Michael Baierl » tech

Bildung 2.0

Michael — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:30:40 +0000

Wie steht es denn eigentlich um unser Bildungssystem? Heute, in der Zeit von Google und Wikipedia? Wie viel Wissen brauchen wir noch und lernen unsere Kinder richtig bzw. das richtige? Wie könnte es sein? Gunter Dueck gibt einen sehr guten Einblick in wie es seiner Meinung nach aussehen könnte:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Optk-gYgFo8

Jetzt hoffe ich noch dass sich unsere Bildungsministerin das auch ansieht….

IBM Watson vs. Human Beings

Michael — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:59:49 +0000

IBM Watson had a good start:

5200 vs. 1000 vs. 200 – IBM Watson is very fast in answering…. watch the day 1 (1/2) video here. Day 1 2/2 video.

Day 2 video (1/2) . Day 2 video (2/2).

Finally on day 3:

Video Day 3 (1/2), Day 3 (2/2).

What impressed me most was not the speed of “the computer” Watson – but the speed of the two guys in answering….

But still – congratulations IBM, well done!

btw, check out this hilarious video:

Bug reports in 2011

Michael — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 21:24:54 +0000

I love how bugs are filed these days….

So eeMNee – this has been fixed, thanks for reporting!

Herzkammerflimmern an der Börse

Michael — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:32:15 +0000

Kleinanleger, die über Online-Broker im Markt mitmischen wollen, scheiden selbstredend aus. Sie sind in diesem Spiel die geborenen Verlierer.

Leider sieht es genauso aus. Warum? Ist hier nachzulesen.

Guns don’t kill people, bullets do.

Michael — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:05:07 +0000

Just to make it clear – we are talking about Powerpoint presentations here, not about war. Although the US Army talks a lot about Powerpoint.

Anyhow, Seth Godin summarizes the idea behind good presentations very well:

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

Slides should help you to sell the idea by bringing emotions along, later on people can look the talk up in a written document. You do have a written document, don’t you?

Read the full article called “Really Bad Powerpoint” and make sure to avoid the usage of bullets as they kill people.

(Image from dilbert.com)

Speed up OpenOffice startup

Michael — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:38:00 +0000

OpenOffice is a really neat office suite which works perfectly fine on the Mac. Unfortunately the startup times are… “not the best”, but here is a little trick of how to improve startup of OpenOffice on Windows, Mac and Linux:

Open up the Preferences (Command + ,)
Navigate to OpenOffice.org > Java
Uncheck the “Use a Java runtime environment”

This will considerably improve the startup time of OpenOffice, while disable i.e. Java based macros. In the very unlikely event that you need them just check the box again…. but until then – enjoy!

The worlds coolest data center

Michael — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:24:00 +0000

Until today I did not know that data centers can be that cool – but check out this article about the server location in Stockholm. Looks like directly out of a James Bond movie:

A nuclear bunker below Stockholm.
Submarine engines as backup power source.
Simulated daylight and greenhouses.

In my opinion the provider Bahnhof built one of the coolest data centers ever – let’s see what Google builds up in Austria.

Original article – more pictures.

Do you backup?

Michael — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:48:00 +0000

Do you regularly create backups of your data? Just in case the harddisk decides to die? Or anything else happens to your computer?
I sort of do. “Sort of” means that I used to run a backup only about once a month – then I started iBackup and waited for about 3-4 hours until it finished the backup to my NAS system (which I bought exactly 2 1/2 weeks before Apple announced its TimeCapsule ). Way too long for just an incremental backup. The reason for this lengthy incremental backup is that iBackup uses SMB to connect to the NAS – which means it transfers too much data to just check if it has been changed since the last backup.

Time to create my own script – a bit of Bash scripting, rsync with an exclude file and an Automator workflow – voila, my incremental backups are now executing in about 5 minutes! Perfect for daily backups via cron and way better than the old backup “process” which took a few hours!

Here is the script: rsyncbackup.sh.txt. Feel free to adopt it as needed!

So my recommendation to everyone – review your backup process, it has to be simple, painless and fast. Otherwise you are not going to use it! Which brings up Mozy – why not using this great, unlimited online backup service? My personal reason is that I don’t want my Mac to be running to do the uploads – that’s what my NAS does in the background – and that I already own a me.com account as well as a 50GB Bingodisk account. No need for another service…

Project Management Course

Michael — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:27:00 +0000

Last week I had a lot of fun – imagine me sitting in the same room with 24 project managers, talking about how to manage projects, risks, scheduling, sizing etc. All other attendees have been project managers, I was the only specialist who just wanted to learn the basics. And get a check mark. But that’s another story.

Nevertheless it turned out to be a lot of fun – our instructor Darryl (who reminded me about Matt) teaches project management since he is literally 3 years old and he is really (and I mean really really) good at it! So even “the programmer” in between the serious project managers learned something about how projects *should* be managed.

In the evenings we went out for some beers – actually and unfortunately the only sightseeing I did. No time for anything else, one evening it was too late for a walk, the other day it was raining… no luck this time. At least I had a great view out of my hotel room.

So there are many valid and good reasons to come back to the beautiful city of Amsterdam, maybe in spring next year?

telnet is insecure! Even if you use WiFi!

Michael — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:55:00 +0000

Discussing about telnet usage in a forum:

> Who the heck is still using telnet? It’s the same as
> with FTP – the password is transmitted in plaintext…

Considering that the wifi connection is encrypted (if using wep/wpa), it really makes no difference.

Outch!