(zen punch)

316

Indro De — Tue, 06 Jan 2009

What a lame Macworld keynote. No new iMac, Mini, or iPhone. No surprises, just an upgraded and overpriced MacBook Pro and some updated software. And no Steve Jobs either...

315

Indro De — Tue, 06 Jan 2009

Only mildly entertaining: Mac Rumors' live-feed from the Macworld keynote has been hacked and is running amok. Update: Mac Rumor's statement.

314

Indro De — Fri, 02 Jan 2009

Jam Legend is a Flash-based Guitar Hero game for your browser.

313

Indro De — Thu, 01 Jan 2009

My Top-10 listened-to songs (since October 2008).


1. David Bowie - Station To Station (1972)

2. The Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969)

3. The Church - Under The Milky Way Tonight (1988)

4. The Animals - The House Of The Rising Sun (1964)

5. David Bowie - Moonage Daydream (1972)

6. The Smiths - Bigmouth Strikes Again (1986)

7. Peter Murphy - The Scarlet Thing In You (1995)

8. Iggy Pop - China Girl (1977)

9. Placebo - Every You Every Me (1998)

10. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Havana Affair (2003)

More charts to follow.

312

Indro De — Thu, 01 Jan 2009

My Top-10 listened-to albums of 2008; well, the last three months of 2008, because that's when I started scrobbling.


1. David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972)

2. David Bowie - Station To Station (1976)

3. Thelonious Monk - Monk's Blues (1968)

4. David Bowie - Diamond Dogs (1974)

5. Bauhaus - Burning From The Inside (1983)

6. David Bowie - Aladdin Sane (1973)

7. The Cure - Seventeen Seconds (1980)

8. The Clash - London Calling (1979)

9. Babyshambles - Shotter's Nation (2007)

10. The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead (1986)

This list does not include Best-of compilations, otherwise The Beatles - 1 would be #1 in the list.

311

Indro De — Thu, 01 Jan 2009

Happy New Year!

310

Indro De — Wed, 31 Dec 2008

My list of towns and cities where I have spent at least one night (sleep-over) in 2008 (for 2007, check ◊ 198).

Collegeville, PA

Trappe, PA

Philadelphia, PA

New York, NY

Krefeld, Germany

Bonn, Germany

London, UK

Looking forward to a lot more traveling in 2009.

309

Indro De — Mon, 22 Dec 2008

Cute Things Falling Asleep.

308

Indro De — Fri, 19 Dec 2008

Following up on log #303: a sitemap gone horribly wrong (via Simplebits).

307

Indro De — Wed, 17 Dec 2008

Discovered a little bit too late: PHP Advent 2008, a 24ways-esque advent calendar for PHP programmers.

306

Indro De — Mon, 15 Dec 2008

Ruby is the greatest thing that has happened since Python (and by "thing" I mean programming language). Try it out right here in your browser!

305

Indro De — Mon, 15 Dec 2008

On my to-do list for this week: CSS sprites (I'll write a little tutorial), some more website optimization stuff (expires header, CDNs, blablabla...), and all the 4582 to-dos from the last few weeks that are still to do.

304

Indro De — Wed, 10 Dec 2008

The year-end Google Zeitgeist 2008 is a compilation of "some of the highlights from Google searches around the globe".

303

Indro De — Tue, 02 Dec 2008

A user interface gone horribly wrong (via Daring Fireball).

302

Indro De — Mon, 01 Dec 2008

The top 3 new artists (who released their debut this year) of 2008 in terms of listeners on last.fm:


1. MGMT (1,501,263 listeners)

2. The Ting Tings (1,025,318)

3. Sarah Bareilles (712,379)

4. Fleet Foxes (631,371)

5. Katy Perry (579,934)

I have no clue to what extend this data is representational.

301

Indro De — Mon, 01 Dec 2008

Oops! During a database migration for last week's site relaunch, one of the tumblelog posts got lost. Anyway, here they are again, the top 20 dumbest band names of all time.

