Stefan’s Blog

Ohne Worte

Für den MediaAssetFinder bieten wir bei Divis auch ein OpenID-Modul zur Benutzeranmeldung an. Oft ist es gar nicht so einfach zu erläutern, um was es bei OpenID geht und wo die Vorteile für den Firmenkunden und den Endbenutzer liegen.

Gerade habe ich einen guten Artikel bei Heise gefunden, der OpenID gut und ausführlich erläutert und das Verfahren auch mit Schaubildern und einem verständlichen Text beschreibt. Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

Well, almost. The pool is finally at the place which I created for it. And the water is also running in - which will take its time. After all, witha radius of 2.4 m and a height of approximately 0.75 m, it must be filled with around 13.5 cubic meters of water – breath taking 13,500 liters of water (especially when you are drowning – haha). A weight of 13 tonnes. And mine is even added, when I’m going to take a bath in the pool…

Hopefully the weather stays fine so that we can inaugurate the pool at the weekend.

This quote from Walt Disney (according to google search results) is a big motivation.

It motivates me to create software. And I do have some ideas and dreams, but sometimes I get stucked. Too much work for one person, no reessources left, lack of knowledge etc.
Today google presented “similar images” which searches images by their content.

This was one thing I dreamed of, when we started programming the MediaAssetFinder.
And if I think about it, there is one conclusion:
“If you can dream it, google can do it!”

Saturday I had my 29th-b-birthday. Luckily a lot of friends and family congratulated. And they used quite different ways to do so.

Some of them called me on my mobile, some called me at home. When I wasn’t available, the left a record on my mobiles or my homes mailbox.
I got SMS as well as intant messages through icq and jabber. And I had posts on facebook, studiVZ/meinVZ and Xing.
That’s great.  Every congratulator chose the easiest channel available to him. And, of course, they everyone got reminded by this same service (birthdaylists on social networks, calendars in mobiles etc).

But then – didn’t I hear the word of unified messaging a long time ago? In the late 1990s this was the attempt to integrate phone, fax, email and sms. There was little thought about web 2.0 or integrated IM.

It was no big deal to access all the messages. The social networks and even my home’s phone voicemail forward the messages to my e-mail-account. And as I was on the way with my iPhone I was able to access all on one single device. So far so good. But it makes me kind of sad that the one reliable system to collect the messages is good old fashioned email.

However, when I had wished to answer each of the messages mentioned above, I would have had to use a lot of services and had no simple reply solution. I know that there are webservices that offer some integration but I don’t want some obscure companies know all my communication accounts – passwords included.

So what could one do?
1) Use one single social network and one single phone number. I love pure monopoly. It make some things that easy

2) Set up a fully integrated pbx and im-solution. At Divis we have a jabber-server and an asterisk which could interact; it’s still a lot of work, though.

3) Stick to good old e-mail. But enhance it!
There could be extra headers like
- X-Origin (phone call, im, social network post etc.)
- X-Forwarding-Service (ICQ, facebook, sipgate etc.)
- X-Senders-ID (phone number, IM-Id, social-network account name, etc.)
Additionally  every forwarded e-mail should have a link for answering. In particular this could be:
- callto://+49123456789  -> use uri-schemes to address the senders account
- http://www.mysocialnetwork.org/services/reply/123456789 -> Web-URLs with tokens
In this way it should be quite easy to reply to every single message using the original channel the sender has chosen before.
And of course  one could think of pimping up the Mail-Client to provide a unique interface for sending messages to any X-Forwarding-Service.

Well, that’s what getting oldr is good for.

And if I’m too late again and you use such apps since ages – please let me know.

Long time ago I started this blog. Today on our way home from Tübingen I finally managed to write a new article on my iPhone. But then the communication between the iPhone app and my outdated wordpress didn’t work out. After updating wordpress on the server, my iPhone’s local draft was sent to nirwana. Sigh.

I’ll give it another try tomorrow.