Okay, enough hot air. So what is it really? wirecurl.com just launched in the past few days after a while of planning and doing and other stuff to handle. With wirecurl.com, Andreas and me try to establish a web magazine that’s a bit more than just one of those regular “We write reviews of iPhone Apps” or “We test cool new websites and show them to you” sites. It’s more about the whole “2.0″ topic, from the web, over entertainment up to lifestyle and other sort of things. Currently, we’re having a hard time to fill up wirecurl.com with content and yet, there’s unfortunately still not that much to see – but we’re working hard to catch up and present you content you might be interested in.

I’m not going to annoy you losing too many words on this, but one thing I’d still like to mention: To sweeten you the launch, we already reviewed a brand new and yet barely known iPhone & iPad App named Flight+, and we’re giving away the App for free! Just check it out on wirecurl.com!

Hope you’ll stick with us and enjoy reading.

Apple Magic Mouse

I’ve been using Apple’s newly designed and named Magic Mouse for around a week now and have to say that I’m actually pretty happy to have bought it and replaced my Mighty Mouse with it.

First of all, the new Magic Mouse has no more scroll-ball, what’s probably the biggest change in the whole redesign. Apple finally found a way to remove the always-broken-due-to-dirt scroll-ball by a multi-touch surface that goes across the Mouse’s whole surface. I haven’t had any problems with scrolling yet, except for my habit that lets me always search for the scroll-ball with my fingers, heh.

Besides the new multi-touch surface, the Mouse became way more flat. It really was a weird feeling to work with it in the first few hours, but I got pretty fast used to it and the only thing I’m still missing are the buttons on the Mouse’s side. I had them configured for application-based Exposé and I know that there are some “Middle-Button-Hacks” for the Magic Mouse available which could be used for such features, but still some real buttons would be more comfortable, in my opinion.

However, I really like the new Mouse, especially since it’s a bit heavier and doesn’t feel like a cheap and shaky plastic-puttogether, as the Mighty Mouse did. Regarding the Bluetooth connectivity, I can’t see any differences yet. I didn’t experience problems neither with the Mighty nor with the new Magic Mouse. As soon as I’ll have some information about the power-consumption of the new Mouse, I’ll update this post – yet, I still run the one-time-batteries Apple provides with their devices and it’s still working pretty fine, at a battery-level of 88%. If the discharge-procedure continues straight-line I’d expect the life of those average batteries to end in around three weeks – at least with my more or less heavy usage. Of course, I’ll replace them by re-chargeable batteries, since I’m not really a fan of the one-time-use.

My conclusion on the Magic Mouse is, that it’s indeed a very high priced mouse but also uses the great multi-touch technology to provide best user-experience at the lowest annoyance possible. I think that, if the actual internal hardware is qualitatively good enough, Apple finally did a good and lasting job on this Mouse. And if you’re not one of those fanboys, that really really really need to always have the latest stuff around, you might be sticking to this Mouse for a long time.

Hope this feedback helps some of you at least a bit on deciding whether to get one for yourself or not. Enjoy!

Sleek Bluebird Theme

Yay! Yet another cool, new theme for one of best Twitter-clients available on the OS X platform: Bluebird. This time, the theme called Sleek is inspired by 2Smoke’s Silent Night Theme for Bowtie, what’s one of the best Bowtie themes available out there btw.

The theme itself is 100% CSS without any pictures besides the background-image. That one’s the same I’ve also already used within my HUD and HUD-Mini themes. I call this environmental-friendly recycling.

I made use of the cool features Safari already implements, like for example round corners or gradients. It’s just nice to see how much can be done using these features – at this point, the CSS hacks replaced any kind of image plus the whole work needed to make gradient-images in HTML/CSS scalable. A very cool time- and work-saver!

However, I hope you enjoy this new Bluebird theme!

