carlo.log

City At World's End, 58 Years Later

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:47:06 +0100

A while ago I’ve decided to do a little time travelling. In literature, that is. So I’ve picked up a novel called “City At World’s End”, written by one Edmond Hamilton. It’s a story about a little rural community in the US heartland having a “super-atomic bomb” go off above it, causing a rift in time, catapulting said city into the far future, and the fight of its citizens to remain on Earth. Adventure!¹

It is exactly what it sounds like: pure pulp. The characters are rather flat; the premise is unintentionally hilarious. Yet, it’s a pretty charming read. :)

When I’ve picked the book up at feedbooks.com, I had a hunch about what I was getting myself into. After all, this novel is (at the time of this writing) 58 years old. That’s right, it’s from 1951. But I’ve chosen the book for exactly that reason (also I was told it had spaceships) — I wanted to know what successful scifi was like in the 50’s of the last century. From their point of view, I’d probably be like one of them “space folks”.² But how would I end up thinking about their view of the future? How would I end up describing their vision of the times to come?

Turns out I’d only use one word, as before: “charming”. Well, that and “a bit naïve”. :)

An example. Said rural community, called Middletown, leaps one million years into the future. One million years! The sun is dying, the Earth is cold, mankind has spread across the galaxy… yet all humans they meet are still ordinary humans like you or me.³ Given that the first homo sapiens entered the stage just around 400.000 years ago, one would expect meeting rather different beings after another 1.000.000 years. Apparently, evolution took a break or something.

But at least there are aliens! One of them is Chewbacca. No, I’m not making that up. There’s a Capellan (i.e. an alien from Capella) whose description is pretty much 100% Chewbacca. He’s big, hairy, ape-like, friendly, loyal and a very good engineer. His name is Gorr Holl. — I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, GEORGE LUCAS.

Then there are the communications. People tend to park their spaceships just out of town (they have spaceships!), yet someone forgot to invent the walkie-talkies, because there’s still a lot of people running back and forth, waving and yelling to alarm the others.

Also, the space-age people from one million years in the future are familiar with Einstein. That’s fame, I’m telling you. (No mention of Michael Jackson, tho.)

And then… women. Oh, the women, what with their constant wailing or their firm resolve or their pre-Doris Day’ish behaviour. Really, the picture painted of the females is an interesting one, saying quite a bit about the age the book was written in. On the one hand, we have Carol, the protagonist’s girlfriend. She’s the friendly, quiet type who likes the “old ways”. (Not what you think.) Beneath her surface is a fragile young woman, almost a girl still, shaken to her core. On the other hand, there’s the new space love interest, Varn Allan from space, the administrator of this neck of ~~the woods~~ space. On the outside, she’s a cold and efficient bureaucrat! But during the book, we learn that beneath her surface there’s a fragile young woman, almost a girl still, shaken to her core. Diversity! Dope.

So. I know the comparison is not entirely fair, but putting “City At World’s End” and its long-term vision (I fail to come up with a better term) next to today’s books, like “Accelerando” by Charles Stross or (less hard scifi) “Old Man’s War” by John Scalzi, it looks, well, less visionary. I am aware that in terms of “scifi seeds” today’s authors have a better (?) starting point than the authors 50 years back, but they seem to do a better job in dreaming up a future working as canvas for their books. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong author here, who knows. And maybe the people in the 50s just weren’t ready for too “far-fetched” visions yet?

Anyways. The tech and the portrayal of the people are equally fun, and reading the book made me grin and laugh quite a bit. But of course snickering is easy for me, from my cushioned seat in front of my computron device. It’s 2009! Yes, we may have global warming and a outrageous lack of everyday space travel and jetpacks, but still: it’s an exciting time to be alive. There’s new technology surfacing almost weekly, from biotech to personal gadgets to propulsion engines and whatnot.

Well, my verdict: If you are wondering what to read next, get yourself an old scifi book. You might have fun. Many of them are free & legal downloads by now. Both Feedbooks and ManyBooks (if it’s up…) are good places to start looking. And if you’re unsure what to get, either just pick one with closed eyes or ask around at GoodReads. :)

Oh yeah, spoilers. The books almost 6 decades old by now, give me a break. ↩
In fact, I’ve started writing this review on the bus, on my iPod. Now that’s what I call science fiction. ↩
No offense, eh. ↩

Tools of the trade

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:15:00 +0100

Assaf passed the ball,¹ and I’m gonna run with it. So Mr Cooper asks “What are your tools of the trade?”.

On the desk

iMac 24”, 3.06 GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, early 2009 model. His name is Rupert, and he’s great. Got him in February after my previous iMac” broke down after running ~3 years straight.

Dell 2005FPW. Really nice and affordable monitor. Tilted by 90°, because I can.

iPod touch 16GB. I don’t leave home without it.

JBL On Stage. It was a parting gift I got from my co-workers a few years back, and I really like it. I mostly use it for the iPod dock these days, but I’ve packed it a few times to serve as a portable sound system while on the road.

MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. One of the best ergo keyboards on the market, hands down. Oh, and yes: that’s a wire. I think a wireless desktop keyboard is an useless concept — it’s sitting on your desk, about half a meter away from your computer, it’s rarely moved (if ever). This is a very common scenario, and in my book it’s stupid to waste energy (batteries etc.) for powering a wireless connection to bridge a distance that short.

Logitech MX510. Good, affordable, reliable mouse. Also cable-bound, see above. Sitting on a tw@ mousepad.

Sennheiser headset. Full sound, the mike is a bit quiet, not the USB version.

CanoScan LiDE 200. No-frills flatbed scanner.

iWork ‘06 Install DVD. Used as coaster.

Belkin n52. Funky little left-hand keyboard/peripheral, mostly for gaming, but I’ve heard of people using it for serious work like 3D stuff. Might be a myth, tho.

Belkin 7port USB hub. It’s not bad. Has some troubles with my external soundcard, tho.

Not in the picture:

13” black MacBook, 2GB. Also running Snopard, and kept lean. Used for working remotely.
Western Digital MyBook Pro, 500 GB, Firewire. For backups.
Creative Xmod. Keeps me from having to plug my headphones in and out all the time. If there was a software solution which would let me switch sound output between the built-in speakers and the headphone jack, I wouldn’t need this.

In the dock, in my mind

I ride the Snopard, naturally.

