Over the weekend I finally had some time to continue playing around with Yahoo! Pipes. (Turns out that quitting World of Warcraft makes your days longer. Huh. Who’d have thought…) It really is a neat toy/tool. Alas, it is not without hitches. If you’ve worked with Pipes before, you know that it has a module named ‘Fetch Data’, but unfortunately this module is only able to deal with XML and JSON data.
I like my life. It’s not perfect, but I don’t care. It’s pretty cool. I could do so much worse, seriously. w00t!
Looks like there is a new Flickr API output format: LOL. Not my work, no idea who built this, but I really like it. Here’s an example of returned data (?tags=cats&format=lol): HAI IM IN UR BUCKETS MAKING UP FORMATS GIMME PHOTOS FROM EVERYONE TAGGED CATS WITH GEODATA I CAN HAS PHOTO IMG_2326 ITZ AT [http://www.flickr.com/photos/blush_response/1377293729/][2] INVISIBLE METADATA LOL KTHX.
Yeah, it’s actually a granite Yoda. Awesome.
I found a few versions of this in my inbox a few minutes ago: Dear “friends” at Rapleaf.com, I know you’re probably just “alerting” me that “someone” might have found possibly incriminating links to my various social network profiles, and that is so nice of you. You know what else it is? Spamming. That’s true! Ask your friends. Sure, there is this “If you do not want to receive emails from Rapleaf, click here” link at the bottom of each unsolicited mail you’ve sent me.
…in Europe. According to the Internet Traffic Report, Europe’s intertubes currently feature around 20-30% packet loss. Average, I might add. It seems like two of three major German routers have fallen of the net. I can indeed confirm this: My connection graph looks like a comb. When calling my ISP I don’t even get to the “on hold” loop, the automaton on the other end is telling me “Everyone’s busy, please leave a name and number, we’ll call you back ASAP”.
Some fun-name generator told me the other day that my porn name is Reed Funkenstein. What can I say, I do not plan on breaking into the adult entertainment market, but I like the name. It basically oozes willpower and ingenuity. It fits like a glove! I will probably use it for my next open source project. Reed Funkenstein is feeling frisky geeky.
Okay, maybe that was a bit harsh, but think about it for a moment. Everyone is complaining about power consumption and global warming and whatnot, THE EARTH IS DYING!!!1oneoneeleven, yet by now it’s really fucking hard to find a decent mouse or keyboard that does have a cable. Why is that? I seriously don’t understand why it’s necessary and accepted among computer users to have a formerly cable-bound piece of hardware that now doesn’t “need” a cable anymore, but batteries (rechargable or not).
Dana is rebuilding our lovely little garden behind the house. We’ll get our new car on Friday (YAY!), and I’m having a frickin’ ear infection, which caused my doctor to cram some tissue and gel-stuff into it. It seems to help, but I’m basically half-deaf now. At least temporarily. I’m allowed to get rid of the things tomorrow, but daaaaaaamn, it sucks. :P So, I’m a little cranky. Weeee.
Hendrik moves to Brighton, UK. I still don’t have much to say about that, I am glad for him, but that doesn’t make me feel better about seeing my best friend moving away. :/ I can totally understand his notion, tho - I’ve been at the same point myself a few years ago - so it’s alright. Well, we also still have the intertubes. Anyways, he’s also looking for work. If you’re in or around Brighton and searching for a freelance Rails consulting/development ninja, you should at least look him up.
The more my little WoW toon is nearing lvl70 (he’s @69 now), the less space in my mind is occupied by the game. I am actually thinking about personal coding again, i.e. building more stuff outside the office. I am not relieved or shocked by this observation, it feels right. My love for the game isn’t decreasing, neither is my love for coding increasing. Both stay the same, yet something is changing once again.
Jakob Nielsen’s bi-weekly ‘Alertbox’ column, aptly labeled “Current Issues in Web Usability“, does not offer an RSS feed. Why is that? It’s published for 12 years straight by now (seriously: wow), still no feed. (There are a number of scraped ones, including one I’ve made myself, but that’s not the point. Shouldn’t there be something official?) Just wondering.
Twitter and Pownce are broken. MySpace, too. Oh, and pretty much every social networking site on the planet, too. For me, at least. It’s not the technical aspect. Not the concept, either. (Well, I don’t understand the hype and/or praise sites like Twitter is getting. From a technical standpoint, it’s well done, I won’t argue that, but I don’t get the point of the sites. But back to the topic.)
