December 2005

It has been a pretty busy week for me. I actually have holidays now but there was some work to do so I basically spent all my time in front of my notebook, hearing the same music over and over again (Cardigans, I love them).

Next week I will have to start learning for college again but nevertheless I will continue to work on my Rails project, which is quite cool actually. Maybe not because it is my project, but because it’s just Rails. It’s so easy to have instant feedback if you did something wrong whilst programming your controllers, etc. I really love this framework (and especially actsasversioned, a nice plugin which makes it easy to use versioning on your models)!

Some other things I want to mention here are two new projects I will start with in the next few days. One is about a rallye fansite (not new actually but now with Mambo Joomla CMS) and the other one is a corporate project of a friend of mine and me (I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I can’t remember now). So if you like books, music and movies and you understand german, there’s a good chance to see something interesting in the new year :-)

Woke up this morning and simply had to upgrade to WP 2.0. And one thing I can say before all the others I will write: It’s amazing!

At first I had some fears that most of my plugins won’t work anymore or my theme would be broken, but everything went quite smoothly. The only thing that didn’t work was my customized Technorati Tagging plugin by Benedict O’Neill. But I simply replaced it with Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is indeed ultimate. Imported all my old tags and - tada! - here it is, Stopbeingcarbon.com, powered by Wordpress 2.0.

Here is a list of all plugins I currently use and which seem to work fine:

• Extended Live Archives
• Del.icio.us Integrator
• Gravatars
• Markdown
• Related Posts
• Subscribe To Comments
• Dunstan’s Time Since
• WordPress Database Backup

Quote from Scott Sigler over at Ancestor:

Ladies & Gents - the Ancestor blog has been a victim of someone in the Intelligent Design community. Over the weekend, our blog was hacked and all posts were deleted. Fortunately, we had the posts and the files backed up, but not the comments. We’ve lost all those wonderful comments from you Ancestwhores.

We received a long email that said a lot of nasty things, but here is a quote from it to give you an idea of the content: “You blasphemers are spreading the false scripiture (sic) of evolution, trying to make people think its okay to merge human DNA with animal DNA. Humans are not animals! It is impossible to combine Godly DNA of Man, who was created in God’s image, with the DNA of beasts. God will punish (sic) you. We have destroyed your blog and hopefully your sinful story.”

The letter was signed “ID for God.”

A gag? Perhaps. But at any rate, the Ancestor blog was hit hard. We’ve got it back online, and we’ve corrected the problem, so all of you feel free to start posting again.

Sick to hear, I’ve done a fast backup of my database. Some people are really crazy.

…to all my readers! Hope to see you again after the holidays (maybe with Wordpress 2.0, then).

I went out yesterday to get the very last Christmas present (if I were chancellor of Austria, I would adopt an anti-commerce law for Christmas). It’s the same every year, people are running around everywhere, buying gifts, carrying large shopping bags and all that.

But my day was saved when I found the new Cardigans album Super Extra Gravity. I heard their single I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer before and I really love it, but the album… It’s just awesome, really a masterpiece in my eyes. So powerful and everything.

Perhaps I will still go to Sweden for my exchange semester, swedish band’s seem to be quite hot at the moment :-)

It’s an interesting experience, reading the Lifehacker-Feed and suddenly stumble upon an entry where you think: “I may know this person”. And actually I really do.

LiquidBlaze developed an dynamic web page and set it as the desktop background. The page is configured so that simple keypresses and clicks run web and desktop searches, local commands, hide and show bookmarks, switch between desktop and laptop profiles and control WinAmp. Not being much of an ActiveX developer I’m not sure exactly how this works. Still, I am filled with lust.

Read more about this great idea at lifehacker or at the flickr.

Finally, Federal Judge Rules Against Intelligent Design.

I saw a documentation on TV last week about this topic and was quite frightened because of some statements of intelligent design advocates (“I can’t be made out of a frog.” - “I’m something better”…).

One of my friends even told me that at the end of the docu there was a room in a museum where you could see Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, etc. and Darwin. Their explanation was that Darwin’s theory of evolution is the source of all evil because before God all people are the same. But Darwin says that the human race is a product of the evolution, so Darwin is responsible for all the dead.

(from slashdot)

Today I will tell you a nice little story about a Volkswagen Golf IV and a student identity card.

One sunny day, three students decided to get a decent lunch at a restaurant. Everything was fine until they arrived back at the parking lot of their college. The driver had to use his identity card to open the gate. The gate opened, the student threw his card onto the car dashboard and… it vanished between the dashboard and the windscreen. Forever, maybe. Two people in the car were laughing, one didn’t. And it wasn’t me ;-)

Quite a simple scenario: You have a Windows Forms Main Menu and want to use one branch as a selector (RadioCheck enabled). In Delphi you defined your different groups, seperated by a seperator and Delphi does the thing for you. In C#, or .NET, you have to handcode all the stuff. Just to remember: We nearly have 2006.

Another funny (no, actually not) thing. GDI+ doesn’t have a plotPixel function. Great. Who the hell wants to draw single Pixels? Nobody. Never.

Do you know why I love Amazon? Ordered two days ago, shipped yesterday and received today. That’s nice.