General

Autumn definitly has arrived and it’s getting dark quite early now. Especially it’s getting to dark to ride my bicycle in the evening. Wishing I had a fireplace, but since I don’t, there’s rarely anything to do but spend my time in front of the computer screen ;-).

However, I redesigned my page, so it looks a bit friendlier now (I hope). Hope you like it.

Is it only me or does anyone else thinks that using abbrevations like i18n for "internationalization" or l10n for "localisation" is b6t ("bullshit")? Heck, they cannot even be pronounced!

Does anyone know a CMS that is able to distinguish between an author of an article and the publisher? These two roles are commonly treated as the same, which is suitable for a blog or company site. However, for a newspaper this isn't the case.

In Cologne subway stations there are so-called "Info-Screens", which are screens sized about 2 to 3 meters that display short news, advertising, weather forecasts etc. And guess what: yesterday's news was about FireFox hitting 50 Million downloads.

Dr. Erika Fuchs died on Friday, April 22nd at the age of 98. Erika Fuchs is well known for her famous German translations of Disney comics and especially those done by Carl Barks. This is a great loss for the German comic community. I offer condolences to her relatives and friends.

... Well, at least on the comic marketplace site I did recently. While this may be community specific, Firefox however is very popular in Germany. The German online magazine Spiegel Online for examples reports a Firefox market share of 28%.

Spiegel online, you may also remember them as the people who think Carl Barks was a German, now published an interview with Firefox developer Blake Ross (in German, though), covering the phenomena:

Spiegel Online: How important the German market is for Firefox?

Ross: Germany is one of our biggest markets, and we work very hard to fit the needs of our German users.

Spiegel Online: Compared to other countries, Firefox market share currently is much higher in Germany. What are the reasons for this?

Ross: Europe seems more open to the idea of open source than the US. I'm not sure, what's the reason for that. The energy and passion coming from our German fans is refreshing and highly appreciated.

Further on, Ross was asked about Google's influence on the Firefox development:

Spiegel Online: Don't you fear Google getting to much influence?

Ross: The world would be better off, if Google had more influence. Google understands what people want from technology - and delivers it with astonishing precision.

Endlich ist es geschafft! Der Comic-Marktplatz ist online. Daran habe ich seit dem frühen Herbst - mit Unterbrechungen - in meiner Freizeit gesessen. Puh!

Had to give it a try: My nerd score is 61.

I started redirecting all my feeds to FeedBurner. Subscribers shouldn't notice anything, however.

I messed up my page yesterday, so it just dispalyed an error message. Shame on me, since I didn't test a fix I applied to WordPress, thinking this fix was too trivial to do any harm. Wrong! There is no such thing as a simple fix, and everything must be testes, of course. But good to be reminded again.