Tourist's view on Hamburg in 4 days

I've been to Hamburg quite often because I know several people there, but I always missed the chance to do the usual tourist stuff there. So this time, we booked a hotel, bought a tourist guide, and made a tourist trip to Hamburg. It was really great. We had really good weather and spend most of the time outside.
First day we took the train to Blankenese and walked back to Hamburg. Okay, from Övelgönne on we took the ferry boad back to Landungsbrücken.
Second day we visited the Miniaturwunderland (that's a must for everyone who likes model railways), walked through the new Hafencity and the Speicherstadt, climbed the stairs of the "Michel" and had a boat trip in the harbour.
I can really recommend Hamburg, it's worth spending some days there. The northern people of germany are very different and I like their style ;)
Finnally some pictures... enjoy...

DLNA Media Server for my PS3 (update)

One year ago I came up with a post about my media server installation on the Linkstation for my PS3. I still stick to the TwonkyServer on the Linkstation but just due to lack of mips-support on other servers. For example the PS3 Media Server has some really interesting features for example YouTube, flickr and picasa support, where the YouTube feature did not work for me, but anyway, the project is work-in-progress and worth to have a loot at.

Happy new year!

I wish you a happy new year 2009, which started very cold & snowy in my home town, duesseldorf. I took some pictures, see here.

Apple iPhone Tech Talk Amsterdam

...took place in Delft (Dear Apple. Delft is not Amsterdam...) yesterday. Since a nice apple employee told us that blogging, photos, recording, (fortunately not breathing) is forbidden, I will not share much with you. Am I allowed to say something about the sandwiches? Probably not.
Fun is different.

Anthony B

...concert in the live station, Dortmund, was the highlite of the weekend. Anthony B and the band rocked the crowd with massive sound. I think his dance style is quite cool, he can throw legs and arms in unbelievable ways ;)
We got a good look at the stage from upstairs and enjoyed the sunday evening...

Patrice concert

... in cologne was awesome. Really. Excellent sound, great atmosphere. What I really like is that Patrice and his band are true musicians. Their live gigs are full of improvisation and peppered with spontaneous elements. This is true live music. Great!

The next generation... fragmentation?

A lot of people argue about JME fragmentation. And about JME, Symbian, Windows Mobile development in general. Too complex, too time-consuming, too fragmented. I agreed. And it seems like most of the people are looking for Web-style, Widgets like solutions for this. I support that "hype", but only to a certain extend. No doubt, it's nearly 10 times easier building a User Interface on a capable(!) browser using XHTML, SVG, ECMA script, rather then using the paint(Graphics g) Method in JME. Agreed. But when it comes to questions like: "How do I get the GPS-location in the browser-based application?" it's getting interesting.... Currently everyone wants to introduce his own solution in that space. Gears (from Google), Mozilla, LocationAware, OMTP, W3C, OpenAjax Alliance, just to mention a few examples. That's fragmentation at it's best. When people talk about fragmentation in the JME space, they usually mean that there are different APIs available on different devices and that the APIs behave differently (due to bugs or bad Spec). What is currently happening in the "browser-world" is even worse. They will have the same problems like JME (bugs, availablility of APIs cross devices) PLUS they don't even have consistent APIs yet. I hope that people start recognize this, and feed their proposals into a standardisation body to get a consistent API out as soon as possible...