A part of every SharePoint implementation is a proper training plan for employees. Without proper training, your SharePoint rollout is quite likely to fail (though, naturally, the reverse is not guaranteed either; that is, if you hold a training it will be a success, as many factors play a part in this).

Being now in my second big implementation in the Asia Pacific region, each time for a big MNC, here are some of my findings and experiences (none of which I claim to be complete or 100% accurate, please see the first point). Going into more detail for each item would result in a huge growth of this entry's size, resulting more likely in a whitepaper-worthy length. The purpose, of course, is to be more thought-provoking than detailed.

Things that need to be considered regarding training of staff are

• No training plan fits all companies!
  There is no standard training plan template that can be applied to all companies and all SharePoint implementations. As with all IT projects, a SharePoint implementation is highly complex. And so are the requirements for the training.
  Therefore, some of the points I mention below will not be applicable for your specific situation. If you are a small office with 20 users, holding sessions with as few as possible users will usually be more beneficial than holding one big training session for everyone. If you are a large MNC, you usually can't provide training in one language only, but rather need to translate it into multiple languages. For that reason, everything else that will be mentioned here CAN be taken into consideration for your training plan, but you should always consider your own needs and the relevance to your situation.
  
  
• Different kinds of end users
  For example, you might have users that use your SharePoint mostly for data consumption, and users that contribute a lot. Naturally, the second groups needs a training with a stronger focus on how to add, edit, and maintain data stored on SharePoint. Another possibility is that you have "regular" users as well as "power" users, the latter which is allowed to and responsible for creating new lists & libraries. Training everyone on how to set these up is clearly overkill, but providing such a training for key users definitely beneficial.
  Another option would be to hold trainings for different departments (or any other kind of user groups that you can identify). The Finance department members might be more interested in learning about Excel Services and dashboards, whereas the Sales people want to know how they can quickly find all the relevant product information that they need.
  
  
• Different locations
  While there are situations where you have all employees that need to be trained, more likely you will have dispersed teams, sometimes spread across countries or even continents. So you will need to hold multiple sessions for all those teams. One option would be to visit all those teams and hold the training directly, though this is obviously a very expensive one.
  Another alternative would be to train some key users ("train the trainer"), which afterwards train colleagues at their own location. This also gives you the benefit of having trainings in different languages (see below).
  Yet another option is to hold training sessions by sharing your desktop with other people through a web-based tool. That way, you can train people located in Paris while you're sitting in your office in Seattle.
  
  
• Different training times
  If you need to conduct multiple trainings at a location, plan for different timings as well. The reason? People have different schedules with some regular and some irregular items. If you plan to hold 2 hour trainings on 3 different days, try to spread them across the day. That way, it will be easier for people to join a training session, as it is less likely that it will conflict with their calendar.
  
  
• Trainings in different languages
  As mentioned before, you might need to train people in different countries in different languages. By holding trainings in one language only, you risk that not all participants understand the contents clearly, and you risk that even though they attended a training, they do not understand how to use all the functionalities covered.
  It is thus recommended to hold trainings in multiple languages where it makes sense. If there are only 3 people that speak a different language, translating your whole training materials would be overkill. But if you have let's say 100 people, you could consider it a must.
  How should those trainings be held? One option would be to hold them bilingual, e.g. in Chinese and English (assuming that English is the commonly used language in your company). You present in English, and someone else (e.g. a knowledgeable colleague, or better a translator) conducts the training in Chinese, both of you switching to one another regularly (~ once per slide). The drawback here is that you will have to include a lot more time for this kind of training, but more severe is the fact that most people will probably stop listening to you and concentrate on the native speaker only. Thus, a "train the trainer" beforehand and the local native speaker conducting the local training by himself makes more sense.
  
  
• Different kinds of trainings
  A training should not be a one-time thing only. It is simply impossible to include everything that you want to train people on in a single training session, so you need to plan for a few different trainings.
  The first kind of training would usually be an introduction on SharePoint that covers the reasons for the implementation, the benefits that can be achieved for the company and the users, and the most basic functionalities.
  Afterwards, it is possible to hold small "refresher trainings" to allow those employees that could not participate the initial training before (e.g. due to time constraints, or as they joined the company only afterwards) get the relevant knowledge. Furthermore, some people might take up the opportunity to go through a training again and get a better understanding.
  
