Finally the new version of my blogging system is published. MovableType 3.0D brings a new feature I was longing for for some time now - Comment registration. You now have to register at “TypeKey” to be able to post comments to my blog.

Well, I know, I don’t like registering anywhere, either, but the blog spam became a great nuisance. So I have no choice. After all, you don’t need to tell all that much to get registered and my blog doesn’t tell TypeKey to give me your email-address. Though it is easy to get registered at Type Key, that should make an end to the stream of spam that has been hitting my site for some time now.

hmm, this site will become a bit lonely without all those spam bots. At least they posted every few days. The comments weren’t very creative and they really didn’t comment on the entries they were made on, but there was some noise. ;)

Yesterday I watched Kill Bill Vol. 2. The first thing to note about it is that it is rather bloodless compared to Vol. 1. There are no more blood fountains artfully splashing out of places where only seconds before various limbs very happily connected to the body they belonged to. No, in Vol. 2 the Bride is a pretty nice wench who refrains herself from dissecting her opponents. She only pulls the eye of an already one eyed enemy out of its natural environment and squashes it with a naked foot.

So: If you are bloodthirsty, you won’t get rid of your thirst by watching this movie. Nevertheless the film is worth watching. The dialogs are - as usual for a movie by Tarentino - quite cool and although there’s nearly no blood, the movie is still visually appealing.

Let’s come back to the lack of blood. I’ve got a theory of why there is so few of it in Vol. 2. I think that the producers gave Tarentino only a fixed amount of fake blood - five wagons or something like that. When Vol. 1 was finished only a few bottles were left over. I imagine Tarentino begged for more fake blood, but did not get any. So he had no choice than to come up with some new ideas.

I released the OverlayDesktop DesktopX 2 Theme. You can find it on WinCustomize

In the past I have played around with different programs and other means to have a fast access to the applications I use without having to wander through the start menu.

There are generally two kinds of programs that try to achieve this:

• Extra bars such as the QuickStart-Bar from Windows that are always visible. Depending on your screen resolution and whether you dock the bar horizontally or vertically, you can put a good deal of icons on them. The problem with those bars is that they take away precious screen space when using big icons. They use fewer space when you use small icons but then it’s sometimes hard to aim at the right icon with the mouse cursor. And still they take away space.
• Then there are some applications that have the great autohide feature. That’s really great. They don’t take away any screen space when they aren’t needed and you can place icons on them as big as you wish. One kind of those applications are the docks that were first seen on the Mac. But those docks also have some drawbacks. One such is that the dock suddenly appears when you accidentally hit the side of the screen where the dock is hidden and then you have to wait until it autohides again.

So why don’t I simply put my icons on the desktop? It’s only one Win-M away. It simply doesn’t feel right to minimize all the windows only to see my desktop and start a new application.

So the idea behind OverlayDesktop is to have an extra desktop area that is accessible without minimizing all windows and that doesn’t become visible accidentally.

The theme consists of two Desktop X objects. One of them is the starter. It is horizontally docked to the upper screen edge and is only one pixel high. It is totally transparent and is always on the top. So when you want to see your OverlayDesktop you move your mouse cursor to the upper edge and press the left mouse button, which makes it visible. The overlay is transparent to some degree, so that you still can see what’s under it. You can place any Desktop X objects on it - shortcuts for example. Clicking on a shortcut which resides on the OverlayDesktop starts the application and makes the OverlayDesktop invisible again.

I’m using this theme for quite some time now and somehow it feels right for me.

My, my, that took some time, but finally I have made a first release of my first Open Source project.

It is called Squareness and you can visit it at http://squareness.sourceforge.net/

It’s a suite of skins and its purpose is to create a uniform look on all supported platforms and applications. Currently I have only a skin for WindowBlinds and a pluggable Look And Feel for Java, but this is only a starting point.

The next skins in this series will be the skins for Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird.

It’s some time since I watched this movie. It was on the same evening that I thought about writing something about it, but I’ve been very lazy. So it took me some time to get to it, but at least here I am

There are many critics who say that no bit of Tarentino’s humor is visible in the movie. “Pulp Fiction”, they tell us, was a great movie, but “Kill Bill” is just another brutal and rude movie with no visible sense of humor.

I don’t know. Did I watch another movie? Did they really watch it or did they only conclude this from the setting of the movie? It’s OK. “Pulp Fiction” is a great movie, but it’s also a totally different one. Did they expect Tarentino to do a “Pulp Fiction 2” or something like that? Why should he do it? It would most likely be boring. It would be like a meal you haven’t finished yesterday, so you put it again on the stove today. It’s OK. It’s even tasty, but it’s old. In “Kill Bill” Tarentino tried some other spices and what he cooked is very good IMHO.

And it’s full of humor. Sometimes it’s a bit hard, but nevertheless good. I was laughing through the whole film. And yeah, it’s full of blood. But the blood comes out in fountains and there is so much of it that you really cannot take it serious and it becomes art.

