#personal

I just came back from lunch at the Barcamp Klagenfurt and would like to post my presentation slides.

Posting the code samples is rather useless since I did some live coding on stage, but I am working on a post on the topic anyway, so you will see the code sooner or later.

Anyway, the slides are here (pptx): Barcamp-Klagenfurt-windsor.pptx

I guess my laptop is officially broken. I am currently digging for my Dell Support CDs to reinstall Vista on it, but I don’t really think that will help at all(except with the Dell support people).

I do credit the crashes to my hardware simply because I’ve been a Vista user on multiple machines since day 1 and know how rock solid the OS really is.
I suspect the mainboard of my laptop to be faulty in some way.

The funny thing is (besides that my laptop fails to boot 50% of the time), I am still doing active development on that machine.
It works, I see some weird errors sometimes, but I can still work normally on the system once it’s booted.

"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

Today is one of those days where I really expect UFOs to land or drunk reindeers to drop some white bearded guy off at my doorstep. It can’t possibly get any worse does it?

First thing I look out of the window to see everything covered in snow right when I’m already late to an appointment, then I finally realize that my laptop is broken.

Now, back at home I went up to the attic where I keep all hardware boxes I acquired during the last 10 years and searched for the DELL OEM support CDs I got with my sweet little laptop.

Guess what? Nowhere to be found.

Turns out, my little brother bought himself a Dell Inspirion 1530 Laptop some time ago. When the Laptop came it turned out that it lacked the required GPU power (they just switched the 15XX series from Nvidia 8600M to ATI X1330 graphics) so he sent it back and got a refund on his money.

Now, what also happened was that my Laptop box was lying around right next to his laptop box on our attic, so when he repacked his laptop to send it back, he accidentally packaged it in my box.
So, not only did that box contain all the packaging material I keep around in case I need to send stuff back, no it also contained all driver and support disks (and the bundled Creative Headphones I got with the XPS).

So now I’m really screwed in a way because I am having trouble with a Laptop that is running Windows 7, I have no way of restoring it to Windows Vista, and I have to explain to Dell that the problem is not caused by Windows 7 because it also was there when I used Vista.

Oh, and while at it. I can’t find the bill and shipping notice for my laptop at the moment.
What a great day. I wish I had given in to that voice in the morning telling me to stay in bed because I felt sick.

While reading Georg’s list of gadgets he bought in 2008 and suggests I thought it might be interesting to compile such a list myself.
So, here it is: A list of gadgets I bought and would recommend (and it’s boring to be honest).

Dell XPS M1330

After running Ubuntu on my old laptop (1.6ghz Acer Aspire) for almost a year due to the lack of system resources I finally got myself a new laptop this year. The old one was a quite heavy 15” WXGA screen so I decided that this time I’d go with something smaller and more portable.
Since I like Dell for their brilliant support I choose the XPS M1330 (the only 13” laptop available from Dell at that time).
Haven’t regretted it since, I’ve been working exclusively on my laptop for quite some time now and this thing hasn’t failed me since. It’s speedy (except for fancy 3d graphics) and still light and has great battery life.
I also found that 13” is enough to actually program on, but it takes some time to get used to bringing up most panels through shortcuts while working in VS fullscreen.

Canon EOS 450D

I’ve never had a camera before. I never even bothered to buy one because I simply never deemed the price appropriate for what I’d get.
While occasionally taking some snapshots with various point and shoot cameras I was never really content with the results once I’d try to view the images on my PC. Pictures would either be noisy due to bad light, or when using flash all colors would simply look wrong.
This time though, I found the EOS 450D at pricey 470€ and gave it a try.
The camera is everything I asked for and more. It’s light, fast, picture quality is great and the battery lasts me for more than 2000 pictures (still amazed about that). Although I may still suck at photography (I hear little Yoda whisper to me “much to learn you have padawan” all the time *g*), I think some of my pictures actually don’t look too bad, so I've put them on Flickr.

Since my girlfriend blogs for a German speaking magazine on art and culture the woman-acceptance-factor on this one was quite high since can borrow it to take pictures of events she’s blogging about.

