I have been playing with YSlow, Yahoo’s tool for web site profiling, for a while. If you haven’t tried YSlow (which is a Firefox addon to Firebug) I recommend you try it right away. Install the Firebug extension first and then add YSlow. It is amazing how much you can improve the percieved site speed by some minor changes to your htaccess file. This site runs Wordpress and I was tempted to install the WP-Super-Cache plugin but was put off by some of the incompatibility issues that were reported with the latest version of Wordpress and PHP safe mode....

I have been trying to reduce distractions in my computing environment lately. Apparently, our brains aren’t wired properly for task switching: …research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory. I spend a lot of time in front of my computer every day. I discovered that over time, I have added so much attention-stealing stuff to my main work environment that I feel constantly interrupted....

…soviet dissident Yuri Orlov is sentenced to 7 years hard labor for distributing counterrevolutionary material. Also, some distant, mostly unknown relatives of mine decided to go on the trans-siberian railway. I found the photo album while helping my mom move some stuff in her old basement. Most of the pictures were too blurry but some turned out OK. Only one picture had a written note. It said “Carl Kobdock” below the guy in the blue shirt....

I have been searching for quite a while now and apparently there is a missing piece of software waiting to be made. If you are working with RDF data in any way you have probably created a vocabulary using OWL and/or RDF schema sometime. This works well for all technologists out there but in my world vocabularies should be created by domain experts rather than developers. Domain experts do not know OWL or RDF schema....

My son has the dubious pleasure of being the primary beta tester of T-shirt messages. This time it is the first draft of the model that will be called “Ballmer”. Turned out pretty OK…

First, some people bash Microsoft for not implementing DIS 29500 (OOXML) in Office 2007. Then, someone discovers that OpenOffice 2.4 does not create proper ODF. (Update: The test procedure was wrong). And then, Microsoft announce that a coming Office service pack will add native ODF support to Microsoft Office ahead of OOXML support. And, South Africa appelas OOXML adoption. Will Microsoft Office 2007 become the first Office suite to support ODF?...

Lately, there has been some really interesting presentations and articles on agile methods and how they fit into the big picture of software development. One that was particularly interesting was Scott Ambler’s 2007 IT Project Success Rates Survey (also see the Javapolis presentation). It presents some information that is different from how the Standish Group defines success in their often refered to CHAOS report. The Standish Group assumes that success is the traditional “on time, on budget and on scope”....

From a performance at the Schumman Theaterin Frankfurt am Main. Unknown date, probably after the war? Mom is moving to a new place and I helped hear clean out some stuff in the basement when I discovered a suitcase of old photos. Most were blurred vacation photos of people we didn’t know or remember. At the bottom of the pile I found these photos of Knut Andersson, my dad’s uncle. Apparently he joined a circus and had a career as an acrobat which wasn’t popular among the bourgeois relatives....

Spring is in the air and it is time to start using the balcony. Currently it is in a state of decay and mainly used to store old furniture. I am out of ideas what to make of it. Can you help? Measurements below.

In the process of constructing a crawler that finds and checks PDF documents on a website I discovered a lot of sites that don’t return information for HEAD requests. A HEAD request should return the same set of HTTP headers as a normal GET request only without the actual payload. The typical response seem to be status 500 (internal server error) on a lot of IIS sites. So, now is a good time to check your own sites to see what you get back from a:...