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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Yesterday’s Munich on Rails meetup was the usual mix of interesting talks and geeky, delightful conversations. When I say “usual”, I of course mean it’s been the kind of evening I by now kind of expect. ;) Many thanks to Roland for organizing and the Experteers guys for the venue and the food. Nom! Anyways: interesting talks. Marco Otte-Witte presented his Excellent gem (gotta love the name) for static code analysis.

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So, gestern also Bundestagswahl. Durch den Ausgang der Wahl ließ ich mich dann zu folgendem Tweet hinreissen: Bullshitrattenfängergeschwätz funktioniert also immer noch in DE! Glückwunsch an Die Linke & FDP. Gut, das war vielleicht etwas undifferenziert. :p Aber die Wahl macht mir in mehrerlei Hinsicht Magenschmerzen. Ich fürchte, den dringend überfälligen Atomausstieg können wir auf unbestimmte Zeit abhaken, das Thema wird jetzt begraben. Und durch die sicherlich anstehende Laufzeitverlängerung der AKWs werden die Stromversorger sicherlich wenig Muße haben, in erneuerbare Energien zu investieren.

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I’ve made the switch from Leopard to Snow Leopard today. First, I took the necessary steps, of course: checking this handy app compatibility list, running AppFresh, then SuperDuper!. While the overall install went smoothly on my mid-2009 iMac 24", I ran into some issues which I’d like to jot down real quick. Terminal.app has issues with my favourite programming font, Inconsolata. The font isn’t rendered at all, which is a pain.

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Eure Sendungen sind scheisse. Nein, wirklich. Ich meine das nicht böse oder abwertend, sicher nicht. Ich seh nicht oft fern, bin von daher auch sicherlich nicht Teil der werberelevanten Zielgruppe. Aber ich finde, Ihr strengt Euch nicht mehr so an wie früher. Erinnert Ihr Euch noch an die gute alte Zeit? Ihr hattet nur 5 oder 6 Kochshows im Programm; “CSI” lief noch da, wo es hingehört (nämlich bei Euch, nicht bei RTL) und hatte nur 3 Werbepausen und nicht gefühlte 18; Herr Mälzer bereitete auf sehr lockere und durchaus unterhaltsame Art und Weise leckere Speisen aus seiner und anderer Menschen Kindheit zu; das “Perfekte Dinner” war auch noch recht neu und mehr aufs Essen denn auf die Schubladen und wirren Vorlieben der Teilnehmer fixiert; und hin und wieder schneiten Enie van de Meiklokjes und Herr Kühler bei irgendwelchen unbekannten Mitbürgern vorbei und rissen ihnen die Hütte ab.

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Since its birth a few years ago, my Firefox addon BetterSearch has been a fun project. People were using it and seemed mostly happy with it, as they could see a thumbnail of the search results on their favourite search engine before actually clicking through. Good times. This was made possible by displaying preview thumbnails from various sources, such as Amazon’s Alexa service and several others. These thumbnails had to be bought from them, which was financed by money I made as an Amazon affiliate.

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Over the last few years, I have always wondered why there was no site that would allow me to track my progress in World of Warcraft. Sure, there’s the WoW Armory and sites like Raptr, but all these places take more of a “your char right now!” approach which never came close to what I had in mind. And those that did go into the direction I was thinking didn’t click with me.

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A post on the MobileRead forums hinted at my Cybook Gen3 stability issues being related to the font face used for displaying text, so I’ve replaced the very lovely Liberation Serif with the slightly less lovely, but nonetheless enjoyable DejaVu Condensed Serif. Lo and behold, the stability improved tremendously — my Cybook hasn’t crashed once since I’ve switched. So, yes, the crashes/lockups are definitely font issues. The more you know.

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One of the first applications I’ve installed after buying my iPod touch last year was Stanza, one of the few dedicated ebook reading tools for the platform. The idea of electronic reading appeals to me. I’ve tried my luck several times over the last few years, on different devices, with varying success. (Anyone remember Palm? Haha, yeah… me neither.) First of all, I like a good novel. Being able to carry a number of them around with me, wherever I go, is a good thing.

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It happens. I see no point in running Planet Yahoo! anymore, for reasons probably known — i.e. a few months ago Yahoo!’s decided my services as an engineer (and those of my co-workers) were no longer required. Sorry if you were one of the few people finding some value in the aggregation of all these Yahoo! blogs into one big feed.

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This is a reblog of a post from my new Ruby-themed tumblelog. I know it’s kind of cheap to repost your own stuff, but who cares. I’ve spent a couple of hours today pulling my hair out while trying to get one of my background job scripts to work with god, the “easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby”. Well, it took a while to make it work, tho.

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Damn, Mookie tagged me. Well, why not. Seven things weird and/or unknown about me: When I was 8 years old, I’ve developed an allergy to cats, more or less out of the blue. Which sucked, since I had two female cats at that time, Tina and Nena. (It was the 80s, gimme a break.) We had to give them away, and my room had to be renovated, as I became nearly asthmatic due to the omnipresent cat hair.

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As mentioned earlier, Yahoo! decided to shut down its entire Munich engineering department. So since January 1st, I am officially out of a job. What a downer… or is it? After some deliberation and discussions with Dana, I’ve decided to concentrate on the bright side: I have a few ideas for products (read: websites), and now I finally have the time to work on them. I’ve always contemplated building them in my spare time while still being employed, but apart from a few small experiments (which were fun to write but are hardly my personal “next big thing”) that concept didn’t work out so well.

