bit blue blog

Fixed Line Means Fixed Address

2008-07-20T14:33:00.001+02:00

Those who know what I do, probably also know that I am looking at data quality, its technology, its market, its usage, etc. And so I can't help it but notice those situations when data quality has gone wrong. Particularly when it involves me personally. The latest screw-up is from my telecoms provider...

We have a regular ISDN (that is, a now called "Universal") connection in the house. It contains three numbers, home, fax, and office. My daughter, who's at the age of "telephonitis syndrome", has her own phone in her room and so we don't have to pick up all her calls, I wanted a fourth number that I assign to her room in the PBX, and have her friends call the new number. So far so good.

I call the telecoms operator and order a new number. No big deal, as an ISDN line can carry 10 numbers. The lady asks for my customer number, full name, and birth date, to verify it's me. I'm told they will assign a new number, probably quite different from the ones I have and send me a confirmation with the date by which it becomes active. Or so they thought....

A week later. Nothing. Three weeks later. Nothing. Over a month later I get a letter from the telecoms company stating that their original confirmation letter has been returned to them because it was undeliverable. Huh? First I thought, they sent a simple confirmation by registered mail and I wasn't at home? That wasn't the case. The problem was, that the telecom company sent the letter to my old address. My old address that I had left more than 5 years ago! And I definitely don't have a telephone number in someone else's house. The operator knows where I'm living, as my current address is where their own fixed line ends, which they should know. And that's the same address, to which they send the bill every month. Hellooooo!

Looks like poor telecoms company have a bit of a data issue, because their records between order management, billing, CRM, and probably another dozen applications simply don't match up. Oh well, another story for the next data quality presentation.

Another face in the book

2007-11-19T16:07:00.000+01:00

I think I understand now why kids get hooked on MySpace. As soon as they build up a decent network of friends (and I hope these are "real" friends, not some 55-year-old freaks pretending to be 12) there is a sense of addiction to find out what's happening within the circle of friends: who met who, who did what, who wrote on which wall, what music they hear or book they read (if in fact kids still read books).

I just got on Facebook, which looks like the half-adult version of MySpace. Although it also contains silly applications such as Skiers vs Snowboarders, the iLike Challenge or Punk-O-Matic, it seems the average age is slightly higher. Lots of high school students, but surprisingly many people that actually have once used floppy disks. Do you remember when you used your last 3.5" plastic shell? Somewhere in the attic I still have a box with 8" diskettes. 128K each. My toaster has more memory today. Gosh, time flies.

Anyway, Facebook is actually not half-bad. With a little searching, I found folks that I know and worked with all over the world. It's a little challenging if the person has an everyday name like Peter Jones. There are hundreds with that name and if there is no picture attached, and the network doesn't leave any clues, finding the right person is next to impossible. But working through the network of who-knows-who is pretty powerful, particularly because the so-called Facebook Newsfeed alerts you about everything going on among the people within the network. Great way of bridging the six degrees of separation. BTW, Kevin Bacon is on, but the profile says he is a Virgina Tech Alum '05. Must be that 55-year old freak mentioned above, who would like to be Kevin and attract young university students. Creep.

If you got a profile on Facebook and actually know me personally, ping me. Contact collectors don't even have to try. They should stay at LinkedIn and boast of their network containing thousands of contacts. That dont impress me much...

Brazilian Warp

2007-08-17T20:37:00.000+02:00

I'm going to speak at our conference in Sao Paulo next week, so will spend a few hours in the air during the next couple of days. But I didn't think that it would be that quick from Brazil to Germany, and at the same time take forever for the short hop to Hamburg. According to my Lufthansa itinerary, on the return flight, they will transport me from Guarulhos to Frankfurt in no time (literally), then apparently use a tricycle for the segment to Hamburg, or why would it take more than 14 hours?

Looks like a bit of a data quality problem. Or the apps developer screwed up (more likely).

What mission are you on?

