Ok, now for something unusual for this blog. Herewith I’ll publish some of my thoughts about the Playstation 3 as well as the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Why? Because within the last weeks I really was afflicted by a lack of understanding about some decision made.

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Here the promised review of the third Barcamp Vienna which took place this weekend. A short summary: It was great.

The whole event took place in the office of Microsoft Austria - which was a really nice location! Many fully equiped meeting rooms for the sessions, and a nice cafeteria and courtyard with seating-accommodation for before-, between- and after-session talks.

Day 1

So what have I taken along with me from my second barcamp? Well, the first day started with a presentation of Mind42 I held (again), because nobody wanted the first presentation slot. I hope I was able to win some new users for the application but overall I think the application gets accepted very well. The rest of the day I joined the sessions about Microformats by Eric Eggert, about Accessibility (A11Y) by Martin Ladstätter & Robert Lender and a session about codecs and possibilities for video-streaming within the web-browser by Fabian Topfstedt (Flash) and Max Knor (Silverlight) which all have been done very good.

It was the first time that I’ve seen microformats in action - allthough I think that was not without reason ;). Nevertheless I’ve installed the Microformats Firefox plugin “Operator” afterwards. Also the A11Y session was very interesting and enlightening as I’ve never had something todo with this before, but I fear that this won’t have very much practical relevence for me in the near future. For example: One of the rules, so that screenreaders work is to use the markup what it was designed for. As I’m squeezing everything out of the browser possible to realize applications like Mind42 I ultimately break this rule.

The rest of the day I’ve spent to team up with Horst Gutmann to plan something like a Web-Framework afternoon for Sunday and to create the Dojo 0.9 Barcamp Blog example for my Dojo 0.9 presentation. In the evening I even got unexpected support for my Dojo 0.9 Session by Fabian Bartsch from Knallgrau. He spontaneously decided to enrich my planned Dojo only session with a section about EXT, another great JavaScript library.

Day 2

The second day feeled much more developer biased, in a positive way ;). In the morning I attended a discussion about different open source CMS systems (Tip: http://www.opensourcecms.com/) leaded by Michael Schuster as well as a short excursion about game development with Microsofts XNA Framework by Max Knor and Andreas Schabus. Well, game development still appeals me, but without time and a good idea this probably will never happen ;).

As mentioned on day 1, on Sunday afternoon we’ve started a Web-Development session marathon. I’ve kicked it off with Dojo 0.9, followed by Fabian Bartsch with EXT, followed by Horst with Django, followed by Max with Astoria (a REST-based database-access-layer) and finally finished by Fabian Topfstedt with a session about Grails. Very nice experience, but because of the feedback-round (whith mostly positive feedback - excellent organization!) and the slow end of the barcamp there sadly was no chance for Web-Development discussions after the sessions. Maybe next time

Overall a very good organized and nice barcamp with many interesting people. Thanks to Rolf Mistelbacher from Microsoft and the rest of the orga-team that made this event possible. At the end of my review I would like point to some nice photos of the event:

• 360° group photo by Christian Lendl
• Horst’s photos
• Flickr tag search

No bew builds the last two weeks? No comments activated during the last two weeks? Well I was on vacation and spent two weeks in Egypt. Now I’m back and mind42 will experience some huge changes within the next weeks as we come closer and closer to the end of the beta.

Altough I hadn’t planned to write too much personal stuff into this blog I think it’s time to report some things and to give an additional little summary about the Barcamp Vienna.

1. On Monday June 11th I successfully completed my studies by passing my diploma examination. For my diploma thesis I’ve researched and implemented a prototype for graphical modeling using JavaScript. The results of this work already can be seen at mind42.com
   By completing the educational part of my life (at least for now) I’m fully motivated looking forward into my bright and hopefully successful and glorious future.
2. To celebrate #1 I’ve took the last 10 days off. I didn’t work anything, I rarely used the computer (ok, that’s a lie :). I’ve got my new Mac Pro last week) and enjoyed my last vacations aka my first paid holidays.
3. Shame on me. Because of #1 and #2 which was exactly after the Barcamp I barely wrote about it. As already reported previously I held a session about mind42. Although only 1/4 of the people attended my session (the other 3/4 joined the Tag Your City session) I’ve got plenty of very constructive feedback. Also I had some interesting talks about mind42 and other stuff after my session which definitely makes the Barcamp a commendable revisit-able event.I’ve even seen that Hannes used mind42 to share his paper based mindmap from the flip chart in the web (1, 2). And also Heinz wrote in his blog Lost and Found about mind42 (The slides to my Webinale session he mentiond can be found here). I’m really happy with all the overwhelming and constructive feedback from the Barcamp or as comments in this blog and in the form of emails and so on…Unfortunately also because of #1 and #2 I already had to leave the Barcamp very early (going home learning and shivering of nerviness). Because of that and because of all the interesting talks, I really wasn’t able to attend very much of the other sessions. I watched the presentations and discussions about “High Tech Finanzierung” and “Medien, Telcos and Brands” but missed all the other stuff. It’s a pity, as I really wanted to get an insight into Processing (which I know have to do on my own) and waste some time with Shitter.Hope to see all the Barcampers again in September if the date doesn’t collide with my summer holidays.

