Working for hours in front of the screen??

Then I maybe have a solution for you :) Actually a friend of mine (thanks Manfred ;) ) send me the link to a nice program that keeps track of your working hours in front of the screen. Especially as a software developer, you often sit for hours in front of your workstation, without having a break. That's however bad, not only for your eyes but also for your brain. It is worth to take a 10 min. break at least every two hours. This helps you relax a little and increases your concentration when you continue afterwards.
Workrave is actually the program, Manfred has given me. The program basically records the user interactions with the program, by simply recording keyboard or mouse actions. Workrave distinguishes between "Micro-breaks", "Rest-breaks" and "daily limits". All of them are clearly fully customizable, so one can for instance define a micro-break every half an hour, rest-breaks every two hours and a daily limit of about 8 hours. Workrave runs quietly in the background and when the corresponding break happens, an information window pops up. Interestingly it doesn't only inform about the break but it additionally shows a cyber-girl (no, not in that sense :D ) doing exercises that should help you relax. In my opinion, however, these exercises shouldn't be performed AGAIN in front of the screen but it is much better to stand up and have a little walk in your room, ideally by going somewhere on the balcony and get some fresh air.
Here you can see some screenshots in case you may be interested. Moreover since the program uses the GTK runtime environment it runs on Windows as well as on UNIX systems.

Google launched Presentation service

Google launched the already announced presentation service, directly integrated into Google Docs. I tried it out and created the following presentation:

http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=djwjts8_47gkjn9k&fs=true

(Official GDocs blog)

Creating professional websites as non-professional person

Often people talk about "Web 2.0" which is not somehow a new version of the Web itself. The term just gives an already existing movement/change a name. This movement's aim is to encourage people to get actively involved in the process of how the Internet changes. People should participate by expressing their ideas and thoughts, making the web more interactive and personal. Therefore in recent years a number tools appeared on the Internet which facilitates this participation. The newest, and probably also the most popular service, are Blogs. Blogs, as this here, are great ways for expressing the personal ideas. They started actually as some kind of online-diary. People soon started to use it for publishing any kind of thing they wanted to, from photos and non-sense talks to political issues. And this is great!
The main point however for the success of such services is the simplification and automation of the online publishing process. The faster and easier it is to publish something online, the more people will be willing to use it. Nobody wants to start hacking HTML, CSS or JavaScript code and deal with FTP uploading etc., because at first people may not have the necessary knowledge about all this kind of stuff and second they also don't have the necessary time. Although I would personally would be able to deal with HTML, CSS and all this web stuff, I probably wouldn't start writing much posts if I would have to write all of it by writing HTML code. It just isn't comfortable!

Beside online blog services, a number of services appeared on the web which facilitate the creation of web-pages in a WYSIWYG-style. The main two pages I tried out are the Google Page Creator (older posts about it) and Jimdo. code. This is what Google Page creator - as most Google services - is directly coupled with the Google Account that is used with Gmail, GDocs, Blogger, etc... It is a quite nice service, offering 100 MB of free web space. GPage Creator however has major problems which make enable it to create professional-looking webpages. This is a pity, also because theoretically Google has already the technology for creating a highly customizable webpage. For instance this blogger here, where I'm currently writing this post. The layout and design of the Blogger page is completely customizable through XML files. Incorporating this technology into Google Pages would be great, since non-professional people can choose from a set of predefined design layouts, while more experienced users can still edit the HTML or CSSJimdo Pages do: they allow non-professional users to create professional-looking webpages in an easy and fast way. Moreover more experienced or expert users can further customize the layout of the page by manually editing the CSS code or by adding personalized JavaScript files. Moreover Jimdo makes heavy use of AJAX, which results in a more responsive application. Pages can be edited by logging in and directly changing the webpage by clicking on the appropriate available toolkits. Things layed out on the Jimdo page are grouped as elements. There are different kind of elements available:

• Header / Title element
• Text-area, where it is also possible to directly edit the HTML code, which allows to integrate for instance JavaScript elements
• Tables
• Youtube Videos
• Pictures and Picture Galleries with integrated Flash or "AJAX" previews
• del.icio.us tags or RSS feeds
• File download
• different forms (Email forms, guest books,...)
• Flickr

I can talk from my personal experience when I speak about the easiness and rich functionalities of Jimdo, since I had the possibility to create a Jimdo page for my martial arts club Yoseikan Budo Nals.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger Play: Watch the blogs go by

Today Blogger launched a quite nice feature. Well, actually it is not a feature that may be especially useful for Bloggers. They launched Blogger Play.

Blogger Play is a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now!

It is really cool and once you start looking at those images you cannot stop any more.

However, from a developer point of view it interesting to see that the complete interface is done with JavaScript and CSS. There is no Flash involved at all (as much as I've seen when quickly running over the source-code). That's really impressing as I think. Moreover the loading and switching of the images works without major interruptions or delays. By the way, I'm sitting behind an ISDN internet (56 Kbps) connection and I can perfectly view the slideshow, which is not the case for many other slideshows I've seen.
Another thing that came me immediately in mind is that Google has its own screensaver included in their Google Pack (left column of my blog it can be downloaded) software. It would be nice if the photos from Blogger Play could be included in that screensaver. For instance if Blogger Play offers an RSS feed or something or they include those pictures directly in the screensaver as a feature or option that can be turned on.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger Play: Watch the blogs go by

GReader a mature product

Google Reader, Google's News Feed Reader, has become a mature product. Some days ago the Google Reader team released a major update to their product. The product that started as a small feed reader has become the central product at Google responsible for anything related to feeds.
Last week they've now added the - so long requested - search functionality. Till now it was sometimes annoying. You've read something on your reader items some days ago, which you would like to see again. It was always an endless scrolling till you found what you've searched. Moreover, since Google is still a search engine, a search function was more as needed. Now they've realized it and it's great.

See Mihai's post on the official Google Reader blog for more infos:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/09/we-found-it.html

Appearing on BlugPulse

On Sunday 02 this blog was listed on the 6th position in the BlogBites section of BlogPulse. According to BlogPulse, the BlogBites section "intends to capture and present a daily snapshot of top stories from the world of blogs."
I'm happy about being listed on such online services as BlogPulse since this also promises new visitors from around the world. :D Actually I discovered this service through my stats from StatCounter after a user visited my site from there.

Google Earth 4.2 - Easter egg

It seems as if Google has integrated an easter egg into Google Earth version 4.2. It is a flight-simulator, not really as the Microsoft Flight Simulator, but a nice and promising start :)
To start it, just open Google Earth (ensure that you have version 4.2). When you see the earth in front of you, press Ctrl+A. After that the following dialog should appear:

As you can see, you can select between two airplanes, an F16 and a SR22. Instructions regarding keystrokes can be found here.