Finally Moved

Hey everybody!

It took some time but I finally made it, to move my blog to a new server, update to the newest WordPress version and also update my plugins.

Hopefully I will have some time to write new articles as well 😉

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Big Brother is watching You

It is about 4 week ago that I switched from my favorite browser Firefox to Googles Chrome. On my Windows 7 system Firefox simply used too many resources.

Today I updated my Spybot installation which protects my registry and made a system scan. What shall I tell you it found 26 tracking cookies on my computer which I caught during only the last 4 weeks. My main usage of the internet is to search for programming informations.

Perhaps I am a little naive but I see no evidence that a session cookie must remain on the computer of a surfer after the user is logged out. Personalization of a website like on Amazon is a nice thing but I think that I should be able to surf in the internet anonymously and only get a personalized view once I reveal my identity intentionally as by logging in.

Instead of anonymity even the browsers reveal more and more informations so that these can already be used as identifying fingerprint as shown in the EFF Panopticlick project.

If you think that all this doesn’t matter to you it is perfectly OK with me but be aware that the companies who are tracking you and your behavior are making a lot of money with your data. What do you get in return? Databases full of tracking data which, connected to a real person, will make you and your doings completely transparent.

What will be the logical next step after connecting you as a person with the sampled data …. ? I don’t think that needs much inspiration.

Be aware when you surf in the internet that many eyes are watching you!

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A dream within a dream

I just came back to the idea that the whole world is just a simulation on a nice super-computer like in the old science fiction film “Die Welt am Draht” from Fassbinder oder in the film “the 13th Floor”.

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

There is always the problem how to hide from the simulated entities that their world is quite limited. I believe in our world they found a nice solution to this problem, they made it round! 😉

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Rails Plugin Documentations

As computer scientist I am working since 20 years now and since 2 years I have a lot of fun programming in Ruby or better in JRuby.

At the moment I am working on my first bigger Ruby on Rails project and have to state something which I wouldn’t perhaps have agreed with in my earlier years too:

Code (even well documented) is no substitute for good documentation!

I would like to address this specially into the direction of some developers who are writing really great plugins for RoR. A little bit more documentation about the basic ideas would lower the threshold for Rails newbies like me a lot. Naturally I am able to figure out how a plugin really works without documentation and I am sure that I can learn a lot from this experience. But eventually I will end up writing my plugins myself because that makes me faster then figuring out how something works which another programmer has developed.

So please keep in mind: Writing code in a computer language which is easier to understand and comes more natural does not subsitute for a good documentation!

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Blog enhanced with WPTouch

Since I am one of the guys playing around with an iPhone now I thought it might be a good idea to make my blog a little bit more readable on the iPhone and other PDAs. After a small research I decided to install the WPTouch plugin and have to state: great work, thanks!

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