http://www.riehle.org Computer science research notes, software industry commentary, and personal anecdotes http://www.riehle.org/index.html I'm finally switching my research blog to Wordpress as well. If you are reading http://www.riehle.org you are all set. If you link to index.html directly you should remove it or change it to index.php. The new RSS feed is available from http://www.riehle.org/feed/. Enjoy! 2008-01-08 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-12-30.html After 10+ years of blogging by writing static HTML pages [...] it has become obvious that I'm a technological stalwart. Hardcore! And way behind the times. So [...] I finally got my act together and installed Wordpress (MU) on my server. The first blog to move there are my personal ramblings [...] Starting January 1st, 2008, you can find them at http://dirk.riehle.org ... 2007-12-30 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-12-29.html It is the end of the year and salary negotiations will be coming up soon. [...] you may want to consider Harvard's definition of what a middle-class salary is and what a salary is that warrants financial support. A few weeks ago, Harvard announced new levels of support ... 2007-12-29 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-12-18.html Wow, this is the most elaborate eBay scam I've ever seen, and they tried to pull it on me. [...] I thought it would be a good idea to sell an old Thinkpad (IBM notebook). When the bidding ended I couldn't believe my eyes ... 2007-12-18 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2007/wikis4se-2007-ppaper.html Craig Anslow and Dirk Riehle. "Lightweight End-User Programming with Wikis." Position Paper for the WikiSym 2007 Workshop on Wikis for Software Engineering. Abstract: Wikis are online collaboration tools to share information amongst users. Todayxs wiki engines typically lack features to integrate structured data from backend databases ... 2007-10-30 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-10-30.html WikiSym 2007 concluded last Tuesday after a stellar program with a record number of participants. The program consisted of [...] Preliminary final participation numbers were 70 (WikiSym only) + 38 (WikiSym + OOPSLA) + 10 (WikiSym Monday) + 15 (pro-rated All-Access-Pass), coming in at a whooping 133 participants! ... 2007-10-30 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-10-29.html Last Friday I gave another talk on "Economic Stakeholders of Open Source". The talk got taped by the organizing event, the Free Software Open Source Software Symposium 2007 in Toronto, Canada. This time it was a high-resolution English language recording that is available to anyone with Internet access ... 2007-10-29 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-10-10.html Today I gave my staple Open Source Research talk at the Stanford Computer Science Colloquium, as I have done it several times before at other universities. What's new is that this talk got taped and can be viewed online courtesy of Stanford University. 2007-10-10 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2007/wikimania-2007.html At Wikimania 2007 I opened the workshop "Bringing Wikipedia to Work: Open Collaboration within Corporations" with a presentation of the same name. The presentation discusses my research group's thoughts on open collaboration (in wikis and in open source). 2007-08-17 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-07-05.html James Maguire interviewed me for Datamation about open source economics, specifically about what impact open source will have on developers' salaries. He asked: Will Open Source Developers be Well Paid? And I provided my answers. 2007-07-05 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-07-04.html America the beautiful, America the ugly. In any case, I found these impressions worth sharing. Photos were taken using a simple Nokia cell phone, at the spur of a moment. 2007-07-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-07-04.html Today, Wiki Creole 1.0 was released. Wike Creole is a wiki markup standard, developed by the wiki community for the wiki community. Which is to say it has the buy-in of large parts of the community, but is not (yet?) under the umbrella of a formal standards body. Congratulations to Chuck Smith and Chris Sauer for leading this effort! This undertaking, I'm glad to say, started at the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis! 2007-07-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-05-11.html I gave a talk today about the "Economic Stakeholders of Open Source" [...] The talk discusses the different business strategies and the underlying economic models that motivate the behavior of stakeholders in the open source ecosystem. The talk was recorded and can be viewed courtesty of Tele Task ... 