Textmate, of course. What else?!
Tweetie. I like it for keeping track of my various Twitter accounts. Both on the Macs and the iPod.
Terminal. I prefer it over pretty much every other shell app so far.
My homedir repo. This is one of the first things I install on each of my local & remote boxes. All command-line-related stuff goes in there, the very same repo is used for each machine, and it’s just crazy handy. Tip of the head to Norm for the initial one and Brad for a suitable version to fork from. :)
Mailplane. The ability to keep an eye on several Google Mail accounts at once is nice.
Launchbar. Awesome. Besides app launching I mostly use it for its clipboard history and calculator.
VMWare Fusion for all my virtualization needs. Got a cheap license a few months ago and never looked back.
Dropbox. On all of my machines. Lovely, lovely piece of software.
OmniFocus for all my todo needs, on all my machines, including the iPod.
I’m currently giving BusySync a spin. After trying to coerce Snopard’s native Google Calendar conduit into a) synching two 2 machines and b) not sucking for a few hours I’ve decided my time is too valuable to keep trying, and went with BusySync. Which is really nice and painless so far. I’ll probably buy it once the trial is over.
Minuteur for Pomodoro-like 2-hour sprints. (The Pomodoro app is a bit too much for my taste. It’s not bad, but not for me.)

Well, not so much “passed it” as “played with it, put it down and went back to work, but I liked it and picked it up a while later”. I just want to be a part of the moment… any moment would do, really. ↩

Dev Env acting up when trying to do bulk operations

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:33:00 +0200

(What a title…) I was pulling my hair out over the last two days when I was implementing bulk operations in a project of mine.

In this case, the list of operations to do in bulk is compiled in the browser, and then the single requests are sent one by one to the server as single AJAX requests. (Think “mark this as read” functionality.)

My problem was that the first and second call in the bulk list usually went through well, but the rest of the calls just ran against a wall since all of a sudden Rails had problems finding the either logged in user or was missing certain methods and/or attributes. Highly annoying as well as completely erratic, as I was sure my code was okay in the first place.

When trying the same operations on a one-by-one basis, all was good. No issues whatsoever.

So while trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, I’ve played around with different ways to get the current user, checking for the availability of its methods and so on, all to no avail.

At one point I’ve disabled the protect_from_forgery call, and one or two different errors started to appear:

A copy of ApplicationController has been removed from the module tree but is still active

That was new. So I’ve started digging around for an answer, and found it in an old Ruby Forum thread.

Turns out that Rails’ development mode was the culprit, as the app’s code is reloaded on every request; so when a lot of concurrent calls are made, the code might reload slower than the calls are coming in and hijinks ensues.

The overly simple solution to this problem? In /config/environments/development.rb, I just set config.cache_classes to true, meaning the code isn’t reloaded all the time — and as it turns out, my code runs just fine after all! Happy happy joy joy.

The downside is that I’ll have to restart my dev server every time I make a code change, but in this particular case, that’s not a big deal.

The big blog move of 2009

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:21:00 +0200

Just a heads-up: I’ve moved my blog today — in two ways. First, I’ve ditched my self-hosted Wordpress setup in favor of Tumblr. Because I ♥ Tumblr.¹ Second, it’s now sitting on blog.zottmann.org instead of carlo.zottmann.org. Old article URLs 301-redirect to their new locations, so all should be well.

Also, I’ve cleaned up the blog history; about 2/3 of the old posts are gone. Most of them either simply lost their context, contained nothing but (now) broken links or are not worth keeping online. Doing my part to keep the intertrons lean!

The move was made possible by Wordpress’ export-to-XML feature, the Tumblr API and a few lines on Ruby code. (The latter is a big hack job, but it works for me. You’ve been warned.)

And to top it of, I’ve picked a new Tumblr theme named “PostCreate” and hacked it to my liking.

I’m pleased so far. :)

Case(s) in point: my tumblelog, the TwerpScan blog, the CharPool blog. ↩

Twittwoch München

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:51:00 +0200

Letzte Woche war ich auf meinem ersten Twittwoch, logischerweise auf dem in München. Da Thomas Pfeiffer, der Organisator, nach Leuten gesucht hatte, die Vorträge halten wollen, hab ich natürlich gleich die Chance ergriffen, etwas über TwerpScan zu erzählen.

Der Vortrag lief gut, auch wenn ich mich am Anfang etwas mit der Technik gestritten habe, aber es gab Fragen, Reaktionen und auch Lob von einigen Usern, die meine kleine Site schon kannten. Sowas freut mich natürlich immer. Manchen schienen etwas überrascht, dass TwerpScan aus München kommt, und nicht in fremden Landen gebaut wurde.

Die anderen Vorträge kamen vom Schauspieler Michael Jäger, der mit einer Social-Media-Kampagne seinen Traum von der Rolle des Tatort-Kommissar vorantreibt. Florian Bergmann stellte das Konzept der Barcamps vor. Valentin Pletzer von Chip zeigte uns moviecritter, eine Twitter-basierte Movie-Reviews-Site. Und Markus Gladbach von der Messe München stellte die discuss and discover vor.

Alles in allem wars ein runder Abend mit einem interessierten Publikum, interessanten Talks (und damit meine ich nicht den meinen!) und guten Gesprächen. Ich hab nette Leute kennengelernt, einige Bekanntschaften etwas vertieft, und es gab Bier. Was will man mehr. :)

Der Vollständigkeit halber sind hier meine Slides vom Vortrag, und weiter unten der Videomitschnitt. Großer Dank an Jens von Clipflakes fürs Aufzeichnen und Zur-Verfügung-Stellen. Die restlichen Videos des Abends gibts auf Clipflakes.tv.

Das Original bei Slideshare

Das Original bei Clipflakes.tv

Dies ist ein Crosspost vom TwerpScan Blog.

Excellent Localmemcache

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:16:53 +0200

Yesterday’s Munich on Rails meetup was the usual mix of interesting talks and geeky, delightful conversations. When I say “usual”, I of course mean it’s been the kind of evening I by now kind of expect. ;) Many thanks to Roland for organizing and the Experteers guys for the venue and the food. Nom!

Anyways: interesting talks.