2007-07-06T22:35:00.000+02:00

Just talked to someone who was looking for advice on their mission statement. Not for the company, mind you, but for their department, which was the data warehousing department! Wow, I thought, never heard of individual missions that would go that deep into an organization. Since I find mission statements (and particularly the huge amount of work that goes into finding one) utterly useless, I couldn't help it, but I had to find out what the current state of affairs is in the mission world.

So here are some current statements, picked up from the web, through a quick search, and I didn't concentrate on any industry. Be the judge, whether those make any sense to you, are in alignment with the company's behavior, and are a differentiator for the company.

Siemens:We will supply our Customers with products and services on time with the highest quality and value. We will accomplish this by our commitment to continuous improvement and by exemplifying fairness and integrity with our customers, our employees, and our suppliers.
At Microsoft, our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.
As enterprises around the world move to adopt performance management, Cognos will continue to direct our products, support, and services toward helping our customers deliver on its promise.
BMC: Passion for IT Innovation that benefits our clients' investment in technologies.
Coca-Cola: To Refresh the World... in body, mind, and spirit. To Inspire Moments of Optimism... through our brands and our actions. To Create Value and Make a Difference... everywhere we engage.
At Nestlé, we believe that research can help us make better food so that people live a better life.
BMW Group: To be the most successful premium manufacturer in the industry.
Smith & Wesson: Safety, Security, Protection and Sport.
The mission of Merck is to provide society with superior products and services by developing innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and satisfy customer needs, and to provide employees with meaningful work and advancement opportunities, and investors with a superior rate of return.

Aha! Yawn. Mission accomplished.

Joost

2007-07-03T21:49:00.000+02:00

OK, I know I haven't been very active on this blog in the recent past. Quite a few have complained that the last post is months old, and I really don't have many excuses, other than that things were really busy over here lately. I wish I could say that I've been watching television most of the time. Not quite, but I wanted to say that this Joost idea is really how TV should be. It's like TVoIP, only that it doesn't include all the basic channels (yet). My daughter would argue, though, that MTV is the only relevant channel anyway. My friend Marc sent me an invite to the Joost community, a quick install (on a decent machine, better have lots of graphics memory!) and you can view channels that you have never heard of. How about an Italian soccer channel that shows a program with (what they call) the 200 best goals ever. Includes old footage of Gerd Müller at the 1974 World Cup. Funny stuff. If you are more into boxing or indycar racing (I'm not), they've got you covered.

If you would like an invite, drop me a line. In the meantime, I'm working on some musical tracks, that I'll post here soon. Stay tuned, through video, audio, or otherwise.

What's Joost, Quicktime (9.79 MB)

"I said that?"... Being mis-quoted.

2007-02-03T00:31:00.000+01:00

Just returned from our Business Intelligence Summit in London, the biggest and the best ever, according to the attendees. And while I felt exhausted and brain-drained every evening, I believe I still can largely remember what I said during the countless meetings with clients, vendors, and members of the press. That's why I was kinda surprised when I received the press clippings with quotes that I would have never, ever said, not in this context or any other. For example, ZDnet UK titles its article:

Gartner: It's business intelligence 2.0 time

Uh. Not quite, in fact, the opposite is probably closer to what we said. I remember a few cases of vendors getting criticized for trying to add the popular 2.0 moniker to their marketing, although they wouldn't even provide 1.0 functionality. The article starts with

Forget talk of Web 2.0, it's time for BI 2.0, according to Gartner.

Nope. Not sure where that quote would come from.

Speaking at the Gartner BI Summit [...], Andreas Bitterer, said the next generation of business intelligence (BI) would be defined by what it was not.

I don't even know what that means, and I would never say any such thing unless I'm completely drunk, which I clearly wasn't back there on stage.

To begin with, BI 2.0 is not about more suppliers, said Bitterer. "There are too many BI vendors," he explained.

Oh, my. I said nothing about BI 2.0 (in fact, I think it's nonsense), and I also didn't say that there were too many BI vendors. What I said is that organizations run BI software from too many different vendors. Slight difference.

"You cannot get one vendor's software to work with another's," he said. "They do not make it easy.

