Pocketbook Color

I read a lot of web articles on my e-reader (often using Push to Kindle which is fantastic). I left the Kindle ecosystem a while ago and Pocketbook (a TouchHD 3) has been a good home so far.

Since my content is often a mix of text and non-text, I was appealed by a color eInk screen. The Pocketbook Color recently came out and I purchased one to test it.

Here are my conclusions after about two weeks of usage:

Pro

  • While limited in their range, colors work well for diagrams, illustrations and screenshots. Photos can look a bit awkward but it’s definitely better than greyscale.
  • Before this e-reader, I haven’t read comics on a device but with color it’s quite fun. The clipping tools in the UI are useful to get rid of white borders around the actual comics.

Con

  • It’s not very suitable for night time reading (which is my main use case), the minimum brightness is high, there is only white backlight.
  • With the strong white backlight it feels like an LCD screen which kind of diminishes the idea behind eInk.
  • The technology seems to use two layers: one “common” 300dpi greyscale, and one around 150dpi color layer. This results in a pattern overlaying the whole screen making the screen less crips when reading text.
  • Pocketbook readers are rather slow. I always wonder how they do scrolling and inertia so much better than Kindles but feel so. slow. navigating through the UI.

Overall, I think color eInk is technology well worth exploring, especially when no backlight is necessary and it doesn’t need any battery power (think photo walls)

I am torn whether I’ll keep the Pocketbook Color as my main reading device because using the reader in the dark is like turning on the light in the room.

Buchhaltung für EPUs: Bookamat

Eine Sache, die man als EPU nicht gerne macht (zumindest alle, die ich kenne), ist die Buchhaltung. Auch wenn man den ganzen “Rechnungskram” an einen Buchhalter auslagern könnte, so finde ich es für den alltäglichen Betrieb wichtig, die Finanzen im Blick zu haben und die Erfassung der Belege selbst zu übernehmen.

Eigentlich könnte man seine ganzen Einnahmen und Ausgaben auch in einer Excel-Tabelle erfassen. Aber das ist in vielerlei Hinsicht mühsam und unübersichtlich. Also soll eine Software her. Der Markt ist nicht klein, es gibt zahlreiche Software, die Kleinunternehmen damit unter die Arme greifen wollen, aber da gibt es gleich die ersten Fallstricke:

1. Die Software soll für Österreich geeignet sein
2. Das Ganze soll bitte auch am Mac laufen

Die einfache Lösung: eine Web Applikation. Auf dem österreichischen Markt gibt es hier 2 große Player: freefinance und bookamat

bookamat

Mit freefinance sind vielleicht Leute vom Fach zufrieden, für einen Halblaien ist das Interface eine (visuelle) Katastrophe, die ganze Applikation ist voll mit Fachbegriffen frisch aus dem Finanzamt.

freefinance interface

Dagegen ist Bookamat eine Offenbarung. Beim Interface sieht man, dass das jemand macht, der etwas von Webseiten versteht: Patrick Kranzlmüller und Axel Swoboda sind mit ihrer Agentur vonautomatisch vom Fach.

bookamat-neue-buchung

Ich verwende schon mehrere Jahre Bookamat und bei jedem Update sieht man, dass die beiden ihre Software selbst verwenden und immer dort schrauben, wo es noch etwas hakt. Kleines Beispiel aus dem Screenshot oben: Man legt mit der Auswahl des Steuerkontos fest, ob es sich um eine Eingabe oder Ausgabe handelt.

Bei freefinance z.B. muss man erst das richtige Formular aufrufen (also Einnahme oder Ausgabe), und bekommt dann das hier präsentiert:

freefinance-neue-buchung


Die Alarmglocken schrillen schon, wenn man die Hälfte des Bildschirms für Hilfetexte braucht. Bei den Zahlen im Dropdown vermute ich, dass es sich um die Kennzahlen des Finanzamts handelt. Das mag hilfreich sein, aber zeigt wie sehr man sich an der Finanz und nicht am Unternehmer orientiert.

bookamat-steuerkonten

Bookamat hingegen zeigt es auch an, aber dort, wo man sich aussucht, welche Konten man im Alltag überhaupt braucht.

