PapaScott

Zidane is God!

France 2:1 England Zidane (90+1), Zidane (90+3)

Update: Haiko and I did not coordinate our blog entries on this match, even though it may appear that we did.

Euro Election

David laughs, Nico cries. In today’s Euro-Parliament election (results presented between Euro 2004 matches), with less than 22% the SPD has its worst national post-war result. They have less than half the vote of the Union (45%). Maybe Schröder should think about buying the rights to Project 18 from the FDP.

What I find worrying is that some of those SPD voters are heading to the ex-communist PDS. Over 6% in the Europe vote, in today’s state election in Thuringa over 26% (SPD just 15%). Fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former SED should by all rights be in the dustbin of history. The failed German reunification is keeping them alive.

Sherpas for WordPress

Shelley had a bad experience with the new WordPress bug tracker Mosquito, and Matt (among others) thought she was being a poor sport about it. Nonetheless, Shelley does have a good point. To be successful, WordPress has to provide support to users that is both effective and understandable.

Bug trackers are a subject near and dear to my heart, since maintaining them is one of my main responsibilities at work (using Mantis, the same software behind Mosquito). My bug trackers at work take a relatively closed approach. The customer communicates solely with a supporter, not directly with the developers. The support is able to solve most problems on his own. If he needs help, his communication with the developers in the tracker are flagged as “private", and are invisible to the customer. We thus use Mantis as both a support tool and a development tool, but the two functions are kept separate.

The supporter is the main link in the process. He acts as a sherpa between the customer and the developers, and decides whether the issue is a customer-side problem that he can help the customer solve, or a software problem that requires a developer (or a feature request that needs to be negotiated into the software spec). The customer doesn’t really care what kind of problem he has, he simply wants it solved.

I’m not sure if this model can be applied to an open source project. Sherpas for open source are few and far between. But without them, an open-to-all bug tracker can disintegrate into chaos. Support for WordPress is probably best given in a forum rather than a bug tracker, with real people and plain language. Technical projects like Samba or FreeBSD can take a ‘apply the diff and see if it works’ approach, but WordPress probably needs to act a little more commercial to serve its users well.

Begging for GMail

If it worked for vowe, maybe it will work for me. If anyone cares to send me an invitation to GMail, you’ll earn a gushing but sincere compliment and my eternal gratitude. Any takers?

Update: All praise be to Phil Ringnalda, who has invited me to partake in the pleasures of GMail.

John Robb: (on the killing of 11 Chinese workers in Afghanistan) “This begs the question: why are we using market-state techniques (like outsourcing work) in a location that needs nation-state development (ie. local work)? This is the same mistake we continue to make in Iraq.”

Wait For Me

The Telekom (or as they call themselves these days, T-Com) has scheduled our DSL connection to be activated on 21 June, approximately 11 weeks after my I submitted my order on 31 March. Good thing I didn’t order something really rare and precious like a Trabant.

Gone With The Wind

Yesterday’s severe thunderstorm in northern Germany provided one solution to getting rid of unwanted wind generators.

Why’d You Cry-y-y, For The Guy-y-y, Say Goodby-y-ye

The next shoe has dropped in the ever-continuing soap opera that is my workplace. Yesterday management proposed a permanent across-the-board 10% pay cut plus an additional 5% conditional on profit. Say what? Like the Sugababes say, takes more than begging to reverse my brain. Maybe I should bring my resumé to BlogGrill tomorrow, I hear there are a lot a blog companies based in Hamburg…

BBC: German ‘bomb blast’ injures many Cologne Turkish neighborhood of Mülheim, thousands of nails found at scene, at least 17 injured

Kaufrausch

The German Consitutional Court today ruled that the national store closing law is not unconstitutional. So one of the more annoying peculiarities of German life won’t be disappearing just yet. But it will probably better if the law is done away with by lawmakers in Berlin rather than a court ruling in Karlsruhe.

An argument by unions for keeping the law is the protection of retail workers, although I have no idea why they deserve more protection than public safety, health care, or restaurant workers who work on evenings and Sundays. If Germany had a functioning and flexible labor market, retail workers would be easily be able to find jobs that match their private schedule. But if Germany had a functioning and flexible labor market, the country would have a lot less problems period.

See also: Webpropaganda, h-blog, Heiko Hebig, generation neXt

Work Less Harder

When I first saw this graph of the CPU usage at my web host for the last month, I thought that WordPress was using less CPU than Movable Type had.

But then I remembered that I turned off a busy database cron job at the same time I switched blog software. That must explain it, since MT is busy in spurts, not continuously like in the graph.

Staticize Plugin for Wordpress Static pages for WordPress, protection against database crapout. It caches the entire page, even the parts I would rather have dynamic, so for now my held-o-matic is more of a held-o-static.

Apple - AirPort Express “Enjoy your iTunes music library in virtually any room of your house. Share a single broadband Internet connection and USB printer without inconvenient and obtrusive cables. Create an instant wireless network on the go. Extend the range of your current wireless network” €149

Dueling Tubas

In the ongoing Old Fart MP3 Competition in various German blogs, I tried to give one to Der Schockwellenreiter. He didn’t take it, so it’s now up for grabs: Martin Mull, Dueling Tubas (MP3, 1.1 MB) (Via Aquarionics) You’re welcome.

Craig’s BookNotes: Artists indicted for possessing biological test equipment If non-genetic-manipulated food is outlawed, will only outlaws will have non-GM food?