MySpace has decided to throw in the towel with regards to its expansion in The Netherlands.   [...] had opened up an Amsterdam office merely 9 months ago but has now announced it will shut it down.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/26/myspace-gives-up-on-the-netherlands/

And about the idea of moving the dutch operations over to the berlin office? What are they smoking in the US Headquarters? Rest assured that this is pretty much the fastest way to discredit MySpace even further in the eyes of its the dutch users.

endlich krise.

What techcrunch is doing can’t be wrong, not totally wrong at least i hope. So lets see, AddThis! seems to finally solve the bookmarking issue once and for all by just taking it out of your hands completly and leaving the freedom of choice in the hand of the readers. It took me less than 2 minutes to click through their “Get your free widget” site and i had my personal bookmark button(test page).

And than, you get statistics pages for free, (techcrunchs, not mine though, sigh):
…and as you can see from the charts, AddThis does RSS Feeds too.

Is this all? Nope, there is more, of course a AddThis! Wordpress Plugin is available as well. But you go figure that out for yourself, i guess.

have(a lot of) fun
cheers

ps.: and(thx to wp plugin) try the bookmark button under this article ;-)


Technorati Tags: widget, techcrunch, addthis, bookmarking

as you all might warm up already for railsconf europe in berlin later this year i would like to let you know that the berlin user group got its own wiki now. After Florian Gersdorf did restart the meetings earlier this year we are happy to host the rug-b meeting every first thursday of the month at our place in /i-d media. And now, thanks to Benjamin Krause, we got our own place at http://www.rug-b.com/ where we set up the instiki wiki for a better overview on the berlin activities. Have a look over there for agenda, locations, timeings, whatsoever.

For all of our conference guest in berlin in september the rug-b started brainstorming about some special events and/or try to arrange for some benefits with berlin infrastructure. So come to Berlin, hope to see you soon!

I’m in no way linked to O’Reilly or the conference but in any case i’m quite willing to help making the berlin rails conference an even better one than the last. So when you have question or ideas for some socializing events around the rug-b or berlin just drop me a note.


UPDATE: wer des englischen nicht maechtig ist, dem soll versichert sein das “we are happy to host the rug-b meeting” nicht bedeutet, dass ich oder mein arbeitgeber der Veranstalter sind, sondern nur der Gastgeber. Scheinbar hat das der Kommentator nicht ganz mitbekommen. Ansprechpartner sind oben also genannt, aber wer will kann selbstverstaendlich auch mich ansprechen. Oder lieber anonym kommentieren, ganz wie es beliebt.

cheers.


Technorati Tags: railsconf, ruby, usergroup, berlin, idmedia, rug-b

Update: Do NOT trigger the password reset!

username: first-come-first-serve-to-sofasportlers@sebrink.de

password: super-secret

Update: someone reset the password(don’t do it!):

URL: https://www.joost.com/ username: first-come-first-serve-to-sofasportlers@sebrink.de password: supersecret

have fun

Joost update:

In response to your request we have reset your password.Click the link below to create a new password:

https://www.joost.com/forgot/PTYytfWTrzU8D6EwDU4iwGtPH73jmv0gYKlznc.Mh0smuFMQA0jcr0.html If link doesn't work, you can try copy-pasting it into your browser's address window, or retype it there. Best regards,The Joost team

the joost folks start spamming to rush us its beta testers into sending invitations.

So hurry - time’s running out :)

To use your tokens, go to https://www.joost.com/betatest/invitations.html before March 22 and fill in the form. We’ll send out your invitation straight away.

ok, they asked for it and who am i to obey? To speed up and simplify things a bit i send an invitation to myself and give it to you. Here you get the beefy part of their invitation reply, go use it in what ever way you’re please to do:

To get started, please visit https://www.joost.com/betatest/ and login with your invitation beta access details:

Username: first-come-first-serve-to-sofasportlers@sebrink.de     (Case sensitive!)
Password: 96ffdayj     (Case sensitive!)

After you've logged in, visit https://www.joost.com/betatest/settings/ to choose your own password.

first come first serve, but i suggest the first one to choose a password just uses jyadff69 than all the followers can use the same account. you decide.

the mac client is actually quite nice and according to their own rumours a massive openening up and lots of invitation ar just around the corner.

have fun



Technorati Tags: joost, free, invitation, video, iptv, marketing

We had our 2nd ruby users group berlin meeting yesterday with two speakers and the demo of the yet to be released omdb.org project.

First was Tim Lossen giving a good round-up of the JRuby developments. Not of much interest to me because i have’t touched Java in a while. There was a common understanding that JRuby is a good thing and will pave Rubys way into the enterprise world, and with Sun now as official backing partner, JRuby is heading for a 1.0 release this summer for Javaworld confererence. You can already run JRuby based Rails applications inside you IBM Websphere Application server, Yeah! But can you run a Rails application with JRuby from inside a Java applet on your client browser? Hm, interesting idea, we couldn’t answer that yesterday.

