I just booted my PC after 4 hours of drive through heavy rain and thunderstorms back from Vienna where I attended Barcamp. I have to say it was just fantastic! All Barcamps I attended before had a very diverse crowd, but usually lacking developers thus the social media enthusiasts usually dominated the attendees.

Barcamp Vienna was different, maybe it was the awesome location at Microsoft Austria headquarters or just the fact that it was in Vienna.. But I met more coders there in 2 days than in the last 2 yeas in Klagenfurt.

Coolest thing, I even met a Subsonic developer: Saintedlama! That was really awesome and funny when we met during breakfast randomly chatting about our stuff and I noted that I’ll be presenting dotless when he said: “Wow that’s you? I wanted to contact you for some time now about dotless. I’m working on Subsonic btw.. " (Imagine my jaw dropping right there.. ). He showed me some really cool demos of the simple repository they introduced in SubSonic 3 and it’s uses with MVC.. and I have to tell you: wow.. Using a ORM was really never so easy..

Anyway, I really had a great time either chatting up really interesting people or doing my two presentations.
On Saturday I talked about dotless while on Sunday I talked about Git. Both talks went great in my opinion, but if anyone was there and has additional feedback on my presentations I’d be glad to hear them. I uploaded both slide decks to http://www.docs.com and you can find them here:

dotless – CSS done right

Git

At any rate: Thanks to Max and Rolf for organizing this awesome event and to Microsoft for so generously hosting it!

Next weekend (29-30th of May) I’ll be attending Barcamp Vienna and plan on having a talk about dotless and it’s advantages over regular CSS. Since my last dotless presentation at Barcamp Klagenfurt was a pretty huge success I guess I’ll keep to the basic structure of the talk and also go into some detail around the organizational stuff that’s involved when managing an OSS project.

Since I expect the crowd in Vienna to be more technical than the usual web2.0 enthusiasts/blogger mix we see in Klagenfurt I also plan on maybe delivering a talk on the best SCM there is: Git.

Since the whole thing is hosted by Microsoft I expect a lot more .NET developers to show up, so it should be a fun and interesting weekend.

See you there!

I just finished my presentation about dotless at Barcamp Klagenfurt and promised to upload my presentation slides to Slideshare.

The feedback for the talk was quite good. Turned out better than I hoped. I just hope that the slides do make some sense without me talking alongside.

Time goes by way faster than I’d like it to and the Barcamp Klagenfurt 2010 is coming up really fast. (6-7. February)

While usually I was quite hesitant to choose a topic due to the diversity of the attending crowd (unfortunately not really enough real technical topics represented there), this year I think I can bring something very interesting to the camp: .less.

The advantages are obvious, with a crowd of bloggers, artists and also technical people talking about something as ubiquitous as CSS, and ways to improve it, will surely resonate well, allowing me to be a bit technical without raising too many question marks above my audience’s heads like last year (where I talked about IoC and Windsor).

As for the talk itself, I plan on first going over general features of Less (since we are a port I can also point people over to the Ruby version if they are more comfortable with that than with .NET ), and then into a tiny bit of detail about how .less works internally.

Finally, I hope to see as many people as possible at Barcamp Klagenfurt! Thanks to the team for organizing this year after year!

It’s been a busy year 2009, and I’m quite pleased with how things turned out.

I had a lot of fun going back to university, working on various open source projects like .less, elmsConnector, Pandora.

I can only hope you enjoyed 2009 as much as I did, and hope 2010 turns out even better. Thanks for reading my blog and have a nice 2010!

You may have seen that I use Lijit to power the on-site search for my blog. Since Lijit by default uses a Google custom search to power this (nothing really wrong with that) I became quite unhappy with the results (Google for some reason doesn’t like to index articles but rather indexes categories ). Since I didn’t find my own stuff through Google, getting the same bad results through Lijit was quite annoying.

So I tweeted this one day:

Well, took about 45 minutes to receive this:

And this very nice Email alongside:

Well, that was 2 days ago. Search results that I get when using the on-site search are back to what I expect them to be and I’m once again able to find my own stuff.

Thanks Lijit. Great service!

It was pretty inevitable that Google Wave would fail after being hailed as the solution to all our problems. Still, looking at a defeat gives me a feeling of malicious joy.

Let’s start at the beginning: I got my invite almost 3 weeks ago, and after an initial: wow cool. I found out that nobody I care about had Wave.

After another week or so I finally got 20 invites to give out (if you want one send me an email, I’ve got 13 left) and finally managed to get the most important people I communicate to into Wave.

