published over 2 years ago (03.04.2006 23:23)

luis buñuel

just found a nice blog post talking about luis buñuel, the surrealist of film. one of the most, erm …, impressive ones is Un Chien Andalou (1929), which he did together with Salvador Dalí. check out the article for more info and a couple of stills …

Warning: you will see something quite hefty there. if after seeing the first still image you don’t want to see what followed, do not scroll down. they – and she – do show it.

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published over 2 years ago (02.04.2006 19:56)

getting irb brackets to work on german windows

for those on windows, there’s the great ruby one-click installer which will set up a nice ruby environment on your box. asking it to take care of all possible localization issues would be asking for too much though, so if you’re on a non-english windows, chances are that irb will be severely broken – no brackets, no ruby joy. and no script/console in ruby on rails.

the reliable way

here’s how i was able to fix the issue:

  • download the file linked to in why’s poignant guide to ruby in the “windows hickups” sidebar. place the files from the zip file in ruby directories as described at why’s.
  • get the text snippet “for europeans” as well. save it to the file c:\ruby\etc\.inputrc_german. (you will have to create the etc directory first). when saving the file you might have to go through the windows shell, as the windows explorer doesn’t let you create filenames starting with a dot.
  • tell readline where to find this file. the safest bet is to directly point at the file by setting the INPUTRC environment variable. so edit c:\ruby\bin\irb.bat and insert the following after the @echo off command (line 2):
    set INPUTRC=c:\ruby\etc\.inputrc_german

the pretty way

if you don’t want to “hack around” your ruby directory and modify irb.bat, of course you can specify the environment variable somewhere else and also put the .inputrc file in another directory. these are your options (start reading from the paragraph “Readline-4.0 will look for an …”).

i fiddled with this a lot, so i came up with the first option. if you want to put the file somewhere else, be aware of the following:

  • the HOME env variable is most likely not set on windows, so readline will not search there.
  • if the path to .inputrc contains spaces (as it will when pointing to a german windows home dir - “C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen...”) readline might choke. at least it didn’t work on my box.
  • if you happen to have cygwin installed (as i do …) there’s some extra confusion, as the HOME env variable is set, but it points to some place that (at least on my system) does not exist.

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published over 2 years ago (02.04.2006 17:52)

apple macbook pro performance comparison

UPDATE: now with core 2 duo processors.

using the macworld’s benchmarks from their macbook pro 2,16 ghz test, i made a table to compare the performance of the new intel-based notebooks relative to the fastest powerbook.

for now, too lazy to make a thumbnail - right click and “view image” for full size

looking at those figures, the intel mac performance advance doesn’t look
as large as apple claims (“4 times faster”) - who would have thought ;-) ?
maybe there’s more to gain for more cad applications - the cinema 4d
gain is impressive, but the g5 is still on par.

not that i need a supercomputer, but the new machine not being slower than the current one would be nice.

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