300

Indro De — Mon, 01 Dec 2008

December is 24 ways-time! 24 ways is an advent calendar for web geeks with "a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer".

299

Indro De — Fri, 28 Nov 2008

A must-read and must-do for web designers: What can you do against the mysterious “Save For Web” color shift in Photoshop?

298

Indro De — Fri, 28 Nov 2008

I'll keep writing about more new features throughout the next few days (yes, there is a lot more...)!

297

Indro De — Fri, 28 Nov 2008

Another major update is the addition of feature articles and the option of adding comments to any of those feature articles as well as to these tumblelog posts (yes, all of them). Just click on the little ◊ thingy and you will see... (If there's a number behind it, it denotes the number of comments for this post).

296

Indro De — Fri, 28 Nov 2008

Some new features (apart from the layout and design overhaul): I am now running my Rails application via Phusion Passenger which means that the brutal


killall -USR1 dispatch.fcgi

command has been switched to a rather peaceful


touch tmp/restart.txt

to restart the Rails application.

295

Indro De — Fri, 28 Nov 2008

Alright, here's another relaunch. Now with more gray tones than you knew existed! There may still be a few glitches here and there, and some features may not be completely done, but I'll be working on this in the coming days.

294

Indro De — Tue, 18 Nov 2008

I must have missed this: CocoaMySQL, a MySQL GUI for the Mac has been abandoned and replaced by Sequel Pro (Leopard-only).

293

Indro De — Sat, 15 Nov 2008

Lutz Heilmann, a German politician of Die Linke wasn't happy with his German Wikipedia entry and pressed charges against the Wikimedia foundation who owns the domain wikipedia.de (which is forwarded to de.wikipedia.org). As of now, the German edition of Wikipedia is not accessible through wikipedia.de. A pathetic move by the former Stasi-member (read the German Spiegel-article). Here are his Wikipedia entries: English and German.

292

Indro De — Wed, 05 Nov 2008

The next President of the United States.

291

Indro De — Tue, 04 Nov 2008

Portishead's Third is dark, haunting, unique, simply beautiful. This true masterpiece is challenging but extremely rewarding. Up there with Dummy.

290

Indro De — Sat, 01 Nov 2008

CopyPasteCharacter is a good idea and on top of that very neatly implemented.

289

Indro De — Sat, 01 Nov 2008

Sound familiar? You are showing YouTube videos of laughing babies to some friends just to move your mouse around every few minutes to prevent your notebook to dim the screen or start your screen saver? Caffeine is a menu bar app that ensures everlasting YouTube viewing pleasure.

288

Indro De — Fri, 31 Oct 2008

Xiph QuickTime Components (XiphQT) is a must-have component for supporting Ogg Vorbis in iTunes. Just copy the component file into your Library/Components folder (for Macs).

287

Indro De — Thu, 30 Oct 2008

The curse has been lifted: the Phillies win the World Series 2008!

286

Indro De — Tue, 28 Oct 2008

Brand new: MTV launched MTV MUSIC, a Hulu-like music video archive. Looking very promising so far.

285

Indro De — Thu, 23 Oct 2008

Here's a portrait of Homer Simpson using only HTML characters and CSS positioning.

284

Indro De — Mon, 20 Oct 2008

In case you need to help out a poor Windows-user who has completely blown up his Windows installation and wants to rescue the contents of his hard drive: mounting Windows partitions in Ubuntu shows how you can get access to those files when using an Ubuntu installation CD. Ubuntu rocks!

283

Indro De — Thu, 16 Oct 2008

Insane number of high-resolution Photoshop brushes.

282

Indro De — Tue, 14 Oct 2008

It's that time of the year again. Steve Jobs announces the new lineup of Mac laptops. And maybe there will be "one more thing"...

281

Indro De — Tue, 14 Oct 2008

What's new in sports? Hockey: My home team, the Krefeld Pinguine, are leading the first German division (DEL) after 12 games. I've been a loyal fan since my first game in the early 90s. Baseball: The Phillies are one game away from moving on to the World Series!