Wrong again. What I explained is the difficulty to migrate reports from one vendor to another, and the vendors do not make it easy by not providing any export functionality and prohibiting reverse engineering.

Oh well, it wasn't the first time that I'm misquoted nor was it the last time. It's just strange to see, how direct quotes get spun around, causing quite a bit of confusion and potential inconsistency.

Booking Ryanair: Cheap, but Sneaky

2006-12-24T02:34:00.000+01:00

I just booked my first flight with Ryanair. In January, I'll be going to London for a day, so I was looking for an inexpensive trip there and back, preferably from Hamburg. Easyjet doesn't fly from here to London, DBA and HLX both depart from here but don't go to London, so I ended up with Ryanair. They claim to fly from Hamburg, but it's really Lübeck, an hour away. They must have missed that geography lesson.

So there I am, selecting days, flights, and I keep wondering about those ticket prices. The outbound flight costs 4,99€, the return is even less: 1 cent! Of course, I'm aware of the taxes, which brings the return flight to 50€, still only about 10% of a similar Lufthansa or BA flight. During the booking, however, I get increasingly mad about all those hidden fees or attempts to extract more money on top of the ticket.

First the system asks how many bags I'm planning to check. Checking between 1 and 5 bags costs an additional 9€ per flight. Ouch! However, I answer (truthfully): zero bags. Still I'm supposed to pay 6€ per flight. What the §&"#%@%!?? The zero option says something about Online checkin/priority boarding. First I thought: That makes sense: no bags, priority boarding. Wrong! I have to read a whole paragraph that explains how to opt out of this thing and simply travel with no bags. Another click per flight, and the additional fee is gone. Sneaky bastards.

Next stop: Travel insurance. They want me to pay 10,50€ per flight for insurance, and a number of pop-ups warn me that the airline recommends taking it. Again, I have to unselect the insurance option, otherwise I'll pay for an insurance that I have anyway through paying with the credit card. Which brings us to the last fee trap.

As this is an online booking service, paying by credit card is the most common option. Ryanair offers payment by Visa, MasterCard, AirPlus, and some stuff like Delta, ELV, Connect, Electron, whatever that is. Turns out, using my Visa card costs me another 10€, just to pay the bill. So that's how Ryanair makes its money: it's actually not an airline, but an Irish fee machine. Amazing business model, but it seems to work for O'Leary.

Holiday season in Athens

2006-12-22T12:48:00.000+01:00

You got tagged!

2006-12-22T00:40:00.000+01:00

I was just invited to join a Virtual Cocktail Party, as Jeff Pulver puts it. Through a number of referrals, I eventually got my invitation from my former META Group colleague Dave Yockelson. (Thanks, Dave, glad to have you back in the analyst rounds.) The idea of blog-tagging is, to ask 5 bloggers to tell 5 things that most people wouldn't know. Kinda like the (sometimes rather embarrassing) opening line at this cocktail party where everybody stands around with a Martini and nobody knows each other.

So here are some not so well known facts about me:

I can probably be considered Germany's first hacker when I broke the IBM 5100 security (1978).
Playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, KV 488, marks the height of my piano career.
On an American Airlines flight to Chicago, I once sat next to Dustin Hoffman (in coach).
I turned down a job at Netscape, because I thought browsers were silly stuff.
On average, I fly more miles in a week than I drive my car in a year.

So there you go. I'm sure those facts will eventually be used against me. And now for the tagging of others... TAG! You're it now...

Two Dot Oh No!

2006-12-21T21:39:00.000+01:00

What's with all the 2.0-ishness that everybody jumps on as if their life depends on it? Maybe it's all Tim O'Reilly's fault, since he created this Web 2.0 buzz, although a 2.0 moniker has been around for years, such as in Business 2.0. More recently, companies on my radar also start to use the term and position themselves in the Business Intelligence 2.0 space. Oh, please.

I had to find out what the hype is all about.

According to DMReview,

...business intelligence (BI) today has not changed in concept since the invention of the relational database and the SQL query - until the advent of BI 2.0.