Next was the talk by Murphy about the state of the ruby 1.9 release. Murphy mainly used Mauricio Fernandez eigenclass for reference and gave a really great overview around the three main themes of this topic: Roadmap, New and changed features and performance. Everybody loves the hand drawn roadmap image(which i can’t find now) and while a Ruby2.0 release being something from a far utopian future, we might see a 1.9 release later this year. I’m actually not following the 1.9 developments but became inspired to check again. Enumerators for examples reminded me to my STL/C++ years, just now without the template pains :-) Interessting were his comments on performance. Tim already showed some charts which related the JRuby to some other implementations and Murphy made some own benchmarks which were pretty much in line with Tims data. The general information is that 1.9(==YARV) is a couple of times faster, ranging from 3 to 10 times faster. BUT! and that is a big but, Murphy did report that on the real life applications he tested, the speed-up was close to insignificant for various applications. This is because the the performance tuning in 1.9 seems to be focussing on benchmark relevant stuff. And real life application are hardly build from benchmark functionallity. This sounds like, been there, seen that before. History(benchmark tweaking) is repeating itself. For me it doesn’t matter. When others can do 4000 requests/second, ruby/rails is definitly fast enough for me.

Finally Benjamin Krause showcased his upcoming OMDB project(tech blog, development version, live). OMDB is a IMDb in wikipedia style with a creative commons licence. 16501 People(see comment) 16000 movies are already in the database and once it will open up, everybody can extend it. Thats a cool idea conceptually and what he showed technically was nothing less than the equivalent to an “Full House” in poker. For example the subsecond async response times for fetching actors from a huge database which were made possible by his ferret magic. impressive.

And this also led to the agenda for the next meeting where Benjamin will give a talk about ferret on Rails. Everybody wanted to see more of it. Also we will have a talk by Adam about AmzonWebServices: S3 and Rails on EC2 . I’m looking forward to it. And about the open mic section, i’m pretty sure we are releasing our foto-foo into the wild.

And for you to have some fun, we plan to record the talks next time and put them up as podcasts to fit with your online consumption habits. Murphy and Tim also promised to upload their talks for online viewing (to the wiki i guess).

looks like the ruby users group berlin is consolidating.

Technorati Tags: ruby, usergroup, YARV, jruby, omdb, imdb, idmedia, berlin,

after having Diz/Kiz online for some weeks now, for the very first time we let it outside. There never was a Beta, and now it is officially out of the gates. My connection? I work for the company which build it: productdevelpment @ /i-d media(full flash!).

Diz/Kiz ist a ruby-on-rails webapp where you can diz or kiz videos pulled in from other sites. With just 2 mouseclicks(the second click is only for confirmation :-) and our bookmarklet you can publish videos yourself.  Diz/Kiz was supposed to give you some fun minutes with a simple “am I hot or not” mechanik.

The spanish speaking genbeta blog has something to say about us:

DizKiz, subiendo y votando vídeos

Cyberfrancis

Diz/kiz es una herramienta online que permite a los usuarios subir los vídeos, por ahora soportando los sistemas de Google Vídeos, Youtube y t-community, añadiéndo simplemente los enlaces de las páginas de los vídeos que desean subir.

and web2null from Germany:

DizKiz: Video-Voting
DizKiz ist ein kleines Mashup von I-D Media, auf dem Videos von YouTube, GoogleVideo etc. vorgestellt und mit “Kiz” (gut) oder “Diz” (schlecht) bewertet werden können. Das ganze ist auch als Widget auf der eigenen Homepage nutzbar.

It is nice seeing your work beeing picked up by people around the globe. There was no Beta and Diz/Kiz was a proof-of-concept for us. Now we keep on going :-) Usabilitywise we need to fix some things and we will add  functionallity. Don’t worry, Diz/Kiz will never become a full featured video portal but remains a simple one-step-stop for your video fun. But more widgets would be ok, wouldn’t it?

And for you beeing a ruby coder maybe, I promise some API to embed Diz/Kiz widgets on your own site. Diz/Kiz was designed from the groud up to embed video data from external storage providers and this is how it was build. Right now we are working on opening up this interface to the web.

next stop: foto-foo! This time we do a Beta, don’t forget to sign up!



Technorati Tags: dizkiz, video, mashup, idmedia, youtube

In a kind of talking-to-myself action i dated my companies avatar in the romantic scenery setting of a sundown on Ideas Island(not yet open to the public). Its him(AyDee Kubrick) sitting on top me. My face is streamed live from my macbook, it is not a still image. It still surprises me actually when these things do work like advertised. This is all about testing the live streaming setup which we want to apply on the island. And i can tell you, there are lurking surprises all the way. With the real stream setup(streaming me is not the plan:-) i have a mysterious lag  between voice and image for example. It is not about lip sync, it is something like 1-2 minutes! I have no idea yet where the image stream gets delayed for such long. A couple of seconds i could understand, but a whole minute? The other still unsolved mystery to me is how to setup the darwin streaming server for serving incoming RTSP request on port 80. The manuals say where and how to enable it, but the server fails to comply to my commands. A nice little catch22 you get: The  server fails serving port 80 without root permissions but when you give it root permission it fails to run at all due to missing configurations. Googl’ing this you get tons of stupid forum post about rebooting your mac to make it work and similar smart proposals. We got it working now with IP tables.

Now that our island emerged from the deep waters of californian virtuallity we are just a couple of days away from opening our space there. I hope for  a  lekker housewarming party next week. creating tomorrow and stay tuned! 

Technorati Tags: idmedia secondlife webcam streaming avatar