Oh the irony
I found myself furiously nodding in agreement when I read this blogpost from “Anonymous Geek called If You Don’t Date Your Work, It Sucks – I’m mostly looking for technical information on the internet and it’s always annyoing when you have to actually read an article on, say, Javascript before you realize that your favourite web crawler found you an at least ten year old article that discusses the finer points of document.write(). I then headed over to my own blog to bask in the glory of my immaculately formatted post dates when I realised that they were in fact broken; for some reason my Wordpress theme had ignored the date settings. This is fixed now. And now—
Please always date your posts, it really helps you readers.
Happy holiday
I’ll be offline and unavailable for support until January 2nd 2010. I wish to you all and your families and friends a happy holiday and a happy and successfull new year.
Motorbiking and evolutionary quirks
Recently I did something stupid – I dropped a motorbike on my foot (not on purpose, of course – this was one of those embarrassing accidents where my foot slipped in an entirely simple and harmless situation). When it happend it was immensely painfull. Usually I suffer pain silently, or rather I get on everybodies nerves by telling them in a pathetic little voice how I suffer my pain silently, but this time I screamed for help – completly pointless, since I could see that my friend (whose bike I was riding, actually) was already coming for help as fast a he could. Somehow I seemed convinced that he would come even faster if I would only scream loud enough. It was only after the first shock wore off that I realized I could wriggle my foot free from under the bike. Hadn’t I spent the first minutes after the accident screaming the pain would have ended a lot sooner.
Now I wonder what’s the point of that reaction. I guess all that adrenaline and stuff served some purpose (maybe to make the pain bearable, altough it certainly didn’t feel that way), but what exactly is the survival value of a response that turns me into a headless chicken with all the wrong instincts [1] ?
I still ain’t dead, swineflu edition
Being ill [1] means that while you have time do do some bits of housekeeping (like updating your blog) you are not actually capable of doing so. After I had finished both the website for a local cinema and the Centrum Judaicum I spent most part of the last week caring for the girlfriend, contracting the girlfriend’s flu and being cared for by the girlfriend. There are much worse ways to spend a week.
I sometimes wonder if there is a switch in every MS Windows version to make it obsolete as soon as a new version is out. After the last update I cannot send e-mails anymore. Apparently the error code means that some firewall is blocking outgoing mails, although I have no idea why now or why at all or how to fix this. Since I have already checked that Outlook is allowed to communicate through the firewall (it is) I will now check if it is still illegal to hit Microsoft employees with a mallet (probably yes, I’m afraid) because their stuff is seriously getting on my nerves (and I used to like Windows quite a lot in pre-Vista (and pre-Ribbon as far as Office is concerned) times). I will eventually buy Windows 7, but it feels a lot like throwing good money after bad.
What else have I done these days? For one thing I’ve started playing with the symfony framework. This is a much different thing than Joomla or Drupal, both of which claim to be “frameworks” as well and provide APIs to write extensions or are extensible by backend configuration. Symfony introduced me to a mode of PHP developement that is new to me – generating applications on the command line [2]. I’m not yet sure what to think of it – it has a steep learning curve [3] and requires much more control over the server than I usually have (many of my clients are on cheap shared hosting accounts) and a rather recent version of PHP (which, again, is not always available on shared hosting accounts). On the other hand it looks like it could be a timesaver if you actually get fluent in symfony developement.
And finally for today let’s have a bit of advertising. Yesterday some friends of mine launched Trabayo, a new job exchange platform. The main difference to other such platforms is, of course, that I actually know and like some of the people behind this. If you want to learn something a bit more substantiall about Trabayo you can read their ‘philosophy‘ or visit the main site (all german).
Enough for today. A number of people have sent enhancements and fixes for the mod_placehere module ( I assume you are here for the module), and I hope that I will finally have a chance to integrate this into the ‘official’ distribution. No promises this time, but I’ll do my best.
Oops, I broke the blog
It looks like I accidentally killed the template I used for this blog. Since this layout is hardly more ugly and confusing than my usual blog layout and since I don’t wan’t to spend time with cosmetics I think I’ll leave it at that (for the time being, I’m planning for a re-design in the near future). (Okay, so I put it back, sort of. Sue me)
XS 400 DOHC for sale
One of the bikes has to go, so I’m selling my little Yamaha XS 400 plus spare parts. It’s not likely that any prospective buyer will be an english speaker, so the description will be in german. Photos below the fold.
Zu verkaufen ist eine 1984 Yamaha XS 400 12E (DOHC) mit 20KW und 56 500 km. Das Motorrad ist verkauft. HU ist in einem Monat fällig. Das Motorrad ist optisch unansehnlich und technisch brauchbar. Ich habe das Ding drei Jahre gefahren, die Anzahl der Vorbesitzer ist nicht feststellbar.
Die Bremsleitungen sind Stahlflex. Der Tank ist entrostet und innenversiegelt, aber aus Kostengründen mit der Sprühdose lackiert. Hinterreifen und Kette (Kettensatz) sind ca 4000km gelaufen, der Vorderreifen ist ca 7000km gelaufen. Die montierte Auspuffanlage hat Rost.
An Austattung gibt es dazu zwei Denfeld-Koffer (nur ein Schlüssel) und ein Yamaha-Topcase (und natürlich der passende Gepäck/Kofferträger).
An Ersatzteilen gibt es dazu eine (soweit ich beurteilen kann) mängelfreie, gebrauchte Original-Auspuffanlage, eine Gabel, Instrumente, Federbein und Kleinteile (Zündspulen, Spiegel, Verkleidungsteile etc).
Wegen der Koffer und der vielen Ersatzteile setze ich XXX Euro als Verhandlungsbasis an.
Das Motorrad ist jetzt zu Verkauf bei Ebay. Die Instrumententafel (Ersatzteil) ist verkauft.
(Für Bilder auf “more” klicken).
Ding Dong the bitch is dead
Some 60 years ago Adolf Hitler committed the single good deed in his life, by ending it – ,on the 30th of April in 1945 he shot himself in the head. Of course that was at least twelve years to late but still, well done Adolf.
If you want to celebrate this most excellent death and you happen to be in the Berlin Area you can do it by visiting the Admiralspalast and watching their production of The Producers, Mel Brooks Nazi-themed Broadway musical.
Incidentally, I helped a little along with their blog, which is well worth reading (german only) – Peter, the blogmaster, collected a lot of (digital) curiosities, like this compilation of Hitler-faced teapots. So I have to concede a small victory to the Nazis, since I now think I will never have tea again.
JSON Feed for Wordpress
JSON is short for Javascript Object Notation, a by now rather popular data format that is easy digestible by javascript functions (it is javascript, after all). So with JSON it is much easier to pull in data from other sources and web sites than with RSS or other XML-based formats.
Mattias Hising of Front-End Book wrote a Wordpress plugin that generates a JSON feed from the latests posts of a Wordpress blog. If you’re already using a Javascript library in your site then it will take only a few lines of script to include the feed your site (example code for Jquery is included in the post I linked above).
I think I will investigate if there is anything comparable for Joomla – this is such a small but useful thing.
Now that this is done with
Some things in my life recently changed – I aquired a private life, which is not something I want to discuss in any detail on this blog, and the jobs I get are getting better which is something I occasionally write about, and finally, I am student once again – I enrolled at Britains Open University to study computing, and one of the reasons I did not respond to help requests in the comments was that I was working on an overdue assessment for my course. I have just submitted the assessment to my tutor, and now that this is finished (for the time being; there will, of course, be more assessments to come) I expect that I have a little more time for Joomla programming [1].
- although frankly at the moment I work a lot more with Drupal than with Joomla