Do I like Octopress? Yes and no. Yes, because now I can write my stuff in Markdown. No, because Octopress feels weird.

• To install plugins, I have to manually copy ruby files into my blog and add them to my repo. If I want to update them, I have to do that again.
• If the plugin needs stylesheets to do it’s job, I have to copy those files into other directories.
• There are only a few themes, and creating new themes is not very easy.

Basically it feels like I am doing everything manually. Welcome to Pre-Wordpress blogging.

I also looked at other static site generators, but they all had different flaws. The most common one: they try to parse HTML as XML. Why this is a problem? Just look at the embed code that vimeo is giving you:

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<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/16287115" width="650" height="366"
  frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

Do you see the allowFullScreen? That’s a boolean attribute. Yes, it is legal HTML code, but would break any XML parser.

Long story short: never ever parse HTML with a XML parser that can’t handle that.

So, what does a good static site generator blog framework look for me?

Like this:

• Uses markdown
• Doesn’t parse HTML output as XML inside of the framework
• Plugins as external references^[1]. And plugins can bring css with them that can be overwritten by the theme of the user
• Themes as external references^[1]
• Possibility to overwrite parts of the theme (HTML, CSS, …)
• Live preview with a local server
• Deploy via RSync and Github
• The layout should be rendered via Sass/Haml or CSS/Erb or … (just make it pluggable ;) )
• Can understand Timezones and doesn’t render new URLs when I am in a different time zone.
• I18n support

1: For example as gems or github links

Do you know a blogging framework that does most of this? If yes, please add it as a comment!

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!

Luckily the FEM captured all talks. If you missed the conference, you can watch all talks online. Sadly (or luckily, depending on the english skills of the person giving the talk ;) ) some of the talks are in German.

Here is my list of talks you should not miss:

Tamagotchi
Description YouTube

Hash-Flodding DOS reloaded: attacks and defenses
Description YouTube

Thumbdrive from scratch
Description YouTube

Safecast
Description YouTube

Milking the digital cache cow
Description YouTube

And now to the german ones:

Fnord Jahrsrückblick
Description YouTube

Security Nightmares
Description YouTube

Die Wahrheit, was wirklich passierte und was in der Zeitung stand Wie Medien unsere Wahrnehmung beeinflussen
Description YouTube

Trojaner Blindflug
Description YouTube

Der Mord fällt aus
Description YouTube

Sprache, Ungleichheit und Unfreiheit
Description YouTube

All talks can be downloaded on several mirrors. Here is 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.

Is the difference in the toolset around the language? No, I don’t think so. Both have good package managers, tons of libraries for all kind of stuff and a few decent web frameworks. Both promote test driven development. On the language side one is whitespace sensitive, the other isn’t. Is that so important? Maybe a little, but I think there is something else that is way more important. The culture.

It all started with a stupid python troll at the Sigint that wanted to troll our cologne.rb booth. To be prepared for the next troll attack I started to investigate Python. For that I talked with a lot of Python guys and wrote a few little things in Python to get a feel for the language and the ecosystem. Luckily at the FrOSCon our Ruby booth was right next to the pycologne folks and we talked a lot about the differences. During that time I got the feeling that I know what is different in the culture of both parties. Last month I had the opportunity to test my theory in real life. The cologne.rb and the django cologne folks did a joined meetup. And I took the opportunity to test my theory. And it got confirmed by lots of the Python people.

Okay, now what is the difference in the culture? It is pretty easy. Python folks are really conservative and afraid of change, Ruby folks love the new shiny stuff even if it breaks older things. It’s that simple. But it has huge consequences. One you can see for example in the adaption of Ruby 1.9 vs Python 3. Both new versions did tons of breaking changes. A lot of code needed changes to run on the new plattform. In the Ruby world the transition went pretty quick. In the Python world it is very troublesome. Some Python people even say that Python 3 is broken and all energy should be focused on the 2.x-branch of the language. The Ruby community saw the opportunities. The Python community only saw the update problems. Yes, there have been update problems in the Ruby world, but we found an easy way to fix this: isitruby19.com. A simple plattform that showed if the gem is ready for 1.9. And if it wasn’t and the gem was important, it got fixed with pull requests or something similar. And the problems went away fast.