Letztlich bleibt mir nur zu sagen: verwendet Bookamat! Es nimmt der Buchhaltung zwar nicht vollkommen den Schrecken, aber es macht sie verständlicher und erfreulicher. Und das ganze nur für 100 Euro im Jahr, inkl MwSt. (dh für alle die nicht unter die Kleinunternehmerregelung fallen nur 83,33 Euro an).

Little Snitch und Freewave

Inspiriert von der Anleitung von Freewave, die zeigt, wie man in einem unverschlüsselten WLAN (wie Freewave es an vielen Orten in ganz Österreich anbietet) dafür sorgen kann, dass nicht unabsichtlich Apps mit dem Internet sprechen, habe ich hier ein paar Anpassungen zusammengestellt, um das Gleiche mit SSH und SOCKS zu nutzen.

Wenn man Zugang zu einem Server im Internet per SSH hat (eigener Webserver, Uni-Account), kann man sich einfach eine sichere Verbindung (zumindest bis zu ebendiesem Server, aber es geht ja eigentlich nur darum die WLAN-Signale zu verschlüsseln) basteln.

Man startet ein Terminal-Fenster und gibt Folgendes ein:

ssh -D9999 username@mein.server

Mit dem Schalter -D<port> wird ein SOCKS-Proxy gestartet, der auf localhost:<port>, in diesem Fall auf localhost:9999, lauscht. Man lässt dann das Terminal-Fenster sowie die Verbindung so lange offen, solange man den Proxy verwenden will.

Dann konfiguriert man sein OSX so (in den Systemeinstellungen unter “Netzwerk”), dass es den SOCKS-Proxy verwendet:

socks-proxy

und letztlich passt man dann noch die Regeln an, wie sie in der Anleitung von Freewave gezeigt werden:

little-snitch-proxy

Der Unterschied besteht in der Regel für “Terminal”, die pppd und racoon ersetzt. Am einfachsten erstellt man die, indem man die Regel erstmal einfach weg lässt und die “alle ausgehenden”-Regel auf “Nachfragen” stellt. Dann das ssh Kommando ausführen, Little Snitch fragt nach, was es tun soll. Daraufhin erlaubt man die Verbindung für immer und stellt danach die “alle ausgehenden”-Regel wieder auf “Verbieten” zurück. (bei mir gibt es hier 2 Regeln, weil ich je nach Anwendungsfall 2 verschiedene Server verwende)

Übrigens: Ich fand die Bezeichnungen “Ohne VPN” und “Mit VPN” verwirrend, deswegen hab ich die bei mir “Potenziell Unsicher” bzw. “Vertrauenswürdig” genannt.

Insgesamt ist leider schade, dass mit einer solchen Konstruktion die ganzen Regeln, die man mehr oder weniger mühsam unter “Vertrauenswürdig” erstellt hat, nicht gelten, während man “Potenziell Unsicher” aktiviert hat: es geht einfach alles durch SSH, auch was man unter “Vertrauenswürdig” verboten hat.

Website Optimization, a book by Andrew B. King

Website Optimization

This time I’m reviewing a book by Andy King. Unlike High Performance website by Steve Souders, it doesn’t solely focus on the speed side of optimization, but it adds the art of Search Engine Optimization to form a compelling mix in a single book.

If you have a website that underperforms your expectations, this single book can be your one-stop shop to get all the knowledge you need.

Andy uses interesting examples of how he succeeded in improving his clients’ pages that illustrate well what he describes in theory before. He not only focuses on how to make your website show up at high ranks in search engines (what he calls “natural SEO”), but also discusses in detail how to use pay per click (PPC) ads to drive even more people to one’s site. I especially liked how Andy describes how to find the best keywords to pick and also describes how to monitor success of PPC.