  
• Different formats
  There are many ways how a SharePoint training can be conducted. Michael Sampson goes into more detail in his book "User Adoption Strategies" about classroom training and web-based training. Another option is to hold a one to one training.
  Each of them has its benefits and drawbacks. Holding a one to one training is definitely the most effective, but also the slowest (imagine having to train everyone this way!) and most expensive. Web-based training, conducted for example through a tool like WebEx, has the benefit of allowing participants in different locations to join. However, it will be difficult for them to do some exercises during this training session, more likely this kind of training would follow a presentation style.
  The most standard kind of training, the classroom training, allows participants to work on exercises, and get support and feedback easily and immediately. The fewer participants here, the more effective the training usually is (yet, the total number of people to be trained and the timeframe of the trainings play a big factor here as well).
  
  
• Executive support
  As with most things, having executive support shows that the company in total is committed. There may be a lower resistance level to participate in a training if employees are asked by their superior to go. So if you set up a training, why not let the CEO send an email to staff to inform them about it? Or alternatively, ask the department managers to notify their staff about the trainings, asking them to participate.
  
  
• Provide registration possibilities
  If possible, give people a choice on their training schedule. As mentioned before, different people have different working schedules, and they know best when a training for them would fit in. So why not set up a training registration page on SharePoint, where they can then select the training they would like to participate in?

Comments (0)

Disclaimer: As my intention is to write about the implementation in general (as for most of it, you could say that it is relatively straightforward to do; only OOTB SharePoint functionality combined with some SharePoint Designer magic is used), you will not find detailed steps on how to create a similar solution here. However, I will briefly describe some tricky parts which I hope will help others doing something similar.

Shortly before the recent FIFA World Cup started, I was approached by a colleague asking me if I could implement a tipping competition for it in SharePoint. Their office already had plans for a regular "offline" competition locally, but in order to promote our SharePoint based intranet, and to let others join as well, he suggested to do it in SharePoint.

After a little bit of testing, I came up with a working, though not perfect solution (the drawbacks and "security issues" are mentioned below). It has been, however, used without any major issues, and can be considered a success.

The Rules

For each match in the World Cup, people are allowed to submit a tip. We decided to let them tip the result after 90 minutes (irrelevant for the group stage, but important for Round of 16 onwards), and awarded points for each tip as follows:

1. 5 points if the exact result is tipped (e.g. both result of the match and the tip are 2-1, or 3-3)
2. 3 points for the correctly predicted goal difference of a match (e.g. if the result is 2-1 and the tip is 1-0 or 3-2; or if the result is 1-1 and the tip is 2-2)
3. 1 point if the correct winner was predicted, but the goal difference is different (e.g. if the result is 1-0, but the tip is 3-0 or 2-0)
4. 0 points otherwise

Implementation Basics

 
A dedicated site was created for the competition. In that site, the following elements were created

• a "Group" page for each of the 8 groups (A-H). Tipping for the individual matches of a group is done through here
• a dedicated page for each of the later stages (Round of 16, Quarter Finals, ...) on which tipping for the corresponding matches is possible
• a scoreboard page that displays the current standings of the tipping competition
• a list that holds all the fixtures of the World Cup (group matches, Round of 16, .... Final)
• a list in which all the tips are stored. As authentication is done through Active Directory, it is always possible to know who submitted which tip ("Created By" field)
• a list in which comments are stored. These comments are displayed on all pages, allowing employees to chat and talk about the World Cup

Additionally, two Excel spreadsheets were created. The first spreadsheet is used to calculate the points of all tips by connecting to the SharePoint fixtures list and tips list, and comparing each tip with the actual result and awarding the points as defined above. Based upon this, a ranking is updated each time new results were entered into the SharePoint fixtures list.