Both models of thinking have pros and cons. The Python world is more stable, you can update your django installation without much troubles. But that also means new technology is only added very slowly. The Ruby world loves changes. So much that most of the “new stuff” in the Python world was tested in the Ruby world first. We love changes so much that the Rails core is build around that idea. You can easily change nearly everything and extend everything. Most of the new stuff the Rails Core Team is testing right now for version 4 is available as plugin for Rails 3. This is pretty interesting if you love new things, love change, and love playing around with stuff. If you don’t and hate the idea of breaking changes, you maybe are better suited with the Python way. But don’t be afraid of breaking changes. They are all pretty well documented in the release guides. It’s not voodoo.

I for myself love the Ruby mindset. Something like Rails or Asset Pipelines or all the other things would not be possible if we are stuck with “no, don’t change that, it works pretty well that way”. Someone has to be the leader. Someone has to play around with new ideas. Yes, some ideas won’t fly, some are removed pretty quickly. But at least we tried them. Yes, I know that some people prefer the conservative way. If you consider yourself to be like that, you should at least try Python. I stay with Ruby.

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.

The first reaction I am getting when talking about this is “but where do you get all the girls?!”. Luckily this is not a problem. The Cologne event had over 60 girls coding. Liane and Tatjana got twice the amount of girls who wanted to participate. There are tons of girls out there who are interested. They just don’t know how to start. And whom to ask. Or to put this in a movie quote: “if you build it, they will come”.

Friday started with a small installation party. Every girl installed Ruby and the editor on their machines. And for everyone who got hungry, there was a beautifull cake and cupcakes from @cakefriday.

On Saturday everyone got their goodie bag and was assigned to one of the 20 coaches. After a few talks from Nadia about Creative.NRW and two shot lesson about the basics of building webapps and Ruby the girls startet creating their app. The whole concept of the event is build around the idea that the girls should be able to finish a small little app on their own. They should leave the event with the feeling that they did something great. And I am pretty sure all of them did.

After the lunch break we had a few more talks. The best one was from @joanwolk and was called “How I went from picking up programming to working in a software company - in a year”. You can get the slides here.

There have been lots of great moments on that event for me. One of them was @bumi who got girls with zero knowledge in Ruby and HTML into creating a flow based layout. After those girls finished the app they had a new idea for an app they wanted to build. And they even continued to build it when we started to clean up the room. To put it into Facebook movie terms: they were in the zone. In a fucking coding zone. On the first day they coded!

Another great moment was when a girl said that here boyfriend told her that this event would never be free and that she must have overlooked something. People teaching this kind of knowledge for free? Why should they do that? Those people could earn tons of money with teaching that stuff. Thank the generous sponsors and the coaches who “worked” for free to make this happen. This is a great example why our community is so great. We don’t see each other as enemies. Everyone is working together to form this community to be as helpful as possible.

Michael did a good job in summarizing the event:

Most fun I ever had teaching. Only thing that’s bugging me is that they understand rails way faster then I did back then. #railsgirls

— Michael Schafermeyer (@mschae) September 29, 2012

If you want to do a Rails Girls Event 100km around Cologne, just ping me. I would be glad to be a coach again!

And to everyone who is interested to learn Ruby in Cologne: the Cologne Ruby user group cologne.rb will meet on the 17th of october. Currently I am planning to give a beginners talk. I haven’t decided the topic yet, but we would love to see you there!

If you find a little bit of spare time till then, please try to work through railstutorial.org .

Bottom up

Use a basic vim with no modification, or with as less modification as possible. No Rails plugin, no special syntax highlighting sauce. If you feel comfortable enough in vim, you add one plugin at a time. Most people start with the plugins that Tim Pope is offering on his github account. The benefit of this is that you focus on the basic vim commands and don’t get distracted by the stuff that is delivered by plugins. The downside is that you won’t get to see the full potential of vim at first. You have to wait till you are able to install plugins and configure your vim.

