New blog!

February 13th, 2007

i have started a second blog. it’s actually not my personal blog but the corporate blog of my company, so that blog is now called upstream - agile web (2.0) software development. i am going to talk about stuff like programming and rails, start ups, current upstream projects and products plus all sorts of stuff that i find interesting.

this blog remains my personal blog and i will keep posting here as well (sometimes :) ).

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coccinella - jabber client with white board

December 27th, 2006

i’m just listening to chaosradio 119 - as a kind of introduction to the 23c3 starting tomorrow. the topic is ‘instant messaging’ and they just mentioned coccinella. it’s a multi platform jabber client that features an integrated white board. wow, i had been looking for this for quite a while to use it for project planning/meeting stuff. well, there it is. it looks ugly compared to ichat, but apple will probably need another couple of months to add desktop sharing to ichat.

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more than just photos

December 26th, 2006

i recently started experimenting with photos beyond creating new galleries over and over again. the first result was a video made from the pictures i had taken at the second softcore stoerpraxis party in leipzig in november:


last week i created my first flip-book from a video recorded with my mac’s isight camera - but that was still an “old style” paper printed flip-book so i can’t show it here. now i just discovered a flip-book video over at iso800, which was created from a series of pictures taken with a digital (still) camera instead of a video camera. this allows for some cool blur effects. gotta try that, too.



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search&replace 2.0 or refactoring with ruby

November 23rd, 2006

sometimes i need to refactor some code in a file. until today i usually used search and replace along with some regular expressions, which more or less worked because i’m not exactly a pro regexp developer. (anyone? :) )

so, today i had to refactor something like this: i had a big array of arrays and wanted to convert it into a hash:

[[1, ‘buy car’], [2, ‘buy house’], [3, ‘plant tree’]]

should become

{1 => ‘buy car’, 2 => ‘buy house’, 3 => ‘plant tree’}

okay, this example is actually made up, that’s not what i was working on today. anyway, so as i said you could go and do some regex replace, which in this case wouldn’t bee too hard, but this is just a simple example. the new way i found for me is this: since the text is executable code already, why not execute it in order to transform itself? add a bit here and there and off we go:

puts [[1, ‘buy car’], [2, ‘buy house’], [3, ‘plant tree’]].map {|key,value|
“#{key} => ‘#{value}’ “}.join(”,\n”)

now if you are using TextMate all you have to do is press [apple]+[r] which will execute your code (make sure you have set your editing window to ruby) and there is your new hash table. sweet, isn’t it?

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so you think the ATM around the corner is safe?

November 21st, 2006

ATM running Windows

how about this one in berlin mitte, running some windows os and proudly presenting its favourite error message :)

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why we must pair-program

October 15th, 2006

obie fernandez brings it to the point:

Truth is, pair programming is one of the only effective ways that a lot of us have ever witnessed keeping average developers from pissing away 95% of their productivity engaging in non-work such as reading and writing blogs, instant messaging, personal email, shopping online and otherwise wasting time on bullshit. When you’re pairing, you simply HAVE to work all day.

“[We] had meeting after meeting about pair programmer at [my former employer], and the only real issue they could raise about it, what it was too tiring to be “on” for 8+ hours a day…”

it’s as simple as that.

by the way i have changed workplace and have actually been working in (just one) pair in the recent weeks. a behind the scenes and results coming up in the next days.

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crazy about firefox?

September 18th, 2006

firefox crop cicrle

so what do you do if you are totally crazy about firefox? easy, you make a crop circle… watch the making of video.

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rmx - open source dmx controller software

September 17th, 2006

rmx screenshot

i have just submitted my first open source project on rubyforge: rmx - ruby DMX controller. it’s a software to control a DMX-512 setup using a computer and a USB adapter. DMX is a standard for digitally controlling lighting equipment such as PAR lights, strobes etc. as found in clubs or at concerts. there are tons of hardware controllers out there but they cost money and they are for sure not as flexible as software. rmx is written in C and ruby and is based on dmx4linux, which only runs on linux 2.4 kernels right now.

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shock

September 7th, 2006

gosh, i just tripped over my laptop’s power cord for the first time ever. never thought i would be stupid enough to do it. i hit it so hard my precious little computer would have been smashed right against the next wall - if it didn’t have a magsafe-connector. phew. thanks steve.

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gorgast 06 fotos

September 5th, 2006

soundtist

meine fotos der gorgast 06 party sind finally online. enjoy. wer selber bilder gemacht hat - her damit.

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