Friday I finally got my new machine delivered to my doorstep: 24’’ iMac, Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 7600GT. First impression: it’s huge. Really huge. “A couple of smaller iMacs are orbiting it!”-huge. But very shiny. My 20” Dell flatscreen is still sitting next to it, looking small. The transition from the Mac mini to the new box was uneventful, almost too easy, if there is such a thing. Next I moved a few gigabytes of porn data over from my PC, the 250GB drive took it with a mere shrug, as expected.

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Today is the day Vista is launched by many happy faces at Microsoft. (The World stood still for a very short moment… it blinked, shrugged, and continued to spin, feeling indifferent.) Today is the day I placed an order for a new machine. It will be big, and I will be very happy the day it’ll arrive—this Friday, if all goes well. No real connection between these two fantastic events. By the way, one of them excites me to a degree I can’t really communicate, the other… eh… not so much.

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Vorhin im XXXLutz-”Restaurant”. Kellner: “Was darf ich Ihnen bringen?” Carlo: “Ich möchte das Tagesangebot, die vier Weißwürscht mit ‘nem Weißbier.” K: “Nein.” C: “Was?” K: “Nein, möchten Sie nicht.” C: “Möchte ich nicht?” K: “Nein, die sind grauenvoll. Ganz ehrlich. Wenn ich Sie die bestellen lasse, dann seh ich Sie nie wieder. Bestellen Sie lieber irgendwas anderes, dann kommen Sie wenigstens vielleicht wieder.” C: ”… Okay, ich nehm dann die Berner Würschtl.

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CSS Well Of Knowledge. 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without is a nicely done, dense list of cool techniques (with links). Great quote. By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (via): If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Minty! Mint v2. ‘nuff said. Firebug video. Last week, Joe Hewitt, Firebug developer, visited the Sunnyvale campus to give a tech talk about version 1.

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Yahoo! meets OpenID. Simon Willison just released his new site, idproxy.net. Basically it’s a wrapper to “transform” your Yahoo! ID into an OpenID. (To put it simple.) It’s making use of Yahoo!s BBAuth system, and it quite nice. Not perfect and fully fleshed out yet, but cool already. And hey, it is secured by monsters! Buy MS Vista. Seriously, there are so many versions, there’s something for everyone. Spring? The snow is melting, the sun is out, and we just got back from Lehner’s where we had some excellent Kaiserschmarrn.

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1080p!!!1 I don’t know whether technically this qualifies as joke, but I laughed. Re-roll. Kind of sad, but I’m in pretty much the same spot. Sans the couch. Wikipedia. xkcd nails the problem with Wikipedia. Buzz donuts. [via JR] Scientist develops caffeinated doughnuts. Oh yes. Each donuts contains the caffeine of approximately two cups of coffee.

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Chocolate Covered SQL. This particular entry at The Daily WTF is hilarious. Even tho it’s unbelievable wrong, the screenshot of this one Google Accounts captcha page is hilarious. Nerds! You know you’re a nerd when you read a spam email with the subject “Do You SUFFER from CVS?” (in this case the acronym stands for “computer vision syndrome”—whatever that may be), and the first thing that comes to your mind is “Yes, Subversion is so much better”.

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When I read Simon’s proposal about social whitelisting with OpenID this morning, I was immediately intrigued by the idea. Basically, he’s suggesting that by whitelisting trusted OpenIDs, sharing these lists among peers, and using them to decide whether to place a new comment on your own blog in a moderation queue or not, a group of people could build a working, trust-based protection against comment spam(mers). Go read. It’s good stuff.

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BookmarkID? Ka-Ping Yee came up with a funny idea on how to battle phishing using browser bookmarks. Google Earth Space Art. [via Mr. Willison] Space Invaders on Google Maps/Earth. Great. :) Amen. Mr. Alfke, you’re absolutely right: “[A]nyone who’ll voluntarily use ‘vi’ in the 21st century will put up with anything. [..] And that goes for ‘emacs’ too [..] I thought emacs was really cool, in 1986. That’s when it was really cool to have a DEC VT220 terminal in my dorm room with a 9600 baud connection to a VAX running BSD 4.

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Apparently, for whatever reason, people came here and read my mad rant about Jabber, OpenID And “teh shiny’‘. To be perfectly honest, I was somewhat surprised about that. Anyways, allow me to address some responses. Peter Saint-Andre answered with some interesting numbers. (He is Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation, Director of Standards at Jabber Inc., Chair of the XMPP Council, and managing editor of the standards process followed by the XMPP Standards Foundation.

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Summing up YouTube. xkcd does an excellent job of taking a snapshot of YouTube in one single comic strip. It’s art! jr has an iNsight Apple is not a business. It’s an art co-op. Project Censored: Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007. Interesting list. I “liked” #2, Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran. How old is the Grand Canyon? Park service won’t say: Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

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I am thinking about my linkblog for a few days now, and whether to continue it or not. On one hand, it is kind of comfortable to just share items in Google Reader or to just store another bookmark using Yahoo! MyWeb. (An hourly cronjob is parsing both RSS feeds and feeding it to my site.) On the other hand, I think the Post Its are the better format. It takes more time (and more work, even) to compile them over the course of a day, but I am more flexible in how to present them.