2007-05-11 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-04-29.html One Sunday afternoon, when taking a leisurely walk at Shoreline, Gesa and I ran into this snake. Apparently, it had not yet conceded defeat to humans. I don't think this is a rattle snake (it didn't rattle), but it sure didn't look like I wanted to step on it. 2007-04-29 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-03-13.html I was reading a b-school case about SAP when I saw the interesting term "vorlagenhandwerker". Presumably, an SAP executive had called German software engineers by that name. Despite being a native speaker of German, I had never heard of it ... 2007-03-13 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-03-12.html This screen saver below is telling me that it prefers not to be woken up by me hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL. (But it doesn't tell me what to do instead.) More obnoxiously, though, it tells me that I already interrupted its precious sleep 25 times (gasp!) by hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL. Now, that's what I call being thorough! 2007-03-12 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-02-19.html The Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) conference is a place for pattern authors to have their pattern languages reviewed by fellow authors. This occurs in Writer's Workshops and the feedback allows the participants to improve their patterns to make them more useful and more publishable ... 2007-02-19 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-02-18.html No additional words necessary. Also see 2006-05-09.html. 2007-02-18 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-02-18.html 2007 International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym 2007). Wikis at Work in the World: Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century. October 21-23, 2007, Montreal, Canada. Co-located with ACM OOPSLA 2007. In cooperation with ACM SIGWEB. See http://www.wikisym.org. Archived * Peer Reviewed * ACM Sponsored ... 2007-02-18 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2007/ecir-2007.html Understanding an enterprise's workforce and skill-set can be seen as the key to understanding an organization's capabilities. In today's large organizations it has become increasingly difficult to find people that have specific skills or expertise or to explore and understand the overall picture of an organization's portfolio of topic expertise ... 2007-01-23 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-01-17.html I'm about to catch my first flight out of the U.S. since the OOPSLA PC meeting in May last year. They have a new procedure: Anyone with a foreign passport has to logout of the country at an exit terminal station ... 2007-01-17 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2007/2007-01-07.html CostCo is a Communist Enterprise, designed to weak the American spirit and rob this great nation of its hard-working go get'em attitude to life. At least by German standards ... 2007-01-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2007/2007-01-03.html Because of recurring requests, and with the authors' permission, I'm providing the 1997 and 1998 tutorials of JHotDraw. JHotDraw was developed by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma, and represents an interesting case study in object-oriented design using Java and design patterns ... 2007-01-03 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-12-21.html You may remember my frustration with Arcor and Telecoms in Germany in general, stated some time ago. Now a reader of this blog who wants to stay anonymous told me his story, and it is getting more absurd by the minute ... 2006-12-21 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2007/computer-2007.html Open source software has changed the rules of the game, impacting significantly the economic behavior of stakeholders in the software ecosystem. In this new environment, developers strive to be committers, vendors feel pressure to produce open source products, and system integrators anticipate boosting profits ... 2006-12-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-11-30.html After a couple of hours of hard work, Microsoft gave me the perfect excuse for a coffee break ... 2006-11-30 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2006/plop-2006-value-object.html Pattern intent: Implement datatypes as immutable classes so that their instances can be handled like built-in values. Dirk Riehle. "Value Object." In Proceedings of the 2006 Pattern Languages of Programming Conference (PLoP '06). ACM Press, 2006 ... 2006-11-29 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/industry/2007/oop-2007.html Vor 15 Jahren haette Ihnen niemand geglaubt, dass Sie einen Grossteil der von Ihnen benoetigten Software weitgehend kostenfrei bekommen koennen. Fuer Softwarehersteller stellt sich die Frage, wie wir finanziell ueberleben oder gar gewinnen koennen. Dieser Vortrag analysiert die Geschaeftsmodelle, welche Open Source zugrundeliegen ... 2006-11-29 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/industry/2006/os-2006-geld-verdienen.html Anwender lieben Open-Source-Software, schliesslich hilft sie zumeist, Geld zu sparen. Was aber ist mit Softwareentwicklern, die bisher mit proprietaerer Software ihren Lebensunterhalt verdient haben? Was bleibt, wenn scheinbar alle relevante Software umsonst zu haben ist? Dieser Artikel betrachtet die Veraenderungen, welche Open-Source in das Software-Geschaeft gebracht haben ... 