Top down

Use a fully loaded vim with tons of modifications. If you want to go this way you definitely should use Janus. That’s the best vim plugin distribution right now. Learn the basic movement commands and than check the plugin list that is delivered with janus and try to use and learn those plugins. The benefit of this is that your vim already has tons of syntax highlighting and other stuff onboard and you just dive into it. The downside of this approach is that you might get distracted and confused by all those plugins and what they offer.

Whatever method you choose, you have to learn a lot of stuff. I would advise you to use this interactive learning tool to learn the first basic commands. After that you should try them till you feel comfortable. The next step would be to watch some of the Vimcasts and try to learn some of the concepts shown in them.

After a few weeks you maybe need more tips and tricks to get to the next level of vim. That will be the ideal time to read Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought. Don’t read it before you haven’t understood the basic concepts of vim. That will be too early for you. It will confuse you. BUT if you have a basic understanding of vim, this book is really awesome. You will learn so many new things or see commands from a different angle. As I am writing this the book is not done yet, but you can get access to it as a beta book.

And for the emacs guys here: yes, there is a working tetris for vi, too: Tetris.vim .

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?!

Strangely most Android devs find it totally okay for their IDE to be completely broken. Xcode might not be the best IDE, but at least the GUI Editor is working perfectly ;) . And even worse: if the GUI editor would have worked as it would have ment to be, it would be a complete usability fuck up. Why? Because Google decided to go the complete Java way, which can be described as this:

Java is a language to compile XML into bytecode

Basically the gui description language is XML. Sadly since the editor for that is broken, you have to write it all by hand. And you have to write lots of it. In tons of files. Oh, you need a nice border around this element? Go ahead, add a new XML file and reference it in this xml file which is referenced in another xml file and that other file is combined with several other style, border and whatever definition xml files. Stuff which I can do in Xcode with a little click in the properties pane of that ui component is cluttered into 3 xml files I have to create. Manually. Would the GUI editor work as expected, it would help me to create those files, but basically it would open a wizard to create those. No easy one click solution available. Because of that huge amount of time you have to spent creating xml markup, it is pretty time consuming to create good looking apps. This whole XML “solution” is also creating another big problem. Because of the Android markets inconsistency you can’t develop your app for one fixed aspect ratio nor screen size. Your app has to adjust to the different screen sizes of different devices of lots of manufacturers. There are basically two solutions Google is offering you. And both suck.

1. Create a new layout for each new screen size and/or aspect ratio. This sucks because creating that layout XML is pretty hard and time consuming work. Added a new button? Go ahead, add it to all those different resolutions. Hurray.
2. Making the GUI scale for itself and create only one XML file. This sadly sucks because you have no easy GUI tool to define the scale behaviour for each component like in Xcode. You have to think hard and write the xml properties in the XML file by hand. And than check it on the different devices. Manually.

Pixel perfect layouts on Android devices? Forget it. You simply can’t. Your GUI designer will not be very happy with the end result. Gaps where no gaps should have been, text not sitting perfectly where it belongs. And I even did not start to rant about the font rendering issues I saw and other stuff :( .

Animations? On iOS you have something called CoreAnimation. On Android there is nothing that even comes close to that. Transitions for different states of your ui components? 3 Lines of Objective-C code. Forget that on Android. You have to write the animations by hand.

It is pretty easy to create really good looking apps with a few clicks on iOS devices. On Android you need to invest more time into that. Way more. That’s the reason why iOS apps look better than Android apps. It is just easier to build them. Google, if you want to have good looking apps on your market store, fix that stuff.

Another weak spot is the lack of a good dependency managing solution. Yes, there is Maven. And yes, you could invest 20 minutes to create a Maven file for your Android project, BUT it is not working very well with the way the Eclipse Android stuff is expecting the file layout. On iOS we have Cocoapods. Okay, it is a very new thing, but at least there is a decent solution. One with a nice centralized repo. Missing the Facebook framework? Just enter pod search facebook and you will get a list of packages you can use. Add one of the packages to your Podfile, enter pod install and you are done. Your Xcode project now has all the dependencies for that Library. In the Java world you have to google for the jar, check if there is a maven repo somewhere that holds that jar and if you are lucky that repo is working and you can fetch the stuff from there. It is very strange that maven is still having the same problems it had 7 years ago. In the Ruby world we have rubygems.org. A nice centralized repository where you basically find everything. Why is there nothing like that for Java? Because of all that a lot of Android users just copy and paste jars around and do the dependency stuff by hand. Or worse: copy and paste Java code snippets around. Oh boy. World of pain.

