Archive 6/2008

When you write an application that uses any kind of web-API out there, you eventually get to a point where you hit some kind of rate-limit. It's especially a problem when the API has a frequently changing rate-limit as Twitter's has. Well, at least on this front, there is now an easy way around

If you remember how the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror" ended it had introduced a whole new universe to the world of Star Trek: The mirror universe, where everyone was more or less the evil counterpart of the universe Star Trek fans were used to. When 30 years later the Deep Space Nine episode Crossover) continued the plot, it just gave small hints of what happened in between and between the Enterprise double-episode In a Mirror, Darkly and "Mirror, Mirror". And this is exactly where the two "Mirror Universe" books, Glass Empires [OL] and Obsidian Alliances come in.

On the GitHub mailinglist there is currently quiet a weird discussion going on regarding following clause in the terms of service there:

7. If you are using a free account you are not permitted to block ads.

The discussion more or less is centered around the question, how GitHub plans to enforce this condition. The funny part comes, when you just google for this term and notice, that this isn't really GitHub specific, but more or less part of a wildly used set of TOS.

From time to time you get to a point, where you want to present information in a way that makes it easy to see and understand their temporal relationship. For these occasions, timelines are a pretty neat tool, yet how do you do something like this within a website in a way that keeps the whole thing interactive?

Besides the usual suspects (the 1000th Flash/Flex implementation), there are also some JavaScript based solutions, that get the job done quite well. For a project that is part of my master thesis right now, we were looking for a simple timeline tool that could easily be embedded and extended to our needs and found the SIMILE Project of the MIT. Part of this project is also a timeline implementation in JavaScript that is remarkably flexible.

Letzten Samstag fand der erste Photowalk in Wien bei strahlendem Sonnenschein, nicht übermässigem Polizei- und Fanaufgebot und guter Beteiligung statt (inkl. Martin, Christoph und mir, die wir aus Kärnten angereist waren) 14:00 Uhr war als Startpunkt ausgemacht und auf gings in Richtung Taborstraße. Dort wurde das Problem des Tages offensichtlich: Hitze. Es hatte gefühlte 35°C im Schatten -- also sehr grob geschätzt ... Sagen wir einfach, es war zu heiß und alles drängelte sich so schnell wie möglich in die schattigen Bereiche des Gehwegs

Morgen in der Früh geht's ab Richtung Wien zum ersten Photowalk in der Bundeshauptstadt. Treffpunkt ist um 14:00 beim Schottenring - Straßenbahnhaltestelle 31 und das Thema ist frei. Jetzt bleibt nur noch zu hoffen, dass das Wetter durchhält und dass viele Leute kommen

Also wer noch interessiert ist, Details gibts auf Roberts Weblog.

Ausrüstungsmässig war ich wie immer zu faul, mir ein Stativ zu kaufen, aber vielleicht ergibt sich ja etwas in Wien. Dank nomenestomen habe ich zumindest schon mal eins im Auge. Wenn mir dann noch ein entsprechendes Geschäft über den Weg läuft, kann ich mich ja vielleicht doch einmal nicht beherrschen. Ansonsten wird halt wie schon in Dresden mein Rucksack als Stativ herhalten müssen.

Falls noch wer mit dem Zug aus dem Süden kommt, ich sitze vermutlich irgendwo im 6:48 Zug von Klagenfurt aus. Vielleicht läuft man sich ja über den Weg

Given the recent news of Joshua Schachter leaving Yahoo what future does del.icio.us really have? The last real life-sign (besides some plugins or module or various browsers) was in September last year when they showed a preview of the next generation engine built around Symfony and honestly: There wasn't anything to blow you away in this preview; no really new features, just a re-design.

If you want to get syntax highlighting using Pygments in Markdown texts, you have more or less 2 options. For one you can work on the HTML output of the Markdown2HTML converter of your choice, or you can try extending Markdown to offer special syntax for stuff you want to pass over to Pygments.

A good idea if you want to go the first route is the use of some kind of HTML parsing library like BeautifulSoup as shown in this snippet and this article.

This post will focus on the 2nd approach, though, since it is a bit cleaner

I guess there is now a new wave of invites for Yahoo's location data dispatcher Fire Eagle out, because I finally received an invite tonight, 3 months after the first wave hit.

For those of you who haven't heard yet of this service (which is not all that surprising considering how low the buzz around this service has been so far), Fire Eagle tries to offer a unified architecture for sharing your current location with web applications and web sites.

I love my D50, I really do. But recently I often thought about still getting once again a small and cheap point and click camera (perhaps the now cheap-as-dirt Panasonic Lumix TZ3) because I could always carry it around with me; at work, on my way to work, back home from work ... you get the picture.

Today Gizmodo brought a story that mentioned another valid reason to often have a camera at hand: Being able to take a picture of a friggin tornado close to ripping apart my farm.

"Priorities", people! Photo ... life ... photo ... life ... photo! That said, this is definitely one of the coolest pictures I've seen of a tornado to date.

I don't intend to take photos in life-threatening situations but instead set a quite high nice-level on saving my hide. Still, for other situations a small point and click would definitely come in handy. Does anyone of you perhaps have any recommendations? So far I'm quite in favor of the above mentioned TZ3 since my father has the same and is quite happy with it so far (nearly a year old by now). On the other hand, I'd like to give Canon a try, but don't want to spend more than 250EUR. Any ideas?