The Empire Weblog

Surfing the web today, I found quite a funny website about inside the Mac sphere: Mac-TV. It's a German site which mainly focuses on offering several video clips. In theses clips the makers of Mac-TV are presenting the new features of the forthcoming Mac OS X release: Tiger (10.4), introductions to several applications or give some tips and hints, e.g. how to change a processor.

On the one hand you can get some more background information about the latest added features of the next Mac OS X release. However, on the other hand, actually, it's mainly fun to see how they present, behave and also their sayings. Just to get a first impression of how funny it can be, have a look at the trailers they offer for free, such as Part 7 of the Tiger Preview series or much better "Tiger: Mail und mehr". In the latter one, the start of the clip is the best!

Let me mention a few of their "best" and/or funniest sayings:

"In London it's so, that all live in London" - In a discussion about the opening of the new Apple Store in London.

"What can we see? One can see, that we actually see nothing." - In a clip about the new features of Safari RSS.

Ok, another one:

Moderator Adult: "The best thing now is, that you can use smart folders for your bookmarks in Safari. For example, I can create a smart folders, which does only show bookmarks not containing the word 'pornography'."

Moderator Boy: "Ahh, 2 out of 100."

While discussing the new feature "Customizing the toolbar and address bar" of Safari RSS, the adult moderator said:

"That's quite a nice feature. That's how it ought to be as it is for all Mac OS X applications. Till this day, it was more like a hack. You might have believed it comes from Mozilla."

Huhhhhh, how rude!!

And a last one: In the 'Apple Store opening in London' clip, the two moderators (the adult one and the boy again) also discussed about the chances if Apple will open a store in Germany or not. Therefore, they have been discussing about serveral locations like Berlin, Munich or "... Cologne, the Ruhrpott and all that junk..." Uiiiii, being rude again. Naughty, naughty boy. I don't think Frankfurt/Main (it's where Mac-TV resides) is a much better option for a new Apple store!

All what's coming in my mind about that: Mind your language!

Many amongst us bloggers know the the service www.geourl.org. It offered a way to register your blog in a directory for certain geographical coordinates. Furthermore, there was a way to get a list of other blogs which are near to your blog.

However, for what reason ever, since May/June this year, the service is down for renovations and has not relaunched yet so far. Since I liked the idea of this services and I realized that others do as well, I was setting up a re-making of it, which I have launched at the URL http://www.geourl.info now.

Please feel free and register your blog and tell your blog buddies to register their site, too.

For all MovableType bloggers using the MTLocation plugin: To adjust the URL from '.com' or '.org' to '.info', you have to edit the the 'mt_location.pl' file (you find it in your plugins directory of your MovableType installtion) and change the URL-ending in function location so that it looks like this:

sub location {
  my $ctx = shift;
  my $args = shift;
  return "" unless $ctx->stash('entry')->keywords;
  = split (/ /, $ctx->stash('entry')->keywords); 
  foreach (@keywords) {
      if (/^loc/) {
      my ;
      if ($args->{geourl} && $latitude && $longitude) { 
          return 
          "<a href="'http://www.geourl.info/near/?">$name</a>";
      }
      else {
          return $name;
      }
      }
  }
  return "Somewhere, SW";
}

For being compatible with the old URLs like

http://www.geourl.info/near/?lat=51.5567&lon=-0.0505&dist=50'

GeoURL.info offers the same query syntax as the former GeoURL site did. That means, you really have to change the URL-ending only. If you have any comments or wishes, don't hesitate to write a comment or send me a .

Have fun with the new GeoURL service!

Can somebody see the little spy amongst all the christmas presents? It's funny that Mr Ruby prefers to sleep in such a small box, but funny to see anyway. :-)

Two days ago, Oracle release its database 10g also for Mac OS X.
For me, this shows that Apple with its Mac OS X becomes more and more interesting for other companies and their software products.

When I find a few hours time, I certainly will check it out. I am very keen of if the installation will be as easy as it is for all other Mac OS X applications.

For example, the installation of Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise for Mac OS X was very quick and easy. Much better than to install it under Linux.