280

Indro De — Thu, 02 Oct 2008

I finally added an RSS feed for the log entries of (zen punch). You may also have noticed the new navigation bar above. Even more features to follow...

279

Indro De — Tue, 16 Sep 2008

One of the founding members of Pink Floyd Richard Wright died yesterday.

278

Indro De — Tue, 16 Sep 2008

I just rolled out the new CRCA Moers release. CRCA Moers is a martial arts academy located in Moers, Germany. P.S.: I still hate Windows and the Internet Explorer and I dream of a Microsoft-free world.

277

Indro De — Wed, 10 Sep 2008

First spectacular footage of the black hole produced by today's experiments of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. You saw it here first! P.S.: No word yet on the God particle.

276

Indro De — Tue, 09 Sep 2008

Here are 28 very useful cheat sheets for web designers.

275

Indro De — Sat, 06 Sep 2008

And another list: South Park's 9 best gaming moments.

274

Indro De — Sat, 06 Sep 2008

There are 6 new NFL rules for the 2008 season starting tomorrow.

273

Indro De — Sat, 06 Sep 2008

Polybius is rumored to be an 1980s arcade game which "caused its players to go insane, causing them to suffer from intense stress and horrific nightmares."

272

Indro De — Fri, 05 Sep 2008

This one is funny. Here is some more web nom: 1. Peter Fox' (Seeed frontman) debut music video "Alles Neu" which has received props from Kanye West. 2. Check out this vintage Nintendo art. 3. Woah! Ultraportable notebooks running Linux: Acer Aspire One and Dell Inspiron Mini 9.

271

Indro De — Thu, 04 Sep 2008

No comment.

270

Indro De — Tue, 02 Sep 2008

"Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA." Meanwhile, check out 8tracks which also lets you upload MP3-mixes and share them with the world.

269

Indro De — Sat, 30 Aug 2008

EarthDeshk is a great deskop replacement application, and these days you can use it to track Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Hanna making their way towards mainland.

268

Indro De — Thu, 21 Aug 2008

teehan+lax have created a nice Photoshop PSD file containing iPhone user interface elements.

267

Indro De — Tue, 19 Aug 2008

Probably the most emotional German victory of the Olympics so far. Matthias Steiner, who tragically lost his wife a year ago in a car accident, won Olympic gold in weightlifting’s heaviest division.

266

Indro De — Tue, 19 Aug 2008

I found this three days after I dumped Vista and installed XP on my dad's laptop: a third of new PCs being downgraded to XP.

265

Indro De — Tue, 19 Aug 2008

Happy Birthday, Melissa!

264

Indro De — Mon, 18 Aug 2008

Noupe has compiled a list of CSS/JS styling and functionality techniques. Definitely worth a closer look.

263

Indro De — Mon, 18 Aug 2008

Throw out Windows! Get Ubuntu (or a Mac)!

262

Indro De — Mon, 18 Aug 2008

Palette Grabber is a Firefox extension that creates color palettes based on the current web page.

261

Indro De — Tue, 12 Aug 2008

Eric Meyer's CSS Reset styles are probably the most common reset styles used. The most basic reset style is: * { margin:0; padding:0; } The line above reduces annoying default margins and padding, but Meyer's css file does a lot more to "reduce browser inconsistencies in things like default line heights, margins and font sizes of headings, and so on". My verdict: must-have.

260

Indro De — Wed, 06 Aug 2008

About time someone points this out.

259

Indro De — Tue, 05 Aug 2008

I am back from the beautiful city of London where I spent all of last week. Expect some pictures on Lucid Heavens soon.

258

Indro De — Wed, 16 Jul 2008

Speaking of Terminal, the following command starts the Dashboard's dev mode. defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES Now you can drag widgets from Dashboard onto your desktop. Just click and hold the widget and press F12 to return to the desktop (use the same method to move the widget back to Dashboard). To make this work, you have to restart the Dock using the beloved KILLALL command. killall Dock To turn off the dev mode, use the same command as above but substitute YES with NO and then "killall". Tadaa!