What? Under which rock have they been hiding? First of all, BI wasn't there yet when RDBMS and SQL were invented, and I know that because I participated in projects around System R in the early 80s. And if I think about BI's evolution with reporting, OLAP, data mining, dashboards, scorecards, predictive models, etc.... this DMReview quote is pure nonsense. If anything, we should be talking about at least BI 8.0, considering the conceptual changes in the world of BI since we began. The article continues

If the goal of BI 2.0 is to reduce latency - to cut the time between when an event occurs and when an action is taken - in order to improve business performance, existing BI architectures will struggle.

With BI 2.0, data isn't stored in a database or extracted for analysis; BI 2.0 uses event-stream processing. As the name implies, this approach processes streams of events in memory, either in parallel with actual business processes or as a process step itself.

While I agree that there is an ongoing trend to reduce latency, this is nothing new. Changed Data Capture (CDC) mechanisms have been picking up events and transactions in near-realtime for years. So the "realtime"-aspect does not describe a completely new paradigm. And what's this thing about data not being stored or extracted? OK, an event does not need to be stored first in a database or any other content store to be analyzed, but event data all by itself is rather useless. Only in combination with existing BI infrastructure such as a data warehouse, any analytical component (in a process stream or not) can generate insight.

For example, let's assume there is a fraudulent event happening. Of course, nobody knows that fraud is about to be committed. The data associated with the event sits in this process stream and is not stored in a database (yet). So, everything is according to the definition above. Then what? How does that transaction event trigger any action elsewhere? How can any application or user figure out anything? Certainly not by simply looking at the transaction. The event data could be sent to some data mining model that generates a fraud score and then it triggers an alert. Is that what is meant by "event stream processing"? If so, we've been seeing this kinda thing for years. In fact, the whole discussion about analytical applications describes the same scenario: Operational applications (executed in "real-time") call analytical components that figure out something, send an alert, call another program or otherwise influence what is happening next. Sounds the same as BI 2.0 to me. Yawn.

Microsoft's new venture: Rugged Clothing

2006-12-12T10:45:00.000+01:00

I'm in Athens today to deliver presentations at our BI event, but I'm curious about this other meeting that runs in another room here at the Ledra. Is Microsoft going into the clothing business?

While we're at it... I wonder how people book rooms using the URL on the shuttle bus. Unless I completely misunderstand top-level domains, or the Greeks are already using Web 3.0, with new naming conventions and all.

Synching Calendars - Revisited

2006-11-30T11:03:00.000+01:00

A few months ago, I wrote about my experiences with online calendars, such as those from Google or Yahoo. Back then, I was hoping to eventually get some easy synchronization between Outlook and the online counterpart, other than by export/import. Well, it looks as if shortly after Google announced its calendar, companies started to build just that: Tools for synchronizing Google Calendar with whatever other calendar was used, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm, Groupwise or others.

The first one I'll try is CompanionLink for Google Calendar from a company named, well, CompanionLink Software, another "leading developer of data synchronization and contact management solutions for mobile phones, PDAs and other handheld devices." Yawn. They allow downloading a free evaluation software, and so I did. Kinda interesting that you need to download, install and run the application, before they actually tell you that the evaluation is good for 15 days. Would have been nice to mention that somewhere upfront. Installing is easy, customizing too. Simply enter the Google login credentials and select the appropriate calendar application and time period, click Synchronize and wait.... Wait for a looooong time, that is.

While I'm writing this, the little synchie app has been running for over an hour. The status window seems to count calendar entries that it pushes towards Google, but I'm wondering why this is soooooo slooooooow. It's not that a calendar entry is a lot of data. And I'm behind a 6M DSL line. At a count of about 1200, the synch application appeared to have frozen, so I clicked Cancel, however, the little "companion" seemed largely unimpressed by that. A few minutes later, it woke up miraculously and kept counting, all the way to something like 3000 or so, and then the window disappeared. No "Finished" message or anything. Weird. On the Google side, everything seemed to have been captured alright, so I'm happy, sort of. I'll try a few more days and will check on alternatives before I'll consider shelling out $29.95 for the companion, particularly because it's still not ideal. Instead of launching an application everytime I happen to remember synching, I'd much rather have some little agent sitting nicely in the taskbar doing this without any user intervention. Doesn't sound like rocket science to me, that's why I'd expect to find something similar shortly...