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I was promoted. Then I lost my job. But I came to a conclusion, and found new goals. (More on this later.) I had planned on running 250km, then hit that goal in October, and ended up doing 400km. My granny passed away, and I miss her. My faith in the USA was partially restored (the Obama campaign and its success even gave me hope, and I don’t even “count”).

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John Scalzi: That said, these are gruesome times for publishing, and a lot of folks are not as well-positioned as I am. Imprints have vaporized, layoffs have begun, and it’s better-than-even odds that a number of authors and books are going to get shaved off of publishing lists. 2009 is also likely to be a singularly lousy time to be an aspiring debut author, as publishing houses consolidate their lists and focus their resources on established avenues (i.

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Yahoo! hat am Freitag verkündet, die gesamte Engineering-Abteilung in München zu schließen. Meine Freude war etwas gedämpft, bin ich doch (noch) Teil dieser Abteilung. Meine Motivation, eine neue “Herausforderung” zu finden, stieg dementsprechend sprunghaft — denn ab 31.12.2008 bin ich somit ohne Arbeit (Stand: heute). Um ehrlich zu sein, ich weiß noch nicht genau, was ich machen möchte. Will ich als Freelancer arbeiten? Suche ich mir einen (interessanten) neuen Job? Mache ich eine eigene Firma auf?

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Mein Child’s Play-Interview in Trackback auf Radio Fritz war ein voller Erfolg, zumindest in dem Sinne, dass ich mich nicht komplett blamiert habe …denke ich zumindest. Dana meinte zwar, ich hätte allen den Stoiber gemacht — meine “Äh…"-Frequenz war wohl höher, als ich selbst gemerkt habe —, aber ich glaube, das ist okay. Niemand in Berlin kennt Stoiber, oder? Die Sendung vom Samstag gibts auch als Podcast, als MP3-Direktdownload und zum Gleich-auf-der-Seite-Anhören.

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Wer hätte das gedacht, mein letzter Post hat Interesse bei einigen Leuten geweckt. Anscheinend war die Idee, Child’s Play nach Deutschland zu holen, doch nicht so absurd. Freude! Ein alter Bekannter von mir, Marcus, hat mich kurz nach der Veröffentlichung angepingt und gefragt, ob ich Interesse an einem kurzen Interview für seine Radio-Sendung Trackback hätte. Natürlich hatte ich – wenn alles klappt, wirds was morgen zwischen ab 18:00 und 20:00 Uhr.

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(Dies ist die englische Version eines ursprünglich deutschsprachigen Artikels.) Child’s Play 2008 is on. Gamers in many countries of the world give money or buy toys, games or other gifts for child hospitals and stations and their little patients; partner hospitals in the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Egypt are delighted about all the donations. The Question But where’s Germany? This question popped up in my head more than once during the summer.

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(This is a post in German. Are you looking for the English language version?) Child’s Play 2008 ist gestartet. Gamer in vielen Ländern geben Geld oder kaufen Spielzeuge, Games und andere Geschenke für Kinderkrankenhäuser und -stationen und ihre kleinen Patienten; Partner- Kliniken in den US, Großbritannien, Kanada, Neuseeland, Australien und Ägypten freuen sich über vielen Spenden. Die Frage Aber warum nicht hier in Deutschland? Die Frage kam mir während des Sommer immer wieder in den Kopf.

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A few weeks ago I was talking with Mike about carefully choosing gifts for our loved ones, about how to select the right things for the right people, so that come holiday season joy would be brought to them. We were discussing this arduous task at great lengths, using big words and long sentences, reflecting the importance of the outcome and the process itself. I believe our conversation started when the phrase “I need some random Christmas crap” was muttered by one of us.

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The short story is: not going to happen. I’ll be shutting escaloop down in about a month or so. It was a nice toy and a fun experiment, I’ve used it to get into Ramaze, but I have neither the time nor the energy to work on it any further. I recommend moving over to FriendFeed or Lifestream.fm for all your lifestream needs. I am sure there are many more such services, just look around.

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During the last few weeks, I’ve built a couple of pipes I want to share. (“Pipe”, in this context, means an application built in Yahoo! Pipes.) Here’s one of them. Your Most Recent Nike+ Run As I’ve mentioned once or twice in the past, I’ve become a more or less avid runner during the last year. One central piece of my equipment is my Nike+. I don’t run without it. I am a geek, I love numbers.

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(This is a rather long piece. It has a point, though… so please bear with me. Danke.) During the last couple of months I’ve developed an increasing interest in the US elections. More or less closely following the news about them, scrutinizing and evaluating their talking points and ideas, I’ve become rather familiar with both candidates, formed an opinion – slowly realizing that I am actually more interested in the politics of a country I don’t live in and an electorate system I can neither influence nor participate in than in my own nation’s.

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I was made aware that BetterSearch is currently not working on Google. Apparently, Google changed the HTML of the results page, and BetterSearch doesn’t know what to do. I’ll release 1.22 soon. Stay tuned. Update 2008-08-22: I’ve just uploaded v1.22 to the Mozilla addon site; once it’s been reviewed by the staff there, it should show up here. Update 2008-08-24: v1.22 was reviewed and approved!

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