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Jeremy Zawodny on The Tipping Point for OpenID: I mean that all it takes now is for one “big player” to jump on the OpenID bandwagon. OpenID will then either take off or fall flat on its face. I believe it’ll succeed… in a similiar way Jabber has succeeded. A good, solid, open system with an active developer community, but not shiny enough to appeal to the masses. Personally, I hope that it’ll fare better.

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Windy. Outside a storm is brewing that is assumed to end all life in Germany. Everywhere. We’re all going to die! Is Jesus coming back, bringing his lawyers? No idea. I just hope we’ll still have a roof in the morning. New keyboard. Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, excellent even on a Mac, thanks to the surprisingly flexible IntelliType software. I love Apple hardware, but the glaring lack of an ergonomic keyboard is nothing short of a shame.

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‘Take a leap into hyperspace’ is an interesting article about the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awarding the title “Liquid Propulsion Best Paper” to a team of scientists around Jochem Häuser (Germany) and Walter Dröscher (Austria), who published a paper called “Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory”, which deals with (hold on to your pants) dimension drives. Well, hyper drives. Well, not even that, but apparently the serious possibility of moving shit around really fast by manipulating forces in eight dimensions.

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Wee hands: A baby gorilla grasps the hand of a caregiver at the Lefini Faunal Reserve. The center was set up to rehabilitate “bush-meat orphans,” young gorillas whose mothers are illegally killed by poachers for meat. Gorilla babies rely on the care and emotional support of their mother for as long as eight years.”_ I don’t know whether this is one of the greatest pictures I’ve ever seen or one of the most depressing—assuming the circumstances.

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Seit letzter Woche steht jeden Morgen an der U-Bahn-Station ein entfernt an Gunther von Hagens erinnernder Mann und hebt eine Publikation mit dem etwas aufdringlichen Namen “Erwachet!” in die Luft. Die sich daraus ergebende Ironie, daß er das Blatt noch schlaftrunkenden Menschen auf dem Weg in die Arbeit ins Gesicht hält, scheint ihm nicht aufzufallen.

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The aforementioned tech article is available now on YUIblog.com! It’s explaining a way to use the excellent YUI library in Greasemonkey scripts. I’m sure that this approach is neither the perfect nor the only solution to achieving YUI/Greasemonkey integration, but it works for me and I thought sharing can’t hurt. Well, the article is here, and the example script can be downloaded from this very site here. Many thanks to Eric Miraglia for giving me a soapbox.

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That Greasemonkey article I was talking about a few days ago is coming along nicely. We’re in the middle of polishing, and if all goes well, it’ll be posted within the next 72 hours. Always exciting. :)

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I am planning to write a more or less full rundown of the year past for a few weeks by now, and I finally faced the fact that it won’t happen anytime soon—i.e. probably never. So I’ve decided to simply jot down some corner stones of a year that was strange, cool, tiresome and good to me. Proudest overall moment: Standin on ~80m2 of laminate flooring after installing it. I did it all by myself within 2 full days; yes, you can see it, it’s not perfect, but I installed it with my own hands.

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Ich bin schwach. Hendrik erzählte mir interessante Sachen über den neuen WoW 2.0-Patch, und eh ichs mich versehe, habe ich den Patch runtergeladen, installiert, und meinen Account reaktiviert. Super, ganz toll. Ich bin so schwach. Ich hab zwei (für mich) ganz neue Ansätze ausprobiert: Untot & Magus. Dummerweise hab ich jetzt wieder Spaß, allerdings hab ich auch noch nicht so lang gespielt. Wenigstens hab ich Urlaub; eine gute Ausrede. Danke, Hendrik.

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When Jon Stewart mentioned “Hanukkah Harry” the other day during an episode of The Daily Show, I thought he had made that name up there on the spot. Or at least made it up as a joke for that particular show. Turns out I was wrong. Hanukkah Harry actually has his own story and everything. And it’s so much better than Santa’s. Oy, presents!

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A few weeks ago I was minding my own business at work, writing a Greasemonkey script to solve a problem I had, when I noticed that apparently I had found the solution for a GM problem that not only I had but a number of other people as well. So, I tinkered and tinkered and tinkered some more and discovered that I had managed to write something fairly wicked that I had never seen before.

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A dirty, dirty, dirty keyboard can be cleaned thoroughly easily, it doesn’t necessarily have to be thrown away—you can reuse it! Here’s how. Unplug the keyboard. Then disassemble it, usually that means taking out the screws in the back and ending up with one plastic board holding all the keys and the (more or less) fancy casing. If the cable can be detached, even better. Now, take the key board and the casing and put it in a dishwasher.

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Gots me one of them Wiis the other day. Got Monkeyball and Rayman, but always ended up playing Wii Sports with Dana for hours so far—mostly Bowling and Golf. It’s surprisingly, insanely fun. Really well done. The fact that she likes the Bowling game so much alone was well worth the price. I am sporadically online, if you want my Wii code, drop me a line, you know how to reach me.

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