Open Maps and the Discoverer in You
I really enjoyed Measuring the World (in German: Vermessung der Welt) by Daniel Kehlmann. It describes how Alexander von Humboldt cartographs southern America and how Carl Friedrich Gauss finds out loads of miracles of the world of mathematics (and later uses these to measure out western Europe). The book is really good in giving you the feelings of those days – how it was being a discoverer.
Lemmings in JavaScript
Some of you may remember one of the best games of the 90s: Lemmings. I can’t remember how many hours I’ve played this neat game – but it must have been quite a lot. I still remember the first levels … Continued
Round Robin Database with MySQL
If you have loads of continuous data which you have to store and at the same time it is o.k. if old data gets removed after a while, a round robin database is your choice. Those databases allow the user to define a maximum number of records (or maximum number of storage space) and new data that would not fit into the allocated space, will simply overwrite the oldest record in the database. Basically a ring buffer on disk. The database won’t grow indefinitely and you don’t have to do extensive maintenance tasks.
shutdownday.org
I’ll participate and leave my machines off on 24th of March!
NY Excuse Mac?
Well, I once blogged about NY Excuse by Soulwax. Here it is on Youtube as a Apple Ad Mix. Enjoy it. And no, I’m not related to Apple in any way. My choice is Ubuntu 😉 – but this song … Continued
Cropping Images with JavaScript
Imagine you have an image on your web page. And you want to crop an area from that image and display it with a given size. And you want to do that, without the server having to do the heavy … Continued
Developers are Musicians
Some random (and slightly interpreted) quotes by Ryan McMinn of unspace.ca, a Canadian project company: Specs = Speculations Contracts induce Software that works but sucks Developing Software is getting a career option Developers are Musicians Check out the video – … Continued
RDT and RadRails Keyboard Shortcuts
RDT together with RadRails on Eclipse is a pretty convenient development environment when doing things in Ruby on Rails. A little unknown are the keyboard shortcuts, which make your day even more productive. Here’s a list of those:
Ctrl-Alt-T
Jump to the test case of a model or controller and vice versa.
Ctrl-Shift-V
Jump to the view of a controller method and vice versa.
Ctrl-Alt-X
Teaching the Machine
We are hyperlinking information, giving it semantical meanings, we are teaching the Web, teaching the machine – and the machine is teaching us. We are the Web. Click. … I know it was on Digg, del.icio.us, etc. – I just … Continued
Reviving a Linksys WRT54G v1.1
I thought it was gone. Forever. My Linksys WRT54G v1.1. But let me start from the beginning: I read that the OpenWRT White Russian release 0.9 got final. I was using the original Linksys Firmware before so I thought I’d give it a try by flashing the end user version of OpenWrt, x-wrt, via Web-Update.