published 10 months ago (20.03.2009 23:11)
Going to Rails Underground Conference 2009
Happy to go back to London, and even the weather should be fine in July :-)
published 10 months ago (20.03.2009 22:49)
DHH is simply grand :-)
»Never let your schooling interfere with your education, someone clever once said. Being willing to sacrifice at the edges is one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn. [...] And I did. During my undergrad, I created Instiki, Rails, Basecamp, and got on the path to being a partner at 37signals. Do you think I could fit all that and still get straight As and have lots of time left over for playing World of Warcraft? No.«
Excerpted from There’s always time to launch your dream.
published 10 months ago (20.03.2009 18:49)
Adicolor videos
These adidas short films are beautiful, bizarre, just amazing. They used to live at places like http://rgb255255255.com but sadly have been taken offline. Fortunately, youtube remembers!
pink
green
white
yellow
black
blue
red
published 10 months ago (18.03.2009 06:10)
Mindmap for Software Craftsmanship Talk
I’m currently preparing a talk on Software Craftsmanship for Euruko 2009 in Barcelona. It’s the first time I try out a mind map for structuring everything related to a topic, and I really like it. By looking at the whole at once, you’re able to see new connections, redundancy, overlap, etc. And it’s more fund to draw stuff than putting everything in nested bullet lists.
I’ve also become a fan of Big Visible Charts, so I prefer creating it by hand instead of using a computerized tool, like MindMeister. Don’t get me wrong – MindMeister is very cool – it’s just that I don’t need it’s advantages of collaboration, change tracking etc. since I’m working on my own.
Two learnings already:
- always start with a really big sheet of paper on a big wall. You never know in which direction you’re gonna need more space! I failed with that, and it’s probably limiting me currently.
- use stickies to dump ideas that come to your mind when you’re not really working on the preparation. You don’t waste much time drawing and sorting, but you don’t forget and can pick up or discard the ideas later.
By the way, the Euruko conference artwork is the best I have ever seen. It’s a beautiful blend of Barcelona’s omnipresent Gaudi tiles and color tones and the Ruby logo.
published 10 months ago (15.03.2009 17:06)
The correlation of income and happiness
I rediscovered this chart in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk on flow at TED. The green dots show income, the red dots perceived happiness. I’m certainly no statistics pro, but it looks like the correlation is zero (these are figures for the US).
Even if there’s hardly any money, people aren’t necessarily unhappy. Instead, happiness spreads to both sides – there are very happy and very unhappy countries. It seems like the Latin American and East Asian people are much less affected by little available money than the Eastern European – compare the happiness of Brazil, the Domenican Republic and Vietnam to Macedonia, Lithuania and Bulgaria. They have roughly the same purchasing power.
published 10 months ago (14.03.2009 16:05)
Trying out zsh
Have you consciously decided to use bash as your shell? I haven’t.
How often do you use the shell? For me, it’s one of the tools I use most.
So while bash does the job, why not find out if there’s something better? I’ve heard zsh mentioned a couple of times, and it seems to be smarter and more modern, while maintaining good compatibility with bash. So I’ll give it a try.
zsh Features selection
- tab completion is programmable and depends on the command it is used with. examples:
- cd<TAB> shows a list containing only directories
- tab completion for options: `ls -<TAB>` shows a menu of available options, selectable with cursor
- cd -<TAB> shows you a list of recently visited directory, select with cursor where to go. instead of pressing <TAB>, you could also have typed cd -2 to go to the 2nd last dir.
- ssh<TAB> shows a list of all known hosts
- kill<TAB> gives you a list of processes. another example: kill memca
finds the correct pid and inserts it
- cd-less directory switching (just type name of directory)
- all shell windows share one history, i.e you can access a command from window A’s history in a new window B
- can shorten the path shown in the prompt (“Resources/Styles/Marble $” instead of ”/Applications/Chess.app/Contents/Resources/Styles/Marble $”)
- more powerful globbing. example: ‘ls \\*/\_helper.rb’ lists all *_helper.rb files in the current tree
- temporary aliases for directories, using ~dirname:
~ $ work=`pwd` ~ $ cd / / $ cd ~work ~ $ pwd /Users/phillip
- bash-compatibility
- optional prompt at the right top side
- much more to be discovered … continued on my zsh cheatsheet
How to start using it on OS X
- OS X already ships with zsh installed. Type zsh to try it out! It’s pretty dumb without proper configuration, so …
- get a .zshrc config file, like from here for example. That page is also a good intro and contains more links to useful resources.
- to use zsh permanently (OS X Leopard): go to System Preferences > User, click the lock and authenticate, right-click on your user and select “Advanced Options”, then select /bin/zsh. Open a Terminal. To check, type echo $SHELL.
- if your like using Ctrl-A/Ctrl-E/Ctrl-K … to go to the start or end of your command or delete to the end of the line, you’ll need to add ‘bindkey -e’ to the .zshrc file.
A tip, independent of zsh, if you create a .hushlogin file in your home dir, the shell will not display the “Last login …” blah on startup.
published 11 months ago (28.02.2009 10:24)
Bathtub IV
Bathtub IV
What a sweet video, what a sweet song! Best watched fullscreen.
Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Metal heart
this one’s pretty cool, too!
Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
published 11 months ago (27.02.2009 07:53)
Oakley Surf Report for iPhone
How depressing, no worthy surf spots in my 300km range :-( . On the other hands, it doesn’t even list anything around the Brazilian surf town Itacaré, (like Itacarezinho beach), either, so maybe things aren’t that bad here after all.
P.S.: Amazing Surf photo in the background by konaboy.
published 11 months ago (21.02.2009 10:56)
giving_it_all_for_high_cheekbones
What a waste. Music to support the melancholy: Frank Turner—The ballad of me and my friends