Stop Being Carbon

I’m currently working on some Rails project which makes use of the great attachment_fu plugin by Technoweenie (which led to my first bugfix for an Open Source project).

Yesterday I stumbled over some glitch with Lightbox (or Script.aculo.us, I’m not really sure) which results in a mal-sized picture. For the sample, go here. The fix is quite simple, you have to explicitly set the width of the image (that should be around line #260):

imgPreloader.onload = (function(){
    this.lightboxImage.src = this.imageArray[this.activeImage][0];
    // The following line will fix the glitch:
    this.lightboxImage.width = imgPreloader.width;
    this.resizeImageContainer(imgPreloader.width, imgPreloader.height);
}).bind(this);
imgPreloader.src = this.imageArray[this.activeImage][0];

I just did some research with Google Finance. Some facts:

• Did you know that if you would have bought shares from Yahoo at the beginning of 1997 and sold them at the end of 1999, your gain in investment would have been about 13.000%? Even after the year 2000, you would still have a again of 700-1.000%.

• Apple (and about the same for Google): Beginning of 2005 till now: +400%

• Microsoft: 1986 - 2000: +55.000% (okay, that’s lame, 14 years).

Any tips for the next big thing?

• 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.

When I got my MacBook back in November I initially wanted to buy a license key for iWork. Unfortunately that was not possible back then for Apple IDs registered in Austria (don’t know about other countries in Europe). I called the Apple hotline and the woman told me that she has several requests every week for an online registration but it’s not possible at the moment to do that.

Today I prepared a presentation for some parallel programming lecture I will be giving tomorrow and when I fired up Keynote I discovered that it wasn’t registered. I could remember that it was not possible in November but gave it another try. And, voila, it worked! Cost me some bucks but so far it really paid off.

So Flickr got video. Wait a second… Flickr? Video? Shouldn’t Flickr be just for photos?

Well, for me Flickr is Beauty. Beauty, because there are so many people who are sharing the best and most beautiful moments of their lives with thousand of others. (Whatever beauty is for each individual in detail, I say that everyone will find his own definition of beauty on Flickr.)

Photos are Beauty. But videos can be Beauty, too. I’m not talking about those ordinary YouTube clips (and for me, personally, I’m not talking about everyday photos you can find on Flickr, even some of my pictures are just bog-standard) but about special moments in the lives of people. Seconds of their life which have a special meaning because they are just beautiful.

So video on Flickr might be a good thing, to add another piece of beauty to the lives of all of us.

My iPod mini’s battery is running quite low on power, just holds for a day or two. In addition, its disk is clicking and it takes me two or three tries to get it to play the song I wanna listen to.

So yesterday I purchased a replacement, a silver iPod nano, 4gb. It has the perfect size for me and enough space to hold the most recent music. Perfect. And even better are the new headphones, which are smaller than the ones I had until now (Sennheiser and original Apple headphones) which makes them much more comfortable.

Opening .pdf files in Safari doesn’t block the machine, nor does Safari complain when I want to close the tab (have you ever opened a pdf on Windows in your browser? You can be lucky when you haven’t installed the full Adobe suite and it blocks your machine for several seconds).

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.

Wow, nearly three weeks since my last blog post (but I do post some updates more frequently on Twitter).

[Warning: tech stuff follows] Anyway, I’m doing quite fine. My bachelor project is slowly taking shape. Currently I am modifying SharpMap for our needs (adding a dynamic layer for our data, adding some events to know what’s going on inside of SharpMap,…).

I’ve also touched the clipping function, which really sucked. I replaced it with Sutherland-Hodgman’s polygon-clipping algorithm which works like a charm. This move was necessary because GDI+ has some problems rendering invalid data (meaning data which is far outside of the viewport). The process doing the drawing will block all others and your system will come to a halt - no moving cursors, no task manager, no nothing.

Because SharpMap is released under the LGPL, I will post the .diff patches as soon as the major work is finished.

Removing .NET Framework 2.0-3.5 because some software can’t deal with it-experience

Uninstalling the unwanted versions via Add/Remove Programs does not work. Searching the web for some uninstall tool, found some MSDN blog. Downloading the tool, selecting the unwanted frameworks, rebooting. Explaining the guy behind me that it’s okay that there’s an error message popping up every second. Re-installing the not-removed .NET Framework, working.

Updating OS X to version 10.5.2-experience

Starting Software-Update, waiting for the download to be finished, rebooting, done.