Rainer Feike techblog

When you run a website in Germany, you’re worried by laws. Some think you need a disclaimer or “Haftungsausschluss”, some think you don’t.
I found a lawer’s text that’s free for copying. So If you need, or need not, a disclaimer for your Page running in Germany (whatever “in” means) take this free disclaimer.

As Mr. Schwartz, CEO of SUN Microsystems wrote here, SUN is going to acquire MySQL AB for about 1 Billion Dollars.

What does this mean to Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and MSSQL Server?

It’s out of the question, that MySQL is the most used Database worldwide. The main reasons are, that MySQL runs with poor hardware, it’s easy to install, to administrate and to use. And it’s for free. When I look back at my jobs in the trading area of investment banks, I remember lot’s of Solaris/Sybase installations. Now, I foresee problems for Sybase here. When I look back at my jobs in the backoffice area of retail banking, I remember lot’s of Solaris/Oracle and AIX/DB2 installations. Will SUN MySQL be as reliable as Oracle or DB2 is? Then I foresee problems here as well.

Why should one pay for Oracle or DB2 when MySQL comes from SUN and is for free?

I am sure MSSQL will keep it’s place in the low-range small office area - just because of the MS certified staff that’s working here. But I foresee huge problems (see here also) for the big systems Oracle, Sybase and DB2.

All the IT world is moving to open source !!!

And that’s a good way

On my search about if search engines like small site or big sites I found no satisfying answer. So I set up a little experiment on my own. I drive a lawyer directory with like about 20.000 pages for two years now. For search terms like “Rechtsanwalt Berlin” - I am aiming for city specific searches - I rank very well on the first SERP.

Now I set up special pages for the most biggest cities in Germany, having urls like rechtsanwalt–berlin (double dash - cause single was already taken for sure) and put three pages there. So it’s a real small site with a very specific topic.

Today - with this entry - I make it public and give em some PR power. In four weeks we’ll see how they do.

Rechtsanwalt Berlin
This is Germanys most biggest city. My current anwalt-seiten ranking on Google is 10. Now I started the special site Rechtsanwalt Berlin - let’s see what happens in like two weeks.

Rechtsanwalt Hamburg
This is Germanys second biggest city close to the North Sea. My current ranking on Google is 9. I set up the special site Rechtsanwalt Hamburg lately - let’s see what happens.

Rechtsanwalt München
This is Germanys third biggest city and I always have troubles with the “ü”. You probably now it from the Oktoberfest!
My current ranking on Google is 18. I launched Rechtsanwalt München view days ago - be patient…

I’ll keep you informed here.

Yesterday I stared the beta run (this is very 2.0 webish) of my wiiclub project. It’s a community for Wii Gamers in German. It makes extensive use of lots of Drupals community features, like i.e.

• the userpoints api
• the fivestar rating
• the buddylist module
• the chartroom module
• lots of image galleries
• features cck types like a “game report”
• uses forum, blog, poll

The site is very much web2.0 like, that means it has

• community features
• bright colors
• orange button with gradient
• gradients in backgrounds
• big primary navigation
• a star like beta-batch
• rounded corners
• centered non-table layout
• cute icons
• clear breadcumb

So, if you are addicted to Wii - come join us

I recently wanted to check my entries in dmoz and found some of my sites were kicked out. Why did they do this? Didn’t get any explanation for sure. They did some work like reorganizing the structure - or whatever. Well, I’m a little bit angry currently - but it doesn’t make sense anyway anymore (except for backlinks - is dmoz a huge link-farm?).

Do you know a single person that uses a directory to browse the internet? Don’t think so.. but if yes - she will not use dmoz more then two times. In the “rich subject tree” you’re everytime a dozen clicks away from your goal - and the choice is subject to ‘editors’, and what’s the relation to AOL? That’s exactly not what the democratic web2.0 is for.

Google claims a few hours to add an interesting new site to its index - the dmoz wants some weeks or months. So maybe we miss some important happening when using dmoz?

Thanks a lot to all the hundreds of thousands of editors that were building the biggest directory of the universe - I am afraid it’s out-dated now - you can not take the challenge of the rapidly growing web anymore.

Yahoo already gave up - when will dmoz power off?

Last weeks I was working on a new Drupal driven company site. This time I wanted to create my theme from scratch (calles “ANewCompany”) and wanted to use heavy taxonomy for cross linking.
The site is on air now and promises professional web2.0 programming (German).

