Diets are everywhere. Be it modern ones like the Atkins-Diet, where you change your body to burn more fat by eating more fat. Or the Hacker's diet, where you simply count everything exactly.

Other people simply try to eat less and do more sports. Or simply eat less calories.

If you'd ask me about my favourite piece of software, I'd answer Photoshop instantly. Naturally, I'm interested in the surroundings of Photoshop as well. Like Adobe, the Photoshop team or their building.

I've just happend to come across a nice little picture story on PhotoshopNews, which shows the Photoshop team as well as Adobes headquarter in St. Jos / California

phpNuke is a well-known portal solution and the base of a lot of other open source CMS projects. Think about postNuke, phpWebSite or Xoops. I did an interview with Francisco Burzi, the man behind the phpNuke project.

Mr. Burzi tells about his family, his job, the future of phpNuke and his thoughts on theoretical aspects of content management systems.

Thanks to Robert Kennedy for proof-reading!

Native english speakers could consider themselves lucky. They don't have a need for accents, don't know about umlauts, about the -symbol, about the chinese, arabic, korean alphabet, and so on. A few letters, a few numbers, a few special keys there you have your english keyboard. The Optimus keyboard is a design study that does more than that.

Instead of having the letters painted on the keyboard, the keys are little displays. I counted 132 keys, that makes 132 small displays. Obviously, this invention is not from an native english speaker.

The previous issue of the german magazine c't (2005, heft 15) had an interesting short one column article about an fascinating piece of software. It enables to share the graphics card of a second PC with the first one over the network, thus enlarging your real screen estate.

Too good to be true? No, it actually works. You can't expect wonders of course, but it's very nice.

I have just upgraded the local Wiki-Module to the current version 0.3.0. The module has been announced on phpWebSite Manual, but I couldn't find it on the appstate homepage yet.

The big new feature of this version is the Wiki Toolbox, as seen on the image.

kiesler.at experienced 9 hits from AltaVista today. Altavista, the big search engine that was popular before Google came up. Naturally I was a bit puzzled as the search query view of the current Visitors 1.2 beta didn't show any AltaVista hits.

The explaination is rather simple. The hits wheren't caused by search queries. No, they where triggered by a special AltaVista random image link.

For me, phpWebSites phpwsbb forum module has a lot of potential which is largely unused. One step in the right direction would be the display of

• Who replied last and
• how many replies have there been to a thread

in the phpwsbb last forum posts block. It would also be nice to have the latest post label (instead of the thread label) and the editor of the post (if there is one) instead of that of the owner. Well, I hacked phpwsbb again to do just that.

Common websites rely on external webmetric-analysis. How many people came on the site, what did they do, where did they go? The Visitors module took that idea and enhanced the statistics with data only a native application would be able to find out. Who was logged in and when? Which modules did he/she use?

But Visitors is quite a bit away from being a full-fledged datamining tool. While it is possible to see which path a visitor on a certain site took right now there is no generic history analysis as of now. I've described some concepts during the past semesters Data Warehousing 2 lecture.

Synergy has always been a very interesting topic to me. Synergy means: mixing up a couple of things so the result is bigger than the initial ingrediences. Henkel did that for a nice ad I stumbled across linkdump.

Henkel is owner of the well-known Loctite brand. What they did was a synergy of advertising and a reality-show: They glued up a monitor with their glue, put a web cam in front of it and transmit the resulting picture over the net. People worldwide are able to send a message to the screen.