Web Design and Usability Guidelines

* Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
* 3-click-rule
* The Myth of the 7 +/- 2 Rule
* The Magical Number Seven
* Articles about User Interface Engineering

Skype - P2P telephony

My brother, Matthias, just told me about Skype which is an excellent (and free!) software, which allows you to do free phone calls through the internet - all over the world.
I tried it out and was really surprised about the good quality and easy handling.
What can I say more, the slogan "P2P telephony that just works" is definitely right.
Here are some features of Skype:
* Free unlimited worldwide phone calls to other Skype users
* Superior sound quality - better than your regular phone
* Works with all firewall, NAT and routers ? nothing to configure!
* Friends list shows you when your Skype friends are online and ready to talk or chat
* Super-simple and easy to use
* Your calls are encrypted "end-to-end" for superior privacy
* Based on cutting edge peer-to-peer technology developed by the creators of Kazaa and Joltid

JAG - Java Application Generator

JAG (Java Application Generator) is an application that creates complete, working J2EE applications. It is intended to alleviate much of the repetitive work involved in creating such applications, while providing a means of quality assurance that the applications created will be of consistent quality.
There are also some screenshots of JAG available.

Eclipse 3.0M5 released

Eclipse 3.0M3 has been released with a big number of new and noteworthy features.

J2EE 1.4 Final Released

J2EE 1.4 Final has been released recently. There is also a J2EE 1.4 Developer Release SDK available for download.

JSCalendar - DHTML Calendar Widget

JSCalendar is a really cool DHTML calendar widget with many features and works on a big number of browsers.

AskIgor - Automated Debugging Service

AskIgor - Automated Debugging Service allows you to find bugs in Linux executables by uploading it and specify the arguments by which the program fails and when it doesn't fail.
Igor tells you where the problem is ...

Ballmer/Gates in The Matrix

I've seldom seen something funny like that from Microsoft:
* Comdex 2003 Bill Gates Keynote - The Matrix
I didn't know that Microsoft has so much sense of humor!

Cocoon Day 2003

I just return from the Cocoon Day 2003 here in Vienna.
It was the first bigger official Cocoon-centric one-day workshop of this kind. It was organized - and very well to be mentioned - mainly by Reinhard Pötz and Alexander Schatten. The event gave a really great overview of the Cocoon basics, some advanced infos and best practices and not to forget many practical use cases.

Perhaps many don't even know, that many (if not all) of the speakers - which were coming from Austria, Swiss and Germany - were not paid for this.
So many thanks to them!

I'm looking forward for more such great events in Austria!

Interesting W3C News

The latest Weekly Newsletter from W3C I got today has many interesting news for you:

W3C Recommendations:
* Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (Second Edition)

Last Calls Working Drafts:
* XQuery 1.0
* XSLT 2.0
* XPath 2.0
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics
* XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization
* XML Query (XQuery) Requirements
* XML Query Use Cases
* XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0

Working Drafts:
* Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 1: Core Language
* Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 2: Message Patterns
* SOAP Optimized Serialization Use Cases and Requirements
* Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2

Notes:
* Units in MathML
* Structured Types in MathML 2.0
* Bound Variables in MathML

Software:
* Amaya 8.2 Editor/Browser Released

NOVA | The Elegant Universe | PBS

I just found this slashdot article about The Elegant Universe of the NOVA program.
There are many resources including the whole 3 hour video viewable online.
I definitely have to take some time to view it.

Internet Mapping Projects

* Internet Mapping Project
* The OPTE Project
The last one seems to be really promising since the resulting code will be distributed freely and it claims to scan the whole internet within only one day.

Liberty Alliance: Phase 2 Finalized

Liberty Alliance has finalized the Phase 2 Specifications and Privacy Guidelines for Federated Identity.

CVSreport

CVSreport produces text or enhanced HTML activity reports from a local or remote CVS repository. It can be used to extract activity information from any time span, or to automatically generate reports and store/send them on commit events.

Java Source Code Formatter

* Jalopy
* Checkstyle

Authoring Techniques for Device Independence (W3C Working Draft)

The W3C Device Independence Activity Group has published the first public Working Draft of the Authoring Techniques for Device Independence.
This document provides a summary of several techniques and best practices that Web site authors and solution providers may employ when creating and delivering content to a diverse set of access mechanisms.

CruiseControl

CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds.
There is also a very interesting article about continuous integration mentioned.
Here are some more related tools:
* CruiseControl.NET
* Dashboard - CruiseControl plugin for IntelliJ and Eclipse
* CruiseControl wiki

Guido's blogging again

Nice to see that Guido has found some time again to write for his weblog after a two-month break during August/Semptember.
I read some interesting news about Microsoft patents there:
* "Believe it or not, Microsoft got a US patent for Cookies. The patent has already been requested in December 1996."
* "Microsoft got a US patent on activity monitoring in IM networks."
I hope that it will not come this far with software patents in europe ...

Netcraft: November 2003 Web Server Survey

Netcraft: November 2003 Web Server Survey shows an interesting result: The Apache Webserver has reached yet again an all-time high of 68.60% of active sites.
It seems also that many large hosting companies which migrated to M$ IIS during 2001 and 2002 are regularly switching back to Apache which might indicate, that they failed with M$ IIS ...

KDE 3.2 Beta 1: Say Hello To Rudi

The KDE Project announced the release of KDE 3.2 Beta 1, codename "Rudi".
Many has been improved since 3.1 and I'll definitely give it a try!

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide 2.2 released

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide is an in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting by Mendel Cooper.
One of the most comprehensive bash resources available, with many excellent examples!