As some of you may have noticed – those of you not only reading the feeds but actually visiting my home page –, it’s appearance has changed significantly. I’m using a fixed size layout now that’s somewhat wider than 800 pixels. Till now I have always used layouts that stretched as wide as the browser could display without scrolling. The problem of those flexible layouts is that the lines of the texts become rather long and the paragraphs sometimes rather short – both looking bad and straining the eyes.

The new title of this blog is originally inspired by “The Lord of The Rings”. The first idea was to have something like “There and Back Again - A Nerd’s Blog”. Well, I had the idea to confess that I’m a nerd from the beginning. If you have followed my blog closely over the time, that should be no revolutionary confession, though. So why not state the obvious? But after browsing the web I found some other blogs having similar titles.

At the same time I was hard at work at coming up with a nice title, an idea of a title image came to my mind and finally I made it real with Blender. I have played around with raytracing software for the last 15 years or something like that. That’s probably because my drawing talents are not as good as I’d like them to be. A 3D program enables even the inept in drawing and painting to create something that looks nice. Blender is a nice program. It’s interface needs some getting used to, but it has been improved greatly over the last years. Now you nearly don’t need to know any keyboard shortcuts to get going.

Back to the design: The two images you see at the top and bottom of the page are two different shots of the same moment in an animation. The shutter used here is somewhat wider than normal creating the nice motion blur effect. It’s a rather sparse scene - some cubes with rounded edges that may be buildings and some weird vehicles that are only flat and don’t have any decorations. That’s my view on cyberspace.

So after creating the image, the current title came almost automatically into my head and here we are. When titles becomes the topic of my thinking, fonts also do. Having a fitting title is only part of the story. You also need some good font that helps transport the message. OFFSITE is a nice collection of free fonts. The only thing it lags is a search engine that would allow you to search for fonts with a certain theme. So you have to browse through the fonts till you find something of your liking.

I’m now using somewhat more meaningful file names for the individual archives. It’s not 000066.html but new_design.html now, but because cool URIs don’t change I have written some RewriteRules to make sure that the old permalinks really stay permanent and and can be used without any change. RewriteRules are a bit tricky but once you undertand there workings they are a really powerful feature.

As I began thinking about the new design of the site I also decided to set up a new blog. This new blog is written in German and is located at robertbeeger.de. It was quite easy to design this one since the structure resembles the one of this site very much. There’s a different slogan here and the colors also are different, but that’s all CSS. Notice that the borders around the menus and posts are done only with HTML and CSS. No images are used here. On the German site I used the “grooove” CSS-border that looks really nice here.

Over the last two months I read the “Chronicles of Blood and Stone” trilogy by Robert Newcomb. It’s a very well written fantasy trilogy with an interesting magic system. I found it to be very gripping and couldn’t let go of it till I read through all three books.

Only now I have found out that this trilogy is only the first part in a trilogy of trilogies. The first book of the second trilogy has only recently been released. Damn, it won’t be until 2010 till the last book is released. Most likely 2015 is a more realistic guess. Oh, I so hate it to wait for sequels. I have canceled reading George R.R. Martin after two of the 6 planned books in his “A Song of Fire and Ice”. He’s now at part 4 and I’m waiting 2 years now for the finished series.

Well at least Stephen King finished his “Dark Tower”-cycle. So maybe I’ll start reading “The Gunslinger” again.

Some days ago I updated my feeds (I already wrote about that). Something worth noting is that I now use the pseudo-standard Feed Icons. They were first used in the Mozilla applications and will now also be used in Microsoft’s IE 7 (See this blog). So it will eventually become the icon users will be looking for when interested in a feed of a website. Well, I’m not sure if it really fits in the look of beeger.net the way I’m using it now, but for the time being it’s not really bad either.

Only a few days after setting up the Squareness DevBlog with WordPress 1.5.2 WordPress 2.0 was now released. I took the time to upgrade to 2.0. It’s a fairly easy procedure not unlike the one needed to upgrade a MovableType installation.

The most changes in WordPress affect the inner workings of it and are mostly interesting to plugin authors and eventually for the WordPress users who will profit from better plugins. The administration GUI changed to a blueish color scheme and AJAX is used on several parts of it.

