Traumwind - Friday 1st November 2024

Yet one of the most memorable images of Katrina's destruction was that of a ruined shell of a Baptist church. I'll bet more Baptists than casino workers were impacted by the storm. Did God wipe that church out for a reason? Is the destruction of that church building a sign that God wants Baptists to leave the Gulf Coast?

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Wednesday 17th August 2005)

Hal is 50. All the best!

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Tuesday 19th July 2005)

mSpace is an interaction model to help explore relationships in information.

mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person's interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues.

Sounds a lot like what I was going on all the time. New ways to learn about things. What to do if you don't yet know what you are looking for. All that. Awesome.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Thursday 14th July 2005)

For all I know, the blogosphere is unpredictable. I would have thought a title like 'Collaborative filtering - almost for free' might aquire some links and some critical discussion. Well, maybe no one has seen it yet? Or maybe my writing is so bad, no one bothers commenting? Nah, bloggers would come pick on me if it was bad. Maybe it's too good? And people want to keep it for themselves?

What ever. Here's my shameless plug for it anyway.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Tuesday 31st May 2005)

In my current project - building a collaborative filtering dunction based on user-clicktracks - I had a nice, simple and clean proof-of-concept code-base. Now two things happened: I switched to data-storage in a /My)SQL DB, and added some client wamted features. And all of a sudden I am faced with a pile of stinking code-spagetti... No it's not really that bad, but my own tastes are such that I really dislike what I'm surrently coding together. I desperatly want to reduce the complexety again, but am 'struggeling' to get the basic unctionality working... I guess I need to come back later and see if this can be cleaned up. I hope I find the time for that. My motto isn't just a motto afer all: "-- traumwind: making complex things simple --"

[update] after writing this done and walking the dog, I sat back down and suddently noticed that a lot of the muddle in the code was due to a unhappy choice of when to do what. Changing things around only slightly cleared up a lot of the confusing code flow. And funnily this clearer code now uses almost the exact same lines of code, only arranged in another sequence...

Looking back I see that my my confuddled code reflected my confuddled state of mind on that day. So now I hvae a nice piece of code, but the feeling of unease still lingers, although it's not any longer grounded in reality. I was preparing for some very hard thinking and problem solving when a simple change of sequence was all that was needed. But somehow my mind is still geared up for that 'dreaded task'...

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Friday 27th May 2005)

DHTML Utopia [ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Thursday 19th May 2005)

today I sent a first beta tar-ball o a brave person. Things have gone very differently from when I first announced I was working on a public version of my blogging engine.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

The Flying Gridswarm, and the UltraSwarm

These two projects are exploring ways of getting a group of small aircraft to fly like a flock of birds, while at the same time performing non-trivial task-related distributed computation across a wireless network.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Tuesday 17th May 2005)

In the night of 15/16th of may, our ISP had a nice b-day present for me. They closed down this server due to an unpaid bill. Problem is they can shut you down on a holiday, but you can only contact the people in charge on workdays. So I could only get service back today, first thing in the morning.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Sunday 15th May 2005)

Ok, now I'm officially a grex-haired old man. '35 jahr, graues Haar'. And I can show the grey hair to anyone interested!
Thatnks for the birthday wishes, I'm sure I will be missing some on the web, so I decided not to link... I'm still in an un-blogging state of affairs, my tracking of the blogosphere is very poor these days. But it shure feels nice to see some old friends remember your birthday even if you don't really had any contact for some while!

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Tuesday 10th May 2005)

It's a date by far over-rated. Especially the 14th May of 2005. Only thing significant on this day might be the fact that it's my 35 birthday and no one seems to have time for a celebration. Oh well, as I said, just forget the date *LOL*

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Thursday 28th April 2005)

I hate Flash MX's as an developement environment. I love Flash (swf) as a technology. I was long searching for a way to do Flash w/o using Flash.
All that time it was right in front of me. Enter swftools. Take a close look at swfc. It takes some getting used to, and debugging ActionScript is a little painfull w/o the IDE, but it shure beats digging around in an awfull GUI app, trying to remember where the heck that menu-item was... scripting, baby!

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

So someone actually went and did what I wanted to have for so long: Mouseposé. A spotlight like zone that follows the mouse ointer, to easily find it or focus peoples attention to where it is pointing.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Monday 28th March 2005)

Not posting here means I'm busy trying to land my first project(s) on RentACoder.com So far it's looking good in at least one instance. But project hunting does eat time...

You can find me under... tada traumwind, who'd have guessed?

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Friday 25th March 2005)

spurred by a post by Seth Godin, I registered at elance.com. It's free. But just now I wanted to bid for a project I'd love to work on to notice that I need to give them minimum $30 a month to even bid!

RentACoder looks nicer in that aspect:

To pay for this service, Rent a Coder charges coders a 15% Rent a Coder Fee on the profit from work and questions. So if you don't find work...we don't get paid.

Also the RentACoder website looks far more informative and helpfull. I found an answer to my question riight away, while on elance.com I needed to actually try to bid to be sure how it would work and what it would cost. Oh, the info is there too. But buried and confusing...

elance.com only takes 8.5% from your earnings... but they have this basic fee... [thx to Rick and Feedster]

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Thursday 24th March 2005)

pre-announcement: I'm in the process of cleaning up the SBELT code that drives this weblog for a public release. Licence will be something liberal like the MIT/BSD style ones.

SBELT is a blog-engine written in PHP (4/5) that is file-system based (no MySQL etc) and has all the basic features I need(ed). Watch this place for a release soon!

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

(Saturday 19th March 2005)

Veronica Schwandt hat einige interessante Dinge zum Thema Gesundheitsberater, psychologische Berater, gesundes Leben, Naturfasern, Naturprodukte, Jakobsweg

mal sehen wie lange Google diesmal braucht um die Seite zu aktualisieren...

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

It seems I'm getting a few things done finally. One was to merge all my new blogs into one feed for my subscribers convenience. So now if you subscribe to this blogs feed, you will also be updated on Tindertraum and Such-Gedanken... I'm not sure if I will do this in the HTML version also. My main goal is to get the word about my new blogs out to existing subscriber, not to duplicate content here.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

public snnouncement: I have startede my German-speaking weblog on search engine stuff over here

öffentlich Durchsage: mein 'Such-Gedanken Weblog ist ganz neu und auf Deutsch...

Ich arbeite zur Zeit an einer Serie von Vorträgen und Seminaren mit dem Arbeitstitel 'Suchmaschinen für Seitenbetreiber'.

Ich möchte dieses Weblog hier nutzen um Gedanken und Konzepte zu erproben und für alle sichtbar zu erarbeiten.

Dem Medium Weblog entsprechend können Einträge daher jede Form von kurzen Notizen bis hin zu ausgearbeiteten Artikeln haben.

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]

there's two things a weblog needs that my current setup lacks:

referrer statistics - who links to me? Who's talking about me? And no, I don't think Trackback or Pingback etc are essential...
possibility of direct Feedback - well, comments sort of. Only due to comments spam etc I won't be doing that again. I'm thinking about a simple (email) feedback form on the bottom of each page. Sends a simple email to me with the page(title) in the subject. That is non-public, moderateet comments...

[ by Martin>] [permalink] [similar entries]