On the site I use following modules:

Blog, Book, Forum, Poll - for content creation
Comment, Contact - for visitor interaction
Drupal - for site registry
Locale - for string translation and adjustment
Menu, Path - for site navigation
Taxonomy - for cross linking and navigation
Search - for site wide full text search
Statistics - for access statistics
Akismet - for spam protection
Comment mail - for admin notifications
Service links - for social network linking
TinyMCE - as wysiwyg editor
Views - for some data mining and block representation
Fivestar, Voting API - for content voting

I developed a new page.tpl.php template where I’ve foreseen the regions as follows

  function ANewCompany_regions() {
      return array(
	  'header' => t ('header'),
          'content_top' => t('content top'),
          'content' => t('content'),
          'sidebar_left' => t('sidebar left'),
          'sidebar_right' => t('sidebar right'),
          'content_bottom' => t('content bottom'),
          'footer' => t('footer'),
          'super_footer' => t('super footer')
      );
  }

For the sidebars I use a table-less floating CSS layer concept for reasons i.e. stated here.
In my template.php file I overwrite theme_links for primary_links (to achieve rounded tabs as primary navigation) and the book navigation theme_book_navigation($node) to make it more nice. Special theming for blog and book content is done by node-blog.tpl.php and node-book.tpl.php files.

Next days I will working on a generalization of the theme to contribute it to the drupal theme repository.

I’ve started a new Drupal project in the DAX Investment business. It’s kind of “pre-alpha” but it’s already a very interesting project from a technology view. It will contain blocks with high dynamical image content as well as stock quotes. So I will need to look somewhat deeper to caching technology and AJAX.
It will also contain community features like blogs and a forum, so there’s also lot of work to do with taxonomy.
I’ll keep you informed.

My current favorite is a mini espresso (Italian coffee) machine. It comes with a typical can and a build in electro oven. It’s about 15 cm x 15 cm with 25 cm height and has everything to breed the Italian kind of coffee.

It is able to cook the coffee and keep it warm (not to long - or else it’s getting a bitter taste), so everything I need for long programming nights

The manufacturer is called “Splendida”.

With the help of Thomas I got invited to the freebase alpha program. In a short sentence I would say, that freebase is the semantic extension of wikipedia. That means, that freebase does not only have “objects” like wikipedia, it additionally has a hierarchy for these objects, relations between the objects, and common object attributes.

I.e. freebase “knows”: Austria is a country, Vienna is a city. A city is contained in a country - for Vienna, Vienna is contained in Austria. In Austria the main language is german. Goes what lanuage is spoken in Vienna…
freebase knows it! Got the point?

So, setting up the “Ontology” on freebase is a little bit like object oriented analysis. And it is a huge job to do for all the world’s knowledge!

Like Tim O’Reilly wrote:

But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.

It is possibly the advantage of freebase to have this messy sprawl of assertions - and with this sprawl the support of all the editors of the “collective intelligence“. The other (MIT) approach is very academic (surprise, surprise) and hard to follow (RDF, GRDDL, SPARQL, ITL, Microformats…). They spend a lot of work in the representation of an ontology - but it seems to be time just to start, to define some interweavings. Who is actually using DublinCore now?

When the collection of data is done, all the relations are set, how can we use the freebase?

freebase offers an open and free-of-charge API (MQL (like JSON) via HTTP) to use the data under common creative license where ever you want.

Questions:

• freebase is driven by the company Metaweb, what happens to the data when something happens to Metaweb, i.e. getting bought by Google?
• when lot’s of pages rely on the freebase service, how will they pay the traffic costs?

I am programming in C/C++ for more then 15 years now. I took a look at JAVA, programmed some applications for 5 years now. But I am not so enthusiastic with JAVA, I find it kind of childish - it never stepped out of that web application area (in my opinion). No question, JAVA is bad for system programming - and no question too, there are some better choices today for business legacy system than JAVA.
I think the programming world is moving to the component side (away from the one-for-all approach, but independent from the infrastructure system for now). So what I looked for is a modern language to program fast, system-near components. And I found D.

If you search for information D is a terrible name
Try “D” in google and you will get some billions of results. Too bad, we need a web-catalog for this topic, but start with wikipedia for a first try. You will find that …

D is imperative, object-oriented, and metaprogramming
In short, that means that D knows objects and templates.

Continue with “Hello World”
The usual hello world is pretty simple and pretty close to C:

import std.stdio; // writefln() needs this module
int main(char[][] args)
{
writefln("Hello World!");
}

As you see, the include “stdio.h” has been replaced by a import std.stdio (looks like we have a package-like concept here now). And the printf() is writefln() today.

But you need a D compiler now
So start with the dgcc project. They deliver for all major (and some minor) plattforms. Install the compiler, save the code from above as test.d then compile like “gdc test.d”. As result you get the well known a.out executable (or a.exe under windows).
Run a.out and you will get:

Hello World!
Error: AssertError Failure test.d(5)

That’s because you didn’t return from your main function, so D is more severe than C. Insert a return 0; after the writefln() line and you’re done.

Next post will start with a serious application: A TCP/IP server in D.