ICT-CLOUD

Olympic Wintergames Ad by Swisscom

2010-02-14T21:54:51Z

I got this week the link to the following clip from a friend. And I was surprised about how social environments (in this case it is Zürich Main Station in Switzerland) can be included in a nice ad clip.

When you have seen the clip you see, that it is from Swisscom and there is a game going on under www.swisscom.ch/fanbuch .
Maybe you want to participate as well... I wish you good luck.

Global Social Networking @ WEF in Davos Switzerland

2010-01-28T07:56:44Z

I was a little bit astonished about the importance social media/social networks have nowadays, as I have read the post from TechCrunch about the Gathering of the CEOs at the WEF in Davos

And as we live in a networked and global society, there are also videos in the post from the speeches. One of them you can see above.

Operation Chokehold or how AT&T does not understand its customers

2009-12-16T10:21:25Z

Image by Adam Pieniazek via Flickr

As we could read this days in different online magazines there has been a satirical approach to give AT&T, Americas exclusive iPhone Provider a lesson. The "Operation Chokehold" has been proclaimed by Fakesteve this week. Other articles have been published by Gizmondo or The Register and also in German Press here from Community 36

Implications

What is interesting about this case, is the fact that Apple cooperates with a company like AT&T that does not meet in any way the quality requirements of the product sold. Now it becomes clear that the customers are not willing to take this situation any longer and a similar case like the one with "Dell Hell" (see blog entry about Jeff Jarvis) where the customer's "revolution" is taking place on the web and having significant impact on the reputation of the concerned companies.
In my opinion it is now time that AT&T is doing something proactively about this issue. If they don't I expect Apple to get out of the exclusive contracts with AT&T.

However, we will see if there is any noticeable impact on the AT&T network during friday when Operation Chokehold may become true.

Install Canon iR 1023 iF Scanner for Windows 7

2009-12-02T09:15:00Z

Image via Wikipedia

Maybe some of you had or still have the same problem as I had - until yesterday. In our offices we use a Canon iR 1023 iF Multifunctional Device (Print, Copy, Fax and Scan) and since recently, we use also Windows 7 64-Bit.

I needed several tries to figure out how this might work and finally got a solution yesterday. Now I can use the device's full functionality again.

Free Visual Basic 2008 Book

2009-12-01T08:11:15Z

Well this is rare: As Golem.de has reported today in this post, Microsoft offers the book Visual Basic 2008 - Das Entwicklerbuch written by Klaus Löffelmann published under Microsoft Press free for download.

In the spirit of Christmas, as it seems, have they decided to give you, for a registration, the bonus and additional material, which includes the source code examples, for free.
The book itself (unfortunately for all English speaking readers in German) is available for free and without registration.

Bad Research from German news portal "Die Zeit Online"

2009-11-24T21:24:10Z

Image via Wikipedia

Today I have seen this interesting post from TechCrunch about Google with the title Achtung! Google Analytics is illegal, say German Government officials. The article summarises what the German news portal "Die Zeit Online" (online version of the famous newspaper "Die Zeit") has written in its article.

Of course did I read the original article on "Die Zeit Online" with the title Datenschützer wollen Einsatz von Google verhindern (in good old English: Privacy advocates want to prohibit Google Analytics).

Well this is an old discussion in good old Germany, which is overcautious regarding the data privacy regulation. I would say (and this a friend of mine has confirmed recently) that it is the country with the hardest regulations concerning data privacy in the web (e.g. for online shops, forums, blogs and whatever else there is on the web). So far this article was not surprising.

What was surprising indeed, was the fact, that the original article from "Die Zeit Online" was not accurate and really bad researched.

Hard words for the future of Microsoft

2009-11-23T15:42:42Z

The fact, that Google is pushing its new Chrome OS into the market respectively it is only beginning to push it, is reason enough to think about the current and future situation of "traditional" operating systems.

TechCrunch has just published a comment from MG Siedler where he is talking about the squeezing of Microsoft

Basically this supports my thesis put in the earlier post about Windows 7

So we'll be excited about what the future (or Google) will bring us.

Steampunk: Let new technology look old

2009-11-23T08:06:32Z

Today I have watched some TV before going to the office. And there has been an interesting report about Steampunk in the German IT-Broadcast "Neues" (Click here for the homepage of Neues)

I was really fascinated by the look of the machines from Rich Nagy and had to write a post immediately.

I am happy to hear from other artists in the IT-Area. Just drop a comment here.

Just discovered that there is another resource for ideas here at Brass Googles from the UK.

