my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Automatic Updates for WordPress

I'd like to introduce you (or rather the WordPress users amongst you) to one of the lesser known gems for WordPress - the Automatic Updater plugin. This plugin automatically updates your WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins and themes, which is a boon, especially if you have to maintain several WordPress installations.

Numbers: A Mathematics Toolkit For node.js / JavaScript

Numbers is an advanced mathematics toolkit for JavaScript and Node.js developed by Steve Kaliski, @sjkaliski: Numbers provides a comprehensive set of mathematical tools that currently are not offered in JavaScript. These tools include: Basic calculations Calculus Matrix Operations Prime Numbers Statistics Very interesting stuff.

Tuesday December 18th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Bauhaus and Web Design

The other day I've read this somewhat older yet still relevant article by Simon Collision: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design. In a stream of thought kind of way it deals with the main tenets of the Bauhaus school of thought and how those relate to modern and future web design. It draws upon Bauhaus ideas such as "form follows function", simplicity and the unification of art, craft, and technology - most of which seem oddly familiar in the context ...

Sunday December 16th, 2012 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

Sauce Labs – Cross Browser Testing

Cross browser testing is a notoriously cumbersome problem. When developing web applications or websites any decent web developer or designer will try to test her work not only on her local machine, browser and operating system combination but will strive to cover as many reasonable environments that hold a certain market share as possible. Provisioning all those configurations with every possible combination of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer and OSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS can cause quite some headaches, not ...

Wednesday December 12th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Virtues of a Programmer

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." - Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition), O'Reilly Media Recently, I've come across those remarkable words by Larry Wall, creator of Perl, again. When I first read them many years ago they made quite some impression on me. I think those virtues subsume pretty well what it means to be a good programmer. Besides, I just like Larry Wall's witty, sometimes quirky, way of putting ...

Sunday December 9th, 2012 by Bjoern in Software

Publishing for tablets – A market ripe for disruption

This week there were two quite intriguing posts on 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog: Tablets are waiting for their Movable Type Publishers shouldn't be app developers Both posts deal with the shortcomings of magazine and newspaper publishing for tablets like the iPad. Currently, publishing for the iPad and other tablets mostly amounts to magazine publishers writing native apps that wrap their content. Given that magazine publishers usually don't specialize in software development more often than not this entails slow, unstable apps and a generally ...

Sunday December 2nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Business, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

New publishing tools

Recently, I came across a few interesting publishing tools: ShareLaTeX allows you to collaboratively edit LaTeX documents: https://www.sharelatex.com Anthologize is aWordPress plugin with which you can export the content of a WordPress blog as an eBook: http://anthologize.org Docverter is an open source server software that allows you to convert markup formats such as HTML, Markdown or LaTeX into print publishing formats like PDF or EPUB: http://www.docverter.com, source code: https://github.com/docverter/docverter These tools should be very interesting to those who produce online content and would like to ...

Saturday November 24th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

WebSphere Blues

Lately, I've been doing a lot of work for a customer involving deployment and configuration of applications on IBM WebSphere Application Server. While I really dislike being the grumpy developer I just have to say that WebSphere Application Server - at least till version 6, which is the one I'm working on - sucks beyond measure. I can hardly think of any piece of software as ill-conceived, convoluted and error-prone as this one. Usually, Java applications live up to SUN's "Write once, run anywhere" claim but not so with IBM ...

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Open-sourcing more of my stuff: Twoice, a ‘Twitter for voice messages’ prototype

Twoice is a prototype of a 'Twitter for voice messages' app built with Grails 1.3.6 (http://grails.org) and some HTML5 and Comet for the UI. It's a nice idea, which has been lingering on my hard disk far too long so I've now released it under the MIT license: https://github.com/BjoernKW/Twoice

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Topicalizer – an information extraction suite – now open source

Topicalizer is a suite of text analysis and information extraction tools developed by me. It used to be available under http://www.topicalizer.com. However, I unfortunately don't have any time any more to properly maintain it, which is why I'm open-sourcing the code for others to learn from and build upon: https://github.com/BjoernKW/Topicalizer

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.