blog.wohlrapp.com

On Sunday my team ICSZ (ICSZ teachers, IBM sales people, a Credit Suisse fonds manager and myself) played the finals of the Basketballclub Zürich Divac Champions League and we defeated Banja Luka, the only team we lost against during the regular season.

See all images on Flickr.

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are hot on everyone’s lips at the moment. In this Podcast Ian Howells from Alfresco interviews Jeff Potts, of Optaros, about an Alfresco application we have delivered that brings together:

• Alfresco outside the firewall
• Alfresco inside the firewall
• Alfresco for document management
• Alfresco for Web Content Management

In this Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 project, Alfresco is integrated with:

• Portal – Liferay
• Blog – JRoller
• Tagging – Alfresco

Specifically they discuss:

• The goals of the project
• Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and characteristics of these types of projects
• The components used in the solution
• The consumerization of IT – Web 2.0 Components within the Enterprise
• How to find out more

Listen now.
Download MP3.

Find more Alfresco podcasts here.
Read Jeff’s blog at http://ecmarchitect.com/.

The joint Optaros-State-of-Geneva team win the Perl track of “Plat_Forms 2007”

A team built from consultants of the global Open Source and Next Generation Internet specialist Optaros and the State of Geneva won the Perl track of the international programming contest “Plat_Forms 2007”.

The programming contest “Plat_forms 2007 - The Web Development Platform Comparison” was conducted in January 2007 in Nurnberg. The contest is an integral element of research project of the “Freie Universität Berlin”. Three broadly used programming languages and environments (Perl, PHP, Java) were compared to understand how well they are suited for rapid web development. In each track three teams took the challenge to implement a comprehensive “social networking” web application in only 30 hours using Perl, PHP or Java.
“It’s really impressive, what our team achieved in only 30 hours. This clearly shows the potential that modern and open programming languages have for rapid and agile web development”, said Bruno von Rotz, Vice President for Strategy & Research at Optaros. “This contest showcased what we see happening with Web 2.0. We use Perl, but also PHP and Java in a wide range of situations and can confirm that effective high performance teams can deliver complex solutions in weeks that used to take months if not years just few years ago.”
The team, formed by two consultants of Optaros and one employee of the State of Geneva, has been able to win the Perl track. The highly efficient and closely collaborating team of Laurent Dami, Cédric Bouvier and Jean-Christophe Durand were able to find pragmatic solutions for complex problems in a short period of time and to deliver a compact and easily enhanceable result. “The flexibility of Perl and the enabled development approach helped us a lot in this exercise”, mentioned Cédric Bouvier of Optaros. “Perl is a highly attractive alternative for rapid web development, especially when combined with powerful frameworks such as Catalyst”, added Laurent Dami of State of Geneva. “Nine months ago we started building the new court management system for Geneva in Perl, in partnership with Optaros; the contest confirms that these strategic choices were the right thing to do. Once more we were able to show that Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible, as Larry Wall, the creator of Perl used to say.”

The Web Development Platform Comparison” can be found at http://www.plat-forms.org/

There was a stunning presentation at TED on Microsoft’s Seadragon technology. See it on YouTube.

Software recognizes patterns in images and joins meta data together. You gain a multi-angle view of basically every spot on earth you can find publicly available images on. This view is used to create a 3D model. Seadragon helps to navigate among the vast amount of data. Seadragon is a RIA visual data (more than just images?) explorer with a neat zoom feature solely “limited by the number of pixels on your screen”.

The technology preview of Photosynth is online at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Why do I promote a Microsoft technology here? Well, I do not really care if Microsoft or anybody else is evil or not. I’m looking for solutions that work, and the acquisition and R&D work that Microsoft has done here is really amazing. A couple of things I’d like to point out:

• You gain value by just offering your pictures, because they get tagged according to the other comparable image’s taggs
• The “data is the next intel inside” and UGC talk applies 100%. A great algorithm generates value only on user generated content.
• The technology definitely leverages high bandwidth and resolution but by definition will work on any device with any connection to the net.

I’m looking forward to being able to upload my own pictures to a collection or even get my hands on the technology myself.

The are a few collections here.

State and federal governments in Switzerland are aggressively pursuing IT initiatives powered by open source software as a flexible and cost-effective alternative to proprietary software. This was also the direction taken by the state of Vaud, with a population of 657’000 one of the larger cantons in Switzerland, in its search for an open source, eGovernment solution to provide access and management of millions of electronic documents. A key requirement was a system flexible enough to support all branches of state government and integrate with the legacy applications used by individual departments. Another key requirement was to have a system without a high license cost (like proprietary softwares), which favored an Open Source solution.

English press release: Optaros implements Alfresco Open Source Enterprise Content Management at State of Vaud

German press release: Optaros implementiert Alfresco Open Source Enterprise Content Management beim Kanton Waadt

French press release: Optaros implémente Alfresco Open Source Enterprise Content Management à L’Etat de Vaud

(via Jeff Potts’ blog http://ecmarchitect.com/)

The first installment of the Optaros Next Generation Internet podcast is available on iTunes. This episode is focused on the Enterprise Content Management practice at Optaros. In it, Jeff talks a little about open source content management and how it compares to closed-source and SAAS solutions.

If you are a windows regular, you know how well tested the software is that you are using. With the number of updates Microsoft has been providing lately for their OS only, you may consider yourself a real (perpetual) beta tester.
Also worth mentioning is that Apple actually is a serious provider for Windows software too. At D5 Steve already mentioned an impressive number of Windows copies of iTunes out there and again in the press release they state

Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing experience too.

With their latest move, they are taking serious advantage of this situation: Safari (3) is and will be the browser for Mac OS and also for the soon to be released iPhone. But how do we test the software (with browsers it is typically the rendering engine that needs most testing) with our user base? Ah, well. Let’s just take advantage of the fact that Safari runs on Mac OS that runs on Intel so lets go the short extra mile and deploy a Windows version of Safari. And here we go. Safari 3 beta for Windows.
Thank you to all Windows users for testing the Mac OS and iPhone browser for the rest of us. Get you copy today.

[Update]
I got a call from the HP Customer Relation Team today (June 11th - last post was from February 13th). They were pointed out to this blog entry and were wondering if there was any open issue with regards to this case. If so I could address the CR team manager directly.
I wanted to make sure this is added to the log and also would like to mention that I do actually give them credit for following up.
[/Update]

I do actually have other things to do than writing my blog. But this is not why I was so “quiet” the last couple of weeks. The real reason was Hewlett Packard, the #1 in customer satisfaction when it comes to commercial notebooks: Over Christmas my beloved HP laptop (nx8220) started some funny behavior. Random reboots, slow hard disk reads, blue screens and the like. By new years the fault had left me with a scrambled Windows installation and a serious set of damaged files. Having found a set of Atapi errors (1781 and 1782 disk failure) in the system’s event log and a couple of unsuccessful hard disk tests I decided to quickly update my backup and get on the line with HP to make use of my 3 year next business day on-site HW support warranty… (more…)

Movable Type is the platform that invented professional-grade blogging, powering the biggest and most successful blogs for pro bloggers, publishers, organizations, enterprises and businesses of any size. As blogging continues to evolve, Movable Type leads the way with reliable service, outstanding performance and continuous innovation.

The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open souce version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products.

http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/