The second spreadsheet is used to display these rankings in a Web Part on the scoreboard page.

This could have also been achieved inside a single spreadsheet,  however in order to prevent other people from accessing the calculations but still be able to show the results, this "two file solution" was implemented.

How it looks like

The entry page of the tipping competition site contains a short welcome message and some brief infos. Below that, the next few matches are displayed, and the official World Cup RSS feeds from FIFA are displayed inside widgets from Widgetbox:

To make it very easy to navigate among the different group pages and other pages, all of them can be accessed from the site's quicklaunch:

As mentioned before, on each page the comments list, called "Have Your Say", is displayed:


What I'm doing in this case is actually displaying two Web Parts: the top Web Part is a Custom List Form Web Part that allows employees to add a new comment, below that is the List Web Part which displays the latest comments. In order to make it look as if they are one, the bottom Web Part's title bar.

A group page shows all matches of a group, the results (if the match was played already), and the tip for the user accessing the page. Once a match has started, tipping is no longer possible:

The pages for the later stages (Round of 16, Quarter Finals, ...) contain the corresponding matches. As it can be seen below, a tip has been submitted for the match Uruguay-Netherlands, but none yet for Germany-Spain:

As mentioned before, the ranking is stored inside an Excel spreadsheet, which is displayed on the scoreboard page:

Technical Information

The Fixtures list is used to store all fixtures. Initially, only the group stage matches were entered with empty Home Goals and Away Goals. As soon as a result was final, it was entered in here.

Later onwards, the corresponding matches from the next stages were entered here as well. To differentiate between the different groups and stage levels, so that the corresponding matches can be show on the appropriate match pages, the column Group contains the group (e.g. A) or the stage level (e.g. Semi Final) for a match.

When people submit a tip, it is stored in the Tipps (sic!) list.The additional columns in this Custom List are Fixture, which is a lookup column that references the ID column from the Fixtures list, and Home Goals and Away Goals (in this case of course not the actual result, but rather the tip by the user). We can see who submitted which Tip in the Created By column.

The Excel spreadsheet imports these two lists. The evaluation for each match is done at the Tips list level. That means, for each tip it is being calculated how many points should be awarded.This is done by comparing the actual Match results (added here via lookup for easy referencing) with the tipped result, and awarding points for draw, home win, and away win. For example, for home win it is first checked if the actual result was a home win AND the tip was a home wine, and if not 0 points are awarded. If it was a home win, we then check if the tip and the actual result are the same and award 5 points if so, otherwise we check the if the difference for both results (actual and tipped) is the same, and award 3 points, otherwise 1 point.

Points for away win are calculated the same way, the calculation for a draw is easier.

Lastly, we simply sum up the points from those 3 possibilities (note: at least 2 of them are 0 points, of course) in the Points to Award column.

These points are then summed up per user, and a ranking can be created.

Technical Snippets

While implementing this solution, I came across a few points that are worth mentioning:

One small problem I had was that I needed to show data from two separate lists. On the tipping pages, I wanted to display the tip of the current user (1) from the Tipps list, as well as the match details (2) from the Fixtures list.

To achieve this, I created a new Linked Source in SharePoint Designer made out of these two lists with a Join:

As it can be seen here, it was then possible to access both of them through a single connection:

In the Data View Web Part used to display the match details and the tip, I then filtered the Tips by the current user and by the ID from the Fixtures list. That way, only the tip for the current match by the current user is selected.

If no tip has been submitted, and thus the row count is 0, a button for first time tipping ("Tip!") is displayed, otherwise the existing tip together with an "Update!" button is shown.

I also wanted to prevent users from both submitting after a match had started and submitting more than one tip. The first step was to check if the current match has started already, and if so, do not display the Tip/Update button.

For this, I created two variables: one for the current time, the other one for the match time.

