Too Far Afield

Soon it will be 02:00 a.m. MET. For the second time today. And it was summer.

We just implemented the feature that allows our readers – hey, that is you among others – to search the Amazon catalogue. By now you can only search the catalogue of the German subsidary of Amazon, but we are planning to extend our interface to multiple Amazon catalogues. For every thing you purchase using our interface we get a small percentage of the item price back from Amazon. So if you wanted to buy something from Amazon anyway you might as well buy it from here.

We used the new version 4.0 API to implement our search. It is a lot faster and easier to process than version 3.0. The book features in the sidebar are coded using version 3.0 of the API. We’ll soon change these to version 4.0, too.

And how do you search? Just click Want to buy another book? right below the book features and to your satisfaction the whole Amazon world including DVDs, Home Videos, PC Hardware and other things – we know, the name of the link is a bit misleading – will be open to you.

Oh my dear, did I say the step from 0.9.3 to 1.0RC1 was a big one without trying the new plugin management? Ladies and Gentleman, this is a huge step towards the best browser ever. I just installed Flash from Macromedia in about 10 seconds and with just a few Next butten clicks. Earlier I needed to be a web expert and it still took about 5 minutes. Thank you people, thank you so much!

Did I already tell you you should Get Firefox? Now? Immediately? Do it! Fast!

Today I upgraded to the German version of Mozilla Firefox 1.0RC1. Abdulkadir Topal, the German translator of Mozilla Firefox, earlier decided that due to various problems there would be no German 1.0PR release, so I was stuck with 0.9.3. That was a bit of a hassle for me as I wanted to get some bug fixes and also a lot of new features.

When Abdulkadir announced that there is a German 1.0RC1 release availlable as a beta release from the Mozilla.org FTP servers I decided to go with it. Well I just did and it works like a charm.

Not only seems Firefox more polished and all the bugs that I hoped would get fixed got fixed, but the rendering of the pages is also a lot of faster*. Dear Mozilla Community and especially A. Topal: Thank you so much for that. I’m totaly impressed, really!

*) Please note that I use the Linux release.

I just thought it was time for a new home page for Nachtarbeiter.net. It features random images, although I have put up only two images right now. One is from Hamburg, 2002 and the other one is from Chicago, 2004. Tell me what you think!

I wonder if the following type of web application could be used by the people that guard my democracy, but I really don’t know. Try it for yourself: Language Guesser by Maciej Ceglowski could be a Google application, because it’s really cool, it is availlable online free of charge and it works for me out of the box.

Today we introduced the new search feature that is linked in the main navigation. Also – just in time for the launch of the Firefox 1.0 release in a few days – I finally added a promotion button from the Spread Firefox Campaign to my website. After all, I’m ready to take back the web with you now.

I also corrected a few validation errors on the manual coded sites so they are all valid XHTML 1.0 Strict again. The validation errors on the index site are bugs in WordPress, that claims to be 100% XHTML compatible. For example, special characters are not urlencode() d in anchor title tags. Also WordPress adds paragraph tags where they are not allowed. So we need to wait for another version of WordPress to get this site to validate again. However, since WordPress claims to be 100% XHTML compatible, I still leave the button in to show off the case.

We are proud to present to you our new about section as well as dynamic Amazon features. We’re finally making some progress, you see!

[Update]

I’ve corrected some spelling mistakes in the about section and also added another subsection to the about site. Hope you enjoy it.

[Update2]

Corrected an ugly bug of WordPress. It displayed the date of each post only for the last post of each day. On all subsequent posts of the same day no date was displayed. This is my hack:

Place this code snippet somewhere in The Loop:

1. <?php
3. $tempdatum = trim(the_date('','','', FALSE));
5. if(!empty($tempdatum)) {
6. $postdatum = $tempdatum;
7. } // end if
9. ?>

Then use the following to display the date of your posts anywhere in your posts:

1. <?php echo $postdatum; ?>

Yes, I know, I promised myself not to do too much links without a lot of text applied on this blog anymore, but these two just made me think.

• I’m sorry sir, you are a security risk
• My European ‘vacation’, part 1

Thanks for bearing with me until I finally meet my goals…

Der Träge leugnet die Existenz der Gesellschaft.

Solon, Greek statesman (638 – 558 B.C.)