On Tuesday this week, I had my worst trip ever to London from Dresden.

Starting Dresden, the train (EC 172) arriving from Vienna had approximately 25 minutes delay. Well, that can happen if there are some troubles with the customs from the Czech Republic transferring the train to Germany. However, the delay was announced two minutes of the scheduled arrival time only. I think, that's a very bad service by the German Railway 'Deutsche Bahn AG'.

Ok, after the train had arrived, we departed about 20 minutes late. Fortunately, the delay in Berlin Schönefeld was 10 minutes only. Good job for this.

After queuing for luggage X-ray scan, check-in and security check, I had to wait for the flight departure which was scheduled for 22.10. Time passed and it was almost 22.00 by then but no sign of the Ryanair aircraft. Very unusual for Ryanair, but who knows what happened. However, the airport didn't think of any announcement of the delay for the Ryanair flight but for the delayed inbound EasyJet flight from London Luton only. Very cheeky! I know, that Ryanair is not very pleased at every airport. Notwithstanding that fact, as long as a airport has a contract with an airline, the airport should offer the agreed service!

Finally, the inbound Ryanair flight from London Standsted touched down about 22.05, 25 minutes delay. Boarding became also a very unprofessional procedure conducted by the Schönefeld Airport. First, the speakers had a very bad sound, nobody could understand anything. Then the security alarm of the door to the stairs hall which leads to the air field started making a very unbearable sound. It took about 4 minutes until one of the airport staff was able to switch that horrible and painful sound off. After that, they could finally start boarding. Getting on board, I asked one of the stewardess what the reason for the delay was. She said, they had to de-ice the aircraft in Stansted first. Ok, that's understandable. And it had to be done in Schönefeld again. The first time I could see that in real life.

After take off, we had quite much air turbulence all the flight till we started descending to London Standsted. After we touched down, got off the plane and passed the passport control, I had to realize that there was no late Stansted Express train this week. Consequently, I had to go by a coach which was replacing the train service. Only 45 mins later, I arrived at Liverpool Street where I got on bus 48.

Overall, I started my trip in Dresden at 17.20 and arrived at my final destination in London at 2.30 next day (German time) which are over 9 hours of a nightmare trip, or: My worst trip ever to London.

Last week on Monday December, 6^th I ordered my new PowerBook G4 SuperDrive (15", 80 GB HDD, 1,5 GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB, AirPort Extreme). As I mentioned in my post from November, 27^th I am very impressed by the new Apple gadgets.

On Wednesday December, 8^th I finally got an email from Apple that my PowerBook has been shipped. Since then, I am very excited to welcome my new baby and I'm looking serveral times a day on the tracking site to find out where my new fruit is.

The current tracking status says, that it has arrived in Luxemburg and it seems that it is now on its way to TNT Netherland from where it should be delivered to me. I hope that will still happen this week. Fingers crossed.

Here is the current tracking status:

13 dez 04 departed direct - Apple Shanghai
13 dez 04 Arrived at EDC - KN Luxemburg
09 dez 04 flight departed - Kuehne & Nagel Shanghai
09 dez 04 flight Booked - Kuehne & Nagel Shanghai
08 dez 04 departed from product source - Kuehne & Nagel Shanghai
08 dez 04 boxes scanned - Kuehne & Nagel Shanghai
08 dez 04 Departed from source - Apple Shanghai
08 dez 04 Data received from supplier - Apple Shanghai

So let's see, when TNT will deliver the it. :-)

TNT did a very good job. They received the package on Tuesday (12/14/2005) in Eindhoven and delivered it to me on Wednesday (12/15/2004). Very quick - and easy! ;-)

Today, and my article 'BPEL4WS - Programming in the Large' was officially published in the German XML Magazin. The article gives a short introduction to BPEL4WS(short BPEL) and how to use it orchestrating different Web Services to a business process. The example we're using within the article is realized with the Oracle BPEL Designer and Process Manager (former Collaxa).

If you're interested in our article, feel free and go to your near news agent and get a copy of the magazin.

Unfortunately, the article is in German only. Before we can translate it to English we have to clarify that issue with the publisher due to copyright reasons.