Stop Being Carbon

Zach Klein wrote a few days ago a story about his flaws. He said that when he was asked about them in college, he couldn’t name them.

I can’t name them either.

But I’m working on it, even if I actually don’t want to. Today I discovered one of them.

I’m impatient. I guess I’ve always been. When I was still a kid, not too young anymore, I knew where my mum hid my christmas presents. I did have a look at some of them, not all, but some. That didn’t annul the joy when I actually got them, because I know what was lying under the christmas tree (again, not all of them, I didn’t unpack them or so).

I was also one of the guys who where quite unhappy when it came to the mid of summer because I knew school was still not going to start for a long time. And I guess I’m a doer. I was never one of those guys who was passive at school, who waited for other students to say something or to act. I wanted to show what I can do and I did.

Now I’m no longer a student, but an employee. And it makes me quite nervous to see what our competition did while we were talking about what we might can do. I wanna build things, I wanna do something, I wanna make progress, actively.

I guess that’s also one of my flaws in my personal life (well, no, I do know that it is a flaw). I can’t wait for things to happen, I need them to happen, I want to influence them and just can’t wait for it). Why do I write all that? Well, because I guess things are changing here. And I can only wait and see. Which makes me uncomfortable and pretty much puzzled.

I got some strange error today when I tried to deploy one of my rails projects to my slice at slicehost. The problem was that I had a newer version of Hpricot running on the slice (0.6.161) versus 0.6 on my local machine. The following line failed:

Hpricot::XChar::PREDEFINED_U.merge!({" " => 32})

Ahm, okay. I didn’t see any changes made to the overall layout of Hpricot so I suspect that line should work. Any ideas?

(If anyone is interested in the meaning of the above line, check this ticket).

…and I’ve never dealt with them, but today I found some small glitch on Vimeo. If you’re running Safari, you will notice that the color of the corners of the different sections does not match the surrounding background color.

I guess the problem lies within the color profile, which is some self configured one and not sRGB (well, at least that’s what I found out while doing some 2-minute research).

I just wanted to register an .at domain and couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the price: €72.00 for the first year. That would make about 10 (!!!) .com domains registered with Dreamhost.com. Can anybody tell me what justifies the price on nic.at?

For pretty long I thought that YouTube is a pretty useless and time-eating monster. Things have changed since I discovered some pretty interesting channels (and clips). A short primer:

• The Google Channel I really like their Tech Talk clips, featuring Linus Torvalds talking about git, the Google maps clips, etc.
• Sketchup Channel That software is amazing! Its so easy to use and yet you can make such good models (I can remember the time when I started learning Blender).
• Randy Pausch - Last Lecture That lecture is really a must-see. It’s so moving and positive.

A few days ago I experimented with some data files from the Open Street Map Project. Because I do most of my quick’n'dirty prototyping with Python, I looked for a Python module which would read osm files (which is, to be fair, really no problem because it’s clean XML).

I stumbled over Rory McCann’s python-osm lib over at Github. His version was missing the relation feature of the osm data structure but it was a one minute walk to implement it.

You can access the forked project @Github.

Does anybody know where I can get Sharpie markers in Vienna?

I’m asking because I’ve seen this photo on Flickr yesterday and he’s using a Sharpie Extra Fine Point Marker. It might be a marker I really enjoy (how strange sounds that!?)

I tend to bookmark tons and tons of links on del.icio.us but hardly read them.

Kernel Boot Process
Diary of a failed Startup
Who needs a Computer Science Degree when there’s Wikipedia
Programmer Insecurity
Metaclass Programming in Python

I’m currently working on some Rails project which makes use of the great attachment_fu plugin by Technoweenie (which led to my first bugfix for an Open Source project).

Yesterday I stumbled over some glitch with Lightbox (or Script.aculo.us, I’m not really sure) which results in a mal-sized picture. For the sample, go here. The fix is quite simple, you have to explicitly set the width of the image (that should be around line #260):

[code lang="javascript"] imgPreloader.onload = (function(){ this.lightboxImage.src = this.imageArray[this.activeImage][0]; // The following line will fix the glitch: this.lightboxImage.width = imgPreloader.width; this.resizeImageContainer(imgPreloader.width, imgPreloader.height); }).bind(this); imgPreloader.src = this.imageArray[this.activeImage][0];

[/code]

I just did some research with Google Finance. Some facts:

• Did you know that if you would have bought shares from Yahoo at the beginning of 1997 and sold them at the end of 1999, your gain in investment would have been about 13.000%? Even after the year 2000, you would still have a again of 700-1.000%.

• Apple (and about the same for Google): Beginning of 2005 till now: +400%

• Microsoft: 1986 - 2000: +55.000% (okay, that’s lame, 14 years).

Any tips for the next big thing?