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Inspired by Martin Fowler’s My favorite musical discoveries of 2021, I wanted to list my discoveries, too. Since I’ve only discovered 4 new bands in 2021, I’m also listing a few other albums I bought. Links go to Bandcamp (allows you to listen to the full album before buying) and Amazon (has only ~30s samples). […]

Imagine this: You’re outside, standing in line of your favorite bakery, and spot a QR code in the window of the store. You don’t care about the code itself, but pull out your phone anyway, open the Game of QR app and point your phone’s camera at the QR code. On the screen, it switches […]

My groups have used the following tools for playing D&D 5e, AD&D 2e and Maze Rats online. Owlbear This is it! If we had known about Owlbear in April 2020, our early attempts at playing online would’ve been a lot smoother. This is the perfect virtual tabletop for us. It works really well and does […]

I’ve been using “Remember the Milk” as a Todo App for a really long time. At some point years ago I started using it to track repeating tasks, usually for things happening rarely enough that its important for the app to remind me. Gradually I’ve set up more reminders with shorter intervals, both for maintaining […]

This post is about three approaches for remote pair programming that I recently learned to value a lot. They’re not perfect, but I like the King Crimson reference. Come Prepared Do all set up, check out, scaffolding or other basics, before you start pairing. If you’re debugging a complicated issue that needs a standalone reproduction, […]

When the alarm rang in her truck’s sleeping cabin, Emily sat up and noticed the latest issue of the Bird Watching magazine sliding off her chest. She must’ve fallen asleep while still reading. Putting the magazine aside, she turned on the water cooker for some instant coffee, got dressed and checked out the leftovers from […]

Wer Visionen hat, soll zum Arzt gehen. Helmut Schmidt, “eine pampige Antwort auf eine dusselige Frage”, Wikiquote “Someone with visions should go to the doctor” is a popular quote by a former German chancellor, in a way representing modern politics pretty well. While improving the world in increments has gotten us a long way, I miss positive visions in […]

This morning I got an email like this: Hi [customer], If your inbox is anything like ours, it’s recently been filled with emails like this one: a company updating its policies. You’re probably going to receive many more before May 25 because of a new European privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation (or […]

Heute mit Bauhaus! Alle anderen Namen sind frei erfunden. Vor ein paar Tagen kaufte ich beim Bauhaus um die Ecke eine Sackkarre. Eine solche hatte sich beim Umzug als sehr wertvoll erwiesen, da damit schwere Geräte wie der Kühlschrank wesentlich leichter zu transportieren sind. Da bei uns endlich die Küchenmontage anstand und wir unsere temporären […]

I’m happy to announce the first patch release for the jQuery Validation plugin 1.15.x series. 11 people helped out to add a few enhancements and fix some bugs. Kudos to all of you, namely: adhayward, Bill Sorensen, Brahim Arkni, Hugo, Huseyn, Jordan Clark, Markus Staab, Michael Hohlovich, svrx, TLib and Torgny Bjers. This is another […]

Every now and then I get emails from computer science researchers (often students), asking me to participate in their particular study. Sometimes I participate, sometimes I don’t, often I’m thinking to myself: Couldn’t you ask me what you should be researching in the first place? While that is an inappropriate response for these emails, I […]

In November 2010, before my first MacBook even arrived, I asked Twitter for “must-have” OSX software and collected the results in a blog post. A year later, I posted an update with a list of OSX software I was actually using. A few more years have passed since then. Last year I switched from my […]

I’m happy to announce the 15th release (discounting various patch releases) of the project, bringing it up to 1.15.0. This is the first release managed by Markus Staab, who took over the maintenance for the foreseeable future. A lot of people (26!) helped out to get this new release out of the door by a […]

The first stable release of the jQuery Validation Plugin, 1.0.0, came out in June 2007, making the project now a little over 8 years old, pretty seasoned for a JavaScript library. According to builtwith.com, its the 25th most popular JavaScript library, with over 1.3 million websites using it. I’m happy to announce the 14th release […]

A rule of thumb describes an approach based on intuition, in contrast to one based on rationality and calculation. I think its fair to say that science is all about rational, calculating, data-driven approaches, where intuition is considered irrational and unreliable. The scientific method is, among other aspects, about eliminating the effect of various biases, […]

In January 2014, now 11 months ago, the jQuery Foundation published its new mission statement: To improve the open web, making it accessible for everyone, through the development and support of open source software, and collaboration with the development community. I was one of the directors of the jQuery Foundation who worked on that statement, […]

This is a patch release for the jQuery Validation Plugin. It contains a few changes, though most notable is the fix for the newly implemented aria-describedby-based behaviour for error elements introduced in 1.13.0. That turned out to have a few issues which are now addressed. Thanks to Markus Staab, who’s have been helping with ticket […]

I’m happy to announce a new release of the jQuery Validation Plugin. It’s been just three months since 1.12, yet this release brings lots of small and two big improvements. For those two I have to thank two people in particular. First, Damian Mooyman, heavily improved the error message display implementation. From the outside, nothing […]

ScreenFlow works pretty well for me for all kinds of screencasts. Its default settings are pretty bad though, when I want to upload the exported video to YouTube and have is played back with decent quality. The problem is the default scale setting: The “Web – High” preset suggests to scale the video down by […]

This is the official recording of my talk at the jQuery Conference in San Diego in February 2014, titled “Effective jQuery – Patterns for maintainability and performance”, recorded a few weeks ago, published yesterday. I probably spent about two full weeks preparing this talk, with lots of rehearsing. Still, I was very nervous at the […]

Its been slightly over a year since the last release of the jQuery Validation Plugin. Its been almost eight(!) years since I started working on this plugin. Its been slightly over eight years since I started my first full time job as a software developer. Almost-decades aside, its time for a new release, so I’m […]

Looking for some Saturday evening programmer entertainment? How about a serious security flaw in very widely deployed software caused by a goto statement? What could possibly go wrong? from xkcd.com/292/ Here’s Apple’s equivalent of the raptor mauling you. That’s the official version, which doesn’t provide any details (“Apples does not disclose any details”). It just […]

In 2013, I gave a talk about making websites accessible, at several conferences. The last session was in September 2013 at the jQuery Austin conference. While the conference itself didn’t record videos, I made a local recording myself, which I’d like to share via YouTube. The audio and video of myself are recorded with the […]

Two stories about space, that turn out to go pretty well together, both, more or less, told by and to software developers. Though I suspect that with a bit of curiosity they are as fascinating to anyone else as they were to me. To start, Russ Olsen – To the Moon! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sso4HtvJsw The other one […]

The ability in Git to search through the commit history locally is one of the major reasons why I never want to work with SVN again. With Git there is no waiting on the server. Git also provides some powerful tools to search that local history, like git-bisect. If you haven’t used bisect, this is […]

“What is wrong with the world?” – that is a question I’ve been coming back to in the last few days. Whenever I read about some problem that stirs a lot of discussion, arguments and – all too often – anger, I wonder: Don’t we have more important problems to solve? The more time I […]

A new version of the jQuery Validation Plugin is available. This is a bugfix release, mostly addressing regressions from the 1.11.0 release. The biggest one was related to the min/max methods, which would compare numbers to strings, in an attempt to make these methods work for date inputs as well. That’s now fixed. More details […]

Sites like Stackoverflow have formal reputation systems, where every user gets assigned public visible points that increase for actions deemed good, and decrease and some cases considered bad. A score of 10 indicates someone new to the platform, a score of 10.000 someone who’s been around for a long time. Someone new to the platform […]

Random YouTube links, with embeds, yay! To start, a classic, two iPhone apps screaming at each other: And finally, true facts about the Mantis: Have a good week!

This post is for anyone who plans to work for a US company as a freelancer, living in Germany. It assumes that you’re already registered as a freelancer in Germany. As you should be used to, a blog post is no replacement for proper legal advice. The good news: You don’t need any permits to […]

A new version of the jQuery Validation Plugin is available. Once again this release brings more stability (bug fixes!), better localization (new: Malay) and improved html5 compability (min/max attributes on type=”date” now work with the min/max methods). More details on the code and feature changes in the changelog below. Backwards compatibility is still going strong: The plugin […]

Cologne.js is this little user group that a few people founded in June 2010. Michael Bumann, offered to host the event at Cowoco, and has been regularly around since then. After half a year, we crowd-funded a projector and donated it to Cowoco, which meant that everything we needed was right on site. For quite […]

Wow, 11 months. It really has been 11 months since the 1.9.0 release. Interesting freelance times! Anyway, the jQuery validation plugin 1.10.0 is here! While the very recently launched Pledige.org campaign is just at the start, I hope this release helps convince you that the project isn’t dead. On the contrary, this release brings you […]

Validate forms like you’ve never been validating before! This has been the, a tad silly, tag line for the jQuery Validation Plugin for a few years now. Back in 2006, when Jörn Zaefferer started that plugin, he was still employed as a Java developer, contributing to jQuery mostly in his free time. Of the half-dozens […]

In this second round of Linkbait, I’ve got a bunch of political or economical articles to kick things of. This eerily reminds me of Shadowrun – not in a good way: “The new texts reveal that TPP negotiators are considering a dispute resolution process that would grant transnational corporations special authority to challenge countries’ laws, […]

There’s a new page on this site, the Talk Checklist. It’s just that: A checklist to go through when preparing a talk for meetups or conferences. It also includes a few bullets that could help with creating the outline for the talk and the actual execution. As the page itself also says: This is a […]

While I like Facebook for its private groups features, the public sharing sucks. Unless I send something to a friend directly, its likely that they don’t see it or don’t bother looking at it, if the title isn’t extremly linkbaitly. So, to stop complaining, I’ll try and post good stuff here, maybe with a monthly […]

Here’s how I imagine a security troll works: Google for “md5” or “sha1”. Look for blog posts that discuss those hashing algorithms in some security context, like storing passwords or checking file integrity. Then post a comment that’s barely more than this: “md5 is insecure!”, replacing “md5” accordingly. Make sure to never add anything useful, like details, context or alternatives.

While I’d still like to see RSS make a big comeback, rather few people use it today, compared to subscribing to feeds via Facebook or Google Plus. To accomodate that, I’ve created pages on both platforms that will get updated along with entries on this blog. Bassistance Page on Facebook Bassistance Page on Google Plus […]

From the (just created) category of the “Public Notebook”, aka things I don’t want to write again and may come in handy for someone else. Here I needed to extract a column of text from a table in Freshbooks, to copy the timesheet descriptions into another document. A little bit of jQuery helps to get […]

With some background in Java, this is a lot of fun: And also very sad, considering that there’s code with an actual ProblemFactory (that extend’s a DefaultProblemFactory):

Here’s a music video with five people playing on one guitar and singing along: Its apparently pretty popular right now, but its also fun to watch and I like the song. Its popular enough that someone made a pretty fun parody: Somebody get Tony!

