Martin Jansen

Today I rolled a first release of the URI_Template package in PEAR. As the name suggests, this is a parser for URI Templates. I wrote the code around Christmas as a finger exercise and to become familiar with what URI templates are, but unfortunately only found time today to get it into PEAR’s CVS and prepare a release. Documentation including installation instructions can be found over there. Should you encounter bugs, make sure to report them via the bug tracker.

Next up: Getting documentation for File_DeliciousLibrary (also released today) out of the door. Then probably a little implementation of Bloom filters.

On February 10th, 1998, XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation. This means that  as of today it has been with us “officially” for the past 10 years.

Happy Birthday, bitch! Great to have you around. 

Microsoft has placed an offer to buy Yahoo!. Some initial, mainly unsorted thoughts below:

• My first impression is that Microsoft is really despaired for not being able to catch up with Google on their own.  How else can they justify a 62% premium over Yahoo’s stock price from Thursday night?
• $44.6 billion dollars is a whole lotta money.
• Microsoft and SAP AG once cancelled their plans for a merger because of the resulting complexity. Yahoo is significantly smaller than SAP (11.400 vs. ~40.000 employees) but still I wonder if Microsoft is capable of handling a nearly six-figure headcount with different cultural backgrounds properly. Quite a challenge for McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte et al.
• What about the overlapping properties of both companies? Assuming the buy-out actually happens, will e.g. the search sites be merged? What about messaging? Free mail? Since the main reason for the offer is strengthening their position in the ad market, I doubt that Microsoft will change much regarding the other properties in the short term after the acquisition.
• Both companies have a diametrically opposed technological infrastructure regarding their web projects: Microsoft eats their own dog-food (Windows, ASP.NET, SQL Server, …) while Yahoo is built on top of FreeBSD, PHP, MySQL, Hadoop and things like that. (Remember how long it took Microsoft to port Hotmail from FreeBSD to Windows? But still it happened.)
• Judging from the outside there is a huge cultural difference between Microsoft and Yahoo. I don’t think they can be combined without pain.
• I’d love to be in Yahoo’s headquarter today. Or as Jeremy Zawodny puts it: “I predict that today will be one of our least productive days since 9/11 at work.”
• Today is a good day for Yahoo shareholders to make some quick money: At the time of writing this, the stock price has grown by 44%.

Yesterday evening I rolled out a new incarnation of martinjansen.com incorporating some things I had been wanting to do for quite some time.  Most importantly, the site does not have any sort of administration interface anymore but only pulls content from other sites.  This is what’s called a Mashup these days.  The sources are:

1. Tumblr for texts, photos, and quotes.
2. Last.fm for some numbers on my listening habits.
3. del.icio.us for links I find interesting. (Coming soon)
4. Flickr for photosets. (Coming soon)

The system is built in such a way that I can add more sources easily. I would for example love to include my movie vote history from IMDb, but the corresponding RSS feed does not contain the ratings but only the names of the movies. Perhaps it is time for some screen-scraping there.

As indicated by point 1, I am writing all of the textual things that appear on martinjansen.com in my Tumblr first. I enjoy quite a few things at Tumblr (especially the dashboard), but also have a thing or two I don’t particularly agree with. Think I’ll write about this later. Still everybody with interest in blogging and little time should give it a try. 

Anyway. As you can see from points 3. and 4. above, I’m not yet done with it, but I wanted to get out of the door with what I have right now. I have been sitting on the new “design elements” since Christmas. As usual the code-related work took me like half an hour, but the graphics and CSS stuff totally outgrew my capabilities.

Should you spot any errors or missing links, let me know.

In the past four days I have found a one-Euro coin on the outer window sill of the shop that is on the first floor of my place three times. I live by the rule “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves”, so naturally I have taken the coins and put them to good use by buying something.

However I’m wondering who semi-regularly puts coins on the window sill (always at the exact same position, by the way)? There is a bus stop on the other side of the street, so it is likely that someone waiting for the bus put it there while sorting change and forgot it. But three times in four days? Rather unlikely. Terrorists passing venomed coins to erase my neighborhood? A anonymous do-gooder giving his money to the poor (i.e. me)? Some retard? Really, I have no idea. In any case: Thanks stranger!

