So, we went to IKEA today, to buy a simple picture frame. When we left, we had bought this: In all fairness – we were eyeing it for about a year by now… and until one month ago, it cost €789. Then they lowered the price to €599. When we went there today the price tag said €299. We never had a chance, they got us. It’s 2.15m long (that’s ~613 feet or something, metric is so much better), real leather, and damn comfy.
My baby sister Claudia married her longtime friend Tino this weekend. Yes, we were invited. :) I’ll skip the part where we fought against the Gods of the Autobahn on Friday (car crashes, construction sites and car crashes within construction sites along the road, took us ten hours to drive there) and how we got almost no sleep the night before and get right to the wedding day. We drove to the town where the church is, Rossla.
By now I’m thoroughly depressed when I think about our aforementioned management blogs. Today I had to learn a few things: There were no new comments on the blog entry. There was no new blog entry, not even a small one mentioning the staff meeting where the blog was explained. The staff meeting where the blog was explained was a real h00t since the two managers (our vice and one of his quality management managers) were opposing themselves to a great deal.
Caution, rather unstructured rant ahead So, our internal company strategy is now mainly focussed on quality management, which, sadly is a topic long overdue. Not enough people, not enough time, to many fucking jobs in a day, the usual. Plus, an in-house communication which seems to come straight from the deepest depths in Hell. One of the more capable managers was promoted vice CEO earlier this year, and our CEO tagged him with the honorable job of straightening out the internal processes – communications, inter-department processes, everything.
Fun fact: Google muß passen bei dem Wort “Multigeschwindigkeitsklitorisstimulator”. In your face, information machine.
Writing software is getting harder and harder. The more you learn, the harder it gets. It’s not about the code (as Drew noticed earlier – his article got me thinking quite a bit, actually), it’s about the mind, the architecture, the wish to do things well right from the start. I’m there. While I was hammering down rather silly but working PHP code for G-Blog.net as it stands today, I’m advancing much more careful in my development of the new version.
Pure elegance: print [self.entries[a] for a in range(len(self.entries)) if (viewingUser == self or not self.entries[a].isPrivate)] and print [entry for entry in self.entries if (viewingUser == self or not entry.isPrivate)] Built-in privacy on data model level. Live and learn. I love this language. I want to thank Morn for the nice pun I used as title. Update: Teh Mornster has flexed his mighty Python-Fu by showing me an easier way (second line).
20 Stages of Perl to Python Conversion :: ASPN Mail Archive :: python- list: 20 Stages of Perl to Python Conversion See a reference to Python being compared favorably to Perl. Think to yourself, “another stupid little language that thinks it’s better than Perl.” Ignore it. Repeat many times. After seeing some reference to Python, decide, “what the hell, I’ll have a look.” Take a look at the language.
What the fuck is wrong with them?! So, our little scooter is broken, the lights burn out every 10 klicks. It’s less than a year old, so this problem should be a warranty case. I bring the scooter to the damn shop, and they refuse to answer my hypothetical “warranty yes/no” question. Fine, okay, they don’t want to answer that question as long as they don’t know what’s wrong. I can relate.
After building community sites for a while by now I think I have grasped the social dynamics blueprint of community sites to some degree. For example: most community-centered sites are starting out small (naturally), then gathering a relatively small loyal following (#1), then gaining momentum (#2), attracting more and more regulars (#3) and – after a while – die (#4). The circle of life, so to speak. But the devil’s in the details.
Okay, so you want to use SpamBayes on your mail server in order to enjoy working with your webmail or IMAP again. Here’s how to do it. Your DH mail account needs to have shell access. Install the latest Python in your $HOME directory. Install SpamBayes (I recommend the CVS version as the official/stable builds wouldn’t install for me) as described in the paragraph “Procmail” on the linked page. Using your webmail interface or IMAP, set up the following new folders: Spam, TrainingHam, TrainingSpam, Unsure.
Little follow-up to my last work post – now I am comfortable with giving away details. So, we got the new boss, restructuring the tech/server/CMS department and our web/production department. So far, so good. Luckily, “restructuring” (in this case) doesn’t mean “lay-offs”; instead, a few new people are coming aboard. The departments are getting reordered big time, they are actually trying to introduce a higher degree of structure, people are shuffled around and so on.
I hereby proclaim the new official term to describe the casting show / petridish cloning boy/girl band “music”: ProstiPop. “Prosti” as in “prostitutes”, “pop” as in “pop music”. It’s not that far fetched if you think about it. They want fame and money now, without much work (face it, kids… one or two months in a “talent camp” is nothing compared to a life full of devotion and hard work), they are willing to sell their soul as well as their bodies/looks (as in “they’re just puppets, Jim”) for media coverage, and they are fine with the idea to not have old friends as band members but complete strangers.