Marco Otte-Witte presented his Excellent gem (gotta love the name) for static code analysis. It’s mostly aimed towards checking Rails code for smell, although —and he made that clear— it’s not targetted at people who strive for the blissful state of “zero warnings”. It’s more relaxed in that way; merely showing you unusual (or stupid or silly) parts of your code, such as missing validations in your models or having instance variables in your partials and the likes. Sadly, at the moment it’s not dealing with HAML templates yet, just ERB. (He’s looking for volunteers, by the way.;)) Here are the slides:

I can actually see myself using it.

And then Sven C. Koehler presented his somewhat irritatingly named¹ yet spiffy Localmemcache. It’s a local, shared-memory-based, persistent key/value store, which looks pretty fascinating. I was a wee bit confused by it until it finally clicked — you wouldn’t be able to tell from its name, but it’s not related to memcached. Aha! It’s a C library with Ruby bindings which offers a more or less simple storage system (values are of the type String, but of course that would include Marshal‘ed data) and apparently blazingly fast — his benchmarks showed that Localmemcache is almost as fast as accessing native Ruby hashes. Its not for everyone —for example, as I understand, it requires a 64-bit Unix system— but it looks like a pretty interesting alternative to memcached for single-machine setups like, say, your single production machine or your local dev box. This should ease the issue of sharing data between different Ruby processes, for example. I’m definitely going to check that out.

Oh, and Peter Schrammel presented a concept for a truly private asset server. As I’m not entirely sure whether this is really public information yet, I’ll keep my yapper shut here. :)

Afterwards we all headed to the Park Café for conversations and drinks. All in all a very nice evening, even though I was still a bit groggy from the day before — the München Twittwoch. (Which reminds me, I should probably whip up a quick post about that as well. Eh.)

Again: my thanks go to the MoR organizers and all the people who showed up, I had a good time. :)

Update: Artikel von Marco zu Excellent auf RailsMagazin.de

To me, at least. Sorry, Sven. :) ↩

Warnfarbenkoalition

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:37:03 +0200

So, gestern also Bundestagswahl. Durch den Ausgang der Wahl ließ ich mich dann zu folgendem Tweet hinreissen:

Bullshitrattenfängergeschwätz funktioniert also immer noch in DE! Glückwunsch and Die Linke & FDP.

Gut, das war vielleicht etwas undifferenziert. :p Aber die Wahl macht mir in mehrerlei Hinsicht Magenschmerzen.

Ich fürchte, den dringend überfälligen Atomausstieg können wir auf unbestimmte Zeit abhaken, das Thema wird jetzt begraben. Und durch die sicherlich anstehende Laufzeitverlängerung der AKWs werden die Stromversorger sicherlich wenig Muße haben, in erneuerbare Energien zu investieren. Das wäre große Scheisse, wenn ich das mal so formulieren darf. (Das Thema wurde ja schon überall zur Genüge diskutiert.) Ich glaube nämlich, dass das Festhalten an der Abschaltung den Markt animieren würde, der Krise kreativ zu begegnen. Ich glaube daran, dass der Markt reagieren würde — man muss ihn halt nur lassen.

Desweiteren finde ich die geradezu volksverdummenden Wahlversprechen, die von o.g. Parteien (und auch anderen) gemacht wurden, grob unverantwortlich. Die Herren Lafontaine und Gysi mit ihren vollmundigen “mehr von allem für jeden für umsonst”-Ansagen handeln bestenfalls fahrlässig, sind dabei allerdings sehr erfolgreich, was mich stark betrübt. Nicht, weil ich generell was gegen einen sozialeren Staat hätte, keineswegs; ich reagiere nur allergisch auf offenkundigen Bullshit.

Was mich zur FDP & CDU/CSU bringt: wer angesicht des aktuellen Bundeshaushalts die Dreistigkeit besitzt, Steuersenkungen in Aussicht zu stellen, gehört (im freundlichsten Fall) ignoriert. Und das System, das zum aktuellen Weltwirtschaftsdilemma geführt hat, als Weg aus dem aktuellen Weltwirtschaftsdilemma zu propagieren, das ist dreist und gefährlich ignorant. Nichts gelernt, Fakten ignoriert, und stolz darauf? Uncool.

Allerdings möchte ich nicht alle Wähler in einen Topf schmeissen, das wäre falsch. Millionen Menschen haben Millionen Gründe, warum sie wählen, was sie wählen. Und das ist okay. Ich kann nur sagen, was mich ärgert: die Subgruppe der Wähler, die aufgrund der o.g. Beispiele ihr Kreuz bei diesen Parteien gemacht haben.

Nun denn: schwarz-gelb. Ärgert mich das? Ja, aber in erster Linie deshalb, weil es zeigt, das in Deutschland derlei offensichtlicher Stimmenfang-Bullshit toleriert und honoriert wird. Aber wird davon das Abendland untergehen? Nein. Werden wir in vier Jahren alle am Hungertuch nagen oder auf Einhörnern in den Sonnenuntergang reiten? Sicherlich auch nicht.

Und hey, wenigstens haben wir Wahlen. Und eine freie Presse. Und ich kann sowas schreiben, ohne von der Polizei abgeholt zu werden. Dies’ Land ist schon geil, auch mit schwarz-gelb.

Demokratie, FUCK YEAH. :)

Upgrading to Snow Leopard

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:19:18 +0200

I’ve made the switch from Leopard to Snow Leopard today. First, I took the necessary steps, of course: checking this handy app compatibility list, running AppFresh, then SuperDuper!. While the overall install went smoothly on my mid-2009 iMac 24”, I ran into some issues which I’d like to jot down real quick.

Terminal.app has issues with my favourite programming font, Inconsolata. The font isn’t rendered at all, which is a pain. I went with Menlo (the new monospaced font coming with Snopard) for the time being. (In Textmate, Inconsolata renders just fine.)
The Language & Text preference pane refuses to allow me to use the “German - Microsoft” layout. It’s a 32-bit vs 64-bit issue with MS’ Intellitype software (which is needed for my Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) — the 32-bit drivers can’t be used in 64-bit apps, and the keyboard reverts to its default “German” layout. According to this Apple support board post it’s not even clear whether there’ll be a 64-bit Intellitype software at some point. Saying this is inconvenient would be an understatement.
I’ve switched from 1Password 2 to 1Password 3 Beta since 1Password 2 would’ve required me to run Safari in 32-bit mode; v3 doesn’t. Looking good. Can’t say more due to the NDA. :)

The rest seems to be fine. Standing out most:

Booting the iMac seems to be faster now.
Image Capture finally recognizes my CanoScan LiDE 200 scanner out of the box! (About time.)

