TaskSwitchXP Pro 1.1 alpha contains a funny easter egg in the about box of its configuration tool. If you wait long enough for all the credits to show up and disappear again, you’ll see a c: prompt on which magically the most feared command of all time appears “format c:” The security question is answered with “YES” and then the formatting starts.

Of course nothing really happens, but somehow one takes a deep breath and at first thinks “Shit! That can’t be real”. Then the brain starts to work and recognizes this as a very rude but afterwards funny joke.

Mazera is a fun game for PalmOS. It contains some really original ideas and the ingame arcade games such as “Bug Pong”, “Bug Breakout” etc. are quite cool.

There is also a secret level that is worth searching for. It’s called “Strange Place”. It looks partly like a chest of small things that didn’t fit anywhere else. There is also a big office that somehow looks out of place in the world of Mazera. It turns out to be the office of the developers of Mazera (like the office of the Architect in Matrix). You also meet the main programmer in front of his computer asking “What would Carmack do”.

That’s quite funny indeed if you remember that John Carmack was the main programmer of the famous Commander Keen, which was back then the first really fast jump’n’run game on the x86 platform that was as good in performance and graphics as the games on game machines by Nintendo and others.

After that joke I really expected to find a All your base are belong to us quote anywhere in the game, but I didn’t find any.

JetBrains now have an own mag named onBoard. One of the first articles is about Language Oriented Programming (short: LOP) and about MPS (Meta Programming System), which is or will be a development environment for LOP integrated into IDEA.

The ideas behind LOP sound strange and fantastic at the same time: You develop some languages to be able to develop another application. This reminds of Donald E. Knuth who invented TeX in order to be able to write his “The Art of Computer Programming”. And indeed Knuth is referenced in the onBoard-article.

To be sincere I don’t know what to think about it. It’s interesting and even intriguing but at the same time I cannot imagine what will be possible with this MPS thing and it is not really obvious to me that it will help at getting a job done. Well, I’ll have to wait till I get this thing into my hands to see how it feels and to make any learned comments about the whole matter.

When I was beginning to develop Squareness more than a year ago, I also began to search for a name. I knew I would release it someday. So it was clear it needed some name. After some thoughts I came up with “Square”, but a search on Wincustomize.com showed that there was already a skin named “Square”. Some more thoughts and there was “Squareness”. I deemed myself witty back then, because “Squareness” has more than one meaning. It not only describes the form of most controls in this skin - most of them are of rectangular shape, in case you didn’t notice :) . “Squareness” is also another word for “sincereness”. So naming the thing “Squareness” gave it also some kind of sentimental touch.

While the name is as good as any other name I could have chosen, it has a big disadvantage I didn’t realize until it was too late. Try to google “Squareness”. You’ll get my “Squareness”-site as the topmost result, which is a good thing. But the rest is mostly about the “squareness of web-graphics” and the like. The problem is that when I want to scan the web and see where my skin is talked about, I have to wade through tons of sites that simply talk about other square things.

When I started this thing, I simply didn’t think I’d once be interested in this sort of information that is now hard to get because of the naming. I notice for example fluctuations in the amount of downloads of the instances of Squareness.

Normally when I publish a release, it takes some days to be discovered. In the first three or four days it is only downloaded once or twice a day. Then something happens and it gets 20 downloads on the same day, pushing the project’s activity score up to 80%. This holds for some days, then breaks down to five downloads a day and returns to 15 to 20 downloads again some days later. It’s very fascinating to watch this development, though I just cannot pin down any reason for it. On one of my searches for this reason I came across a forum in a language which was neither German, English nor Polish. In a thread on this forum some guy posted three links to three look and feels for Java Swing. One of those links pointed to Squareness. So Squareness has some fans out there who recommend it to other people.

Anyways, there’s one lesson I draw from this. The next project I’ll come up with will have a more creative name. It won’t be a common adjective. Ideally it will be a word that has no hits in Google.

When I got my GMail invitation a good half year ago from a friend of mine, I was really tempted to use it as my main account for private e-mails. It looked good, had nice features and above all one Gigabyte of free e-mail space was just fantastic. In the end I decided against using GMail. Occasionally I’m looking into my GMail account to see whether some e-mail got lost there, but that’s it.

I had three reasons to decide against GMail. One is that @gmail.com address. I bought beeger.net primarily to have this beeger.net e-mail-address. So I really don’t need some other. But still the 1 GB. Another reason not to use GMail was the distrust in GMail’s privacy. It scans your e-mails and shows you matching ads. While there is nothing you can say against some ads when using a free service, I just don’t like having my e-mails scanned and a profile created for me based on those e-mails. They vow that the e-mails are scanned only for keywords and not used any further, but you never know. Well ok, as an e-mail travels through the internet there are probably dozens of opportunities to scan it, but nevertheless I’m not the one to say “Oh, that’s ok, you can read my mail. It doesn’t matter to me. You may have fun with the spam I get, if you want, too.”. The last reason is that GMail doesn’t support any kind of encryption – no S/MIME no PGP. That’s quite logical. It’s impossible to find any keywords in an encrypted e-mail.