The part about the optimization for speed feels a little too separated in the book. It is a good read and provides similar content as Steve Souders book, though the level of detail feels a little awkward considering how different the audience for the SEO part of the book is. Still, programmers can easily get deep knowledge about how to get that page load fast.

Unfortunately Andy missed out a little on bringing this all into the grand picture. Why would I want to follow not only SEO but also optimize the speed of the page? There is a chapter meant to “bridge” the topics, but it turns out to be about how to properly do statistics and use the correct metrics. Important, but not enough to really connect the topics (and actually I would have expected this bridging beforehand).

Altogether I would have structured things a little different. For example: It’s the content that makes search engines find the page and makes people return to a page, yet Andy explains how to pick the right keywords for the content first whereas he tells the reader how to create it only afterwards.
Everything is there, I had just hoped for a different organization of things.

All in all, the book really deserves the broad title “Website Optimization.” Other books leave out SEO which usually is the thing that people mean when they want to optimize their websites (or have them optimized).

I really liked that the topics are combined a book and I highly recommend the book for everyone who wants to get his or her website in shape.

The book has been published by O’Reilly in July 2008, ISBN 9780596515089. Also take a look at the Website Optimization Secrets companion site.

Thanks to Andy for providing me a review copy of this book.

This was FOWA Expo 2007

fowa.jpg

I have been attending this year’s Future of Web Apps Expo in London’s ExCeL centre.

There were a ton of interesting speakers and I enjoyed listening a lot. Amongst others there were Steve Souders of Yahoo (High Performance Web Sites), Paul Graham of Y Combinator (The future of web startups), Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com (The architecture of WordPress.com, he was the only one to go into some detail) and Kevin Rose of digg (Launching Startups).

I also enjoyed Robin Christopherson’s talk very much. He is vision impaired and showed how he browses the web (amazing how fast he had set the speed of his screen reader — I know why and guess that most vision impared people turn up the speed, yet it still feels awkward to listen to it) and which challenges therefore arise. Unfortunately Chris Shiflett only held a workshop which I was not attending.

The conference was clearly not so much for developers (at some points I would have greatly enjoyed some delving into code), so I am trying to keep my eyes open for even nerdier conferences :) Any suggestions?

On the evening of the first day there was a “live” diggnation recorded which was pretty fun.

According to Ryan Carson, he will be publishing audio files of the talks on www.futureofwebapps.com soon. Thanks to Carsonified for installing this great conference. I hope I will be able to return next year.

I have posted more photos to flickr.

fowa, fowa 2007

What does “size” in int(size) of MySQL mean?

I was always wondering what the size of numeric columns in MySQL was. Forgive me if this is obvious to someone else. But for me the MySQL manual lacks a great deal in this field.

TL;DR: It’s about the display width. You only see it when you use ZEROFILL.

Usually you see something like int(11) in CREATE TABLE statements, but you can also change it to int(4).

So what does this size mean? Can you store higher values in a int(11) than in an int(4)?

Let’s see what the MySQL manual says:

INT[(M)] [UNSIGNED] [ZEROFILL]
A normal-size integer. The signed range is -2147483648 to 2147483647. The unsigned range is 0 to 4294967295.

No word about the M. The entry about BOOL suggests that the size is not there for fun as it is a synonym for TINYINT(1) (with the specific size of 1).

TINYINT[(M)] [UNSIGNED] [ZEROFILL]
A very small integer. The signed range is -128 to 127. The unsigned range is 0 to 255.

BOOL, BOOLEAN
These types are synonyms for TINYINT(1). A value of zero is considered false. Non-zero values are considered true: […]

So TINYINT(1) must be different in some way from TINYINT(4) which is assumed by default when you leave the size out1. Still, you can store for example 100 into a TINYINT(1).

Finally, let’s come to the place of the manual where there is the biggest hint to what the number means:

Several of the data type descriptions use these conventions:

M indicates the maximum display width for integer types. For floating-point and fixed-point types, M is the total number of digits that can be stored. For string types, M is the maximum length. The maximum allowable value of M depends on the data type.