2006-11-28 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-09-24.html Word had already reached me in the form of an email by Dick Gabriel, but I had to confirm it with my own eyes: There is now a Teuscher store in the Stanford Shopping Center. Oh yeah!! 2006-09-24 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-09-23.html After a long wait, a car at last. And I'm allowed to drive it around California. If that sounds surprising given that I have a California's driver's license, read on ... 2006-09-23 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2006/wikisym-2006-proceedings.html Dirk Riehle and James Noble (editors). Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis. Odense, Denmark: ACM Press, 2006. "It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd International Symposium on Wikis --- WikiSym 2006." ... 2006-09-09 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-09-04.html Saw this sign on September 4th, U.S. labor day, at the local IKEA. I don't remember seeing any such sign in Germany. And here I was thinking Germans are too direct ... 2006-09-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2006/2006-08-31.html WikiSym 2006 concluded last Wednesday with Ward Cunningham's talk on "Design Principles of Wiki." Before that, we had listened to Angela Beesley on "How and Why Wikipedia works," Mark Bernstein on "Intimite Information," and Doug Engelbart with Eugene E. Kim on "The Augmented Wiki." The technical program comprised eleven paper presentations, two panels, and four workshops. Participants got active using Open Space, a method for self-organizing groups ... 2006-08-31 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-08-30.html One of the more popular pages on this site are my ramblings about business school. How I got in, what it meant to me, and why I'm glad its over. So at times I get emails asking me whether it was worth it. Would I provide career advice? ... 2006-08-30 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-08-29.html Checking into an Airbus 340 is something of a gamble if you are flying economy class. Do you take a row 21 seat or not? If you do, you might be able to snatch the power outlet from a passenger in business class. You might also end up sitting next to an ill-behaved kid, as this is the row where they put parents with children ... 2006-08-29 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-08-28.html I was busy the last few days orchestrating my move back to the United States. I'm writing these lines on board my Lufthansa flight to SFO, so everything went alright in the end. This, however, is not the impression I got when the big moving day started ... 2006-08-28 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2006/wikisym-2006.html This article presents an interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses on how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working. The interview was conducted via email in preparation of WikiSym 2006, the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, with the goal of furthering Wikipedia research... 2006-07-07 http://www.riehle.org/travel-stories/asia/india-2006.html In 2006, I got invited to attend a friend's wedding in New Delhi. So I decided to turn this into a month-long vacation. Life had it that I could take only ten days of that month, so I cut it short. Nevertheless, it remains an unforgettable experience... 2006-07-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-06-08.html I've always wanted to know how many German-origin words there are an English, but usually couldn't even come up with more than a handful of well-known examples. So, for my and your records, here is what looks like the ultimate example to me... 2006-06-08 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-05-29.html I had caught a glimpse of this product a few weeks back, when someone had bought it in front of me at the local Aldi supermarket. Later, I had been agonizing over whether my brain was playing tricks on me or not. Could there ever be something like "microwaveable sushi"? 2006-05-29 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-05-24.html It's another one from the netherworld of international travel. Returning from the Silicon Valley to Berlin, I knew I had booked a cheap flight back in April. How cheap, I realized only when I stepped on board of AA 134, a Boeing 777, in Los Angeles... 2006-05-24 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-05-09.html Here's to rural American pride... 2006-05-09 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-05-08.html Last week I had to fly into Austin to attend the OOPSLA 2006 PC meeting [...] when I arrived at the hotel at 11:30pm, I had been awake for about 24 hours, most of them traveling. Which is to say, I wasn't exactly wide awake... 2006-05-08 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-04-27.html In case you didn't notice, Easter is over. In Germany, you would probably say that Ostern ist auf den Hund gekommen. 