April 2006

I just updated GeoMint to use the new Google Maps API v2. Version 1 will stop working sometime so I thought “Before you’ll get loads of hate-mails, do it now!”. You can find the download at the usual place (move your cursor to the left to the top of the page and click on “GeoMint”).

I’ve even located my little-annoying The map won’t load-bug. Javascript code which is inside of the AJAX response text won’t be executed and so there’s no chance for my plugin to load the Google Map once again. Maybe I will add a “Refresh” link to the bottom of the page which should actually do the work.

A few weeks ago I’ve seen a movie on TV. A pretty strange one actually, starring James van der Beek. I missed about 2/3 of the film, forgot the title and had no idea what it actually was about (besides remembering a damn funny scene at the end where one of his friends reports what he did in Europe the last few days, in fast motion).

Nevertheless, it was quite an event (”A good movie on TV? Tell me! You’ve only seen the last 20 minutes? Doesn’t matter.“). So I told my friends, they told me that they’ve seen the movie too (my 20 minutes plus 5) and one could even remember its title.

{Add some days of studying, holidays and a few visits to the cinema here}

Last week I grabbed a random not-yet-read book from my bookshelf (which was Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero”) and somehow the whole story reminded me of the movie I’ve seen a few weeks ago. I was thrilled by the book and his style of writing. It was exactly what I was looking for all the time since I’ve finished a majority of Douglas Coupland’s novels. And because my favourite book-and-everything-else-store is still Amazon (I like it when I can get everything what I want within four mouse clicks), I ordered American Psycho (DVD), which I haven’t seen yet. I knew that the original story was written by Bret Easton Ellis and I think I do have the book. Somewhere. And now to the point why I’m writing this entry (despite the fact that I simply have to write something, do my creativity a favour, you know): There was this little link titled “Also by B.E.Ellis…”. Clicked it and what did I see? Right, Rules of Attraction, the movie I’ve written about at the beginning of this post.

The moral of this story? Don’t know yet, I’ll tell you when I’ve seen the movie (the whole one, not only the last 20 minutes).

…I’m not dead. I repeat: I’m not dead.

Thomas Fuchs, the creator of script.aculo.us, just returned from the “Canada on Rails” meeting where he did a presentation about the new RJS features in Rails 1.1 (you can get the slides here).

To tell the truth: That looks awesome! It has never been so easy to create a webapplication (application defined as something that really has interactivity). It’s a pity that I’m quite busy at the moment and do not have time to play around with these new features. I actually didn’t even have the time to install Rails 1.1. Shame on me.

He’s driving a Hummer Scout because they wouldn’t sell him a tank.

Picture originally uploaded by Noah K.

I will be dreaming tonight, for sure. No nice dreams, no dreams about little kittens, about sunny beaches far, far away or about my favourite rockband playing in my garden. No, bad dreams will visit me tonight, nightmares they are called. I gonna dream about B- and RTrees, about evil methods, doing all kind of strange stuff, being merged so strong that you don’t know where to begin with designing your code. And after the first sweatings they will tell me that my algorithms are slow, that they will merely suck, waste huge amounts of cpu time and memory. I can already see the Windows scheduler, showing my a big TERM-signal flag.

Enough poetry for today, now the hard facts: Yeah, I’m currently working on an RTree implementation for some geo-stuff we’re doing at school. It’s about reading geo data files, processing them in an RTree, manipulating them,… and exporting them. Current example file is a postal code map of Austria, dealing with a few thousand shapes. The resulting gpx file (the desired exporting format) is about 77MB large, fun to import into Google Earth ;-)

[A short note about the title of this post: I'm following Daniel's suit and simply took a random song-title from my Winamp playlist for this entry].

Today I stumbled over some amazing wallpapers over at deviantart.com. Normally I’m not into those fancy themes and desktops, I’m even running the default Win2k layout on my notebook, but it’s nice to have some good looking wallpaper in the background.

And because I’m too lazy and I exactly know that I won’t change it from time to time (old habits die hard), I wrote a small program which will change your wallpaper every time your start your computer. All you have to do is copying the images into their own directory (.jpg and .bmp supported at the moment), run the program the first time with -i [directory] arguments and - voila - you’re done.

WPSwitcher.exe [16KB]

Sometimes it’s better not to read books (before you stop here and call me an illiterate, read at least the next sentence) because than you can’t be disappointed by the film version of the book.

I haven’t read Michel Houellebecq’s “Elementarteilchen” and so the only thing I can say about the movie is: it’s great, it’s simply great. It’s the story of two half-brothers who are, more or less, looking for the real love (actually they are stumbling across it). For one of them that’s sex, mixed with love, for the other it’s the purity of love.

…never, I repeat never ever forget to copy your working directory from your workstation at the FH to your network volume. Because else you will loose 2 hours of hard programming work.

And another one (seems to be my lucky day): Why the hell does the .NET Compiler tell me that it can’t find the System.Drawing namespace?

Addencum: The answer is near, my friend. Project->Add Reference (or something like that, I’m using a German version).

Leben
Originally uploaded by me.