Since I may have to do some PHP programming in the near future, I have been looking for a nice IDE over the last week. For syntax highlighting and simple editing, Notepad++ has been doing the job so far, but I’m getting sick and tired of having to use the print() command to output variables I need to check. Thus, code debugging was one of the mandatory features I was aiming for in my conquest for an IDE. As of yet, I have been using Eclipse for my Java programming, being very satisfied with its feature list as well as its GUI and the fact that it’s supported by a huge community. Furthermore, it’s open-source (therefore freely available) and easily extensible through hundrets of plugins, available via the Eclipse-internal software update mechanism.

development | 1 Comment »

Up until last week I used Bloglines to organize and read my RSS feeds. Since I have two computers and regularly access my feeds from both, I found this to be the best solution. While Bloglines satisfied my needs at first, over time I got more and more upset with their interface. Clicking on a feed automatically marks ALL items in it as read, no matter whether you actually read them or not. So if you have a feed with an already fairly large amount of unread items in it, you better work through them at one go, otherwise you’ll loose some. Trying to bring back items that you couldn’t read (because you maybe clicked on another feed in-between) by setting the display option to display “All items” will do the thing, although then you will still have to determine on your own, which items you have or haven’t already read. This got me to the point where I postponed reading some of my feeds until I could spare the time of struggling through 300+ news items and over time this got worse and worse. In the end I always just clicked on the damn thing to get it over with (not having read a single line:-)

Uncategorized, web | 1 Comment »

Yesterday I wrote about Gmail’s introduction of IMAP. After fiddling around with it a little I must say that I’m not impressed by their IMAP implementation of the tagging system, or “labels” as they call it. On the client side the labels are represented by individual folders, one for each label. So if I want to tag one of my e-mails with “work”, “php” and “project”, I simply create 3 folders with the appropriate names and put a COPY of my mail into each one. Although Gmail lets you nest these folders, I wonder what my Outlook will look like in about a year….thousands of folders….

web | 1 Comment »

Finally!!! GMail now supports IMAP, which ends the era of endless “forwarding chains” of connected GMail accounts. In the end I had 5 different accounts (each of which forwared a copy of the incoming mail to the next one), one for each computer/device I wanted to POP my mails onto. Fortunately, the people from GMail heard all the crying.

web | No Comments »

Classic, but still hilarious…

fun | No Comments »

I got tired of browsing to the eBay website every hour to check my current auction. As I am using Yahoo Widgets I searched their website for a widget that would show me the current status of my auction. What I found was a widget called “eBay Watcher” by Michael Gaines. Unfortunately, it was pretty outdated and didn’t support auctions from Europe (those in €). So I fiddled a little with the code, et voilà “eBay Watcher Euro“.

So far it’s (still) pretty basic and only supports one auction at a time. Once loaded, you need to put in the auction ID found in the right upper corner of the eBay auction’s page. Try it out!

development | 1 Comment »

Here is a recap of the Democrats’ Presidential Debates from Monday. The general question of this piece was “How will your policies reduce energy consumption?” Sen. Gravel was the first to response and suggested to change the tax structure:

“And so if we now have a retail sales tax, you’ll take this nation of ours from a consuming nation to a savings nation.“

Yeah right! Anybody else wonders, why he didn’t get as much speech time as the other candidates did? Sen. Dodd on the other hand introduced some approaches that might actually work and help to prevent global warming, such as:

politics | No Comments »

Here is a list of software I intend to implement, once I can spare the extra time. Please let me know if you already know any freeware (under Windows) that does any of the following:

• Flickr Tag Synchronizer: The idea is to have a program that will synchronize the additional photo data (tags, geo-tags, comments), which was associated with your pictures when they were uploaded to or edited in Flickr with the source pictures on your computer. I would like to have all the meta data in the pictures file-header and to be honest, I’m not too keen to do the tagging all over again.

development | 3 Comments »

A week ago I upgraded the Ubuntu system on my server from 6.10 to 7.04. I was a little worried since the last system upgrade I did messed up my whole Debian installation and finally made me re-install the entire system. At that point I switched to Ubuntu…

On a first glimpse the upgrade process went smoothly. Because my server is in a closet and I don’t have a monitor or a keyboard directly hooked up to it, I have to access it via SSH and (Tight-) VNC; and that’s where the fun started. While SSH access made no trouble, the keyboard layout was all scrambled. Typing “asdf” comes out to “abfh” and so on….After searching several forums I was happy to learn that I am not alone out there. Apparently it is a glitch in the updated Gnome version that causes trouble for the VNC client.

linux | No Comments »

After many month of abstinence, due to the effort I’ve had to invest into my Master’s Thesis, I finally found the time today to start up Battlefield 2 once again. However, after 1 or 2 minutes into the first level I got kicked by Punk Buster with a message dialog popping up, saying: “Unknown Windows API Function [131125]“.

Searching Google lead me to a post by Splattergnejs on http://www.punksbusted.com that identifies a little program called Airfoil (which I was currently running a demo version of) to be the source of all problems. Seems like its audio-grabbing routines and Punk Buster don’t get along…so long Airfoil

games | 2 Comments »