The biggest problem I had as a guy who tried to learn the stuff was the pure amount of idiots in the Android developer scene. Or to be fair: the amount of idiots posting their so called solutions on StackOverflow. If you search for Objective-C or Ruby stuff, you have a few morons that post worst practices. But compared to the huge amount of morons posting in the Android world I am living in a pretty nice place ;) .

In the end I managed to create an app that was decent enough to show it on the IFA. Go see it on the Samsung booth :) . Basically it is an remote for your putpat.tv app on the Samsung TV. Developing the communication between the tv and the android app was really easy and I hope we will transform that into a full app in the near future.

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.

What was good?

The selection of the speakers and the order of the talks was brilliant. Sadly I could not see the keynote on friday night because I wanted to meet a few friends in Berlin. The talks on saturday and sunday have been great. Especially the talks from Konstantin, Florian, Isaac (and his wife ;) ) and Nick. The weather was fucking awesome and thankfully the conference room was airconditioned. The idea of selecting a location on a lake in August and having 35°C was great, too. On top of it the free time on saturday was great to get to talk and socialize with lots of people.

What was bad?

Sadly a lot. Let me begin with the most important thing:

Really love @agnoster ´s Discussion/Talk about Art and Science at @eurucamp . Sad it is not recorded :(

— Bodo Tasche (@bitboxer) August 19, 2012

No recordings. It is 2012. Please do your speakers the favour and record that stuff. Put it online. Let me rephrase that: if it is not on youtube, it didn’t happen. The speakers use hours and hours to prepare their talks. And after 30 minutes of talking it will be gone. Forever. Why? Renting camera equipment is pretty cheap. Like 40€ a day cheap. If you are planing a conference and you have no time or knowledge on how to setup that stuff, just ask for help. Especially if you advertise yourself as “community-organised”. One tweet, one blog post would have been enough.

The guy who did the webpage needs a little help in usability. The schedule does not link to the speakers or the description of the talks. You basically had to search on the speaker page for the talk. By hand. Why? Why no deep link with an anchor? The activity page had no “join this activity” link, instead you had to write the tweet yourself. And that was error-prone. One link like this one and you would have helped everyone.

The iPhone app? Even more confusing. And broken. It still shows a “1” new alert on the Icon. And I don’t know how to get rid of that notification. Never worked very well. The guys behind OleaPark need to rewrite the complete UI with the help of an usability expert. Next time just use the Euruko App by Applicake. It showed that it works perfectly. And it even had the schedule of the event and locations onboard.

I loved the goody bag. Tons of nice stickers and stuff. Some of them ended on my macbook :) . BUT the brochure about outsourcing? WTF?! The only thing that could have made that one worse would have been comic sans.

Being one hour outside of Berlin on a lake could be a good Idea. It’s a nice opportunity to keep the people together and let them socialize even more. But sadly there have been no events planned for the nights. And that let to the building of very small groups of people. Some went to Berlin, some went to the camping ground and some even went to bed at 22:00(!!). That was a huge lost opportunity. The time on saturday afternoon was great, but it could have been even better if it had been organized 1-2 weeks beforehand. Some people would have used the time to organize events or to bring more stuff with them. Next time the activity page should be online 2 weeks beforehand to make that possible.

And now to the hotel. That was a huge letdown. Starting with “on a lake” which translated into: 15 min bike ride to a good beach. If you went into the lake right on the hotel, like I did, your feet would bleed because of the tons of sharp objects in the water. 5 out of 5 people I talked with who went in there had that experience. Next problem was the food. It was bad. Really bad. On Sunday it was a real miracle: it was cold. Cold spaghetti. On a 35° day. How did that happen? And even worse: the vegetarian lunch bags on saturday had fish in them. And they excused it with “cultural differences”. There is no cultural difference in “vegetarian”. If you don’t know what that means, look it up. For a big hotel like that one it was pretty stupid to do that kind of stunt.