It’s about the display width. The weird thing is, though2, that, for example, if you have a value of 5 digits in a field with a display width of 4 digits, the display width will not cut a digits off.

If the value has less digits than the display width, nothing happens either. So it seems like the display doesn’t have any effect in real life.

Now2 ZEROFILL comes into play. It is a neat feature that pads values that are (here it comes) less than the specified display width with zeros, so that you will always receive a value of the specified length. This is for example useful for invoice ids.

So, concluding: The size is neither bits nor bytes. It’s just the display width, that is used when the field has ZEROFILL specified.

If you see any more uses in the size value, please tell me. I am curious to know.

1 See this example:
mysql> create table a ( a tinyint );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.29 sec)
mysql> show columns from a;
+-------+------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------+------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| a | tinyint(4) | YES | | NULL | |
+-------+------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
1 row in set (0.26 sec)

mysql> alter table a change a a tinyint(1);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> insert into a values (100);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from a;
+-----+
| a |
+-----+
| 100 |
+-----+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

2 Some code to better explain what I described so clumsily.
mysql> create table b ( b int (4));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.25 sec)

mysql> insert into b values (10000);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from b;
+-------+
| b |
+-------+
| 10000 |
+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> alter table b change b b int(11);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from b;
+-------+
| b |
+-------+
| 10000 |
+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> alter table b change b b int(11) zerofill;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from b;
+-------------+
| b |
+-------------+
| 00000010000 |
+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> alter table b change b b int(4) zerofill;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.08 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from b;
+-------+
| b |
+-------+
| 10000 |
+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> alter table b change b b int(6) zerofill;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from b;
+--------+
| b |
+--------+
| 010000 |
+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql, field size

Spamhaus.org no longer lists Austrian Registry on its Block List

It has come to my attention today that the almost famous Spam Block List provider put the IP addresses of the Austrian Registry nic.at on their block list.

The list that Spamhaus provides is actually something good: it allows mail server administrators to automatically block mails arriving from servers that are known to be operated by phishers.

At this point Spamhaus took the wrong term, though. They demanded from the Austrian Registry to delete 15 domains that they consider to be used by phishers, apparently without providing (enough) evidence to nic.at. So nic.at responded that — because of Austrian law — they cannot just delete domains without proof of bogus WHOIS addresses.

I cannot judge who is ultimately right in this dispute (like did Spamhaus provide enough evidence or not), but I can definitely judge that Spamhaus took the wrong decision when they started to block the IP addresses of nic.at in their list.

Welcome to the Kindergarten, guys.

nic.at is bound to Austrian law, and as a foreign company you can’t just come along and ask them to remove certain domains. What if someone would go to your registry and request deletion of spamhaus.org without providing any legitimate reason.

Dear Spamhaus, you need to stick to your policy. Your block list is about phishers, and nic.at did not send out any phishing mails. You can’t just put someone on there because you want to pressure them.

As a result, mail server administrators should no longer rely on block lists of such a provider who misuses his own list for trying to put other companies/organizations under pressure. So this is the right moment to remove sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org from your server configuration.

Coverage on the German Heise.de.

Update 2007-06-20: They have stopped listing nic.at. Finally they see reason. (They have changed the IP address block to 193.170.120.0/32 which matches no addresses); also see german futurezone.

nic.at, spamhaus, sbl

Delicious Interface Updates

Today del.icio.us did some really nice interface updates.

In the first place, they announced inline editing which is very slick. You just click on “edit” on the “your bookmarks” page and you can edit the item right away.

They also updated the URL page which looks very nice and tidy now.

These updates don’t affect blummy, you can still use it to add your bookmarks from any page. If you haven’t seen it, give it a try.

The announcement also says that private bookmarking (one of the big missing features) will be released next week.

digg it, add to del.icio.us

del.icio.us, interface, update