2006-04-27 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-04-13.html Mein heissgeliebter Rosenthal Osterhase hat einen Kollegen bekommen. Das ganze ist nicht ganz so farbenfroh wie vor 2 Jahren, aber trotzdem schoen. Frohe Ostern 2006! 2006-04-13 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-04-04.html With all the recent hoopla around MySpace I signed up a week or two ago and then forgot about it. Today I read in the news that News Corp. has been cleaning up MySpace by removing 200,000 or so sketchy profiles. So I logged in to see what had happened and whether my account was still there ... 2006-04-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-03-31.html Taken from the NY Times, this photo shows an explanation of a woman's body types. Please note the use of the word fullness. What's your fullness today, your highness? Feeling a little doughnutty around the waist? It never ceases to amuse me how companies make little dances around common words, in particular when it comes to women's body fat. 2006-03-31 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-03-13.html Trader Joe's is a U.S. supermarket chain, mostly known for its varied but rarely comprehensive offerings. It is owned by Aldi, a German discount supermarket chain. So it was only a matter of time until you could buy Trader Joe's warez in Germany. As you can see below, the result is kind of funny ... 2006-03-13 http://www.riehle.org/index.html We are pleased to announce the following lineup of speakers for WikiSym 2006: Angela Beesley: How and Why Wikipedia Works; Doug Engelbart: Wikis and Dynamic Knowledge Repositories (live webcast, incl. Q&A); Mark Bernstein: Intimate Information: organic hypertext structure and incremental formalization for everyone's everyday tasks; Ward Cunningham: Design Principles of Wiki: How can so little do so much? 2006-03-10 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-03-07.html A friend sent me this: A description of proper housewife behavior, from 1955. This must have been when Prozac and other antidepressants were born. 2006-03-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-03-04.html Hasema is a producer of religiously conforming sportswear for the islamic world. Its main products for women are full-body soccer and swimsuits that properly cover your hair [...] What caught my eye and made me file it in the funny language blooper department was the self-advertisement on their homepage ... 2006-03-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2006/2006-03-02.html I've always wanted to be able to simply drop gadgets like my cell phone, bluetooth headset, mp3 player, into a box where they recharge automatically. Right now, I have a barrage of power converters and power cords on my desktop to deal with the gadgets. Every single gadget I have to plug in and then unplug ... 2006-03-02 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-02-18.html Eine amerikanische Bekannte vermeldete soeben die Geburt zweieiiger Zwillinge, eines Sohnes und einer Tochter. Herzlichen Glueckwunsch! Und, wagt jemand zu wetten, bei welchem der beiden Babys es sich um den Sohnemann und bei welchem es sich um die Tochterfrau handelt? 2006-02-18 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-02-15.html It has finally happened: my first sighting of a Lenovo Thinkpad on the net. What oh what has this world come to? (Well, I'm sure Lenovo will do a fine job. It's just that as a multi-generation IBM Thinkpad user I'm somehow feeling kind of blue.) 2006-02-15 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-02-04.html On one of my first trips to the U.S. back in the early ninties, I bought a pull-over winter jacket at a local Abercrombie & Fitch store in Austin, Texas. It is comfortable to wear, practical, and ... 2006-02-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2006/2006-02-03.html I just found these photos on my cell phone camera. They were taken while shopping at the KaDeWe in Berlin, Germany. It is a few nuggets of hilarious christmas fare. Enjoy! 2006-02-03 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2006/2006-01-27.html Here for a change (and your amusement) a pointer to a conference I'm definitely not involved with: Waterfall 2006. It's all about how to "just follow the process." (In case you wonder: Yes, it is a joke, but a funny one, cooked up by Mike Cohn, a proponent of agile software development methods.) 2006-01-27 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2006/2006-01-26.html WikiSym 2006 is the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, a symposium dedicated solely to wiki research and practice. It will take in August of 2006 in Odense, Denmark, and will be co-located (scheduled back-to-back) with ACM Hypertext 2006. Please consider submitting a paper ... 2006-01-26 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2006/2006-01-15.html STICA '06 is a workshop on using semantic technologies in collaboration applications, for example, semantic wikis. It is part of the IEEE WETICE series of workshops, and will take place in June 2006 in Manchester, UK. Please consider submitting a paper! ... 