I am now using Octopress for my blog. Was it an easy switch? No. Was it worth it? Totally. I love working in Markdown. Getting rid of the hack that was called a Markdown Wordpress plugin made my day.
Do I like Octopress? Yes and no. Yes, because now I can write my stuff in Markdown. No, because Octopress feels weird.
(cc-by-nc-sa 2.0 by tinowa)
Phew, I finally found some time to do a proper writeup of the 29c3.
The 29c3 is a conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club with tons of great lectures and workshops. This year the conference moved to Hamburg after years of being in Berlin. And it totally worked. Over 6.000 people visited the conference and it never felt crowded. You always found a table to hack on or a place in the conference rooms to watch the lectures. Even for the very popular lectures. I loved it. You can already count me in for the next one!
Phew, what a weekend. 48 hours of pure fun at the Rails Rumble. Rails What?! For all of you who don’t know what the Rails Rumble is: it is a contest for Rails developers. Implement an awesome idea in 48 hours and win prizes while doing so. Awesome, right? Out of the 500 teams who participated, around 300 got a working version of their idea…well, mostly working ;) .
Our idea was to create a working geocoder for OpenStreetMap. A geocoder can reference an address like “Bergstr. 1, 50789 Köln” to a point on a map. There are a few geocoders available for the OpenStreetMap, but sadly they have tons of problems. Ours does not :) . You can find it at happy-geoco.de.
Please vote for it.
If you are interested in the technical background, Klaus wrote a nice article about it. Worth a read!
Ruby and Python. Two languages. Two communities. Both have a similar target: to make software development better. Better than Java, better than PHP and better for everyone. But where is the difference? And what language is “better”? For the last question I can say: none is better. Both camps are awesome and do tons of great stuff. But for the first question the answer is longer. And I hope to provide that in this little article.
I love the Rails Community. It’s one of the best things that happened to me in the last few years. There is only one thing I could criticize: the lack of women. Sadly this is a general problem in the computer industry. But luckily the Ruby people are really awesome and try to change that. There are tons of events and organisations who try to help women get into coding in our community. One of them is called Rails Girls. The first Rails Girls event was helt in Helsinki 2010 and since then it spread like wildfire. Just look at list of upcomming events for the next months. And please don’t get fooled by the girlish look. That look is only demonstrating that they don’t want to teach you rails in a boring way. The event should be fun. And in an relaxed atmosphere.
I have switched to vim over a year ago. And I am pretty happy with that switch. With all the tools vim is offering me, I am now typing faster and use less keystrokes to get my things done. The only problem when switching to vim is to learn the vim way. It is not that easy for a beginner to get a hang on that different modes vim is presenting you. Basically there are two approaches on how to learn vim. Both have one thing in common: if you don’t use it, you don’t learn it ;) . Besides that it’s a philosophical question what way is better. It depends on you what way works best for you.
The last two weeks I started to develop an Android app for a showcase putpat.tv is doing at the IFA. If you follow me on Twitter you have noticed a few rants about Android development. For example this one:
Developing Android vs iPhone is like developing PHP vs Rails. Just creepy to think that android is from Google. Why Google, why?
— Bodo Tasche (@bitboxer) August 29, 2012
At first I thought I was doing it wrong. It couldn’t be that bad as I felt it to be, right? But during the last weeks I talked with a few Android devs and the conversation always went like this:
Me: Oh man, Android development sucks!
Other: I don’t know what you mean, it is pretty easy to develop apps.
Me: Do you use the graphical gui editor?
Other: No, that thing is broken, you have to edit the xml files by hand.
Me: WTF?!
Okay, this will be difficult. last weekend i was at eurucamp. the first one last year was a side conference for everyone who could not get a ticket to euruko. this year it was a stand alone conference. this time they tried to do a full blown conference. will i go again next year? hell yes, i will. did i enjoy this year? yes and no. hopefully someone will read this and try to use this to make next year more awesome. organizing a conference is a lot of work. a lot of stressfull work. and i fully respect that. for the 2nd conference they did it was really well organized.
Last week I migrated a few projects to Uberspace. Some of them are rails projects and I had to find a good way to run them on Uberspace. There is an entry in the Uberspace Wiki for using Rails, but that one is using FastCGI and no RVM, so I had to find a way to install passenger on my own. This is how I did it.
During a presentation yesterday at the cologne.rb @railsbros_andi showed his terminal. It had a nice spiderman ascii art on top of the input line. This inspired me to investigate how to add a nice image when opening a new shell.
My result looks like this:
Now every time I open my shell, I am greeted by the joker. How cool is that ;) ? You can see the code behind that in this commit.
But how did I do that? Luckily it was not that hard. After searching the web
for possible image converters I found icat
on github. Simply install it and let it convert an image. Pipe that image to a
text file and cat that at the start of your shell. Done.
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And now you have to find an image that you want to use :) .