Stop Being Carbon

I’m currently implementing a pure JavaScript time-series/line graph. I’ve got the idea from the book I’m currently reading (Visualizing Data by Ben Fry).

It works great, still have to do some improvements here and there but my main goal is to get it running with IE, which doesn’t support the <canvas> tag (which is really a pity).

Do you know any alternatives? It’s enough if I could draw basic shapes like rectangles and lines, nothing fancy.

• Take more photos
• Launch at least the two projects I’m working on
• Spend a few days at the seaside with my girlfriend
• Get my degree
• Spend a weekend in at least one European capital
• Move to Vienna
• Go to the theatre, at least once twice
• Go running, two times a week minimum
• Find a cool internship for August
• Get a job (in the web industry)
• Plant herbs
• Do a painting together with my girlfriend
• Contribute to some Open Source projects
• Learn another programming language
• Learn Cocoa
• Find a flat without a pre-installed kitchen
• Learn Swedish again
• Spend more time cooking and baking
• Watch ARTE more often (or quit my subscription)

I will start my internship at Frequentis tomorrow and I have to say that I’m pretty excited (it’s not so that it would be something completely new, I did a one-month internship there in August and did some project work in spring). But still, it’s something which I’m looking forward to.

It’s also nearly the end of my studies at my university, I will write my second bachelor thesis, do the exam and then I am finally done. Plans for the future? Definitely, but I won’t tell – yet.

• LaTeX can be quite picky about umlauts, even if you set inputenc to utf8. Labels don’t treat umlauts correctly and so pdflatex will give you some strange error message.
• LaTeX again. Underscores within your text are also a bit of a problem, but there’s a package you can use (underscore)
• You cannot save transparent gif images with .NET easily (meaning: Bitmap.Save(someStream, ImageFormat.bmp)).
• GDI+ will give you strange error messages wherever it can. Saving a png image to an output stream is such a thing. You need to save it to a memory stream first and then save the memory stream to the output stream. That’s because the png must be seek-able, which is not the case for the bitmap class.
• TextMate is awesome. For real.
• Transparent pngs work surprisingly well in IE7.
• SVG support in Firefox is great, but sucks for Internet Explorer (you need a plugin from Adobe which you cannot install without administrator privileges).

Seems like I had a busy day.

It’s finally here, my shiny new MacBook has arrived on Friday. Overally I can say that Leopard is awesome, as is the hardware. Programs are really snappy, Spaces, Spotlight, Safari (I love the search feature and the resizable textfields) are all awesome.

The only problem I have at the moment is the keyboard. I’ve chosen the german version, which does not have labels for all characters on a key. So finding some strange shortcuts can be quite tricky sometimes.

Pictures and further insights will follow.

Yep, I’ve ordered a brand new MacBook (the one with the Santa Rosa chipset) last Thursday. The Apple website says that it will ship on Friday, unfortunately I have no clue where my MacBook is at the moment (Apple tracking doesn’t seem to work for now). But I will happily wait, read all those fancy Apple blogs which are floating around the web, collecting hints and tips and will be a happy Mac user on Friday (please!).

Update: Seems to have arrived in the Netherlands.
Update #2: On it’s way to Vienna.

…is probably the most relaxing thing for me (followed by driving my car at night).

You know that you have some real friends when one of them tells you that you look like you’ve been partying for the whole night, but you’ve actually just returned from holidays.

It got a bit quiet here for the last few days. That’s because I started my internship at Frequentis on Wednesday. Work is truly interesting, lots of new people, loads of abbreviations and terminology I’ve never heard of.

On Thursday I’ll meet my advisor for my bachelor thesis, which is about Parallel Processing.

I shortly wanna tell you what I did the last semester. There were some boring subjects, some partially interesting ones and some which were really a challenge. Building an AIS Viewer with C#/.NET was indeed a challenge and it will be for another month – I’ll work for the company which provided the project in August. We had a pretty long way to go but finally the whole thing looks quite good and we are quite proud of it.

The next semester starts at the end of September but I’ll do some research during holidays (it’s the last but one) for my bachelour’s project – Parallel Processing.