2006-01-15 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2006/2006-01-07.html Interest in wiki research has surged recently, and I'll be giving a couple of talks on the subject in early 2006: January 11, 2006: Humbold Universtaet Berlin, group of Prof. Oliver Guenther; February 1, 2006: Universitaet Hannover, group of Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl; February 8, 2006: Wissensmanagement-Gesellschaft, Berlin. While these talks are all public instances (in principle), I'd like to ask you to contact me first if you want to attend a talk ... 2006-01-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-12-26.html The photo story of an artificial christmas tree which bloomed on christmas morning ... 2005-12-26 http://www.riehle.org/index.html I changed the website's blog structure: There is now a research, industry, and personal blog. All of them are aggregated through one RSS feed at http://www.riehle.org/rss.xml. 2005-12-13 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-12-07-b.html The Swiss are a proud nation. One thing a foreigner learns quickly is not to belittle their currency as "Frankli" or "Rappli" like an innocent (and clueless) German might do. The more surprised I was when I saw that the Swiss themselves belittle one of the main staples of culinary Munich, the Weisswurst ... 2005-12-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-12-07-a.html When I woke up this morning, I saw the following local newspaper clip at the breakfast table. It made me wonder whether I was in Zurich or in New York. How many cities are there where you can see a black man and an orthodox jew right next to each other, each peacefully ... 2005-12-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-12-04.html Today's Dilbert is just hilarious; at least, I guess, if you are working at a Security company ... 2005-12-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-12-01.html Meine Tante machte sich mal wieder ueber mich lustig und schickte mir folgenden Zeitungsausschnitt (click to get full size) ... 2005-12-01 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-11-22.html During the reelection campaign for Bill Clinton, his wife Hilary Clinton ended up in hot water when she quipped she "could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" rather than work for a living. Today, Angela Merkel was elected chancelor of Germany by its new-formed parliament ... 2005-11-22 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2005/2005-11-22.html Deciding to hire a person, at most companies, is a group decision process. Usually, the potential co-workers interview the candidate and get together afterwards to make up their collective mind. [...] As such, the hiring decision is subject to common mistakes that can make a group substantially smarter or dumber than any single person ... 2005-11-22 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-11-14.html From the department of funny language bloopers: This shoestore in downtown Copenhagen, DK, goes by the name of "Athlete's Foot", probably to attract American tourists that come by here and are in desperate need for a new pair of sports shoes ... 2005-11-14 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-11-12.html Can you spot something unusual in this autumn display at my parent's house? 2005-11-12 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-11-08.html Is it just me or is there something wrong with this picture? I mean, to me this hairy Samson and his midget shopping cart don't look like a good fit. Aren't real men supposed to be pushing oversized shopping carts at the local Walmart rather than sorting pea-size groceries into miniature shopping carts? ... 2005-11-08 http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2005/wikisym-2005.html Dirk Riehle (editor). Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis. San Diego, CA: ACM Press, 2005. "Welcome to the proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym for short), the first international conference dedicated to wiki research and practice!" ... 2005-10-26 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2005/2005-10-25.html Over the last year, I've spent quite some time interviewing engineers for our Berlin-based startup. Having sat at both sides of the table many times got me thinking about how to best conduct such an interview. Approaches vary, however, I think a few things are common to all of them ... 2005-10-25 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-10-22.html OOPSLA 2006 will be held in Portland, OR. William Cook is the program chair; I'm on the committee. This time, there will be an interesting change, bringing an OOPSLA publication closer to a journal publication than ever before: Authors get to see the PC reviews before the actual PC meeting! So they can comment on the reviews and clarify questions ... 2005-10-22 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-10-21.html Here are some photos from a visit to San Diego's famous La Jolla town and coast. Unfortunately the wheather wasn't too good, but I guess you can still see some of the beauty of the coast line ... 