Category: work & projects

PS3 Start in Europe
On friday the official ps3 sale in europe will start. Unfortunately the ps3 is even now sold out cause of the hight amount of reservations. So you must be really lucky to grab one. I got the news that amazon has some pieces left so buy it now and you will get it for guaranty on friday. Very strange thing besides: I never had a ps1 or a ps2 when I was younger, but now, just neary grown up I’m fully into video gaming. In fact I just have one video game for my psp and use it mostly for programming and homebrew apps. For me the psp is the most awesome piece of hardware you can put into your pocket.
Now back to the ps3: I started today as a partner site of my psp dev page a new ps3 blog that will inform you about homebrew and dev on the ps3. Coolest thing about homebrew capabilities of it: Sony offically supports a special Linux version running on the ps3. So i think there will be really exiting stuff to write on.
19. March 2007
Mindstorm Alpha
Last few days I have been working on a new small web applikation which is called mindstorm (hopefully lego won’t get angry cause their robotic building kit is called mindstormS). It is technically based on my openKE Framework and uses some Features like the Tagging System of it. Basically what you can do on mindstorm is to share ideas and opinions in the easiest way. There is no registration needed and synchronous and asynchronous working is posible.
Just looking forward to some people who just play arround with the appliaction and then tell me about bugs etc.
3. March 2007
1 hour of wordpress templating
Last week I started again with some template designing for wordpress, cause I’m not satisfied with the layout of some of my blogs. I want to make a style like the famous US blogs techcrunch and readwriteweb (3 colums, 2 sidebar elements..).
I began my journey with creating a simple wrapper for a wordpress template, which is a work of just a few minutes. WordPress gets a lots of critisism because ot the templating mechanism which do not offers a strict seperation of layout and code. I don’t bother and must admit that wordpress ist still my number #1 blog system. The two screens show first the basic wrapper, which is the base for my theme and the second one showing a semi finished theme with the colors of this blog here. All in all, just one hour of work.
As you can see, you can use the basic wrapper to create a really powerfull and stylish template just using CSS. You can download the wrapper here, and give it a try to create your first wordpress template!
Download: basic.zip
1. February 2007
openKE Design changes
I’m developing and designing openKE now for about 4 month. It have been sometimes quite a challenging project cause I never developed such a big application on my own. I don’t know how many lines of codes the app now have, but I guess about 20000. It’s now time for me to review the project, learn from the mistakes I’ve made (not many 😉 ) and now put all my energy in launching the service and try to make it that successful, as I hope that it may be.
Looking back on the different designs of the openKE user interface:
29. January 2007
OpenKE Alpha Launch

Now, after 2 and a half month of developing my new project openKE.org is ready fpr a soft launch. Since the last infos i published here, a lot of stuff has changed, too much to list it all here. The User interface is now only in German, but I’m trying to change that in the near future and also made the plattform available in English. Registration is now open for anybody, so give it a try! Like always feedback is very welcome.
13. December 2006
OpenKE Update 2

Another time to present another new logo. Now with more web2.0 flavour. I think this will be the final one. Beta registration for openKE is no open – feel free to register and test the features of the plattform. Development goes on all little bit though, cause I spent most of the time in doing bug fixes or optimizing the code.
New features will come soon: I’m planning an user rating system based on the number of postet bookmarks, and valuable comments in the groups. I think no community based app can do without such ranking mechanisms to encourage people to be active. Another part I’m currently inplementing is an automatically generated user skill profile based on the data from searches and other action an user makes on openKE. The system will learn from the actions of the user and will group data sets to get a view of the users intrests and maybe also his skills. This feature is a little bit delicate part because of issues like privacy etc.
I got quite a good feedback from the first user of openKE – thank u for that. Stay tuned for more infos.
23. November 2006
OpenKE Update

This is the new logo of my current projct: openke.org. I made the whole page more in a web2.0 style because nowadays you can’t make such a site without following the formal style guidlines etc…

Here are two more screens of the application. Firt the resource page, which I already presented in the last post, but here are several changes made: highlighting of favorites, editable, add to favorites link. The second pic shows my profile. Several properties are click-able and used to search other user with this properties (see at the bottom Interessen und Fähigkeiten!)
The appliaction is now deployed on the live system and beta testers can register with the form on the index page. When actually the beta will be open is not clear, but i try to made it this week done. I would like to invite you to be part of this beta test and the first users of openKE!
12. November 2006
OpenKE Screens
Development on my newest project openKE moves on quite good. I think I can start the Beta Testing in the Mid of November. Below I insertet 2 screens of the app, so you can gather a quick overview what it look like and what features it will cover.
–
The first Image shows the Resources Page, which is the heart of the application. Here all the open books, videos, elearning courses etc. are stored. There will be soon more details on every resource: a picture of every book for example and so on. I also plan to host several files on a the openKE server to guarantee its accessebility.
The second pic shows just a forum view of the java proramming intrest group. nothing particular to tell you about that feature. Another Features will be, according to the navigation items you see:
– Special Intrest Groups with forums for knowhow exchange
– User and contact management
– A Skill and Intrest Profile
Feedback is as usually very welcome. Feature Request? – bring em in!!
31. October 2006
OpenKE News

The last few days I was working hard on my open knowledge community project (formerly anounced as openiktbook). I decided to change the name into OpenKE, which means open knowledge enviroment or exchange – i’m not quite sure at this stage about the name. I registered the domain openke.org for this project, already symbolising the non profit character of it. As you can see I’ve made a few logo design for the page – my favorite is the one that I inserted at the top. Feedback is very welcome!!
Besides a little bit of artwork I spent a lot of time on the architecture, database design of the whole application. The DB strucure is at this stage done and I’m just optimizing the queries and so on. For your intrest: I made a own approach of a tagging implementation, which is actually not that new cause also utw uses it, but the performance and handling of it is quite good. I dont’ think it could be done significant better. If you are intresting in this information I can write a tutorial on it. It’s quite hard to find infos on building a tagging implementation on the net, so I think it’s a good recource for all of you.
I don’t talk much about the features of this application, cause I just keep thinking on new cool features and this and that…There’s no clear picture of it in my mind at this stage, so I can just tell you that is is about free knowledge resources like book, videos of conferences, free e-learning courses and so…This is one part, another is the interaction between the users on the plattform. To prove that I’m not talking shit, here are my notes on the features:
---Global Feature List---- - Resources Area * Tags/Tagcloud/Taglist *Popular Searches/ *Latest and Popular Stuff Lists - Knowledger Area *Visualisation of all resources *ability to discover new field of intrest - Exchange Area *Forum *e-learning courses _ User Profile * Skill Table - Popular Searches - Log User interaction for a user profile
11. October 2006
Launched mobileajax.de
For the last few days I have been working on my mobile ajax and mobile web2.0 project. The first step was just to create a blog with an individual style and some content. Follwing in the next week there will be more and more content and maybe just a few demos on mobile ajax.
For those who have no idea what mobile web2.0 and so on is, i would like to recommend you the book Mobile Web2.0 by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish. I have read a few chapters of it and I’m really exited. I brought some ideas also in my thesis but this book deals more in detail with the new paradigma in the mobile content industry.
23. September 2006