Am 24. März findet der nächste Multimediatreff (MMT) in Köln statt. Die Konferenz gibt es schon länger, das hier wird immerhin Ausgabe 29, es ist aber erst der zweite mit Schwerpunkt HTML5. Das Programm ist zwar noch nicht ganz fertig, es gibt aber jetzt schon einige interessante Themen. Am Nachmittag werde ich dort auch über […]

“[…] plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, [they just don’t work in practice]” — from Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath This provides a nice answer to […]

Redirects are a good to refactor the web: Instead of never changing anything, you can migrate to new URLs, and put redirects in place to keep old URLs alive. As anything, it can go very wrong. As a recent example, I just clicked on this particular link: http://yuilibrary.com/theater/nicholas-zakas/zakas-architecture/ I found that link in a post elsewhere. […]

Here’s a list of post drafts I got saved in WordPress and didn’t publish: Alhazen, Rasputin, North Korea, Meta Humor, HR Exploitation++, Security Trolls, Introduction to JavaScript unit testing, Advanced JavaScript Basics, Things we don’t know, Node.js and cooperative multitasking, Chevelle, Silversun Pickups, Favorites: Opeth, Favorites: Tool, Favorites: King Crimson, Scala on Google App Engine, […]

To add insult to injury, here are some more recordings, created between 2006 and 2009. To start, a Funk Jam Mix with Gerrit and Uwe. Up next, a never finished song, for some reason filed as “radioedit”, there’s just drum and bass, Uwe and me: This is an odd one. As far as I can […]

Not exactly legendary, but fun nonetheless, are some old recordings that I’ve uploaded to SoundCloud. Previously they were embedded via some flash-based plugin, which stopped working a long time ago anyway. To bring those back to life, I’ve replaced them with the new html5-based SoundCloud widget. While I’ve got some more to upload, I’d like […]

On the Locating Sound post, Gerd Riesselmann left this comment: Female crickets locate male crickets by the sounds they make. However, the head of a cricket is too small to locate the sound by measuring the time difference between the incoming signals. So how does the cricket locate sound? It does it by “hardwiring” movement […]

Did you know that sound travels four times faster under water? And we can therefore not locate a sound source like we can under regular conditions? Let’s take a peek at that in more detail and what we could do to build a workaround! To start, sound travels 1235km/h or 343m/s. The latter is more […]

Google Plus and Facebook are good to share content, but it shouldn’t live there. For a WordPress-based blog, integrating Facebook’s Open Graph metadata helps both the G+ and FB crawlers to display a good preview for your posts. A plugin that does a good job with that is WP Facebook Open Graph protocol. For links […]

On a quiet Sunday afternoon I actually managed to render one of my old 3D models in WebGL. And I didn’t even have to deal with WebGL at all, thanks to Three.js. The model I wanted to is an ATST, originally created for my Domino Star Wars project. I had the model exported as a […]

Here are some resources on WebGL, the OpenGL implementation that now runs in current Firefox and Chrome browsers. There’s a WebGL specification, and as usual, its intended for implementors of the spec, not for users of the API. Though at least this spec as actual usage examples, so if you’re looking for a specific detail, […]

This is one ofmy all-time favorite cartoons that I found on the intertubes long before YouTube existed, and that I wish all my friends would know so that they’d get the references and in-jokes. So here it is, the awesome work of Don Hertzfeld called ‘Rejected’:

Vector math is pretty much essential when you want to do any kind of physics simulation, be it as simple as a bouncing ball. While my goal originally was to implement a flocking simulation (like birds flying close to each other, but not too close), the lack of math skills led me to build a […]

At some point I was planning on building a Home Theater PC (HTPC), but so far didn’t get anywhere. The setup I have right now, my regular PC (mostly a gaming machine) plugged into the TV and some silly cable setup to another 2.1 audio system, is working well enough. So if this is something […]

This is another “I never want to look this up again” blog post, maybe someone finds it useful. My usecase: Automatically back up savegames through Dropbox, on the one hand as an actual backup, on the other to share it across computers. To do this on Windows, you need a junction link. In this case, […]

Early November I attended the first Velocity Europe conference. This was my second conference where I attended, didn’t speak and paid for the ticket myself (Mobilism 2011 was the first, and I already bought a ticket for the 2012 edition…). There’s a lot to say about the conference, though there don’t seem to be a […]

This little nugget was shared on some internal mailinglist, but deserves more attention. And as usual, blogging about it is a good way for myself to find it again. To start with, install PCKeyboardHack. Follow their instructions for installation, changing the capslock key to some other keycode (getting to that in a second) and disable […]

The signs are rather obvious. And yeah, I’ll be linking to this from Twitter, G+ and Facebook… Now that this site has a somewhat responsive design (try on tablet and small screens!), next I need to look into discussion options, maybe test Disqus.

Almost a year ago, 28th November 2010, I started a list of must-have OSX software, gather a lot of suggestions via Twitter, comments and email. I updated the post about two dozen times, mostly in December 2010. Its about time to make my own list, based on what I use consistently. Office Fluid as an […]

Validating email addresses is a very unthankful business. Whatever you do, you’re doing it wrong. If you follow the spec, users complain about false positives, if you don’t, they’ll complain about false negatives. And you can’t even blame them – in most contexts, “[email protected]” is not a valid address, according to the standard it is […]

You prolly heard of Brook’s Law before: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later While that is, in Brook’s words, an “outrageous oversimplification”, it captures a lot value. And as with most things, taking a step back by generalzing it, yields some interesting results. Consider the recommendation (see for example slide 46 […]

My .bash_profile, sourcing git-completion.bash to get autocomplete for git itself and git-flow-completion.bash to get autocomplete for git-flow, along with two single character shortcuts for the most common shortcuts (s for `git status`, d for `git diff`). And my .gitconfig, among regular config and customizing colored output also defining a bunch of aliases: [gist id=1287185] (If […]

An update for the jQuery validation plugin is available. Most notable is heavily improved compability with HTML5 controls: You can apply validation rules to input types like number, email or url, it’ll get picked up by the plugin if the type matches a rule, and a required attribute (with the argument) also works with both jQuery 1.6+ […]

This post is meant to gather articles or other links on the topic of software patents. If you have something to add, let me know! To start with, Dilbert takes the opportunity to make fun of ’em today. Next up, Martin Fowler on software patents, but starting of with some background on where patents originally […]

An update for the jQuery validation plugin is available. This brings compability with jQuery 1.6.1, while staying backwards compatible with 1.3.2, 1.4.2, 1.4.4 and 1.5.2. The bug was related to the plugin’s usage of the form.elements property, which jQuery 1.6 doesn’t support anymore. Other then that, there is a bug fix for adding and removing […]

An update for the jQuery validation plugin is available. This brings compability with jQuery 1.5.1, while staying backwards compatible with 1.3.2, 1.4.2, 1.4.4 and 1.5.0. A bug related to remove validation with client-side formatted messages was fixed, along with improvements to localizations and four new ones, resulting in a total of 34 localizations. This release […]

If you think about hard- and software in terms of wasted potential, instead of just bad design, you can start seeing a lot of potential everywhere. I had that moment today when thinking about my so called smartphone and what it does in terms of phonecalls. Its really not that much. There’s a list of […]

There’s this modern myth about our attention span being really short, damaged by mobile phones and the internet. Usually these arguments are based on anecdotal-evidence, without any attempt at refuting them. So when I found this nugget in Donald A. Norman’s book Emotional Design, I had to share it: Today it is customary to argue […]

This is a list of OSX software I gathered mostly via Twitter, asking for “must-have software”. Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions and recommendations! I haven’t yet tested any of these myself, so consider all recommendations here as “supposed to be great, your mileage may vary”. To start, a loose collection without a specific category […]

Back in September at jsconf.eu 2010 Nikolai Onken and me presented Robotic JavaScript. Here’s the video of the show:

I’ve got three drafts that I hope to eventually publish here, though unless I make some progress in December, likely not this year. And now that I’m completely hooked to Twitter, if you are somewhat interested in my geeky activities, follow me on Twitter. In terms of programming activies, my GitHub profile gives a good […]

In the Tarantino Mashups post I featured the Tarantino vs Coen Brothers video from Leandro Copperfield. Leandro did another Mashup, this time involving movies from Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorcese, overall over 30 movies cut together. Kubrick vs Scorsese from Leandro Copperfield on Vimeo. Made me want to watch all those movies I haven’t seen, […]

That’s what I wondered about when I got an email containing this bit: I took four years of german in university and I think the knowledge has always made me a better programmer. So, among my reply, I asked the guy to explain that, and later for permission to reproduce his reply here: I spent […]

Am 13. Juli findet das erste offizielle Treffen der CgnJS statt, einer Gruppe JavaScript Begeisterter aus Köln und Umgebung. An diesem Abend wird es zwei Vorträge geben: Jens Arps mit ‘JS auf mobile devices’ und ich halte ‘Developing web applications with jQuery UI’. Vorher und nachher gibt es viel Möglichkeit zum Kennenlernen und Austausch rund […]

GitHub with their web interface makes it really easy to fork a project, but it leaves you alone when it comes to updating your fork with the changes in the original repository. Its actually really easy with a few steps: git remote add original git://url-to-original-repo This adds another remote repository. You can use git remote […]

I’m finally deprecating the jQuery autocomplete plugin, about four years after its creation (which was actually a merge of two forks of another plugin). jQuery UI 1.8 was released in March, bundling the brand new Autocomplete widget and a worthy successor of my standalone plugin. The API is way more simpler while much more capable, […]

The Emperor’s Old Clothes is the title of a lecture by Charles Antony Richard (C. A. R.) Hoare, published by Communications of the ACM in 1981. A not well-readable PDF version of the text (found via Simon Willison and Wikipedia) is available on archive.org. The lecture itself was delivered on Obtober 27, 1980. Here are […]

Over all the flash-must-die debates and if DHTML5 can replace Flash, I’m missing some pragmatism. What are the actual issues with Flash? Can those be solved? Here are the day-to-day issues that I’m experiencing as a user of Flash components: Captured keyboard input My biggest issue: When a Flash movie has focus, it swallows most […]

Auf 3dsupply.de werden derzeit Blogger mit einem kostenlosen T-Shirt bestochen, das man sich auch noch selbst aussuchen kann, wenn man den auf deren Seite verlinkt. Da ich den Shop mag und da schon öfter bestellt hab, mach ich da auch mal mit. Frei nach Frank Zappa: I’m only in it for the money! Not. Zum […]

Tarantino movies are great, the music in them is great, and mashing all the movies together is even better. Eclectic Method did that: Eclectic Method’s The Tarantino Mixtape on Vimeo (HD available only on their site) Their Tarantino Mixtape is not quite new, but has to be mentioned when looking at this Tarantino plus Cohen […]

Now that jQuery UI is on Github, I need to learn how to branch and merge with Git – and not just local branches, but also pushing branches to Git so that others can work on them. The chapter on branching from Pro Git is a good start for learning branching in Git. And the […]

An update for the jQuery validation plugin is available. Most important: Its now fully compatible with jQuery 1.4.2, and still fully compatible with jQuery 1.3.2. I didn’t test with 1.2.6, but it should work, too. There are four new localizations: Lithuanian, Greek, Latvian and Hebrew. The Spanish localization got a few improvements (I fully trust […]

There is a setting in the log4j framework that allows you to log the exact location of where the logger was invoked (I’d provide a link to the related documentation, but I can’t find it; the lo4j site is a horrible mess). I always wondered how that works, here’s how: public class Invoker { public […]

I’m thinking about rebooting this blog: Create a new .com site with my jQuery stuff and posting about technical/programming stuff there, while relaunching this site into a german blog, posting about non-technical stuff, music, politics… If you read this, please let me know what you think: leave a comment, or send me a mail at […]

Hier sind drei Artikel auf zeit.de, ich die allesamt sehe empfehlen kann. Zum einen ein Streitgespräch mit Günter Wallraff, zu dessen Buch Aus der schönen neuen Welt (ebenfalls sehr empfehlenswert) und den zugehörigen Film, Schwarz auf Weiss. Auch die am Ende erwähnte Titanic-Satire dazu lesen! Dann wäre da ein Artikel zur Sozialdebatte, auch wenn in […]

The auto-update to 2.9 didn’t went that well, seems like WordPress is choking on my wp-content folder. At least I managed to restore it to the default theme. That’ll have to do until I manage to reproduce and fix the error locally.