All in all, not a bad update. The family license goes for €49, so I didn’t have to think long about it.

Update: I was able to fix the keyboard problem! Today I found Ukulele, an Unicode keyboard layout editor. After downloading it, I’ve poked around the DMG and found two files, LogitechGerman.keylayout and LogitechGerman.icns. After copying them to the /Library/Keyboard Layouts/, all that was left was opening the Language & Text preference pane and activating the “Logitech German” layout. Dynomite!

Liebe VOX-Redaktion(en)!

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:14:57 +0200

Eure Sendungen sind scheisse.

Nein, wirklich. Ich meine das nicht böse oder abwertend, sicher nicht. Ich seh nicht oft fern, bin von daher auch sicherlich nicht Teil der werberelevanten Zielgruppe. Aber ich finde, Ihr strengt Euch nicht mehr so an wie früher.

Erinnert Ihr Euch noch an die gute alte Zeit? Ihr hattet nur 5 oder 6 Kochshows im Programm; “CSI” lief noch da, wo es hingehört (nämlich bei Euch, nicht bei RTL) und hatte nur 3 Werbepausen und nicht gefühlte 18; Herr Mälzer bereitete auf sehr lockere und durchaus unterhaltsame Art und Weise leckere Speisen aus seiner und anderer Menschen Kindheit zu; das “Perfekte Dinner” war auch noch recht neu und mehr aufs Essen denn auf die Schubladen und wirren Vorlieben der Teilnehmer fixiert; und hin und wieder schneiten Enie van de Meiklokjes und Herr Kühler bei irgendwelchen unbekannten Mitbürgern vorbei und rissen ihnen die Hütte ab. Das war Fernsehen, bei dem man sich wohlfühlen konnte.

Das ist allerdings lange her.

Vor ein paar Tagen schaltete ich beim Abendessen dummerweise mal wieder auf VOX, und stolperte über ein Format namens “mieten, kaufen, wohnen” (das auf Eurer Site irritierenderweise als “Doku” geführt wird). Da gehts um komplett unwichtige Leute, oft mit zuviel Geld, die auf der Suche nach einer permanenten Bleibe sind. Wenn die Leute wie Zuhälter aussehen oder aufstrebende junge Frauen “am Anfang ihrer Gesangskarriere” (Zitat Einblendung) sind, umso besser. Wirklich, ein rundes Magazin. Sehr interaktiv!

Ich vermute jetzt einfach mal, dass Ihr es als “interaktives Fernsehen” wertet, wenn ich die ganze Zeit meinen TV anschreie.

Die Sendung war schon nicht schlecht, aber ich glaube, da geht noch was. Sicher, Ihr habt Rainer Calmund beim Abspecken im Programm, genauso wie “Mein Revier”, wo Ordnungshüter beim Von-Arschgesichtern-vollgelabert-werden gefilmt werden¹, und auch noch einige andere Perlen der investigativen Unterhaltung. Ich versteh schon, Ihr wollt das echte Leben zeigen. Ist ja auch nicht verkehrt. Aber mal ganz ehrlich… Ihr könnt das besser!

Aus diesem Grund war ich so frei, mir noch ein paar Konzepte zu überlegen, die ihr umsetzen könntet. Über meinen Namen im Abspann oder großzügige Geldgeschenke (bitte kein Koks!) würde ich mich freuen, aber dies ist nicht zwingend notwendig.

“Meine Fußgängerzone”

Nehmt fünf Durchschnittsbürger, die sich nicht kennen, aber in der gleichen Stadt wohnen, und lasst sie Euch die zentrale Fußgängerzone ihrer Stadt zeigen. Gutes Vermarktungspotential: die angrenzenden Einzelhändler sind bestimmt bereit, ein paar Euro für mehr “Exposure” zu zahlen. Am Ende stimmen Passanten, die die Aufzeichnung nicht gesehen haben, über die Fünf ab. Noten von 1 bis 10 werden verteilt, wer am Ende 50 Punkte hat, bekommt eine Kiosklizenz.

Pro-Tipp: Geht auch als zusätzliche Wochenend-Version mit Verhaltensauffälligen, e.g. “Promis”, die z.B. durch die Kö oder Lüdenscheid traben.

“Damals, gestern, heute”

Menschen von der Straße, die keiner kennt, rezitieren die BILD-Schlagzeilen von gestern oder vorgestern, so sie sich noch daran erinnern. Gern auch mit Aufregern! Das kommt immer gut an. Fußball, Ficken, Friedensverhandlungen im Westjordanland — die Themen sind letztendlich wurscht, wichtig ist nur, dass “einfachere Gemüter” (nicht abwertend gemeint!) die Chance bekommen, sich bei der (versuchten) Selbstdarstellung als Bildungsbürger lächerlich zu machen.

Pro-Tipp: Kann auch als Samstagabend-Format für RTL produziert werden, wo bei Oliver Geissen verlorengeglaubte/-gehoffte Verhaltensauffällige, e.g. “Promis”, vor dem Greenscreen die BUNTE-Schlagzeilen der letzten Woche wiederkäuen. Wenn Ihr das irgendwie mit Musik kombinieren könnt, interessiert sich sicherlich auch Hugo-Egon Balder dafür.

“Tanküberfall”

Ein Tankwart wird den ganzen Tag mit der Kamera begleitet. Es gibt unzählige Tankstellen, die Woche hat sieben Tage, das Format könnte also ewig laufen.

Pro-Tipp #1: Hin und wieder könnte ein Verhaltensauffälliger, e.g. “Promi”, mit seinem gemieteten Sportwagen zufällig an der Tanke des Tages vorbeischauen. Passt nur auf, dass Ihr Jürgen Drews nicht zu oft deswegen anruft.

Pro-Tipp #2: Für genügend Geld verkauft Euch Roland vielleicht auch die passende Domain. ;)

“Taube, Bischof, Heim”

Ein Einmal-Pro-Woche-Format: Die Wochenrückblende aus der Sicht eines bitteren, pensionierten Klerikers mit Hang zur Ornithologie, der in einem Altenstift wohnt. Ganz ehrlich, dafür braucht Ihr nicht mal einen Drehplan, sowas dreht und sendet sich praktisch von selbst. Wenn das kein Dokutainment ist, dann weiss ich auch nicht.

Pro-Tipp: Irgendwie Otto Waalkes unterbringen. (Mitglied des Pflegepersonals?)

