Schlagwort: Software

WordPress 4.0 ist da

Nachdem diese Nacht WordPress 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde, habe ich innerhalb weniger Minuten bereits alle Blogs und Webseiten aktualisiert. Immer wieder faszinierend wie einfach und problemlos so ein Updateprozess eigentlich auch gestaltet werden kann. Zwischenreleases werden sogar mittlerweile automatisch aktualisiert, beim letzten Mal waren es mehrere Millionen Webseiten in wenigen Stunden. Und dann beschäftigst du dich wieder mit OwnCloud oder phpBB. Irgendwie stellt sich die Frage, wie lange noch..

Was bei WordPress 4.0 alles neu ist, gibt’s hier. Benny

Bring HTML5 Web Delivery to LiveCode

It seems that this is actually becoming a crowd funding blog right now. I have one last campaign I would like to present you. Some of you might remember the LiveCode Kickstarter campaign from last year where I got involved a bit. I am using LiveCode Community on a regular basis now and therefore have quite some interest for the new campaign to succeed since this new one will bring us HTML5 deployment from within LiveCode! Or as the guys at RunRev tell us „Web delivery will provide the ability to output your LiveCode applications into modern web browsers. It will allow a fully faithful representation of your application within the browser environment. It uses HTML5 so it does not require a browser plugin. You will be able to author true Web Apps with LiveCode.“

The campaign runs for another 21 days and is already on about $60k pledges. Still some way to go up to $395k so LiveCode really can use your support!

ProtonMail – sicherer Emaildienst

trioErneut läuft eine Crowdfunding-Kampagne die ich sehr unterstützenswert finde. Diesmal handelt es sich um einen komplett verschlüsselten und möglichst sicherer Emaildienst names ProtonMail.

Gegründet von CERN und MIT Leuten befindet sich die Firma und die Server in der Schweiz, was aus Datenschutzgründen und Zugriff der Regierungen sicherlich sehr sinnvoll ist. ProtonMail sammelt Geld um den Dienst schneller ausweiten zu können und bietet als Gegenleistung verschiedene Varianten von Early Access- und Lifetime Abos. Verständlicherweise will und kann sich ein solcher Dienst ja nicht über Werbung finanzieren, da bei Werbung einiges an Daten gesammelt und weitergegeben wird. Nach dem Launch wird ProtonMail monatlich so um die $5 Dollar kosten.

Obwohl die angestrebte Finanzierung schon lange erreicht wurde, ist jeder weitere Dollar sinnvoll – dadurch können auch Mobile Apps und weitere Stretch Goals früher entwickelt werden.

Link zur Kampagne

Link zu ProtonMail

The Art of Brewing

Used Hops Cooking WortCaping a BottleBrewing really is art, mixed with cooking, and baking. But I would not call myself an artist, or a chef for that matter. I probably just call my self a brew enthusiastic. My first batch was started a month ago using a Canadian Blonde kit from Cooper’s. That was quite easy, but ended being 40 pints of a quite light 4.2% beer with a nice taste. So I had to try again. But I wanted to go one step further and increase the difficulty since the kit was rather easy to do.

This time I decided to try to brew from extract, that means the wheat and malts are already but various hops for the taste and other grains for the color is added manually in a process called steeping. Same goes for the yeast to kick off fermentation. Good thing is, the extract brewing doesn’t require additional sugar because that is already (and by nature, I believe) in the malt extract. After cooking the wort for about one hour, I put it in a plastic bin, add cold water to cool it down and then pitch the yeast.

The only thing you need or can do after pitching the yeast is waiting for it to do its job by transforming sugar into alcohol. This should be finished after one to two weeks and the best way to find out if it is done is to measure the beer’s gravity. The first measurement today showed a promising result so I think I will be able to put in bottles tomorrow evening. Then it needs another few days for the second fermentation to go through and for the yeast to settle, and should be ready to be enjoyed in about two weeks. I am looking forward to see how my first real beer is going to taste – and how I can adapt it even more to my taste.

First Batch looks goodSince brewing is a process one wants to monitor closely for several reasons like knowing when it’s time for the second fermentation or bottling, knowing whether the yeast has the right temperature, …, I bought myself a USB thermometer sensor on a one meter long cable. I will put this sensor (once it’s insulated, but that’s another story) into the fermenting wort to constantly measure temperature. And since I might have some computing skills, I write myself a brewing program that helps me organise my beer recipes, the production batches, and help supervising this sensor as well as potential others. Obviously, there is way more potential in this program which I started to write two weeks ago. I hope to be able to post some screenshots soon. It is actually planned to run on a Raspberry Pi for several reasons. If you would like to have a go with the program yourself once it is actually in some alpha or beta stage, let me know.

So, what features would you like for your brew tool?

For people as new to home brewing as me, I recommend the books Homebrewing for Dummies which explains everything very nicely, and the classic The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World which tells you everything about fermenting whatever it is you want to ferment.

Comparing Wuala and Zoolz – Best Backup Tool

zoolzWhen I read that zoolz.com is offering 100 GB for the first one Million new users I just hat to give it a try – and obviously compare with my beloved and constantly used solution wuala.com. Both of them have some very nice features, and as it turns out I probably am going to use both products because there is especially one big distinction between the two: While Wuala.com can be used as a backup tool, it also is a full-grown cloud storage with sync features from the very first byte. On the other hand, zoolz.com in the free version offers a huge 100 GB free of their cold-storage space. As  the name somehow implies these 100GB are stored on Amazon’s Disks running Glacier services. This means, the backup can be offered very cheap because it a restore is less quickly available within 3 – 5 hours – which makes the tool only usable as a backup, but not as a sync service. As zoolz.com confirmed to me they do offer an instant storage for syncing, but only as part of their business pricing plans.