257

Indro De — Wed, 16 Jul 2008

"Wakoopa is the perfect place for people to discover software online. When you sign up, you also install a small tracker that keeps tabs on what software you use. This creates an online profile for you to share with the world, and also gives you updates and recommendations on what your friends and others are using."

1. Firefox

2. Adium

3. Photoshop

4. Textmate

5. Terminal

These are the top-5 programs I use, according to my personal profile on Wakoopa. Yes, Terminal is #5.

256

Indro De — Mon, 14 Jul 2008

I am working on a few more changes to design and layout of this website, including the removal of AJAX effects on the portfolio page.

255

Indro De — Mon, 14 Jul 2008

A long time ago (#52) I said that I won't use the Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) technology, but that's history. Some headings now use the Diavlo font. More sIFR to come.

254

Indro De — Sun, 13 Jul 2008

This website may look a little chaotic the next few days with icons, logos and changing graphics all over the place. After all, this is my "virtual playground".

253

Indro De — Thu, 10 Jul 2008

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it. (via JeffBridges.com)

252

Indro De — Thu, 10 Jul 2008

And just in time for the iPhone 3G, Apple has launched its iPhone/iPod Touch App Store and released an iTunes update (to version 7.7).

251

Indro De — Thu, 10 Jul 2008

Tomorrow, Apple will release the iPhone 3G. And while Apple claims that the new iPhone is twice as fast for half the price, the truth is that the required new two-year contract with AT&T is more expensive than the one for the original iPhone (and this adds up, making the 3G significantly more expensive in the long run).

250

Indro De — Fri, 04 Jul 2008

If you are like me and addicted to Pandora but you're in a region of the world where you are not allowed to use it (due to legal reasons), then here is the solution: Hotspot Shield. This program creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your computer and the internet, allowing you to access Pandora (and it protects your laptop while accessing wireless hot spots).

248

Indro De — Thu, 03 Jul 2008

If you are using Firefox and Gmail, then you can install a very nice redesigned style sheet for Gmail to use with the Stylish Firefox extension.

249

Indro De — Wed, 02 Jul 2008

Ingrid Betancourt is free (photos).

247

Indro De — Wed, 25 Jun 2008

And just like that, *poof* it's gone. The new Facebook feature has disappeared again.

246

Indro De — Wed, 25 Jun 2008

Facebook now allows you to leave comments on mini-feed stories such as status messages, profile updates, or anything else that may appear in that section of your profile.

245

Indro De — Wed, 25 Jun 2008

Pandora rocks! Now there is a new Adobe Air application called Pandora Desktop which allows you to play your stations from the desktop (as opposed to having a browser window open).

244

Indro De — Tue, 24 Jun 2008

I wonder how Kobe Bryant will respond to Shaq's freestyle rap dissing Kobe for losing in the NBA finals.

243

Indro De — Mon, 23 Jun 2008

Wednesday, Germany will play Turkey in the semi-finals of the Euro 2008. On the photo: Gomez, Schweini, Kuranyi. I like the website for the tournament with its extensive use of AJAX. Not bad either: more than a billion site visits since its inception in February of this year.

242

Indro De — Mon, 23 Jun 2008

U.S. Comedian George Carlin died of heart failure yesterday. He was 71 years old.

241

Indro De — Fri, 20 Jun 2008

Firefox 3 supports color profile management but this feature is disabled by default. To enable it, enter about:config in address bar of the browser, then click on the button (tell them you're careful). Type gfx.color to find and double-click on the following entry: gfx.color_management.enabled After a restart, Firefox now uses the intended color profile of images.

240

Indro De — Fri, 20 Jun 2008

Last night, I went to a Pearl Jam concert in the Susquehanna Bank Park (formerly known as the Tweeter Center) in Camden, NJ. Here is a short review of the concert. And here is yesterday's set list.