I needed to add a script tag in every file that included jquery.ui.core.js, directly after that that existing element, with the same indentation. This is what worked quite nicely for me: Search for: (\s+)<script type=”text/javascript” src=”(.+)/ui/jquery.ui.core.js”></script> Replace with: $1<script type=”text/javascript” src=”$2/ui/jquery.ui.core.js”></script>$1<script type=”text/javascript” src=”$2/ui/jquery.ui.widget.js”></script> It groups the whitespace in front of the script element as well […]

Update update: Files are now availble via Microsoft’s AJAX CDN. An update for the jQuery validation plugin is available. There are five new localizations (now at 26 in total), including Arabic and Farsi (both right-to-left). Validation of selects is now more interactive, click events are properly handled to provide quicker feedback (also a bug related […]

Another fragment that turned out to be useless for the project, but may come handy in the future. A port to JavaScript should be easy enough, too: import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; public class CommandStack { /** * Implement for each individual change that can occur in an editor. * * Both {@link #execute()} and {@link […]

This is for the archive and due to lack of useful tutorials on writing custom search pages in your own Eclipse plugin. It turned out that the default text search is good enough for my purposes, so I’ll stick it here as a future reference. To start, your Eclipse plugin needs to add org.eclipse.search as […]

Crawling some old backups, I found this: Can you guess what it is? Well, along other files, there’s also a readme: Author:    [BIA]_Enchos (TNT) Email:  [email protected] HE DOENER ———————- Built to replace the HE grenade in Counter-Strike Halflife. ———————- This pack Include: — New Hud Sprites All new models, v_, p_, and w_ Completly new […]

If you’re working an open-source projects, these days you can barely get around Git and GitHub. Actually getting started, especially on Windows, isn’t trivial. In my case I had some projects I need to transfer from a Google Code subversion repository to a new repository at GitHub. Actually getting started with GitHub needs to wait […]

A few weeks ago I mentioned a current music favorite, The Dillinger Escape Plan. Today I’ve got another one I’d like to share: Demon Hunter. While a bit more straight-foward in terms of instruments, vocals are again a great mix between melodic-catchy and slightly over-the-top. See for yourself, from the Storm The Gates Of Hell […]

Early this month, Street Fighter 4 was released for PC. As long as you have a gamepad at hand, its a great game: easy to get started, and very hard to master. If you’re into mastering, this site with tips and strategies may be useful. To play online, challenging other players, or your friends, you […]

Two songs from my current favorite album, Ire Works by The Dillinger Escape Plan. Enjoy! [youtube MqXVBeEuwLU] 03. Black Bubblegum [youtube xMEYLlDThZU] 09. Milk Lizard

I’m happy to announce the first release of the Message jQuery plugin. The plugin allows you to easily display feedback messages as an unobstrusive overlay. The message fades away automatically after some time, avoiding the need to click an “ok” button or something similar. The user can speed up hiding of the message by moving […]

An update for the jQuery validation plugin is available. Among various bugfixes there are two new localizations (Taiwan and Kazakhstan), an enhancement to $.validator.addMethod that allows you to specify (localized) messages first, the actual method later; the submitHandler-option now keeps a submit-button “alive”, that is, won’t get lost when using the option. Probably most notable: […]

Fresh from the jQuery UI Lab comes the Photoviewer widget. As described on its planning wiki page: An alternative to Lightbox and its various clones, with the sole purpose of displaying images: One or more thumbnails point at the full resolution image, and instead of displaying that image on a new page, its displayed, above […]

I’m happy to announce the first release of the Prettydate jQuery plugin. The plugin is based on the plugin originally written by John Resig and provides clientside date formatting in the style of Twitter’s timeline: “just now”, “5 minutes ago”, “yesterday”, “2 weeks ago”. This release extends John’s original release, providing support for internationalization and […]

I’m happy to announce the first release of the Password Validation plugin, an extension for the jQuery Validation plugin. This plugin extends the jQuery validation plugin, providing two components: A function that rates passwords for factors like mixed upper/lower case, mix of characters (digits, special characters), length and similarity to a username (optional). A custom […]

This is a review of Learning jQuery 1.3, written by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, published by Packt. Packt sent me a copy of the book for review. Learning jQuery 1.3 is a rewrite of Learning jQuery, which was written by Jonathan and Karl, too, and where I was involved as a technical reviewer. At […]

The jQurey autocomplete plugin on this site is going to be part of jQuery UI. If you’re interested in contributing to that effort, here is an introduction with the most important resources. To start, take a look at the Planning Wiki Frontpage. There the autocomplete widget is listed with a high priority. That means that […]

Uncomfortably related: My favorite Uncomfortable plot summaries: BLADE RUNNER: Man with no apparent skill stumbles into escaped robots, fails to kill most, fucks one. KILL BILL: Irresponsible mother wants custody of her child. OCEAN’S ELEVEN: Gang of career criminals commit act of terror to facilitate robbery and romance. THE EXORCIST: Jesus trumps science. Danke Tomasz!

Three quotes from Anil Dash: I heard that everyone who tweeted about #amazonfail is racist! (Please RT, we can fact-check later.) via Twitter Clay Shirky gives some good background for that. If I call it “FUNsubscribe” instead of unsubscribe, maybe we can *both* delight that I’m no longer receiving your ceaseless flow of spam! via […]

Everyonce in a while someone pulls out the rhetorical hammer and calls something a “best practice”. In german I call this a Totschlagargument, the best translation I could find seems to be thought-terminating cliché. My favorite political example from that wikipedia page: “…or the terrorists win.” Anyway, whenever someone pulled best practices out of his […]

An update for the jQuery validation plugin is available. There is a small code fix, a new supported locale (slovak) and most notably, a new demo featuring integration with jQuery UI tabs and grouping selects. Fixed messages in additional-methods.js for maxWords, minWords, and rangeWords to include call to $.format Fixed value passed to methods to […]

There are a few projects on Google Code that I want to keep track of, specifically reviewing any commits. A feed works quite well for that, and Google Code provides them, but makes it hard to discover. Therefore, a small tutorial to get there. The basic URL is this: http://code.google.com/feeds/p/PROJECT/svnchanges/basic?path=BRANCH Highlighted are the parts that […]

The guide How to configure SSL on the Jetty wiki guides you through creating a self-signed certificate, required for developing and testing Java web applications that require SSL. The guide works fine, but causes a hard-to-debug side effect. By creating your own keystore, you exclude the default list of trusted certificates. This is a problem […]

Just added this to my project on the registration page, after reading the Developerworks article Cross-domain communications with JSONP: $(“#zipCode”).blur(function() { var city = $(“#city”); if (!city.val() && $(this).valid()) { $.getJSON(“http://www.geonames.org/postalCodeLookupJSON?&country=DE&callback=?”, {postalcode: this.value }, function(response) { if (!city.val() && response && response.postalcodes.length && response.postalcodes[0].placeName) { city.val(response.postalcodes[0].placeName); } }) } }); Upon blur of the zip […]

It’s difficult to maintain, separate concerns, have consistent development patterns, and provide re-usability of large jQuery applications with developers of mixed skill levels. from jQuery-dev Isn’t this always true for any large application, jQuery or not? There is certainly some interesting stuff to come, from better documentation on how to solve the problem with existing […]

Quiz: What is this code doing? int c = …; byte[] bytes = (new String(new char[] { (char) c })).getBytes(); Found in some project where for some reason a file upload didn’t quite come back as it should…

The Google LatLong blog has a post about their efforts on mapping our oceans, also explaining some of the problems related to that. Problems that Robert Ballard doesn’t get to explain on his appearance on the Colbert Report: Watch the interview, then continue with the LatLong post if you’re intrigued!

I’m currently working on a web application that uses the Apache Wicket web framework. While implementing a new feature related to file uploads, I stumbled about a problem that turned out to be a known issue. The bug was already fixed in Wicket’s trunk, though not yet released. The scheduled version for the release is […]

Let’s have a look in the crystal ball and predict how your future PC will look like in a few years. Your CPU has 16 cores, runs at 3 GHz and embeds 128 MB of memory. You’ve packed 32 GB of memory, which reaches peak transfer rates of 20GB/s. Integrated on your mainboard are 256 […]

jQuery 1.3 is out – head over to the jQuery blog release post for details. Happy third birthday, jQuery! If you plan to update, make sure to also update the validation plugin to 1.5.1, which provides compability with 1.3 as well as 1.2.6. Other changes include: Updated marketo demo to use invalidHandler option instead of […]

The Big Picture is a photo blog by Alan Taylor, hosted by the newspaper boston.com. The basic idea is the following: Provide a short summary of a current story, and tell it with anywhere between 15 and 45 photos, each with a short description and the source. Photos are 990px × 667px, which supposedly is […]

As a follow-up on the meaningless -oriented, here are a few Dilbert’s that really capture the essence of anemic managment BS talk: This one’s great, too: Remember: Use use instead of utilize, says William Strunk Jr. Maybe even better yet: Well, chopping the head of will certainly stop a management zombie: And while I’m at […]

Whats the problem with -oriented? David Ing wrote in Dude, Where’s My SOA?: ‘Oriented’ is a funny word. You can think and act however you like, design things with heartfelt principles and claim to be XYA-Oriented: It doesn’t mean you really are. I’ve seen a lot of object ‘oriented’ code that wouldn’t recognize encapsulation, I’ve […]

Cognitive Dissonance is currently my favorite example of a design principle based on psychology. The idea is that people adjust their attidude towards something in unrational ways, up to a certain incentive. Let’s let Dogbert explain: And this is from 1992! A great example is described in Universal Principles of Design: Perhaps the most successful […]

The act of measuring certain sensitive variables in a system can alter them, and confound the accuracy of the measurement. from Universal Principles of Design In other words: A more accurate measure has more influence on the measured system. Accuarcy and invasiveness have an inverse relationship. In even other words, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Heisenbergsche Unschärferelation) […]

To post a comment on this blog you now don’t need to provide anything apart from the actual comment. I hope to see a few more disucssions that way, as it makes it easier to quickly comment something. Of course, you’re still welcome to provide your name, email or URL! Update: FAIL.This didn’t have the […]

A new release of the validation plugin is done, now at version 1.5. Four more localizations were added: norwegian (no), italian (it), hungarian (hu), and romanian (ro), bringing the total number up to 16 localizations! A few new options are available as well: ignoreTitle is false by default, when set to true, all titles are […]

I love that Pyro stunt at around 2:40: [youtube Dn9970dxQ2g] I’m curious how long it’ll take till we see similar stuff based on Left 4 Dead. By the way, this is a good guide for playing l4d.

