"VW Käfer Cabrio" by Schockwellenreiter.

… the 1 millionth VW (Volkswagen) Beetle was “born”, according to the Brockhaus Multimedia screen saver on my home computer. Since June 2002 21.5 million VW Beetle have been sold. Manufacturing of this car started in summer 1945.

Its successor was the VW Golf. The VW Beetle inspired designer to come up with the VW New Beetle manufactured in Mexico starting in 1998.

Multi-tasking is bad, this is my opinion.

Nevertheless, "bild der wissenschaft" published a nice article about multi-tasking titled "The myth of multi-tasking" in May 2008 with some interesting and surprising findings ( and I added a few of my own additions here ):

• The term multi-tasking comes from computer science and describes how an operating system performs "multi-tasking" by actually switching quickly between tasks to make it look like it would perform these tasks simultaneously.
• Our brain can sense multiple sources simultaneously but can act only on one task at a time. Thus multi-tasking of a brain works the same way as in a computer operating system: through frequent switching. Switching creates extra effort, that’s why I hold to my opinion: multi-tasking is bad. At the end activities take longer and much non-value-add time had to be invested to simply swap thoughts in and our from active parts of your brain. And this swapping is a source of many errors.
• When doing multi-tasking the productivity of our brain is decreased by around 40 %.
  

  "MULTITASKING" by akbar Simonse from Den Haag, The Netherlands

• It is not scientifically proven that women are better in multi-tasking than men, even 80% of people asked during a survey would think so and some studies seems to indicate this. It is as strenuous for women as it is for men. Keeping multiple items under control like the three kids in the living room, the pot with soup on the stove and the phone call with a friend is simply a matter of training, men could learn that as well. As long as the kids and the pot are fine and don’t require any action the situation is under control, but as soon as the woman or man would have to act on multiple events multi-tasking would be required for the price of reduced productivity and stress. The best example I always like to mention: watch people trying to drive a car and having a phone call at the same time and you know what is meant here.
• There are people who actually like that frequent switching and short periods of time to focus on one activity. These are typically people who can not focus on one thing for a longer period of time.
• Companies should try everything to avoid multi-tasking for their work force. This would reduce the rate of errors, stress and the risk of employees to become sick ( of that or because of that ).
• One hint here: check your e-mails only every two hours.

After I have set up a virtual Windows XP on my Vista box I also was attempting to get a Windows 95 image to run on my Vista using Vmware Server. Here are a few hurdles I had to go through to get it running in a more useful way:

1. Audio didn’t work, even after enabling the audio device in my virtual computer before doing the install. Adding hardware is risky: when running the automatic hardware discovery the beast freezes including the host system and including a blue screen of death experience. When adding hardware the automatic scan should be skipped. A working audio driver turned out to be the Creative ‘Sound Blaster PCI 128′ driver as mentioned here, which I downloaded from  the Creative archives.
2. Network didn’t work. This was easy to fix by just adding the Microsoft TCP/IP protocol ( through “Network” in the Control Panel, Configuration – Add … ) 
   
3. The built-in browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 3.0) was hopelessly old and did not render any web page correctly and threw thousands of “script error” messages. A browser working under Windows 95 turned out to be Opera version 9.22, as mentioned in this blog posting, which still is available from here. Before I tried to install older versions of firefox ( back to 1.5.0.9 ) or flock or Netscape without success: either the installer crashed or the browser itself after installation, and I couldn’t get any older versions of these browser.

Yesterday I finished reading "Lean Brain Management" by Gunter Dueck.  A book about the future which already has begun. A future we either might not want to live in if we don’t change what we are today, or a future which will change us into some(one)thing different. From the very last sentence of the book I conclude that even the author does not want to live in that world he is describing.