Update: Well, there seems to be an issue with using Outlook and the companion at the same time. Apparently, the little helper locks some Outlook files during synchronization, so Outlook itself can't use them. If that is the case, it's very bad application design. However, the error message itself is strange. It says "Another application closed unexpectedly." Maybe that was the effect of the failed Cancel and the window disappearing without any comment. In any case, the application is closed now, right? So why is the message then saying "... until you close all applications currently using it"? I thought everything is closed already. Or did the little companion turn into some locking zombie? In any case, I won't pay anything for this....

Peoples' True Interests

2006-11-27T16:27:00.000+01:00

If I were Google's searchmaster, I'd be reading all day what people enter into the search field. In fact, I'd be surprised if the Googlarians didn't store every single search item and use it for the better of humanity. Or their company's own stock price. Either way, I sometimes get a tiny glimpse of what must be billions of search terms every day, by looking at the referring URL of the anonymous surfer eventually hitting any of my web pages. And while it can be ego-boosting if I find people actually entering my own name, the more interesting searches are when some random combination of words on any given page of this blog turns into a hit for someone looking for the answer. More recently, I noticed the following interesting search words:

how do I become a spammer
how big should a big screen tv be?
IT vendor taglines
corporate slogans
14 ways to pronounce "ough"
anita blond calendar 2005
photographic memory
photo business card
the need for manufacturers silly disclaimers
blood at fertile time
climbing eiger

This calls for an experiment. Hey, it could even be called research. I will create a content-free posting that includes nothing but vendor names, buzzwords, potential keywords and tags. And then I'll just wait, because Google and Sitemeter do the rest. I will report results.

On Air

2006-11-26T18:43:00.000+01:00

This past Saturday, I participated in a WDR 5 broadcast about Web 2.0. The format is called Profit and touches on all kinds of business aspects. This time, anchor Frank Wörner and I talked about the new Web 2.0 bubble (if it is one), new business models, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and the Google-Microsoft battle. If you're able to understand German (or otherwise want to expose yourself to a foreign language), you can find a downloadable podcast.

The interesting thing for me was the fact that I didn't have to go to WDR headquarters in Cologne, or even our local broadcasting company, NDR, but only to some tiny (half a closet, really) private studio here in the city, only 10 minutes from my house. First I thought I was in the wrong place, going up stairs in a very old appartment building. But there it was, on the third floor, the "studio", including control room and soundproof box, both separated by a car's windshield (I'm not kidding). The owner explained that the curved surface of the glass would do much better to diffuse sound reflections. Well, it must have worked, because the sound technicians in Cologne didn't complain. The sound connection to WDR was the surprising bit. I expected some sophisticated mechanism to establish the voice connection between Frank and myself, which sounded as clear as we were sitting next to each other. Apparently, a single ISDN line is all you need. By having a Codec on each end (in this case an old CDQ 1000) talk to one another, the analog signal easily gets transferred via a standard 64k line. Amazing. I need to upgrade my home studio....

Homeland Security - what's next?

2006-11-14T22:23:00.000+01:00

The paranoia continues. I mean, I am all for protecting a country, its people and all the rest, but apparently the US Department of Homeland Security and its ability to screen travellers just went up a notch. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives just issued a statement that highlights the details about those regulations at the US border. As if fingerprinting and photographing every US visitor wasn't enough, it's now apparently possible to seize computers, memory sticks, phones, and basically all data on any device brought into the country.