I just finished reading Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World by Bruce Schneier. The last few paragraphs are something I’d like to quote here, and recommend to get the book for yourself if you are inclined: Can you make your home absolutely safe? No; that’s the bad news. Can you do […]

Software is developed within constraints. Resources, mainly time and brainpower, are always limited. Given enough time, (mostly) everything can be solved, but as time is always limited, creativity is necessary to find ways to solve a given problem in the given time. Creativity requires a certain environment and condition. A lot of ideas come when […]

Windows, and I guess other OS’ as well, queue key events: Even when a window is currently loading, you can already press keys and watch the intended action once loading is done. That usually works when the loading is blocking. Unfortunately that rarely works for web applications. Since using GMail with mostly keyboard-only, I’m especially […]

I’ve created dedicated pages for my old Youtube-Wordpress-Plugin and a new one, Comment Validation. What does the Comment Validation plugin do? It adds client-side form validation to your comment form, helping commenters to fill out the form. It doesn’t get in the way, so if you fill out fields as usual you’ll never notice it. […]

Second attempt at some electronic music. I’m still learning the tools, let me know if you enjoy the music. Interpretation by bassistance

Another “shared items” entry by Scott, Photgraphic buildings: [Image: Photo by Filip Dujardin, courtesy of the artist]. I’ve recently seen interesting other stitching works, where an image is created by stitching together parts of one or multiple images, eg. by Thomas Bayrle. Haven’t yet found a good resource for his works online, only Google Images […]

Scott Trudeau wrote via his Google Reader shared items, as a note to a Ars Technica article about spam botnets: Spam response rates are something like 0.00001% so you have to send a LOT of spam to make money. The interesting part of that article: If you’ve ever despaired of teaching your friends/family/coworkers not to […]

My first attempt at some electronic music. Enjoy! 4dayweek by bassistance

As a follow up of my Why GPL? Or: How the GPL eats the kittens it protects post, I’d like to discuss a few comments and explain some misconceptions, my own included. The first comment was by Kevin H: I think the article is very well written. After seeing how apache projects end up in […]

The GNU Public License is the best known for its viral aspects. Among the prominent GPL licensed software is of course the Linux core and MySQL. Recent newcomers include the JavaScript framework ExtJS and the application server SpringSource Application Platform. The primary motivation for choosing a viral license like the GPL for people or companys […]

I’m starting to like the combination of Flickr for uploading and managing photos and the Tantan Flickr WordPress Plugin. Things are still somewhat rough, but already give a good impression of things to come. The sidebar displays a few random photos and this post contains some highlights from a recent birthday party. Next I need […]

This is a small update for the jQuery tooltip plugin. The support for image maps is back, the deprecated $.fn.Tooltip is gone (just use tooltip() instead), and two new features: A fade option, which takes the duration to fade in/out a tooltip in milliseconds. And the positionLeft-option, which configures the plugin to display the tooltip […]

A new release of the validation plugin is done, now at version 1.4. Along a few bug fixes, notable new features are custom messages specified via metadata and enabling an image button to cancel validation (just add class=”cancel”). New localizations are czech (cs) and dutch (nl). Also the deprecated methods minLength, maxLength, rangeLength, minValue, maxValue […]

The autocomplete plugin 1.0.1 is released! For anyone using 1.0 or below, an update is highly recommended, as this is a pure bugfix release. From the changelog: Fixed element creation (<ul> to <ul/> and <li> to </li>) Fixed ac_even class (was ac_event) Fixed bgiframe usage: now its really optional Removed the blur-on-return workaround, added a […]

The Bug Bash comic, Technology Inventions We’d Like To See, inspired me to implement the buzzword generator, and after a few minutes, it was done. A few more words would help, but I kept it to close to the reference for now. So I proudly present the Internet Buzzword Generator For those interested, it uses […]

HELMET So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb. Jeff Attwood quoted this from Spacesballs in his post on Designing for Evil. The link to a scrummy blackhat forum he provided is quite interesting, and after reading along, I found some comments worth quoting. I ended at a […]

Jeff Atwood’s latest post on PHP sucking hard, while powering a very decent amount of the internet, got my attention. Not so much by the content itself, but rather because I was thinking about PHP and Java web applications a lot lately anyway. This blog is powered by PHP and I write little PHP scripts […]

For anyone working with WordPress or who’d like to know about the recent changes on this site: I’ve WordPress updated to 2.5.1, which went quite well. I had to use the UTF-8 Database Converter plugin, as I was updating from a version previous to 2.2 which made UTF-8 the default. The plugin works very well […]

April Fools’ Day was a month and a half ago, and it took me that long to realize one particular joke as being a joke. How did that happen? I’ve started reading the Online Comic Darths and Droids sometime around March. Darths and Droids is another role-playing parody, not unlike The Order Of The Stick, […]

I’m posting code snippets in reply to questions on one of the jQuery mailing lists a few times daily. Rather annoying is the lack of support for indentation: I have to use spaces one-by-one to indent code. After posting about that on Twitter, Scott Gonzáles provided some good ideas and code (to access GMail’s iframes) […]

A new release of the validation plugin is done, now at version 1.3. This release adds five more localizations and fixes a few bugs, eg. “asdf” is not a valid creditcard number anymore. Major improvements went into validating a form without triggering UI feedback and batch adding and removing of rules. The complete list of […]

The first to respond in the comments can get Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 for free! Just let me know what you want to have (one of them or both) and I’ll contact you via email if you won. You need a Steam account to receive it.

I’ve started this autocomplete plugin in fall 2006, picking up the great work from Dylan Verheul, Dan G. Switzer and Anjesh Tuladhar. Dylan provided the initial implementation which got improved by Dan. Anjesh added support for completing multiple values within one field, similar to GMail’s to-field. I’ve merged these efforts, refactoring a lot of code, […]

The Java User Group Cologne event with Neil Gafter, which I mentioned in the post on closures, featured discussion about backwards compability. You can’t avoid that when talking about language evolution. During that discussion, Neil presented an interesting argument, which I remembered while reading a post from Bruce Eckel and which I’d like to present […]

People argue that verbose code is easier to understand. Do you agree when reading these two? public List<Item> bought(User user) { List<Item> result = new ArrayList(); for (Item item : currentItems) { if (user.bought(item)) { result.add(item); } } return result; } def bought(user: User): List[Item] = { items.filter(user bought _) } If you are familiar […]

A short timeline of my programming career: 03/2006: Started this blog, with the title being a combination of “bass”, and “assitance”, theme is built of photos from my Peavey Cirrus 03/2006: Finished my 2-year apprenticeship as “staatlich geprüfter Informatiker, Multimedia” (eg. computer science lite with focus on multimedia) 04/2006: Started my first job at TIMETOACT […]

Um überhaupt mal was zu posten: Ich mag die Mimik und Gestik!

The 1.2.1 release for the validation plugin is out! Among bugfixes related to remote validation and message display a few handy improvements landed: The delegate dependency is now bundled with the plugin (it was always required anyway), and the small part of the ajaxQueue plugin that was required for remote validation is now part of […]

Olé! Totgeglaubte leben länger. Nach langer Abstinenz ist nichtlustig.de wieder mit neuen Comics da, z.B. der hier: Jetzt auch mit RSS-Feed, sehr praktisch. Viel Spaß damit.

I’ve just released an update to the treeview plugin. One major improvement are completely overhauled themes, based on CSS sprites that require only two images. That makes customizing them much easier, while also improving performance – less file, less filesize. Also new are lazy-loaded trees, based on Ajax and JSON. From the changelog: Fixed tree […]

I’ve just released an update to the tooltip plugin. Its mostly a bugfix release with a few small improvements. I’ve also moved the documentation to the jQuery wiki and restructured the folder layout to fit other plugins. From the changelog: Improved bodyHandler option to accept HTML strings, DOM elements and jQuery objects as the return […]

I’ve recently posted about the 1.2 release of the validation plugin. The post contains an unordered list of changes from the last release, which is handy when coming from a previous release, but lacks the perspective of someone new to the plugin. Therefore this post will cover three areas where the plugin has been improved […]

Der bekannteste Beitrag von xkcd.com ist mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit dieser: I.d.R. ist damit auch klar, um was es geht und wer das Zielpublikum ist. Denn wer nicht weiß, was sudo ist, wird wahrscheinlich auch mit dem Rest von xkcd wenig anfangen können. Der offizielle Untertitel ist “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.”, hinzufügen […]

Its finally done, the 1.2 release of my validation plugin is out. Check the plugin page for links to the download, demos and documentation, which has been completely overhauled. From the changelog: Added AJAX-captcha validation example (based on http://psyrens.com/captcha/) Added remember-the-milk-demo (thanks RTM team for the permission!) Added marketo-demo (thanks Glen Lipka!) Added support for […]

Seen on commadotcom: I just watched this amazing video of this speaker at Ted. He uses animation and charting techniques to really communicate information better. I think this kind of software is just fantastic and has been designed with flair and genius. Take a look. Thanks a lot Glen for sharing! I’ve just watched it, […]

Ab 1. Januar 2008 kommt man in die Kölner Innenstadt bzw. die Umweltzone nur noch mit Plakette. Gestaffelt wird nach keine, rote, gelbe und grüne Plakette. Bei Benzinern gibt es entweder die grüne Plakette oder garkeine, abhängig ist das von der Schadstoffklasse des Fahrzeuges. Die Schadstoffklasse findet man im Fahrzeugschein, je nach Austellungsdatum gibt es […]

Aza Raskin’s keynote “Don’t make me click” on day three of the ajax experience revealed an interesting pattern, without actually mentioning it – therefore I label it The Return of the Command line. For a start, lets clarify what a command line is: from wikipedia: A command line interface or CLI is a method of […]

Wer hin und wieder bei amazon.de einkauft wird früher oder später wohl etwas zurückgeben wollen. Da es das nicht ganz so einfach wie das Bestellen ist, hier ein Erfahrungsbericht: Ich habe kürzlich bei amazon.de einen Kopfhörer bestellt und aufgrund Mißgefallens zurückgeschickt. Während des Einkaufs hatte ich einen 10 Euro Gutschein verwendet und den Rest via […]

I’m currently in New York City, in a hotel in Queens. There is another day left to explore Manhattan, my flight back is on Monday. I’ve taken a lot of notes, but haven’t found the necessary time to put them in a proper form, so I’ll write up the rest about Boston, the week in […]

At the welcome note, Ben and Dion showed their favorite YouTube videos, stuff like Darth Vader being a Smartass and Darth Vader Blues. I arrived that late that I missed that actual stuff they were talking about. Oh well… The first session that I attended was by Kevin Hoyt from Adobe about the Adobe Integrated […]

This was the first actual day of the AJAX experience, with welcome refreshments, keynotes, quite some interesting sessions, lunch and cocktail, and, dinner with about 14 people from the jQuery community. I met Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer, authors of the Learning jQuery book. I met and talked quite a lot with Richard Worth and […]

11:25 EST Just had my first continental breakfast, which was better then what I expected from what I’ve been told about it. Coffee, tee, juice for drinks, toast, donuts, bagles, and, a wafle maker! Someone was so pleasant to explain to me how that one worked, I must’ve made the impression of being quite lost […]

08:10 GMT+1 I’ve made it to my first station of my three-week trip to Boston, San Francisco and New York, the airport in Düsseldorf. Both check-in and security check were very relaxed, with no waiting line at all. I’m writing this while waiting for my flight to Amsterdam. There I’ll have another three hours of […]

Getting Validation 1.2. done takes much longer then I expected. To compensate for that, here is a bugfix release for the validation plugin, containing all fixes and improvements from the latest revision, compatible with both jQuery 1.1.x and jQuery 1.2.x. Plugin page(s): http://jquery.com/plugins/project/validate & http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/ Notable changes: Fixed invalid XHTML, preventing error label creation in […]

A few years ago I spent a lot of time download every Frank Zappa live video I could find in the depths of the internet, and later burned them on a DVD to store them – and forgot wher I put that. Anyway, I couldn’t get a complete version of the Dirty Love Tribute, played […]

Good news everyone! The treeview plugin version 1.3 is out, giving you an even better tool at hand to display and navigate your trees. Plugin page(s): http://jquery.com/plugins/project/treeview & http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-treeview/ Notable changes: Fixes for all outstanding bugs Added persistence features location based: click on a link in the treeview and reopen that link after the page […]

We don’t have enough time. Some may even say, they have no free time at all. In my experience, that is always a matter of priorities. If something has a high enough priority for you, you find free time to spend for it. If your top priority is your job and you keep spending ten […]

In der 9.2007 des Javamagazin erschien mein Einführungs-Artikel zum Thema jQuery. Feedback dazu habe ich bisher noch von niemand erhalten, den ich nicht sowieso schon kannte. Macht aber nichts, und vielleicht ändert sich das noch, da der Artikel jetzt auch online verfügbar ist. Der Artikel ansich ist derselbe, praktischerweise sind aber alle Verweise direkt als […]

Das hat mir erstmal den Tag gerettet, danke Alex! Sehet selbst: [youtube I2PzagXsD0Y] As Greg pointed out: Watch the bass fill! Thats the best part.

I’m happy to present you a new release of my Accordion menu plugin for jQuery. Thanks to some essential help from John Resig on animations, this may be the first release that is actually worth its code. And its the last release as a standalone plugin (stay tuned). If you are already using the plugin: […]

“Früher”, als ich mich noch mit 3D-Rendering und speziell mit High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) beschäftigt habe, bin ich mal über die ein oder andere SIGGRAPH-Seite gestolpert. Heute weiß ich immerhin, dass das eine Messe (oder Konferenz?) zum Thema Bildbearbeitung ist. Dort sind wohl auch die ersten Studien zum Thema HDRI präsentiert worden, das heutzutage […]

Wenn es einen Film gibt, der auch in der zweiten Reihe eines großen Kinos Spaß macht, dann Deathproof! Das aktuelle Werk Quentin Tarantinos, das hierzulande in einer leicht erweiterten Version gezeigt wird – statt dem double feature mit Planet Terror, auch wenn das noch kommen soll – erzählt von Stuntman Mike, dessen Auto nur für […]

From a discussion on artima.com about templating languages comes this unmodified quote, even out of context a good laugh: > Also, your objections against seperating logic from > presentation so far have been purely practical. ????!!!! Well…. as Steve Martin used to say… Excuuuuse meeeee. 🙂 Thanks Jonathan Revusky (one of the main authors of […]

While glancing over Dr. Dobb’s article Getting Started With jQuery I read this: Whether the motivation behind making their labors freely available is a matter of seeking recognition, resume building, free advertising for other services, bragging rights, or just plain old-fashioned altruism, we can gratefully take advantage of these tools. jQuery is one such tool. […]

In Anlehnung an “Es bockt!”, hier ein kurzer Schadensbericht zu meinem eigenen Verbocken. Das ich in letzter Zeit ein paar Probleme mit meinem eigenen PC hatte, hat der ein oder andere im engeren Umfeld ja mitgekommen. Angefangen hat es mit meinem Versuch, den Rechner leiser zu bekommen, durch entfernen drei alter HDDs und zweier CD-Laufwerke, […]

One day, your computer will be a big ass table! Eine amüsante Parodie auf “Microsoft Surface”: [youtube CZrr7AZ9nCY] Nichtsdestotrotz ist das Ding ansich immer noch interessant, nur wahrscheinlich erstmal noch viel unbezahlbarer als ein iPhone.

An update to the jQuery accordion plugin brings you, among minor bugfixes and a demo overhaul, one notable new feature: The navigation-option automatically activates a part of the accordion based on the current location (URL) of the page. The basic idea came up in the comments on the plugin page and was at first implemented […]

There is a good article about client-side form validation on the Interaction Design Blog. It describes important points to keep in mind when building your own framework for client-side validation. Of course the alternative to building your own framework is to use an existing one. This approach yields some important advantages, amonst them the “given […]

This update to the jQuery Tooltip plugin brings a few minor yet very useful features and some very important bug fixes. A full list of changes can be found in the changelog. Maybe more useful are improvements on the project structure. In addition to the started changelog, the plugin page now uses the same documenation […]

Äh, er bloggt! Die Rede ist hier von Gerrit: Bandkollege, Philo-Student in Bonn und Teilzeit-Geek. In den ersten beiden Beiträgen geht es um Jabber-Server-unter-Debian-aufsetzen und seinen neuen Diezel VH4 Shredder Amp, das dürfte wohl gut die grobe Richtung vorgeben. Ick freu mick so!

Ein paar Klassiker der Bullyparade sind doch immer noch unübertroffen. So z.B. “Der kleine Hitler”: [youtube tMh0dQYJKWg] Auch schön, und mir bis gerade noch völlig unbekannt: [youtube EJ1s-O_vOwY]

Dramatic chipmunk: [youtube a1Y73sPHKxw] Und aus dem Bereich “Best of Spam”: You and her will really math if your try Penis Und da ist dann nichtmal nen Link bei. Spam pur. Nachschlag: Evolution Of An Internet Sensation

Hooray! Version 1.1 of the validation plugin brings, along a few bufixes, sophisticated validation on blur, keyup and click events. They are designed to help the user where appropiate, without interrupting when he hadn’t even the chance to enter anything. Coming up in the next version: Ajax validation. Finally.

I’m now one of many frequent readers of Coding Horror, a blog by Jeff Attwood about “programming and human factors”. In a recent entry, “Escaping From Gilligan’s Island”, Jeff wrote about classic mistakes in software development processes. I felt inclined to comment on one of the comments: > The big difference between a beginning developer […]

Its out! A version of the jQuery validation plugin that I call 1.0 final. I hope to improve the versioning of the plugin from this point on. On my list of possible milestone targets are more sophisticated event-handling per-element, a lot of integration examples with other plugins and libraries like date- and timepicker, masked input […]

“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”[1] Danke David!

Do you want to possess the whole world? Try our Penis Enlarge Patch and you will be the master of the universe. Da ist die Kategorie “Kurz und gut” doch besonders passend.

See http://noteslog.com/category/chili/ One of the most interesting and useful jQuery plugins for a developer posting code snippets on the web is Chili. Chilli stands for “code highlighter”, is written and maintained by Andrea Ercolino and published under the MIT opensource license. To use the plugin, you need to include the plugin itself and all the […]

“Release early, release often”. I try. And here it is, the first release candidate of my validation plugin. A few more features where added, a heavy refactoring completed to remove all dependencies on IDs, the long-known Opera issue with select-elements is fixed and more. As always, all interesting stuff is on the plugin page, with […]

Ein wenig Junk kann einem doch echt den Tag retten. Danke an den gütigen Spender. [youtube 2McwVlKUYUA]

I’m glad to announce validation plugin beta 3. A lot of feedback from users went into this release, in the form of several bug fixes and new features. Thanks everyone who participated somehow! As usual, all interesting stuff like downloads, examples and documentation are on the plugin page. I’ve also updated the Plugins API browser […]

Ein wenig Action gefällig? Grandios choreografiert, mit Matrix-Mucke und Charakteren aus bekannten Videospielen (Halo, Metroid Prime) und einem schnulzigen Ende: [youtube K9sYixr2miY] Download in voller Auflösung (unter Game Media “Haloid – High Resolution” anklicken, im Popup gibt es einen “Save Download” Link) Danke Tobi für den Tipp!

Zwar schon vor ein paar Tagen auf der Liste gepostet, aber da wurde nicht ganz klar, das es sich bei dem einen Video um ein ganzes Konzert handelt. Ein ganzes Konzert! Wer also gestern nicht auf der Freakshow 2007 war (diesmal war garnicht die Rede davon, das es die letzte sein würde, ist das ein […]

Nachdem es hier zuletzt doch eher technisch zuging: Ein Jam mit Uwe und Gerrit. Olé. Aufgenommen am Anfang der Probe gestern Abend, noch in unserem “alten” Proberaum. Habens Spaß damit! [Gerri More – idee_070409.mp3 http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/gerrimore/idee_070409.mp3]

Mehrere Bekannte von mir sind auf bestem Wege, ihr Diplominformatikstudium abzuschließen. Sie müssen jetzt oder in einem Jahr nur noch ihre Diplomarbeit schreiben. Meine Frage, worüber sie denn schreiben wollen, oder sogar wo sie denn später sich bewerben wollen, konnte mir bisher keiner beantworten. Nun könnte es enorm helfen, die zweite Frage zu klären, um […]

Am 2. Oktover 1997 veröffentlichte David Siegel einen Artikel mit dem Namen The Web is Ruined and I Ruined it. Darin beschreibt er diverse Sünden der Webentwicklung, die auch heute noch viel zu häufig zu finden sind. Er gibt zu, selbst ein HTML Terrorist zu sein, und aufgrund der Popularität seiner Seite damit viele Nachahmer […]

Gestern wurde offiziell das Buch zu jQuery angekündigt, “Learning jQuery“. Autoren sind Karl Swedberg, schon länger mit im jQuery Team, ehemaliger Englischlehrer und Betreiber von learningjquery.com, und Jonathan Chaffer, der primär an Drupal arbeitet und einen mehr technischen Hintergrund hat. Das es gut wird, kann ich jetzt schon mit ziemlicher Sicherheit sagen, da ich mich […]

Wir haben heute die Kündigung für unseren schnuckeligen Proberaum in Marienheide bekommen, zum 01.07.2007. Dadrüber werden wohl in dem ohnehin insolvenzverwalteteten Gebäude Wohnungen gebaut, also müssen wir raus. Extrem ärgerlich. Derzeit sind auch keine Alternativen in Sicht, daher: Wir sind dankbar für jegliche Tipps für Proberäume in Gummersbacher Umgebung, da kommen immer noch die meisten […]

So wird auch die Arbeit mit schwerfälligen IBM-Tools und Servern erträglich: Desktop-Rechner für Entwicklung: Core2Duo 6600 (Dual Core 2,4GHz), 4GB Ram, 400GB HD, 2 Samsung TFTs a 1280*1024 Laptop für Mail/Chat/Browsing: Thinkpad T42p, 1600*1200 Jetzt bräuchte ich noch einen kvm-switch um nicht ständig Maus und Tastatur wechseln zu müssen, da gewöhnt man sich zwar auch […]

Es gibt ja noch ein paar zockenswerte Spiele, aber leider auch viel Murks. Ein paar Tipps meinerseits. Gothic 3 Technisch hat es Piranha Bytes es irgendwie total verbockt. Mag ja sein, das mein Rechner schlicht zu alt ist, aber das trotz 2GB RAM, Settingstüftellei und extrem niedriger Auflösung und Details immer noch mistig läuft, einen […]

The validation plugin beta 2 is out! If you are already working with it: A update is recommended. If not, and you need client-side validation (pure or mixed with AJAX requests), check it out. Recent changes: Improved dependecy feature by adding two custom expressions: “:blank” to select elements with an empty value and “:filled” to […]

Heute Gestern war für mehrere Stunden diese Seite fott, Besucher wurden mit einer schnöden default-Seite der Hostingsoftware begrüßt. Was genau schiefgelaufen war, ist mir noch nicht klar, aber es hing wohl damit zusammen, das die Domain “abgelaufen” war, und – warum auch immer – erst manuell verlängert werden musste. Andererseits bedeutet das: bassistance.de ist jetzt […]

jQuery 1.1.2 was released yesterday, hooray. This is a bug fix release. Version 1.1.3 will follow pretty soon, once testing on enhanced animations and event handling is done. I’ve updated my API browser for version 1.1.2. We backported the improvements made to the documentation from jQuery’s wiki, of course there weren’t any API changes that […]

I was thinking about how jQuery would look like when implemented in other languages: Is it possible to offer the same API jQuery currently provides in JavaScript? Is it easier, or more difficult? What are the differences? Since I’m most familiar with Java, I started to mock up some classes. I’m relying on some of […]

I’ve been listening to chronixradio.com a lot lately, mostly chroniX aggresion, while programming, helped to ignore the noise in the office around me. I found that radio a great source for new music. Last year I heard Nonpoint there for the first time, bought one of their albums, “Statement”, on amazon and didn’t listen to […]

Auf panopti.com präsentiert der Student Johannes Widmer seine Bachelor-Abschlussarbeit (Studiengang Digitial Media). Der Besucher bekommt auf sehr ansehnliche Weise verschiedene Informationen zum Thema Datenschutz präsentiert: Er schaut sich die Stationen aus einem Tag von Paul an, und erfährt, an welchen Stellen Paul Spuren hinterlässt, die von Unternehmen für Marktforschung oder von Behörden von Terrorismusbekämpfung genutzt […]

Gerade noch im IRC gesehen: does anyone knows http://www.flashearth.com/ ? Eine halbe Stunde später habe ich mich erstmal satt-ge-eartht… Nach der obligatorischen Eigenheim-Suche, in meinem Fall von Köln über die A4 nach Bergneustadt und wieder zurück, testete ich die verschiedenen Dienste durch, neben Google Maps bietet flashearth.com auch Material von Microsoft, ask.com, Yahoo, OpenLayers und […]

Fragte Frank Zappa: Absofuckinglutely, würde Ben Folds vielleicht antworten. Gestern erlebte ich mein erstes Ben Folds Konzert in der vollen Live Music Hall in Köln. Im groben deckt sich der Verlauf mit Udo’s Beschreibung. Clem Snide konnte ich ebenfalls nicht viel abgewinnen. Währenddessen unterhielt ich mich mit einem ehemaligen Kollegen: Dieser hatte Clem Snide bereits […]

For anyone using the Accordion menu plugin, or looking for it: Version 1.1 is out! This includes all bug fixes since the first release, update to jQuery 1.1, and an overhaul of the plugin page, including documentation. A zip archive with both uncompressed and compressed files is ready for download, or you can check it […]

Update: The API Browser now supports external search requests, just add a “q” query paramter to the URL, eg. to searach for “ajax” you’d add “?q=ajax”. Very handy as a Firefox search extension. According to the feedback I got via IRC and jQuery’s mailing list, there are several people using my API browser (so far […]

Auf einmal ging es doch alles sehr schnell. Geendet hat es mit einer Abschiedstour durch die Büros: “Hallo, ich hab gekündigt und einen Aufhebungsvertrag unterschrieben, hab insofern hier quasi meine letzten Minuten und wollte mich noch verabschieden. Ich fang nächste Woche Donnerstag bei einer anderen Firma in Köln an, Hermann wird nachher beim EKM bestimmt […]

I’d like to announce the release of my Treeview plugin for jQuery, which is based on the work of Myles Angell. It allows you to take nested unordered lists and convert them into a collapsable and expandable tree. It provides options to animate toggling, display the tree collapsed at first, select certain branches to start […]

Mein Langzeitfavorit der Online Comics ist eindeutig userfriendly.org. Ich kenn sonst keins, das wirktlich täglich erscheint und fast immer den Nerv der Zeit und den des gemeinen Geeks trifft. Da die erste Folge bereits am 17. November 1997 erschien, benötigt man durchaus einige Monate, um alle Folgen durchzuarbeiten. Empfehlenswert ist dafür die Archiv-Ansicht, da zum […]

A very common yet annoying task in daily webdeveloping is to clear the text displayed in a search field, when the field is focused. And even better, the text should be restored when the user leaves the input field empty. The naive approach uses inline onblur and onclick javascript, or maybe at least onblur and […]

A week after jQuery’s one year birthday and the 1.1 release, version 1.1.1 was released. While 1.1 contained a few (new) bugs, these are now fixed, and an update is highly recommended. jQuery 1.1 provides some important new features, simplifies the API a lot and it’s selectors are way faster. Instead of just listing the […]

Today jQuery 1.1b was released. It fixes all the bugs that were found in 1.1a and to prepare for the 1.1 final release. If you find any bugs, and please consider everything that doesn’t work after upgrading a bug, report them. Together with 1.1b, the compability plugin was released. If 1.1 breaks any of your […]

Heraus kommt iPhone. Ausgestattet mit einem 3,5 Zoll Touchscreen verzichtet es komplett auf eine herkömmliche Tastatur. Dank 2-Megapixel-Kamera und WLAN-Empfänger verbindet es iPod, Telefon und mobilen Browser in einem Gerät. Bedienkonzepte, die bisher nur aus experimentellen Projekten bekannt wurden, finden hier Anwendung: So lassen sich z.B. Fotos vergrößeren, indem man mit einem Finger irgendwo das […]

…for something completely different: After my first failed attempt (I was about *cough* 24 hours too late at the test site), I managed to succesfully complete the test for the “Sun Certified Java Programmer”. And 91% aren’t too bad, considering a passing score of 59%. Now if only I could find a job were I […]

jQuery 1.1a was released a few hours ago and is ready for public testing. Apart from lots of bugfixes, major speed improvments, a heavy API cleanup and several new features (to be detailed in the next days), you get a nice mediawiki based documentation. If you’ve got any questions, visit IRC (freenode.net #jquery)

Take a look at this code snippets: String.prototype.trim = function(){ return this.replace(/(^\\s+|\\s+$)/g, “”); }; It provides a very powerful method, it can often be useful when working with Strings, eg. when formatting text from form inputs. Adding it as String method via the String.prototype makes the usage easier then a class global function. Instead of […]

You started with a simple HTML form, maybe for registering new users. Now someone asked you to put all kinds of other stuff on that page, and you don’t want the user to reload all that when the form is submitted. But you also don’t want to gather all the input fields, serialize and send […]

A common problem when developing web applications is to provide some data from your server-side to client-side scripts. Consider a client-side form validation: You don’t want to generate tons of inline scripts and you don’t want to dynamically generate your javascript files. So you need a way to provide and read metadata from the HTML […]

As soon as you start writing your own jQuery plugins, which is highly recommend to organise and reuse your code, you should check out the official jQuery plugin authoring guide. It has evolved quite a lot since it’s creation and documents several patterns found in jQuery plugins by a lot of different authors. It may […]

Bei der aktuellen Version 0.28 von GlovePIE wird direkt ein ganzer Stapel an Wiimote-spezifischen Scripts mitgeliefert. Mit dabei waren zwei Scripts um Winamp zu steuern, die allerdings beide nicht gerade sehr nützlich waren. Nach etwas Rumprobiererei kam dann diese recht praktische Script bei raus: // Wiinamp // Volume Down (D-pad up) // Volume Up (D-pad […]

Some news about the jQuery project and related stuff: jQuery 1.0.4 was released on 12th Dezember, featuring tons of bug fixes and several improvements to API documentation in general and with focus on the AJAX module. Details can be found in John’s release entry. If you are wondering about the jQuery team, John has also […]

Beeindruckender Stop-motion Film mit dem Titel “Tony vs. Paul”. Unbedingt anschauen! [youtube AJzU3NjDikY]

*snip* (asmodai) Danke [joern] Bitte (Getty) Aufhoeren (asmodai) That’s so wrong to read as a Dutch person (asmodai) when hoer/hoeren means hooker(s) Update Aus demselben Channel: [02:31:45] (f’toggg) you’re american? [02:31:56] (f’Shocker) yes [02:32:09] (f’toggg) US? [02:32:16] (f’Shocker) yes [02:32:41] (f’toggg) which part you are? [02:33:00] (f’Shocker) USA PS: “toggg” ist Franzose 🙂

Nachdem es nun so einfach ist, die Wiimote am PC zu nutzen, ist natürlich die Frage offen, für was man sie denn sinnvoll einsetzen kann. Auf der GlovePIE-Seite findet sich unter anderem ein Script für “Zelda: Ocarina of Time”. Mit einem N64-Emulator wie Project64 kann man dann das N64-Zelda am PC mit der Wiimote steuern […]

Nachdem Tomasz mich gestern auf gewisse Videos aufmerksam machte, in denen jemand z.B. Half-Life 2 per Wiimiote steuerte, konnte ich es nicht lassen, und hab mir heute erstmal eine Wiimote mit Bluetoothempfänger gekauft. Eine Wii will ich irgendwann auch noch kaufen, da fehlt mir aber noch eine akzeptable Lösung um die Wii direkt an meinen […]

Wer sich mit Informatik beschäftigt und/oder dafür interessiert, sollte unbedingt einen Blick auf den Artikel “Revenge of the Nerds” von Paul Graham werfen. Ein Satz, der mir in letzter Zeit auch des öfteren begegnet ist, findet sich auch: Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe this approach is “industry best practice.” Its purpose is […]

There were quite a few requests to fix a certain issue with the Tooltip plugin. Whenever the tooltip was displayed at the bottom or right of the screen, it moved outside the viewport and caused scrollbars to appear. This is now fixed: The tooltip checks it’s position and moves itself more to the top or […]

John Resig released a screencast about an “Expandable Sidebar Menu”[0], in other words: An accordion menu. While his screencast is a great demonstration and tutorial for everyone beginning with jQuery, the menu itself is somewhat limited. If you are looking for a more flexible implementation, you got to just the right place. The original implementation […]

“Ryan” ist ein etwa 13 Minuten langer Kurzfilm über Ryan Larkin: “Oscar-winning animated documentary about the influential Canadian animator Ryan Larkin. Incredible CGI.” Extrem empfehlenswert für jeden der etwas für Comics, Cartoons oder andere Formen der Animation übrig hat. Part 1 [youtube 0ASA81hjIAU] Part 2 [youtube gtEjlD4aXbY]

Nach langer Trockenphase hab ich nochmal eine Aufnahme von “Gerri More” (Gerrit, Uwe et moi) anzubieten. Nachdem wir gestern den Abend im Proberaum damit verbracht, mit Hilfe der geliehenen Remaining-PA etwas aufzunehmen, haben wir am Ende noch zwei Jams aufgenommen. Die erste Aufnahme ist leider im digitalen Nirvana verraucht, daher blieb nur die zweite übrig. […]

Just seen: Impress your girlfriend with jQuery. Funny 🙂

I started working on a new stylesheet for the jQuery API documentation. Both the current and it’s alternative, Visual jQuery, have some serious limitations. My draft tries to handle the biggest problem: An easy-to-use navigation. Both alphabetical and categorized listings are to be displayed as nested (for categories) and expandalbe trees. So far the listing […]

Small, easy to use and maybe just what you are looking for: This jQuery plugin provides you with customizable tooltips. Documentation, examples and download links are all on their own page. As soon as the jQuery SVN repository is available again, I’ll commit the source, so anyone can improve the implementation if he likes. Comments […]

Freitag, 3. November, nach 23:00 Uhr: Nach einem Olé-Bier mit den Arbeitskollegen, CD-Kauf im 2001 und dem monatlichen Treffen der rheinländischen Progger bin ich wieder in meiner Wohnung und stell den Handy-Wecker für morgen früh. Für 10:30 Uhr ist der Test zum Sun Certified Java Programmer angesetzt, irgendwo in Düsseldorf. Über die A3 ist das […]

Auf spiegel.de wurde heute ein Artikel zum Film “Borat – Kulturelle Lernung von Amerika um Benefiz für glorreiche Nation von Kasachstan zu machen” veröffentlicht. Innerhalb des Artikels kommen drei kasachstanische Studenten aus Hamburg zu Wort, die die Verunglimpfung ihrer geschätzen Heimat kritiesieren. Dass sich jemand nach “Borat” mal fragt, wie Kasachstan in Wirklichkeit ist, glaubt […]

Da ich auf einer gewissen englischsprachigen Mailingliste inzwischen immer bassistance.de in meine Signatur packe, gibt es hier den ersten englischen Eintrag. While IE7 now supports position: fixed, there is still the need to solve that for IE6 and below. The footer on this page is now positioned with the following CSS styles: position: fixed; bottom: […]

Da der Lärm des Laminatsverlegen von den Nachbarn sicherlich nicht begrüßt würde (wie auch Arbeiten mit dem Schlagbohrer), hab ich heute die Zeit genutzt und auch mal die Seite ein wenig überarbeitet. Der doch eher überflüssige Kalender musste gehen, die “fancy tooltips” wurden durch ein jQuery-Äquivalent ersetzt, an dem ich allerdings erstmal selbst feilen musste. […]

Nachdem ich die letzte Woche immerhin schon drei Nächte in meiner eigenen Wohnung verbracht hab, teilweise sogar schlafend, ist langsam ein Ende der Renovierungsarbeiten in Sicht. Eine Genehmigung zum Laminatverlegen hab ich jetzt. Das allerdings wohl auch nur, weil ich im Erdgeschoss wohne, die Nachbarin über mir durfte keine Laminat verlegen. Mit dem Verlegen will […]

Eine gewisse Zeit lang hatte ich Gelegenheit, zu Hause Schlagzeug zu spielen. Dabei ist auch “Morphologie” entstanden, das sich allerdings auf folgendenen Schnippsel beschränkt: [Morphologie-sample http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/morphologie.mp3] Gitarre, Bass und Schlagzeug sind jeweils von mir selbst eingespielt. Vielleicht wird daraus irgendwann mal ein richtiger Songs…

Nachdem ich mehr als ein halbes Jahr jeden Tag nach Köln gependelt bin, habe ich jetzt endlich eine Wohnung gefunden. Knapp 60m² in Köln Buchforst, im Erdgeschoss mit zwei Zimmern und einer Wohnküche. Vom Oberbergischen aus gut mit dem Auto erreichbar, und per S-Bahn (Linien S6 und S11) bin ich flott in der Innenstadt und […]

s. heise online – Google kauft Online-Video-Seite YouTube Für beeindruckende 1,65 Milliaraden US-Dollar hat Google YouTube gekauft. Soweit wurden keine Änderungen an der Plattform oder der Marke angekündigt, die 67 Mitarbeiter sollen auch weiterhin beschäftigt werden. Mit den US-Marktanteilen von YouTube (46%) und Google Video (23%) kommt Google auf einen Anteil von 69% und beherrscht […]

Purple And Brown kennt ja mittlerweile schon der ein oder andere, zuerst hab ich es beim Thomas gesehen. Die Halloween-Folge ist aber noch neu und mal richtig kaputt: [youtube UD7lcHAmt2g]

One of the main perveyors of the Bass GuWenn bei YouTube etwas mehr nach Stanley Clarke sucht, trifft man irgendwann auf Larray Graham, mit dem Stanley unter anderem 1985 bei “Live under the sky” gespielt hat. Bei YouTube gibts eine lehrreiche Reihe mit Videos in den Larry basst und singt, von einem Drummer “begleitet”. Die […]

Nicht das ich nicht schonmal versucht hätte, das nachzuspielen… Aber live zu sehen, das da einfach “noch ein Bassist” spielt, ist schon interessant. Auf jeden Fall eine grandiose Live-Version: Hier zimmert nicht ein genialer Bassist seine Solos runter, sondern spielt mit einer tollen Band zusammen. Sehr empfehlenswert. [youtube zxpopvlZJmQ]

Analog zum WordPress-Youtube-Plugin hab ich ein Google-Video-Plugin zusammengeschraubt. Der Code selbst und die Verwendung sind fast identisch und ebenso einfach. Auch hier gilt: Runterladen, unter wp-content/plugins entpacken, in WordPress unter Plugins aktivieren und hiermit (ohne Anführungszeichen) einbinden: [“google” id] Bei Google-Video ist die ID, die ihr hier benötigt, als docid-Parameter angegeben, bei folgendem Link fett […]

[youtube YcMT395UvWI] Vorsicht, unlustig.

s. Visual jQuery Magazine Die erste Ausgabe des “Visual jQuery Magzine”, ein Online-Magazin im PDF-Format, von, über und mit jQuery, ist heute erschienen. Eine lesenswerte Mischung aus Interviews, Tutorials, Plugin Parade und anderem.

Gesehen auf evolutionNext WebLog. Muss ja mal was für den “Geeks”-Teil des neuen Untertitels tun.

Update: This guide is now available as part of the offical jQuery documentation Ce guide est aussi disponible en version français Wer beim Webdesign Javascript einsetzen möchte, sollte sich unbedingt jQuery anschauen. jQuery ist eine sehr schlanke und gut dokumentierte Bibliothek, die sich von vergleichbaren Produkten primär durch eine spezielle Syntax absetzt. Für einen gute […]

Das heute vorzustellende Online Comic schimpft sich “The Order of the Stick”, kurz OOTS. Hier wird die Geschichte einer Pen&Paper Rollenspielgruppe erzählt, die vor allem all die Ulkigkeiten des (A)D&D-Regelwerks parodiert. Die Charaktere sprechen sowohl für sich selbst als auch für ihre Spieler, so dass gern mal der Waldläufer-Halbing Belkar “Wild empathy check! WILD EMPATHY […]

Da kommt also jemand auf die Idee, aus diversen Aufnahmen von Reden des Herrn Bush, im Moment Präsident der USA, einen kompletten Song zusammenzuschneiden. Die Vorlage von “Sunday Bloody Sunday” stammt wohl von U2. Sollte man mal gesehen haben: [google 6805063692754011230] Nachtrag – Sowas ähnliches gibts nochmal, diesmal aber als Beatbox mit Cheney als DJ: […]

Der neue Untertitel “Bass, Geeks and Rock’n’Roll” soll wiederspiegeln, was sich hier demnächst hoffentlich tun wird. Neben dem Thema TeX, zu dem ich noch Weiteres schreiben möchte, soll es hier dann auch bald mehrere Einträge zu jQuery geben. Stay tuned!

Zutaten: Eclipse, z.B. “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers” MiKTeX-Distribution TeX-Plugin Foxit PDF-Reader Zubereitung: Eclipse runterladen und entpacken MiKTeX-Setup runterladen und zweimal ausführen TeX-Plugin per Update-Manager installieren Projekt erstellen und PDF-Reader verknüpfen Fertig! Zuviel zur Kurzfassung, jetzt das ganze noch im Detail: Wer TeX noch nicht kennt, dem sei der TeX Wikipedia Artikel empfohlen. Sobald dieses […]

Bild ich mir das nur ein oder hört man auf dem aktuellen Tool-Album “10.000 Days” beim letzten Track tatsächlich “Bassistance” raus? Das “ance” erfordert zugegebenermaßen viel Fantasie, so verzehrt wie es ist. Der Anfang ist aber schon recht eindeutig: [TOOL Easteregg http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/Easteregg-TOOL-Bassistance.mp3] Damit man es etwas besser hört, den Ausschnitt nochmal in doppelter Geschwindigkeit: [TOOL […]

Generator gefunden auf Agenturblog. Vor allem das “BETA”-Icon ist Klasse.

Ende Juli dieses Jahres fand im akw! in Würzburg das jährliche Freakshow Artrock-Festival statt. Andere haben darüber schon berichtet, unter anderem Udo in einem ausführlichen Beitrag[1]. Mein persönliches Highlight war dort die Band Panzerballett[2]. In der Progshow gab es eine Woche zuvor bereits einen Track zu hören, der definitiv Lust auf mehr machte. Die Begeisterung […]

In ein paar Tagen ist es bereits soweit: Im AKW in Würzburg findet am 29. und 30. Juli die diesjährige Freakshow statt. Neben tollen Bands abseits vom Prog-Mainstream trifft man dort auch wieder auf einen großen Teil der [progrock-dt]. Zur selbigen gehören auch diverse Rezensenten der Babyblauen Seiten. Aus dem Archiv von Charly und anderen […]

Ich hatte ja schon das ein oder andere von Victor Wooten gehört und gesehen und auch mal ein Interview mit ihm im Bass Professor gelesen, aber das Video hier zeigt doch wesentlich besser, was für ein genialer Bassist Victor doch ist. Allein der Sound … *sabber* Sehr cool auch das Ende, ein Flageolet, darüber nen […]

Der Reiz einer Serie liegt meist bei der Identifikation mit deren Charakteren. Sei es die Simpsons oder Futurama, über die ich mich stundenlang begeistern könnte, vor allem Dr. ‘Horray! Someone pays me attention \o/’ Zoidberg. Sei es Babylon 5 oder ’24’, bei denen zwar die durchgehende Story wesentlich mehr Gewicht hat, aber trotzdem immer noch […]

Man nehme: frische (Baguette-)Brötchen vom Bäcker Bockwurst (Glas oder Dose) Tomatenketchup Mayonaise Hamburger-Sauce geröstete Zwiebeln Bei einem “normalen” Brötchen passen auch locker zwei Würstchen rein, bei Baguettebrötchen sollte eins reichen. In einem Topf Wasser zum Kochen bringen, dann den Topf von der Platte nehmen und die Würstchen acht bis zehn Minuten ziehen lassen. Auf die […]

Unter dem Namen “Heavy Rain” soll irgendwann 2008 ein Computerspiel erscheinen. Auf der diesjährigen E3 gab es dazu eine sehr beeindruckende Technikdemo. Gezeigt wird dort ein virtuelles Casting. Die Ansätze von realistischer Mimik, die es zuletzt z.B. in Half-Life 2 oder Oblivion zu sehen gab, werden hier auf ein beeindruckendes Niveau gehoben. Mittlerweile gibt es […]

Nach Bastelei an “Song2” jammten Uwe, Gerrit und ich letzten Sonntag noch ein wenig, heraus kam dabei folgendes: [Funkattack http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/gerrimore/funkattack_060611.mp3]

Letzten Samstag war es soweit: Der erste Zusammentreffen der neuen Elefanten-Koalition mit Alex an der Gitarre. Einen ersten Eindruck gibts in Form von zwei Auschnitten. Von vier Tracks haben Teile des zweiten und dritten überlebt, aber höret selbst: [track2 http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/dgde/DieGesellschaftDesElefanten-06-06-10-track2.mp3] [track3 http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/dgde/DieGesellschaftDesElefanten-06-06-10-track3.mp3] Tomasz schlich sich noch kurz vor Schluss rein und filmte uns kurz. Hubba!

Zum Konzert von Trigon und La Maschera Di Cera am 04.06.2006 im Spirit of 66 in Verviers reiste ich in einem angeschlagenen Opel Corsa mit Marcus (berichtete bereits) und Tomasz nach Aachen. Bei einem kurzen Zwischenstopp sammelten wir noch Sal (hat auch schon geblogt) in Köln ein, um dann kurz vorm Ziel fast liegen zu […]

Am 03.06.2006 feierte ich meinen 22. Geburtstag. Die ersten zwei Einladungen gingen bereits zwei Wochen vorher raus (und wurden dann auch prompt wieder vergessen), die letzte zwei Stunden vorher… Wenn ich mich nicht verzählt hab, waren insgesamt 17 Leute da, davon bis zu 16 gleichzeitig. Völlig unabhängig von irgendwelchen Zahlen war es ein sehr schöner […]

Nachdem Tomasz ja bereits erklärt hat, sich von der Fußball-WM möglichst fernzuhalten, nutze ich die Gelegenheit, um auf ein interessantes Internet-Angebot hinzuweisen: In einer Art Video-Blog namens Ehrensenf berichtet die Technikjournalismus-Studentin Katrin humorvoll über allerlei Fundstücke im Internet oder anderen Medien. Wie Ehrensenf recht passend selbst beschreibt: Ehrensenf gibt es täglich neu (Mo-Fr). Und Ehrensenf […]

Um auf bestimmte Beiträge aufmerksam zu machen, gibt es jetzt eine neue Seite: Best Of. Dort verweise ich auf Einträge, die schon was älter sind und nur nach längerem Blättern gefunden werden könnten. Ich bin mir noch nicht ganz sicher, ob die Auswahl so gelungen ist. Das wird sich wohl noch zeigen.

Nachdem mich Tomasz auf den Moviemaze-Beitrag zu X-Men: Der letzte Widerstand aufmerksam gemacht hat, musste ich zwei der angebotenen Wallpapers verwursten. Also zwei der hübscheren Bilder zusammengefügt und den überflüssigen Text entfernt: http://fuzz.bassistance.de/x-men-der-letzte-widerstand.jpg adult sex video amateur home sex video amateur sex video amatuer sex video amature sex video anal sex free video anal sex […]

Für “allgemein” lustige IRC-Zitate gibt es ja bekanntlich bash.org und sein deutsches Äquivalent, german-bash.org. Kleines Beispiel: (Zybl0re) get up (Zybl0re) get on up (Zybl0re) get up (Zybl0re) get on up (phxl|paper) and DANCE * nmp3bot dances :D-< * nmp3bot dances :D|-< * nmp3bot dances :D/-< ([SA]HatfulOfHollow) i'm going to become rich and famous after i […]

Nach dem “Jammix1” vor einer Woche gibts jetzt noch zwei eine Woche ältere Aufnahmen vom 21. April. “Mixdown1” sind diverse Schnippsel vom ersten der drei Tracks, “Mixdown2” die letzten sieben Minuten des zweiten. [Mixdown1 http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/DieGesellschaftDesElefanten-06-04-21-Mixdown1.mp3] [Mixdown2 http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/DieGesellschaftDesElefanten-06-04-21-Mixdown2.mp3] Bitte entschuldigt die völlig unkreative Namensgebung.

Ne wat is dat schön. Unter der Kategorie “Guitar Face” gibt es Bilder der Gesichter spielender Gitarristen. Da gibts unter anderem: Auch schön:

die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast. Insofern war ich erstmal etwas skeptisch, als die Statistik von dieser Seite hier behauptete, im April 1,25 GB an Traffic gemessen zu haben. Den größten Teil davon haben wohl die “Die Gesellschaft Des Elefanten”-MP3s verursacht. 23 mal zehn Megabyte macht ja immerhin schon 230 MB… Im März waren es […]

Dominik hat mich auf ein paar Videos aufmerksam gemacht, auf die ich hier kurz eingehen will. Knapp eine Minute lang ist das “Real Life Simpsons Intro“. Hier hat sich jemand die Mühe gemacht, das bekannte Intro der Cartoon-Simpsons mit echten Schauspielern umzusetzen, was überraschend gut gelungen ist. Von Jethro Tull habe ich bisher keinerlei Videoaufnahmen […]

Nach langer Trockenphase hier nochmal ein wenig Musik. “Die Gesellschaft Des Elefanten” besteht dabei prinzipiell aus Marcus am Schlagzeug und mir am Bass und weiteren Musikern nach Möglichkeit, wie z.B. die Aktion mit Ralf.

Ohne besonderen Anlass trafen wir uns gestern zum dieser Tage recht beliebten Grillen. Auf ein wenig Bierkonsum wollten wir natürlich auch nicht verzichten. Tomasz, der Initiator der Aktion, hielt mit seiner Kamera einige Momente für die Nachwelt fest. Nachdem er ja selbst bereits Chipstüten und Teebaum kommentiert hat, hier noch ein paar andere Bilder. In […]

s. auch Frühling? Ein paar Bilder von heute und ein paar vom 22. April. Der Schnee von gestern scheint den Blümken wenig ausgemacht zu haben. [mygal=fruehling2]

Ein junger Mann von außerordentlich blassem Aussehen ging bis zur Mitte der Westminster-Brücke und kletterte auf die Brüstung. Ein dunkelhäutiger Herr, etliche Jahre älter, im Abendanzug mit dunkelrotem Futter, einem Inverness-Mantel, mit Monokel und kurzem Spitzbart erschien wie aus dem Nichts und packte ihn am Arm. “Lassen Sie mich los, verdammt!” murmelte der verhinderte Selbstmöder, […]

Aus den finsteren Orten hervor, aus den heulenden Nebeln, aus den Ländern ohne Sonne, aus Ghonorea kam der großgewachsene Catharz, das launische Schwert Eichenfäller in der Rechten, den verfluchten Speer Blutsäufer in der Linken, auf dem Rücken den bösen Bogen Todsänger mitsamt seinem Köcher voll angsteinflößender runengezeichneter Pfeilen, Herzsucher, Lochfresser, Seelenräuber, Waisenmacher, Augenblender, Sorgensäer, Rübenspalter […]

Mr. Underhill kam unter seinem Hügel hervor; er lächelte und atmete schwer. Jeder Atemzug schoß wie ein doppelter Dampfstrom aus seinen Nüstern, schneeweiß im Morgensonnenschein. Mr. Underhill blickte zum strahlenden Dezemberhimmel empor, lächelte breiter denn je und zeigte dabei schneeweiße Zähne. Dann ging er ins Dorf hinunter.

Seit meinem ersten Terry Pratchett Schreibenwelt-Roman bin ich großer Fan der “Komischen Fantasy”. Um dem ein oder anderen die diese ein wenig näher zu bringen, will ich unter der Kategorie Lesenswertes ein paar Kurzgeschichten zitieren.
Den Anfang macht Frederic Brown mit Der Ring des Hans Carvel.

Update: Dieses Plugin wird (seit 2006) nicht weiterentwickelt. Ich empfehle Smart Youtube, damit werden die Videos auch im Feed richtig angezeigt. Benutze das auch selbst. Um Videos von Youtube.com in WordPress anzuzeigen ist ein Plugin nötig. Bisher hatte ich dazu Kimili Flash Embed verwendet, musste dann aber feststellen, das es sich mit einem anderen Plugin […]

Vor gut drei Wochen gekauft, schau ich mir jetzt endlich meine erste King Crimson DVD an. Los gehts mit einem Konzert in Japan von 1974. Nach einem abschreckenden Intro mit grauselig billigen Effekten reifte langsam die Erkenntnis, das der Rest der DVD nicht in dem selben Stil gehalten war. Sehr beruhigend. Nachdem ich erst vermutet […]

Erstaunlich, was man mit der ollen Billig-Aldi-Digiknipse mit dem richtigen Licht an Bildern machen kann. Alle jeweils in Photoshop einer kleinen Tonwert-Korrektur unterzogen und verkleinert. [mygal=fruehling]

A bisserl Funky Zeug mit Uwe, Gerrit und Volker. Also die mooncircus-Besetzung mit Gerrit an der Gitarre. [Funky http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/UGV-Funky.mp3]

Helge Schneider ist toll. Ihn live zu sehen, ist allerdings noch toller. Besonders, wenn er zusammen mit Pete York tourt. Zwar hat Helge ein paar mal betont, das Pete schon die ganze Zeit darauf wartet, endlich sein Solo spielen zu dürfen… Aber ich glaub eher, Helge hat darauf gewartet, das Solo zu hören. Holla die […]

Wie versprochen, hier ein paar Ausschnitte der Aufnahmen von Ralf, Marcus und mir. Zum direkt anhören und runterladen. [Driving Down The Highway http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/GesellschaftDesElefanten-DrivingDownTheHighway.mp3] [Freejazz http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/GesellschaftDesElefanten-Freejazz.mp3] [Ganzton http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/GesellschaftDesElefanten-Ganzton.mp3] [Rock http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/GesellschaftDesElefanten-Rock.mp3] [Interview With Hartmut Stoelzel Engelein http://bassistance.de.www85.your-server.de/wp-content/uploads/music/GesellschaftDesElefanten-InterviewWithHartmutStoelzelEngelein.mp3]

Auf youtube gibt immer wieder nette Videos, auf eins wies mich gerade Axel hin. John Myung darf hier lustig frickeln, begleitet von einem mir unbekannten Keyboarder und, versteckt hinter seiner Schlagzeug-Festung, Mike Portnoy. Für Bassisten oder Bassliebhaber durchaus sehenswert. [youtube Zip2_BHqGBs]

Remagen, 28. März 2006 – Das Trio Dominik Müller, Jonathan Fleck und Jörn Zaefferer, fortan bekannt unter dem Namen “Roaring Hamster” traf sich gestern erstmals im Müllerschen Studio. Mit Dominik am Schlagzeug und Jonathan an der Gitarre jammten und komponierten wir gut vier Stunden lang. Insgesamt gibt es vier brauchbare Aufnahmen.

Letztes Jahr habe ich zwei Kurzfilme erstellt. Domino Star Wars gabs ja schon zu sehen, jetzt ist auch der zweite online: El Duell. Jetzt hier und auf youtube.com. Und nicht im Kino. [youtube jiKlfLRJR7I]

zum Artikel zur Cebit noch ein Nachtrag. Zum einen zum Kommentar von Marcus: Die SuSE-Features hauen mich irgendwie nicht vom Hocker, die sind auch irgendwie nur auf ein Mehr an Klickibunti aus, hab ich so das Gefühl. Dazu sollte noch gesagt werden, das XGL nicht speziell für Suse bzw. von Novell entwickelt wurde. Auf der […]

Im Rahmen der Ausbildung ist letztes Jahr ein zweiminütiges Video “Domino Star Wars” entstanden, erstellt größtenteils mit 3D Studio MAX. Der ein oder andere kennt es schon, jetzt hab ich es auf youtube hochgeladen, und ist damit für jeden zugänglich. Anschauen könnt ihr es euch auf youtube.com, oder direkt hier: [youtube 83FWE_qBudU]

Zwar zieren diverse Links die rechte Seite meines Blog, unterhalb der Kategorien, aber wohin führen die eigentlich? Wenn ich weitere hinzufüge, werde ich diese wahrscheinlich einzeln kommentieren, bis dahin muss aber eine Übersicht her, was es mit den bisherigen aufsich hat. Zuerst einmal zu den beiden Band-Links: Bei mooncircus spiel ich als Bassist seit etwa […]

Heute Abend ist Premiere für die erste [progrock-dt]-Show auf neuem Sender. Unter der Schirmherrschaft von Toxic Apple – Radio moderiert jetzt jeden Montag ab 20 Uhr das Team aus Marcus, Daniel und Achim (aka heizi, baerchi und schuli). Zur Sendung gibt es bald wahrscheinlich eine eigene Seite mit Informationen zu kommenden und vergangenen Sendungen. Gut […]

Letzten Mittwoch besuchten wir die Cebit in Hannover, die größte IT-Messe der Welt. Und groß war sie wirklich. Vom Süden her kommend, schlugen wir uns erst nach Norden durch. Die “Digital Living”-Halle sollte bis 22 Uhr geöffnet haben, daher wollten wir da zuletzt hin, da der Rest der Messe um 18 Uhr schließen würde. Es […]

Nach 21 Jahren Entwicklungszeit ist es da: Mein Blog. Meine Ausbildung habe ich so gut wie abgeschlossen, seit gestern hab ich einen Job (am 1. bzw. am 3. April geht es los), ich kauf mir einen neuen Bass, spiel immer noch in zwei Bands, programmier zwischendurch diverse Javasachen… Es gibt durchaus das ein oder andere […]