$ ps aux | grep randomprocessname
psycho 20429 0.0 0.0 11824 1580 pts/7 S+ 12:00 0:00 /bin/bash ./randomprocessname
psycho 20528 0.0 0.0 4188 740 pts/17 R+ 12:00 0:00 grep randomprocessname
$ pkill -9 randomprocessname
WTF? Kill that sucker!
$ pkill -9 randomprocessname
No typo... Am I crazy?
$ pgrep randomprocessname
What's wrong?
$ pgrep randomprocessna
20429
$ pkill -9 randomprocessna

For some arcane reason pgrep/pkill matches only the first 15 characters.


Name: does not matter
APN: internet.eplus.de
Proxy: <empty>
Port: <empty>
Username: eplus
Password: <empty>
Server: <empty>
MMSC: <empty>
MMS proxy: <empty>
MMC: 262
MNC: 03
APN type: <empty>


Update:

The recommended configuration is:


Name: does not matter
APN: internet.eplus.de
Proxy: <empty>
Port: <empty>
Username: simyo
Password: simyo
Server: <empty>
MMSC: <empty>
MMS proxy: <empty>
MMC: 262
MNC: 03
APN type: <empty>


After the initial success with the eplus configuration, I had some problems with it, too. But I guess these errors were internal eplus network hiccups because they were gone without me changing anything and now both configs work.

But thanks to the omniscient internet I found a solution. At the bottom of the “Keyboard & Mouse” preferences page is a setting which allows you to navigate only between text boxes or between all controls. I don’t know who came up with the great idea that the default should be “text boxes and lists only”, but I guess the mighty Steve knows what he is doing.

Rod Hilton explains it much better than I could ever do, why you should Pair-Program. But I haven’t heard about the “ping-pong pairing”:

When doing Test-Driven Development, one of the things we do is called “ping-pong pairing”. So the other developer will write a test, then make it compile but fail. Then he passes the keyboard to me. I implement the feature just enough to make the test pass, then I write another failing test and pass it back.

I have to try this on Monday…

• http://www.thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/blog/10-10-2006/mysql-drop-all-tables
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-empty-mysql-database/
• http://knaddison.com/technology/mysql-drop-all-tables-database-using-single-command-line-command

However this does not work if there are foreign key constraints between the tables (because the tables constraining others need to be deleted first). Here’s the advanced version that solves this problem:

#!/bin/bash
USERNAME=myUser
PASSWORD=myPassword
HOSTNAME=dbHost
DATABASE=mydb
while (true) ; do
    TABLES=`mysql -h $HOSTNAME -u $USERNAME -D $DATABASE --password=$PASSWORD \
                  --batch -e "show tables" | grep -v Tables_in`
    if [ -z $TABLES ] ; then break; fi
    for i in $TABLES ; do
        mysql -h $HOSTNAME -u $USERNAME -D $DATABASE --password=$PASSWORD  -e "drop table $i"
    done
done

I agree this is not nice because it’s a brute force approach – but hey, it works! And resetting a database is most probably not a performance-critical task anyway.

Here’s what works for me:

<script type="text/javascript">
  window.onbeforeunload = function(){
    return "Did you save your stuff?"
  }
</script>

I have no idea why this behaves as it does, it must be one of those “very interesting ideas” Frank mentioned about javascript.

What it does is this: When the user presses the browser’s “x” to close the window, this dialog box is shown:

If the user presses Cancel, the box disappears and the browser window remains open, and if she presses Okay, the browser window closes (who’d have guessed). So far, so good. Unfortunately the message is displayed even if the user clicks on a link or submits a form (to do something within the webapp) .

