After seeing it at last year’s decoded conference I wanted to have an arduino and finally got me a Lilypad – its purple, sewable, cute little sister designed to build interactive clothing. It was even more fun than I thought and I spent a whole weekend and several evenings designing, programming, debugging and sewing my first interactive shirt.
That’s how I made it…
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Working on my first operations story, configuring new switches for the data center, and being really annoyed and amused by the amount of acronyms in the manual.
My favorite is:
GVRP,
- that’s GARP VLAN Registration Protocol
- and that is Generic Attribute Registration Protocol and Virtual Local Area Network
That makes a total of “Generic Attribute Registration Protocol Virtual Local Area Network Registration Protocol”. Wow.
Me and its godparents from conject proudly introduce the little sibling of our first baby. Parents always love to show around the achievements of their little geniuses and make big plans for their future – so do we. Wassily (named after his famous Bauhaus role model) is really good with colors. For now his drawings decorate my fridge only and conjects Munic office, but thats where all artists start their carrier, right? Soon after he has learned some basic rules of composition, we will start preparing the portfolio for his college of art application. Some time you’ll wish you had snatched some of his early work.
Last Saturday I visitied decoded, a conference dedicated to the beautiful things one can do with code. Topics ranged from art projects over open source hardware to more serious topics like visualization of data.
All talks were awesome (and I totally want an arduino for Christmas), but the one that kept me researching and having new ideas was the one of Moritz Stefaner about visualizing information. He has some really inspiring websites (here and here). I especially liked his contribution to the book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search” – it’s about search, visualization and it even has formulas. What more could one want? >> more…
After a long long pause (there was a lot of stuff to do for a trade fair) I started blogging again – that is, I’m trying to make sense of the drafts I wrote some months ago and turn them into real posts. But there are some, hastily written down while programming, I can’t make any sense of.
My favorite is this weird error message we encountered while trying to do something with grails:
I still do remember the error message and that we finally found out why it occured (some Spring issue…) and that we solved it somehow – but I don’t remember any details (still hope that Helga does or that I wrote a mail to myself explaining the issue). It’s like finding some strange note from last year in the pocket of your winter jacket… vaguely reminding you of something, but you can’t figure out what.
About a month ago we relaunched this blog with fresh colors and a crispy new layout. On the left you can see a reminder to the old green and grey theme as it was before. Its seriousness and tediousness didn’t seem to perfectly match our attitude (allthough we are of course serious after all). Some evenings of moving around pixels and poking around in php templates (enough is enough now) finally produced this colorful spring theme.
Enjoy!
Hunting one of the strangest layout issues in IE – if you hover over an element, the input elements on the page mysteriously move down – we learned about the very strange concept of “layout” internet explorer employs: Give your elements height, width or one of the other CSS-properties that “cause an element to have layout” (I can’t help but giggle when I read this, and I have no clue what it’s supposed to mean) and many of your IE display issues will disappear. >> more…
Recently there was a public voting for Barbies next career. I didn’t grow up with that kind of toys, but obviously there are editions showing the Barbie doll in different professional roles. Today Mattel (the Barbie producer company) announced Barbies next two careers. There were four options: environmentalist, surgeon, news anchor and computer engineer. They did two surveys, one among girls and another public voting. While the girls have choosen news anchor as the preferred profession for their dolls, the public clearly voted for computer engineer. I must admit, I also did my best. Now we should be prepared for a new generation of girls, who know they can do it. I was impressed to read in the factsheet that they actually asked IT professionals what a computer engineer might wear. Although I personally disagree with the choosen colours and the pants, I think it’s a nice thing if girls around the world ask their teachers and parents about the meaning of that numbers on her shirt.
Next month, we will stop supporting IE6 in conjectPM. This means getting rid of all those “if it’s IE6 add 2 pixels to the y-position”, deleting lots of CSS hacks, throwing away all spezialized stylesheets… we’re already counting the days (great that February is such a short month) and think about having a “hooray, no more IE6!” party.
Or, to cite this month’s ThinkGeek newsletter, “Hearing the news was just like being in high school and getting a pass out of P.E.” (that was about Google stopping IE6 support for Mail and Docs)