<xsl:variable name="matchdaytime">

     <xsl:value-of select="number(translate(ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(/dsQueryResponse/Fixtures/Rows/Row[@ID=$FixtureID]/@Match_x0020_Time),1033,'yyyyMMdd HHmmss'),' ',''))"/>

   </xsl:variable>

   <xsl:variable name="curentdaytime">

     <xsl:value-of select="number(translate(ddwrt:TodayIso(),'-T:Z',''))"/>

   </xsl:variable>

With these two variables, it was then possible to act accordingly (here shown with Update):

<xsl:choose>

       <xsl:when test="$matchdaytime &gt; $curentdaytime">

        <input id="updateTippButton{@ID}" type="button" class="button" value="Update!" />

       </xsl:when>

       <xsl:otherwise>Tipping Period over</xsl:otherwise>

</xsl:choose>

 

As it can be seen, there is no action defined here once the button is clicked. I make use of jQuery in order to process the tip and submit it.

The following script shows the two important functions involved here: one is the $(document).ready() function from jQuery, which attaches an event handler to all Update/Tip buttons (uniquely identified with the match ID). The other one is the Tipp function that submits the tip (either through adding a new tip or updating the existing one) .

<script language="javascript">

  function Tipp(fixtureID, tippID, cmd) {

  //alert (fixtureID + "--" + tippID + "--" + cmd);

  var Home = $("#HomeTeamGoals"+fixtureID).val();

  var Away = $("#AwayTeamGoals"+fixtureID).val();

  //alert(Home+" : "+Away);

  if(Home != '' && Away != '' && Home>=0 && Home<=12 && Away >=0 && Away<=12) {

  var id = "";

   if(cmd=="Update")

   id = "<Field Name=\"ID\">"+tippID+"</Field>";

        var batch =

            "<Batch OnError=\"Continue\"> \

                <Method ID=\"1\" Cmd=\""+cmd+"\"> \

                 "+id+"\

                    <Field Name=\"Fixture\">" + fixtureID + "</Field> \

                    <Field Name=\"Home_x0020_Goals\">" + Home + "</Field> \

                    <Field Name=\"Away_x0020_Goals\">" + Away + "</Field> \

                </Method> \

            </Batch>";

        var soapEnv =

            "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?> \

            <soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" \

                xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" \

                xmlns:soap=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\"> \

              <soap:Body> \

                <UpdateListItems xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/\"> \

                  <listName>Tipps</listName> \

                  <updates> \

                    " + batch + "</updates> \

                </UpdateListItems> \

              </soap:Body> \

            </soap:Envelope>";

        $.ajax({

            url: "http://ap.landisgyr.net/WC2010/_vti_bin/lists.asmx",

            beforeSend: function(xhr) {

                xhr.setRequestHeader("SOAPAction",

                "http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/UpdateListItems");

            },

            type: "POST",

            dataType: "xml",

            data: soapEnv,

            error: showError,

            success: proceedSuccess,

            contentType: "text/xml; charset=utf-8"

        });

    } else

  {

    alert("Incorrect Input");

    document.getElementById("newTippButton"+fixtureID).disabled = false;

}

}

function showError(xData, status, error) {

     alert("Error: " + status + " - " + error);

}

function proceedSuccess(xData, status, requestObject) {

location.reload();

}

$(document).ready(function() {

    $(".button").click(function() {

     //new

     if($(this).attr("id").replace('newTippButton','') != $(this).attr("id")) {

       Tipp($(this).attr("id").replace('newTippButton',''), 0, "New");

     }

     //update existing

     if($(this).attr("id").replace('updateTippButton','') != $(this).attr("id")) {

     var id = $(this).attr("id").replace('updateTippButton','');

          Tipp($("#FixtureID"+id).val(), id, "Update");

     }

    });

});

</script>

Drawbacks / Issues of my implementation:

As there was not much time left before the start of the World Cup, and also because I was busy with several other more important tasks, I focused on getting the solution to work even if it meant that there'd be some smaller bugs or issues.

One of them is that I did not any possibility for the users to submit multiple tips. As it can be seen in my code above, I only handled the case of submitting a single tip. So if a user wanted to submit multiple tips, for example for all matches in Group C, he/she had to tip each match individually.

