March 10, 2010

Giu

Run This!

"Add a button to let your readers run snippets of code directly from your blog and see the results interactively.[...]". Pretty neat web application. It runs code snippets pretty fast and it's very easy to use (A WordPress plugin is available). Be sure to check out the examples on the page. It surely would be cool (and useful, too) if snippet hosting sites (like http://gist.github.com) would use this service to run the snippets. I actually didn't install the plugin yet, but I can imagine that WordPress users who have already installed the Dean's Code Highlighter plugin will have some issues with using the Run This! plugin, since both use the <pre lang="...-construct for pasting snippets.

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by giu at March 10, 2010 18:21

March 09, 2010

Giu

Inverse Graphing Calculator

Quoted from the page: "[...]The way the IGC works is, you type something you'd like as your curve, like 'Hello World' or 'I love you'. The IGC produces an *equation* which has this phrase as its graph!". In the first version of the IGC, the equation was shown as a PNG in LaTeX style (the image name actually contained the LaTeX code), but the author removed it (surely because of the traffic the IGC got, since I couldn't load the IGC a few hours ago). I would love to see the code behind this thing. Pretty interesting!

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by giu at March 09, 2010 22:17

Alexander Boesch

aptitude search

Ich brauche deine Hilfe, denn hier (Tansania) komme ich mangels fehlender Testinfrastruktur nicht weiter. Falls du also ein aptitude (je neuer desto besser) zur Hand hast, kannst Du mir vielleicht das erklären:
aptitude search libstdc
Einen Haufen Resultate
aptitude search libstdc++
Einen Haufen Resultate
aptitude search libstdc++6
Kein Resultat
aptitude search libstdc++5
Kein Resultat

Suche ich nach einem anderen Paket mit vollem Namen funktionierts aber:
aptitude search geany
Ein Resultat.

und so weiter.

Getestet mit aptitude Version 0.4.11.11-1~lenny1

by alexander at March 09, 2010 13:12

March 07, 2010

CoCaman

Free Online Website Translation Tools

The Bad, the ugly and the worthless

It’s Sunday evening and people are waiting for the Oscar ceremony to start. And while waiting, I gave some free online translation tools a spin. If you do not understand German, you will not have to much fun in this post, sorry.

Here are the nominations

Yahoo

Yahoo Translation

Bing

Bing Translation

Reverso2.com

Reverso2.com Translation

Google

Google Translate

FreeTranslation.com

FreeTranslation.com

WorldLingo

WorldLingo Translation

This little experiment is in no way scientific. I just found it funny to see how machines translate my blog header. Some did pretty well (Bing especially, WorldLingo) while other did complete nonsene (like Reverso2.com or Google with a wrong article). Yahoo and WorldLingo need to fix their “e after ä” error.
I think I will give Bing a few more tries in the future. Their translation seems very solid to me.

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by CoCaman at March 07, 2010 19:05

March 06, 2010

CoCaman

Zattoo Feature Requests

Zattoo, the first IPTV online video player for TV stations, is now for more than three years on the market and available. In fact, my first blog post about Zattoo “Zattoo – News from the field” is from January 2007. Since that time a lot has changed. The installable software has lost its Linux client and has moved from a proprietary MPEG-4 video codec to Adobe Flash. Both, the online interface as well as the installable client now uses Flash. The main reason for this is costs. In licensing and in keeping an updated client software.

Teletext
Just a link to the website just does not do it for me. Sorry!

But for the time being, Zattoo is just a player. I really wish Zattoo would start to offer some new feature and maybe gain some attention once more.

Feature Requests

Video Recorder
This is a no-brainer. Why not negotiate contracts with TV stations, that allow the end users to record? There are other Swiss services that allow recordings. Their are basically just online tv recorders without the Zattoo user base. And Beat Knecht and the Zattoo team sure has the contacts to get stations to the table.

HTML 5 / MPEG-4 or OGG Streaming
I really do not like flash, at all. It sucks up energy for nothing. And especially videos are very CPU intense. Why? Can you not go back to MPEG or better OGG streaming? OGG is an open and free audio and video codec. Somehow you already must have created some sort of MPEG-4 streaming. Or how does it work on an iPhone? For sure not with Flash.
Maybe you can even start to offer “direct” links to streams, much like Cablecom on hispeed.ch does. That way I can fire up my regular video player (VLC) and watch TV over it. Yes, you have to show advertisements to make money and pay your infrastructure. Okay, than just offer this for premium customers.

