Available now: FMX Conference Planner webapp

The FMX 2010, the 15th Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media in Stuttgart, Germany is just about to start. I'm very proud to announce that there's an webapp for most mobile devices (Android, iPhone, Opera Mini, ...) to get the latest information about talks, timetables, floor-plans etc!

The service is currently in beta, so if you find any errors, please report them! Check it out now!

Have a great time in Stuttgart! And don't forget to check out the HS-Augsburg booth at Steinbeis-Saal 1.8 to see Souvi live!

Cute and easy to use Mac OS SIP-Client

Today I would like to present you a really helpful app for the Mac. Telephone is, at the name seems, a small and easy to use SIP-Client. You don't have to hustle with complicated configurations or interfaces where you don't know where it's safe to click. Telephone is reduced to the max and does not have any other features than taking and receiving calls. Perfect!

It has a complete implementation of the address book and can be configured to use different accounts at once. Sorry there's no more to say about it. Just download it and start calling! Oh wait, it's freely available (even the source!) for Leopard and Snow Leopard. Have fun!

Applescript - Sheduled run of scripts the Apple way

Last week I had to write some Applescripts to ensure that our installation in Berlin would run two weeks without supervision. I tried a lot to startup an application in the morning and shut it down in the evening, because it's comsuming a lot of ram per minute and would crash after a few hours.

I'm new to Applescript, so I tried to gather informations about the shedule part of my task. How can I tell the script to do the tasks at a specific time? I found a few solutions using crontabs or launchd but I was not satisfied with that solution, because I could not find that much documentation and experience of users I would have loved to.

Souvi live (updated)

Update2: Souvi received the exceptional price award at the Art of Engineering 2010 competition. Thanks to everybody at Ferchau Engineering, we really enjoyed it! Congratulations to all winners!

Update: We made it! Souvi is one of the 6 winners of the 2010 competition! We don't know the exact position yet, because it's top secret until April 19 at the Hannover Messe. We're looking forward to a great ceremony and a lot of fun! Thanks everybody for the amazing weekend in berlin.

Howto: Simple security question hack for private wordpress blog

Last month I was faced with a task, to make a blog a little more "private". It's a wordpress blog which should be available for friends but not open for everybody especially for crawlers. The easiest way to secure the blog would have been a .htaccess protection but in this case, this solution would have been to complicated for the users. There should be no need to tell people a special login or a password. Friends should be able to enter the site just by answering a simple question which everybody with a little background knowledge could know.

Removing all file associations from VMWare Fusion

Lately I was asked if I knew a trick to stop VMWare-Fusion to open up movies on the mac instead of letting quicktime do the job.

It seems strange that some file-type associations are bound to a windows installation inside a virtual machine and it's even more annoying to have the virtual machine boot up. So I did some research on the net but did not find a suitable solution.

Inside the settings pane of a virtual machine you should disable the launching-feature but this does not affect the happening when it already happend. So the trick you have to do is delete the Applications folder inside your virtual machine bundle. If you did so your mac should not boot up your vm anymore.

Hope I could help you with this easy trick.

Creating a Windows-UI for Arduino

Working with the Arduino is pretty much fun, but when it comes that you need a easy to use interface on your computer to control the arduino, there are not so many examples available on the net. I needed a windows-application that can set up some variables and send them to the arduino board which will then in return send data to the application of different measurements. I spent a lot of time researching easy and intuitive solutions, beside the "typical" arduino-processing combination.