“Catch me if you can”

Kennt Ihr “Deadliest Catch”? Geht in Deutschland natürlich nicht so, weil m.E. die meisten Leute die Beringstraße für einen Berliner Zubringer halten (siehe “Damals, gestern, heute”). Die Thematik (Fischer bei der Arbeit) ist aber trotzdem spannend; vor allen Dingen, wenn man sie —Achtung!— aus der Sicht der Fische betrachtet! Ganz genau, die Kamera begleitet Seetiere, sowohl in der Nord- und Ostsee als auch in Binnengewässern. Man könnte z.B. Welse mit Webcams versehen. Das könnte Deutschlands erste Unterwasser-Edutainment-Show werden!

Pro-Tipp: Es würde sich anbieten, zwei Serien zu machen, eine für die hohe See, eine andere für stehende Gewässer im bayrischen Hinterland. Das Hobbyangler-Segment ist noch nicht ausreichend abgedeckt, glaube ich.

“Pro-Bohno”

Tägliche Show (30-45 min), die aus mehreren statischen Blickwinkeln das Treiben in einem Coffeeshop sendet. Think “Big Brother” ohne Container und mit mehr Laptops. Wäre billig herzustellen: einfach ein paar Webcams aufstellen, und die Streams live zusammenstellen. Der Vorteil wäre, dass der Laden nach ein paar Tagen von noch unbekannten Verhaltensauffälligen (und evtl. auch Boris Becker und/oder Jürgen Drews) überrannt werden würde, die dann versuchen, sich vorteilhaft mit Gesang, Tanz und lockerem Auftreten zu präsentieren.

Pro-Tipp #1: Nach ein paar Wochen könnte man als Steigerung dann einen Rückkanal in den Coffeeshop legen, d.h. ein Fernseher, über den Dieter Bohlen live die Kaffeekäufer beleidigt.

Pro-Tipp #2: Am Samstag könnte man für RTL eine 1-Stunden-Show mit Oliver Geissen produzieren, wo Verhaltensauffällige, e.g. “Promis”, vor dem Greenscreen… na, Ihr wisst schon.

Schlusswort

Das sind jetzt nur ein paar Ideen. Die sind alle geil! Und ich hab weder gekokst noch getrunken!

Wie gesagt, über Rückmeldungen und Geldgeschenke würde ich mich freuen. VOX, macht mal was Neues. Ihr wart mal mein #1-Sender der Privaten. Aber all der Unfug, der jetzt bei den Privaten läuft (nicht nur bei Euch), haben mich zu einem begeisterten Zuschauer der Öffentlich-Rechtlichen gemacht. (Srsly, ARTE, Phoenix und der ZDF Dokukanal sind super!)

PS: An alle, die sich jetzt amüsiert haben: glaubt ja nicht, dass das nicht passieren könnte — solcher Mist läuft schon lange, und zwar überall.

PPS: An alle, die sich jetzt amüsiert haben, und bei einem anderen privaten TV-Sender als VOX arbeiten: Euer Sender ist vermutlich noch viel beschissener.

Was, das läuft gar nicht bei Euch? Warum nicht?! ↩

Selling BetterSearch

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:34:00 +0200

Since its birth a few years ago, my Firefox addon BetterSearch has been a fun project. People were using it and seemed mostly happy with it, as they could see a thumbnail of the search results on their favourite search engine before actually clicking through. Good times.

This was made possible by displaying preview thumbnails from various sources, such as Amazon’s Alexa service and several others. These thumbnails had to be bought from them, which was financed by money I made as an Amazon affiliate. When BetterSearch would find an Amazon product in the list of search results, it would not display the Amazon.com thumbnail but the actual product image, along with the price, average rating and related information. When a user would click through, and buy stuff from them, I (as their affiliate) would get a few cents.¹

This worked out well. It paid for server, bandwidth and thumbnails, and yes, I’ve made some extra money from it. Not much, but a bit.

Then, around end of 2008, Amazon changed the terms of their affiliate program — all of a sudden, what BetterSearch (and several other addons for different browsers) were doing wasn’t allowed anymore. No more tagging of so-called “organic search results”. Oh noes! The Amazon partner program-related code had to go.

This put me in a somewhat tough spot. On the one hand, I liked my addon, and I know a lot of people were using it on a daily basis. On the other hand, it was just a side project, and the only source of income to counter the costs had suddenly dried up — and to be honest, as much as I like BetterSearch, it’s nothing I was willing or able to invest lots of money in just for the fun of it.

But luckily, the company of a former co-worker of mine was looking for something like BetterSearch. They were interested in buying the addon, and we came to an agreement.

What does that mean?

It means BetterSearch, the Firefox addon, is now owned by Abakus Internet Marketing. They will continue to develop it, they will run its servers, pay for the bandwidth and the thumbnails — in a nutshell, everything BetterSearch is theirs now.

For the end user, not much will change — apart from a vastly expanded number of available thumbnails, that is. Firefox will update the addon whenever there’s a new version, the way it was before. No need to manually install or adjust anything.

What’s not part of the deal

No user-related data was passed along. First and foremost, BetterSearch didn’t collect any user data. But of course there’s always the case of the thumbnail server logfiles. Everytime a thumbnail is requested, it’s noted in a server logfile, along with the user’s IP address. (That’s the modus operandi for pretty much every server everywhere on the internet. Ask your local geek about the details.) Since I don’t care about this stuff, these logfiles were deleted on a daily basis anyone looking at them.

Either way, these server log files were not part of the deal.

The future

I think the addon’s future is a bit brighter now as it was a few months ago. Now there’s someone with sufficient resources to maintain and further develop BetterSearch. To me, that’s a good thing. :)

Some people think it is “amoral” to tag Amazon links in such a way, and claimed it was sneaky. I disagree with both points. For me, it added meaning and context to the Amazon search results. And the information that this was done was disclosed on the addon’s website, it’s AMO page and in the addon’s preferences dialog. Everybody using the addon decided to use it. Free will and all that. So there. ↩

CharPool Has Launched: There's A New WoW Site In Town

Sat, 16 May 2009 12:27:54 +0200

Over the last few years, I have always wondered why there was no site that would allow me to track my progress in World of Warcraft. Sure, there’s the WoW Armory and sites like Raptr, but all these places take more of a “your char right now!” approach which never came close to what I had in mind. And those that did go into the direction I was thinking didn’t click with me.