239

Indro De — Wed, 18 Jun 2008

Firefox 3, with an alleged 15,000 improvements, is now available for download. After installing the browser, I found that some of my bookmarks were missing which happened because I tested a pre-release of Firefox 3 a few months ago.

238

Indro De — Wed, 11 Jun 2008

The Google Mac Developer Playground contains some interesting open-source projects for the Mac. However, has Google come up with something really innovative recently?

237

Indro De — Wed, 11 Jun 2008

Does time really slow down when you are in a high-stress or near-death situation? Using a Perceptual Chronometer where random numbers flash so rapidly on an LCD screen that they can not be seen under normal circumstances, several tests where performed to measure the ability of the brain to "slow down" time and identify these flashing numbers.

236

Indro De — Mon, 09 Jun 2008

Amazon.com has been on and off this morning, after it has already been offline for a few hours last Friday. Amazon.com is losing around $16,000 per down-minute (for the U.S. only).

235

Indro De — Wed, 28 May 2008

A snapshot of the upcoming geckostyle redesign.

234

Indro De — Wed, 21 May 2008

Ro London has compiled an interesting list of 300 icons from 1800 high-profile websites in 7 categories such as arrows, bullets, mail, carts and bags, etc.

233

Indro De — Tue, 06 May 2008

I just got a "Rails application couldn't start properly" message when opening this website. A quick refresh got rid of the error. So it is true that Dreamhost has problems hosting Rails applications. I'm not sure yet what to do about this.

232

Indro De — Tue, 06 May 2008

There is some AJAX-magic happening on my portfolio page. Here is the RJS template that does the magic:


page.show 'defaultdiv'

page.delay(0.5) do

  page.visual_effect :blind_up, "defaultdiv", :duration => 0.5

  page.hide 'postdiv'

  page.replace_html 'postdiv', "<h1>#{@prodnotes.title}</h1>"

  page.insert_html :bottom, 'postdiv', "<p class=""description"">#{@prodnotes.body}</p>"

  page.show 'postdiv'

  page.visual_effect :blind_down, "postdiv", :duration => 0.5

end

Note: "defaultdiv" is the div that includes the default screenshots and client information, while "postdiv" is the div that is being updated with the project information.

231

Indro De — Mon, 05 May 2008

Nine Inch Nails is giving away their newest album, The Slip, for free.

230

Indro De — Mon, 05 May 2008

Problem solved! I think a DB field name called "display" was the reason for Rails acting weird. This is a list of reserved words for Ruby and Rails and "display" is listed as one that could cause problems. Good to know.

229

Indro De — Mon, 05 May 2008

I'm having some problems with the portfolio page, which somehow is displayed as content type of text/plain. I will look at it promptly and hopefully figure it out.

228

Indro De — Sun, 04 May 2008

Safari 's Windows market share tripled after Apple slipped the latest Safari version into its Windows software update. Sneaky indeed (and it shows that a lot of people really don't care what's being installed on their computer).

227

Indro De — Wed, 30 Apr 2008

The new website is now online. Of course I'll make some minor changes in the next few days, and I will also add a lot of content for the portfolio page (including screenshots).

226

Indro De — Fri, 25 Apr 2008

P.S.: I have intentionally disabled all the links in the menu above. Everything will be up and running by tomorrow afternoon

225

Indro De — Fri, 25 Apr 2008

Here are some links to pages that were very helpful during the deployment process: starting the process/basic instructions, some helpful tips, how to host your own gems (very helpful!), and the last obstacle was just creating a new user name for the main database, because somehow I couldn't access it with an existing username (/log/production.log is always helpful)...

224

Indro De — Fri, 25 Apr 2008

It's so close. The Rails deployment on Dreamhost was a mess, but I finally got it to work. I'll have to do some more database migration and add some content, but the new website should be up by tomorrow afternoon.

