• 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

You can reserve a username at casualcollective.com and the first 1000 players are already allowed to test the system. And guess who is among these 1000? Yes, I am

If you don’t know bugbash you are missing such funny strips like the one for today:

On Thursday I ordered an Ixus 800 IS with a 2gb SD card from amazon.com as a christmas gift for myself. As promised the camera arrived yesterday morning but without the memory card. Amazon screwed up but why am I writing an article titled “Perfect customer service”?

First I read amazon.de Help but I found no phone number. Then I checked Imprint, where I found a link label Callback service. Less than a second after I entered my phone number, my phone rang. Less than 30sec later I was explaining my problem to a customer service person. I was really suprised as he told me something like “the card is in stock, you will have it tomorrow”. Me: “What?!?” Him: “Yes, I will send it by express. 99.9% of the packages are delivered the very next day.” Me: “Cool, that’s great. Thank you VERY MUCH!”. And for the happy ending the package did arrive today Thank you, Amazon!

There is a CafePress shop for RubyHacker stuff with a few nice thingies. But I wanted something else

A shop (fotokasten.de) sells all-black mugs which only reveal the image when something hot is inside. Therefore I needed my own RubyHacker image and couldn’t find one online. To save everybody else the work, here’s my result.

I will post images of the mug when I have it

Update:
I made a mistake and put the wrong image online. Fotokasten does not accept gif (which is pretty lame but I cannot change it). Changed the image to a jpg.

I love ThinkGeek and all the useless gizmos they sell. But it has one huge disadvantage: obscene costs for shipping. I was happy to find out about GetDigital.de, a German online store, that sells similar stuff.

Sorry, this is completly off topic, but too funny to ignore:

I stumbled over this funny site called CodeGolf.com and tried my luck on the first problem (actually it’s the sixth, but it was the last and therefore appeared first on their page - confused?) Writing a Brainfuck Interpreter:

The brainfuck language uses a simple model of a computer consisting of an array of memory cells, a movable pointer into the array, an output stream, an input stream and the program itself. The program is formed from a sequence of the below commands :

• > - Increment the pointer to point to the next cell to the right.
• < - Decrement the pointer to point to the next cell to the left.
• + - Increment the byte pointed to by the pointer.
• - - Decrement the byte pointed to by the pointer.
• [ - Jump forward to the command after the corresponding ] if the byte at the pointer is zero.
• ] - Jump back to the command after the corresponding [ if the byte at the pointer is non-zero.
• . - Output the value of the byte at the pointer.
• , - Accept one byte of input, storing its value in the byte at the pointer.

It didn’t take me very long to write a running interpreter. My first version was more than a thousand characters. Even after renaming the variables and stripping all the whitespaces I still needed around 700 characters, which is huge compared to the best Ruby solution with only 142 characters. Read the rest of this entry »

Funny little quiz…

and a bonus link Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories

Have a look at these nice Ruby T-Shirts: Read the rest of this entry »