about: things
on me and coding and some things

Stumbling again over the gardner group SL hype cycle today i couldn’t resist applying this little fix to it. Those which still care for SL will know what i mean. For the others, don’t bother, looks like you won’t need to watch out for Linden Labs Second Life. Will they ever come back?

Virtual Worlds, mainly in the form of Virtual Goods(GOLD!) will be become bigger and bigger over the years, but this will happen without SL. And rightfully so. Their client is still really bad. No fun in starting it up on my laptop, so i don’t.

If you ever checked the super ugly absolutly non-maintainable source code* of the open source client, you can’t hold back to interpret this as another example of an solution which was not ready to deliver once the markets where ripe for conquer.

have fun

* and don’t forget, “use the source, luke!”




Technorati Tags: secondlife, hypecycle, gardner

unvermeidliches macbook air post. aber dank bild brauch ich zum glueck nix dazu sagen.

found at: joyoftech.com, indeed.





Technorati Tags: macbook, air, apple, fun

Who hasn’t took the chance to go there, by now is pretty late. “Vom Funken zum Pixel” media art exhibition is closing today. The Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin  in Berlin was staging it for approx 2-3 months now. You might still catch it, when you run, it’s closing at 20:00.

Why i bother telling you ask? After closing, I will go there gearing down, because I had the pleasure and honor of having “The Invisible Shape of Things past” being exhibited there. This installation/work/sculpture/prints are a work i did together with Joachim Sauter over 10 years ago. Since then it was exhibited(and evolved) just a handful of times

What remains now, is to put it back into boxes. And to look forward to the next exhibition. coming soon.


Technorati Tags: mediaart, ishapes, art, exhibition

Actually it surprises me that the internet exploder users still make up a 10% percent share on my blog. My personal experience tends to be different. More often than not it looks a little like seen below.

Anyhow, the 10% internet explorer usage fits nicely with another or my stats from Google Analytics:



The ‘Connection Speed’ distribution numbers for modem users are actually an exact match to the Internet Exploder numbers. Hmm, coincidence?

Maybe, but just in any case, let me give a warm hello to the seemingly web-savvy internet wizzards still surfing the net on their modem lines with Internet exploder and Windows. God luck, but rest assured you  won’t find ‘optimized for IE’ stuff here.

have fun

p.s.: yes, i spoiled actual visitor numbers. You just don’t know the timeslot.
 


Technorati Tags: apple, marketshare, google, analytics, IE

Yesterday i was wondering who is right about the URI and as it turns out the culprit is the googlecharts gem. The RFC defines ‘UNWISE’ characters, the ruby URI implementation seem to correctly fail on them and the Google API defines the just the URI, not how it has to be encoded/escaped.

I posted the scary URI regex from the ruby open-uri package which fails to grasp the Google Charts URIs. Debugging such thing is no fun so i went for a quick fix instead and actually could find it in the googlecharts gem. Just replace:

jstize(@@url + query_params.join('&'))

from ...ruby/gems/1.8/gems/googlecharts-0.2.0/lib/gchart.rb with:

unwise = []#%w({ } | \ ^ [ ] `)
query_params.each do |p|
   unwise.each { |c| p.gsub!(c, "%#{c[0].to_s(16).upcase}") }
end

jstize(@@url + query_params.join('&'))this escapes the ‘|’ (pipe) characters which were causing the exception, like this one:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/uri/common.rb:436:in `split': bad URI(is not URI?): http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chdl=requests(cached)|requests&chd=s:Fb9JJfgZ,Fb9KJfgq&cht=lc&chs=300x200 (URI::InvalidURIError)

Technorati Tags: ruby, googlecharts, google, gem, fix

UPDATE:found a simple fix/hack for the googlecharts gem



Uhh!, this for sure is one of the more scary regular expressions you normally encounter. Its URI::REGEXP::PATTERN::ABS_URI from uri/common.rb:137. Looks complete, doesn’t it? And still it fails to grasp my seemingly valid Google Charts URL which is: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chdl=requests(cached)|requests&chd=s:Fb9JJfgZ,Fb9KJfgq&cht=lc&chs=300×200

It’s the googlecharts gem which creates this URL here(not me!), but than bails out when trying to download an image from it.

/opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/uri/common.rb:436:in `split': bad URI(is not URI?):...

Now, who is right? Google? The URI RFC2396? The googlecharts gem? Debugging such things are the less thrilling moments in life.

Besides that, even when bailing out on this one, the googlecharts gem feels good. It offers efortless chart creation and basic cases are already covered, the advanced stuff will follow i think. Go check it out when in search for an easy charting solution. Googlecharts gem felt better to me than the gchartrb which is another wrapper for the same service, but your milage may vary.

have fun




Technorati Tags: ruby, googlecharts, api

ok, after this very short twitteruption this afternoon of the premium xings i sat down tonight at home and thought, hmm? getting rid of advertising on xing.com isn’t really worth a premium membership. A short look onto the pagesource with firebug revealed the pretty simple html schema.

so even me personally was able to sketch a simplistic greasemonkey script to erase ad iframes from the xing page like follows:

UPDATE: fixed the script and updated pastie link(thx henrik)



eeeeasy, download from pastie download (old) (no guarantees, you know, script might eat your backups and such)

For those who don’t know, Greasemonkey is a firefox extension to add custom javascript to any website. And this means, you can do whatever you want with the content. There are greasemonkey scripts which are adding links to the amazon site linking to sites with better prices for example. not fair, but thats life. in the web20 world.

have fun

p.s.: they paypal/aws/whatever payment sponsor button to fork 1 euro from your saved premium account money i will  code next week - hope to welcome you back on payday.





Technorati Tags: xing, greasemonkey, adbuster, twitter

Have you ever wondered how the world around you would look like for ‘The man with the X-Ray eyes‘? Look no further. from the Touch design project emerged a set of beautiful visualization of the strange electro-magnatic creatures around us.

Another example on how the world changes for the ones with eyes to see,

have fun,
be scared,



Technorati Tags: rfid, design, art, visualization