So how do I fix this? The newsgroups said that I could add a condition to check if I really want to warn the user about closing, like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var hook=true;
  window.onbeforeunload = function() {
    if (hook) {
      return "Did you save your stuff?"
    }
    // no return value obviously means no dialog box.
  }
  function unhook() {
     hook=false;
  }
</script>

The default is to use the hook, and I can use the unhook() function to disable the hook. How does this help? How do I know when I want the hook disabled? Frank knew the solution, and it’s really very simple: I want to disable the hook whenever the user clicks on one of my own links or buttons within the webapp. This can be done by adding an onClick event to each link or button like this:

<a href="..." onClick="unhook()">Some link within my app</a>

At first it looks a bit cumbersome to change all the links and buttons, but in a webapp, most of the links will be written by some application code anyway so it’s not much trouble to change them all at once.

It’s a bit strange because what I’m doing here is programming some general behaviour (the hook) and then exclude all the common use-cases (internal links, by calling unhook()) because I can’t make javascript react to the few exceptions (browser close button) directly.

The final page looks something like this:

<html>
  <head>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      var hook = true;
      window.onbeforeunload = function() {
        if (hook) {
          return "Did you save your stuff?"
        }
      }
      function unhook() {
        hook=false;
      }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!-- this will ask for confirmation: -->
    <a href="http://google.com">external link</a>

    <!-- this will go without asking: -->
    <a href="anotherPage.html" onClick="unhook()">internal link, un-hooked</a>
  </body>
</html>

Closing or re-loading the window will display the confirm box, too.

Use the following links to check that it works:
Don’t leave for Google before you leave a comment.
You shouldn’t be able to close this page without warning, either.

There’s one small problem left: if you click on the “leave a comment” link, the page will not be re-loaded because it’s just a page-internal link, and after that, the hook variable will be false and you won’t be asked for confirmation if you click on the google link again. But thankfully I don’t have these page-internal links in my webapp…

Addendum: Claus Augusti directed my attention to two official documentation sites about the onbeforeunload event. Thanks you! The documentation in the Mozilla Developer Center explains that one should not just return a string, but should assign a value to the returnValue property of the onbeforeunload event (browser-dependent), like this:

window.onbeforeunload = function (e) {
  var e = e || window.event;
  if (e) {   // For IE and Firefox
    e.returnValue = 'Any string';
  }
  return 'Any string';   // For Safari
};

This is contradictory to the example given in Microsoft’s documentation (returning a string is sufficient), and contrary to my experience with Firefox, but at least it helps to understand why this works at all.

Title: Ruby On Rails I18N Developer
Skills: I18N, Ruby on Rails, mySQL
…
Job description:
…
Chumby Industries is looking for a Ruby On Rails/I18N Contractor to deliver results for the internationalization (I18N) effort on the server.
This candidate would be responsible for externalizing all the text strings (both static and dynamically generated) that the website uses so that Chumby could later change the language of the site based on location.

Skills required:
Previous I18N efforts on browser-based platforms
Strong web-based development experience
Ruby on Rails experience
mySQL database experience
Familiarity of layout issues involved with I18N

My experience so far was great.

Step one: configure WiFi
It detected my local network without a problem. I had to enter the password and was ready to go.

Step two: activate chumby
Create an account at chumby.com and click on “activate chumby”. It shows a 4×4 matrix of dots you have to copy to your chumby to connect you account with your device. This is a nice idea. It’s very simple, easy to use but effective. And surprisingly that’s it.

Step three: add widgets
Just one click. Sometimes the widgets need a some configuration but everything is explained right there.

Minor annoyances

• only two brightness settings: high & low
• you have to press pretty hard on the touchscreen

Plans:
Find a German power supply (should be easy) and start coding a widget

We used Kara to teach them a little bit about programming. You can create finite state machines to control a bug which runs around and tries to solve different problems. The girls did much better than I expected and finished all the exercises we thought would be enough for a whole day before lunch.

Without much preparation I decided to teach them a little about “real” programming and Ruby because there is a Ruby version of Kara which lets you write Ruby code to control the bug.

The experiment was very successful. The girls solved all the problems again, this time in Ruby and from their feedback they really enjoyed it.