But what exactly did I have in mind? This is where it gets a bit complicated. I was looking for a site that would automatically keep track of my characters for me, make daily snapshots, let me upload images and notes… Give me a timeline of their progress… In short, something that would allow me to document the “life” of my toons. Maybe something that would give me a bit more, with “more” still being a very diffuse idea.

Anyways, I always felt this was strange there was no such site, as I believe there’s an audience for that. So many people do invest so many hours, so much energy and money into the game, I can’t possibly be the only one wanting.

I ended up firing up TextMate and starting to code, and only a short while °cough° later, I had something I deemed good enough to release as a beta.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you CharPool.

The site does exactly what I’ve described a few paragraphs ago, but it also throws in (in my opinion) funky Twitter support, whereas you can tweet in the name of your characters, and these tweets will show up on the chars timeline, together with your achievements and screenshots etc. It also has feeds.

There’s also a page which shows you the WoW-related tweets of your guild mates and also of the people you are following on CharPool. The guild support is still rather rudimentary, and at the moment is mostly just a hint at things to come. Again, it’s Twitter-based, because I’ve read somewhere on AOL that it is what the “cool cats” are “digging” right now.¹

So, I am having plans for CharPool. Big plans. But it’s still in its infancy, there’re a few rough edges, and I’ll need testers to take a look, poke around, and give me feedback. Preferrably WoW players, because, you see, without active characters the site is rather pointless. :)

I’ve opened up 250 beta slots which are given away on a “first come, first serve” basis. I’d appreciate it if you could take a look if WoW is your cup o’ tea. If not, maybe you know someone who is a player? Then you could pass him a note.

Thank you very much in advance.

Gods, I want to be hip, just once. ↩

Update On The Stability Of The Bookeen Cybook Gen3

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:21:37 +0200

A post on the MobileRead forums hinted at my Cybook Gen3 stability issues being related to the font face used for displaying text, so I’ve replaced the very lovely Liberation Serif with the slightly less lovely, but nonetheless enjoyable DejaVu Condensed Serif.

Lo and behold, the stability improved tremendously — my Cybook hasn’t crashed once since I’ve switched.

So, yes, the crashes/lockups are definitely font issues. The more you know.

Review: Bookeen Cybook Gen3

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:21:53 +0100

One of the first applications I’ve installed after buying my iPod touch last year was Stanza, one of the few dedicated ebook reading tools for the platform.

The idea of electronic reading appeals to me. I’ve tried my luck several times over the last few years, on different devices, with varying success. (Anyone remember Palm? Haha, yeah… me neither.)

First of all, I like a good novel. Being able to carry a number of them around with me, wherever I go, is a good thing. Back then I was spending almost two hours each day in public transit, and imagine that: reading beats staring at subway tunnel walls the whole time.

My second argument is a bit more elaborate. You see, I’ve read a lot of books in my life, most of them just once. Not everything written by man is a gem begging to be re-read time and time again. And while this is okay —not everyone can be Shakespeare, and most of these books I’ve enjoyed at least a bit, after all— it raises the question of what to do with them after reading. There are so many “one-off” books in my basement, it’s not really funny anymore. Some of them I gave away, some I’ve sold, some I’ve fed to a recycling bin. But the others are sitting there, silently, and everytime I look at them I wonder a) what to do with them and b) how much wood was used up to make them. (Yes, I’ve actually had a point to make here.) Thus, I’d feel less bad about getting said one-time-read-through novels in electronic form.

Anyways: After a few months with Stanza I’ve decided electronic reading works well enough for me to warrant a dedicated device for home use — a real ebook reader. After some shopping around, comparing prices and reading up on different offerings I went with the Bookeen Cybook gen3.

After a few weeks of using it a lot I now feel comfortable enough to share my findings. I know at least a few people are curious about it — hi Mookie & Bernhard. ;)

Quick Facts

6” e-ink screen
600x800 pixels, 166 dpi
B&W, 4 grayscale
No backlight, naturally
Multi format: reads Mobipocket (DRM and non-DRM), HTML, PDF, TXT, PalmDoc, image formats etc.¹ Both EPUB and better PDF support are promised for the upcoming firmware update. (Hopefully this’ll include reflowing text in PDFs.)
Has an SD slot — in case the 512MB onboard storage isn’t enough.

The Good

Rather affordable: I’ve ordered mine in the UK, and paid €225 incl. shipping to Germany. The box contained the Cybook, a short pamphlet, and an USB cable. Not more, not less.
It’s a light device: Only ~170g, battery included.
The screen is great, the time it takes to turn a page is surprisingly short and not noticeable anymore after reading a few pages.
There’s no proprietary software to be installed. Connect it to your Mac/PC, and it’ll show up as mass USB storage device in your Finder/Explorer. This is also how you put new content on the device. I like that.
Truetype support: Don’t like the built-in fonts? Just copy TTF files to the device and use them instead. I really like that.
Rather simple and logic menu layout. The menus mostly make sense.
Handy display controls: Font family, font size, layout (justification etc.).
Impromptu bookmarks: Turning off the device or going back to the “library” (i.e. the main list of stored texts) during reading will make a note of your progress. Going back to the text later on will bring back to you where you’ve stopped reading.

The Bad

Doesn’t support EPUB yet, but apparently this will be “fixed” within the month.
The PDF support is… well, let’s just say that yes, it displays most PDF files. But it either tries to cram one document page into the space of the 6” screen or flips the display 90° and shows either the upper or lower half of the document page. It works, but it ain’t fun, yo.
No page numbers: There is an (optional) horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen to display how far you’ve progressed through the book. It’s a neat idea, and a good alternative to page numbers. Well, in theory. It’s an idea that wasn’t fully thought through, as you can also jump to any page using its page number through the menu. Which is somewhat useless, as the current page number isn’t indicated number anywhere. It’s just not displayed. I know that on a device that supports different font families and sizes, calculating page numbers can be a drag, but come on: the navigation currently in place is only 4 parts working — and 1 part barely sufficient.
Stability:
- It locks up every now and then, which puts me in the strange situation that I had to reboot my book. (There’s a tiny reset button on the back of the device.)
- Since the reading progress is only stored during shutdown or upon return to the library but naturally not during a lockup, the device will not remember where I was when the crash happened. So after a reset the last automatically saved bookmark will be used — my progress made between opening the text and the lockup will be lost. This is unfortunate, as there is no “forward ten pages” menu option, so I usually end up flipping through dozens of pages after a crash, looking for the right page.
- Update: The crashes are apparently directly related to the font used — using DejaVu Serif Condensed instead of Liberation Serif helped the stability quite a bit. YMMV.
Not all books come with a TOC, and it’d be nice if the Cybook would autogenerate one. Alas, it doesn’t.
I’m having problems opening the PDFs from the Suvudu Free Library, which makes me a sad panda. I hope this will change with the aforementioned firmware update.
I don’t like the available three library views all that much. They’re a wee bit uninspired.