Although I have decided against GMail, I think it is a great idea and nice service. GMail has some unique features like bundling e-mails into conversations. I can understand anyone who uses and likes GMail.

Unfortunately since GMail was released to beta testers there are people developing and people using hacks for GMail. It begins with hacks like a GMail2POP3-bridge that allows you to use GMail through your normal e-mail client and it probably won’t end with GMail drive that allows you to use GMail as an external drive. While very inventive, those hacks will kill GMail in the end. GMail’s source of income are the ads that are displayed along your e-mails. But if most users use those hacks that prevent the ads from being seen by the GMail account owner, then GMail cannot earn anything for showing those ads.

So it’s another situation in which people think that “free” always means “free” as in “free beer”. It’s really boring to see people not understanding one of the principles of our modern world: “None – excluding possibly your relatives and dearest friends – gives you anything for free without some other motive than to make you happy”. GMail’s motive is to make money through ads. If that doesn’t work out GMail will be past before long.

Professing to be a nerd, I’m always on the search for new useful and cool tools. Some days ago I found two such tools.

Somehow I’m always looking into application launchers and seem never to find the right one. The start panel of Windows is the most horrible thing. It takes ages to find one’s way through the hierarchies of menus. Organizing them helps a bit, but it is no real solution. Recently I have used OverlayDesktop which is a DesktopX theme I developed. The problem with OverlayDesktop is that you have to put the icons for the applications you want to use on it. As long as you don’t do this, you find yourself returning to the start menu.

AppRocket is different. It takes no screen space and you don’t have to do any extra management to make it work. It comes out when you press Alt+Space – or any other hotkey which you can choose freely. It’s only a thin bar at the top of the screen. As soon as it shows up, you can start typing. As you type something a drop down menu shows up below the bar containing matches in your start menu, Firefox bookmarks, your collection of MP3 files etc.. So when I type “Fire” “Firefox” is the top element in this list. That’s because I have chosen Firefox several times after typing “Fire”. AppRocket puts the mostly used entries at the top of the list. Yeah I know, MacOS freaks will say that AppRocket is an imitation of LaunchBar . That’s right, it is, but LaunchBar is for MacOS and AppRocket is the only implementation I know of for Windows. So in the world of Windows this is something new and cool. I’m using AppRocket for two weeks now and am very satisfied with it. AppRocket probably won’t be for you if you type with one or two fingers and have to look at the keyboard while searching for the next letter, but as long as you are at least somehow proficient in touch typing, it’s a great tool.

The task switcher you see when pressing Alt+Tab is really old. It hasn’t changed since Windows 3.1. The problem with this task switcher is when you have many windows of the same type such as ten browsers, 3 editors and so on. The icons look the same and the window title sometimes also doesn’t help to find the right one. That’s when TaskSwitchXP enters the stage. TaskSwitchXP is a task switcher with previews. While you run through the icons on the right side of it, it shows a miniature preview of the window for the currently selected window on its left side. There are other such tools. One of them is even one of the PowerToys released by Microsoft. Another of those tools is AltSwitch . The tool by Microsoft is said to be slow. I have tested AltSwitch and it is also totally slow. A tool of this kind is useless if it takes it more than a half minute to show the preview. TaskSwitch is reasonably fast. It still has some problems with some Windowblinds skins that use transparency in their start panel, but I’m confident that the developer will get it fixed. It’s open source BTW.

Somehow I feel like downloading some MovableType plugins and playing around with them. These are the plugins I begin with

• Textile 2
• SmartyPants
• CodeBeautifier

Textile 2 allows you to type your blog entries in a somehow simpler syntax than XHTML. You don’t need to bend your fingers to write all those tags. You just write down a block identifier such as “p” or “bc” follow it by a “.” and start writing your text. It feels a bit like TeX. There are other identifiers and they are followed by periods instead of being preceded by backslashes, but other than that it’s the same feel. As in TeX in Textile blocks are separated by blank lines.

SmartyPants beautifies the appearance of text. It changes normal quotes into curly one and knows how to handle en- and em-dashes.

Codebeautifier changes boring looking code blocks into syntax-highlighted – possibly still boring ;) – code blocks. Let’s try something in Java:

public class SomeThing extends NoThing
{
  public void doAnyThing()
  {
    System.out.println("Maybe I should say something?");
  }
}

One cool thing about CodeBeautifier is that it integrates nicely with Texttile.

