On Sunday, one day ahead the official start of the RailsConfEurope in Berlin (Germany), the Berlin Ruby User Group invited all conference attendees and Ruby-on-Rails fellows to aBratwurst on Rails at the Kalkscheune, right in the center of Berlin. More than 400 people registered for the event and it was really crowded at the barbecue and at the bar – the perfect event to get in the right mood for the conference. The least I can do is to offer a great big “Thanks!” for all the organizers and helpers!
That fuels the anticipation for the coming three days of the RailsConf!

The Apple Event on September 5th with Steve Jobs was really stunning. The complete iPod product line is renewed and Apple created even a new type of iPod: the iPod touch. On the first look this is just a further development of the iPod-portfolio for watching movies in widescreen on the move. But it is far more – it’s a revolution!
Until now, iPods have been music playing devices … only some 3rd-party accessories enabled the iPod to record audio and you also can play some games on them. But the new iPod touch goes far beyond: WiFi/WLAN and the built in Safari webbrowser transform the music- and video-player into a mobile internet surfing terminal. On the one hand, Apple stimulates developers to create especially optimized webpages and content for the iPhone and the iPod touch. On the other hand Mehr …

This blog is normally not focussing on politics, legislation, the constitutional state or democracy. But the things happening in Germany’s domestic and legal policy these days, slowly but massively affect our life and work. It affects our rule of law, our democracys, our civil rights, our constitutions, our freedom. Not only in Germany. Especially, if you deal with the internet in private and business … as probably most of us do.

Heribert Prantl, domestic policy editor the big German newspaper sueddeutschezeitung, wrote a profound article in the NZZ folio titled "Terroristen als Gesetzgeber" – terrorists as legislators. I’m really sorry that his article is only available in German – but it’s really worth reading it. All of us, who love democracy and freedom should be concerned about the facts he describes precisely.

Sources: NZZ-Folio 09/07, lawblog.de

WordPress 2 comes with a standard WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) Visual Editor. It is based on TinyMCE … and it is not bug free Within Safari (3.0.3, Mac) for example, I always loose all <br ⁄> and <p> <⁄p> tags when I switch from the visual to the code view.

So, how can the visual editor be turned off?

In "Options" > "Writing" of the admin-area you don’t find nothing. It’ because this setting is referring to the user⁄author. That’s why it is located in the "Users" section: Simply edit the user you want to change (click on the "Edit" action). Then check off the checkbox "Use the visual editor when writing". That’s it. Now the good old HTML-editor is back again when you edit or create new blog postings.

The new Flash Player beta version is ready to download on the Adobe Lab web pages: Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2. Most important: The support of the video codec H.264 and the audio codec AAC. Both belong to the best codecs in quality and efficiency on the market. And both belong to the MPEG-4 standard. Jon Dahl on Rail Spikes provides more background information on codecs and their advantages. The Adobe developer Tinic Uro gives more details on the codec implementation.
Attention should be paid to the Adobe announcement especially against the background, that there is still no confirmation on a Flash Player for the Apple iPhone. Youtube, which encoded their videos only in a Flash-video format, now started to encode new videos also with H.264 to serve the attractive target group of iPhone (and Apple-TV) users.
Maybe the pleasant step of Adobe is also a first sign that the wish of a Flash Player for the iPhone is eventually coming true. This would be great news – especially for innovative GUI- and interaction concepts.

We can be anxious what the future will serve us