about: things
on me and coding and some things

yep,



found @ http://www.woostercollective.com/2008/01/geek_graffiti.html




Technorati Tags: politics, usa, geek, humor

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

reminds me to the old alt.destroy-the-earth newsgroup. Now the folks at Los Alamos finally worked out a concept to bring light to darkness without the hassle of an ICBM. Their convenient “portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub”. You just “bury it underground”(see picture corners) and voila! clean green energy for 25,000 Homes.

An annual production of 4,000 unit will be up by late 2012. Great! Oh, just in case you’re worried about security, listen to Deborah Blackwell, spokeswomen of Hyperion: 

“Like you don’t open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in … You don’t ever open it or mess with it.”

Right, just don’t mess with it! Deborah, ever watched a malicious 7 year old while not opening a double-A battery just to find out what’s in there?

But i guess they will solve that easily by only allowing people with an nuclear reactor license to install the hot tub in their homes. As that already works so well to keep hand guns in the rightful hands. The hands of the god loving people, in the land of the brave and the free.

have fun

Technorati Tags: clean, nuclear, power, USA, climate

which color lies halfway inbetween #ff00ff and #00ff00 you ask?

One line of ruby code can interolate two color vectors like they are usually found inside css files, like: body{background: #ff00ff; color: #00ff00}.

%w{ff00ff 00ff00}.map{|a|a.scan(/../).map{|b|b.hex}}.inject{|c,d|(0...c.size).each{|i|c[i]+=d[i]};c}.map{|e|"%02x"%(e>>1)}.join

@UPDATE:

#121 character solution by schmidt(http://www.nach-vorne.de)
%w{ff00ff 00ff00}.map{|a|a.scan(/../).map{|b|b.hex}}.inject{|c,d|c.size.times{|i|c[i]+=d[i]};c}.map{|e|"%0x"%(e>>1)}.join

Answer -> 0x7f7f7f. sure, there must be a shorter version. Can you show it to me?

next step: color animations and gradients and HSR colorspace conversions mayby.

have fun



Technorati Tags: ruby, coding, puzzle, css, hex, color, interpolation

this sunny sunday afternoon i was putting together some utility code(stupid me!) to do some remote blogging from the shell or the cosy inside of my vim editing session. This for some later time, but while i was going on with my test-driven/test first development i hit the problem of missing a test to check for the base class of my errors. I wanted to:

assert_raise(StandardError) { @blog.find_post(:postid => 123456789) }

to generally check for any kind of trouble bubbling up but it was not working as expected. Instead i got nasty Failure reports:

1) Failure:
test_find_post(XMLRPCTest) [mylib.rb:83]:
<StandardError> exception expected but was
Class: <XMLRPC::FaultException>
Message: <"Sorry, no such post.">

I suspected XMLRPCTest::FaultException to maybe not beeing derived from StandardError, but that was not the case. A look in the ruby documentation and the ruby-talk thread confirmed:

assert_raise(*args) {|| ...} is checking for the EXCACT exception type only!

How was it for you?

On the ruby-talk mailing list there was a little discussion about this topic and i pretty much agree with all the +1 sayers on the list. Edwin Fine propsed adding his own assert_raise_s method the Assertions class. You easily get into muddy waters with opening standard ruby classes for some duck-typing but reverting to:

assert_raise(XMLRPC::FaultException) { @blog.find_post(:postid => 123456789) }

was not an option. This would expose way to much implementation detail to this very high level coding of the very first tests so early in the project. So I was using the source, as yoda said and found another solution for me.

Modules as base class arguments to assert_raises

After i read Edwin’s post i checked the source for def assert_raise and learned that this method is actually checking for some kind of exception base class. The argument to assert_raise is an array of exception types. assert_raise does partition this types into Class and Module.

The assertion_raise checks for Class types is exact, but the Module is not(can’t be). They are checked with an is_a? condition – there can’t be no object instance of module type or course.

My original test therefor simply fails because StandardError is not a Module but a class. The XMLRPC::FaultException implementation is not mine but it is bubbling through my lib which i’m testing and this is precisly the condition i want to write tests for.

