Just a short posting to mention that I got selected to participate in the IBM Corporate Service Corps… more blog postings in #ibmcsc will follow soon!

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:

Last Monday my Mac refused to boot up again – even in single user mode he remained in a reboot-loop. Trying to get to the data was not that easy as the hard drive was encrypted using PGP Whole Disk Encryption.

Not a problem I thought – I have a TSM backup from the Friday before and most data is in code repositories or anyway. All I really need is a presentation for Tuesday morning. So I boot up my Thinkpad, install all the Windows updates (I do not use it that often ) and start TSM.

Empty backup set.

What?

Verify all the connection settings.

Empty backup set. No data showing up in TSM.

Starting to sweat.

Now here the story about why I love my Mac starts. I love the Mac platform because:

• I was able to create a 1:1 copy of my personal Mac on an external USB drive.
• I was able to boot from this cloned disk via USB by just holding the Option key. Just boots, all data and settings there. Try doing that with Windows
• After booting I installed PGP and mounted the internal disk. I was able to copy away all my data from the broken disk to the external drive (this includes the whole /home/mike directory and some /Applications).
• Time to reformat the whole disk and install a clean copy of Snow Leopard (finally a good reason to upgrade!).
• After booting into the clean OS all I had to do was copying (!!!) the /Applications to the appropriate folder and copying (!!!) the home directory to the right location. After logging into the newly created user account all my data was there.
• By copying the home directory everything just worked – even the WLAN connections, settings, MobileMe syncing, all just working. All I lost have been the printer settings. No need to re-install tons of applications, all just copied back – and working fine!
• Try the above on Windows!
• Now I tried something – I started TSM on the Mac and logged in – and magically all my data showed up in TSM! What? Verified on Windows – empty set. Can someone working on TSM please explain that behavior to me? Why is the TSM data only showing within the same platform?

Overall the whole work took half a day – including a clean OS update and to “migrate” all applications. Only TSM scared me a bit – so I now started to create weekly backups using Carbon Copy Cloner – which is a good thing anyway, as it is super-easy to boot the backup on another machine. And I love the Mac because it does not use a magic registry and installing applications is really simple!

Nur ein kurzer Screenshot einer Website, die ich persönlich recht lustig finde… und zwar zu finden auf der Seite wo sich Studenten für Jobs bewerben. Und die Auswahl zwischen “Ritter”, “Baron”, “Graf” und auch “Prinzessin” haben…

Ist meiner Meinung nach das wichtigste Feld im ganzen Bewerbungsprozess

Wien, 16. Dezember 2008. Ein Gebäude gegenüber dem Schwedenplatz. Es geht um (=es ist viel los). So viele Mitarbeiter wie heute finden sich sonst das ganze Jahr nicht im Haus ein. Vor den Liften findet ein regelrechter Kampf um einen Aufzugsplatz statt. Fast so wie bei den Sitzplätzen der ÖBB zur Weihnachtszeit, nur dass hier nicht einmal gegen einen Aufpreis eine Reservierung möglich ist. Die Lage wird durch den Ausfall eines Liftes noch dramatisch verschärft. Und in den einzelnen Stockwerken finden Versammlungen statt, die auf USA Flügen per Gesetz und Ansage verboten wären.

Tuscheln.
“Ist er schon da?”
“Ich hab was gehört!”

Worum es geht? Um DAS Ereignis des Jahres. Um IHN. Den eigentlichen Grund warum wir jedes Jahr zur Arbeit gehen und kurz vor Weihnachten auf den verdienten Urlaub verzichten.

Lachs.
Viel Lachs.
Sehr viel Lachs.

So viel Lachs dass der Einzelhandel stöhnt. Am Schwedenplatz trifft man lauter Leute mit ihrem Lachs unterm Arm, man grüßt sich, schließlich kennt man sich ja. Und weiß, welcher Tag heute ist. Der Tag, an dem ER geliefert wird. Aber ab morgen wird es wieder ruhiger werden, bis ziemlich genau zum 7. Jänner, viel Zeit zum Lachs essen, anschließend beginnt die Planung für das nächste Jahr. Man will ja schließlich vorbereitet sein, wenn im Oktober die Mail mit der Lachsbestellung eintrudelt….

(Bild 2 von flickr)

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?

I was once been told by an IBM HW engineer that one of our System 38s “had ceased to be operational because of an AMD failure”

“A what?” i replied
“An AMD failure” He restated
“Woz that?” I asked
“An Air Movement Device” He said
“Oh you mean a fan” sayz I
“No I mean an AMD, Fans just blow air, AMD’s move air in a predefined and expected way”
I beat him soundly with a dead haddock sadly this only resulted in yells of
“Hit the BRS!”
“What is the BRS?” I enquired as the haddock once again smacked up side his head
“The Big Red Switch” He replied spitting scales from between his teeth
“The Big Red Switch? What Big Red Switch would that be”
“The Big Red Switch that stops you battering me on the bonce with a dead haddock”
“Oh” I said continuing to belabour him with the haddock only stopping when he promissed me a boondoggle, mind you he did have to explain what that was aswell

From Steve McDonagh. I’m not going to comment this, but read on:

A “stretch target” is defined as a “goal that probably is impossible” as in: “We’re setting stretch targets next year”.

Read more about the fact that “IBM employees are said to have a language of their own” but “have a ‘Can Do’ attitude taking personal responsibility for resolving issues and urgent service requests”…

I just noticed that my previously published article about “Must-have tools for HTML, JavaScript and AJAX development and debugging” has been translated to Chinese:

进行 HTML、JavaScript 和 Ajax 开发和调试的必用工具

Have fun reading