I don't believe the US Customs officials mean that my memory stick is a weapon (although I could poke someone with it) or I could knock someone down with my corporate laptop. But if that's not the problem, it's clearly only about the data getting into the country. Bad data, that is. Then again, has someone in the US administration ever heard of the .... uh... Internet? Didn't Al Gore invent the whole thing? Reminds me of the old joke where border officials worldwide were searching for CDROMs in travellers' bags to prevent the use and spreading of pirated software. They quickly learned that if someone wanted any data to travel across borders, without any border patrol, they would simply use an email or ftp the data to any place in the world.

So, if the memory stick is not the threat, the data is, but only on devices brought physically into the country, what could it be that the customs officials are after? Not the pictures of Uncle Henry's birthday party, that's pretty obvious. Well, maybe it's all about exactly that corporate data that everyone carries around. In other words, a way to enable legalized industrial espoinage. So much for the common conspiracy theory, but in any case: Nice move, boys, sounds like a golden opportunity for vendors of encryption software.

Reading business cards on Windows Mobile

2006-11-13T18:41:00.000+01:00

It's quite interesting how Microsoft made more and more inroads into my personal life. The last barrier (or is it?) just fell last week, when I switched my mobile from a Sony Ericsson P910i to an HTC TyTN. And with that, my year-long Symbian OS liason, which started in the days of the early Palms, has come to an end, and now I suddenly am a Windows Mobile user. Well, an unbeatable Tytanic Vodafone deal (read: high phone bill) made that move relatively easy.

The daily use of the new device needs a little getting used to, even though it's plain ol´ Windows (well, sort of), with Start button, Office apps, media player and all the rest. Now, of course, I need to check out all those funky apps that would make the new toy even more attractive. My friend Gary pointed me to the Gmail midlet, which I would have started using immediately, if it wouldn't have required a new JVM. So now I'm back in the plumbing looking at IBM's J9 to make it work.

Another really useful type of application I found is PenPower's Business Card Recognition tool. This is particularly useful for people that collect (that is, exchange) large numbers of business cards. Just last week alone at our Symposium event in Cannes, I must have gotten about 60 from clients, vendors, and prospects. Entering all those details into the address book is typically a time killer work during long flights. I checked out Penpower's trial version, by which you simply take a photo shot of the card, and the OCR engine generates text, which then gets copied into Outlook. Worked a few times pretty well, but then stopped, although unregistered versions are supposed to work for 30 days. Looks like Taiwanese days are much shorter then European days. Oh well.

Alternatively, I dabbled with scanR, which is an online service of the same kind. You take the photo, send it to an email address, and voila, they return a vCard file, that you simply import into Outlook. Worked alright, but I don't feel that comfortable sending complete details of people I know to a third party, although they claim to follow privacy rules.

>> scanR uses the information we collect to set up and provide the scanR service to you. scanR also stores some or all of the information we gather from processing images through the scanR service in a database for the purposes of improving the accuracy and performance of the service. Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. We may review personal information for the purposes of resolving a problem or support issue. <<

They store all cards to "improve the accuracy"? That's nonsense, they could just as well use hand-scribbles to do the same. Also, there is no information as to how long that data will be stored. What really was interesting is this verbage: Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. I would really appreciate that, however, there is no place on the whole website to opt-in or opt-out, so this "approval" doesn't really exist. Looks like I can only send business cards of general managers of some hotel or the card of my gas station attendant to this service. Then again, why would I want to store those addresses in the first place?

Digging in the Dirt

2006-10-28T13:39:00.000+02:00

I love it when people from one vendor, for example, the competitive intelligence folks or product management, leave trails how they are trying to knock, bash, and discredit their competition. Of course, many times, there is hearsay like "I was told that vendor XYZ's product doesn't scale, doesn't perform, has quality issues, is untested, ..." The creativity has no limits. Then there are people that use Google to skim the Internet's bulletin boards, forums, or blogs in their quest for dirt.

My Sitemeter log just monitored a nice example of the described category. A Firefox user on a Mac, working at Oracle is apparently on the lookout for stories about support challenges at MicroStrategy.

What's interesting is not the fact that a vendor would do such a thing. Business is war, right? The funny part is the wording of the search term that the Oracle person used to find something of value about MicroStrategy. Horror stories? As if someone would just write them up nicely for easy consumption.