These are all feature requests that come to mind. But I am sure, you have more ideas that could help make Zattoo a better service and experience. Please leave a comment with your idea or requests.

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by CoCaman at March 06, 2010 17:31

March 05, 2010

Fabio Ferrari

Adrenalin Junkies & Formular Zombies

Fast einen ganzen Monat habe ich dazu benötigt, das Buch Adrenalin Junkies & Formular Zombies zu lesen und so folgt nun wieder einmal ein Eintrag meinerseits.

dff5eb80-61fd-4216-8d1b-19ce13a15680Nerd, Überflieger, Bandit, Leckermaul, Zicke, Primadonna, Wichser, Workaholic … Es gibt viele Begriffe, die menschliches Verhalten im Alltag anschaulich beschreiben. Für das Verhalten in Softwareentwicklungs-Projekten kennt man solche Begriffe nicht. In diesem Buch werden sie genannt. Die Mitglieder der Atlantic Systems Guild, die auch die Autoren von Büchern wie “Der Termin”, “Mastering the Requirements Process”, “Wien wartet auf Dich” und vieler mehr sind, haben Tausende von Projekten unter die Lupe genommen und beschreiben hier typische Verhaltensweisen, schädliche wie nützliche. Sie zeigen, wie man mit Schönreden, Management nach Gemütslage, Bleistiftstummeln oder Filmkritikern Projekte in Schwierigkeiten bringen kann. Dagegen lässt sich die Arbeit der Entwicklungsteams mit Nicht lange schnacken, Endspiel üben, Natürlicher Autorität und – nicht zu vergessen – Essen++ befördern.

Das Buch ist in 86 Kapitel gegliedert und wurde von 6 verschiedenen Autoren geschrieben. Auf Grund dessen wirken die Themen für mich etwas zusammengewürfelt. Die Themen werden kurz und bündig erläutert. Auf eine Zusammenfassung verzichte ich an dieser Stelle, da es für mich ein passendes Nachschlagewerk für zukünftige Arbeiten darstellt. Die Beispiele und Beschreibungen lassen sich ideal in eine Präsentation integrieren und geben der vermittelnden Thematik die nötige Gewichtung.

Diese Lektüre ist auch als Ebook erhältlich…

by Fabio Ferrari at March 05, 2010 10:29

March 04, 2010

Guido Zgraggen

Giving up FarmVille

I guess everybody has its own story how or why he got started with FarmVille. I still claim that I didn’t do it out of free will, but that is another story. Today, I like to write about the ending of this story…

After investing (aka wasting?) an awful amount of time in this game. I realized that it is not worth it. Especially, since I don’t perceive playing it as fun, but still I was coming back again and again…

So why did I come back? I always had goals, like getting all the ribbons, catching up with the level of a friend and so on. But still doing so is quite painful and it needs a lot of clicking to achieve anything on FarmVille. Amy once made an observation: “You look bored when you play FarmVille”. The thing which surprises me about this game is that it is an online game but is missing several social aspects which could make it much more fun.

Admittedly, I didn’t work in the last couple of weeks and had therefore some slack time. But in the future I want to spend this time doing something else…

Amy and I decided that this Sunday is going to be our last FarmVille day!
Someone else who wants to commit to that?

by Guido at March 05, 2010 00:04

March 03, 2010

Giu

HP Universal Print Driver Series

Everybody who owns a printer from Hewlett-Packard knows how annoying it is when you just want to install the driver delivered with the printer. As most of you surely have already undergone such an installation, the alleged printer driver on the CD will also install some software utilities. The point is that if somebody wants to install the printer driver solely, the installation of additional software is surely an unwelcome overhead. Well, I may call this good news, then apparently a HP Universal Print Driver Series exists. As the homepage mentions it, "The HP Universal Print Driver is the single driver that gives users instant access to a range of HP print devices[...]". And this driver doesn't come with millions of little programs that the driver from the CD will install on your machine. I didn't test it yet, but it's surely a good alternative to the evil printer driver on the driver CD.

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by giu at March 03, 2010 22:26