2005-10-21 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-10-20.html WikiSym 2005 concluded on Tuesday, Oct 18. With 89 registered participants and many more trying to sneak in, it was a great success. From the feedback, we feel encouraged to organize a WikiSym 2006 next year. On the conference wiki, you can read up on talks, panels, and workshops involving the likes of Ward Cunningham, Jimmy Wales ... 2005-10-20 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-10-08.html Due to a let's call it succession of circumstances I found myself riding to San Jose's DSW Shoe Warehouse, a large discount shoe store. What's remarkable is that I was in the company of three beautiful women, each looking for the perfect shoe ... 2005-10-08 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-10-07-b.html One of the things that's been bugging me for a while is the question of what's behind wikis and WikiSym 2005, the first wiki research conference. [...] The question may seem odd, after all as the conference organizer, I should know. But then, wikis are a technology, and the question is always, what is a technology good for? ... 2005-10-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2005/2005-10-07-a.html Yesterday night was Web 2.0 party night in San Francisco. I first attended the Socialtext BoF at Jillian's in the Metreon building. Ross Mayfield had brought in Ward Cunningham and a lot of interesting people showed up. [...] After the Socialtext BoF it was the official Web 2.0 party at SWIG's. The place was packed ... 2005-10-07 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-09-24.html I run a final check: Dark clothing, hiking boots, sweat-proof wallet and cell phone cover, keys, earplugs. All set, I'm ready to roll. Tonight the Chemical Brothers will be spinning at the Velodrom. [...] At twenty hundred hours I meet for dinner ... 2005-09-24 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-09-04.html Some time ago, I attended an informational event held by a well-heeled German VC firm. On the registration form, I checked off a box saying that we [...] were about to found a technology company. This was the only interaction I've ever had with that firm. In July, I received the following email ... 2005-09-04 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-08-28.html I was sitting amid five computers, staring at my screen in shock. I had just realized that a few minutes ago I had deleted my last copy of personal photos on my harddisks. The last tape backup was at least a year old, so I had just lost one year of photos ... 2005-08-28 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-08-10.html In the by now famous fake commencement speech "Wear Sunscreen," Mary Schmich states: "[...] Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft." There is some truth to this statement, but by and large, it is a misunderstanding ... 2005-08-10 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2005/2005-08-06.html I'm at Wikimania [...] I listened to a keynote from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and invited talks by Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, and Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki. If you missed the talks, make sure to come to WikiSym 2005, where all three of them will be on a panel about the future of wikis ... 2005-08-06 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-08-01.html In Germany, you generally don't need a reason to drive fast. Rather, it is considered unmanly not to cut corners, have your tires scream, and make people jump. (At least where I live.) In the U.S. it is different, primarily because all those formidable-size soccer moms with their formidable-size SUVs ... 2005-08-01 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-07-18.html Zur allgemeinen Erheiterung, die sieben Schritte, welche in Deutschland zur formal korrekten Grundung einer GmbH ausgefuhrt werden mussen. Schritt 1: Gesellschaftsvertrag (beim Notar) - Gesellschaftsvertrag unterzeichnen - Erste Versammlung abhalten, abzeichnen; Schritt 2: Bankverbindung (bei Geschaftsbank) ... 2005-07-18 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-07-14.html Pattern intent: Allow a system to have new and changing object types without having to reprogram the system. By representing the object types as objects, they can be changed at configuration time or at runtime, making it easy to change and adapt the system to new requirements. 2005-07-14 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-07-05.html Did you ever wonder where Germans get their keen sense of punctuality from? It is an educational system of sorts, with mutually supporting experiences. Subtle, but powerful. Or not so subtle, as I had to learn upon returning to Germany. In Germany, typical store opening hours are from 10am to 8pm ... 2005-07-05 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-07-01.html Vortrag im Kolloquium des Instituts fur Informatik der Freien Universitat Berlin: Entwurfsmuster sind aus dem Repertoire erfahrener Softwareentwickler nicht mehr wegzudenken. Sie helfen im kreativen Akt des Entwurfs von Systemen, sie helfen in der Dokumentation, und sie machen ... 