Good Business Designs - An Introduction

2009-11-05T20:01:33Z

Well, this is an old topic: web design is at least a topic since there are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or even earlier. Nevertheless do I want to present you some hints and tips from my point of view, what a good design for a business site is. This idea has evolved in my current background, as I have recently changed the company and my employer is also thinking about a relaunch/modernisation of his homepage. So this is the reason I have chosen such an outdated (or should I say evergreen) topic.

The idea behind this is to have at the end a series of blog posts, which cover different sites as they come into my mind and to evaluate the positive and the negative sides of a design.

I hope this will be an interesting series for my readers to follow me and that we might have some kind of discussion.
As a starter, I want to give a short introduction into the normal "process" of the creation or the relaunch of a business web site.

Windows 7: The Negative Sides

2009-10-22T15:28:14Z

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Now it is done: Windows 7 has released officially on 22nd Octobre 2009 worldwide. I had the chance to work in advance with the new operating system and this is a good opportunity to draw a first conclusion. I have to remark, that I need to switch back (from OS X Snow Leopard) at work to Windows, since I need to provide my colleagues with some 1st level support. So here are my first impressions:

Cablecom improves service before rebranding

2009-10-06T21:10:06Z

As everybody knows by now: Cablecom plans to re-brand itself to its owner UPC here in Switzerland before end of 2009. So this will be interesting how they then will operate and if the service will improve.

From my first impressions, through my latest experience and stories heard from friends or relatives, are quite optimistic, that there is a quality oriented service organisation emerging from good old and lousy Cablecom. I know that this is a contradictory statement to the one made earlier on this blog but I want to remain fair.

The stories and my own experience go all into the same direction: Service is improved by listening to the customer. So they really apologised for small mistakes and asked about how they could probably improve their service. In my case they called me after I have moved out of my flat into an area, where the Cablecom is not the provider for TV (and other services on base of a TV-Network), just to ask me what could have been wrong.

Apple's Marketing Keywords

2009-09-19T10:18:35Z

We all know that there are different approaches for marketing guys to sell a product. And one of the most successful in the last few years may be Apple's Steve Jobs in selling his iPod and transform Apple (for some) to a lifestyle.

Now a nice video has shown up on Youtube, where the user "justanotherguy84" has cut the presentation of the new iPod Series from Apple to show only the adjectives used in this presentation. The video is really made in a good quality and funny, but see yourself:

Advertising with outdated features

2009-09-11T18:58:52Z

During my ride with the train today I had the chance to discover once more how foolish some advertisers must be. Today's example comes from HP, well known manufacturer of different IT devices. Among the devices they sell also relatively cheap / affordable notebooks (but also some high end devices).

However - I had to discover an advertisement in the current edition of a Swiss Weekend Magazine called "20 Minuten Friday", which is freely distributed at the train stations and covers different topics (mostly about fashion and glamour talk). Because they are lying around everywhere in the trains on the weekends I scan this magazine every weekend and read some articles from it.

And there it was - one of the most stupid advertisements I as an IT-Pro have ever seen in the last few weeks! But look for yourself at the picture below:

Building a small gallery with Zend Framework and MySQL

2009-09-10T11:33:52Z

Well now as we have stored our images within the filesystem of the web server and the information in the MySQL database (see part 1 of this series), it is about accessing the files and the information.

Basically the needed steps are quite easy:

Prepare SQL statements in your model for data
Create Controller and View Template
Create a View Helper Plugin to grab the image.

I will not explain in detail how to build the SQL statements respectively the functions in the model and how to set up the Controller and View Template. You will find other posts on this blog about this topic and with links to good tutorials

Using MySQL auto-increment values with Zend_Filter_File_Rename

2009-08-16T20:51:17Z

The task is simple: Let the user (or someone else) upload an image to your server and store it in a predefined location. Additionally you would like to store some information, e.g. an user name, an image title and a comment in a MySQL-Db. As an experienced programmer you will maybe take the Zend Framework.
To handle just a few images, this is no big thing. Make a Zend_Form and enable it to upload a file and store the information according to your model in the database. That is it.

Well thinking a little bit further you may think about the names of your files and what happens when there are two files (one on the server and one to be uploaded) with the same name. You have a conflict. To be more precise: without any intervention the newer file (the one to be uploaded) overwrites the existing file. You have to explain the user where the old image has gone and why there is another image twice in your database.

You have two solutions to this problem:
# Scan your directory upon validation if there already exists a file with this name (or maybe you have stored the filename in the database and query the database) and decide what to do: rename file or do not permit upload, e.g. return a false on validation.
# You can use own filenames based on a MySQL auto-increment value, e.g. the ID-Column which holds the additional information (user name, title, comment).

I will show you how to implement the latter solution. In a second tutorial I will show you how to access this files.