What gets me is this: With those search words, why does my blog show up in Google's results? The mentioned entry page mentions MicroStragegy alright, but no horror story.

The Upside of Bad Data

2006-10-17T19:35:00.000+02:00

Maybe I should stop evangelizing. For years I've been telling clients to take data quality seriously and manage information like a corporate asset. Since Monday I'm thinking "maybe it's a good thing that companies have such a mess in their databases." Think about it, wouldn't it be nice if you couldn't get a speeding ticket, because the address data in the police database is corrupt?

Well, most of the time, it sure is beneficial to have correct, complete, and consistent data that is not duplicate, and so on. Not so today. When I checked into the Marriott Anaheim this week (I'm attending the IBM IOD event here), I was surprised to be treated with more respect, friendliness, benefits, and perks than in any other case when I checked into a hotel. Nothing to complain about, but why the sudden change? I live a large part of my life in hotels, and I have never seen that special treatment. The puzzle was solved quickly when the check-in clerk handed me a piece of fancy cardboard with a personalized welcome note from the Marriott Rewards program (some kinda frequent sleeper program). It had my name on it. It also said I was a Platinum Elite Member, which I'm not. And I was supposed to have (get this!) a balance of 1,912,602 points in my account. Almost two million points? No way. Now, was I going to tell the guy that I rather not have an upgrade to the best available room, a bottle of wine, fruits and nuts in my room, high floor with a nice view from my balcony, access to the concierge lounge with free breakfast, hors d'euvres, drinks, etc? Think again.
No idea where the hotel pulled that data about my account from. Honestly, I don't care either. Cheers!

Being Alanis

2006-10-11T13:19:00.000+02:00

Here is a song I'll be working on. It will be my first attempt of generating some music based on fully computer-generated lyrics. I know what you think. Many of the Top 40 hits are probably just that. Want to create your own lyrics that sound like Alanis Morrissette? The Brunching Shuttlecocks gladly generate them for you.

"I Think"

I Think phone calls are really a huge problem
I Think papers are too much on my mind
I Think meetings have got a lot to do with why the world sucks
But what can you do?

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like a Monty Python line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Bettie's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

I Think airplanes are gonna drive us all crazy
And hotel nights make me feel like a child
I Think computers will eventually be the downfall of civilization
But what can you do? I said what can you do?

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like a Monty Python line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Bettie's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like Bettie's smile, cruel and cold
Like Monty Python's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

I blog therefore IP

2006-10-11T11:33:00.000+02:00

Just found a fabulous self-check of blogs by Lore Sjöberg, who wrote the ultimate blog post over at Wired.

"Blog" itself is short for "weblog," which is short for "we blog because we weren't very popular in high school and we're trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people."

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it.

So there... brilliant. Those of you who read this blog, thanks for stopping by.

Would you like to become a spammer? Yes - No - Help

2006-10-11T00:18:00.000+02:00

There is nothing worse than a non-message. Check this out: A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook. A program? What the hell... could the message get any less specific? The window title shows Outlook itself. Does that mean Outlook is the program and it's asking me whether it can access its own addresses? That'd be pretty funny and doesn't make any sense.

So do I want to allow this? Honestly, I have no idea. For sure I don't want any spyware to call home, but why would any spyware/adware/malware access my addresses in the first place, since the potential email receiver is certainly not in my address book. Could I have caught a virus that attempts to use my account to spam everyone I know? Unlikely. So what is that mysterious program and why does it want to mess with my addresses? I have a suspicion that it is the Outlook search engine Lookout, because it just flagged an indexing error and stopped operating until I voted No on the message above.

Yum? Someone just ate the database

2006-10-10T12:09:00.000+02:00

I'm always amused when I connect to a website of an established company or other organization and instead of seeing a well designed, intuitive, nicely rendered HTML page, I am looking at an error message of some software that apparently has failed. From my memory, the leader in this space (granted, nothing to be proud of) is probably MySQL. I have seen countless websites blow up with nothing much than a MySQL error. Not good, particularly since those guys claim to be enterprise-ready and suitable for mission-critical applications.