223

Indro De — Mon, 21 Apr 2008

Matt Pond PA was good. After the show, we got to hang out with them a lil bit in their shady white van.

222

Indro De — Sun, 20 Apr 2008

Indie band Matt Pond PA is playing at Ursinus College today and I'll be there.

221

Indro De — Wed, 09 Apr 2008

The next installment of (zen punch) will be a lot more ajaxified. Here are two resources explaining how to paginate with Ajax in Ruby on Rails and how to paginate, sort and search a table with Ajax on Rails

220

Indro De — Tue, 08 Apr 2008

Again, Dreamhost has charged my account by mistake (but promptly credited me). It's nothing serious and not as annoying as keeping my websites offline for hours or overcharging me hundreds of dollars. The one thing that is annoying however, is the way Dreamhost communicates (if they even do that) with their customers. This is an actual quote from the official Dreamhost newsletter I just received:

I'm really really really really really really really really really
				really really really really really really really really really really
				really sorry.

Yeah, that doesn't really, really, really do it for me. I must say, that this apology went out to customers on their "Blingy" cluster which has been struggling with performance problems over the last few weeks and they're offering a month of credit as reparations.

219

Indro De — Tue, 08 Apr 2008

This website's redesign is making good progress, but it still needs some work. I will probably (once again) release an incomplete version (missing some planned features) and upgrade the website from time to time.

218

Indro De — Tue, 08 Apr 2008

Kansas won the NCAA tournament and saved my bracket. In other news, Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing also made the Basketball Hall of Fame. Congratulations!

217

Indro De — Sun, 06 Apr 2008

Dick "dipsy-doo dunkeroo slam-jam-bam, baby!" Vitale will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

216

Indro De — Thu, 27 Mar 2008

I uploaded a new photo to Lucid Heavens.

215

Indro De — Mon, 24 Mar 2008

After the first weekend and the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament, I can safely say that my bracket is worthless. Now I want Western Kentucky or Davidson to win it all.

214

Indro De — Thu, 20 Mar 2008

It has begun! Here is my bracket (click on the bracket to make it disappear)! The bracket shot was taken after 7 games were already completed, that's why some school names are green (I picked correctly so far).

213

Indro De — Wed, 19 Mar 2008

The Houston Rockets ended their historic 22-game winning streak with a loss against the Boston Celtics last night, just in time for the NCAA tournament to begin. Everyone filled out their brackets yet?

212

Indro De — Sat, 15 Mar 2008

The only reason for me to ever go to Texas: the South by Southwest festival/conference is going on right now (March 7 - 18) in Austin, Texas. Divided into three main acts: Interactive, Film, and of course Music, this event looks like the place to be right now. Close to 1700 bands are playing in different venues, numerous panels on all kinds of new media topics are being held, etc. Read more about the SXSW on their website and also check out NPR's SXSW music coverage

211

Indro De — Fri, 07 Mar 2008

It doesn't really matter where you look, there are tons of great quotes in any Family Guy episode. Here's another one:
A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar. Rabbi: "Hey, did you hear the one about us?"

210

Indro De — Fri, 07 Mar 2008

Stewie: "Hello, mother. I come bearing a gift. I'll give you a hint. It's in my diaper and it's not a toaster."

209

Indro De — Thu, 06 Mar 2008

I have recently (or in one case not that recently) come across two very funny shows on TV. First, there's HBO's Flight of the Conchords, which is the hilarious story of two aspiring musicians, Bret ("Brit") and Jemaine, in New York. Then there's the show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Both of these shows are refreshingly funny and entertaining and very recommended. Now I just need to find the time to actually watch these shows.