A thing that will probably cause some controversies is the new Aksimet plugin for comment spam checking. With this plugin WordPress leaves the “purely OpenSource” landscape. The WordPress zealots complained about Six Apart’s central role in the TypeKey service. For Aksimet to work you need an API-key from WordPress.com and all comments that are posted on your WordPress blog are send to Aksimet for checking. Now come on WP zealots and explain how this is better than the Six Apart/TypeKey situation.

Oh well. I had to watch it. It’s the newest movie by Peter Jackson and I really had to know what the next thing after “The Lord of The Rings” would look like.

From the nerd’s viewpoint it’s an amazingly well done movie. The effects are very well done and the creatures look quite realistic. Besides the big monkey otherwise known as King Kong there are all kinds of dinosaurs and also some other prehistoric creatures which probably actually never dwelt on this planet.

The story is as shallow as ever. King Kong falls in love with a blond beauty from New York and defends her against all sorts of creatures. Finally King Kong is transported to New York and becomes the main actor in a Broadway show. He dislikes his role very much and leaves the show. On his way to the Empire State Building he picks up his beloved blond and climbs all the way to the top of the skyscraper where he is finally shot down by some war planes.

Not much of a story, is it? The dinosaurs a worth a look and there are some nicely done scenes with all those imaginatively created creatures. Peter Jackson created another 3 hour movie but this time it’s only effects and nearly no story.

This is the first time I changed the feed generation since installing MT over two years ago. Now this site provides feeds in the RSS 2.0 and the Atom 1.0 formats with full text and the occasional images. The RSS 1.0 feed will be removed in a few weeks.

So: Update your feed readers to use one of the new feeds.

For my Squareness project I have created a development blog, which I’m using to blog about all kinds of development news concerning Squareness. There are sometimes long periods of time without new releases. This blog will fill in the time between releases.

I took this oportunity to test another blogging system - WordPress. I haven’t been using anything other than MovableType for some time now. I’m still statisfied with MovableType, but I wanted to see what this thing so many people talk about looks like.

Creating the theme was a breeze. Most parts were already present in the Squareness site. I took the default theme as a template for my own and replaced many things around the WordPress tags. The admin GUI looks nice and is quite intuitive. There’s also a port of the Markdown plugin and it also seems to have its SmartyPants on. Very nice.

Some days ago I was contacted by Kirill Grouchnikov, author of the “Substance Look And Feel”. He told me about “Laf-Plugin” and asked whether I would integrate it into Squareness Look And Feel.

Laf-Plugin is a simple plugin API targeted specifically at Swing Look And Feels. L&F authors can define plugin categories and load plugins defined for those categories. Laf-Plugin comes with a predefined plugin category – component plugins.

As Swing comes of age more and more third party components and component libraries become available. At the same time more and more pluggable look and feels become available. Laf-Plugin provides a consistent way of defining the look and feel for such components in the context of a specific look and feel. The look and feel dynamically finds the plugins available for it and loads the additional ui delegates defined in them. When a third party component is used the ui delegate from the matching plugin is used and the component fits seamlessly into the look and feel of the containing application.

I think Laf-Plugin is a very good idea. It’s simple and lightweight and does its job. I have integrated Laf-Plugin into Squareness and am currently developing a plugin for “Ribbon” to make sure my integration works correctly before releasing it.

I hope more look and feels will join this effort and I hope that component developers will also support it. Component developers need to provide ui class id for each component to make this work.

Inkscape is a vector graphics editor. It’s native format is SVG, a standard for vector graphics by the W3C slowly gaining support by the web browsers. Inkscape is based on Sodipodi, which hasn’t seen any updates for nearly two years.

It’s really fun to work with Inkscape. The transformation tool and the boolean operators that allow the combination of two shapes are quite cool. I also like the layers support that allows you to create layers containing the shapes. It’s sometimes useful to be able to hide a layer when you want to concentrate on a specific aspect of the image. Inkscape doesn’t have SVG-animation support and will probably never get it, though animation support would make it really perfect.

“The Descent” is a nice splatter movie with classic boo-effects. It’s a film about six women going down into some caves that have supposedly never been explored by any human being. One of the women lost her husband and daughter in a car accident and is still somewhat labile. As was to be expected, the women get lost in the caves and meet some strange creatures that feast on fresh humans. Dinner’s served :)

I have already watched the movie back in August on the FantasyFilmfest. Now it’s officially landed in the German cinemas with a German synchronization. Since there isn’t any other viewable movie in the cinemas right now, I watched it again. Even when watched the second time the movie is still quite scary.