Much Ado About Blogging » Anouncements

OweMe – Money Lending Manager for iPhone

B. Terhechte — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:08:14 +0000

So after a small hiatus the first serious StyleMac iPhone application is out. OweMe, the Money Lending Manager has been created with a lot of attention to detail and based on a specific problem: I often experienced the situation that I lend someone a small amount of money (say $5) and forgot about it later on. On the other hand it just as often happened that I lend money from someone and forgot about it too – until I got a disappointed or even enraged call.

That’s where OweMe comes in. A slick and easy to use interface helps in quickly jotting down all these small amounts of money one owes or lends from time to time. I’ve been testing the application for about 4 weeks now as I wanted to make sure it works as advertised before I submit it to the App Store. And I’ve already used it a dozen times. It really, really helps me in keeping track of all the small amounts of money I tend to get or give. I wouldn’t want to miss it on my iPhone.

Features:

- Clean, simple and FAST UI, optimized for the task at hand featuring
- seperate lists for Credit and Debit values
- Add notes, names and due dates
- Use the iPhones location info to gain additional information on the whereabouts of an entry
- Secure your data with an optional access code
- Set detailed options like sort order or currenc
- Select between different wallpapers
…and more

You can find more information on the OweMe Website. The direct iTunes App Store entry can be found here.

Auszeichnung. Digital Signage made in Germany

B. Terhechte — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:23:36 +0000

Unser Unternehmen, die VIDERO AG, wird morgen vom europäischen Wirtschaftsverlag als beispielhaft innovatives Unternehmen für den Wirtschaftsstandort Deutschland prämiert. Andere ausgezeichnete Unternehmen sind z.B. SAP, Bionade oder das Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Wir freuen uns sehr über diesen Preis. Ich persönlich hoffe, dass die bisherige Energie in Unternehmen & Produkt auch in Zukunft gleichwertig Innovativ fliessen wird. Wir haben schliesslich noch viel vor.

Ich werde in den nächsten Tagen auf dem VIDERO Blog ausführlicher über dieses Ereignis bloggen. Wer also Interesse hat, kann das Blog ja bei Bedarf abonnieren.

Terhech.de 3.0

B. Terhechte — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:29:44 +0000

As you might have realized by now (if you aren’t a feed reader, that is), Terhech.de has been updated in a significant way. First and foremost the site presents itself in a new design. Not only the layout, but also the logo, claim and colorset recieved bold changes. My personal understanding is that this site vaguely reprents my personal image online. Not in a CV or Biography type of way, but rather the type of image one would recieve if being friends with me. This can easily be set into context when reading the various topics I adress on here. Thus, just as I mature and olden, this site needs to change respectingly. During the past two years I internalized a broad accumulation of experiences, each being interconnected in the one or other way with my study and insofar highly valuable. This means that my pace of change has been seriously accelerated and today I differ perceptibly from who I was just two years ago. The old terhech.de claimed to be ‘on fire’; a description far from true today, I settled and rather than being enthusiastic, on fire or jumpy I’d describe me as thoughtfull today; taking time, rethinking decisions.

So the rather limited colorset just as well as the slight variations in layout relate to that. Another important change (for me anyway) is the new claim ‘Much Ado About Blogging’, a play / pun on Shakespeare’s well-known piece ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. As the wide array of scientific papers I had to read for study raised my awe for other people’s intellectual creations, I put my own position into (much smaller) perspective. The new claim plays just along these lines, adhering to the repositioning of the ‘blogosphere’ within the recent year. Once hailed as a omnipotent tool, inheriting the potential to save democracy and manking, it too failed to hold up to these artificial expectations as soon as it gained more users and in line with that less quality and less impact.

But not only the aesthetical side of this site changed, the same is true of the technical side, by means of a complete new system. Terhech.de 1 and 2 were based on my own piece of software. It served its purpose well, and was, in a way, my own foray into unknown territory, learning about the technical basics behind blogging, like for example rss. However, the progress of time played against my little application, and now, almost for years after I wrote it, it’s old, hard-to-use, buggy, not expandable and very insecure. I had long been playing with the idea of switching to WordPress, but during previous usages in various of different projects, I’d always found annoying tidbits which kept me from switching. However, the new WordPress 2.5 changed all that, and finally offers everything I’d like my blog to do (and much more). So some of the new features one can see now are based on the switch to WordPress.

There is another very important change, one that can partly be traced back to the WordPress switch. My old software only allowed to write posts by means of a sidebar-plugin for Mozilla-Browsers, which enforced the necessity to use Firefox for blogging. Back in 2004 and 2005, when I was still heavily using Firefox on Linux, that seemed to be the right idea. I could leave the sidebar open all the time, and blog whenever I stumbled upon something vaguely interesting. However, since I started to use MacOSX, my Firefox usage diminished rapidly. Firefox on Mac OS X is rather slow (Firefox 3 changed this, though) and earlier versions lacked native integration. Thus Safari (and in between Camino) became my browser of choice. This led to the problem, that everytime I wanted to blog, I had to fire up FireFox and wait for it to boot. This annoyance was one of the reasons why I stopped to blog regulary. The other reason was, that I could not find a good topic to write about. I learned so many interesting things in the past two years, but most of them could not be reduced to a small posting, and wouldn’t be understandable without the bigger context. However my above-mentioned transition wouldn’t allow for more Beach-Party, Kindergarten or Vacation-Postings. I didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted to write about serious, interesting topics, in a witty and thoughtfull way. But the old terhech.de didn’t allow for that.