And, we had a lot of fun watching each other’s cursor spit out text live on the screen. Unfortunately, that was the only thing we found useful, and it was only funny for about 20 minutes. After that, we went back to our lives and that’s it. I’m still waiting for a reply to a Wave I sent Kristof almost 2 weeks ago.

So, what’s the problem? Wave technology is revolutionary, the idea is just not. It’s at heart:

Awesome technology looking for a problem to solve

Wave fails in most/all of it’s goals:

Replace Email: Ok, so Email is everywhere and it works (thanks to GMail). I get mails pushed to my Android phone, and all in all: It does everything I want flawlessly and most importantly: EVERYWHERE.
Wave on the other hand: Only inside my browser, no notification tool whatsoever. Pretty much equally useless as Facebook Messaging.

Replace Chat: Instant typing is funny, but using the tool for IM just does not cut it usability wise. Live and Skype are great at that too, and even ICQ had that instant typing thing going some versions back (nobody wanted it). Wave once again misses all the major points here: No mobile client, no notifications, no desktop client.

Replace Message Boards: Try running a public community off Wave: It’s impossible. Since you have to add people to the wave one by one, there is no way to spawn a new thread unless your community is really really small. Public viewing (the main purpose of most messaging boards) is impossible, thus the whole thing is not suited to replace a message board.

Replace Wiki: Again, who cares about a wiki if it’s not publicly available? I know really few people who have a wiki for <5 people, and even those few won’t care for Wave’s wacky and really laggy Playback feature.

Be a collaboration tool: Well, Wave does that pretty well. Only that I don’t really see any online collaboration happening anytime soon, since most people are just too used to sending Word documents or Excel sheets around, they won’t dumb down to using a Wave just because they see each other’s cursors.

Well, and that’s about it. Wave tries to do a thousand things, and succeeds at not one of them. It’s totally useless without having any sort of desktop integration and mobile device integration. And once it has all of that, I still see myself sending more “Hey check your wave” emails than receiving a answer through wave.

What I want now? I want Google to use the awesome technology they created with Wave and bring it over to GMail. I want to be able to drag&drop files to my GMail and have them be attached to my mails. I want this incredible spellchecker inside GMail and I want it now. That’s all. I don’t care for your revolutionary shiny thingy that does everything but nothing.

1 hour ago I noticed that I need the Castle.Facilities.Logging assembly, so I fired up SVN to checkout the newest trunk and run a build.

It took 53(!!!) minutes to checkout. Something is seriously wrong with SVN at times, there is no other way to explain the differences in speed I was seeing during checkout: Some files came with 50 kb/s, some with 2 kb/s and others with 100. That said: I’m sitting ontop of a 12 mbit ADSL-2 connection that peaks at about 1.6 mb/sec.

I hate waiting, and waiting an hour for a trivial operation that should not take any longer than 10 seconds is really the end. I only hope most projects get away from svn as soon as possible, the benefit in speed is just massive.

Oh and btw: I know that there are SVN mirrors of the castle project on GitHub, I already did a fork of one of those to pull it down. Only that it was 6 commits behind the current svn trunk and I couldn’t build the solution at that revision so I decided to re-pull the most current svn (big mistake).

I decided to do something really stupid: Spend 50€ on a Apple Keyboard.

Why? I was in the market for a keyboard that mirrors my laptop’s key press experience. The Apple Keyboard seemed like the perfect choice at first, and so I bought it at my local Apple retailer.

One thing I didn’t consider at the store was that on the Apple Keyboard ALT and Command have traded places, and the default mapping on Windows is Command = Winkey.

So, I found some handy guides on the internet on how to use the nice little program AutoHotkey to remap keys on the keyboard. So I could flip positions on Winkey and Alt.

Doing so with AutoHotkey is very easy and there are numerous scripts out there to do all sorts of crazy things. Here is the script I came up with after some time:

LWin::LAlt
LAlt::LWin
RWin::RAlt
RAlt::AppsKey
+F8::Send {Media_Play_Pause}
+F7::Send {Media_Prev}
+F9::Send {Media_Next}
+F10::Send {Volume_Mute}
+F11::Send {Volume_Down 2}
+F12::Send {Volume_Up 2}
F13::Insert
F14::PrintScreen

Also I have found it important to run AutoHotKey as admin, otherwise all these key mappings are lost whenever you enter a UAC protected area.

