Goodbye, Tumblr! Hello, Calepin! So, once again I was fed up with my choice of blogging platform. Tumblr, which I had turned to after ditching Wordpress, is just not what I am looking for anymore. It’s not a bad platform in itself, but I noticed more and more that… I really don’t care about “liking” a post (I am talking about Tumblr’s own feature, not Facebook’s.) I really don’t like reblogging all that much.
Well, Movember 2011 came and went, it’s time for one final update. Over the course of the last four weeks I was able to rake in a total of €3011 going to the Movember Global Action Plan benefitting prostate cancer research and prevention world-wide. Many thanks to Susi, Mike, Marcus, Brad, Christian, Hendrik, Alexander, Mario, Dawn and my parents! You guys rock. Also I’ve actually talked about prostate cancer with a number of people — it’s not necessarily the most awesome topic at a party but it’s important nonetheless.
So, der Movember 2011 ist vorbei, Zeit für ein finales Update. Über die letzten vier Wochen hinweg habe ich insgesamt €301 für den Movember Global Action Plan eingenommen, der die Spenden an die Prostata-Krebs-Forschung und -Vorsorge weltweit verteilt. Vielen Dank an Susi, Mike, Marcus, Brad, Christian, Hendrik, Alexander, Mario, Dawn und meine Eltern! Ihr rockt! Ausserdem habe ich mich tatsächlich mit mehreren Leuten über Prostata-Krebs unterhalten, was zwar nicht unbedingt das lustigste aller Themen ist, aber wichtig.
Relevant web development top list is relevant. (Please pay attention to the hojillion ads in the sidebar while you look at this hastily constructed list of partially broken links.) Being an avid reader of [any “high-rated” web development resource site], I always envied their exhaustive web development top lists. Like the 20 best jQuery plugins to make lists. Or the 50 must-read tutorials for finally understanding those web development resource sites.
When Hendrik told me I’m missed Cocktober (ask him…), I was very sad. But then I realized this year’s Movember is upon us, and I wasn’t sad anymore. True story! So I scrambled to register myself there, pledging to make more of a fool out of myself than usual over the course of the coming month. What for, you ask? For a good cause: I’m trying to raise money for prostate cancer research.
Nachdem Hendrik mir eröffnete, dass Cocktober (fragt ihn…) schon vorbei wäre, war ich sehr traurig. Aber dann fiel mir ein, dass auch dieses Jahr wieder ein Movember ansteht, und dann war ich nicht mehr traurig. Also habe ich mich dort flugs registriert und verpflichtet, mich einen Monat lang zur Wurst zu machen. Und wofür? Für einen guten Zweck: Es geht darum, Geld für die Prostata-Krebs-Forschung zu sammeln. Viele Kerle halten diese Untersuchungen ja immer noch für unmännlich, und diesem idiotischen Vorurteil halten aufgeklärte Gentlemen wie ich mit der männlichsten aller fellbasierten Erfindungen dagegen: dem Schnauzbart.
TL;DR: ditch RVM on production systems unless you like pain. A few notes on getting chef-client to install a Ruby 1.9.2 Rails stack on a production box. I’ve been spending a good number of hours on this, and I’ve learned a couple of things I need to jot down real quick lest I forget. Preface: as you’ll see, I’m not a devops guy. I don’t have to maintain a lot of servers, so I tend to forget after setting one up that once per year.
In which I describe some of the silly fun I had in Volition’s 2008 absurdist gang warfare sandbox murder simulator comedy, and why I like it after all. A few months ago I picked up Volition’s 2008 game Saints Row 2 for €12 on a whim. I’d bought the German version at first –which makes sense what with me being in Germany and all– but shortly afterwards decided to start over playing the uncensored UK version instead as the DE edition is basically a different/crippled game.
A few months ago I switched to Chrome. It’s a solid browser; it does what I want and expect (mostly), it’s stable, it comes with a “boxed” Flash plugin so I don’t have to taint my entire system with that POS install that wonderful piece of software system-wide. I’ve come across a number of handy extensions for it. A few of them I’m still using them after a couple of months; since I try to avoid cruft creep (virtual and otherwise) they obviously have some value to me.
Really nice article in the Guardian’s Environment section today: A small town in Germany where recycling pays That’s the second Guardian article I’ve read in the last few weeks that deals with the German recycling system/culture. I find them interesting not because they’re news to me but because they pose an outsider’s view, written to explain the benefits to an interested (?) outside audience. The system works, it’s nothing we think about anymore.
“Men’s Journal » The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See”: A terrific, stunning article about Daniel Kish, a blind man who has mastered echolocation to live his life autonomously. Like most people, I don’t know many blind people. There were none in my neighborhood, there still aren’t even though my neighborhood has changed a few times in the last two decades. Here in Munich you see a good number of white canes (as in any other bigger city), but I do my best to not treat blind or handicapped people any differently.
Cool NYT article is cool: “Space Tourism: One Giant Leap for Researchers”. There’s a lot of research that can be done in the few minutes of zero G the upcoming commercial space flights will provide, but the rides are much, much cheaper than the NASA/ESA ones going to the ISS. I still find it amazing to realize we live in a time where space tourism is a very real prospect, and not far-flung science fiction.