One security issue was that there was the risk that people would discover that they can enter their tips directly into the list, and would then update them accordingly after the matches. I did not look for any way to prevent this, but simply did a timestamp check in the Excel spreadsheet. If a tip was submitted after a match started, it would've been highlighted. It didn't happen.

As for the evaluation, there was still a lot of manual processing required. I could've tried to automate the processes more (e.g. I had to create the ranking manually), but in the end I decided that it would not be worth the effort. Doing it manually was a 5 minute task each day, and I didn't know how long it would take me to create a fully automated version.

Summary

I really enjoyed creating this solution. While it definitely isn't the technically most perfect, and it also lacks some other things (e.g. a very nice design....), it was a nice endeavour different from my other SharePoint activities. It allowed me to show my colleagues what else could be done with SharePoint.

Comments (0)

Once again, I've decided to redesign my website, and thus also the blog. In addition to that, I've moved the blog from the subdomain rene.modery.net to modery.net, as it is the major content provider for my website.

I made a few additions as well, e.g. it is now possible to "like" my postings here on facebook (Update: facebook's "like" feature is currently buggy, I deactivated it for the moment), and you can see my latest twitter update in the navigation bar. Lastly, I made it easier for readers to contact me, more information on the Connect with Rene page.

I will also take a new direction with my postings, and write a lot more about work related issues. Several articles about some SharePoint solutions I developed recently, the value of SharePoint as I see it, and some governance thoughts are currently in development.

Comments (1)

I rarely visit Singapore's busy shopping street, unless I have a reason to.

Waiting for my girlfriend before dinner, I decided to sit down and drink something, watching cars on one side and people on the other side passing by, reminding me of how busy, active, lively, and fast-paced Singapore is.

Comments (0)

It's been quite some time since my last postings. In the mean time, I've been busy with settling in my new job, planning my project here, and starting with the implementation.

In January and early March, I've been to Sydney for around 10 days each time. I had a very good time there, the colleagues there were very friendly and helpful, and I can say that it was a great start into the new job.

Last week, I was in Noida (next to New Delhi), India, for similar reasons: talk to the management team and get their requirements for my project. Again, I had some very productive meetings with very good feedback, and I'll now be busy with the next implementation.

 

On a separate note, my family will come over from Germany in May, and we'll all go on a short family holiday together to Phuket, looking forward to that.

Comments (0)

January
Holiday on Christmas Island

February
Went to China for work
Handed in my thesis, finished my degree

March
Went to Indonesia for work
Went to Philippines for work

April
Got an iPhone
Went diving
Went back to Germany for 9 days, return via Beijing
Started my aquarium

May
Singapore didn't want any tax from me (at first)

June
I think nothing happened in June....

July
Holiday in Haikou  (Also see http://rene.modery.net/1_living_working_travelling_in_singapore__asia/archive/405_recent_holidays.html)
Applied for PR

August
Holiday in Taiwan  (Also see http://rene.modery.net/1_living_working_travelling_in_singapore__asia/archive/405_recent_holidays.html)
Stopped being single :)

September
Holiday in Guangzhou (Also see http://rene.modery.net/1_living_working_travelling_in_singapore__asia/archive/405_recent_holidays.html)
PR application got rejected

October
My Birthday

November
Bought a very cheap fish-eye lens

December
Last month with Heidelberg Asia Pte Ltd
Went on Holiday to Krabi with girlfriend and sister

Comments (3)

There's no need to mention the importance of a good network of contacts when it comes to looking for job opportunities. One of my student jobs I got through a friend (for his father's company), as he knew a bit about what I was doing as a part time job then, and they required someone to help them in that area.

Another job at SAP I got through my former flatmate. He did some Java programming there, and as he was going to Australia for an internship for a few months, they needed a replacement. I just came back from my internship in Singapore and was looking for a new student job, thus it was a perfect timing, and I took over from him.

These are cases where a network of people that I had close contact with in "real life" helped me. However, I also have two examples (my two most recent jobs) that show that it's also possible to find a job through one of the social networking websites. I'm sure that there are people who found a job through, for example, facebook or studiVZ, but the more important networks for these 'business-related' activities are LinkedIn and XING. LinkedIn has a lot more people on it, whereas the XING interface is a lot more usable in my opinion.