Big restructuring is going on in the office. For the first time in two- and-a-half years I have the feeling we’re moving. I’m not fully sure yet it’s forward we’re going to - at least not in the short run; in the long term, we probably are, yes. (There are still a couple of people we need to get rid of before we can get up to full speed, I think.
I’m a Bloglines user for, what, exactly 4 months by now, and it just crossed my mind that it is more or less my central one-stop website. I read my daily news with Bloglines, I read my blog subscriptions with Bloglines, I read most of my comics with Bloglines, I read my geek/programming news with Bloglines, I read my gaming news with Bloglines. And best of all, I can do it everywhere I have a browser with web access, and I don’t have to read anything twice or to install.
I’ve been toying around with Dean Allen’s mui funky Textile for a while by now, and finally, as I’m approaching a certain state of development in G-Blog.net v2, I think I have a use for it. It’ll most likely be the formatting gizmo of choice for the next version of this very site. Anyways, while the original version 2.0 beta is great, it’s somewhat annoying to have as part of an object-oriented framework, since this version is basically just a number of functions.
After reading Ender’s Game a couple of months ago, I’ve almost immediately put all Ender books I could find on my Amazon wishlist. This X-Mas, I got the four next books in the series. Tonight, I’ve finished Speaker of the Dead. What an exceptional book. Wow. Even the excellent Ender’s Game looks pale in comparison… Not sure what else to say, still to overwhelmed.
After being annoyed with spam emails for quite some time now (who isn’t?), I was setting up some perimeter defenses to keep the viagra and penis enlargement offers out of my eyesight. SpamAssassin on my server (its threshold is set pretty high after it accidently filtered out some good mails); Firebird’s spam filters are working for me at home, and the SpamBayes Outlook Plugin is keeping me sane in the office.
I’m not going to answer people anymore when I’m in the bathroom. You’re outside, I’m inside for stuff not of concern to you, there’s a closed door between us, and I am not crying for help. So - go away. If I’d want to communicate, I’d either face you or contact you, but I’d not hide in a little box to do it. Get the message? GO AWAY. Thank you. And Happy New Year.
My big “semi-sister” accepted an honest proposal made to her by her boyfriend. In short, they’ll get married. Congrats, my dear Susi. I’m so glad you finally got your ass up, Andreas. ;) I already thought I’d see her implode with excitement over this relationship before you were able to ask her, hehe. This reminds me that my baby sister and her boyfriend decided to get married a while ago as well.
A breakthru for mankind: I’m writing this entry using my lap. Well, the iBook sitting on my lap, to be precise. I love this thing. (The iBook.) Great piece of hardware, definitely a keeper. Which, of course, is directly connected to the rather hefty price tag. Then again, it was a breeze to set up and connect to the Internet, too, and it’s a rather pleasant experience alltogether after all so far.
Wired.com: An implanted male hormonal contraceptive is now being tested. It works in much the same way as its female counterpart, which uses the hormones estrogen and progestin to shut off the release of eggs to prevent pregnancy. In the male version, testosterone and progestin are used to turn off sperm production. “The hormones work by suppressing the production of two other hormones from the brain – LH (luteinizing hormone) and FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone),” said Dr.
Hendrik/Morn and I are back on improving Wakka, his/our little PHP/mySQL wiki engine. A Subversion repository and a neatly installed bugtracking system definitely helped our will to continue fixing this sweet little bugger. ;)
I’m writing PHP code on a regular basis, and I need to document my code. Problem: I’m lazy, and 9 out of 10 times, the basic phpDoc comments for functions or variables/properties are semantically identical. Solution: cDocPHP. It’s a little script I hacked together. It’s neither neatly written nor particularly great nor commented (hehe), but what it does, it does quite okay. So what does it do? Simple: it’s a little form where you can input a package name, your name (i.
Another Sobig worm is making its rounds. It doesn’t make use of any hidden security holes, it solely utilizes the stupidity of people. I still can’t understand why people are opening attachments from people they don’t know. So the worm is spreading like a fucking wildfire, scans the infected PC for email addresses, and sends out mails using the found addresses as either sender or recipient. Somewhere, it found some of my old company email addresses, and now I’m getting tons of “you suck, please fuck yourself and die noisily” mails from virus walls and other companies' security countermeasures which think I sent those mails.