Now, you could argue that the website of my football team shouldn't be considered mission-critical, but it's embarassing nevertheless. So, instead of knowing scores of the teams, I'm looking at garbled techno-babble.

Warning:
mysql_connect(): Too many connections
in /www/www.eintracht.de/documents/yum/_php/database.php on line 401

399 function connect() {
400 $this->deconstruct_location();
401 $this->db = mysql_connect($this->host, $this->user, $this->password)
402 or die("Verbindungsaufbau zum SQL-Server ist fehlgeschlagen.");

@ >/yum/_php/database.php:401 -- mysql_connect(...)
@ >/yum/_php/database.php:385 -- database->connect()
@ >/yum/_php/database.php:321 -- database->select_db()
@ >/yum/_php/onlineusers.php:110 -- database->query(...)
@ >/yum/_php/onlineusers.php:47 -- communityonlineusers->refresh()
@ >/yum/_modules/community/onlineusers.php:62 -- onlineusers::onlineusers(...)
@ >/yum/_modules/community/handler.php:103 -- communityonlineusers->communityonlineusers(...)
@ >/yum/_php/module.php:44 -- communityhandler->communityhandler(...)

What's with the yummies? Someone nibbling at the SQL statements? Ugh.

Liveplasma

2006-10-10T01:31:00.000+02:00

I always enjoy finding some clever tools or technology that inspires me. Liveplasma is the latest one and it is particularly useful for mashups of all kinds. The examples given are mapping an initial search of a piece of music, an artist, a movie with similar or related topics. Here is an example of a search by musicians. Chuck Loeb is one of my favorite guitarists, and the mapping of similar music by other artists is actually very accurate and pretty much reflects my CD collection. (Yes, I still have lots of CDs).

Now consider Liveplasma as a navigation tool for, let's pick my own industry, research documents, topics, analysts, vendors. Wouldn't it be cool to jump from vendor X to topic Y to analyst Z and back to another vendor? Or think about a vendors web site about products (e.g., printers or software): search by product name, and get an instant mapping of related drivers, updates, ink cartridges, distributors, user's guides. The options are endless, for example, CNET has used it to map its news.

flickr update: A night in Dublin

2006-10-08T21:26:00.000+02:00

So the Armadgeddon folks apparently like my photographs. At least it's a start, but I don't think they really armadgettit. Because I'm not bitter. And so the valued AR people can see more than the virtual itinerary images, I'll start showcasing a few samples here every once in a while.

www.flickr.com

Vendor advertising

2006-10-06T08:05:00.000+02:00

There I am this morning, sitting in the kitchen with my coffee and my laptop, checking on the news after an (almost) all-nighter, and the Klassikradio station broadcasts a little radio ad that makes me almost spill my coffee. Now, I'd agree that the target audience for classical music (or what they consider "classical" as they play a lot of movie soundtracks, too) does not consist of school kids, but rather white-collar people 30, 40 and up. So I can only assume that this is what SAP had in mind when they launched the radio campaign where a guy announces in the jingle that working with the same data would be a benefit to companies. Duh. Anyway, I can't help it but think "who wants to go and buy enterprise software after listening to a 15 second radio commercial"? Well, the ad was about Business One, so maybe I shouldn't consider it enterprise software to begin with, but it appears to me to be a huge waste of money, as filtering by age group is not particularly effective for business applications. If I was to target German buyers of software such as ERP or CRM packages, I'd always recommend finding business people that are confined as a group (e.g. in specialized events, or in an airplane) rather than some shotgun approach. My favorite media for that kind of advertising was always the Handelsblatt am Abend, a free 8-page news update, distributed to Lufthansa business class fliers, every afternoon and evening. There you have mostly business people that try to kill an hour going home or to their next destination and everybody reads those few pages cover to cover. That's where I would place ads. In my next life, I'll go into marketing ... no wait, I wanted to become a rock guitarist.