As for the job before my current one, I got it through XING. I contacted some people in Singapore through it, as I wanted to find an internship/thesis job here. One of the people I messaged replied saying that there might be an opportunity for me. As it turned out, I asked just at the right time, as they were looking for someone to help them with an IT project, and were considering hiring an intern for it.

As for my current job, which I started recently,  I was contacted by a headhunter through LinkedIn. As I always keep my profiles as much up-to-date as possible, the headhunter saw my SharePoint experience, and as it matched the requirements nearly 100%, he contacted me and asked if I was looking for a job (which I actually also was at that time).

Comments (0)

After nearly 2 years and 4 months with my current company, I will start working for another one here in Singapore from mid-January onwards.

I definitely learned a lot during my employment here at my current company, and gained a lot of experience in different fields. It was a great work environment, with great colleagues and a very interesting job scope.

My new job will be very similar to my the old one, but with some more responsibilities. I'm already very excited about the opportunities this brings with it, and I'm looking forward to applying my knowledge and experience which I gained during the past nearly 2.5 years in a new environment.

Comments (1)

Right now, there's a book warehouse sale organised by Penguin Books at the Singapore Expo.

I was hoping to get some good business books (I didn't....), but didn't even think about any IT books (which I got!). They had several very good books on various topics (Cisco related, Adobe related, Microsoft related, some Unix/Linux books, PHP, Ruby, ...), and to my surprise even three SharePoint books, which I bought:

If I had bought these three books on amazon.com, I would've paid a bit more than $110 (USD, that is). At the sale, I paid $10(SGD) each! At the current exchange rate, that's about $21.72(USD).

Comments (1)

For a few days now, I'm using Dropbox. It's a service that lets you store your files online, but with a really great integration into your operating system (they support Windows, Linux, and MacOS!), so that you can access them nearly everywhere very comfortably.

I'm using it so that I can now easily access some shared files on my netbook, my laptop, my office laptop, and even my iPhone without having multiple copies floating around! Before that, I always had to copy a document on my thumbdrive and carry it with me (and no, I did not always have the latest version with me, and yes, I sometimes had a few copies of a document....)

The 2GB version is free (which can be slightly expanded, please see the end of this posting for more info), if you need more space they offer a 50GB and a 100GB version for a monthly fee.

Their Features page gives a good overview of their service:

File Sync
Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically.

File Sharing
Sharing files is simple and can be done with only a few clicks.

Online Backup
Dropbox backs up your files online without you having to think about it. 

Web Access
A copy of your files are stored on Dropbox's secure servers. This lets you access them from any computer or mobile device.

Security & Privacy
Dropbox takes the security and privacy of your files very seriously.

Mobile Device Access
Free Dropbox iPhone app

 

Also, if you edit or delete a file, a history of the change is kept and you can go back to a previous state within 30 days:

 

You can also see what was changed when in a nice overview tab (web version):

 

Files can be stored within folders (web version):

 

Here's the menu for a file as seen on the web version:

 

As I said, Dropbox can also be tightly integrated into your operating system. As I'm using Windows, I'll show some examples of the Dropbox Window 'client' here.

During installation, you can specify where Dropbox should store the documents. Yes, that means a local version of the documents inside your Dropbox will be available!
After the installation, you can find the Dropbox symbol in the taskbar:

A single click opens the settings for it:

 

Double-clicking opens the location that you specified during the installation (of course you can also simply navigate there through Explorer):

 

Additionally, for the folders within your Dropbox, you get the following menu for viewing deleted files and sharing the folder when you right-click:

 

This is how the contents of the folder look like. Not much difference to a regular folder in Windows, but the difference is that any changes made here (e.g. copy&pasting a document into here, or editing a doc) will be synchronised to the Dropbox server, and from there then to all other locations that you set up. For example, if I upload a document via the web interface from my office laptop, I can later on access that document on my laptop, netbook, AND iPhone.

