a7p's » Uncategorized

Just gone WP 3.0 …

A7P — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:32:26 +0000

… seems to be an absolutly painless update. #Nice!

Nice for learning reStructuredText

A7P — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:48:47 +0000

CouchDB-mistake

A7P — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:26:54 +0000

A few weeks ago I made a mistake. While working on something else (which I did not enjoy), I watched a video about CouchDB – and now I’m hooked.

The concept of CouchDB seemed strange to me at first sight (and part of me still thinks it is). Having an Erlang implemented document oriented database which uses a map-reduce concept to get the data. There are plenty of ways to use CouchDB (which offers an http-, rest-oriented interface), libraries for almost every civilized programming language exist – but in my eyes the most beautiful thing about CouchDB is the possibility to write self-contained applications in JavaScript. Paired with CouchDBs brilliant replication features some very interesting ideas come to my mind – you will read about my learnings from Couchland here (btw I don’t like Borat).

And now I’m going to enjoy my brilliant breakfast.

Tweening made comfortable

A7P — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:24:58 +0000

… starting to code webapps in ActionScript3 I discovered (this widely known) tweening class. It’s truly comfortable and definitely the way to go when you have to tween.

Centering an ActionScript Object

A7P — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:12:34 +0000

For food I code ActionScript3 – and I have to admit, I kind of like it – not flash it self, but you can do very unwebbish things to archive excellent looks. Flash for design, xhtml for content and function – if you ask me.
Today I wanted to center an SWF in a browser – regardless of window-size. Since I did not find an adequate solution (which of course is obvious and simple) here’s mine – just for the the book:

...
// I want everything to stay exactly as I drew it
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
// register event handler
stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, resizeHandler);
// I don't want to repeat the code in the initialisation, so I trigger the event manually
dispatchEvent(new Event(Event.RESIZE));
}

private function resizeHandler(e:Event):void
{
this.x = stage.stageWidth/2-this.width/2;
this.y = stage.stageHeight/2-this.height/2;
}

PS: I need a syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress.

In subtile ways XUL is great

A7P — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:50:39 +0000

Just modified a print-plugin for Mozilla Sunbird. If everything is html, css and JavaScript, all you have to know is html, css and JavaScript . Just spend 10 very successful minutes in the source code.

TAPI & managed code

A7P — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:11:24 +0000

I solved my TAPI-problem using C#s excellent COM binding – BUT my solution does not work reliable. Recently I discovered this knowledge article – M$ recomends against using TAPI from managed code, which made me searching for another solution to invoke calls from a python script. TAPI handling is really really ugly if you do not want to dive into Windows COM-programming and using the older C-interface also is the opposit of fun.

TAPI SUCKS!

DHL online stamps

A7P — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:27:23 +0000

… and once again the Deutsche Post managed it to really annoy me. Their online-stamp-system uses PDFs with embedded JavaScript .. you have to click away about 5 warning messages, about remote connections, printing etc and you can print it only ONCE… of course you can print test pages from their PDF-JS-”Application” … I just hate it – it’s so stupid.

LinuxTag 2008

A7P — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:08:51 +0000

This year for the first time, I was able to visit the German “LinuxTag” every single day and I must say, I am a bit disappointed. Surely, I heard a lot of good speeches, but I wanted more – most of the stuff was not very technical.
My impression is, “LinuxTag” lost some of it’s magic, might be that’s because many projects choose other events as their main meetings. And with German being the main conference language it was pretty uninteresting for an international audience.

It was not (truly) boring and I significantly improved my vim configuration *g*, got (false) information on some LaTeX-options, felt competent and spend very much money on food and caffeine.

The best speeches I heard where about Modsecurity and PosixCapabilities.

It’s very likly I will visit LinuxTag again next year, but I will see it more like a nice trip to the capital – visit friends, museums and enjoy the beautiful parts of the town.

PS: Jono’s a true community specialist – he knows his buissiness – I decided to take a leaf out of his book.

FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7170

A7P — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:16:43 +0000

The Fritz!Box mentioned above is now capable of receiving Fax-Messages and forward them as Email-attached PDFs – Nice!