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 . 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:

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 .

If you want to grap some datapoints from OSM, you just have to follow these steps:

1. Download the map data you need from Cloudmade or Geofabrik.
2. Download osmosis
3. Filter the needed data with osmosis.

To get the cologne train stops you need to start osmosis like this:

The bus stops can be collected like this:

After a little data parsing session I got the result I needed. All locations for all stops and their KVB-ID. You can use the KVB-ID on the KVB-Website to see detailed informations of that station. The URL for those look like this:

http://www.kvb-koeln.de/german/hst/overview/KVB-ID/

The data can be found in this git repo.

In the last few months I struggled a little bit with designing a few websites. Yes, I am a web developer. And yes, I create good designed web pages. But usually I get a Photoshop File and build the site from that. That needed to change.

My weapon of choice was Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy. And it is really great. From layout over fonts to color you will find everything covered in this book you need to design a webpage. After this you have all the basic knowledge about design. The next step is experimentation and learning from good looking sites.

Sadly the next book is only available in German, but “Kunst. Die ganze Geschichte” is a good companion for the design book. It covers the complete history of art and explains the different styles and why the artist has painted the image how he has painted it. You can get a great deal of inspiration from this. And to every cologne citizen: you can get into the museums for free on every 1st thursday. Use that!

At first I was a little bit afraid of doing this. Will I still be able to read my news, blogs and other content on the net? Will I see tons of click-overlays, blinking flash adverts and other annoying stuff that made me install an adblocker in the first place?

The first hour of surfing without an adblocker was eye opening. Advertisement has learnt a lot in the last 10 years. And the site owners too. Most of the sites changed from “ads right were the user is most annoyed to see one” into “ads were they don’t piss off the user”. And most of the ads have learned that lesson, too.

In the second hour of surfing I did something I would not expect to do ever. I actually clicked on an advert that interested me. It was the ad for a computer game I wanted to buy. And after seeing the trailer on the ad-site I bought it. To be fair I would have bought that game anyway and clicking on ads was very rare in that week. There were only a handfull of ads I clicked on. And most of them didn’t interest me after I saw their site.

In the next few days I got the feeling that I was wrong in activating the adblocker on all sites. Most sites do respect you and try to make money with ads and think hard on where to place them. Sadly there were exceptions. Some sites love to put a video ad in full browser window size that you have to click away. With activated sound. But those were rare.

After the week was over I thought about activating the adblocker again, but I felt I did not need it for most sites. I only want to punish sites that didn’t respect me and tried to do evil stuff with ads. Stuff that I think was not okay. Like those full screen ads.

Sadly Adblock Plus, the adblocker of my choice, did not have a nice gui interface for that “blacklist mode”. If you know how to write the filter rules, you could have the plugin only filter ads on certain sites. But I didn’t want to do that manually. So I forked the plugin and added that feature. The fork can be found here:

https://github.com/bitboxer/charma_adblockplus_chrome

If you clone that repo and load the plugin into your chrome, you can activate the blacklist mode in the last tab of the settings panel. After that the adblocker is deactivated on all sites and you can enable it for specific sites with a click on the icon in the url bar.

And I really encourage you to at least try this for a few hours. The internet can only be free if we allow ads. Only those few sites who do annoy you with bad designed ads need to be punished. Not all sites.

TL;DR: Ads are not that bad like they used to be. Try to switch to an adblocker that only enables adblocking on bad sites, not on all sites. I have created a fork of adblock plus for chrome that does this.

Do you want to participate? Register for the event today! Details can be found on hcking.de.