Two key messages from the book:

My friend and his family visited us on Saturday. His kids are the best example: they definitely prefer some artificial food over any what my wife and I would call real food. Once my wife made mashed potatoes out of potatoes, you know, the real stuff with milk added where you really can taste the real potatoes in it. They didn’t like it. They are used to the artificial mashed potatoes you can buy in the super market, this yellow powder to which you add some water and then you get what is sold as mashed potatoes. A mashed potatoes fake. Everyone can prepare it, and obviously ( for most people ) it is even better than what you could produce on your own with real ingredients and a lot of effort. Fakes are the future !

And fakes are easy to produce. The procedure printed on the back of the package is easy to follow, a four-year-old could do it: put the powder in a bowl, add water, stir, done, enjoy. Simple steps, no training is needed to execute those. This principle needs to be applied to our entire life and to the business of every company. Business processes are designed in such a smart way that no smart people are needed anymore, except the few who would design those business processes and those intelligent systems behind. We have to achieve the ultimate level of specialism.

We don’t need IT architects anymore who know the entire portfolio of our and partners and competitors products. In the future you might become an expert how to install DB/2 version 9.5 on an AIX 6.1 machine. That’s it. Your training will take 4 hours and then you ( or everyone else ) can do the job. We don’t need skilled software developer who “speak” a lot of programming languages and can do software design as well, and testing and documentation of course. In the future programming is not needed anyway, you just sick a view prepared components together and that’s it. Or you become the expert for “for”-loops in Perl. Whenever a “for”-loop is needed somewhere in some perl code they call you. We don’t need project manager anymore who need month and years of training and expertise. We might not do projects anyway anymore, but if we do you might be the expert on how to fill out a change request and they will call you into the project if a change request needs to be filled out.

Intelligent people are bad. They make things complicated and cost a lot of money. To be competitive we have to get rid of them.

I don’t know whether Gunter Dueck has written a book about SOA without knowing it. At least I can not recall that I have seen that acronym anywhere in the book. Wouldn’t SOA be the perfect platform to achieve Lean Brain Management (LBM) ? The more we take out those steps in a business process requiring human intervention, or the more we simplify those, the closer we get to the LBM world. And if we built all smarts into the business process like services disocvering each other automatically and connecting in the right way to execute the business process, or like a SOA Supervisor who keeps track of everything and makes corrections when needed, then we are almost there !

Are we there yet or even close ? The author has his doubts, and I have my doubts too, especially after I have just seen at the end of last quarter when I had to work over the weekend and stay in a manufacturing site in Hungary to help supporting their processes and logistic systems  how many intelligent people have to stand by during those critical days to ensure everything goes smooth and to correct all the unforeseen situations and complicated problems coming up.

LBM can be applied everywhere in our life and the second part of the books describes how LBM can be ( or already is ?) applied to military, science, sex, health, psychology, laws, religion, politics, and management of course.

May be human beings will always fight against LBM. May be it is against our nature. May be we are not willing to give up our brain and what we can do with it. But wouldn’t it bee the smartest thing to do to use our brain to finally get rid of it ?

1. Germany : Turkey = 3 : 2. Yeah ! Not a great game but a great fight, and thus Germany qualified for the finale of the European Soccer Championchip. What I liked most was our third goal, not only because it finally catapult our team into the finale, but also because it was shot by Phillipp Lahm who I think is the most dedicated player in the team, whether it comes to attack or to defend, he is always there to do a good job. OK, in this match he made some stupid mistakes, but actually it has been said that he participated in 5/6 of the goals shot by the German team, thus he really deserved to shoot his own !
2. Alex and Axel are married since 20 years. Unbelievable ! These are the flowers I got from my wife ( besides some bottles of one of my favorite white wine ) …

and these are the flowers she got from me. We celebrated by watching the soccer game ( see # 1 ) and emptying one of the bottles.

After fixing the Windows Vista Flash problem on my computer I am still struggling getting my Picasa web albums showing up correctly under Windows Vista. The screen shot below shows how it looks like under Windows XP ( on the left ) and under Vista.

