Both blogs run on Wordpress. Being on Wordpress, there’s multiple options if you want to improve the experience of your blog for mobile visitors. It all depends on how deep you want to go into configuration or fiddling with code.

If you are like me and want it to just work, WPTouch might be the right choice for you. Here’s all the work I had to do to enable what I believe is a great user experience for the mobile community. I selfhost my blogs. If you host your blog on wordpress.com, it is even easier.
Steps for selfhosters:

1. Download the plugin from the author’s website
2. UnZIP the files to a local directory
3. Upload the files to your blog
4. Bonus: Add “Windows CE” as additional mobile platform/user agent.
5. Donate (still on my to-do list)

The bonus step enables users of Windows Mobile devices using the mobile version of IE to share the same experience as non Windows phone users. By default the following user agents are supported in the current version of the plugin:

android, aspen, blackberry9500, blackberry9530, cupcake, dream, incognito, iphone, ipod, opera mini, webmate, webos

The settings dialog of WPTouch offers a dead simple way to add other devices or agents.

Sound easy? Is easy, painless and works. A more detailed description is available on wordpress.org and the author’s website.

Tip:
In case you do not have a mobile device like an iPhone to test your configuration, Apple’s Safari may be of help on Windows and on the Mac OS. Once you enabled the developer menu via the advanced configuration dialog it allows you can “fake” different Apple mobile devices/browsers. There’s also a menu option to add a custom user agent. Safari can then pretend to be almost any browser on any platform.

Other themes/plugins supporting mobile devices on Wordpress that look cool but I have not played with:

WPtap-Mobile
dotMobi

We have another HPC Pack 2008 family release now live!

The MPI Cluster Debugger (with C/C++ project templates) is now available via the Microsoft Download Center. Search for ‘hpc debugger’ or go directly to http://bit.ly/1Fe7Zb.

This package integrates the ‘F5’ experience of launching the Visual Studio 2008 MPI Cluster Debugger and your Windows HPC Server 2008 environment, for a better and more integrated debugging experience.

This is pretty awesome!

Resources

Windows HPC Server 2008 website
Microsoft HPC Community Portal
Windows HPC Learning Kit
Visual Studio website
Visual Studio on MSDN
HPC Team Blog

*haven’t blogged in a while. It felt so good when I hit the post Publish button in Live Writer, I just had to do it again …

Not that I ever had the chance to be part of his ponzi game, nor am I a direct victim of his wrong doings. But we all suffer the consequences from his pride (see below). He and a large number of other people, less smart, less convincing but with at least as much “power” are responsible for the worldwide economic crisis.

What I don’t get is why he an others could trick ordinary and extraordinary people in such a profound way. Well, you might say, those people now pay for their greed. And greed is what they drove into the hands of Mr. Madoff and alike. And while you are right, and greed is – in many, many cases – the root of all evil, we had set up institutions worldwide to protect us from our own greed if you will.

Institutions like the SEC in the US and similar agencies across the globe are meant to protect us from ourselves. Among many other things. So the most pressing question is what will  happen to those institutions and folks working there? Will they be prosecuted, punished, sentenced?

And BTW, Bernard L. Madoff is human after all, right?

“Mr. Madoff had apologized for the harm he inflicted on the clients who had trusted him, his employees and his family. He blamed his pride, which would not allow him to admit his failures as a money manager.”

New York Times

Now, that makes us all feel much better, doesn’t it? That and that his wife will not have said “Honey I’ll wait until you’re back.”

TechCrunch talks about it. Twitter is full of Tweets about it. The world talks about it. Bing. The new decision engine from Microsoft. I was not surprised to find this on TechCrunch:

The company’s (StatCounter) analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google’s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).

What surprised my though was my wife. While she continuously surprises me every day, this time it was a particular interesting surprise. It went like this:

Can I have Bing up here?

Their website is so much nicer and have you seen this? Lots of recommendations for related searches and even links to a buying guide and grill types and stuff. I love it. Can you make it my search engine, please?

Who could say no? Certainly not me! We’ve never talked about it other than me mentioning the fact that Microsoft has launched a new search engine and that she should take a look and try it.

My wife is your typical PC user and most of the stereotypes you might have heard over the years apply. She calls me when something seems to be broken. She waits until I come home when she does not know what to do when a dialog box pops up and asks questions an average end user is completely overburdened with. And it goes on. I scored big time when I installed Win7 beta and later RC on her MacBook. But she lives on the Internet and most of her Internet experience starts with Google.

To make a long story short and to answer the TechCrunch question:

Are we witnessing the birth of the first true Google challenger or is this nothing but launch momentum bound to fade away?

At least from my experience last night, this has nothing to do with forcing a search engine onto people or with the heat of the moment, I am convinced Microsoft has (finally) found a way into the consumer’s search decision world. We use it at work for quite some time and I love it.

What’s your experience? What do you (dis-)like about bing? Have you or anyone you know switched? Find out more about bing and The Sound of Found.