of Lars J. Nilsson

Really, I don’t have much to say. I’m not a scientist. I’m barely a sceptic. And I certainly cannot express myself on any level even aproaching that of the late Carl Sagan. But there is a blog-athon. Go there. Read what far smarter people than me have to say. And if you by chance have not read The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark you should. If nothing else, consider, from Billions and Billions: Thoughts of Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium:

The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Now, what is this? Could it be nirvana? Currenty experimenting, will be back.

Hi, and sorry for the posting gap. I have now officially, after several weeks of indecition and al lot of fast balls, exited Tain AB for a position at NetEnt. From Poker to Casino. More info to come I believe.

Stephen Colbert again… A very, very good rant:

Tomorrow you all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones created in stem cell research labs run by homosexual doctors who sterilize ther instruments over burning American flags. Where tax- and spend-democrats take all your hard earned money and use it to buy electric cars for national radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrant. Oh, and everybody is high! Whoo!

Update 2007-02-12: Apparently Viacom has flexed its muscles on YouTube and forced them to removed the video. Link dead. Funny how this makes me less likely to ever buy cable TV. You hear me Viacom?

This must be the funniest thing I’ve see for a long time. Dawkings on the Colbert show. Brilliant stuff but unfortunately only 7 minutes long. Did seem like they enhoyed themselves though. (And if you don’t know Colbert before you better be aware that he is… Perhaps slightly sarcastic. Read this for guidance if you get confused.)Update 2007-02-12: Apparently Viacom has flexed its muscles on YouTube and forced them to removed the video. Link dead… Annoyance!

Dr Adequate tells you straight. Very good ideed.

And so the ultimate home away from home turns 3 years. Celebration is in order! In attendance, in order of random selection:

• Redeyed Jenna
• Mr Jones – Founding father
• Fungrim – The devil is in
• Drakmiklos
• Karin – The dancer
• The Matts of all Matts
• Anders K.
• The Sollerman
• Ola – The wagnerian
• Åsatro

Also featuring special guests “Matilda” and “Christian”. Please note that these aren’t their real names though.First order of the day, Moet et Chandon! My god, I think I created a monster. The one bottle of champagne was soon followed by 6 bottles of sparkling. Wheee!3 years ago, me and Mr Jones founded this damn thing. And since, The Club of Mondays have only missed one single monday where sickness and job related shore leave left the Stage Door empty. That makes… One hell lot of mondays.And Mr Jones have only missed 3 occasions. Count ‘em: 1-2-3. Good gracious me.It is funny, a lot of people have passed by during the years. At times it would be Mr Jones and me only. And at other time some 15 people. Lovely people. Lonely people. Lovesick people. All kinds of people. Friends and family. Amazing strangers and quiet guests. Loud opera singers and forlorn conductors. And yet, the core remains.Hang on! What fool ordered another bottle of sparkling?!And among the nights attendances where indeed several hard core members: Redeyed Jenna, Mr Jones, yours truly, Drakmiklos and The Matts of all Matts. Amazing stuff. (Can you remember the amounts of laughter we’ve had? The tears? I certainly can.)At this point, our collective thanks to The Stage Door. It wouldn’t be the same anywhere else. (Damn! We forgot to invite Mother and Thomas to the festivities. Well Mama, if you read this, know that we love you).That fish was really good. And, so I heard, was the meat. And as usual: the best hamburger in Gothenurg made it customary appearance on the table. Next anniversary, we’ll buy some flowers for cooks.And there was singing. Although I think it was by mistake and was widely regarded as a bad move from the rest of the table.Yes! We have pictures. Hurray!And so the night went.

This is a series of post starting here, in which I look at different CMS installations and despair.At the end there’s only two left to consider, Magnolia and Joomla! And I’ll go for Magnolia first. Simply because I will need to tinker a fair bit with the system, and  Magnolia seems a lot more friendly to a Java developer than Joomla! Don’t get me wrong, I can program in PHP as well, but I’d rather not, and the  Joomla! template PHP is rather cluttered.As for extensions? This may be a problem for other sites, but I don’t think it will be for this particular setup. Even if so, I can install some WebService stacks parallel to the Magnolia apps and use JSTL and ordinary JSP to serve the content in the templates.Multilingual content? Joomla! has it, but all too contrived. Doing separate directory structures for separate languages may not be optimal for everyone, but it’ll work for this installation. And I can already see myself doing some templating tricks for the rest.Joomla! is a runner up, and if the client is not happy with the Magnolia editing functions I’ll have them try Joomla! instead. In either case I think I’ll be happy to work with any of the two systems.

This is a series of post starting here, in which I look at different CMS installations and despair.Magnolia came in late in my research but I immediately started thinking that I perhaps had found something good. As several other systems it comes with one “community” version and one “enterprise” version, but I don’t mind as long as the feature set isn’t too crippled on the community install.The Good

• Easy installation. Two WAR files dropped in and that’s it. Very good. Apparently comes with Apache Derby bundled so you don’t even have to configure a database. Although, more on this later…
• Stage environment. Two separate installations, one for editing and one public. Very good indeed, although there’s a down side as well.
• Uncluttered and very good AJAX gui.
• Easy to editor pages. And easy to understand and change the site structure.

The Semi-Good

• Multilingual content. It is not supported, but it is officially not supported with an “no, but of course you can do it, and easily” answer.  Meaning most sites will end up with  separate directories for each language, and when you really need one page/many languages, you can actually do it.
• No themes. But officially no themes. But very simple templates. This is counted on good in my book as I’ll end up designing the site anyway, starting from scratch with a clean and simple templating system is just as good as a full-fledged, community supported, themeing engine for my purpose.

The Semi-Bad

• Bundled database. Good for installation but you should really document very clearly how to reconfigure it to use an external database, I can do with Derby but would prefer MySQL.
• Stage environment. Although the idea is very good it means that you most probably will end up having two parallel applications running, thus cluttering up the site URL’s. This can be solved of course but it takes some tinkering. I was thinking of installing the stage installation on a separate domain instead, so you’d get, for example, “www.mysite.com” and “edit.mysite.com”. I shall have to think about that.

The Bad

• Somewhat small community. Or I haven’t really found them yet.
• No 3rd party modules? Is that because of the point above? Or have I missed something?

ConclusionVery good package. And probably a winner. I really like the cleanliness. And the the easy page administration (saves a lot of support time). I like the templating. On the downside, I’ll be looking for 3rd party modules if I need them and may be forced to write my own, but I would need to do so in any case for any system to a certain extent, so that is only a minor scratch on the whole. Multilingual content? Well, considering the competition Magnolia comes out smelling of roses, I’d much rather take an honest “no, but it easy to do”, than a “yes, but it is rather complicated”.

This is a series of post starting here, in which I look at different CMS installations and despair.AtLeap is a relatively new CMS from Blandware. Despite it seeming a bit immature, I was intrigued enough to install it simple because 1) it was easy; and 2) it screams “multilingual” at you at it’s front page.The Good

• Easy installation for anyone familiar with Java / Ant. For anyone else I image it’d be a pain.
• Completely server / database agnostic. Impressive!
• Multilinual content out of the box. Why doesn’t everyone have this?

The Bad

• Cluttered admin GUI. One big menu with both admin items and real site items? No thank you.

ConclusionI admit not spending too much time on AtLeap. It is obviously somewhat immature. I imagine it would be a very good base for larger projects with a lot of custom development, you get the goods right at you door and don’t mind writing your own themes and extensions. As it is, I probably won’t have time for it.