After several years of loyalty, I switched my instant messenger application from Miranda to Pidgin on all Windows machines. The main reason was the broken MSN protocol in the recent Miranda versions. The developers officially reject to fix this quickly, since some updated major Miranda has higher priority. Not good enough for me … My second reason is the terrible IRC support in Miranda. Anyway, it is still a nice application.

My new friend is Pidgin. It also has a plenty of protocols supported (including a working MSN library), and comes with a really clean interface. Ugly, but clean. You can clearly see the Unix background – plenty of (really) useful features, hidden behind a surprisingly simple interface.  I also have a good feeling when the application runs on every major operating system. The underlying protocol libraries are also used in Adium, my favorite MacOS X client. So it seems that the user community is huge enough for an ongoing protocol support …

In order to reach a similar comfort to Miranda, two things were helpful for me:

• Pidgin Skype support plugin
• Protocol-specific icon set

Oh yeah ! Finally I managed it to migrate to a real, useable, and maintained blog system. WordPress rocks, and a nice guy saved all my old postings by providing a converter from BBlog to WordPress. I now will reformat all earlier stuff step-by-step …

In the beginning of my Internet life (~8 years ago), I planned to establish a permanent private email address. This is the most simple solution to ensure that old friends can reach you again. I thought this would be the only way – Google did not exist at this time. We purchased our domain as a group of friends, and it still exists.

In this earlier times of 28.8 Baud modems, owning such a domain was an expensive task. Therefore, I never thought of owning additionally the domain for my family name. But now I am older, and it simply looks better … Therefore, I took the ultimate last chance for some nicer mail address by ordering one of the new EU domains. And … it worked ! For this reason, I will now migrate everything to my new private domain. Hopefully, this will be the last change for … let’s say the next 10 years … The web page is still rudimentary, I am still searching for my personal successor of Typo3 …

Its being a long time since the last post … The first blog enthusiasm is over, and in December I only worked on finishing existing, boring stuff.

After christmas, we had a great holiday week [url=http://www.gutshof-bastorf.de/] in the north of Germany[/url]. I promise to provide some photos in the near future. We waited for the new year in a self-made snow cave, which was not as cold as it sounds. The kids (our son and the boy from friends) more or less liked the snow, but where more exited about the ocean. For me, this sounds like a mandatory summer holiday trip …

Technically, nothing really important happened so far. Dan discovered some bugs in the DRMAA test suite, which are written down in the SourceForge tracker items, but not fixed so far. The ASG project is heading towards the next big prototype, and we spend nearly the whole last week in December with building web service servlets in NetBeans 4. Sorry Sun, but the Java IDE’s seems to be years beyond Visual Studio and friends. Install the last VS version, play around with the new .NET 2.0 features and the integrated IIS. This is how Web Service development should look like ! More details ? Just ask …

A really astonishing thing happens to me: People find my blog and ask specific questions. Don’t get me wrong, but I am on the web for nearly 10 years now. I never got such an amount of feedback regarding published information. Blogs seem to work, so I promise to spend more time for this.

The title of the blog simply clarifies my reason for joining the writing community. Since I am working at [url=http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de]university[/url], every day brings up a small piece of new knowledge. This blog will collect (and hopefully sort) this stuff, so that this information is no longer lost in emails, wikis, paper notes, or other kinds of ‘information storage’.
Currently, I am involved in several projects at university. You get a first impression with the blog categories – more later