Tag: Personal

… and I’m on this world for a quarter of a century.

Today is my 24th birthday.

Sometime I really would like to be much older than I’m now. I would so much have liked to get the whole IT revolution – as it stands now, the first real program I wrote (besides many complicated batchfiles) was for Windows 95, so I missed all the fun of segmented memory and assembler. Too bad.

Then again: There are those days where I just whish to be younger so I will be able to see even more new technologies rise and vanish before I die. It would be so nice to be still alive when we finally get fusion reactors, warp speed, matter-transporters and all this stuff.

I love technology. I really do.

This is only for my fellow readers from the german part of switzerland. I’m presenting it without further comments as those knowing about the two newspapers and capable of understanding german will certainly get my point.

I took the pictures with my cellphone, so the quality is kind of bad which is why I do not provide an enlarged version

You may have heard of Geocaching.

This weekend I found my first cache. It was quite well hidden, but as I knew the territory (it’s where I lived from 1993 to 2000), it was not that difficult.

When I first tried to find the cache last sunday, it was already quite dark outside, so I had to give up. Yesterday, I’ve returned and finally found Magic Place / Forch-Denkmal

The picture was taken using my K700i. I didn’t have my camera with me

This is great. This makes me incredible happy as it documents quite a relevant part of my live, which I though was long gone. Here is it:

My old webpage

And even more: Fabedit, too is still there.

I took the time to fix all long dead links and the syntax of the navigation tree, so it works in Mozilla (somewhat). Hell, I even fixed those little cgi-scripts.

I first thought, that fabgrats was lost, but I found a copy of it lying somewhere else. This is so incredibly great!

So. What’s the fuss?

In the years 96 till 2000, I was quite active in the web. The freeware tool RasInTask [the page has an usability defficit. There are some deeper links on the right side under “subtopics”] (unfortunately I lost the installer, so you cannot download the tool any more – unless you want to use the source, which is well-conserved) was quite well-known in the net. I actually got quite good reviews in two german magazines and I had quite some fans.

And I did more. I wrote articles, short stories, delphi components and such stuff. All of it, so I do think now, was kind of compensation for what I was not getting in real-life. Respect and a girlfriend. So this old page is not only interesting from a technical standpoint (I think, despite it being a bit amateurish, it was quite good back then [just look at how it’s possible to link directly into the page with an unique url despite frames being used. I did this with the RasInTask link above] – not to speak about RasInTask which I still think is quite good, though no one would use it these times), but also from a psychological.

This relict from old times is quite a good proof that people, extroverted on the web are quite different in the real live. And while I’m still kind of active in the net world, I think I can say about myself, that I’m finally adjusing my real live to what I always was on the net. This is a good thing, it seems.

So, what’s there for you, my fellow reader?

Not much. An old picture of mine, some texts written in quite bad english and this nostalgic flair of a webpage done in the 90ies. The only thing probably useful to you is, unfortunately, lost (and I really don’t think that you can still compile the sourcecode of RasInTask any more)

For me it’s something different. Its a testimonial of who I was and who I’ve become. Yes. Those years between 99 and 02 where great. And quite a lesson for me. It’s good to finally feel grown up after such a long time. And it’s good to see who I was, just to learn, who I really am.

Oh. And I will go back to more technical stuff the next time. I promise

UPDATE: I actually found the RasInTask installer somewhere, so it’s available do download now. But plase note: I know that the code is not very clean. I’m quite convinced that there are some access violations and synchronization errors just waiting to annoy you. So while it’s interesting from a nostalgic point of view, I’d recommend against installing it. Oh! And don’t ask me for support. I have not touched this fo years.

pilif@galadriel ~ % cat ebinerv.php
<?
 for ($i = 0; $i < 100; $i++){
   mail('xxx@sensational.ch', 'Gnegg', 'Gnegg!', 'From: xxx@xxx.ch');
   echo "rSent Mail $i";
 }
 echo "nDone!n";
?>

In principle I’m long ahead such little toys. But Ebi had this special configuration where each email that arrives at his mailbox is forwarded as an SMS to his very old mobile phone. And the phone has that nasty bug (or some may call it strange behaviour) where the “Delete all”-function does not really do it’s task.

In the end it was quite funny to see ebi manually delete neary each and every SMS he got because of my script. Maybe he will now buy a better phone or fix his configuration? We’ll see.

Richard did a wonderful job on the new PopScan website. Looks great and even uses CSS to some extent. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting there.

The page as such is much better than the previous one, though it’s not translated to english yet.