“What happens after Yahoo! acquires you” over at 37signals.com is an interesting read. Funny story from the Yahoo! trenches: a few years after Y! had acquired del.icio.us there still was no internal bookmarking service. There were a lot of pleas from the tech-minded folks to set up an internal del.icio.us instance, which fell on deaf ears. I believe it was Leonard Lin of the Upcoming team who then installed a copy of Scuttle, an open-source del.
Jean-Louis Gassée tweets: Apple’s new rules rile. But not me: I’m the paying customer and I resent the old model. The new rules are customer-centric. Like, for example, with data sharing. Apple won’t share your personal information to publishers without your permission. Publishers want unfettered access to that information because they want to sell it, because that’s what they’ve been doing with subscriber information for decades. – John Gruber
A few days ago I’ve disabled the auto-posting of my starred Instapaper articles, thus forcing myself to ponder about why and how to share and describe a piece before hitting Instapaper’s “Share” button. I think this worked out well in several regards: I do less “mindless sharing”. My old setup meant that I only had to click the little star icon in Instapaper, and the link would be posted on my Tumblr, which resulted in a barrage of articles which I merely liked.
I wrote Ephemera a) to learn MacRuby and b) to scratch an itch I had. Since then the iPad was released, and the itch is gone – I don’t read news on my Kindle anymore. Still, Ephemera has a good number of users, but even though I had planned to I simply don’t have the time to develop it any further. I don’t feel like abandoning it so I’ve decided to release its codebase as COSS (crappy open source software).
I like YUIDoc. I don’t like its default theme. Since I couldn’t find any other themes on them internets, I wrote my own, named “Dana”. Since I normally use YUIDoc to document either pure Javascript or jQuery code1, I didn’t keep any of the old YUI code; I’ve ditched pretty much everything and started from scratch. And this is what I’ve come up with: As you can see in the screenshot, as an example I’ve generated the well-known YUI API docs.
Over the last few months I’ve been clocking in ~180km in my Vibram FiveFingers. For the most part I take it slow; I run when I feel like it (which is rather often), and I check out routes I’ve not ran before. Sometimes these are long, sometimes not so much. And I’m happy to say that apart from a one-time, mild case of shin splints caused by running too slowly (I’m not kidding) a few weeks back which “grounded” me for a few days, I am without injury and pain.
Interesting article in the NYTimes: Rivals Seize on Troubles of Facebook. Ultimately, I doubt there’ll be enough momentum for any of these sites to really take off. And yes, I say that despite me backing Diaspora*. But I believe they will fail to attract a serious following because in the end, you go where your people are, and they’re not there yet. Herd mentality meets chicken & egg. I—as an end user—would need to decide whether my jumping ship @ FB is more important than loosing the “posse” I’ve built there during the time I’ve used the site.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 Wore my Nike Free yesterday, as they’re the most flexible (actual) shoes I own. No time for running, tho, also still some residue muscle pain. Today: Beautiful morning, decided to ignore the bus and walk to the subway. 3.5 km in my Nikes, and while they’re pretty good, I miss the ability to wiggle my toes. Came home, went for a 3.5 km VFF walk with Dana.
Reading Christopher McDougall’s highly interesting and inspirational “Born to Run”, I came back to my idea of running (semi-)barefoot. Turns out there are a lot of people with the same idea, and companies catering to this idea. So last Thursday I treated myself to a new pair of Vibram FiveFingers KSO. (My new Vibram FiveFingers KSO) VFF are basically what you would get if you dipped your feet into molten rubber, minus, you know, the excrutiating pain, blistering skin and earache caused by your own frantic screaming.
Last night I’ve released a new version of Ephemera, my 2-way Instapaper /ebook-reader sync tool for Mac. Here’s what’s new: NEW: The app runs on both 32 and 64 bit Snow Leopard now. NEW: When auto-sync is enabled and you plug in your reading device, Ephemera will show a “Going to sync…” dialog for 5 seconds, where you can temporarily disable syncing. NEW: Support for password-less Instapaper accounts. FIX: Preferences menu item will be correctly disabled during sync.
This post references MacRuby 0.5, used with Xcode 3.2 on Snopard (10.6.2); the general technique will likely work on other OS/Xcode version, tho. Just saying. Apps with more than just one framework The standard MR app template massages $LOAD_PATH a bit in order to have apps which embed the MR framework use said embedded framework in Release builds. The piece of code in question looks like this: if Dir.exist?(NSBundle.mainBundle.privateFrameworksPath) $:.map! { |x| x.
This post references MacRuby 0.5, used with Xcode 3.2 on Snopard (10.6.2); the general technique will likely work on other OS/Xcode version, tho. Just saying. At some point in my project I needed to access OSX' Keychain to store sensitive userdata. Unfortunately, due to the lack of void pointers in MacRuby 0.5 (see Trac ticket), I couldn’t use standard methods like SecKeychainAddGenericPassword. The guys on the mailing list told me to use a wrapper instead.
I’ve built my first Mac app: Ephemera, which offers two-way Instapaper.com sync for your ebook reader. Here’s its story, my motivation, and what it does. Preface Ephemera is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with Instapaper.com or Marco Arment. I’m just a huge fan. How it came to be A few months ago, in Oct or Nov 2009, about an hour after getting my Kindle 21 I just knew that it would be the perfect device to read my news on.