A couple of years ago I taught a programming course for kids at the Volkshochschule in Karlsruhe. At that time I used Perl (it was a loooong time ago and I didn’t know Ruby then) but if I ever do this again I will use RubyKara.

The changes are really simple. Here are the diffs:

--- wordpress/wp-admin/wp-admin.css 2008-03-29 08:21:12.000000000 +0100
+++ ../amazing-development.com/wp-admin/wp-admin.css        2008-03-30 16:47:22.000000000 +0200
@@ -573,8 +573,8 @@

 #wphead #viewsite {
        position: absolute;
-   margin-top: 12px;
-   margin-left: 10px;
+       margin-top: 3px;
+       margin-left: 3px;
 }
 #wphead #viewsite a {
        font: 12px "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;
@@ -590,8 +590,8 @@
 }

 #wphead h1 {
-   font: normal 36px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
-   padding: 11px 170px 16px 12px;
+       font: normal 18px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
+       padding: 11px 170px 20px 13px;
        margin: 0;
        margin-right: 15%;
 }
@@ -635,9 +635,9 @@
 }

 #adminmenu a {
-   font-size: 16px;
+       font-size: 12px;
        padding: 5px 7px;
-   line-height: 30px;
+       line-height: 20px;
 }

 #adminmenu a.current, #sidemenu a.current {
@@ -770,7 +770,7 @@
 }

 #submenu li {
-   font-size: 14px;
+       font-size: 10px;
 }

 #minisub { /* for empty submenus */
@@ -961,6 +961,14 @@
        text-decoration: underline;
 }

+#wpbody h2 {
+  font-size: 12pt;
+}
+
+#titlediv h3 {
+  display: none;
+}
+
 #poststuff h2 {
        margin-top: 20px;
        font-size: 1.5em;

One thing is for sure: as soon as these laptops become available in Germany, I will buy one.

My current favorite is the TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS. It has:

• low power consuption (ok, sleep mode: 18.8W; in operation: 44.6W)
• RAID support (way more features than I would ever need: Single disk, RAID 0 (Disk Stripping), RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring), RAID 5, RAID 5+ Hot spare, RAID 6, and JBOD (Linear Disk Volume))
• no encryption

But I couldn’t find any other NAS server with a good price (less than 500€) and this combination of features so I guess I have to live without encrypted disks. If you have any experience with this box or know about another box which has all these features, please leave a comment.

I’ve remove my caps-lock key from a couple of keyboards already. But I did not know that a campaign called anticAPSLOCK existed which tries to ban caps-lock from future keyboards. Nice idea!

It looks very similar to the old app with a lot of added AJAX. But they fixed at least one major annoyance: if you open a feed with a lot of unread messages only the ones you have actually seen are marked as read. Nice, very nice… And bonus points for calling it “βloglines”

Update 6.9.2007:
As far as I could tell βloglines has all the original features but one: the “keep new” checkbox. I use this very feature quite often to mark important posts and was thinking about switching back to the old version but my prayers were answered today:

What happened to “Keep As New”?
We have renamed “Keep As New” to “Pinned”. It can be toggled by clicking on the pin icon in the lower left of an article (or using the “n” hotkey). Your previous “Keep As New” articles should all be transparently available in the Beta as “Pinned” articles.

More information can be found here. I tried to download the paper mentioned in the video, but with 1.18K/s the 20M would take 5h and I don’t want to wait that long.

I guess others are downloading the paper, too

Update 17.9.07:
Thanks to “themaniac” I installed this Greasemonkey script which works perfectly. I was a little bit vexed because I couldn’t find a way to configure the address where the bcc should be sent to. The simple solution: a popup asks for the address the first time a mail is sent

There is no bcc header but the address I use to receive the bcc’ed mails appears in the received header, so I added these lines to my sieve script to move these mails into the Sent folder.

# bcc'ed mail from gmail
if address :contains "Received" "xxx@yyy.de" {
  fileinto "INBOX.Sent";
  stop;
}