XBox 360 Elite

Ok, maybe it was just silly to buy this thing 1 month before the WoW addon Wrath of the Lich King was released, but I haven’t really regretted it either. The XBox is just another awesome console that simply works. There are tons of games (although too few that can be played in coop and aren’t of the shooter kind), and using it as a media center extender also works quite well. Since the console also gave me an excuse to get myself a new TV and transform my basement into a “media room” I’m quite happy with the investment after all :).
Why consoles? Put in a DVD and play, it just works. No installs, no settings no hassle. I don’t have too much time for games, and not wasting on installation / configuration issues any more was totally worth it.
I’d also suggest getting yourself Guitar Hero: Legends of Rock, the most fun game I’ve played for quite a long time.

Note: This has a very low WAF so consider buying her something nice too before confessing your sin :).

iPhone

(I’ll spare you the obvious picture ;)) My old phone broke and I needed a new one, since I didn’t want to switch carriers (tele.ring) I was stuck with a very bad selection of low-end consumer phones that didn’t really satisfy my needs. But buying a smartphone in Austria without signing a contract usually means spending >500€. Since the dollar was so low at that time it I got an original iPhone for less than 300€ and unlocked it myself.
Still convinced that it’s the best smartphone available to date. But I guess that may change with new releases from Android and the Palm Pre looks interesting. I’d also like to note that it’s not really smart to buy an iPod nano and order an iPhone 2 weeks later.

HP w2408h 24” Widescreen Monitor

Seriously, do yourself a favor and get one of these. More space is always better, and I’m already waiting for the Dell 30” displays to drop in price because I need even more space. 1920x1600 pixel of space provide plenty of room for parallelism, and the display simply looks awesome. Although some people don’t like TN panels, the colors are just stunning.
Also with the new Windows7 dock features the big resolution will be even more useful.

So that's it. I guess I spent way too much money on way too few things ;). Now this year will probably get a bit heavier on photography equipment (still looking for some maybe a new zoom lens). And with Windows7 up ahead I will probably also update my home pc once again (components are just ridiculously cheap right now)

Although I don’t dress up with a fancy black suit and hunt criminals by night, holiday season means living a double life for me.
Most of my friends study in Vienna or Graz and only visit during holidays, so whenever they are all in town I have to maintain a student life during the night while still working during the day. That usually means getting up at 9am while staying up till 5am.

Believe me, when 6 people don’t accept no for an answer and want to play poker at your place, you’d better restock on coffee and make sure you eat light so you don’t ruin your stomach completely. (I start regretting having built my own poker table)

And still, it’s holidays so trying to maintain a 8 hour per day pace is almost impossible. Besides your family obligations at various christmas celebrations and the usual shopping madness there isn’t really enough space to get focussed on something long enough to actually finish it in a good way.

So today I came back to office and started filling out the holes in my application I left during the holidays. Working my way from //TODO: statement to the next, revisiting the old code I noticed one thing: Code quality doesn’t matter.

When I write code I can’t forget it afterwards. I mean, I suck at remembering syntax or class names (man I love google for bringing back my memories over and over again), but if I feel like a solution isn’t elegant enough or a module should be restructured to make more sense I’ll think about it whenever not occupied and eventually come up with something better.
What would have taken me hours to get right the first time, was fixed in a matter of minutes after I had time to think about it. So this leads to the interesting conclusion that nothing I’ll write today will actually matter next week, as long as I constantly rethink and rework my code I’ll end up with high-quality code no matter how bad it was when I first wrote it.

So the most important thing to consider when writing code the first time is not let implementation details “leak” out to other parts of your system, so reworking one part of the system won’t affect the other. Also writing tests for one-line methods may seem dumb and repetitive, but once you start juggling around stuff while a release date is coming at you at alarming speed, those one-line tests will assure that your app won’t blow up once deployed.

Although I don’t dress up with a fancy black suit and hunt criminals by night, holiday season means living a double life for me.
Most of my friends study in Vienna or Graz and only visit during holidays, so whenever they are all in town I have to maintain a student life during the night while still working during the day. That usually means getting up at 9am while staying up till 5am.