The Useless

Plays MP3.
On the left side of the device there are four buttons. Only three of them have a function.

DIY Improvements

I wanted a cover to protect the screen, but didn’t want to spend money on them “official” leather covers. So I’ve …molested a Moleskine (ahem²). Which actually worked out pretty nicely after all. Because I am a man of many talents! Oh yeah.
Liberation Serif. ‘nuff said.
Impress the ladies: MobiPerl and hpricot make for a good team.

The Verdict

It’s no Kindle 2. It’s a neat device without frills. It’s not perfect. But it’s affordable and works, and I don’t regret the purchase.

A full list can be found at Bookeen.com ↩
I apologize, but this is a pun I wanted to make for years. ↩

Planet Yahoo! Explodes In A Huge, Yet Pretty, Greg-Martin-Inspired Cataclysm

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:05:56 +0100

It happens.

I see no point in running Planet Yahoo! anymore, for reasons probably known — i.e. a few months ago Yahoo!’s decided my services as an engineer (and those of my co-workers) were no longer required.

Sorry if you were one of the few people finding some value in the aggregation of all these Yahoo! blogs into one big feed.

God Gotchas

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:53:51 +0100

This is a reblog of a post from my new Ruby-themed tumblelog. I know it’s kind of cheap to repost your own stuff, but who cares.

I’ve spent a couple of hours today pulling my hair out while trying to get one of my background job scripts to work with god, the “easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby”.

Well, it took a while to make it work, tho. Yes, god is cool and simple and gets the job done. But there are some things that cost me hours and which I found out only by reading the source code.

So, I just want to quickly jot down some gotchas before I forget them again, running the risk of falling into the same traps again in the future.

My script used the constant LOG to keep my Logger instance. Logging worked fine when I ran the script by itself, yet when god took over, it didn’t anymore. Actually, the script died rather quickly. As there was no logging at all going on, and all STDOUT output was suppressed, I came rather close to losing it. Turns out god itself is declaring a LOG constant of its own, which was done before my script had the chance, so when it attempted to initialize it, it would actually try to re-declare an existing constant, and we all know how well that works. ;)
Once that was done, my script was logging just fine, but it didn’t produce any output whatsoever. Raah! Teeth were gnashed… there was definitely teeth gnashing going on. Even telling “my” Logger (the one inside my script) to write to a file didn’t produce anything. That was a fun hour, really. The reason for this behaviour: god is closing all open file descriptors when it sets up monitoring a script. Which included my script. Awesome! On the upside, it meant I could get rid of the part of my code dealing with different logger behaviours. Meaning less LOC! It doesn’t get any more agile than that, folks.
In case you actually want to capture anything your original script is sending to STDOUT, there’s the not-really-documented God::Watch#log. Set it inside your God.watch block to specify a log file. (See example below.)
If you need to set ENV variables, God::Watch#env is your friend. Accepts a hash with arbitrary key/value pairs. For example, I declare a few God.watch blocks, one for each value of an array (think “worker 1 to 5”), and I use God::Watch#env to pass the current value to the worker script. Works well.
When you do a sudo god stop , make sure to give it a few moments before running sudo god start again, or you might end up with orphaned unmonitored scripts running rampant in the background.
Running sudo god log without any further arguments will tell you that “You must specify a Task or Group name”. That’s actually a lie, as it only accepts task names. (A group is a number of related tasks. A task is a single monitoring watch.)

So, yeah.

Don’t get me wrong, please: It might not look like it, but once I had figured it all out, I’ve decided I actually like god. I like the feature set, it’s really easy to set up, and it works. I’m happy it exists.

Se7en Things

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:36:49 +0100

Damn, Mookie tagged me. Well, why not.

Seven things weird and/or unknown about me:

When I was 8 years old, I’ve developed an allergy to cats, more or less out of the blue. Which sucked, since I had two female cats at that time, Tina and Nena. (It was the 80s, gimme a break.) We had to give them away, and my room had to be renovated, as I became nearly asthmatic due to the omnipresent cat hair. Interestingly, becoming allergic to something you had no problems with before isn’t all that uncommon. Still, not a nice experience.
I’m one quarter Polish. My granny was from Poland.
I have a drivers license for small tanks. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in the driving school while I was in the Army (90’s), and went with it. :) So, I own a license for “Klasse F (Voll- und Halbkettenfahrzeuge) — F2 (bis 30t)” (up to 30 metric tons). I do not, however, own an actual tank, and quite frankly, I am not even sure whether I am allowed to steer a track-laying vehicle (like a tank) outside of the military now (regulations have changed quite a bit since then).
I had a pet rat when I was 14. My parents hated it. :)
The first computing device that was truly my own was an Atari 800XL. Awww yeah, bitches!
I own not five, but six pairs of original Bavarian Lederhosen in various lengths and styles. About 12 years ago, when I moved to Munich, I valiantly declared that I would never ever dress in Bavarian clothing as it just felt wrong. This, of course, led to me ending up with two pairs at my next birthday, as two circles of friends both had the same idea. Things developed from there. I came to like them, even though I very rarely wear them.
I tend to lie when asked by others to talk about things they might not know about me. A lot, actually.

Bonus!

I once met Justin Timberlake. True story.

I’d like to thank the Academy

I’d like to tag everyone who feels like participating in this crazy new meme. For example Mike or Hendrik, who would both really surprise me would they take this thing and run with it. I doubt it, but you’ll never know. So… It’s a FFA. Find the rules over at Mookie’s place.

2009 — My Grand Experiment

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:43:33 +0100

As mentioned earlier, Yahoo! decided to shut down its entire Munich engineering department. So since January 1st, I am officially out of a job.

What a downer… or is it?

