Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Author: Oliver Wrede

  • Downtime – arrrgh!

    My server was hacked and the provider decided to completely eliminate the whole system without confirmation. Lot’s of reconfiguration and updating needed. Most functionality is gone. Comments are lost. The wiki as well. ARRGH! Shouldn’t a provider call to negotiate further actions? This is really weird.

  • Crappy CMS

    I remeber well Brent Simmons’ proposal of a“Law of CMS URLs”: The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs. Today I had the chance to work as editor with the WebDB portal platform from Oracle 10g Application Server. It is pretty modular, but it is a pain in the a** to really get to…

  • 25 dificult questions you could be asked in a job interview

    This is an very interesting collection of questions for job interviews. Very good to be prepared for those in case you plan to have one.

  • Presentation about weblogs in Hagen

    I am going to present about weblogs in higher education at an event at the Univeristy of Hagen next week. I am not quite sure what the audience is expecting and what how this topic is going to fit into the day. I think the (german) presentations will be video taped and published online. In…

  • New semester: Information Mapping 2

    I decided to repeat a seminar from a couple of years ago: Information Mapping. This time I want to suggest two optional research topics that I think might be very intersting to work upon: the first is “60 years Hiroshima” and the second is “Deforestation“. I got interested in the Hiroshima topic last year when…

  • Tinderbox 2.4 released

    Eastgate released Version 2.4.0 of their fabulous Tinderbox tool. A number of enhancments – most of them very interestig to advanced users. There has been quite some time since the first announcement of a Windows version of Tinderbox. I am sure the release is not too far ahead in future. Keep an eye on the…

  • Flickr blog

    I am not getting tired of Flickr. If you love photos you got to read the flickr blog from time to time. It contains wonderful posts to astonishing photos or services based on Flickr content. There are so many stories captured in Flickr sets and the way users can comment, annotate and group is really…

  • Social Software @ BBC

    Martin Röll and Robert Basic point to an interview with Euan Semple, head of knowledge management solutions for the BBC (unfortunatly the link to the interview seems to be broken at the moment). Semple reports BBC is using bulletin boards, weblogs, wikis and some kind of social network tool. The points raised by Martin and…

  • Tidy Service for MacOS X

    This could be a very useful helper for the frequent HTML coder: an implementation of the HTML Tidy Library as MacOS X Service: this allows to clean up HTML code in any application.

  • EAD 06

    6th International Conference of the European Academy of Design.

  • FlickrGraph and Mappr

    I really love this: Open application programmer interfaces like this one provided by Flickr allow people to be creative about and develop own interfaces to the dataspace. Here are two examples for Flickr: Mappr and FlickrGraph. Hands down!

  • New Gmail invitations

    Google has upgraded the invitations in Gmail. I now have 50 invitations left. And it appears to be the standard for all users. If you want one please comment here (click on the date above). I won’t send an invitation if you don’t state your real name and your personal website. Update: Comments closed. No…

  • Microsoft Design

    Microsoft has create a special website for recruiting designers for their design department.

  • After the game is before the game

    So the semester is almost over. I end with a much bigger base of new slides from recent lectures that will probably make the future lecturing task much easier. I had never the chance to use a former presentation 1:1 for a new one: there is always a need for update and improvement – but…

  • Navigation blindness

    This article by Henrik Olsen suggests to design navigation systems in webistes to be much more prominent: Most web development projects put a lot of effort into the design of navigation tools. But fact is that people tend to ignore these tools. They are fixated on getting what they came for and simply click on…

  • indypeer.org

    Few days after my returning home from New York after 9/11 (the day I originally planned to fly home) I felt strongly that the WTC attacks were just a episode and that there is a great deal of background and responsibility on the side of the current (and probably former) US governments and the fact…

  • Destructive Wiki spam

    I had my wiki locked for anonymous editing to get rid of spammers. Only one or two pages were editable because I wanted people to be able to work on them. I was hoping that spammers would turn down if they can’t find an editable page ad hoc. Not so. In “return” they did not…

  • I work, you work, we all work, with iWork

    I am doing almost all of my presentations with Keynote – and was waiting for Keynote 2 to show up. Actually I am not missing any feature in this application, but I am looking forward to the Flash export and I wonder if it will be easy to do voice-overs for self-running presentations. What I…

  • Technorati now allows free tagging

    Technorati now supports free tagging of weblog posts. This is similar to the tagging used at Del.icio.us and Flickr. Of course I like it. But right now I am not quite sure how to add these tags into my weblog layout. Should I replace my very own categories wit them? Hmmmm… I should not forget…

  • Tsunamis at Wikipedia

    This Wikipedia page is very interesting: While the tsunami wave of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was by far the deadliest ever recorded it was by far not the highest: that was recorded 1958 in Alaska and was created by a land slide inside a small fjord (LItuya Bay) causing a wave to reach high…