2005-07-01 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-06-24.html Vortrag bei der Gruppe Claus Lewerentz am Institut fur Informatik an der Brandenburgische Technische Universitat Cottbus: Current software development tools let developers model a software system and generate program code from the models to run the system ... 2005-06-24 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-06-23.html I think it all started going downhill when they closed the bar to make us focus more on the speaker. Apparently, they needed to educate the audience about proper behavior. I was attending this networking event, which shall go unnamed, to meet a banker. However, before the meeting, the gods had put 2 hours of boredom ... 2005-06-23 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-06-13.html Today, I attended the "Start Up and Grow" event at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut at the University of Potsdam. The event was the kick-off for the Hasso-Plattner-Ventures venture fund, a VC founded (and funded primarily) by Hasso Plattner. Watch the stream of fotos from my cell phone as we made it through the day ... 2005-06-13 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-06-03.html What's wrong with this picture? If you are an engineer, it is likely to be obvious to you. If you are not, you might roll your eyes in exasperation. (But make sure roll them in the right direction.) So, what is it? Well... It is the way the toilet paper has been put onto the toilet paper holder. Look at it, it is all wrong ... 2005-06-03 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-05-12.html Vortrag am 12. Mai 2005 im Forum BB, dem Berlin/Brandenburger Softwareforum: Entwurfsmuster sind aus dem Repertoire erfahrener Softwareentwickler nicht mehr wegzudenken. Sie helfen im kreativen Akt des Entwurfs von Systemen, sie helfen in der Dokumentation, und sie machen ... 2005-05-12 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-05-06.html The U.S. banking system is one of the most entertaining in the world. In Germany, you simply ask your bank to wire some money to another bank. In the U.S. you send checks around using postal mail. Did you ever wonder about the saying of "the check is in the mail"? Here is a story of how big this absurdity can become ... 2005-05-06 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2005/2005-04-05.html I run a few wikis, most notably A Geek's Tour of Silicon Valley. After getting hit with wiki spam and watching it for a while, I decided to go YAGNI (*). Or, more precisely, to do the simplest thing that could possibly work to stop the spammers from defacing my wikis. I've been free of wiki spam for a few months now ... 2005-04-05 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/industry/2005/2005-03-17.html MySQL's story is one of immense success. Initially a blazingly fast but loose database, it grew through user involvement to become the preeminent open-source relational database of this world. But now, I believe, it is nearing its highpoint and will eventually trail out, being overtaken by other open-source relational databases ... 2005-03-17 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-03-03-b.html If you lookup "Miss" in your favorite German/English dictionary, it will most likely tell you that in German, "Miss" translates to "Fraulein." Unfortunately, the dictionaries are hopelessly out of sync with reality. Look at the picture below. It depicts Ms. Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins, a seasoned executive hitting 60 these days ... 2005-03-03 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-03-03-a.html As you probably observed, this site still has no comment button, so most of the feedback I get for my pieces is through regular email. Sometimes, a reader's experiences are so hilarious that he agrees to have their comments posted. Here are the experiences of Vivek Sharma when trying to enter the United States ... 2005-03-03 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/research/2005/2005-03-03.html We are organizing WikiSym 2005, the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis. If you are interested in wikis, please consider submitting a paper or attending the event. It will take place in San Diego in October 2005 and will be co-located with OOPSLA 2005. You can find the full call for submissions at http://www.wikisym.org. 2005-03-03 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-02-27.html Glorious web. Always a good indicator of what's to come. Below, you can see two most obnoxious attempts of getting my attention. One by the venerable New York Times, which by the virtue of their personalized advertisements portrays me as a banker jumping around in a bast skirt and a tie ... 2005-02-27 http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-02-17.html After returning to Berlin, the first thing I did after I found an apartment was to order a phone and internet connection. It was seductively easy: You signed up on a website and two weeks later, so it was promised, you would have your phone and DSL connection. Little did I know ... 2005-02-17