Believe me, when 6 people don’t accept no for an answer and want to play poker at your place, you’d better restock on coffee and make sure you eat light so you don’t ruin your stomach completely. (I start regretting having built my own poker table)

And still, it’s holidays so trying to maintain a 8 hour per day pace is almost impossible. Besides your family obligations at various christmas celebrations and the usual shopping madness there isn’t really enough space to get focussed on something long enough to actually finish it in a good way.

So today I came back to office and started filling out the holes in my application I left during the holidays. Working my way from //TODO: statement to the next, revisiting the old code I noticed one thing: Code quality doesn’t matter.

When I write code I can’t forget it afterwards. I mean, I suck at remembering syntax or class names (man I love google for bringing back my memories over and over again), but if I feel like a solution isn’t elegant enough or a module should be restructured to make more sense I’ll think about it whenever not occupied and eventually come up with something better.
What would have taken me hours to get right the first time, was fixed in a matter of minutes after I had time to think about it. So this leads to the interesting conclusion that nothing I’ll write today will actually matter next week, as long as I constantly rethink and rework my code I’ll end up with high-quality code no matter how bad it was when I first wrote it.

So the most important thing to consider when writing code the first time is not let implementation details “leak” out to other parts of your system, so reworking one part of the system won’t affect the other. Also writing tests for one-line methods may seem dumb and repetitive, but once you start juggling around stuff while a release date is coming at you at alarming speed, those one-line tests will assure that your app won’t blow up once deployed.

There are many things I love about Amazon: free shipping, recommendations, customer reviews, good product pictures, awesome website, gift lists. I could go on and on, all those things make Amazon the #1 shopping site on the internet, and I love buying my stuff there. They offer free shipping on everything above 20€ and all books ship for free too. So, whatever you buy, you never think about shipping, you never think about returns or anything. You always know, there’s this big-ass company called Amazon that takes customer satisfaction etc pretty serious and will not cause you any troubles on returns etc. They always ship on time and they have almost everything.

Now, Amazon decided some time ago that “almost” everything isn’t enough and they went to really everything.
They opened the Amazon platform up through a program called Marketplace, where other vendors can sell their products through the Amazon.com website. And man do I hate that feature!
I never went to Amazon because they had everything, I went there because they had almost everything completely hassle-free.
Now, when I am searching for something I end up at 3rd party vendors 90% of the time (feels like Amazon stopped selling themselves almost) that have different shipping policies (almost nobody offers free shipping except for Amazon) and different return policies. Hell, I’ve seen 1-man-shops surface on Amazon that didn’t even have a rightful email address (listing a hotmail address in your company profile does NOT generate trust!).

Last week I decided to order a Canon EOS 450D DSLR and went to Amazon to shop for accessories  like memory, batteries etc.
Guess what? It took me almost 30 clicks to get to a product that was offered by Amazon! When searching for a SanDisk SDHC Extreme III 8gb card I found it 4 times, from 4 different 3rd party vendors but not from Amazon.
I gave up after 30 minutes of searching and ordered another SD card, completely pissed and very unsatisfied. And there is no way to turn the marketplace off, there is a filter that lets you select vendors but apparently this isn’t working when selecting Amazon (you still end up with a listing of 3rd party vendor sold products, yikes!).

The best thing is: Apparently Amazon is selling the SanDisk SDHC Extreme III 8gb card, I just couldn’t find it last week but did so now.

So why did Amazon destroy one of the most pleasant buying experiences of all time? I go to Amazon to buy their products, not to buy some other guys products he is selling from his basement, getting charged shipping costs and not knowing how returns or reclamations are going to be handled! Are those people insane? If I’d be into that kind of things I would be shopping at Ebay not at a respected and well trusted Amazon!

I can only hope Amazon will change their mind on this and create some “Amazon products only” button, so I can enjoy shopping again. Now it’s more a quest to filter 30 products for their vendor.

