Familie Uhlig

Achim treated himself to an iPhone and asked me for a list of my favorite apps. Since this wasn’t the first time someone asked for my opinion, I decided to write it up.

Before going into the details, I need to say that I don’t claim to have a good overview over what apps are available. So this is more like a list of my personal favorites than a directory. I ordered it by personal preference.

Here is the outline:

• My Personal Favorites
• Other good apps
• Doesn’t work for me
• Fail for me
• On my wishlist

My Personal Favorites

#1 – NetNewsWire

I am a news junkie. I subscribe to more than 200 feeds, and NetNewsWire makes reading them fun. There are two features that stand out: First of all, it is very easy to mark an item as read and skip to the next unread item. Secondly, it allows to mark a whole feed as read, so that all known articles do not appear as new anymore. Plus it syncs with Google Reader (incl. unread marks) – this makes it very easy to add new feeds or continue reading on the PC.

There is only one con – it has advertisements in the article list. If there was a way to pay for the app and get rid of the ads, the app would be the best thing on earth.

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I have been playing with quite a few social network sites in the past (Xing, wkw, LinkedIn, flickr, last.fm). An issue I have with XING in particular is that with a free account, XING does not allow me to export my connections (at least I did not find a way to do that).

After Sebastian convinced me (and, apparently, a few others too) to create a profile on Facebook, I was faced (no pun intended) with the same problem again: How do I synchronize all my contacts between the various sites? After all, most of my professional contacts are on XING. But how can I invite them to Facebook without manually entering all names and addresses again?

This time I decided to solve this issue. I created a Greasemonkey script that steps through all pages of my XING contacts and puts a list of email addresses onto the last page. This allows me to copy and paste them into e.g. Facebook.

Here is the script: xing_export.user.js

Disclaimer: I only tested it on my personal profile, and only with the account language set to German or English. If you give it a try, please let me know how it worked out.

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For a long time I have been searching for a nice place to keep a list of my books in order to make it available to the public. My intention is that other people like my friends, neighbors and colleagues can go there and see if I own a book that they are looking for. Especially IT books have such a short time to live that it makes sense to look into somebody’s copy instead of buying it.

I thought about implementing such an application by myself, and the latest idea was to create a Rails application that uses ISBNdb and Barcodepedia, perhaps even in a mashup.

Then I found LibraryThing, and for now I think it is decent for what I am using it for. I have no plans to put all my books online, thus the limit of 200 books of a free account will not bother me.

The only open question is how I could store a status on the book, such as who has currently borrowed a book. But maybe the comment section of LibraryThing will server for this, too. Another idea would be to use tags. I will experiment with that over the next few days.

One important aspect that led me to choose LibraryThing was that it allows to export all books I entered – so there is no lock-in of my data.

You can find my (incomplete)  list of books here.

This is really something that touches me: A guy is missing after he went alone on a boat trip, and some of his friends and family use the net to enable people to help searching him. This is not one of the usual “please help to find xyz” chain letters – this is something where everybody can help.

Well, it’s not just a guy – it’s Jim Gray, a computer scientist who played an important role in the development of technologies like databases and transaction processing. People were able to convince the NASA to include the area where he could have drifted to to be included in a satellite photo scan, and also being photographed by ER-2 aircraft. Werner Vogels has some technical details about what is being done.

Now the great thing actually is that you can help, too, and here is how it works: You log on to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service using you Amazon account, and you will be presented with one of the pictures of the area where Jim and his boat might have drifted to. You inspect the picture and see if it contains something that might look like a sail boat. Examples of what it would look like are given, so the average internet user should be able to spot the difference between plain water and an artficial object being on the surface.

Usually computer scientists are not seen as people that are involved with saving lives. But I sincerely hope that the internet community can play an important role in finding Jim. We are using technology he helped to invent, and now there is a chance that technology helps to save his live.

Update (2007-07-29): There is still no sign of Jim or his boat. Wired has a great article with much more background.

After the recent arrival of Wordpress 2.1 I decided it’s time to move my tiny web presence to a real host (as opposed to self-hosting on my home DSL line which I did ever since 2001).

Installing Wordpress went fine (as usual). But I could find a way to migrate my content over from the old box. The new Wordpress version has a new database schema, so I couldn’t just import the raw SQL.

As usual, the answer is just as far away as a quick Google search, and again I am amazed by the timeliness of the solutions the open-source world creates. I found Aaron Brazell’s “WordPress-to-WordPress Import” plugin. For me, the most important aspect was the export part – I installed the plugin on the old box and exported the content to a WXR file (WordPress eXtended RSS). This is the format the new 2.1 version of Wordpress uses, and I was able to upload that file to my new installation and get it imported.

I just read about The Top Ten Lies of Engineers (via Volker’s non-blog). The line I like most is

… for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet.

Excellent read! In fact, I like it so much, I made it my new signature

Last week I was invited by a collegue to join openBC, a website that tries to find and encourage networks of people. I had been asked before but I always thought that it was only useful for freelancers. But it was a weekend, by wife and son both stayed in bed with a light virus infection, and so I had plenty of time to explore the site and try to find people.

I should have done this moths ago! I am very bad in networking and keeping in touch with people, but within two days more than 20 friends, collegues and other people I know confirmed me as a contact. And there are lots of others I can think of that are not there yet.

I don’t think I will used it to make new contacts, but the ability for people to keep their contact information up to date themselves is a great reason for me to stay there for a while. This might not be the platform’s inteded usage, but it is enough for me to try it.

If you are looking for someone you lost contact with, give it a try!

Jemand sollte ihr sagen, daß Papa sich (und seine Tochter) gerade lächerlich macht. Volker hat die wichtigsten Links zusammengetragen.