Download sleek.bbtheme

Since I’ve already posted a quite descriptive post regarding the theme itself, I won’t beat around the bush now. For those who haven’t read the initial story, here you can review it. You can download the theme by clicking the link at the bottom of this page. Note, that the theme needs the theme-switcher-reloaded Plugin for WordPress to be up and running to work properly. Additional to that, you will need to make some changes to your actual theme, which allows the user to actually switch to the iPhone theme. These changes depend on what theme you are using, but in general you need to modify your theme’s header.php and include a code like this one:

<?php
if(empty($_COOKIE["iphonetheme" . COOKIEHASH]))
{
if (stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'iPhone'))
{
echo "<div style=\"background-color: #F66; color: #fff; padding: 8px;\">";
echo "You seem to be browsing this site from your iPhone or iPod Touch.";
echo "Would you like to <a href=\"?wptheme=iphone\" title=\"\">change to the optimized site</a>?";
echo "</div>";
}
}
?>


The iPhone Theme itself already contains a button which provides you to switch back to the regular theme.

However, feel free to download, distribute, modify and have fun with my WordPress iPhone Theme – it’s released under GNU GPLv2!

Download: WordPress iPhone 0.1

The red block let's you choose.

I’ve been now using Prologue for quite a very long time – I guess longer than I’ve ever used one WordPress theme before – and I’m highly pleased of it. However, even that Prologue has a built-in iPhone/iPod Touch browser-detection which cuts away the sidebar and only keeps the important news-stream in focus, I haven’t been very satisfied by that. The font is still pretty small, nearly unreadable, the links are therefor pretty hard to hit, et cetera.

However, yesterday then Andi showed me some pretty nice little framework he just found, what actually doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress itself, but made me think of a very cool idea. The iWebKit-Framework is a small set of CSS and image files that concentrates on building a website in a way so that it looks just like an iPhone or iPod Touch Application. The whole thing’s appearance is pretty sexy, you can take a look at the downloads and get the framework plus some example HTML files for testing.

My optimized front-page.

So, I took a closer look on the iWebKit stuff and did some (again better, a lot of!) PHP WordPress theme hacking. I think I spent the whole night building that thing – but I also think that it was worth it, heh. And I guess, I’ve created a revolutionary and new WordPress theme aimed for the usage on iPhones and iPod Touches – the only problem I had left was: How to I get WordPress to use this theme only on the tiny Safari, but on nothing else? After some more PHP hacking, which included modifying my Prologue theme but not the actual WordPress (what’s the really cool thing within the whole story), I’ve found a way.

When you browse my WordPress now using your iPhone, you should be getting a red message right on top of the site, which tells you that it has detected the tiny Safari and suggests you to use the iPhone optimized theme. If you confirm by clicking the first link, the whole site’s design should get to look just like on the pictures I’ve inserted here.

My contact information - optimized.

I will extend the theme some more, maybe by building in JavaScript effects or other Eye-Candy, to make it fit even better into the iPhones Look & Feel. I was also thinking of some Cover-Flow’ish effect for my Gallery (which at the moment just links to my Picasa-Site, but thanks to the great API provided by Google it shouldn’t be too hard to implement that right into the page).

Maybe, after some more testing I’ll be able to provide it for download, including a whole documentation of how to make it work. Until then, I hope you enjoy browsing my Blog, especially over the iPhone or your iPod Touch. Please feel free to write me your impressions, feedback and also suggestions for improvement by commenting here or writing me an e-mail. So far …

Have fun!

I...

... hate...

... you...

… @andi.
One day, I will send you such pictures.

My new iPod Dock

So, it’s the 24th of December. Again. And yet, people spend thousands of [currency] for buying useless stuff to other people, which usually gets changed into something they could actually benefit from – for example money. Luckily, the gifts I got were pretty cool and actually stuff I planned to buy myself someday. Especially the gift my lovely girl got me was just great: The Apple iPod Dock! Yay. :-) I was pondering for a pretty long time whether to buy it or not… but now I don’t have to anymore.   It’s very cool, it comes with adapters for every iPod available on the market and with an additional Apple Remote, for controlling the iPod from the sofa, the bed or anywhere else. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t ship the Docks including an iPod->USB cable, so the one shipped with the iPod itself has to be used. I was actually hoping that I could take that one as “mobile cable” from now on, but meh. Luckily, I just bought myself an iPod car-recharger, which is contained of an cigarette-lighter to USB (f.) plug and an USB (m.) to iPod cable, which I can just take with me and connect it to any USB-capable computer. However, the Dock works just great, you plug in the iPod, iTunes starts and synchronizes it and you can play all the music from your iPod directly on your HiFi – and the quality isn’t even that bad! The only problem now is, that (if using the Apple Remote that got shipped with my Mac), I’m controlling the iPod and iTunes simultaneously, what of course makes no sense. I guess I need to unpack the new Remote shipped with the Dock and use that one. I hope my Mac ignores it by default. Now I’m drinking some Jack Daniel’s and chilling in front of the computer, waiting for this day(s) I usually dislike to finish. So far, noroc!

