“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.

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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.

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“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.

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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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This post references MacRuby 0.5b2, used with Xcode 3.2 on Snopard (10.6.2). At some point you’ll probably want to create a release build for your app. You’d like to compile it and embed the MacRuby framework so the app is self- contained. Cool beans. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it seems. Yes, the MacRuby Xcode template contains both an “Embed” and a “Compile” target, and they seem to work fine.

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Some things I’ve learned or discovered during the last few days. Nothing special, but taking notes is usually a good idea, so there. Get values fromInfo.plist For example, app name and version: info = NSBundle.mainBundle.infoDictionary info.objectForKey("CFBundleName") info.objectForKey("CFBundleVersion") Open an URL in the default browser: url = NSURL.URLWithString("http://municode.de/") NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace.openURL(url) Run an AppleScript Sometimes you want to execute a short AppleScript snippet to save yourself some time by using the higher-level functionality AS offers instead of writing a huge block of MacRuby.

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Just a note, mostly to myself: The default XCode MacRuby rb_main.rb template will contain these lines: Dir.entries(dir_path).each do |path| if path != File.basename(__FILE__) && path.match(/\.rb$/) require(path) end end Works fine for uncompiled files, but when you want to compile your app, there’ll be no *.rb files — just *.rbo files. So rb_main.rb needs to be adjusted. Dir.entries(dir_path).each do |path| if path != File.basename(__FILE__) && path.match(/\.rbo?$/) require(path) end end I just spent 15 minutes wondering about these Unknown class 'Controller', using 'NSObject' instead.

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What They Call The “Real Life” 2008 ended with me getting unemployed. The decision being made for me was a catalyst to finally make my move. I was planning to get out of employment in 2009 anyways, so, you know. Thank you, Yahoo!. Early in the year I went freelance. As mentioned, I had played with the idea for a while by then, so that was pretty cool. And scary.

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Somehow, after connecting my new Logitech G9 Laser mouse tonight, two keys on my MS Natural Ergo keyboard were swapped. Highly annoying. After some digging around the Googles, I learned that in order to “reset” your keyboard —i.e. making OSX forget your keyboard type— all you have to do is a rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist Once done, disconnect the keyboard, plug it in again, and the “New keyboard found, wot is it?

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A while ago I’ve decided to do a little time travelling. In literature, that is. So I’ve picked up a novel called “City At World’s End”, written by one Edmond Hamilton. It’s a story about a little rural community in the US heartland having a “super-atomic bomb” go off above it, causing a rift in time, catapulting said city into the far future, and the fight of its citizens to remain on Earth.

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Assaf passed the ball1, and I’m gonna run with it. So Mr Cooper asks “What are your tools of the trade?”. On the desk iMac 24", 3.06 GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, early 2009 model. His name is Rupert, and he’s great. Got him in February after my previous iMac" broke down after running ~3 years straight. Dell 2005FPW. Really nice and affordable monitor. Tilted by 90°, because I can. iPod touch 16GB.

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(What a title…) I was pulling my hair out over the last two days when I was implementing bulk operations in a project of mine. In this case, the list of operations to do in bulk is compiled in the browser, and then the single requests are sent one by one to the server as single AJAX requests. (Think “mark this as read” functionality.) My problem was that the first and second call in the bulk list usually went through well, but the rest of the calls just ran against a wall since all of a sudden Rails had problems finding the either logged in user or was missing certain methods and/or attributes.

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Letzte Woche war ich auf meinem ersten Twittwoch, logischerweise auf dem in München. Da Thomas Pfeiffer, der Organisator, nach Leuten gesucht hatte, die Vorträge halten wollen, hab ich natürlich gleich die Chance ergriffen, etwas über TwerpScan zu erzählen. Der Vortrag lief gut, auch wenn ich mich am Anfang etwas mit der Technik gestritten habe, aber es gab Fragen, Reaktionen und auch Lob von einigen Usern, die meine kleine Site schon kannten.

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Just a heads-up: I’ve moved my blog today — in two ways. First, I’ve ditched my self-hosted Wordpress setup in favor of Tumblr. Because I ♥ Tumblr.1 Second, it’s now sitting on blog.zottmann.org instead of carlo.zottmann.org. Old article URLs 301-redirect to their new locations, so all should be well. Also, I’ve cleaned up the blog history; about 2/3 of the old posts are gone. Most of them either simply lost their context, contained nothing but (now) broken links or are not worth keeping online.

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