Now that the Key mappings are all set up I have to say that I am really happy with the keyboard so far. The typing experience takes some time getting used to, but it’s really solid and well manufactured and I am not really all that sure if I’ll go back to my Natural Keyboard 4000 anytime soon. (I might if the Apple one proves to be discomforting after prolonged use, but that remains to be seen).

PS: Windows Live Writer on my main machine decided to break. As of now I can’t write blog posts on my computer any more and I have on explanation for that (besides some Exception text stating that Courier New has no regular cut). And I get really pissed off by that (and by the fact that WLW is saving my drafts in some obscure binary format I can’t read).

Last year I bought myself a iPhone 2G through friend from the US and was very fond of it, mainly because I didn’t have a Smartphone before. But as time goes by, the limitations of the iPhone platform became more and more obvious.

I made the decision not to buy a newer generation iPhone when I was at the office one evening and needed to carry a large db dump file with me home. Imagine my feelings when carrying a 16GB iPhone that has about 13GB of free space available and not being able to use it as a thumb drive due to it’s lack of a mass storage mode. Luckily I had my DSLR with me so I formatted my 8GB SD card and used that instead. But not being able to place files on a phone is just plain stupid.

Also I’m just tired of iTunes and it’s totally retarded syncing model.
I’m a totally connected person, all my data is in the cloud, be it code (BitBucket, GitHub), email (Gmail), calendar (Google calendar), Google reader or contacts (Gmail). So having to plug my phone into the computer at regular intervals to update information on it is just not the way I wanted it to be. (Especially considering what a headache it is getting data synced between Outlook and Google’s services).

So going to a Android phone was a pretty logical decision for me. I can take all of my current data with me, use the wireless syncing capabilities that come with using Google’s Gmail and Calendar services, and be up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Actually, it only took about 3 minutes for Google to load all of my contact list into the phone and present me with a fully working environment of Contacts, Email and Calendar. And that’s really impressive.

And lastly, I’m a developer! Being able to develop for my own device is very important to me, and not owning a Mac and hating the idea of programming in objective C (believe me I tried) severely limited my ability to do that on the iPhone platform.
Android on the other hand is using Java (not perfect, but still way better than C) and is not constrained to a particular platform with their SDK.

Although the platform choice was easy, the phone one was hard. As of speaking there are only 3 serious Android handsets in the market: HTC Magic, HTC Hero and Samsung Galaxy.
And to be honest: None of the three is perfect. The Magic has no headphone jack, the Hero is very bulky and due to sense UI not always as Snappy as I’d like it to be and the Galaxy didn’t bring any interesting features besides the AMOLED display. 
Since none of the current devices is really perfect, I figured buying the cheapest one and letting the platform mature for another year would be the best course of action. So I bought the HTC Magic.

So far, I’ve been using my Magic for about two weeks and love it. It’s fast, having multi-tasking paired with push notification for almost everything from Google makes this phone simply a joy to use. I get email notifications faster on my phone than I get them through the GMail notifier on my PC. I can use Google Talk to chat with friends who use Android instead of writing SMS or look up their position through Latitude.
Also the battery life on my Magic is way better than it was on my iPhone. While I was lucky to get my iPhone through one day without plugging it in, my Magic can easily live through 2 with push services and background tasks enabled.

The Android Market is also filled with lots and lots of apps, so there is no real disadvantage from the iPhone here. I even came to appreciate the ability to scan barcodes on the phone while shopping!

Now, from my limited testing so far I found the following apps really nice and handy:

1. twidroid (Twitter .. )
2. Places Dictionary (Gives you POI near you)
3. My Tracks (Running track recorder)
4. NewsRob (Very good Google Reader app)
5. Astrid Task/Todo List
6. Wikitude World Browser (cool augmented reality from Austria)
7. Google Maps (make sure to get the newest version manually from the Market)
8. Battery Widget (from mipping.com)
9. Barcode Scanner (also scans QR codes)
10. Quickpedia (Wikipedia app)
11. Google Sky Map (oh this is so awesome!)

But what I love most about the phone is simply it’s syncing! I edit all my contacts online through GMail and without even thinking about it they all get updated on my phone too. No hassle with plugging it in or anything, totally zero friction. It just works!

My only gripe with the thing so far: You can have only one input language for the keyboard selected at a time. Since I frequently use the phone to look through twitter or emails, I sometimes need to switch from German to English. The iPhone had that handy little button to switch, while the Android would require me to go through the phone’s settings.

Verdict: I’d never go back to my iPhone. Although the platform is still young and there are some rough edges to be worked out, I feel like Android will be a serious player during the next years.