Driving home from a party in downtown yesterday night with a friend, we encountered some strange changes. Actually we saw them in the driving mirrors of my friend’s car. A few meters behind our black Audi A6 estate car was an old model Volkswagen Golf and it was stuffed with people. At a red traffic light near Music Hall we followed them getting out of the car, running around – doing some kind of strange dancing on the street – and getting back into the car – to different seats. The driver changed, too.

On every subsequent red traffic light – you notice that we somehow had the same way home – they would get out of the car, running around on the street like mad, and get back into the car – changing both seats and driver – just before the lights would switch back to green.

We wondered if it were some modern variation of a popular German game called Stopptanz mixed with a bit of another popular German game called Die Reise nach Jerusalem and drove our way home.

So what would you have thought of this?

I get asked a lot why Apple’s customers are so loyal. It’s not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That’s ridiculous.

It’s because when you buy our products, and three months later you get stuck on something, you quickly figure out [how to get past it]. And you think, “Wow, someone over there at Apple actually thought of this!” And then three months later you try to do something you hadn’t tried before, and it works, and you think “Hey, they thought of that, too.” And then six months later it happens again. There’s almost no product in the world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs about Apple’s business philosophy, adapted from The Seed of Apple’s Innovation published by BusinessWeek on October 12, 2004

October 12th
Back at 11 o’clock in the morning. Fighting against jet lag now. Thanks Chicago and their people for a nice beautiful week over in the United States.

October 11th (1/2 day)
Just some chilling in the sun. However the waether seems to get bad now. Dosn’t matter for us as we leave today anyway. In the newspaper: List of all finishing runners from Chicago Marathon.

October 10th
Weather is even better today. Chicago Marathon in the Morning. Around 40.000 runners, over 30.000 finishing. Visited the Museum of Science and Technology. Unfortunately the U-505 (a German u-boat from WWII) was closed for conservation and will not reopen until 2005. However they feature many other interesting things like a Boing 737, a coal mine form the 1930s, a walkable heart, the Apollo 8 lunar landing module, to name a few. Also visited the Omnimax theatre. In the evening again John Hancook Tower.

October 9th
Good weather again, blue skies, 23 C, visited the aquarium and the field museum, field museum has the worlds biggest t. rex body (also known as Sue). Later shopping and dinner at House of Blues.

October 8th
rainy weather finally, so in the morning art institute of chicago, they have some nice monets chagalls, rembrandts, picassos and others, the famous nighthawk painting is currently in Germany, though – funny isn’t it?, later shopping tour through all the big centers in downtown, in the evening 16″ pizza for 4.99$

October 6th
very sunny, weather like German July & August, Adler planetarium, great view of the city skyline, in the evening Andie’s Jazz Club, enjoyed the music

personal notes:
Imagine a world in which you could actually phone M2. and something would happen.

Yesterday we visited the campus of the University of Chicago. It has some great sights to see. On our way to it, we drove through a few suburbs you better won’t be in at night. On our way we were the only white people in the train/bus.
At night we took the opportunity to visit the center that was falsely reffered to as John Hicks center im my last post (of course it is the John Hancook center) for the second time. We waited 10 minutes for the servant and in the end she didn’t charge us for our drinks, although we hand’t said something. That is service, people.

See you later this week with some other great news from Chicago.

Unfortunately, I forgot to write a post about “Hey, I’m off to Chicago!”, but as our hotel has free Internet access, I might as well keep you up to date.

If you ever have the chace to get to Chiacgo, do it. It is a wonderful city. And when you’re finally there and it’s sunny weather, have a look to the city from North Avenue Beach. You’ll get the whole skyline. You might then take a 5 minute walk along the shore of Lake Michigan to the so called Magneficiant Mile, where you can find a whole bunch of shopping centers and shops like “Ralph Lauren” and what not. Also there is the John Hicks Center, which is one of the largest skyscrapers of Chicago. You’ll notice it from almoust everywhere in the city where you can spot the skyline, because it has a pyramid like touch.
Be sure not to spend 10$ admission for the observatory. You would rather safe these bucks and go up to the restaurant and have a 10$ drink there (a cocktail or two coke or a sandwich are all 10$). Try to get a seat on the west side of the tower (aka not the sea side). Drink your drink until dawn. There you go, you just had the best view you could get in Chicago in a lether seat, with a drink or a sandwich in your had, for just 10 bucks.

See you later this week with more stories from Chicago and some nice photos maybe.