The stop of resupply of water during the break on saturday was not a very smart move. Everyone only had the capri sun they got with their lunch bag. And running out of club mate in a location in Berlin was a first for me, too. Running out of it in Hannover or Osnabrück is understandable. But Berlin? The city where most of the stores have it on their shelfs?

And as a closing note to the speakers: dark background means light colors for the fonts. Dark font on dark background is not readable. Maybe on your laptop with 100% brightness, but not in a conference room.

Installing passenger

First I installed RVM and configured it. After that I had to install passenger:

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gem install passenger
passenger-install-nginx-module

This will install passenger and builds a nginx with the passenger module included. When asked for a location for nginx, answer that with ~/nginx.

Now nginx and passenger are installed. Next stop is configuring nginx to run on the uberspace. Open the ~/nginx/conf/nginx.conf and add this at the top:

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daemon off;

This disables the daemon mode. We will run nginx with Daemontools and don’t need the ngnix deamon system.

And now in the server block you have to change a few things to make it look like this:

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listen       MYPORT;

location / {
    root   /home/MYUBERSPACE/MYRAILSPROJECT/current/public;
    passenger_enabled on;
}

Replace MYPORT with an unused port on that machine. Since you are sharing the ports with all users on the uberspace machine, you have to check for a port that is not already in use by another user. The root location must be the public folder inside of the rails project.

Configure memcache

Next stop is memcache. Since the machine is used by a lot of other users, you should try to remove load from the cpu. Using caching will fix this. Because you are also sharing the ports, you can’t just start a memcache on an unused port. If you would do this and cache user data in the memcache, everyone would have access to those. You don’t want that to happen. The solution to this is running memcache in unix sockets mode. The unix socket should be in your home directory, that way only you can access the memcache. Sadly the 2.0 branch of dalli (the memcache gem) does not support unix sockets anymore, you have to use an old version of it.

Change the memcache gem line in your Gemfile to this:

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gem 'dalli', '~> 1.1.5'

And now configure your cache_store in config/environments/production.rb to use the unix socket of your memcache.

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config.cache_store = :dalli_store, '/home/MYUBERSPACE/memcached.sock'

Starting the services

Now everything should be configured correctly. It is time to start the nginx and memcache. To do this we will use daemontools. The daemontools will start the processes and monitors them. If the uberspace needs to reboot, it will also restart them.

First install the daemontools with this command:

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uberspace-setup-svscan

Now you can add nginx to the daemontools like this:

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uberspace-setup-service nginx ~/bin/nginx

And memcache like this:

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uberspace-setup-service memcache /usr/bin/memcached -s $HOME/memcached.sock

With that daemontools installs and starts the services. Please look into the wiki for details.

Redirect the apache requests

Add this to the .htaccess file in $HOME/html

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RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost:MYPORT/$1 [P]

This will tell apache to proxy all requests on that domain to the nginx that is accepting connections on MYPORT.

But always remember: you are sharing that host with other people. Don’t configure passenger with 40 workers…memory on that machine is a scarce resource

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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brew install imlib2
git clone https://github.com/atextor/icat
cd icat
make
./icat ~/joker.png > ~/.dotfiles/logo.ascii

And now you have to find an image that you want to use :) .

If you can read this, you are accessing bitboxer.de on my new virtual server. Yeay!

I moved to Host Europe in 2010 and was kinda okay with it. The server was fast enough, the service was okayish and everything worked. What I really hated was the administration part of it. Plesk is a pain in the ass to use. Totally cluttered and unintuitive. And the Host Europe Admin System (aka Kiss) is nothing better.

A few weeks ago I heard about a hosting provider a few friends of mine are using. At first I was kinda astonished that someone could talk with so much passion about a hosting provider. Usually that’s nothing to get passioned about. Cluttered Interfaces, okayish support…why should I get in love with something like that? But than I tried it for myself.