Gwibber on my GNOME Desktop

Just tried out Gwibber and I gotta say that it’s a pretty nice and smooth-looking Twitter client for the GNOME Desktop. It’s written in Python and uses GTK2 in combination with Webkit to display the eye-candy-tweets. It was pretty much a pain to get the Ubuntu-Packages working on Debian, but now it’s running pretty good and yet it seems stable. I’m wondering where to configure the appearance, hm… well, however.

Just try it out yourself!

My Idea of the Perfect Terminal-Server Infrastructure. Click to download the PDF.

Some time ago I was involved in a project at work that made me think a bit about the infrastructure companies use and how they could look like, in a perfect world. It became clear, that many companies tried and still try to move their infrastructure to free software – modern web-services with Apache and Mono, virtualization with Xen (at least before Citrix was there), desktop-virtualization with VirtualBo…errr.. Sun’s xVM, and so on. Unfortunatelly, these things actually do not bring many advantages to the end-user but maybe giving them a better feeling because of not-throwing monopolists the company’s money into their throats. The fact is, that the low-brow-user doesn’t really care or even see whether there’s a KVM or a VMware running as host for the server he’s just working on. So, how about bringing free software to the enterprise desktop? I’m not talking about buying a SLED license-box. I’m talking of opensource service on which end-users can actually do their daily work.

Correct me if I should be wrong, but as far as I noticed nowadays Citrix is one of the widest spread solutions when it comes to terminal-servers – how should it be else as inventor of the Independent Computing Architecture. And of course, there are good reasons why Citrix covers the market in that area: it is a great product which allows many different users to work at the same time on one (or more) Windows Servers and, besides of that, also supports redundancy – what is the non-plus-ultra when it comes to enterprise. And in theory, everything works out great with no SPF (Single Point of Failure) and the highly compressed ICA protocol allows comfortable working, even over thin lines. Though, in practice, it doesn’t work out as smooth as it’s read in the brochure. For example, I don’t like how redundancy is being solved in the ICA/Citrix Terminal-Server solutions. In my opinion, the client’s configuration is not the place to store what terminal-servers are available, and it should not be left to the client to decide to which it connects. As soon as you slacken your infrastructure and allow employees to connect using clients on their own managed workstations, you lose control about the redundancy configuration and what is more important, you also lose control about load-balancing. When an employee only configures one terminal-server, the client will always connect to this one, regardless whether it’s fully crowded while the second one is twirling one’s thumbs.

Besides, I find it pretty hard to administer two or more identical Windows Servers, since the installation-routines of each tiny little software under Windows works in a different way than the others before. You can’t just Keyboardcast each installation-command to each of the two (or how many Terminal-Servers are being used) Servers and verify that everything installed fine afterwards. I’m not saying that a Unix or a Linux is the perfect Terminal-Server, but in my opinion a Windows is really hard to manage – and more than one are a disaster. Of course, there are tools and services which provide you the feature of distributing a software onto many windows machines “with one click“, but usualy they require some pre-configuration and testing, until it works out really smooth. What, in the end, costs more time (and by that also money) than just executing the according aptitude, zypper or yum command on each of the <variable> servers.

