Recent blog entries for eckes

I wonder if any of you has some ideas for Katas. In my case for the Java language.

In case you wonder what a Kata (in programming) is: a (small) coding challenge which you solve repeatingly to practice and improve your coding skills.

A nice written story is here: The clean Coder: The Craftsman 62, The Dark Path.

Some Katas can be found here: codekata.pragprog.com, but I wonder if you can share better (especially smaller) execises with me.

What experiences do you have with doing Katas?

Bernd

I am pretty happy that Advogato is still running, and it looks like it got some new activity.

On my personal side, I discovered again the joy of fotography. This was caused by a new cam in our household: I gave my Wife Mela a Nikon D70s as birthday present. So right now I am playing around with that, even started a german speaking blog on my findings.

From eckes.org:

Advogato.org was an early community site and aggregator for Open Source advocates. It was build around a Web Application (mod_virgule) which supports trust metrics. That way the community members can certify each other. This was used as a spam prevention and identity assertion measure.

This technology was well ahead of its time. Now Raph Levien announced, that he will shut down Advogato. He thinks that there are enough alternatives, and he does not have the time to add features to the software or even fight against some recent DOS attacks.

The site will be missed, but it is most likely really time to move on. I was myself a master on advogato, but I did not write a lot diary entries there: eckes. I will continue to blog on my private site eckes.org and on my business and technology related blog: itblog.eckenfels.net

30 Jun 2003 (updated 7 Sep 2006 at 16:17 UTC) »

Mela, my wife had this cool idea, to start a Geek Movie Quiz on eckes.org. With the help of Ollie, we started to record the first scene. Ollie and me are immitating a scene from a well known movie.

If you are curious how the fabolous and amateurish geek quiz looks like, check by at eckes.org.

Unfortunatelly we offer a little price to the winner only inside germany, but nevertheless, you can read your name on the next month edition, if you are able to guess the right movie title.

eckes.org moviequiz

Currently we feature Real Media downloads and an animated gif, of the scene.

15 Jun 2003 (updated 15 Jun 2003 at 04:50 UTC) »

I took the time to update my Advogato entry and the Project Page for the Freefire project.

Yes it is still alive, even if I am currently much more visible on eckes.org.

Oh yes, speaking of eckes.org, I just added Advogato syndication to eckes.org. My site is PHP-Nuke based, and it is pretty easy to add a RSS feed to it. Currently it is located on the lower left of the site, but I guess I should rearrange a few of those blocks, anyway.

If you wonder, why I have been so silent here is, because I simply forgot about Advogato. I think it can have some more PR, thats why I have added the headlines.

amars: hey, no problem. I dont feel insulted or anything, and I am thankful for your both advice. I have looked a bit deeper in the code, and already found a problem :)

Reading the code realy makes me wonder why it works at all :)

Anyway... I don't agree that it is a bad thing if technical iliterate people would like to wave a community. Of course if they are only attracted by the name or fancy graphics it is bad.

To get ontopic again, I think a lot of open source projects are only attrackting crowd cause of a cool name, a good web site, nifty screenshots or a funny project leader.

Well, and some of them, because they are actually good :)

22 Jan 2002 (updated 22 Jan 2002 at 00:22 UTC) »

happy b-day to me. If you wonder how I have celebrated, I listen to two talks at the local (Karlsruhe, Germany) SAGE meeting. We had a talk on Unix+Smartcards and Windows+CLI.

deekayen, amars: well, actually there are a few things to consider: first of all, you are right, PHPNuke's security could be improved. On the other hand, I do not have writeable files on my account. The system is (at least compared to slash) realy hogging the database, but it works for me now. Actually sometimes I have kind of Windows user attitude. I want something done, easy :)

Well, anyway. Choosing between PostNuke and PHPNuke is not a matter of easy comparing personal tastes or icon dsign. I managed to get up slashcode, pslash and PHP-Nuke. Maybe I get some experience with postnuke, too. And I contribute to all of them, thats what a Journeyer is for :)

Discussion on eckes.org (still PHP-Nuke)

Yeah!

I finally managed to do something usefull (well, at least I think it is) with my private eckes.org domain. It was a birthday present (2000-01-21) by mela, my wife. And now -2 years later- that I am about to become 30, I have my own private Web Portal.

It is based on PHP-Nuke, which I truly can recommend. Easy to set up and with a lot of features. I was even able to set this up on a hosted account.

So, If you care about my oppinion, you can find them there :)

eckes.org: Opinions of a Geek

I think I will use this, as a Backend for Freefire, since the Forum and Link Management looks promising. On the other hand, this will require some work to get the Look and Feel the way I like it for the Project.

Well,
I thought about getting some new things done, so some of me Debian Packages should find a new and better Maintainer. The Package which deserves some more work is the Jabber Server. I hand it over to Michel Onstein.

10 Dec 2000 (updated 13 Jan 2002 at 06:18 UTC) »

It is fun to work with Packages which use GNU's configure. (Actually I see this from the Standpoint of a Debian Package Maintainer, not from the Standpoint of a programmer).

Therefore it is no fun to package software like the 1.2 Jabber Server which has a home grown configure script. I wish it didnt, but since i am not used to build configure systems i will have to let somebody else to the dirty work.

Meanwhile you can find my package of the Jabber Daemon in Debian, where also a Patch is present which solve some of the more nast problems of the old configure script :)

Jabber.html

In case you wonder what Jabber is, it is a open source instant mesenger system and will be quite cool :).

Ah! and another short link: in case you always wondered how FTP works and why it is so firewal unfriendly have a look at my new Freefire Article "FTP by Example". I know it has some broken Links, I'm just curious if you think it is readable and helpful. And I hope you like the new Layout. (Not completely finished I need to make the pagesize more dynamic).

1 older entry...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!