Damn Vista ! I am glad I found this wonderful Firefox plugin Fire/Universal Uploader which makes uploading files to Picasa a peace of cake. A real wonderful user interface reminds me at Norton Commander ( or Total Commander, one of the few pieces of software I ever paid for and don’t want to miss on any of my computers ): on the left side you see your local files and on the right your PicasaWeb albums and files. You simply select a file on the left and click on an arrow to do the upload and a status bar at the bottom visualizes nicely the progress. Or you simply drag’n'drop a file from the left or from your desktop or explorer. Real cool ! And this powerful add-on supports other sharing sites as well like youtube and flickr and many more !

Here is a screenshot from this add-on:

Bad back to my original question: Why or why does PicasaWeb look so different on Windows Vista ?

Yes, it actually seems to be possible to have Firefox 2 and 3 installed separated from each other on your computer and either run the older or newer version as you desire, especially useful when you are not sure whether the one or the other vital add-on will work with the new Firefox.

The procedure how to achieve that is available here in the “redemption in a blog” blog. This procedure worked for me a well under Windows but lacks a few important hints I like to mention here now:

1. When it comes to install Firefox3 it is important to select “Custom Install” and specify a different path for Firefox 3, like for example "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox3".
2. The installation will create an icon on your desktop to launch the new Firefox. First of all you should change it as described in the procedure mentioned above to use the right profile. In my case this is Target = “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox3\firefox.exe" -P firefox3 -no-remote” ( firefox3 is the name I had chosen for the new profile ).
3. Now you might want to create a second icon to launch good old Firefox 2. Rename the shortcut icon I mentioned above to e.g. “Mozilla Firefox 3”, then create a copy on your desktop and rename it to “Mozilla Firefox” or “Mozilla Firefox 2”. Change the path everywhere ( in “Target” and “Start in” ) to the directory where your old Firefox is installed, in my case: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox". Now change Target = “"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P default -no-remote”.
4. When you launch Firefox from another application, e.g. your feed reader, you might notice that through the installation of Firefox 3 your default browser has been changed to Firefox 3. In case you want to change this, launch old Firefox, go to Tools - Options – Main and click on “Check Now” besides “Always check to see whether Firefox is your default browser during startup” ( it is not necessary to enable that option ! ). Your Firefox 2 will detect that it is not the default browser anymore and will allow you to change that.
5. When launching Firefox 2 through another application it may happen that it picks up the wrong profile ( if you played around with Firefox 3 before ). You realize this by the fact that all or most of your old Add-ons are gone. If this happens often you might want to decide to launch profile manager again as described in procedure above and disable option “Don’t ask at startup”. This will allow you to always manually pick the right profile when launching Firefox 2. Less convenient, but you will be on the safe side.

That’s it. Have fun with trying out Firefox 3. Many Add-ons meanwhile have been changed to support the new Firefox and pretty soon you should be able to kiss Firefox 2 good-bye !

After doing my first steps with computer virtualization and getting Windows 95 to run under a Windowx XP host system on my old computer and after buying a new computer with Windows Vista installed the next logical step for me was to try getting Windows XP running under my Windows Vista system.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 turned out not to be a solution for that since it doesn’t run under Windows Vista, as I mentioned here. Thus I headed to vmware.com and installed free Vmware Server.  This software allows not only to  run any of the many available virtual appliances available out there, it also allows to build your own. Those available virtual applicances usually are based on free linux operating systems. Since Windows is a proprietary operating system you need to build your own virtual appliance using your own Windows license.

Thus my first step to take was to actually build myself a Windows XP installation CD since the Windows XP license I own is an OEM license for my old computer which did not come with a native installation CD; only some recovery CDs are available for my old computer.

“How to Create a Bootable Windows XP Setup Disk on a Preinstalled / Preloaded Windows System“ by Christopher Heng was a valuable read and procedure for me to get myself that CD.

After creating a new guest operating system with VMWare Server ( and configuring it to use the right CD drive of my computer ) I was able to boot it up with this new CD and get me XP installed. And after approx. 45-60 minutes – it took some time to prepare the 80 GByte hard disk I had specified for this guest system – my Windows XP virtual system went live.