I’m a keyboard addict. I love keyboards and they love me.
I never managed to break one in any way because I have never used one long enough to break it. I consider my keyboard the most important tool as a programmer, and that’s why I constantly try to get the best available.

I guess that is over, I haven’t bought a new keyboard for over a year now.

My last 3 keyboard buys have all been the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 so I have one for every workplace I happen to be at. My 2 computers at home have one, my desk at work has one, it’s just that great!

I got introduced to Ergonomic keyboards through the Logitech Ergonomic Desktop Freedom Pro (or at least I think it was called that way) and used it long enough to really learn how to properly type. It was good compared to what I was using before (10 pound IBM bricks) and it was the first keyboard I actually bought myself (for the ridiculous amount of 280€ as a 16 year old). Unfortunately Logitech discontinued the ergo series and Microsoft’s old Natural keyboard was discontinued too so I switched back to normal keyboards for quite some time (trying out all sorts of fancy keyboards like the Fingerprint Keyboard etc) before I found the Microsoft Natural 4000.

At that point I haven’t used a ergonomic keyboard for some years so I was hesitant, but I got lured by the price. 40€ is nothing after having spent 100€ on the Logitech G15 (worst keyboard ever) and I was blown away by what I got!

Typing is so convenient on this keyboard, and my wrists feel a lot better after extended periods of work than they did before on the (ergonomic nightmare) G15 (we’re talking about magnitudes of >300% here).
The leather I rest my wrists on feels very comfortable and soft even after a year of extensive use.

The keyboard also comes with some sort of tilt-attachment that creates a reverse slope. It’s unusable if you want to play games, but for typing it is very comfortable to not have to bend your wrist to access keys.

Also notable is that the keyboard comes with a standard pgup/pgdown layout instead what makes working pretty easy once again (who designed the DELL keyboards should be crucified for the Pos1/End placement!).

Some shortcomings:

• No Next/Previous Media functionality. Only Play/Pause and Volume control buttons.
• No lock workstation button, I had to remap my Calculator key
• Zoom wheel in the middle of the keyboard is pretty much useless.

Still, the best keyboard you can get.

Just when I hoped driver issues are gone for good, I bought my new Logitech VX Revo because I was so upset with my Microsoft Presenter Mouse 8000 (worst mouse ever!).

After experiencing huge precision and lag issues with the Microsoft Presenter 8000 I wasn’t really happy to find my new Logitech totally laggy on the acceleration part.
I’m a huge fan of mouse acceleration, and that’s the main reason I wasn’t happy with Logitech mice, they accelerate differently than Microsoft ones.

But this wasn’t just different, the mouse accelerated absolutely insane:
I then found out that Logitech and Synaptics don’t come along too well. Synaptics and Logitech both try to hook into the same acceleration and so your mouse acceleration gets controlled by the Synaptics driver and your touchpad by the mouse driver. Adjusting the mouse speed worked separately, but still the acceleration was way out of line. So after a day of tinkering I finally gave in and uninstalled the touchpad drivers.

I tried to find a  solution to the whole SetPoint – Synaptics issue and it seems that there is no solution. Logitech blames Synaptics and vice versa. People just end up doing what I did, uninstalling the touchpad driver.

Logitech and Synaptics don’t work together.

And that means:

• I can’t scroll on the touchpad (the scroll-area was part of the touchpad driver).
• I can’t disable the touchpad when working with the mouse (driving me crazy all the time)
• I miss all the neat stuff like gestures etc.

Soltution: Don’t get a Logitech mouse if you’re stuck with a Synaptics touchpad. It’s simply not worth the trouble.
And while at it, Microsoft should make the Touchpad driver that’s built into Windows better. I’d wish for Windows 7 to support gestures and scrolling out of the box, not having to rely on stupid drivers!

Ok, I was bored and so I looked a bit into the Ubiquity author tutorials. The result is a pretty simple command that searches WoWhead for the given noun.

I don't think it's really ready yet. Live previews would be cool.
Still, you can grab it here if you have Ubiquity.

Download: WoWhead Search command
(please bear with the page, it's just a placeholder)