Uberspace is different. I fell in love in the first few minutes I tried it. They show how webhosting should be done.

• Easy interface
• Create new accounts in seconds
• A complete ssh interface with everything that is important to me preconfigured. Starting from htop to Midnight Commander everything was there.
• Good performance (at least on the server I am running this on ;) )
• Adding a new Mail Address is just one entry in the .qmail away
• They are open about the used tech
• The wiki has tons of easy to understand articles
• Great support. Usually they answer within a really short time. Even on sundays. And the best thing about that: the answer is not a robot mail or from a sales guy.
• No strange artificial limits (e.g. as many databases as I need) as long as my quota of 10 gigabyte hard disc is not reached

And now one of the best parts: the pricing. It’s up to you. The minimum price is 1€ per uberspace per month. It’s advised that you pay around 5-10€. I have decided to pay 16€ for the service. And it’s worth every penny of it. Why 16€? That was the price I payed at Host Europe :) . After moving a few more domains to uberspace, I will increase that even more. If you like something, you should show it.

You should give them a try. The first 30 days are free!

Some tech facts:

• 10 gigabytes of space per uberspace
• Minimum of 1€ per uberspace per month, 1,50€ per uberspace with a domain (+ 5€ service charge for registering the domain). You also can register the domain somewhere else and connect that one to your uberspace for free
• 100 gigabytes of traffic per month per uberspace
• unlimited mysql databases (the disc quota is used to limit this), they are thinking on how to implement PostgreSQL
• IPs in the logfiles are anonymized. They do everything they can to reduce the amount of data they have. They even don’t have my adress and never asked for it.
• Rails and node.js supported

If you have more questions about Uberspace just ask them :) .

(Photo by Terence Lee)

Things I loved:

• The Tuschinksi Theater was one of the most insane conference locations. Just look at the photos. Unbelievable.
• The party at the roest was a great closure for the event. Nice people, a fireplace and it was near my airbnb apartment ;) .
• The talks where great. My list of stuff to investigate is pretty long now. Hopefully I will have time to try everything on the next weekend.
• The people. The vibe was great. Okay, there where some haters, but sadly you can’t have a conference of 600 people without them :( .
• The fruits they handed out as snacks. Good Idea to keep us nerds on a healthy diet. Athens, can you do that, too?
• The bob ross theme that @roy added to the conference during his talk. (Btw: thanks again for the sticker, roy ;) )
• The iPhone/Android app with push notifications for updates during the conference
• The rfid checkin game

And if you missed it, you can get the vibe of the first day in this video. There will be more videos and the talks uploaded soon.

I can’t wait to be in Athens next year.

Zurich gave me chocolate, but euruko greek will give me a nice beach to hang around the days before/after #euruko 2013. Let’s go to athens!

— Bodo Tasche (@bitboxer) June 2, 2012

And Athens, one little thing: can you make the voting process for the euruko 2013 better? Create a site where every attendee can vote, or use handsigns. The sound volume stuff is not good enough anymore.

Besides talking about ruby and other stuff on the sigint I also talked with a few guys about keyboard layouts. I struggled with the german keyboard layout for a while now. It’s very hard to access brackets ( []{} ) on it. Sadly those brackets are very important if you write code. Even more if you write in objective c. Choosing dvorak or neo) would not help, both need modifiers for the brackets, too. We discussed a lot of options and the best one was to change the öäü keys back to brackets. With that solution you have the best of both worlds. You don’t need to change your writing habbit a lot and you have fast access to those keys.

Luckily Frederic already started a keyboard layout that I could use, but it didn’t go far enough. I took his file and enhanced it a little bit.

My keyboard layout for my mac now looks like a german keyboard with these keys changed:

If you are interested in using it, feel free to clone it from github.

I started to look for leftovers of that plugin. After searching for a little while I found it. Somehow the plugin was still in the chrome directory, but was not listed within chrome. Deleting its directory was the final fix for it.

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rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Google/Chrome/Default/nneajnkjbffgblleaoojgaacokifdkhm"

Never ever install the divx webplayer. It is not worth it :( .