I remember playing around with Fractint on my DOS box some long years ago. It sometimes took hours to generate those Mandelbrot and Julia images, but it was somehow fascinating. Fractint seems to be dead now. I have no idea why it died and when exactly it died. Anyways, other programs have taken the place of Fractint. One of them is Ultra Fractal. It does all Fractint did and several things more. Another program is Apophysis

Apophysis is different from Fractint and Ultra Fractal because it generates a wholly different world of fractals. It generates fractal flames. I haven’t looked into the used algorithms and I really don’t know why they are called flames. To me they really don’t look like flames. Mandelbrot and Julia images aren’t surprising anymore. They all look similar because they are only parts of the same never changing things. You can choose nice colors, use other tools to generate landscapes of them, but they stay what they are and people who have seen many of those images in the past recognize those fractals in new images. Fractal flames seem to have far more variations. Ok, I have seen many Apophysis images up to now. So when I see one I know that it is one, but they aren’t getting boring yet and again and again I see new ones that really look great. Maybe it’s because the used algorithms are far more complicated and many things can be changed. At the generation of Mandelbrot images you can only specify which part of it you want to zoom into. When creating fractal flames you can specify of what components they will be build and each of those components has again a great number of properties to play with.

BTW: Don’t let the quality of the preview put you off of playing with Apophysis. You have to render the images. The preview is only a preview. Rendering takes more time, but the generated images are really great.

One of the greatest artists when it comes to Apophysis is Tom Wilcox. I call him an artist because though it’s technically only choosing the right numbers, IMHO it is a kind of art to choose the right numbers here.

Last week the new JDK was released. Funny thing is that Sun couldn’t decide which version number to give to that new release.

The web-site tells us that it is J2SDK 5.0, but the name of the installation file is jdk-1_5_0…. and the default installation directory is also jdk1.5.0. So what is it now?

Now we have three version numbers for the same release. The platform number hasn’t changed for while. It’s still Java 2. Then we have 5.0, which seems to be a marketing department version number, and 1.5.0, which is probably the version number the development department has chosen.

This is maybe a conspiracy theory, but it seems that two groups at Sun fought over the version number and none of them won the fight. There are those who say, that this release contains so much new features, that it has to be 5.0. Others may say, that JDK 1.4.0 also had many new features. So why should it not be 1.5.0?

I think it’s all only confusing. It doesn’t help Java when none knows how to call this new release.

Nevertheless the features in this release are big and will have a great impact on how software will be developed with Java in the future. The inclusion of generics alone is a big step. In addition we have annotations, typesafe enums, autoboxing and more.

In the past I have tried out a number of feed readers. Some of them were self contained applications with a three pane view reminding of e-mail clients. In those feed readers the first pane shows the list of feeds, the second shows the current articles and the third shows the excerpt of the article that is included in the feed. In most cases you can click on a button that will show the referenced article in an embedded browser window. The second sort of feed readers I have used are extensions for Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbird. One of the better extensions for Firefox was Newsmonster. It looked good and its aggregator was good too. One drawback was that it used a Java applet internally for all its functionality. Loading of this applet was very slow and since it was loaded at the start up of Firefox - back in that time still named Firebird -, the browser took eons to load. Sadly the development of Newsmonster was canceled shortly after the author realized that nearly none would buy the professional version, which contained some scoring system for feeds that none used. Feed Reader Panel and it’s greatly improved derivate Sage are fully written in JavaScript and load much faster. They are simpler but they do their job good enough. I also used ForumZilla which is now incorporated into Thunderbird. It extends Thunderbird with feed accounts. Those look like normal e-mail or news accounts, but contain feeds and their articles. One good point about ForumZilla is that it doesn’t trash old articles. You can ignore a feed for some days and explore it once you have the time and pleasure to do it.

So that’s for what I used up until a month ago when I discovered KlipFolio. KlipFolio is a nifty little application that primarily isn’t meant as a feed reader. To be precise, I discovered KlipFolio somewhen in the past and didn’t take a great notice of it then because it is not a feed reader. KlipFolio sits in your tray and waits to be clicked on. Once you click on it, it appears on your screen. It consists of any number of Klip windows, each showing the contents of its own Klip. The windows itself can be of any size and you can change their skin. It’s not that easy to say what Klips are. In their simplest form they look like feeds - headlines with excerpts of articles. If you click on a headline a browser is opened showing the article. But Klips can be more. I have a Klip that shows me the weather forecasts for the next week in Hamburg. There are also other sorts of Klips such as stock tickers.

The kind of Klips that look like normal feeds can have a more sophisticated configuration. The Klip of “Wired News” for example allows you to choose from a number of categories. So you only get the articles you are interested in.

Klips are generally free of charge. There are zillions of them at KlipFarm. You can download them and install them into your KlipFolio. From time to time the Klips will contact their servers and fetch new articles or other kinds of data.

One big feature of KlipFolio is the generic feed viewer Klip. You can configure it to read any feed. With this KlipFolio becomes the news center on the desktop.

Here’s a number of Klips I recommend:

• Feed Viewer : Wrap any RSS feed into a Klip
• MozillaZine : What’s going on in Mozilla-land?
• Neowin : News by nerds for nerds
• CustomWeather : How’s the weather? (Even for German cities)
• The Register : Another of those nerd news sites. A must read!
• Wired News : Sometimes weird, sometimes wired and sometimes even unplugged ;)
• Heise Online : Tech news in German
• Tagesschau : News from outside nerd-land in German

When opened my KlipFolio occupies nearly the whole desktop space. It shows me all the current news. I can browse quickly through the headlines and decide whether there is something interesting for me to read. It’s a real time saver.