While 100 GB Wuala storage costs about $140 per year for one user, Zoolz.com charges $120 for 100 GB Instant Storage plus 100 GB Cold Storage for 10 users. When setting up the zoolz.com directories, you chose what storage technology this directory should use. A similar storage offer from Wuala for business with 100 GB Storage, 10 users and 10 groups costs about $630 without any dedicated cold storage (Btw, Dropbox for businesses is more expensive). It seems that zoolz.com is cheaper, at least for businesses.  I know this is not directly comparable, especially for me since I basically use Wuala as a network drive with all my data directly stored there. But apart from pricing, what makes the difference?

wuala

To me as somewhat of a security interested person, encryption does make a difference. This is one of the reasons why I don’t use DropBox with any sensible data since it is just not secure enough. Wuala on the other hand offers a complete encryption which happens directly on your computer and uploads the encrypted data. This means the guys at Wuala (or any government) don’t have any chance to look into your folders apart from breaking the encryption. Zoolz.com offers a similar feature called client-side encryption where you chose a password and then can access the data only when using that password.  But since this password also works on their website and thus they need to store your login data somewhere I think it is not as secure as Wuala where there is only an indirect web access using a portable java version of Wuala which works the same way as the desktop version.  And then there is the issue of the location of the servers. Zoolz is an American company running on Amazon (an another American company) AWS Servers, likely in the US. This means they are subject to quite a few legal issues regarding data ownership and protection. And since Wuala is a Swiss company (now owned by Lacie) and servers in Switzerland the Swiss data protection law applies which is similar to the European and a lot more data subject (user) friendly.

Apart from the browser access, both tools offer clients on all well-known desktop and mobile operating systems.  Both tools offer scheduled and event-based (data changed) backup in the paid subscription and bandwidth throttling. Obviously, Zoolz has a nicer design than Wuala, there is no need to further discuss this. A nice feature I found in zoolz was the schedule throttling which allows to tell the program not to back up when in presentation, game or video mode, in order not to interrupt your important business stuff *s*.

So you see these services are not as directly comparable as I first expected them to be. I leave the decision on what program to use up to you, but I can tell you what I am going to do. I will keep my current Wuala setup with the sync to several clients and my main data in the cloud, it just works fine. And I will use zoolz as a very nice and feature-rich front end client to Amazon Glacier with only a small price increase compared to the effective cost of Amazon Glacier (those 100GB free per User cost Zoolz at retail price about $1/month). I will backup large but less important files on Zoolz since I will be able to wait a few hours for their restore in case disaster should happen. However, I will reconsider this setup in the future quite a few times I guess and will blog again in case something changes my mind. How about you, do you have a different opinion or experience?

LiveCode ist OpenSource

LiveCode 6Ein paar Wochen nach der äusserst erfolgreichen Kickstarter-Kampagne haben RunRev gestern ihr Versprechen eingelöst und die erste OpenSource-Version von LiveCode veröffentlicht. Die „as is“ Version trägt die Nummer 6 und ist auf dem Stand der bisherigen Commercial Version minus Script-Security Features.

Gemäss den Lizenzbedingungen dürfen Apps und Programme die mit der OSS-Version erstellt werden verschenkt und verkauft werden, es ist einfach zwingend vorgeschrieben dass auch der Quellcode mitgeliefert oder zumindest Online komplett verfügbar sein muss. Wer das nicht möchte, kann weiterhin eine kommerzielle Lizenz kaufen die dann keine Veröffentlichungspflicht enthält. Die kommerzielle Version kostet rund $500 pro Jahr und bietet auch Zugriff auf umfassende Schulungsvideos.

Den Download eines Builds und weitere Infos gibt es direkt bei RunRev hier. Und hier gibt es auch noch die Quelldateien zum Selbstkompilieren, oder mithelfen.

Zusätzlich möchte ich noch auf das Forum und die Mailingliste hinweisen. Ich habe selten eine so hilfreiche und „erwachsene“ Community erlebt. Scheint so, als seien die Trolle da schon länger verhungert..

LiveCode wird OpenSource!

Bildschirmfoto 2013-03-05 um 11.54.31Wie einige vielleicht bereits gesehen haben, war die Kickstarter-Kampagne von LiveCode ziemlich erfolgreich. Anstelle der angepeilten 350’000 Pfund gabs am Ende der Kampagne letzte Woche ganze 493’795 Pfund. Damit werden auch die Strech-Goals erreicht, was RunRev eine viel raschere Umsetzung dieser Funktionen ermöglicht. Ehrlich gesagt war ich ziemlich lange unsicher ob es überhaupt für die 100% reicht, weil der ursprüngliche Geldeingang doch eher mager war. Gegen Ende nahmen die Pledges aber massiv zu. Da zuzuschauen war extrem spannend, mindestens so gut wie ein Rugby-Game..

Gemäss dem Fahrplan soll bereits im März (also wohl Ende Monat) eine OpenSource-Version zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Diese basiert auf der momentan aktuellen Version. Danach macht sich das Team an die Umstellung des Codes auf eine Community-Entwicklungs-freundlichere Struktur, welche im Herbst erscheinen soll.

Ich bin momentan immer noch am Lernen von LiveCode und möchte euch einige meiner Lieblingslinks zur Verfügung stellen. Zusätzlich empfehle ich die Developer-Mailinglist, wo einige der erfahrensten LC-Entwickler gerne weiterhelfen.

LiveCode1001

RunRev Forum

Showcase und Beispielstacks