 

 

The difference between the Windows version and the iPhone version is that the documents in the iPhone version do not get synchronised immediately, but only when you access them. But you have the option to set favourites, which are documents that get downloaded immediately and are available for 'offline access'

Startscreen for the iPhone application

 

Overview of all folders inside my Dropbox:

 

Inside the 'SharePoint' folder:

 

Viewing the document list:

 

My favourites (documents that are stored directly on the iPhone):

 

Here's how an Excel spreadsheet looks like on the iPhone (in landscape mode):

 

And this is the internal PDF viewer (portrait mode)

 

 

As I said before, the service is free for the 2GB version. Additionally, if you refer a friend or sign up through a referral, you get an additional 250MB:

 

So if you're interested in testing or even using it, here's my referral link: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTI4MzQ1ODQ5

PS: If you complete the first 5 steps on the Getting Started page, you'll get an additional 250MB:

Comments (1)

Nine years ago, my English teacher (I "majored" in English & French in my last 2 years in school, which means that those 2 classes had a bigger weight than the others on my final grade) asked me to give a short summary of a TIME magazine article about Napster in class. I still remember how fascinated I was with this story at that time, as it provided a good view into the background story of the initial development of Napster.

In a way, Napster changed the world. Peer-to-Peer networks are more than common nowadays, filesharing is an issue more than ever before. That's why reading this article again made me see it in a different light, at that time I did not fully understand the impact that one teenager would have on the content industry.

The article from October 2000 can be found for free on the TIME magazine website under Meet the Napster.

Comments (0)

During the past 7 or so days, I was ocassionally working on some changes to the blog here. Besides several minor modifications (mostly to the CSS stylesheet, some corrections in the lifetype templates), I also added 2 slightly more important functionalities.

1. I removed the old Archive links on the navigation to the left (they were pointing to individual months), and replaced them with a single page that contains ALL entries that I've ever written:
   
   
   In order to get this done, I first wrote a small (ok, tiny! just a few lines of code in the end) plugin for lifetype, that fetches and returns all blog postings (somehow I couldn't find this in the existing functionality, maybe I just overlooked it). This was my first PHP coding in a long time....
   Additionally, I then created a Custom Template for this new Archive page, that applies the viewing logic to the long list of entries, and displays it as it can be seen above.
   
2. The second addition to the blog are 'previous' and 'next' links in the viewing page of the individual postings:
   
   
   This makes it a lot easier to navigate through the blog posting by posting.
   

Comments (0)

Last weekend, I bought a 0.38x converter lens for just $5 at the 'Thieves Market' (you could say it's a flea market). Naturally, it isn't worth much more than those $5....

Today, I bought a step-down ring to be able to add it onto my existing 14-45mm lens, and went towards the Boat Quay area to take some first pictures with it. The results:

This is how much I see with the 14-45mm lens at 14mm regularly:

Once I add the converter, I get this at 14mm:

Already a lot more to see! But clearly, I can also see the inside of the lens....

If I zoom in a bit until I don't see any black corners of the inside of the lens anymore, I get this angle (24mm):
Still a lot more than at the regular 14mm.

 

Of course, you get what you pay for, so the quality is not really good if I use this lens. But given the extremly cheap price, it's a nice toy!

Comments (0)

One great thing about Christmas time in Germany is the abundance of Christmas choclates and other sweet stuff. It just isn't the same in Singapore, Germany's got a huge variety.

After I was buying some new pants for myself with my girlfriend, we were briefly walking around in that mall and went inside a Cold Storage (a supermarket chain here in Singapore). Unlike other supermarkets here, like e.g. NTUC, going to a Cold Storage is a bit different as it caters more for the needs of foreigners ("ang moh supermarket", as my girlfriend said today jokingly). So just after a few meters, I spotted something that made my heart jump:

Those are "Lebkuchen umhüllt mit Schokolade", or "chocolate coated spiced cakes" (ginger bread).A true Christmas "delicacy"

Comments (1)

Click image for more background information!

Comments (0)