“Module tagged” exceptions and assert_raises_kind_of

First i wrote an empty tagging module for lib to tag all Errors and exceptions coming from my lib:

module MyLib
    module Error; end
end

Now i can tag all exception from some deeper laying code with my Error module:

begin
    ...
rescue => e # errors bubbling from the underworld
        # tag it
    class << e; include MyLib::Error; end 
        # throw it
    raise e
end

Voila, and now i can write:

assert_raise(BlogMist::Error) { @blog.find_post(:postid => 123456789) }

and finally got what i wanted but you’re milage may vary. Basically this gives me a way to create some kind of folksonomy of errors coming from my library. Don’t know yet where this might lead me, but hey, ruby is the best for protoyping and playing around!

Don’t be lazy!

Testing for error base classes instead of pricise error handling is not to make you lazy! As discussed on the forum thread it is to start with tests early on and being able to refine error condition testing over time.

Technorati tag: ruby, ducktyping, assert_raise, test-first,

form the “competition drives innovation” department i would like to tell you about the foto-foo (of my company) update for sharper images, but see for yourself!

nobody blogged about us(sigh), but with cameroid and phozi two other sites similar to us got mentioned on techcrunch and elsewhere. And as competition drives…, you know, we are glad to have them around. To keep us motivated. So we got sharper images for today, lets see whats next? Ideas?

Technorati Tags: foto-foo, photobooth, cameroid, phozi, onlinewebcam, webcam, widget, idmedia

what’s there more left to say? As steffen already posted on our company/product blog he managed to shoot the man himself! David(of ruby on rails fame) in front of our foto-foo webcam snapshot solution. This is best practice par excellence, right there, on location, from there to internet with no inbetween. That is foto-foo: no files, no upload, no hazzle, and, Thanks! David! You are the man, have a good time over there at the rails conf in portland and hope to see you all back in berlin in september!

cheers

Technorati Tags: rails, dhh, foto-foo, idmedia

military laser guidance technic in the hands of urban rebels makes for a super cool new way of tagging tall buildings with laser pointers. Graffitiresearch from rotterdam is putting high tech in the hands of “writers, protesters, artists and the citizens of Rotterdam”.




go see the movie!


Technorati Tags: laser, graffiti, tagging, media, art, guerilla, marketing

In a kind of talking-to-myself action i dated my companies avatar in the romantic scenery setting of a sundown on Ideas Island(not yet open to the public). Its him(AyDee Kubrick) sitting on top me. My face is streamed live from my macbook, it is not a still image. It still surprises me actually when these things do work like advertised. This is all about testing the live streaming setup which we want to apply on the island. And i can tell you, there are lurking surprises all the way. With the real stream setup(streaming me is not the plan:-) i have a mysterious lag  between voice and image for example. It is not about lip sync, it is something like 1-2 minutes! I have no idea yet where the image stream gets delayed for such long. A couple of seconds i could understand, but a whole minute? The other still unsolved mystery to me is how to setup the darwin streaming server for serving incoming RTSP request on port 80. The manuals say where and how to enable it, but the server fails to comply to my commands. A nice little catch22 you get: The  server fails serving port 80 without root permissions but when you give it root permission it fails to run at all due to missing configurations. Googl’ing this you get tons of stupid forum post about rebooting your mac to make it work and similar smart proposals. We got it working now with IP tables.

Now that our island emerged from the deep waters of californian virtuallity we are just a couple of days away from opening our space there. I hope for  a  lekker housewarming party next week. creating tomorrow and stay tuned! 

Technorati Tags: idmedia secondlife webcam streaming avatar

Belohn´ Dich beim Fernsehen

… mit Sofameilen, dem ersten TV-Bonussystem das laufend während des Fernsehens gesammelt werden kann. Beantworten sie Fragen während sie fernsehen auf dem Display der Betty-Fernbedienung und erhöhen sie ständig ihren Kontostand.

arerrgh, das kann ich aus verstaendlichen gruenden natuerlich nicht unerwaehnt lassen. Ich habe schon lange aufgehoert mich ueber diese leute vom fernsehn zu wundern.