Chad Dickerson has published a very nice list of the top 20 IT mistakes to avoid on InfoWorld.

There are many commonly overlooked mistakes in the list, from outsourcing to open source. As a bonus, the examples he uses offer a lot of insight on how even big IT companies are run.

Flickr is a photo sharing service on the current wave of social applications.

Its very interesting approach is to allow users to spontaneously form peer groups which share photos.

The service is built essentially on LAMP components. Niall Kennedy points out a very interesting presentation about the architecture of the software, which discusses issues regarding the components used (PHP, PEAR, Smarty, MySQL) as well as the scalability.

Wie das ka.stadtblog.de berichtet legt webEdition seine im Juni sehr erfolgreich abgeschlossene Aktion PRO Schulhomepage neu auf.

Nachdem bei der Aktion von März bis Juni 2004 nach eigenen Angaben mehr als 500 Schulen die kostenlose Version des CMS angefordert hatten und seit dem Ende der Aktion ständig weitere Anfragen eintrafen, hat das Unternehmen beschlossen die Aktion wieder aufleben zu lassen.

Die ganze Aktion scheint etwas in die Richtung der Aktivitäten des Landesmedienzentrums zu gehen (mit deutlich kommerzielleren Absichten).

CRM114 is a controllable Regex Mutilator and Smart Filter, designed for easy creation of filters for things like incoming email redirection, spam filtering, system logs, or monitoring processes.

Besides the regex filter rules, CRM114 supports phrase matching (by SBPH hashing or Markovian matching, or Winnowing). Which makes it very efficient for sorting email or eliminating spam.

CRM114 is a Linux-only (at the moment), commandline based program and available under the GNU GPL.

The codewalkers have a very interesting tutorial online about how to create a security certificate by yourself using open source software.

Such certificates are needed for SSL transactions for example and are very expensive when bought from well known authorities like VeriSign or Thawte.

The article goes through all the steps from installing the necessary software, to generating the certificate until installing it on the webserver.

Nach einigen Jahren starken Wachstums und großer Popularität seines Deutsch<->Englisch Wörterbuchs hat der LEO Dienst der Technischen Universität München kürzlich sein Angebot um ein neues Deutsch<->Französisch Wörterbuch erweitert, welches ebenfalls ein rasantes Wachstum an den Tag legt.

Microsoft's CER tool (Corporate Error Reporting) allows to monitor reports and messages issued by the Windows error reporting client which is shipped with Windows XP and 2003 and the error reporting clients included in other Microsoft products.

The clients can be configured to send their error messages and reports to a server running the CER software instead of sending them to Microsoft. This configuration step can be achieved using the Group Policy deployment using active directory.

This seems to be a very useful way to catch and analyse system and/or application crashes, for example when testing a new software or hardware product.

The tool can only be obtained through Microsoft's Volume Licensing Site.

Inkscape is an open source SVG editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc.

Supported SVG features include:

• basic shapes
• paths
• text
• alpha blending
• transforms
• gradients
• node editing
• svg-to-png export
• grouping
• and much more!

Although it still is a bit buggy in some areas, this is a very valuable tool on Linux and a welcome alternative to Illustrator or Freehand on Windows.

Some screenshots are available.

Roger Fischer from bitflux quoted an interesting article from Zeit.de about Online-Addiction, i.e. people experiencing addictive behaviour related to the fact of being online, the ability to chat or to check email.

The article also contains a paragraph about multitasking where the author refers to a study by David E. Meyer (Biography 1, Biography 2) from the University of Michigan, which he sums up to the following:

"The people doing multitasking and constantly switching between their two tasks, took 50 percent more time to execute their tasks than the people doing one task at a time."

Sadly enough there is no additional information or references to the study in the article. However after googling a bit i found a page about multitasking by the University of Michigan. One of the press releases listed explains the neurological background of multitasking quite well. However it doesn't seem directly related to the study mentioned in the article.

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Hi there, welcome to my new blog.

My name is Jean-Marc König and i'm currently working as a software developer at pi-consult in Karlsruhe, Germany.

I wanted to setup this blog in order to keep people up to date on what i'm doing. Another goal is that it serves as my personal notepad, where i can save information and stuff i want to remember and be able to share with others.

I think of a blog as a more personal and more interactive way of communication compared to my former website

As i'm a german and french guy thinking in english sometimes i might post in those three languages depending on the topic. Just contact me if you feel like you're missing something because you don't know the language!

For those who might be interested in seeing what i look like, here's a picture of me: