More is better - at least when it comes to lines of CSS. I personally prefer putting each CSS rule on their own line in my CSS files, but some people have advocated the use of putting each of your…
I totally forgot to mention this when it actually went live a few weeks back. At Børn i byen we’ve been busy redesigning and changing things around, and the result is now live at bornibyen.dk…
Read the full entry, Projects, Technology, Webdesign , 0 comments
Heroku is a great way to host your Rails apps. Rails 3 is the new hotness. Sass is a decent way to write your stylesheets. Unfortunately combining the three isn’t as straight forward as it could be, but it can…
Webkit - and Safari in particular - have been really aggressive in adding support for upcoming CSS 3 features - and some CSS features not yet part of any spec. As much of this is still Webkit-specific it isn’t really…
Read the full entry, Browsers, Technology, Webdesign , 1 comments
When I first read the Java Kicks Ruby on Rails in the Butt article by Javier Paniza, I brushed it aside as something from the time when Rails was just getting traction and people using related, established technologies started feeling…
On one of my projects the specs are now taking a full 10 minutes to run on my machine. Needless to say, it’s mightily annoying seeing a spec failure in the output knowing you’ll have to wait for 10 minutes…
My rant about how Stikipad founders has screwed their customers attracted this comment from reader Verity, which I figure warrants a proper reply, not just a comment: It proves that it will be a long time before we dispense with…
Quick and dirty way of testing Javascript live on a website in browsers without Firebug: <form onsubmit="try { $(‘output’).innerHTML = $F(‘input’) + ’ => ’ + eval($F(‘input’)); } catch (e) { alert(e) } return false"> <div id="output"></div> <input id="input" name="input"…
Apple, please make it easier for us to consume Steve… Why is there not a single podcast I can subscribe to, so the HD versions of the most recent Apple keynote, iPhone SDK announcement, or any other reality-distortion-field-spreading event automagically…
I am going to BarCamp Copenhagen on Friday. This being my first encounter with the BarCamp concept I have pretty much no clue what I am going into, and I am both excited and a tad nervous - I mean,…
According to the HTML 4 specification a definition list can be used to mark up dialogues. Mark Norman Francis objects to this, and in “his article on 24 ways” he goes on to claiming that using definition lists for anything…
2 hours down the drain, and all I had to do: sudo port install ImageMagick sudo port install rb-rmagick…
This is a followup to my post about using YSlow to optimize websites with a warning. In that post I mention using mod_deflate to GZip encode all our text based content before delivering it to user agents supporting this. However,…
Going through my aggregated feeds today was a pain. Everyone were writing about the WWDC07 keynote stuff and I hadn’t seen it yet. So I had to stop reading and start looking . And since I blog too little these…
You know we’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? After launching the rewritten and redesigned BiQ I…
BiQ on Rails, Browsers, Programming, Projects, Software, Technology , 5 comments
After 6 months of evangelizing and advocating, followed by 6 more months of rewriting, and then 3 more months of building new features and enhancing existing ones, we have finally launched the new version of BiQ. Going from ASP/VBScript on…
BiQ on Rails, Programming, Projects, Software, Technology, Webdesign , 3 comments
Rails 1.2.3 was released today, primarily to fix a few bugs and compatibility issues with the recently released Ruby 1.8.6. Since the Rails team doesn’t provide an aggregate changelog and I was going through the individual changelogs to see what…
The Rails core team is cleaning up. That’s obviously a good thing, however it does leave us facing a kabillion deprecation warnings when running tests and whatnot. Unfortunately the official deprecations page appears to have been thrown together quickly after…
This is a followup to my previous rant about the state of accepting online subscriptions. A few things happened after my post. Most importantly the client met with a focus group of potential users, and - among other things -…
Around 6 months ago I started the actual progress of rewriting our existing, customer facing application at BiQ. A week or two before christmas the rewrite went feature complete. That is; all the features we want and need in the…
BiQ on Rails, Programming, Projects, Technology , 2 comments
Payment gateways, merchant accounts, transaction fees, statements, grraaaah, it’s driving me bonkers. Here’s the deal: I have a client wanting to sell subscriptions for his web application. Nothing fancy, everyone’s doing it. It should be easy finding a payment gateway…
Google Code Search is a new search on Google Labs specifically for searching through, well, source code. And what do the geeks do with it? Figure out how many fucks are in the code of various languages Find serial number…
Small plea to podcasters; Crank up the volume, we old geezers can’t hear your (probably) quality content. I’m getting close to 30 years old and apparently my hearing is already failing. Even if I crank the volume on my iPod…
Thursday marked a major step on the path to exploring Rails as an alternative for BiQ. As I’ve mentioned earlier I’ve been looking for someone to come and present Rails for us. We found Scott Raymond of Blinksale and IconBuffet…
Read the full entry, BiQ on Rails, Business, Programming, Projects, Technology , 2 comments
It seems I have stirred quite a pot around the office with my recent ravings about Rails. Today the tech-head on the board sent me this article about why Rails won’t make it into the mainstream and asked for my…
Heh, even when filling out the provided PDF on a computer and printing it, the OCR at SKAT (Danish IRS) manages to misread stuff. Substance Lab turns into Sunstance Lab….
At the day job I’m the sole developer and maintainer of a legacy ASP/VBScript system. Yes, ASP/VBScript. No, not .NET. And yes, it’s driving me insane. The code contains around 42000 lines of VBSCript drivel and 30000 lines of supporting…
BiQ on Rails, Business, Programming, Projects, Technology , 2 comments
I switch between a few different computers on a daily basis; a Windows machine at work, a Windows machine at home, and an iBook on the couch. This does cause some difficulties, one of those being about having access to…
Looks like my Windows XP has suddently started integrating my Mozilla Thunderbird into the Explorer……
As posted previously we’ve been looking to buy a printer for the home office. We ended up buying a Brother DCP-340CW from enavia.com. It arrived yesterday and these are my initial impressions….
I’ve been getting into podcasts recently, for various reasons. The concept of podcasts is great. Listening to smart and funny people is always interesting, and someones voice has a way of getting to you that letters on a screen rarely…
Looks like my birthday wishlist has been filled already. And hey, I turn 30, just like Apple, so I really deserve it!…
In a previous post I took a few easy and cheap shots at some danish web development agencies. I did this since their websites irked a pet peeve of mine. Unfortunatly, in my eagerness to rant I ended up writing…
Read the full entry, Blogging, Technology, Usability, Webdesign , 0 comments
This post is inspired by the announcement of the Danish Internet Award 2006, sporting a 1999-style website complete with Flash intro and invalid markup (They do have a weblog, though). I looked at the list of people from the grand…
Read the full entry, Blogging, Technology, Usability, Webdesign , 5 comments
An important design element that’s part of the whole AJAX business is somehow letting your user know that stuff is actually happening while the server crunches away. A common way to do so, is to add a little animated GIF…
Before you do anything else, go to fluxiom.com and check out their video. Then realize this; It’s a web application. Holy crap! I can’t wait to see it in action. If indeed the interface and interaction is as the movie…
The girlfriend and I are looking at buying a new printer. Our main criteria is that the printer must be usable from both Windows and OS X (and deliver nice quality prints, obviously). Things that would be nice in addition…
I’ve been wanting to write about the recent SONY BMG Music copy protection fiasco for a while. The whole thing is simply so messed up and I find it hard to keep my mouth shut. Short summary: SONY BMG Music…
Whoa, deja vu. They’re messing with the matrix again. And guess what? Seems noone has learned a lesson from the last glitch….
This seems to be an issue that pops up every so often on the Ruby on Rails mailing list and IRC channel and probably elsewhere. When using Lighttpd proxypassed behind Apache (this might also be true if you’re not behind…
My first Ruby on Rails project is currently being tested by some friends. Today one of them told me that it was running REAL slow for him; around 15 seconds per request! Needless to say, that’s bad (and weird, since…
Jumping on the meme bandwagon, here’s a list of my favorite Mac OS X applications (so far): Quicksilver - it took me a while to “get” this. Now, I definatly wouldn’t want to go on without it - and I…
Jabber-based, Google-sponsored Instant Messaging. Bloody hell, don’t I feel silly now for never getting my kickass Jabber client application running. Oh, and “hah” to all of you thought I was crazy when talking about the benefits of Jabber ;) Could…
For a long time David tried to persuade me that the extra cost of an Apple computer was worth it, by excitedly telling me “It’s all about the experience, man!”. I didn’t believe him until I finally caved in and…
I thought Google Maps were cool. Now Google has bridged the gap between desktop and server app and brings you the world in it’s full, texture mapped 3D glory with buildings and terrain raising out of the 2D surface making…
Update: Ah well, it was a fun experiment, but I’ve decided to scrap it again, possible in favor of something pure Javascript’ish. The AJAX preview is either too unresponsive to be worthwhile or I send way too many requests against…
A few stray impressions, thoughts, and notes for myself regarding my first days as a Mac user. Some of these could probably be solved be reading the manual, but if OS X is intuitive I shouldn’t have to, dammit! ;)…
This entry is posted from Safari on my sparkling new iBook. Yup, that’s right, I am now more or less a switcher - even though I have no plans to discard the Windows PCs just yet. So far the experience…
The Google Web Accelerator has been a wake-up call for a lot of people (myself included), and it has resulted in a lot of fingerpointing and a lot of “I told you so ages ago, I rock, you suck”. Whatever,…
Ever since it was made public, Dave Hyatt has been busy working on making Safari pass the Acid2 test. Yesterday he reached the goal. Congratulations to Safari for being the first browser to reach this milestone, and huge thumbs up…
Having followed the Ruby on Rails weblog I’ve known about Bla-bla List for some time now. However it’s appearance on Forever Geek made me figure I’d give the application a shot and try it out for size. Now, I won’t…
Open source is for people who don’t want to make money Note this wasn’t in reference to creating open source solutions, but about using open source to power your business (specifically at the database level). Who wants to prove the…
A month ago Opera CTO, Håkon Wium Lie, and WaSP publically challenged Microsoft and all other browser vendors to get their asses in gear and their browsers CSS support up to snuff. Now the goal line has been unveiled….
I have a Sony Ericsson T610 cell phone, one Microsoft Outlook 2002 (yeah, I know…), a Bluetooth dongle I’ve forgotten model and make of, and XTNDCOnnect PC. Once upon a time, they were all able to communicate with each other…
So Google apparently pulled down the GoogleX page, that I posted about linked to yesterday, from the labs. http://labs.google.com/googlex gives a 404. Luckily it can be found in their own cache. Scoble has a post with more mirrors….
What would make a MS SQL Server 2000 randomly decide that performing write operations is too daunting a task? And instead of telling people that it doesn’t want to write things anymore, it just fails to respond while the query…
I don’t get the big outcry surrounding the Google Toolbars upcoming AutoLink feature. People are crying foul, apparently because Google changes their content, that they can no longer be sure what readers see on their website, and that this is…
I put the newly launched MSN Search to the ultimate test: Searching for my name. Result #34, the last result of the bunch, was my about page. It was one of 3 results containing all 3 words from my name,…
Guide to OS X for PC to Mac converts Mac Mini benchmarks for different harddrive sizes and speeds How to turn your Mac Mini into a media center Mac Mini benchmarks compared to other Macs Mac Mini dissected Anandtech…
This showed up in my Google ads today: Apparently someone really has it in for Jens Jacob, Berlin and is willing to spend money on getting his point through. This made me wonder what other, creative, non-advertising uses people have…
The big geeky story around the blogosphere these days is the new Google Suggest feature. Drew McLellan takes you behind the scenes, Adam Stiles looks at and “hacks” the technical side of Google Suggest, and Kevin Gibbs who made the…
Jakob installs Ruby on Rails on a Debian machine - it’s not as easy as one could hope.
Thank you, Poland, for taking the stand against software patents that Denmark was strongarmed into not taking. One small step away from the US software patent conditions….
Linux sucks. Or rather; Getting to know Linux sucks if you don’t already know Linux. I don’t consider myself a total dimwit in regards to computers or command line processors and the like. As a fact, I tend to believe…
Jakob explains how he set up CVS over SSH2 on a Windows 2000 machine.
Scoble assures us that it is untrue that Microsoft doesn’t want to comply with the W3C standards. Dave Massy from the IE team calls it a myth that Microsoft doesn’t support standards. Still, the newest addition to Microsofts IE-marketing, the…
I just received my first (non-spam) email taking advantage of everybody’s favorite HTML-tag, <marquee>. In a business related email, that I was supposed to take seriously. Somehow that proved quite difficult….
From Google Information for Webmasters: Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories… ::snicker::…
At the beginning of 2004 I made the decision to change from my internet provider, Tiscali, and get a new one, Cybercity. Now, a few months later it seems evident that Tiscali don’t want to let their customers go, and…
Arg! “Re: Re: Document”, “stolen”, “Fake”, “Re: Your bill”, “something for you”, “Re: Your document”, “hi”, “hello”, “unknown”, “warning”, “read it immediatly”, “information”, and the list goes on. People, stop getting viruses - how hard can it be? Having a…
First of all, these are the web comics I try to keep updated with: Calvin and Hobbes Dilbert GU Comics Little Gamers Penny Arcade PvPonline VG Cats WTF Comics Wulffmorgenthaler Some of them update daily, some weekly, some whenever they…
Fine, so you have an email server or client that can autoreply to people sending you mail, notifying them if you are on extended vacation, “on course” (actual autoreply), taking a dump or whatever, great for you. But please, for…
Hell froze over and “probably the best Windows application ever written” was released. And I could care less: The iTunes Music Store is not available in your country yet. You will be able to browse music and listen to previews,…
Do not take anything for granted. Verify your backup routines work as intended….
As if Google wasn’t absolutely amazing already, it now features a calculator. Apart from doing basic calculations, it also converts various physical units, ie what is 45 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit. How cool is that? Oh, and shameless Firebird plug:…
Oh yeah, I am all over this; Tapestry - Comics delivered by RSS. Strips from Dilbert, PvP Online, Calvin and Hobbes, and more delivered straight to your aggregator. I suppose I can stop building my own comic-scraper now :)…
Going through my referrerlogs I noticed a person coming from an MSN search for “keyboard” (“tastatur” in danish). Investigating a bit, I found out that MSN Search ranks me as number 4(!) using that searchterm. To be fair, I have…
Artificial Intelligences are brown, dangerous, hunts for food at night and are generally pleasurable. At least according to this AI which challenges you to a game of 20 questions. You think of an object and the program tries to guess…
I too have been visited by MSNBOT, Microsofts newest weapon in the battle for search supremacy: 2003-06-19 07:24:42 131.107.163.58 GET /robots.txt - 404 270 MSNBOT/0.1+(http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) - 2003-06-19 07:24:42 131.107.163.58 GET /index.asp - 200 0 MSNBOT/0.1+(http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) - For more information about…
They are all doing it; advocating RSS and/or providing RSS feeds. Heck, I myself am providing an RSS feed for those who care, although I have never been one of those who cared for reading blogs via RSS. I have…
Bookmarklets are extra browser features that you can store as bookmarks on your personal toolbar. www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets is a collection of some great bookmarklets. Most the Web Development ones have made it into my personal toolbar and I’ve already solved…
Inspired by a post at A Whole Lotta Nothing I decided to create my own version of his Movable Type “hack”, using ASP/VBScript (yuck) instead of Movable Type….
An IPv4 address consists of 4 bytes and is generally represented as A.B.C.D - for example the IP address of mentalized.net is 217.116.224.24 (note, you can’t actually use this IP address to access mentalized.net). This address can also be expressed…
So to recap, I take a photo with my phone, push about 7 buttons to send it off to a secret email account on one server. A cronjob on a different server checks the account every 10 minutes, then…
My referrerlogs are being polluted. Popdex, Organica, Technorati and others seem to not care about the HTTP specification and are reporting bogus referrer headers from their spiders. From the HTTP specs regarding the referrer headerfield (emphasis mine): The Referer[sic]…
Hooters Airlines Spellchecker for Internet Explorer textareas Freedom Fries - how childish can congress members be? Ten Reasons to Love France Highres QuickTime VR panomaras Third Annual Weblog Awards Pr0n as currency? By the way, I really like the…
At last my new computer arrived at work, and I could start installing all the software-goodies I claim to need. For some reason I decided to write down what I installed and in which order, and for some even more…
Movable Type 2.6 has been released and is now running on this site. It has a bunch of fixes and new features. Updating went without a hitch (so far at least) - now I only need to remove the plugins…
I know a bunch of people who use ICQ to cover their Instant Messenging needs. I know even more who use Microsofts Messenger. As if that wasn’t enough a few people have opted to use Yahoo! Messenger. I have been…
After all but 2 EU nations rejected the restrictive European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD), the European Commision has now presented a much lighter directive. This new directive tries to preserve the rights of individual consumers while trying to stop commercial…
Heh, going through referrerlogs is kind of fun in a geeky sort of way. Doing this I stumbled across an odd referrer to my previous post. A little digging revealed that the visitor came from a browserbased email reader. In…
If your company website uses images for navigation and some method of keeping those images visible at all times while browsing the site (like frames or CSS), you are possibly owing Ameritech Corporation money. They own US Patent no 5’933’841,…
Mentalized.net shizzolated, know what I’m saying?…
Anakin is a switcher……
Brad Choate is redesigning his website, and he’s blogging his progress. He has a long list of ideas/task indicating a good deal of care for usability/technical details and is checking them off as he goes. In a voyeuristic kind of…
This is pretty cool. Apple recently announced their Safari webbrowser. That’s fine and dandy, and I don’t use a Mac,so I don’t particularly care, but big parts of the blogging community is all over this announcement (quite understandably I might…
To make my start of 2003 even more pleasant, it turned out that my boss had bought himself a new laptop. A nice little machine that I luckily didn’t have to install as it came preinstalled with Windows XP and…
