair and golden, even if it doesn’t warm you.
I suppose fun motorbiking is somewhat evil – I contribute to global warming and I do not even have the excuse that I urgently need to go somewhere. But man, do I feel alive now.
Occasionally I go and look what Google Analytics tells me about my visitors. I assume that people who come are mostly people who built websites (since most people look for the Joomla stuff) and thus put somewhat more thought into choosing the software they use (like in using software that helps with web developement), but I was still amazed by the browser stats. From the (on average) 115 people who, according to Google, use this site daily a staggering 66% use Firefox, as opposed to 28% that use Internet Explorer.
And only 0,65% use a screen resolution of less than 1024*768 pixels, but 71% use a resolution of 1280*768 or better. So is the small screen finally dead or is this also a web developer thing (as programmers usually have better tools) ? And don’t tell me about handheld devices – a regular webpage looks like crap on 2,5″ screen, especially if the browser uses the regular screen CSS and you can’t do anything clever with your CSS to adapt your page to the retarded screen size. So I maintain my opinion that you need separate pages with separate URLS for handheld devices, which can still be powered by the same Database and serverside Scripts, so not much harm done. If anybody can prove me wrong please do so (but do not use the iPhone as an example which, according to the TV ads, requires me to obscure the screen with my finger if I want to scroll).
Anything else? Oh yes, I bought a new computer – I finally had to admit that my old workhorse ( a Dell Dimension 2400 with a 2,4 Ghz Celeron CPU and 768 MB RAM) simply didn’t cut the mustard anymore. I replaced it with a Laptop – an ASUS Z53SC. I’d been looking for something that has a lot of RAM and Firewire, and ASUS’ claim to use “green” technology was a welcome extra. I was amazed how much hardware you get these days for relatively little money – 2 Gig of RAM, 160 GB S-Ata Harddrive, 2 Ghz Dual Core Processor and a DVD Burner. I would have preferred a little less technology in a more robust exterior (the plastic casing looks and feels rather cheap), but that seems to be not an option in the “1000 Euro or less” price range. Also, the thing came pre-installed with Windows Vista, my first exposure to Vista at all despite the fact that the OS is already one year old.
Many people have already remarked on how much Vista sucks and I would like to amend this by telling you that Vista sucks. Really. And I’m not talking about alleged faults in the technical design of the OS. In my experience people are willing to ignore even glaring bugs if the parts that can be used can be used smoothly and without much thinking (I know I certainly am). But I have been using Windows practically since it was first released in Germany, and with Vista it still took me all afternoon to set up a network connection (worse, I did not find out why it didn’t work at first and I still don’t know why it worked in the end). When I use – and pay for – a system for twenty years I really do expect that I can use any new version without thinking. Everything else is like coming home only to find that somebody built a brick wall through your living room. Unless there is a redeeming feature lurking somewhere under the “Aero”-surface that I did not yet find I have to say that somebody at Microsoft did a lousy job.
I have currently trouble with my server (going up and down like the assyrian empire, that kind of thing) and this will go on till the weekend (because then this site will move to another server). I frankly don’t know why I write this, because those who need to know (because they cannot reach this site) won’t be able to read it (because they cannot reach this site), but after four or five hours fiddling around with the damn thing I need some kind of closure.
And I promised somebody to do a script and haven’t done yet… Hi Caliskan, if you read this – I did not forget you, it just takes a little longer than expected. Because somehow some thing always gets in the way.
Heroes premiered tonight in German television. Overall a good show, but there were one or two things I didn’t like. I mean, young people who suddenly discover special powers that set them apart from the rest of humanity? I heard something like this before, only I guess when the idea was originally conceived in the 1960s it propably made more sense.
At the beginning of the show there is a professor blathering away how evolution will bring forth special powers like telekinesis or teleportation. Hell, no. We live in 2007, and everybody knows (or should know) that there is no plausible or even possible mechanism for psychic powers – it is much more likely that the woman of the future grows a botox gland, or even that men will aquire the missing take-the-trash-out gene (after all this would possibly help their chances with reproduction). I do not as such have a problem with reel science but frankly I had hopes that such a highly acclaimed show would come up with some new ideas. But then I hope that they used a weak idea to get the show started and won’t get back to the mutant thing as the plot develops, especially since the show has some good characters (“Super-Hiro !”, naturally).
In other news, I worked all afternoon to trim my proposal for an essay in a planned SF anthology down to the requested maximum of 750 characters before I realized that I had misread the specs and that they were really asking for 750 words. This is a little embarassing, and usually I would consider it a waste of time, but to bring down a full page to a super-condensed three-liner was in a way a brilliant excercise and so I’m not too sorry. Overall the restored proposal may be too big on words and too weak on theory, so I might have made a fool of myself, but then I loose nothing by trying.
A couple of days ago I visited a friend to see her and my – what would be the secular equivalent to a godson? My “Darwin-Son”? or “Dawkins-Son”? – well, to see her and her son (of whom I’m obivously quite fond, he’s two and a half and a very bright and lovable child). After some hours of playing ‘Make the Funny Noises’ and ‘Help me Catch the Red Balloon” the child was laid to sleep and we perused my friends library of science fiction series on DVD. I finally fell asleep to an episode of Regenesis (which is acutally quite good, only you shouldn’t try to watch all of it at once).
The next morning my friend invited her new neighbour for breakfast, which was even more fun than I’d initially thought, because said neighbour turned out to be an astrophysicist from Brazil – she does work on black holes and currently stays in Potsdam for some fellowship thing or something. So we talked about black holes during breakfast (actually I asked some naive or maybe genuinly stupid questions and got some clever answers, but that still counts as talking, right?) before she anncouned that she really wasn’t working on black holes at all – instead she said “I’m working on something really weird”.
That really cracked me up, because a star collapsing into a singularity is already pretty high on the list of weird things and it was funny that she could easily top that (is it too late for me to become an astrophysicist? The weirdest thing I see in my job is the CSS rendering of IE 6, and that’s rather more annoying than interesting).
The “really weird” thing is Gravastar Theory. I tried to read up a little on the theory – I read the original paper by Mazur and Mottola and naturally I didn’t understand a word (at least none with more than three letters), so I read another paper I’d found on the internet by two guys names Visser and Wiltshire, which (I think) discussed the merits and faults of the theory and which I didn’t really understand either, so I resorted to the Wikipedia entry which I mostly did understand but which is not particularly exhaustive and obviously lacking even by Wikipedias standards.
It may be weird, but it’ still interesting (and frankly so was my lecturer) . I should try and get another invitaton for breakfast.