My idea was, to set up the whole terminal-server infrastructure that’s usually provided by some Citrix Metaserver Product (or whatever) using simple and free tools. In this example, I based the whole scenario on Linux as server system and NoMachine as desktop protocol. In my opinion, NoMachine isn’t perfect (in no way, never), but it definitely is the best opensource-equivalent to ICA that’s available nowadays.
Unfortunately, you can’t make up an enterprise-ready terminal-server solution just by taking these two (Linux, NoMachine) products and throw them together. For example, the setup would be totally missing the one thing I just complained about before at Citrix’s solution: Redundancy. NoMachine (short, NX) itself is no terminal-server solution, just to clearify that. And it’s not described like that anywhere. NX provides remote desktop access over very thin lines with comfortable quality and speed. Period. And this explains why the redundancy of NX is quite limited. But let’s go into greater detail:

When a NX Client connects to a remote desktop, the machine running that desktop usually contains of three core services: One NX Server, one NX Node and one SSH daemon. The Client connects to the SSH daemon using a special NX-user and the SSH key that has been exchanged at the installation. From there, it authenticates against the NX Server using the credentials passed to the NX Client. If the authentication succeeds, the NX Server then forwards the connection to the NX Node, which does the actual desktop management (starting the GNOME or whatever desktop and transmitting the information to the client, etc.).
NoMachine now supports the nice feature of redundancy and load-balancing between the NX Server and the NX Node(s). For example, you could outsource the NX Node service on another machine, then clone that machine (of course, change things like the IP, Hostname, etc.) and afterwards configure the NX Server to forward connections to the newly created NX Node-Machines. The NX Server then decides where each client connects to, by paying attention to the load of each node and periodically checking its availabillity. So, if node A would already run one connection, the NX Server would send the second incoming client to node B. If node A would break down, the Server would notice that and send newly incoming connection only to node B, until it “sees” node A online again.

Now, with these informations in mind we could already create a very simplistic Linux/NoMachine Terminal-Server. But, as I was saying before, we would be missing full redudancy. In the described scenario, the NX Server would be our SPF, and we could not change that since the NoMachine configuration doesn’t provide such a feature. It would not even be possible to provide it – unless we add one more service in between the client and the server. And this is what I’ve done in the scenario I made up (see the picture, click to download the PDF). I called that service the “Rendezvous NoMachine Proxy”, because it uses the zeroconf services to communicate with the clients. Like I said at Citrix’s solution before, I don’t like configuring the available terminal-server statically within each client – of course, it doesn’t bring complexity, but it brings many other disadvantages. However, the RNP would contain a list of all available NX Servers and be able to dynamically decide whether a client is allowed to connect to one specific server or not (-> implementation of simple ACLs). The clients would use Zeroconf to find all available RNP servers and randomly take one to ask for an NX Server to connect to. The RNP would then check the NX Servers’ statuses and by that decided which server to return to the client. The client would then continue the regular procedure of authenticating against the NX Server and pass over to the NX Node, if successful.

But what are the actual advantages of this idea? Okay, to summarize them up: First of all, the whole solution would have complete redundancy. Each service would be available two or more times. The second advantage of this built-up is, that by using an extra service (RNP), the NoMachine software itself doesn’t need to be modified or even rewritten. The only modification that’s needed to be done would affect the NX Client. Instead of just connecting to the IP given in the configured session, the client would need to ask for an NX Server IP through the RNP before the regular login procedure could be started. And this would just need a hook and no modification of the whole client that would make it unmaintainable. The NX Node/Server components already provide configurable hooks for scripts that get executed before the actual connection starts, so it should not take more than a feature-request for that to get implement into the client, too.
However, another big advantage would be the centalization of the actual remote desktop services and the outsource-abillity of the clients. For example, the NX Servers and Nodes would be located centrally at a datacenter, while the clients could be located in many different places, subdivided in little groups. At each place at least two RNPs should be running, which check where the clients are allowed to connect to. So, to visualize the scenario a bit: The group sitting in Boston is responsible for development. A Client wants to connect and asks one RNP for a NX Server address. The RNP then notices that it’s a developer who requests a NX Session, so he will look up his ACL and summarize the NX Server to which a developer is allowed to connect. Then, the RNP checks the NX Servers’ statuses and returns a session-configuration to the client which is then used to connect.
From the group based in Miami and responsible for finances, some employee requests a terminal-server session. Again, the RNP there looks up what NX Servers are configured and where the guy’s allowed to connect to and returns the session-configuration.

There are many more advantages of such a built-up. To detail each would take me too much time and just flood this Blog entry, heh.

