Joachim Fornallaz

iSight

Posted on September 27, 2003 by joachim

Since yesterday at 8:05 p.m. I am the owner of a brand new iSight camera. This is such a nice product, both the technical and design aspects are outstanding. Too bad iChat AV requires a 100 kbps uplink network speed for video conferences and I only have a 384/64 kbps ADSL connection at home, so I won’t be able to use the camera at home until I get a faster connection (which should be done in a few weeks).
When upgrading the network speeds lately, Bluewin only increased the download speed while CableCom increased both download und upload access.

Posted in Hardware | 3 Comments

Die Bahn

Posted on September 24, 2003 by joachim

On my way from Darmstadt to Paris last friday, the train had technical problems and so I arrived 30 minutes late. The other times I used the “Deutsche Bahn”, the trains were all delayed too. Is that coincidence?

Posted in General | Comments Off

Apple Expo 2003

Posted on September 24, 2003 by joachim

Last week-end, I was in Paris visiting some relatives and what a coincidence: It was the the last day of this year’s Apple Expo, so I thought I’ll stop by. Of course, I saw the new 15″ PowerBook and other new products like the wireless mouse and keyboard, but I was most impressed by the XServe and XServe RAID machines exposed. When I think about the struggle when dealing with Sun server machines und how much costs they cause …
The Apple booth was ways bigger than all others, and really well done. It was funny that there was not a single iBook exposed, but there were so many PowerBooks there you couldn’t miss them. The new 15″ doesn’t produce as much heat as the original 12″ PowerBook does, but I would not want to work several hours in a row on that machine.

Posted in Apple | 1 Comment

Apple uses XHTML

Posted on September 8, 2003 by joachim

I was quite surprised to see that Apple is slowly moving to modern Web technologies. The new iPod web pages use XHTML 1.0 with CSS2, the other pages still claim to be using HTML 4.0 Transitional (with a little bit of CSS 1). This is a big step forward for a high traffic website.
When using modern technologies, there are always compatibility issues with older software like Netscape 4.x. Even if the market share of Netscape 4 is rather small nowadays, many websites still support this browser. Apple chose to redirect Netscape 4 users directly to the iPod pages from the Apple Store, which are viewable with any Kind of browser I guess (no doctype defined).

Posted in Web | 1 Comment

Beaver

Posted on September 2, 2003 by joachim

While surfing the web before getting really starting with work this morning, I discovered the existance of a promising RSS aggregation tool running on Windows called Beaver. While it can’t beat NetNewsWire for Mac OS X by any means, it does its job well, but there is a huge drawback – a miserable performance.
In fact, this is the first serious .Net application I’ve seen so far and I must say, I was surprised how bad the .Net framework performs on a 1 GHz Intel machine. Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s running on Windows 98, but Java applications do quite a better job regarding speed and responsiveness in the same environment.

Posted in Software | Comments Off

Trainingship

Posted on August 29, 2003 by joachim

Since everyone seems to wonder how things are going with my trainingship at ESOC/ESA in Darmstadt, I thought I’d share some impressions I had until now.
There are two ‘dimensions’ or even more about a trainingship I think. The first one is not the work itself, but the organisation around it. There is this crazy theory you learn during university classes and suddenly, some stuff of that makes suddenly sense. So now we have a problem here: The best thing for management classes would be to first complete a trainingship in a big company, then attend the classes (even the base classes). For technical classes, a trainingship should take place after a couple of semesters (as it does now).
So what about the work itself? Well, I can’t tell anything – it’s top secret :). Really though – I can talk about some insight I had about proper software project documentation. In my case, I know that someone will have to carry on the work I am doing now, and that makes you feel that a documentation really is needed. Also, a usage documantation is needed when you know that people will actually use the software on a daily basis. I still think software should be self explaining by having a very good user interface, but in some cases, a little help is never a bad idea.
What I am really sad about is the fact that at university, no student ever carry on a project that has been started by another person.

Posted in University | 2 Comments

dasBlog

Posted on August 25, 2003 by joachim

I am wondering about the trackback functionality of this weblog system. I know that you can ping other URLs using dasBlog. But can I ping an URL of a dasBlog entry? I guess no although MT said the pings were successfully sent.

Posted in Software | 3 Comments

OO Design for PHP

Posted on August 25, 2003 by joachim

I am asking myself how much sense it makes to apply standard OO design to projects written in PHP, a language which lacks some essentials OO functionality in the current production release.
You end up spending a lot of time to come up with a good application design, but I think the benefit is not as big as it could be.

Posted in Developer | 2 Comments

Huebi

Posted on August 20, 2003 by joachim

Another weblog has rised out of the shadows of the internet. I am pleased to see that Huebi just started a brand new weblog called and available at virtual-existence.ch.

Ja weisch 🙂

Posted in University | 4 Comments

Mozilla Firebird Progress

Posted on August 13, 2003 by joachim

If you are using or intend to use nightly builds of the Mozilla Firebird Browser, I suggest you have a look at The Burning Edge to stay informed about new added features, bug fixes or regressions of the software.