I’m blogging since about two months, without having any disclaimer, which is definitely not a good idea ;-) So please find below my disclaimer:

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My name is Didier Beck and I am working for the Helvetia Patria Holding. The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. Everything here, though, is my personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.

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A quite interesting article from FastCompany about companies’ blogging:

If you are interested in, some valuable comments ;-)

Holger released the internationalized version 1.7 of its blogkomm tool. I’m using it for my blog to be able to add comments to “normal” blogger posts. Very easy to use und fully flexible in the field of the GUI customization.

Great tool for all blogger users :-)

If you like all kind of good music (blues, jazz, rock, etc.), you perhaps have heard something about this so great Montreux Jazz Festival. You can find the program 2004 here (pdf).

A great experience!

I also like very much (as usual ;-) the new poster (pdf):

If you are interested in some discussions and assumptions about the infrastructure of Google and its massive grid cheap computers, let’s read the following article from the MIT Technology Review.

It seems that Google is hidding its real numbers concerning its incredible infrastructure and that the way Google is operating its infrastructure and the quite innovative approach concerning this grid computing are perhaps more relevant as THE competitive advantage of Google than the different search algorithms.

I managed to get in the beta program of Gmail of Google ;-)

A lot of (partly completely crazy) things were written about this. Anyway, I’m now trying this new email system quite a lot, to be able to really talk about Gmail. Stay tuned for more information.

My Gmail: didier DOT beck AT gmail DOT com

Skype released a new version of his so great P2P phone (VoIP) tool yesterday:

=> Skype v0.97.0.40

Thomas Claburn interviewed Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove and creator of Lotus Notes, for InformationWeek on April, 12. The discussion was about different items:

As usual with Ozzie, some very valuable comments!

Some days ago, news.com published an interesting article about MySQL, the Swedish GNU-licensed database system. We are using this DB in the eBusiness Center (pdf) where I’m working, not in a productive environment (without any surprise, we use Oracle ;-), but as a local DB for the developers.

Our usage of MySQL seems to represent actually the strategic positioning of this product in the market, i.e. MySQL is trying to sell its product as an easy-to-use but professional and scalable database. This role was in the past played by Microsoft SqlServer, which is now becoming more and more a direct competitor of Oracle and IBM DB2. Consequently, the MS product is also becoming more and more complexe and expensive. Microsoft leaves this niche market, I mean the market for test, development and small productive environment, which requests less functionality than the ones you can find in Oracle, DB2 or SqlServer.

MySql is a good, performant and reliable database with a reduced set of functionalities, which are just ok for a lot of usages… The product works with a GNU-license, the support fees are really reasonable. It is also interesting to mention that MySQL is developping the product by its own, I mean they do not use the open-souce developers community. This is clearly a way for them to have the product development and technology-orientation under control. MySQL owns all the rights of its code.

I recently bought the last DVD live of Placebo called Soulmates never die – Live in Paris 2003.

It’s really a great and amazing DVD, incredible band, that’s fucking rock & roll!!

Frank Black appears on the last track, a famous cover from the Pixies called Where is my mind.