Being tired of typing http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de into my browser's address bar when looking for an English expression, I created a Beolingus De-En translation button for the Windows Live Toolbar.

I've submitted the button to the Windows Live Gallery, however the submission is still pending approval...

[Update 6/5/2008]

This morning, the submission was approved and can now be downloaded from here.

Or whatever other language you prefer. Windows Live Translator went online and allows you to translate what other people are talking about you.

Windows Live Translator Button a chance. First you need to install the Windows Live Toolbar and add the button that, by the way looks like the following:

Especially for my mum, I am also going to add a translator button directly to my blog. The code can be found here. Simply adding the code to the dasBlog home template and here we go.

For some days it looks like there are some issues with the Akismet API. A couple of SPAM entries found their way into my blog not being monitored by the service at all. Now I decided to give ReverseDOS a try.

It's a small HttpModule developed by Michael K. Campbell. Let's see what he is going to say about ReverseDOS:

"ReverseDOS is a very simple HttpModule that checks various parts of incoming requests against a list of crap that you don't want pushed on to your site. If ReverseDOS detects a match, it attempts to stall the requesting client for a number of seconds (specified in a .config file). During this loop, which uses virtually no server resources - and only a tiny smidgen of bandwidth, ReverseDOS checks every .3 seconds to see if the client is still connected. If the spammer disconnects, good riddance. If the spammer sticks around, they're finally rewarded with the Response Headers - containing an HTTP 403 - Access Denied Response Code."

Does not sound too bad, does it? Since I run my own server now it is a cinch to get it run. Deployment is quite easy, copying the bits, the configuration file and adding one line to your Web.config. Following the installation instructions, it took a few minutes to get everything set up. So far, it looks like it runs fine with dasBlog 2.0. I'll give the default configuration file a try, before I see what to add there.

SmartMedia Internals originally uploded by aheil.de

Have you ever been interested in what's in a SmartMedia card? Here you go.

It's official now: From the next term on, Chemnitz University of Technology offers a Master of Data and Web Engineering. Interested in it? Get the English flyer here [pdf]. There is also a verbose German description available here [pdf]. Why this is cool? Because you can study and learn with one of the founders of the Web Engineering community. If you are interested in this topic read the first paper in the first issue of the Journal of Web Engineering from 2002 [pdf]. Definitely cool.

With the last update on the WebComposition/DGS, we now provide RSS feeds for CRUD events. Therefore, the Meta-URI /meta is extended by the additional path segments /meta/crud, /meta/crud and /meta/crud/rss. The Meta-URI /meta/crud can be extended to /meta/crud/create,  /meta/crud/read, /meta/crud/update and /meta/crud/delete. Each URI points to a certain set of events. The event URIs in form of http://www.foo.bar/meta/crud/abab1c07-9262-4e6a-9f52-3dc497ef92f1 point directly to the RDF of the corresponding event.

Following this HTTP-URI will lead directly to corresponding description of the events as seen below. Therefore, we take care of our carefully chosen URI concept within the WebComposition/DGS approach.

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
          xmlns:meta="http://www.webcomposition.net/2008/02/dgs/meta/"
          xmlns:ns="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
          xmlns:crud="http://www.webcomposition.net/2008/02/dgs/crud#">
    <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService">
        <meta:event>
            <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService/meta/crud/abab1c07-9262-4e6a-9f52-3dc497ef92f1">
                <ns:date>2008-05-15T19:20:13.7+02:00</ns:date>
                <ns:creator />
                <crud:read rdf:resource="http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService/foobar" />
            </rdf:Description>
        </meta:event>
    </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

A more visual depiction of the event can looks like below. Following the RDF data you are pointed to the resource that was affected by the event.

The careful observer realized that I am using Twitter for microblogging for a while. I tried a couple of tools such as Twadget for the Vista sidebar. I created also some Jabber account to post using the IM feature of Twitter. Jabber doesn't work for me since I can't connect to the server from within corporate network. The tool I finally ended up with is Twhirl. I haven't found any time to play with all the features. It is based on Adobe's ARI runs quite smooth and makes it a lot more fun to twitter. Only fact I am disappointed about is the footprint of almost 30 MB. Anyway, the tool is worth a look if you are using Twitter especially since it is also available for Mac OSX. Go and try it and follow me.

To keep updated I am just starting publishing my free/busy times to Office Online. First of all, register with Office Online, this shouldn't take that long if you have already a Windows Live account.

Open Outlook and chose the calendar you want to publish by right-clicking it in the task pane.

Now select 'Publish to Internet' and then 'Publish to Office Online...'. After doing some registration you can finally choose the options for publishing the calendar.

We are going to choose the granularity of details we want to publish. In my case I choose the  'Availability only' option.

Then I am going to allow everybody to see these availability times. If you are going to publish more details, you might want to consider to share your calendar only with invited users.

At the end I am going to check the 'Advanced Options'.

In this case I am fine with the automatic uploads. After confirming, the initial upload is performed. In the task pane you'll now find another icon for your calendar indicating that it is shared.

Finally, my free/busy times are now available.

It was quite a busy week with little time to write. However, I met Benjamin Schröter who does quite interesting stuff with the Microsoft DSL Tools. Added to blogroll.

[svn]After some discussion about the WebComposition/DGS configuration this week, we changed the usage of schema validation with the Web.config file. The validation scope is now not bound anymore to data adapters directly. Rather we introduced a default validation defined in the Web.config such as

   <webComposition>
        <dataGridService>
            <defaultValidation scope="None"/>
         ...    

Valid values are 'None', 'List' and 'Element'.This schema scope represents the default schema validation scope whenever an information store is created and data is added. If set to 'None' no validation is performed at all. Using 'Element' the added XML is validated against the schema (a-priori validation) before the element is added to the information store while  the usage of 'List' causes the data to be validated against the schema after being added to the information store (a posteriori validation).

The settings can be easily overwritten by using RDF meta data e.g. when using the N3 filter on a information store http://www.foo.bar/myStore:

<http://www.foo.bar/myStore>
http://www.webcomposition.net/2008/02/dgs/meta/validation
"Element".

That way, the default value can be always adapted to the specific need for a single information store.