The only disappointing thing about the movie is that it was cut into two ones. I would have been glad to sit for three hours in the cinema with no break and to watch it from the beginning to the end. “The Lord of The Rings” taught us to take movies of that length in one piece. They will make more money with those two parts than they would have made with just one long movie. This is understandable but it adds some bitter taste to it.

I have finished reading the fifth installment in the Harry Potter series. And I have to say, it’s again a very gripping book and fun to read. Although it is again fatter than it’s predecessor, there are no boring patches in it.

I could tell you, who get’s killed this time, but I won’t. Don’t want to spoil it for you.

Rowling introduces a new “Defense Against the Dark Arts” teacher in this book. The character is very good drawn. Although I disliked it from the beginning, some of the best parts of the book show it in action. It’s very convincing. I felt myself reminded of a teacher o mine I had back in school.

The new JDK 1.4.2 comes with two new lnfs. One of them is a look and feel for Windows XP. It uses the new theming engine build in into Windows XP. When using this look and feel Java applications look like native applications on XP. Well, at least that’s what it’s meant to be like.

As long as you use one of the horrible Luna visual styles that come with Windows XP, you probably won’t notice any peculiarities. The problem is I don’t use Luna. Luna is, as I already said, horrible. It wastes space and is not ergonomic in some places.

Although there is a theming engine in Windows XP, Microsoft locked it up and only signed styles made by Microsoft can be run. As always there are ways around this. You can install a hacked version of uxtheme.dll or install StyleXP, which pats XP on the had and says “It’s ok to use this visual style. Trust me” every time an usigned visual style is to be used. So there are possibilities to escape Luna. And that’s what I did. Many unsigned visual styles created by lots of people are around. One of them is Watercolor, which recreates the original style of the Whistler builds of Windows. This is a very smooth and ergonomic style. I cannot understand why Microsoft dropped it and changed to Luna. But ok, this is a Microsoft secret and sincerely I don’t care.

When JDK 1.4.2 came out I though to myself “Cool, now I’ll be able to use my Java apps with a look and feel I really like”. But the disappointment came fast. The first tests with SwingSet2 showed that the look and feel is really bad. I think it’s hand optimized for Luna and doesn’t really use the theming engine the way it should be used. It’s nearly useless with Watercolor. The progress bar is not showing, the caption buttons aren’t on the right places and the sliders look just awful.

Let’s wait for JDK 1.5 then. Maybe they’ll fix it there.

After one year with Blog I now switched to MovableType. The installation worked like a charm. Sticking to the installation notes brought me in no time to a working system. The good and clear site information system of domainfactory, my hoster, helped also in this

I’m nearly finished changing all the templates to the style of this site. That’s not as easy as with Blog. Blog only had three or something like that templates. MovableType has 13 of them. There’s now a commenting system and a RSS feed is also available.

One advantage of MovableType is that it runs on the site and I can blog from whereever I want. The reason for using Blog and not blogger in the first place was that I did not want to post my ftp access data on some public site. Since MovableType runs on my site, I have both the security - Ok, there’s always a possibility that one’s site is hacked - and the flexibility

One thing I miss from Blog is the spell checker So be warned: Broken English can now occure more frequently than up to now. We’ll see.

I have played with FeedReader some time ago, but somehow I didn’t like the program. So my interest in RSS-feeds ceased for some time.

While browsing through the web and clicking randomly on some links I reached MozillaZine where I found an announcement of a new version of some tool called NewsMonster. I visited their homepage www.newsmonster.org and got the impression that it is a tool like FeedReader, which integrates itself into Mozilla and also allows to publish blogs using XSLT-stylesheets as the templates for the blogs. The last bit of this feature list sounded interesting to me. So I downloaded and installed it. As I found out very fast there is no blogger functionality in this program.Well, a bit disappointed not to find this interesting feature I nevertheless played around with it and found it to be quite useful. Especially the integration into Mozilla is one big advantage over FeedReader. And now also RSS found again my attention. I think RSS-feeds are really useful when used with an aggregator like the one in NewsMonster. It will look up any number of RSS-feeds and tell you whether there is something new on the web-sites featuring the feeds. You don’t need to visit them all each day to find out. You get a short sample of what the news are about and can open them if you are interested. It simply saves time

Yeah, it’s really hot in Hamburg. I’m sweating like hell, but that’s ok when it’s in your spare time, because then there is always the possibility to put on a new t-shirt every time you want. Or even better, you can spend the time all naked in your apartment.

Yesterday was a horrible day. I had to work and I had to put on my black suit, because this working had to be done at a customer’s place. The one good point about it was that the working only took two hours. So it actually was bearable.

That’s a funny thing. In winter the people dream about the summer and warmer weather. But when it actually comes, they dream of something cool : ice, winter, xmas. That’s weird. Well, luckily xmas comes in 6 months minus some days. That’s great. Xmas is really fun. You see all those crazy people running from one shop to another to get some presents and there’s always this music you cannot stand after hearing it for 2 hours in a row. But hey, xmas is cool.