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Christoph — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:12:10 +0000

I really think that discussing with myself if I should write ‘can’ or ‘could’ in an email makes me a better person.

Color profile me

Christoph — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:53:52 +0000

…and I’ve never dealt with them, but today I found some small glitch on Vimeo. If you’re running Safari, you will notice that the color of the corners of the different sections does not match the surrounding background color.

I guess the problem lies within the color profile, which is some self configured one and not sRGB (well, at least that’s what I found out while doing some 2-minute research).

Links for rainy days

Christoph — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:37:09 +0000

For pretty long I thought that YouTube is a pretty useless and time-eating monster. Things have changed since I discovered some pretty interesting channels (and clips). A short primer:

The Google Channel I really like their Tech Talk clips, featuring Linus Torvalds talking about git, the Google maps clips, etc.
Sketchup Channel That software is amazing! Its so easy to use and yet you can make such good models (I can remember the time when I started learning Blender).
Randy Pausch - Last Lecture That lecture is really a must-see. It’s so moving and positive.

5 reasons why real estate sites suck (in Austria)

Christoph — Sun, 04 May 2008 10:05:22 +0000

Their design looks so 1999 (and their markup is even 1994)
What’s one of the reasons why Google’s search is so successful? Because it doesn’t offer any distractions. You have a search box. That’s it. Simplicity is the key.
It’s time for RSS
When I’ve clicked through all the search criterias (you do not need to refresh the page as soon as I’ve select one district of ten) I want to store these results, and, just to be able to keep an eye on the thing, get a link to an RSS feed. So I can quickly see if there are new offerings.
Ads all over the place
I don’t know how they make money (I guess they take fees from the estate agents) but distracting ads all over the place are a thing which are common for every site I’ve found.
I really wanna do search for all attributes
You can search for price and area but then you can’t search for the number of rooms. Or you can search for the district but can’t tell them that you wanna have an eat-in kitchen.
Pictures? Yes, resized, unreadable and low quality
Okay, bad quality pictures are often the fault of the estate agent. But badly scaled images which become unreadable (floor plans) are really not necessary. Not resizing them at all and just setting the size of the image container is really bad practise.
Prices? All included, please
Just yesterday I’ve stumbled over a site which didn’t let you enter an all-included price but instead just considered the rent (without taxes and service charges). Really helpful, thanks. When you’re looking for a flat which costs 700 Euros you will get rents as high as 900 Euros.

Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid

Christoph — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 18:35:44 +0000

Praise the lord! Looks like we’ve won.

Pownce Invites

Christoph — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:39:51 +0000

I got a Pownce account and still four invites to give away. Leave a comment if you wanna have one.

Python Lifestream

Christoph — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:41:53 +0000

The last few days I had some time to create a lifestream, as you can find some here and there.

It was actually pretty simple thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser. I simply stuffed all my personal feeds into a dict, including the source description for different styles, text,…; did the feed parsing, collected all entries, sorted them and wrote them to an html file (I was a bit shy about an online solution due to some speed, performance and privacy concerns - at least not everybody can see my virtual-personal actions for every second of my life).

All in all the hardest part was getting that damn thing running on Dreamhost via a cronjob (mainly because I’m using my own version of Python, own modules,…).

Wordpress Archives

Christoph — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:08:33 +0000

Since I deactivated Extended Live Archives for this blog (because nobody really used it and it adds code and style sheets to the page) I played around with some code from the web to generate a Wordpress archive page which would group together years and months of blog posts (yeah, I can really speak of “years” and “months”, Stopbeingcarbon.com is now over three years old).

One drawback I found by accident is the query number for this specific code. years*12+n (which results in about 600 queries for my blog). Not so good.

So I had a look at my mysql logs and found a reoccurring line which selects a single post via an id. Googling brought up some results with get_permalink() as the malefactor. The get_permalink() function takes an id of a blog post and returns the permalink. Which is nice, but I already had the post, I just needed the permalink.

By copying the function, removing one line (the post-loading-thing) and renaming the argument I had a new function which would give me the permalink from a post object. Outcome: query count is down to one tenth and I’m happy (as well as my db server).

Vista problem (fixed - kind of)

Christoph — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:52:47 +0000

So, the Vista problem is now fixed, the guy bought a new wlan access point and - voilá - the thing’s running just fine. Well, at least the Vista machine, had some problems on an older XP system with a Siemens PCMCIA card - the damn thing should support WPA but it doesn’t.

Bits and pieces

Christoph — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:00:23 +0000

knock knock Anybody here? Long time ago this blog was visited by billions of people, they posted comments, the author replied and wrote new entries - daily. {dream:off} Well, time’s changing, I’m now again 100% studying and have a bunch of things to do (some keywords for those interested: .Net, NMEA, FreeBSD, UI, Oracle, Ruby, UML,… - you can find more info with the help of my del.icio.us bookmarks).