(By linking to Google Maps above, I am of course inviting you to come and look for coins yourself. If you find one, ring my door bell. If I happen to be there, you can invest the buck in a fine coffee brewed by yours truly. :-))

There is an interesting news item on BBC NEWS talking about a recent report by the European Commission on the increasing proliferation of biofuel in Europe and especially Great Britain.

Essentially the report states three problems with biofuels:

1. Planting for the production of biofuel has a huge impact on the environment. Think of all the machines that are required to farm the cropland.
2. In order to have enough space for more cropland, soil needs to be disturbed, i.e. forests may vanish in favor of cropland and land formerly used for food production may be reallocated to producing biofuel. Which leads to the most important and severe issue with biofuel:
3. With rising demand for biofuel, food prices will inevitably rise as well. The food producing industry is going to have to compete with the petroleum industry because both need cropland to plant palms, soybeans, and whatever else can be used to produce food or biofuel. This development will especially hurt the population of developing countries.

Essentially this means that while biofuel sounds like an awesome idea at first, it does not turn out to be overly cool in the end.

On a more general level, I have recently been thinking about fuel-based transportation quite a bit and have to come to the conclusion that cars and similar vehicles are an incredibly stupid idea:

• Road traffic is dangerous. In the WHO European region 127.000 people died in road traffic crashes in 2004. I doubt this number has dropped significantly since then.
• Road traffic is bad for the climate. Cars and trucks are an important factor for the increase in global warming. (Not as bad as the industry, but also not neglectible.)
• Road traffic is bad for people’s health. Traffic contributes significantly to air pollution.
• Roads dominate urban architecture. Ever wondered how beautiful your city would look like without streets?

It will be interesting to see how transportation looks like in a few decades. Maybe it will happen in the underground, based on some fancy, climate-neutral technology? Perhaps we’ll have flying taxis like in The Fifth Element? Or will someone eventually get around and figure out how to make Teleportation an industrial-strength technology? Who knows. In the meantime I’ll go out and breath some fresh, aerosol-enriched air.

[Disclaimer: I own a car.] 

I’m considering to buy an Apple Time Capsule when it hits the streets next month because I need a backup appliance for my MacBook Pro. What I was wondering today was if getting one is a good deal or not. So I did a bit of investigation and some math. (Following I’ll be looking at prices in US-$, but my fellow citizens in Europe will likely get similar results.)

The 500 GB Time Capsule is going to ship for $299 and includes a 500 GB NAS, a 802.11n Access Point, a DSL router, a 3-port switch, and a print server to hook up USB printers to a network. This feature set can be replicated by the following devices:

• NAS: Iomega Home Network 500 GB NAS Hard Drive: $169.99
• Access Point / Router / Switch: Linksys WRT150N Wireless N Home Router: $89.99
• Print server: Linksys PSUS4 PrintServer: $59.99

This totals in $319.97 (already including insane Amazon discounts), which is 20 bucks more than the Apple device. It lacks Time Machine support which is very unfortunate. Also with this configuration you will have three devices taking up space, consuming energy and requiring maintenance instead of just one Time Capsule.

Of course I’m assuming that one actually needs a router, an access point and a print server in addition to the NAS. I certainly do, so Time Capsule will most likely be a good deal for me.

At yesterday’s Macworld keynote, Steve Jobs announced a new version of the Apple TV appliance which includes movie rentals in HD quality. This last fact, ladies and gentlemen, is huge news.

Instead of forcing consumers to enter the compatibility hell that is HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, Apple extends the proven iTunes infrastructure to support high-definition movies and at the same time gives people a good-looking, easy-to-use, and comparably cheap platform to put in their living room right next to their TV.

Forget DVD, forget HD-DVD, forget Blu-ray. Acquiring movies online in awesome quality and playing them on your TV, your laptop, your desktop computer, your iPod, or your phone for that matter is the future. It must not necessary be Apple who wins this game. They have to some extent fucked up selling music in iTunes and it looks like Amazon is passing them currently. But what is important is that someone is seriously starting the competition.

I for one welcome our new HD overlords.