On Feb 9 Leo & Richy got married in Freising. I was asked to be the official photographer for the wedding. It was a fun wedding and a great experience being in charge of the pictures for such an important event.
I just uploaded a subset of the 900 or so images I took, so go check out the gallery of my favorite shots.

Technorati Tags: photography, wedding

I stumbled across Remember the Milk a couple of weeks ago. It's a web app to manage task lists with great integration with pretty much anything I use: You can email tasks to your todo lists from the blackberry, it supports iCal style export, it has an iPhone optimized app, plus there is a quicksilver plugin!

Apart from being very useful and saving you the pain of synchronizing task lists across platforms all the time, what I like the most about the application is its use of keyboard shortcuts that really boost your efficiency when dealing with the app. Haven't seen anything like it in a web app so far. So go check it out, it's free.

Technorati Tags: GTD, productivity, web 2.0

I was recently asked to shoot photos at a wedding of friends and ended up with a memory card that wasn't readable in a camera or in a compact flash drive at all anymore. No idea why this happened, I've been using this camera for about a year now and never had any problems.

Since it was crucial to get the images off anyways I had to look into data recovery tools for the first time. I found PC Inspector and it saved my day. It was pretty slow to get about 400 MB of RAW files off the card but it did the job. I was able to recover all files with the exception of a couple broken ones! So if you ever end up in a similar situation, have a look at this tool.

Technorati Tags: bugs, photography, data recovery

This isn't really hot news, I came across this story a couple of times last year but haven't blogged about it. Amazon is renting out capacity in their Datacenters and charge based on volume traffic. You can rent disk storage or CPU time on virtual machines.
It is definitely an interesting option for fast growing startups and other companies who are not sure about their short term growth. In the long run, I don't think it is a solid foundation for any IT focused company to have your most valuable assets, your data, stored with someone else no matter how reliable Amazon is.

The most interesting aspect of all of amazons web services to me is the mechanical turk. The term comes from an 18th century chess playing machine, which turned out to be controlled by a human inside. Amazon's concept however is to reverse the idea of a web application by switching the roles of human and computer. Humans are a lot better at certain tasks then even the most advanced computers, so amazon provides a Web Service API for programmers to describe their problems and request a solution. Humans can then register to complete these tasks and supply the solution back to the software. I'm really curious how this service will be used.

Technorati Tags: amazon, hosting, mechanical turk, web 2.0

I guess by now everyone has heard about fridays offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo for $45 billion. Up to now, all I read online were the mere announcements of the proposal, this article by the iht.com and this one in wired provide more detailed analyses of possible consequences.
Personally I'm not sure if this deal, if it goes through as planned, is going to push microsoft into a better position on its online activities competing against google. In terms of market share (in areas where google is actually making money), yahoo is nowhere near its competitor and microsoft doesn't really have anything successful to add to that.

Technorati Tags: google, merger, microsoft, yahoo