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Blog & Notes

December 2010

November 2010

October 2010

September 2010

  • Lanyrd is a wonderful website to find out which conferences your friends and followers are going to.

  • This month gave birth to a new buzzword: Instant.

  • Like Patternry for UI design patterns and inspiration.

  • Copper can't keep up

  • All this magic just for checking NULLs: Null checks and the Maybe monad. If the syntax is too noisy, maybe the programming language is not right.

  • Selbständig vs. Unternehmer

  • Thumbs up for Ayende

  • Eat less is the answer.

  • These Windows System Repair Discs saved me a few hours yesterday.

  • RTL biegt sich die Welt zurecht...

  • Doing some spikes with CSS3 transitions. Nice. Safari with hardware acceleration is top of the line. Hope HW-accel will be added to Chrome soon. Update: It will (and even has--trying).

  • Squerly: Scala ORM and DSL.

  • How the Blade Runner opening scene was created. Great hacks!

  • “The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.“ —William Gibson

  • What is this centuries' equivalent to Led Zeppelin? 10 minutes of Rock music seems so old-fashioned these days? But who am I to argue when Madonna is filed under Rock in iTunes.

  • On IE6: Lot of webdevs complain about IE6 being a pain in the ... But maybe people took the web more serious in early 2000 than you might think. Maybe they wanted to create business applications with HTML/JS etc. as a platform. Maybe they are not able to change their architecture every two years or so. You want IE6 to go away? So you're putting pressure on those guys who started to use HTML etc. in the business world. Guess what they're doing: Start anew on HTML5? Or go and write another Windows Forms app?

  • Node.js is amazing. Yeah, I keep repeating myself.

  • Seems like DuckDuckGo gets all the hype these days

  • Evil and brilliant hack: Evercookie.

  • Wie unsere (deutsche) Diskussion um Privatsphäre von außen gesehen wird.

  • Salvatore Sanfilippo of Redis fame shows how to do instant with Redis ;-)

  • Insider view of developing a feature for Windows Vista. Ouch.

  • Jeep (dis)assembly in sub 4 minutes.

  • Had a flu over the weekend. Still recovering.

  • say -v Fred "Fitter, happier, more productive, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)"

  • MacRuby: The Definitive Guide

  • Where Brokers meet: Nuclear Phynance

  • Why does Twitter need all this OAuth bullshit for its API when HTTP Digest/Basic works fine, is standardized, and reasonably secure (over https)?

  • A post that hopefully gets into a series about probability

  • Simulating a 6502 with JavaScript: Nice

  • “Java is to Javascript as ham is to hamster.“ —@johl

  • “Enrolling your daughter in Gymnastics: 1% chance she'll be an athlete. 100% chance she'll be the drunk girl doing backflips in a bikini.“ —@kellyoxford

  • Animated map of unemployment in the US during the recession.

  • MetaWhere: Future.where :sql.not_in => ['code']

  • Oops. The HDCP master key

  • Literate programming for Ruby with Rocco

  • Why didn't Twitter pull a month earlier?

  • Facebook open-sourced Online Schema Change for MySQL.

  • Shoot that ad

  • So they do several thousand trades per second, yet it takes days to send money from one bank to another.

  • “In Sterling, Colorado muss eine freilaufende Katze Rückstrahler tragen.“ —@Wissensbox

  • Hipster Hitler. Not sure if it's politically correct.

  • Der deutsche Widerstand, vor und nach 1945.

  • Google is invad^H^H^H^H^H building a data center in Finland

  • It's the small things that count... Some Chrome tips here.

  • Insider stories from a former employee of Goldman Sachs

  • Rethinking the Mobile Web is not only right to the point but illustrates how presentations should be: Engage, tell a story, images, use simple wording, no bullet points whatsoever.

  • For the internet addicts.

  • Readable JavaScript with CoffeeScript

  • Weil München auch so schon teuer genug ist: MVV Blitzer, aka Crowd Sourcing Kontrolleurmelder.

  • The Editors: The Racing Rats, An End Has a Start, and best of all Munich (acoustic).

  • Today is Programmers' Day. According to Wikipedia, this is an official holidy in Russia, celebrated on the 0x100th day of each year. This must be fake.

  • Spoon: Another virtualization solution.

  • Since when has Google an integrated site search? Go search for Urban Dictionary and watch the first result. It contains a text input field along with a Search urbandictionary.com button.

  • Lateness is also a pet hate of mine

  • His Steveness introduces: iNinja

  • Linus is American after all

  • What Google did to make themselves instant: Google Colossus etc.

  • The Complete History of Lemmings

  • Diaspora has been releasing their code. Pretty standard Rails app if you ask me.

  • “Any idiot can tell you why death is bad, but it takes a very particular sort of idiot to believe that death might be good.“—LessWrong

  • Maybe we'll see Ruby on the iPhone anytime soon? Update #1 #2

  • Now go and build your own Shazam.

  • Been using EF CTP4 today for a small sample. Looks alright—for building samples at least.

  • Beim Sex stoppte ich und bewegte mich nicht mehr. Sie: “Was machst du?“ Ich: “Das habe ich bei Youporn gesehen, nennt sich Buffering.“ (via @ferkl)](http://twitter.com/ferkl/status/24364607324)

  • JavaScript is the least understood and most bashed programming language in history. This attitute is often expressed by people who think that JavaScript is some sort of Java. Or people thinking OOP is how real programmers code.

  • Still feeling slightly sick...

  • Never underestimate the power of a great story

  • With HTML5 and CSS3 coming along, there's only a few advantages left for desktop-development (ask Google for a nice introduction to web development). There are so many gems in those two specs that aren't even discussed yet. Maybe people like Yehuda Katz going to work on SproutCore client-side web frameworks is showing the direction for future application development. Interesting to see when MS will release their SproutCore/ GWT/ Cappuccino clone.

  • Gave IE9 beta a test drive. Best IE ever. Seriously. Won't switch nonetheless. Wonder if this will help turning IE6 down since Vista is required at least.

August 2010

July 2010

  • Async Rails

  • Unix toolbox: Hardware, statistics, users, limits, runlevels, and whatnot.

  • I'm pretty sure Apache HTTPd and nginx will borrow some stuff from Mongrel2

  • NoSQL document database for .NET users: RavenDB by Ayende

June 2010

May 2010

  • I've been trying to find out what the future will hold when it comes to webdev and frameworks. I'd not be surprised to see asynchronous frameworks like Node become mainstream. CPUs these days so goddamn fast that they just sit there waiting for I/O.

April 2010

  • Mercurial tutorial with wonderful quotes: “The system administrator, whom everybody calls Taco, is too shy to eat lunch with the rest of the team. On those rare occasions where he is away from his swivel office chair, you will notice a triangular-shaped salsa-colored stain on the seat where drippings of his many Mexican lunches fell between his legs, insuring that nobody takes his chair, even though it is the superior Herman Miller variety that the company founders bought themselves, not the standard-issue Staples $99 special that causes everyone else back pain... Anyway, yeah, there’s no backup.“

  • Every time you make a PowerPoint, Edward Tufte kills a kitten.

March 2010

February 2010

  • Next Windows will be... uhm... different promised...

  • Daten sind keine Dinge, und deswegen kann man sie nicht stehlen?! Unsere Justizministerin. Unglaublich.

January 2010