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

Thanks to Sonja I found out, that bloglines launched the new beta for their feed reader under beta.bloglines.com.

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.

The video demonstrates a new way of resizing images invented by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan.

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

Am I the first person who would like to add a bcc to all outgoing mails in GMail? I just spent some time searching through the settings and looking for a Greasemonkey scripts or firefox plugins which might do the trick. But I found nothing. Not a single tool.

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" "[email protected]" {
  fileinto "INBOX.Sent";
  stop;
}

I recently bought Beautiful Code. In chapter 7 Alberto Savoia writes the essay “Beautiful Tests” about the use of randomized tests to easily create a wide range of inputs for a system under test.

I really like and use his idea of randomized tests. But there is one very important hint missing in the chapter:

Initialize the random number generator for every test to a fixed seed!

Why? Tests should be repeatable! Otherwise you can never be sure if you have fixed a bug from the previous test run, because you don’t know if the same test data was created.

Why for every test? Again: tests should be repeatable! If you want to run a single test and the random number generator was initialized for the whole test suite, you behavior will change for all but the very first test case.

A few days ago I received a very nice birthday present from Google: a job offer for a position as software engineer in Munich. Well, today I handed in my resignation