At last but not least, there’s one part I didn’t mention up to now: The “Internet”-area displayed in the PDF. That one contains of two Citrix Windows Terminal-Servers. Now you might be asking.. wtf? I thought we wanted to opensource and crap?!… well. In a perfect world, the last portion of the document wouldn’t be needed. But in real life, Windows is an important part and in the majority of cases it can’t be just be cut out of the infrastructure. As long as companies need to work with solutions like SAP or other Windows-Only software it is not possible to get rid of it. And this would be the only neat possibility of combining both worlds, in my opinion.

However, feel free to comment on my idea, improve and even try to implement it. I would really like to see this (or something similar) working someday. It shouldn’t be pretty hard to build the needed service and make the modifications needed for this to work.

A "chrome look" Valvecover bought on eBay.

Around half a year ago, I bought a customized valvecover for my CRX on eBay. The guy was selling these things like as he would mass-produce them. However, on the picture it looked shiny and chrome, but when it arrived I thought Ugh, wtf? – it was pretty ugly and that “chrome look” described by the seller looked more like a plastic-toy you get when buying a Happy Meal at some big fastfood franchise. On monday I decided to finally do something with it, so I went to the Honda dealer and ordered a new valvecover sealing with overnight express. Unfortunatelly I missed the 12 o’clock deadline, so it took two days instead of one. Still the express was faster than waiting six or more days for it.

The "chrome look" Valvecover after I sandblasted it, heh.

However, today I went to that friend’s of mine garage and sandblasted the whole chrome paint off the cover. After that, I was thinking of what color to paint the valvecover…. yellow? Green? Blue? Black? White? But after a while I decided to take red. Red is a pretty cool color combined to the black of my car/my underhood and the chrome of my strut bar. So, together with that friend of mine I went to a local car shop and bought a can of heat-proof red paint. That stuff is pretty expensive, by the way, but it doesn’t look that bad. At least while it was still wet, it had a nice glossy look which I hope it keeps after it dried. Now I’m going to let it dry until friday and then I’ll start painting the Honda emblem/text.

My shiny, red-painted Valvecover.

I was thinking of painting it either black or white, though I’m not yet sure on how to do that. I guess I’ll sand off the red paint from the logo and then use a tiny little brush to handpaint the letters.

Anyway, after it’s all done I will polish the valvecover and mount it onto my CRX’s engine. I’m really excited of how it will look. I’ll handwash the underhood and make some pictures of it as soon as it’s in. So far, so good.

Full interior concept drawing

After some more drawing I finally got a detailed plan on how the construction could look like:

Detailed drawing of how the construction could look like

Then I bought the materials I needed and went to a friend’s of mine garage. Together with him, we started implementing the stuff I doodled on that paper. First, we had problems with the welding points, because the used to just break up like nothing. After replacing the gas with a new bottle it worked out pretty good. We bended the small steel-pipes for the speakers and created the “arms” that hold the amplifier. Actually I wanted to bend these two pipes, too, but it would have looked pretty ugly, so we decided to just leave them straight. For mounting the speakers and the amplifier, we took screws and welded them onto the pipes, with theirs screw thread to the upside.

After everything was welded together, we started grinding all the ugly welding points away and sprayed the black-metallic paint onto the construction. Then, we waited. And waited. And waited. God, I hate this sleazy paint. And still waited. After nearly two hours the paint wasn’t at least running away anymore, so I carefully took the construction and mounted it into my CRX. Then, piece for piece I started putting together the hifi components and did the wiring through the car, to the front where my capacitor is. I know, a capacitor should not be more than thirty centimeters away from the amplifier to be efficient, but actually the only reasing why I have that capacitor in the front of my car is for not having to wire every little cable (central-locking, amp, etc.) directly to the battery.

However, after wiring the whole thing up I tested out the sound and quality, and I have to say that I imagined worse. The problem is, that these speakers are hanging “in the air” and have no resonators, so I didn’t expect to much from the output, but it’s actually better than I thought. Now I’m wondering whether to just build two resonators or make an open baffle construction out of it, for example by using two thick plexiglas disks.

Anyway, I will think about it some more. So far, so good.

See all pictures on my Picasa WebAlbum.

My gimped version of that hot, red Honda CRX.