Another month, another big event. It seems like Cologne is a real heaven for nerds right now. From my point of view its right behind Berlin as #2 best nerd place in Germany. Hcking.de is a good proof for that. Cologne should really get its act together and start to enhance its coolness factor. Stop that awkward “internet capital city” campaign and start a fresh new brand. Maybe Made with love in Cologne.

Most of the time I was sitting at the cologne.rb usergroup booth to represent ruby.

Want to try ruby? Meet @colognerb at @sigintyfrog.com/h6kd7vwj

— Bodo Tasche (@bitboxer) May 19, 2012

Sadly the booth area was not very accepted by the audience, but it was fun nevertheless. I tried lock picking at the neighbor booth by the SSDeV Cologne.

Nerd achievement unlocked: lock picking, Level 1. twitpic.com/9mygvi

— Bodo Tasche (@bitboxer) May 19, 2012

Besides having fun at the booth area I watched only a few talks. The best by far was the Men who stare at bits, which hopefully can be found on the media.ccc.de webpage soon. Udo Vetter gave his famous talk on how to deal with police called ”Sie haben das Recht zu schweigen”. If you haven’t watched it by now, you really should.

The next conference will be the euruko. Can’t wait for it!

Wow, THAT was a great weekend. The Advance Hackathon was a complete success. Over 100 people hacking, networking and having fun together. It was one of the best hackathons I ever participated. The project topics have been very amazing. From an instagram clone with a distributed storage system to a lego sequenzer everyone worked on brilliant stuff. During the whole time you could feel the energy in the room. All projects can be found in the wiki. Hopefully there will be an update about all projects on the blog soon. The great german sign language presentation by Pamela Perniss was a nice surpise, too!

And the food was fucking brilliant. I don’t want to know how much weight I have gained through that weekend :o . And the barista(!!) made perfect coffee:

Das ist ein _verdammt_ leckerer Kaffee :) #ah12

— Tobias (@l_ama) April 29, 2012

Our team (Lucas, Timo, Tobias and myself) worked on adding new features to hcking.de. We

• added a mobile layout
• made it possible for everyone to edit events
• created an ical importer
• updated all gem dependencies
• added the possiblity to favorite tags
• started updating the layout to a 8 bit layout
• and tons of other stuff

Thanks to the Mediencluster NRW for organizing this #awesome event!. Hope you will repeat this soon!

Ps: putpat is searching new developers!

Thanks to @señordeveloper. The shirts can be found here.

Update:

This photo was taken by droid boy at the advance hackathon.

But what is it good for? If you think it is as a hint for the reader to explain how important this mail is, you are wrong ;) .

This is a “pro active spam filter”. In the beginning of email, software developers tried to find a way to distinguish emails by self-important persons from emails that really needed their attention. Since software developers are very expensive, it was not possible to let them answer every mail of those egomaniac persons. Mails like:

Attention! Showstopper! The button is in dark green, but it should be in a lighter green! YOU HAVE TO FIX THIS ASAP!

A normal spam filter was not able to detect those persons. It needed some help to do that. But how? The idea was very simple, but worked out great: a egomaniac will always try to get his mail answered as soon as possible. And he will try everything to cut the line. That’s the reason why that “priority” field was invented. The spam filter only has to check the ratio of “high priority” mails to normal mails from every person. If the ratio is higher than a certain amount, the person is considered to be an egomaniac and his mails will be sent to the bottom of the reading list.

I can’t live without this. But don’t tell any manager/user/customer. It’s a secret that saves my ass regularly ;) .

This article is a translated post I wrote a few years ago.

To do this, you have to open the terminal and enter this:

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networksetup -setv6off Ethernet 
networksetup -setv6off wi-fi

After you restart iTunes, it will finally be able to connect to your Boxee.

Sadly the Boxee guys don’t want to fix this issue. Disabling IPv6 is a very drastic move :( .

There will be tons of different topics to hack on. A list of all proposals can be found on Github. Sadly it is fully booked, but I don’t think that anybody would throw you out if you come by ;) .