So with the change of topic, and the change of software, chances are that I will revive this blog in a new and more meaningfull way. Thanks to my friends and fellow readers, for staying with me so long. I’ll try to add more value from now on.

I got my iPhone

B. Terhechte — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:56:44 +0000

As you can see, I just got my iPhone today. Software version is, due to Carrier-Reasons still at 1.0.2, and I plan to keep it that way for some time.
First impression is: Awesome. Absolutely awesome and amazing.
Although it lacks some of the features which I would take for granted in modern Mobile Phones, it shines on many other feature-comparisons.
I’ll write more soon.

New feature: MiniBlog

B. Terhechte — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:29:09 +0000

Welcome
I just finished the inclusion of my new Twitter/Jaiku data into this blog. During the past months I realized that I won’t be able to blog as much and as detailed as I’ve been doing it in the past (and even my past blogging speed can be described as good..). So in order to not let this site die, I decided to experiment with Twitter a little, in order to find out if I would – given I could – use the feature to only blog small messages instead of massive texts. Especially if this can be done in a mobile way. Since Jaiku allows me to blog via sending an SMS I therefore decided to give this thing a try and am quite happy with the outcome.

So from now on, expect more small pieces of information on here which can be subsumed to understand what I’m currently up to.

Apart from that, I’ll – of course – try to blog more. (honestly )
In addition to that, I included my flickr-feed into this blog, too. In fact, the new terhech-de RSS-Feed is actually a Yahoo-Pipe combining the Terhech.de Feed, the Twitter-Feed and my Flickr-Feed. So you get all the good stuff in one big gallup

Thanks for reading. And I promise I’ll read more on your people’s blogs too. Life seems to enhance constantly

Small Blog Enhancements

B. Terhechte — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:46:26 +0000

WordPress 2.0 (“Duke”) has been released, and although it’s tempting to
scrap the software behind terhech.de altogether and just switch over to
the new, usability-enhanced, wordpress, I couldn’t somehow convince
myself to really do so (call it nostalgia).
So I invested some time and implemented a simple Captcha in order to
fight the large amounts of chinese spam which filled the comments area
lately. The Captcha isn’t really secure, but I think it might do the
trick, if not I’ll probably have to enhance it a littlebit.

Terhech.de v 1.5

B. Terhechte — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 17:26:59 +0000

Finally. I’ve been shifting this for a long time, having started this
as a reason do implement a blog system with MVC in Ruby-On-Rails it
ended now in being only an enhancement to my old blog system I wrote
myself (Labelled it ‘junkblog’). I wanted to implement this whole
blog in Rails so I could learn rails and understand the concept behind
it. However, I couldn’t do this timewise, so I took the expected
functionality and implemented it in straight php/smarty so I could – at
least – push the new layout online since I never liked the old one
much.
There’re, as you can see, more options now, and everything is
implemented so I can expand it even more in the feature (if I ever find
that time..)
For now it’s just additional personal information, slightly better usability and a, hopefully, nicer layout.

Thanks for listening And, I’d love to get some reactions from you,
do you like the new layout better than the old one? What bugs you about
it? Comments appreciated
thanks a lot.ez

Espagnol por favor?

B. Terhechte — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 08:42:14 +0000

In a kamikaze attempt which serves to improve my spanisch language
skills (which currently linger slightly above 1 on a scale from 0 to
100), I decided that I’ll from now on try to write the one or other
blog entry “en espagnol”. Equipped with Dictionary, Translator,
Syntax-Handbook and a couple of (hopefully) helpfull Spanish-Speaking
friends I aim for the high goal of being able to at least participate
in basic spanish conversations within a years time. Wish me luck.
Ah yes, if you know spanish, I’d love to get syntax corrections from
you for one of the preconditions for improving language abilities is to
learn from others and to inhale their knowledge through opinions and
corrections.
Thanks – y muchas gracias por leer este texto.

Another little improvement

B. Terhechte — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 14:54:16 +0000

Due to popular demand there’s now the option to save your settings in
the comment-dialog, so that they’re automatically loaded next time you
wanna give an insightfull comment.

In addition to that, there’s now a little XMLRPC bridge between this
blog (www.terhech.de) and my LiveJournal
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/el_zeratulo/). I set me up the
LiveJournal some months ago but never really wrote anything in there;
So I connected this blog and that Livejournal, and from now on most of
my Blog entries here will appear on the LiveJournal too. This is
especially cool since some of my friends hang out there. Next topic on
my todo-List ist to beautify that LiveJournal, it’s damn ugly right now

And I’ll create a seperate category for my Track-A-Day Posts, so they don’t fill the whole blog.

Comment support

B. Terhechte — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:12:11 +0000

You probably already lost hope in it some time ago – but here it is: Comment support

Actually nothing special regarding the complexity of the task, just
about one hour of coding, but well.. I’m currently shifting my
priorities so that spare time is *really* spare time.

And, I tried to force myself to use only VIM as an editor in order to add the comment functions, because I really want to extend my VIM-Knowledge. But I’ll write about this at another time as I’m about to leave for a nice party now

Ah yeah, my last post had a small bug
for the link wasn’t really a link, you can click it now and read all
the nice info about the Microsoft Typos as I just fixed the bug. Thanks
Andreas for notifiying me.

In other news. I bought the new Chemical Brothers Album, and it damn rocks.