personal development since 1989

Editorial

Nearly three years ago in April 2007, when I was about to finish 11th grade at school, my father told me his plans for moving 200km to Northern Germany. So I chose the best possibility for myself, I left school and searched an apprenticeship as an IT specialist. It was quite hard, because most positions had been filled already and I got a lot of rejections. But after all, I got a chance at a company in Lower Saxony. In two interviews and good results in an aptitude test, I could convince them of my skills. The contract has been signed beginning of July, not even one month before the beginning of my apprenticeship.
And so it all began… Read more

Last Friday and Saturday was the first IT barcamp near my living town and my first, either. So I was a bit excited about which people to meet and what topics to discuss.

What is a barcamp?

A barcamp is like a conference about a special topic. But unlike a conference, where everyone listen and consume a barcamp is a more spontaneous. You participate, share your knowledge with others and define your topics together.
The name is a little wordplay. As a developer, you know that the variables foo and bar are imaginary words to describe any type of value which can be stored within. First camps in this style described above were kicked off by Tim O’Reilly and had the name foocamp which stands for Friends-of-O’Reilly camp. Read more

For those like me, who organized their bookmarks for accessing them all over the world, Google Bookmarks would have never been a choice. Old functionalities were very simple, adding an URL and Title. With some labels and maybe a description and that’s it. But, wait – where are the things del.icio.us, digg.com or StumbleUpon offers? Functions which turns bookmarking service into social bookmarking services, like sharing or at least publishing? Not in Google Bookmarks, at least until some hours ago.

In the screenshot, you see the old version of Google Bookmarks. On the left side, you see a list of all your labels. On the right site, you’ll find all of your bookmarks searchable with the form on top of this page. And that is really all Google Bookmarks was able to do.

The new Google Bookmarks

As you could see in the next screenshot, Google Bookmarks are presented in a new, tidy way.  But the design is nearly the same.

On the left remains a list of your labels, on the right a list of all your bookmarks and also the search on top of this page. But you can also see a lot of new features I want to explain step by step in this article.

Add bookmarks easily Read more

Some channel modes on Quakenet servers forbid nick changes for the time you are in this channel. (Mostly, it will be mode +m) I’m in one of these moderated channels to follow an event bot and I want to change my nick to nick|afk if I’m away for a longer period. So, what to do?

To understand and solve this problem, I want to explain in greater detail. mIRC allows you to define an alias for some commands. For example, you can automatically say “Hello” by pressing the F1 key with the following command:

/f1 /say hello

You can also combine multiple commands on one alias by using the pipe symbol. Another example could be, you want to join the channels #test1 #test2 and #test3. Instead of entering your join-command three times, create an alias like:

/f2 /join #test1 | /join #test2 | /join #test3

An equivalent would be:

/f2 {
/join #test1
/join #test2
/join #test3
}

Read more

Yes, I admit that comparing ICQ with IRC is like comparing apples and oranges. ICQ is colorful and widely spread. IRC is the opposite, text-based and rarely spread – even back to the basics. But, you won’t believe, both have similarities. IRC and ICQ based on the TCP protocol and tried XMPP. Even both have no encryption out-of-the-box but offer additional possibilities.

Enough of these similarities, the most annoying feature of ICQ are these flashing and toned emotions. Short after those are the user-modified status messages with a lot of special characters, colors and misspelling. I don’t understand why it is cool to replace every g with a q or why a word has to be read mirrored. This is one of the points, which confirmed my decision to use IRC. Read more