So much for that - hopefully some more mind42 news in the near future

Just finished my software demo about mind42.com on the Barcamp Vienna (10.06.2007). Some Feature requests and fresh ideas for the project came in, but as I didn’t wrote them down the risk is high that I already forgot most of them

Check out the barcamp wiki to help me out remembering all the inputs! Go to the wiki.

First impressions:

English translation coming soon…
Phänomenal…
Spät aber doch, habe auch ich meine Existenz in der Blogosphere gestartet.

Über mich:
Mein Name ist Stefan Schuster, bin Mitte 20 und Programmierer (+Designer). Ich bin gerade dabei meinen Diplomstudiengang “Informationstechnologie und Telekommunikation” an einer Fachhochschule in Wien zu beenden, arbeite aber bereits seit 3 Jahren als “professioneller” Programmierer neben dem Studium (seit Anfang des Jahres sogar Vollzeit).

Was euch erwartet:
In der Arbeit beschäftige ich mit allen Neuigkeiten und Techniken rund um Web-Applikations-Entwicklung mit JavaScript. Aber auch privat fesseln mich die vielen neuen Themen rund um Web 2.0, Fat-Clients, Single Page Applications und was man dabei alles aus JavaScript herausholen kann. Daher werde ich in diesem Blog vor allem auf diese Themen eingehen: Neuigkeiten der sich rasch entwickelnden Ajax/JavaScript Welt, meine Projekte sowie allerhand interessante Fakten und Kniffe rund um JavaScript über die ich bei meinen Projekten stolpere.

…, oder warum ich Blogs nicht leiden kann:
Ein Blog mit der Headline “warum ich Blogs nicht leiden kann” zu eröffnen ist sicherlich gewagt, allerdings war und ist meine Meindung zum Blog-Hype nicht immer unbedingt die Beste. Vor meinem Studium habe ich Community-Webseiten zu verschiedenen Computerspielen betrieben, und auch selbst programmiert (LAMP). Und dann kam irgendwann das Thema Blogs auf…

Für mich war und ist der Unterschied zwischen einem Blog, und den News-Skripten die ich früher selber programmierte einfach nicht ersichtlich. Was sind denn schon Blogs? Blogs sind eine Sammlung von chronologisch geordneten und kategorisierten Artikeln + Feedbackmöglichkeit. Was waren meine News-Skripte? Eine Sammlung von chronologisch geordneten und kategorisierten Artikeln + Feedbackmöglichkeit. Für mich war ein Blog, und vor allem die Blogging-Plattformen nicht viel mehr als eine Möglichkeit für technisch weniger versierte Leute sich selbst zu publizieren. Doch was soll dabei der ganze Hype? Persönliche Homepages, auch mit chronologisch sortierten und kategorisierten Artikeln + Feedbackmöglichkeit in einem News Bereich gab es auch schon vorher (auch mit RSS Feed wenn man wollte und konnte)! So ganz verstanden habe ich das nie.

Aber was solls: Blogs haben sich mittlerweile dermaßen etabliert, das nun auch ich meine persönliche Web-Präsenz in Form eines Blogs gestartet habe. Und schließlich haben Blogs mit Ihren Track- und Pingbacks ja schließlich doch noch ein technisches Merkmal was Blogs von einfach News-Skripten unterscheidet.

In diesem Sinne: Viel Spaß mit meinem Blog…

P.S.: Noch was zum nörgeln an Blogs. Ich kann das Wort Permalinks nicht leiden. Was soll bitte an Permalinks permanent sein, so wie der Begriff das einem suggerieren will. Permanent klingt nach einer Garantie, das der Link immer bestehen wird. Eine solche Garantie kann im World-Wide-Web aber allein schon aus technischer Sicht nicht abgegeben werden! Was wäre wenn ich die Domain oder den Webspace kündige? Oder ich einfach die Struktur meiner Homepage ändere und sich hinter index.php nicht mehr Wordpress verbirgt? Dann wars das mit der Permanenz. Daher heißen die Permalinks bei mir einfach “Direct Links”…