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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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