I tried really hard not to trash my former² company 1&1. But they are such an easy target Read the rest of this entry »

I just found out about EURUKO 2008. It will take plaze in Prague, Czech Republic, on March 29th to 30th. From what I’ve heard are EURUKOs fun events and I would like to go this year if I can find the time especially because of this announcement:

19. 02. 2008 · Matz is coming to EURUKO!
We are very happy to announce that Matz (most probably accompanied by Koichi) is coming to EURUKO! There are currently more than 100 people registered to attend, so thank you all! We will update the website in next couple of days with more details on program, information about sponsors and other stuff.

It has been some time since I used Ruby but it is still my favorite language by far.

Update:

I just registered for EURUKO I will probably go by car so if someone from the Munich area needs a ride, just leave a comment… And a bonus feature: I found this Tech Talk of Matz talking about Ruby 1.9 today…

…please learn about well formed URLs. And if it’s really too hard for you to figure out, I would be happy to come over and help for a Finals ticket or two

What’s the problem?

I’m a nba fan and I subscribe to the NBA.com RSS feed (http://www.nba.com/rss/nba_rss.xml) which works fine most of the time but sometimes I get an empty page. Why? Because some lazy developer thought it might be a good idea to add ?rss=true to every link.

If you look at todays feed you can find this item:

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Cavs' Gibson Expected to Miss Four to Six Weeks]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3255778?rss=true]]></link>
<description>...>
</item>


If I follow the link ESPN returns:

<!-- obj null -->


The suffix ?rss=true appears after every link in the feed so I’m pretty certain it’s not ESPN’s fault…

Update:

It’s even better. Not only do they destroy external links by appending ?rss=true, they kill their own links, too:

<link><![CDATA[http://my.nba.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300025597?rss=true]]></link>


I was thinking about buying a NAS (network attached storage) server for some time and looked at different products. My requirements are low power consuption, RAID support, and disk encryption.

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 moved to Munich a few month ago – well actually I move to Munich only a few days ago but my stuff is here for a few months already. But anyway, I don’t have DSL yet. There are 6 or 7 WLANs in my building but these damn neighbors know how to set a password. This means I feel like living on a remote island far away from civilization when I’m at home. About an hour ago I brought my GF to the train station and luckily there is a Starbucks with a hotspot. With my iPass account I can access it without paying to 8EUR/h and get my fix of internet today

I got a nice Lego mindstorm box for Christmas. It’s extremely cool. The graphical programming interface is a little bit childish but good enough to build the first few robots. Funny that nowadays building the robot is the most difficult part for such a project

Things to do:

• Watch and try everything from NXT Tutorial.
• Try Ruby-nxt. The project seems stale because status is still alpha and last update in November 2006. I would love to use my favorite language to control the robots I’m going to build.
• Have a look at the NXT firmware.
• Look at all the other ways to program the NXT.

Today I tried to run JRuby on Android. I failed. This article is more like a lab report so expect more boring details… Read the rest of this entry »

As you can see I’m toying around with the android SDK. I guess this will be my first 20 percent project here at Google.

So far I’m impressed with the state of the SDK. There is a ton of documentation and up to now everything worked at once.

I have a couple of ideas I would like to try on android but unfortunately all of them involve bluetooth and there is no bluetooth support for the emulator (yet?).

If you have a great idea you would like to see as an app for your next cellphone, just leave me a comment or implement it on your own

According to an article by wired Apple added a special feature to their sexy metallic keyboards: accidental touches won’t activate caps lock. It’s the first step in a process to remove this useless and annoying key from all keyboards.

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!

• Turn on computer
• search for google tech talks at video.google
• turn up the volume and start working

ps: I watched Seattle Conference on Scalability: Lessons In Building Scalable Systems, an older talk called A New Way to look at Networking and Haiku: The Operating System