During the night, my sister gave birth to two baby girls, Joline and Charleen. They’re all healthy and well. No pictures yet, my parents will visit her, the twins and her husband later today. Congratulations, Claudia and Tino! :) That makes us “Uncle Carlo” and “Aunt Dana” then. Huh.
After reading another great press release I think I now know what “Web 2.0” means. Up until now I was convinced that if you asked 10 people what it means, you’d get 10 different answers. Turns out all the tech guys have it wrong, tho. You see, it’s all in the pronunciation. It’s not “Web two-point-zero”, it’s actually “Web two-point-oh”. As in “Web two-point-OH-MY-GOD WE’RE, LIKE, TOTALLY COOL”. Don’t laugh.
It just dawned me that on the web, Germany must be to the UK and US what China is to the rest of the “real” World (at least in the perception of the rich western countries): copycats. Cases in point: Frazr vs. Twitter, StudiVZ vs. Facebook, a dozen del.icio.us clones vs. del.icio.us. Seriously, the (visible part of the) German startup scene is making a sad impression. Pretty much each new German site I see is more or less a carbon copy of a successful UK or US site.
Dear old people of Nippon, thank you. It is only because of you that I am still the one and only Yahoo!/Google search engine result for the term Gerontomageddon. Sincerely yours, Carlo
Dear Perl community, I just wasted 15 minutes of my life trying to figure out how to get the index of a particular element in an array. Turns out I have to write a for loop to walk through the array. This is insulting. Seriously, it’s 2007. If at this point in time you’re still defending your beloved language and/or using words like “elegant” or “quick” when describing Perl, you’re bat shit crazy.
So I have 100 invites for this new site called Spock.com. In a nutshell, I see it as Wikipedia + search engine, but just about people. It’s an interesting approach. For a general quick explanation, feature list, a few screenshots and all around overview, see this TechCrunch article. The interesting thing is that it’s not a social network, but more of a meta- hub that allows you to find, tag and describe yourself and/or others.
Wir haben heute Yahoo! News 2.0 gelauncht. Gratulation an alle beteiligten Kollegen. :) Die Site hat viel Neues, vor allem eine schickere Präsentation und (hoffentlich) weniger Bugs. Es gibt noch ein paar Ecken und Kanten, aber die schleifen wir auch noch zurecht. Anschauen! (Ich hab auch ein wenig beigesteuert (Video-Importer), aber das war der kleinste Teil.)
The other day I met Justin Timberlake at a bus station here in Munich. That was quite bizarre, he was just standing there, apparently waiting for the bus. At first, I wasn’t sure whether it was really him; just a guy in a shirt, jeans and a jacket. I glanced at him a couple of times, the man looked a wee bit pissed, but not too much. You know how it is—you look at someone, wondering whether your mind is playing tricks on you, or whether you’re going crazy, because what you see is highly improbable.
The other day I talked about our impending doom, but Madrid wasn’t totally bad. In fact, I had two great nights there. On Monday, after I’ve arrived, my esteemed colleagues and I went to a little tapas restaurant whose name I forgot. Too bad, because it was rather spiffy. Nice food, great wine, much fun. We actually walked there from the office, so I managed to get some quick glimpses at the city.
After giving Media Temple a go for a few months regarding hosting this little blog on their much-touted plan/platform, I’ve decided it’s definitely not worth $20/month for me. Seriously, it’s just a wee blog, nothing big. In fact, it’s mostly a plain vanilla Wordpress setup. Nothing special there. And also I don’t get many visitors, so I was surprised to see the site to awfully slow. What gives? On top of that is the SSH access responding at glacier speeds at any given time; very underwhelming, too.
It’s funny, highly entertaining, and dripping coolness. Go watch it.
A few days ago, the company sent me to Madrid, Spain, for a summit. Madrid was nice. I’ve met a lot of friendly people, co-workers and random passersby alike, taxi drivers and dancers (more on that later), and made some observation which lead me to believe our attempts at saving the climate are futile. In short: from what I observed over the course of three days, along with what I’ve seen during our days on Teneriffe, Spain’s collective consciousness doesn’t seem to give a damn about energy conservation.