"Ain't life a bitch?" Billy Cole said in The Last Boy Scout and shot himself in the head. Well, yes, life is a bitch, especially if other people shoot you in the head as happens to peaceful monks in Burma.

Free-Burma.org declared this day to be the "International Bloggers' Day for Burma". Bloggers should cease posting for one day and just post the following banner:

Fair enough a deal for creating some awareness in this world! I probably create more awareness by posting at all again, but it's the effect that counts. If you got a blog, join in and whether you have a website or not: Join the list of participants

The first teaser trailer for the upcoming John Rambo movie which is set in Burma features this dialog:

John J. Rambo: You bringing any weapons?

Burnett: Of course not.

John J. Rambo: Then you ain't changin' nothin'.

Let's hope that the world won't need more weapons to change bitchin' life in Burma for the better!

ohloh is a pretty nice n' nifty web2.0 service, that allows anyone to assess Open Source projects and coders. I don't know, why I just now stumbled across it (my bro told me about it), but it is pretty decent.

The basic idea rocks as it combines good statistics gathered from openly available SCM (Source Code Management) tools like CVS, SVN and git (which btw rocks) with collective, subjective information won from the ohloh community. The latter works by providing the people the ability to give kudos to other contributors and by putting projects into one's stack. Stacking is an interesting idea as it not only allows you to see which projects are much used, but also allows for suggestions as on Amazon "other users also use...". Spiced with tagging(which doesn't really deserve this name though) and mashed up with Google maps, this makes an overall pretty good application.

The source code statistics are good, but still flawed. For example *lite CSS is mentioned to be "Mostly written in JavaScript", which obviously is bulls#%$ and I only made 100 commits in TikiWiki. But well, I made exactly 100, that's not bad either.. ;) Also I would wish some more RSS-feeds, for example for projects or contributors.

Anyways I today played three hours with the site and wish them good luck! The concept is great! :)

toggg died on sunday 17th June 2007 of a heart attack.

He was one of the first guys to start working with me together on TikiWiki, when I joined the project and he was the guy going to LinuxTag with me to promote Tiki there.

toggg was a great coder, almost fanatic open source advocate, loving father, wizard of regular expressions and a major pain in the ass if he wanted to!

Most people didn't get his nagging way to call attention to problems (and sometimes I became bored by it, too). Sadly this misunderstanding grew into a big antipathy in some TikiWiki admins. So even his best contributions were disrespected - as for example the Pear::Text_Wiki integration into Tiki. toggg might have had a love-hate relationship to some authorities in Tiki, but he definitely loved Tiki. So he used his knowledge to write a Pear::Text_Wiki parser and renderer for Tiki-syntax, because he saw the huge advantages, that would be opened up to Tiki. Sadly his work was cruely dismissed and nowadays even is removed from TikiWiki HEAD in a genocidous code cleanup action. I think, this code would have provided one of the biggest improvements ever and been a killer-feature for Tikiwiki.

Some time later toggg turned to spip - a french CMS - and when I talked to him on IRC, he often told me how kind the people there are and that they understand him and how well they work together. I don't know, if at spip there are better people or if their social development system just works better - but I'm damn sure, that he didn't behave much differently. And I'm very thankful to the people at spip, that they realized, what kind of guy toggg is and that they valued his code and contribution! I think one of the most beautiful evidences of his great relationship to spip can be found on flickr: I love toggg at flickr.

There's so much to tell about him... how he always loved to show pictures of his little daughter Lola; how he had to give his too old hens away, because he couldn't kill them himself; how openly and truely interested he approached strangers; how he used to say, that you only get to know a foreign country's people and language in bars; how he used to say, that there's no magic, just code; how he used to say "time no key"...

... he was a real hacker and a good friend!

• toggg's open source projects
• spip saying good bye
• pictures of toggg at flickr
• TikiWiki saying good bye

"toggg is three g"

I love you too, toggg !

EDIT: I just saw, that toggg even syndicated my blog-feed on his homepage - on the page "family" in the category "on the web". I didn't know that, we talked so little lately, because of my lack of time... oh, man, toggg, I'm so sorry, that I always postponed visiting you!!

I'm scum!
I'm a criminal!
I'm not worthy of living in this society!

Why?

Because I tell you about a number...

... a constant in an equation!

And this equation allows you to watch BlueRay-Discs! Pretty important a number for people and their cultural life, if you ask me!

If you know this number, then you can build devices and softwre to watch BlueRay-Discs! This number gives you the freedom to choose your way of watching your BlueRay-Disc! If this number will be kept secret to a small circle of people, then there will never be an OpenSource BlueRay-player software. Now that would be something worthy of the criminal, low-life scum of this society, that doesn't like to collaborate for the good of all...

13256278887989457651018865901401704640

The masses have already decided, that this number mustn't be kept secret.

I really got into biking again and so I today took my bike and just rode through the city looking for some jumps, stairs and fun. There is a stairway, that I once drove down on way to work - but only the first landing. There come some four or five landings after that, which are closer to each other and so the fear-factor rises there.. ;)

Today I then thought, I'll have a look at it again. And while I was riding in that direction a kid cruised besides me and asked me: "Are you going to ride down those stairs?" I honestly answered: "Not all of them." Which resulted in the trivial answer: "I do!" Well, after I got past the first landing and the little boy was already riding down the second one just saying: "I do brake though...". When I then looked at the next stairs I only thought: 'hmm, not so much different than the ones before....' and got going. And it really was no issue, just my style doesn't feel smooth, which is a pity. That's also why I never really like riding stairs - it's a necessity in city-biking, but I can't make it feel or look smooth... well, gotta work on that. At least I stopped completely in between the landings and kept standing on my bike thinking of how to change style for the next one... looks like I'm finally progressing on my bike again! :)

Those kids are awesome, they don't think much of consequences and they just do. I was really thankful to meet him there today to show me the way...