So, I just took the CRX’s picture I wrote about and thought, How about gimping it a little bit up? And so I did. I actually “implemented” everything I was talking about. The black lights (though it is pretty hard to darken lights with The Gimp), the stock gas cap and I also removed the spoiler on its back. I actually also wanted to darken the rims to make them look more like graphite or even black, unfortunately that’s not that easy and the draft I designed looked pretty crappy – so I just left them as they were. Now only the H-emblem on the hood’s still missing. I was wondering, whether to place the original, chrome H onto it, or maybe brush it matt-black to fit the lights and the fence.

This CRX really kicks ass, in my opinion. Unfortunately, red is a very complicated color which shouldn’t receive too much sunlight anyway. But I think that the <color>/black-combination looks pretty cool on any color – yellow (for example the one that Audi uses to paint on their RS4), pink (the one from the S2000 in TFTF) or orange (some chameleon sunrise-orange). Besides, I really start loving the rims, though I think that without a bodykit which extends the car to the bottom, these 18 or 19″ rims would look pretty stupid on the CRX.

Later today I will go and buy some more steel for bending and welding, to finally finish the HiFi built-up in my car. I love holidays.

Really hot CRX with very sex rims.

As I was saying yesterday, I’m really thinking of getting an 1988 Pontiac Fiero GT 2.8 V6. Unfortunatelly that car brings so many disadvantages that it could only been driven as second car. Besides, I would not want to sell my CRX, since I’m really attached to it. Yesterday evening I was browsing a bit the internet and searched for parts for my CRX, when I just found this really nice and red CRX. I really like the way it’s been built up, though I would do some more modifications on it. First of all I would paint the fence in its front lip black, just like the blinker lights, the headlights and the rear lights. Besides, I would unmount that ugly spoiler and replace it by the CRX’s original one, of course painted in the car’s red metallic. And the last two things I would change back to stock would be the gas cap and the H-emblem on the hood. I don’t like it when people clean away the Honda sign. What I actually really do like on that CRX are the rims. By now, I could not find out what make they are, so if anyone actually knows how these rims are called please tell me.

Whatever, I think the guy who did that put about three or four K into the car’s exterior design, what would just be the price for a used, stock Fiero. Humpf.

Found at: http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/davikan/

In the past few days/weeks I was constantly playing with the thought of buying a new car. And by new I don’t mean a 2008-year-of-manufacture car – I was more thinking of an specific ’88s automobile: The Pontiac Fiero GT.

The Fiero is an american, mid-engined sports car that was designed by a great and famous car designer – John DeLorean – and built from 1984 until 1988. The Fiero was available with two different engines, a 2.5 L 4-cylinder and a 2.8 L V6 and – what’s actually the best part – also with 5-speed manual transmission. There are two different body styles of the Fiero: The notchback and the fastback. Of course, I’m searching for a fastback version, since in my opinion the Fiero fastback has some similarities with my actual ’91 Honda CRX (ED9). *crouching down* *running away*

However, with around 1200kg, the Fiero isn’t the lightest car and from what I’ve found out the V6 only has around 135 HP. My CRX weights around 400kg less and has a 125 HP high-drive 4-cylinder which makes it in less than 8 seconds from 0 to 100, depending on how fast you shift. Of course, at around 120 kilometers per hour, the Fiero might smoke my 1600ccm Honda with its V6 mid-engine, but from 0 to 100 km/h I think that my CRX would beat the Pontiac. Besides, with my 1.6i-16v engine I need around 6 to 8 liters of gasoline when driving in a gentle way, and I really doubt that the Fiero could keep up with that.

Still, I really love the way this car looks, especially when it’s good in shape and maybe also a bit modified, like for example the YellowFiero. Unfortunatelly, there are a handful of disadvantages on driving a Fiero here in Germany. Would the car get a pollution badge? Where to get replacement parts for it? How long does it take to get them? Who repairs the car by actually knowing what he does (unlike some independent shops)? Indeed, the acquisition costs for a used Pontiac Fiero with less milage are pretty low, but with all that questions in mind, I think that the maintainance costs could eat me up. I guess I will spend some more time on researches about the car and its issues, do some test-driving and then decide what to do. Besides, I would really regret it to sell my CRX.