Finally I got my hands on a xda Trion aka HTC Hermes after the German mail lost my first one. It took almost four weeks to recover the delivery.

Finally I found some minutes to update the design of my welbog. The design is now the same as the webpage and the weblog is integrated into the site. However there is some finetuning left, I have to do during the next few days. Basically I did manage to replace the dasBlog theme CSS by the one I use for the homepage. since the layout is similar, I just had to modify some of the CSS classes in the dasBlog templates.

After getting a licence and re-installing the MAPILap NNTP [1] Outlook plug-in I was kind of frustrated that the plug-in did not work anymore. Basically I found the reason in the registry settings of the tool. There the account was still disabled since I have chosen this option during a test installation before [2].

Just delete the folder with the deactivated profile name. After the next start of Outlook the plug-in wizard appears again.

[1] http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/nntp/
[2] http://blog.aheil.de/MAPILabNNTPForOutlook.aspx

The Microsoft Studio August 2006 CTP is available for download [1] now. The most important change is the renaming of the WSAP protocol to DSSP [2]. The specification of DSSP can be found at [3]. API changes are listed at [4].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa...
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/msroboticsstudio/archive/200...
[3] http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/8/2/...
[4] http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel...

Live Writer [1] seems to be a quite nifty tool for offline blogging. The installations process is quite easy.

Also the handling of the tool is quite intuitive. And the support for adding images is awesome. Since I use shoadows for all my images I am quite pleased that Live Writer does support this feature which saves me some time while blogging.

[1] http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

There is a new blogging tool for offline blogging. Actually something I was waiting for a long time. Most of the tools I have tried until now usually did not support some essential funcitons I required.

"Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service." [1]

So I will try soo its compatibility with dasBlog.

[1] http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Back from the ICWE 2006 [1] conference, finally I found some minutes to re-think about all the talks seen there and papers read in the proceedings. Actually I found out that there are many approaches to model systems. Finally, there are a few questions I think about when I hear the term model:

1. How easy is it to create and change the model. Do I need tool support or can I do it using pen and paper? 
   
2. Is the model machine-readable? Can I process the model in any way? What is the benefit of the model?
   
3. Do I create the model and the the artefcats depicted in the model or do I create the model with respect to the artefacts i have found? What happens if these artefacts change?
   
4. In school I learned in chemistry about models. For this our teacher showed us a Matchbox car [2].

[1] http://www.icwe2006.org/
[2] http://www.matchbox.com/home.aspx

Windows Principles [1].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/windowsprinciples.mspx

"What's wrong with you?"

Johannes Meinecke, San Francisco, 2006

"I know what to do, and how to solve the problem, but I do not know the bloody API." - I just met the guys implementing the Krugle [1] search engine over here at ICWE 2006. And it does work quite well.

[1] http://www.krugle.com