Windows XP running on Windows Vista

The only initial problem I saw was that no audio was available on my virtual Windows XP computer. Thanks to this article “Enabling Audio in VMware Server” by Mohammad Azimi I learned how to add additional items to my virtual computer ( an audio device in this case of course ) and thus getting it to play sounds and music.

Done. I have a Windows XP now running on my Windows Vista computer. And as soon as Vista starts to be too annoying I simply fire up XP ( or turn on my old computer which is still sitting there under my desk ).

Some days things just go wrong. You make a mistake and in order to fix that you make an even worse decision.

Last week I was attempting to format a DVD on my new computer with Windows Vista installed. Since this seemed to take a very long time I wanted to do something on my second computer I currently have available in parallel ( with good old Windows XP on it ) but unfortunately I confused the keyboards and after hitting the wrong key the formatting of the DVD was aborted. After that Vista was having problems accessing it again, thus I decided to feed it into my DVD Recorder which would do the formatting much faster anyway. So I thought.

After the DVD disappeared in my recorder ( an Orion DVD/VR-2962 SI ) it went into “Reading…” mode …. and stayed there forever. “Reading…” was displayed on the screen ( actually “Lese…”, which is “Reading…” in German language ), and didn’t go away even after minutes. The problem with this machine is that as long as it is analyzing ( “Reading….” ) a new DVD there is no way to access the setup menu or do anything else with it. No multi-tasking .

Now I really seemed to be in trouble. I pressed the Eject button but nothing happened. What to do ?`I tried several alternatives like pressing the Eject button for a minute or pressing it rapidly again and again, I turned off and on the recorder keeping the Eject button pressed … nothing. I started reading the user instructions - an unmistakable sign of trouble. First I scanned through the troubleshooting pages: nothing useful. Did those pages every helped anyone solving a problem ? Thus I started reading more through the instructions without finding anything helpful.

My insubordinate DVD recorder.

I started my research in the internet. Almost nothing, except one hint: disconnecting the machine from the wall power, waiting for 1 minute, then turning it on again and keeping the Eject button pressed or press it rapidly. I tried this and several variations of this procedure. Nothing. “Reading …”. No way to do anything with this recorder anymore. Basically a piece of scrap now, except I could start to disassemble it. Damn, that’s really not what I wanted to spent the next hour with after I already wasted almost an hour of my time. I tried to push the DVD tray or even used a knife trying to open it with some form of violence. Nope, didn’t work. Damn ! I did what more was a reaction of frustration than another attempt to fix the situation: I hit the recorder with my hand on its top right above the DVD tray. The Eject symbol appeared on the screen and the tray opened smoothly.

Violence against machines - and of course against people - should always be the last option. It is said to make things worse. And I guess this is true in most cases. But not always.

Of course I didn’t try this again. After a reboot of my Vista machine it was cooperating again and recognizing the DVD and I was able to get it formatted. What a silly way to spend my time. At least I got some story to blog about here.

NGC 1333

Those of you who like astronomy might be happy to read about two nice offerings I bumped into last week:

• Google Sky – a web based offering from Google obviously, allowing you to explore the sky. It works similar to Google Maps: you can zoom in and out, move around, view the sky with different filters like infrared or microwave, and you can actually share URLs, like this one here of NGC 1333, a reflection nebula in the constellation “Perseus”, a chaotic star birth area 1.000 light-years away from earth, with a very young ( only 10.000 years old ) star, IRAS 4B, where with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope a lot of water has been discovered, according also to an article in the latest issue of “bild der wissenschaft” I have been reading recently.
• Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, a nice looking virtual telescope on your desktop after you have downloaded and installed  it ( after you have checked the pre-requisites ! ). This allows very smooth navigation through the sky, searching for objects and retrieving additional information, discovering constellations and then traveling into the deep space to lots of objects of interest ( NGC 1333 is in there as well ). You can also view our planets, zoom closer, turn them and you even can zoom down to our blue planet and discover it like you can do with Google Earth by using different types of maps ( streets, hybrid etc … ).