After some deliberation and discussions with Dana, I’ve decided to concentrate on the bright side: I have a few ideas for products (read: websites), and now I finally have the time to work on them. I’ve always contemplated building them in my spare time while still being employed, but apart from a few small experiments (which were fun to write but are hardly my personal “next big thing”) that concept didn’t work out so well.

Thus, I’ve decided to concentrate on my own stuff in 2009 — full frontal self-employment. That’s right, I’m an entrepreneur now.¹

I plan on spending about half a year to bring my ideas to life, and then taking on freelance jobs later on to bolster the income these site will (hopefully) generate. My ideas are related to gaming, both because it’s something I love and because I am definitely seeing a market there. I think my concept is sound, and I know I can build this …thing. It won’t be easy, but I have no problems working for my money. ;)

I don’t know whether it will work out or not, but I want, nay, need to try. The time certainly is as right as it gets. Actually, one could argue that I’ve waited a bit too long with my idea, since a “contender” appeared on the scene a short time ago.² But I don’t see this as a showstopper, quite the contrary — it’s good to have competition as it keeps you on your toes. :)

So, 2009: it’s going to be my year. It’s a grand experiment, and while working alone I won’t be alone, as my wonderful wife and my friends are supporting me. Still, I don’t know yet whether I will succeed or if this kind of thing will be working for me. Quite honestly, this makes me a wee bit nervous.

Nonetheless, full steam ahead!

Yes I can.

Actually, officially not yet, as there’s still a bit of paperwork to work through with a small number of different parties, but this won’t have any effect on the decision already made. ↩
I could say he stole my idea, but that’d be bullshit: I didn’t tell it anyone, and besides — ideas are cheap, they only count when you pursue them. ↩

Mini Review: 2008

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:45:31 +0100

I was promoted. Then I lost my job. But I came to a conclusion, and found new goals. (More on this later.)
I had planned on running 250km, then hit that goal in October, and ended up doing 400km.
My granny passed away, and I miss her.
My faith in the USA was partially restored (the Obama campaign and its success even gave me hope, and I don’t even “count”).
We’re done with the bulk of the renovating of our 2nd floor. I’ve installed the floor tilings. w00t!
I was overly surprised by a videogame — GTA IV. I’ve spent a lot of time on that one. Wonderful adult entertainment.
I got me an iPod touch — which turns out to be a good reading device, thanks to both Instapaper Pro and Stanza.
I’ve tried to bring Child’s Play to Germany, and failed. Oh well, it was the first round. Better luck in 2009.
I’ve launched a few smaller projects — Twitter Twerp Scan, escaloop (which I’ve shut down a few months later) and Random.li.
I came to love GitHub. Great site/service.

Verdict

A really good year.

Posts

I didn’t write as much as I had planned on doing, but nonetheless, here are a few of my “better” posts (subjective opinion, YMMV).

Have a good 2009.

On (e)Books

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:57:40 +0100

John Scalzi:

That said, these are gruesome times for publishing, and a lot of folks are not as well-positioned as I am. Imprints have vaporized, layoffs have begun, and it’s better-than-even odds that a number of authors and books are going to get shaved off of publishing lists. 2009 is also likely to be a singularly lousy time to be an aspiring debut author, as publishing houses consolidate their lists and focus their resources on established avenues (i.e., spend their money on people who are already bestsellers) rather than seeking out new folks. Basically, life’s gonna suck in publishing for the next year or possibly two.

I love my ebook reader (Stanza on the iPod as you can’t get the Kindle here in Germany yet), and I’d like to buy more ebooks. It’s a distribution channel which (I think) would be a pretty good way for the publishers to make additional money …if many of these files wouldn’t cost me as much or more than the dead-tree versions.

I mean, really: I like good novels as much as the next guy, and I am definitely willing to spend money on them. Also, I don’t like hardcovers for the price tags (yes, I think $25 is a lot of money). One would think that a digital version would cost substantially less than the hardcover, but it’s not always the case. Case in point: “Zoe’s Tale” by John Scalzi, currently on sale for $25 (ebook, FictionWise) and $17 (hardcover, Amazon).

I have no problems with paying $7 or $8 for an ebook, but anything over $10 is highway robbery.

Do not misunderstand me: yes, I am tempted to buy it, but I will fight the urge, because quite frankly, John’s a great writer, and I enjoy his novels very, very much. Also, I don’t think he’s the one dictating the price — so who’s responsible for these insane prices which seriously keep me from spending money?

(BTW: Yes, you might say “get the paperback”, but this is not my point. My point is: I want the digital edition, because it’s the version I prefer for various reasons.)

Anyways, I believe right now the publishing industry is facing the same problems as the music industry — they’re shooting themselves in the foot because they are either ignoring the possibilities of using a great distribution channel or actively sabotaging it by asking for completely disproportionate amounts of money.

Angry Carlo is angry.

(This is a slightly longer repost of a comment I’ve left on Whatever. After posting I wanted to make some clarifications, but couldn’t edit the comment, so here we go.)

Es War Einmal… Yahoo! Engineering München

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:34:54 +0100

Yahoo! hat am Freitag verkündet, die gesamte Engineering-Abteilung in München zu schließen. Meine Freude war etwas gedämpft, bin ich doch (noch) Teil dieser Abteilung.

Meine Motivation, eine neue “Herausforderung” zu finden, stieg dementsprechend sprunghaft — denn ab 31.12.2008 bin ich somit ohne Arbeit (Stand: heute).

Um ehrlich zu sein, ich weiß noch nicht genau, was ich machen möchte. Will ich als Freelancer arbeiten? Suche ich mir einen (interessanten) neuen Job? Mache ich eine eigene Firma auf? Im Moment bin ich etwas unschlüssig, alle drei Optionen klingen irgendwie verlockend.

Vielleicht muss ich nur überzeugt werden. Also, sollte eine coole Firma in München zufällig nach einem versatilen Allrounder mit einem Faible für Scripting/Hacking (Ruby, Python, Javascript, Perl, PHP, LUA…) und alles Neue suchen, der sich mit geschlossenen Augen in diesem Internetz auskennt: ich würde mich sehr über eine Mail, einen Tweet oder einen Anruf (089 / 317 12 74) freuen. Oder auch über einen Besuch auf meinem LinkedIn- oder Xing-Profil. :) Danke!

Und sollten irgendjemand nach einem wirklich sehr, sehr guten Web Dev suchen: mein Freund und Kollege Mike West ist zur Zeit ebenfalls auf der Suche.