Sigh, the year 2003 sure starts interesting. One of the developers we have used in building an important tool for our website apparently didn’t have enough confidence to believe that his work would be used for more than half a…
Will Ferrel parodies the Apple Switch-commercials…
SpamAssassin caught yet another spam-mail for me today. I am pretty sure I have never seen spam score this high (22.80 points): SPAM: Content analysis details: (22.80 hits, 4 required) SPAM: TO_MALFORMED (-0.8 points) To: has a malformed address SPAM:…
During the weekend I’ve been going through the site, tweaking CSS, HTML and Javascripts in order to become 100% standards compliant and to fix some visual quirks. After struggling with Movable Type templates, their standard scripts, the lack of CSS2…
“Recursion” != “Recursivity”, doh!…
Some time ago I heard of a little tool called BlogToaster. BlogToaster is a MSN-bot, that monitors weblogs.com and sends you a message when your favorite blogs are updated. It works like a charm and makes it way easier to…
Yet another critical security hole has been discovered in a piece of Microsoft software. Naturally I want to close that hole, so I download and run the patch. Now I am faced with a dialog telling me that I need…
Ok, I admit it, I am a sucker for gadgets, and especially PDA-style devices seem to be aiming for a soft spot in me. Today Dell’s Axim X5 hit me. With a 400Mhz processor, 64MB RAM, expansion for 802.11, space…
Wise words from PHP father Rasmus Lerdorf: “Don’t over-architect things. If your solution seems complex to you, there is probably a simpler and more obvious approach. Take a break from the computer and go out into the big (amazingly realistic)…
Some of the new Nokia phones are looking damn sexy, but what’s up with the 5100 looking like something from the Transformers?…
phil ringnalda dot com warns about the latest idea from the lowlife scum also known as spammers: Target the comment sections of blogs using a script that posts a comment to every entry on the blog. Why don’t we just…
Just for kicks I created a tiny web-spider (less than 2K, 30 minutes coding time) in Python designed to get email addresses off websites. The script is small, the rules for recognizing website- and email-addresses are real simple, but still…
Not only the danish newspaper industry aspires to become the next extinct dinosaur in the digital world of tomorrow. The music business is right on their tail. EMI has announced that they have found the solution to their dwindling income:…
This is pretty cool: IBM connects washers and dryers to the web, meaning students living in dorms can monitor and control their laundries from their computer. From a website they can monitor if a washer is available, they can dispense…
In an attempt to make my working enviroment more ergonomically pleasing, I (quite literally) laid my hands on one of those curved keyboards, that are supposed to be more healthy for your arms and hands. I swear, the transition phase…
Yet another ludicrious software patent has seen the light of day. ActiveBuddy has been granted a patent regarding Instant Messenger bots. In short the patent covers systems who can receive queries from remote computers and return an answer - all…
Apparently Microsoft have decided to put themselves above morals and ethics and decide for the users of the MSN Messenger what they may and may not call themselves. When trying to change your .NET name, some words will simply make…
We all know them, and we hate them all: E-mails in your inbox advertising everything from “Get rich in 5 minutes”-schemes to penis-enlargements and “free” busty blondes. Now I wouldn’t mind any of those things, but I do mind the…
Most new bulletin board systems like phpBB, EZBoard and UBB provide users with the ability to put their personal mark on their messages in the form of textual signatures and smaller personal icons. Alas the users are usually also provided…
Dave Winer pointed me in the directon of a story on Wired regarding deeplinking. The story is particularly relevant for me as it involves the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association and the company Newsbooster (which has offices two floors above my…
I had quite a giggle from this…
I just had an e-mail arrive in my inbox. That itself is not particularily special nor interesting, however the sender was a person who seems to be existing in the outer rim of my own, little, personal world. For some…
I just wanted to point out, that the guys from Low Dimension have released a new public beta of the SharpE-shell. I have not yet tried it, but if it is anything like the preview-builds I have seen, it will…
On any given day, when I am sitting at home after work, I can be contacted through 2 different instant messengers, 3 different e-mail accounts (with a multitude of aliases each) and on 2 different IRC-networks (where I am on…
I have always promised myself that I would not fall prey to the blogging-fever that has been going around, and for a long time the title of my website actually was “This is not a weblog”… Well, nothing lasts forever…