Walter Soldierer’s Blog

A black Google home page! At first I thought there must be a problem with my monitor. But then I noticed the link to explain why it’s black. Google Germany joined the “Licht aus für unser Klima” campaign, showing their support for the idea that turning out the light on the evening of December 8 for for minutes would send a clear signal to the participants of the Bali climate conference. (more…)

Some time ago I won an iPod Shuffle which I use as a backup device for playing podcasts. Because fast-forwarding is too slow, the Shuffle is not a good device for playing podcasts. But what really annoys me is the fact that you have no control over the files unless you use Apple’s massive iTunes music player. People who never had one won’t believe this, but you can’t just use a file manager like Explorer to copy or delete files on an iPod. Actually you can, but the Shuffle won’t recognize or play them. I found a tool to fix this problem! (more…)

My spam prevention strategy includes a great free service called Spam Gourmet which provides me with ‘disposable’ on-the-fly email addresses. If I do not trust the site that asks me to enter my email address, I just fill in an address like xyz.5.soldierer@spamgourmet.com. Spam Gourmet will then forward up to 5 emails to my secret private email address. On another site I would enter abc.2.soldierer@xoxy.net, and Spam Gourmet, who also owns the xoxy.net domain, would forward max. 2 emails. Using disposable email addresses, I can safely drop some bait for the harvesting robots here: (more…)

If you, like me, have opened a number of social network accounts, you have entered your personal profile multiple times at different web sites. You then have to again search and select your friends. Isn’t it annoying to go through this process over and over again?

When I heard about Google’s OpenSocial initiative, I thought that this had finally come to an end. OpenSocial will make the web a better place and social networking will be much easier than before, they say. Great! Google will enable us to register our profile and friends only once. We would then simply give Facebook our OpenSocial URL and OpenSocial password and they would use an OpenSocial API call to rerieve our personal and friends info. If we add a new friend, we would only have to do this once for all online communities that we participate in. What a wonderful virtual social world this would be…

But… this does not seem to be OpenSocial’s main purpose. (more…)

Another smart acquisition by Google, proving that miniblogs are considered an important social networking phenomenon by big influencial organisations, too. I was wondering which of the miniblogs would be bought first. Twitter lost. With its strong mobile integration and RSS capabilities, Jaiku obviously was a more interesting acquisition target for Google. Here is the announcement. Lets hope that Google keeps up Jaiku’s good work.

I was wondering why Nokia had not bought Jaiku already. The Jaiku founders are former Nokia employees, and Jaiku works great with mobile devices, with special client software for Nokia phones. Also, Nokia is building the OVI interactive portal as the next step in “connecting people”, with music and games. Jaiku’s social networking features would have nicely complemented this service. For more information about Nokia’s OVI site see my on-conference blog post.

Jaiku is great. I let it import CSS feeds from all my social networking sites. Webvet.jaiku.com is the easiest way to track me online

One of my favorite podcasts is Security Now with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. I am a long term subscriber, actually I didn’t miss a single episode so far. Finally, after 2 years of enjoying Security Now and applying the lessons learned both at home and at work, I was able to give something back. Steve:

One of our listeners, actually very courteous, a Walter Soldierer I think is how I pronounce his name, he provided me with the name of the guy at VeriSign, and email address, who’s in charge of the whole PIP technology program. His name is Gary Krall at VeriSign. I sent Gary a piece of email saying, hey, I was really glad to get your name and email.

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