208

Indro De — Wed, 05 Mar 2008

Something interesting about the Google search behavior I was not aware of. I've been randomly wondering about the following: when you submit an empty search query on the Google homepage nothing happens (well, the form submits but the same page is displayed again). But now just enter a blank space and submit the search, and a different empty page shows up. It makes sense, when you examine it a little bit more, although even then it is strange why Google doesn't trim empty spaces from the front and end of search queries. Here are some further examples: This is the the URL that shows up when you search for: abc (the www.google.com part of the URL is ommitted) /search?hl=en&q=abc&btnG=Search This happens when you search for: abc def /search?hl=en&q=abc+def&btnG=Search A single blank space is: /search?hl=en&q=+&btnG=Search Three blank spaces are: /search?hl=en&q=+++&btnG=Search By now this all makes sense. By default, Google searches for pages with occurrences of all words in the query (AND) as opposed to just some of the words (OR). Instead of writing +one +word or one AND word it is okay to just write one word because the space is seen as a +. Pretty smart, although it still does not explain why there should ever be a query with just x number of spaces.

207

Indro De — Mon, 28 Jan 2008

I am a huge fan of Pandora and the Music Genome Project. Here is my Pandora profile and a radio station I made featuring some of my favorite artists, including The Cure, The Church, Bauhaus, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Morrissey, Tears for Fears, Radiohead and others: Music That Saved My Life.

206

Indro De — Sun, 27 Jan 2008

It has been a while since I've watched a German movie (without English subtitles) so it was a real pleasure to watch Kebab Connection. Next on my Netflix queue are two more German movies: Das Experiment and the 1931 Fritz Lang movie M.

205

Indro De — Fri, 25 Jan 2008

On the schedule today: the D'Andrea/Day Wedding in the Crystal Tea Room of the Wanamaker Building in Philadelphia, PA.

204

Indro De — Tue, 15 Jan 2008

Meanwhile, Apple introduces the MacBook Air.

203

Indro De — Tue, 15 Jan 2008

This time Dreamhost, my web host, really messed up. Sadly, I have to take back what I wrote exactly one year ago (post #004). To see what happened, read the DreamhostStatus entry, the digg post, a InfoWord article, and this really not-so-funny blog entry by the douchefag who caused this mess.

202

Indro De — Sun, 13 Jan 2008

Some pictures of the recent appearance of snow in Baghdad.

201

Indro De — Sat, 12 Jan 2008

I signed up for a two-week Netflix trial last week and so far I'm pretty happy with it. I received all my movies the next business day and Netflix received my movies within one day as well. My first few movies: Superbad, Legend, The Doors, Almost Famous.

200

Indro De — Fri, 11 Jan 2008

Best kitchen purchase I have ever made (and I've just owned it for about 3 weeks). Check out this Global Chef Knife. This is one fine piece of cutlery, from Yoshikin's Global brand of cutlery.

199

Indro De — Tue, 01 Jan 2008

Happy New Year! Here we go 2008...

198

Indro De — Mon, 31 Dec 2007

Many bloggers are doing this at the end of the year. This is a list of towns and cities where I have spent at least one night (sleep-over) in 2007.

Krefeld, Germany

Bingen, Germany

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

New York, NY

Collegeville, PA

Washington, D.C.

Philadelphia, PA

Montreal, Canada

Not nearly as exciting as last year's list.

197

Indro De — Sat, 08 Dec 2007

"MizPee finds the closest, cleanest toilets in your area."

196

Indro De — Fri, 07 Dec 2007

Recently, things like this amuse me:


				if a = "then response.write" then response.write "then response.write"

It has been a long week...

195

Indro De — Fri, 07 Dec 2007

It was nice meeting Ed Snider, owner of the Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers, and dining in his private Director's Lounge in the Wachovia Center. Surely didn't expect that for my first visit to a Flyers game. I even got a souvenir puck from the locker room. Thanks Geoff and Dr. Dorshimer!

194

Indro De — Sat, 01 Dec 2007

I am going to my first Philadelphia Flyers game tonight (vs Dallas Stars). You can catch the game on Comcast SportsNet, if you're in the area.

193

Indro De — Tue, 27 Nov 2007

Back from snowy Montreal with around 240 photos. The first one is already on Lucid Heavens. More to come soon.

191

Indro De — Mon, 19 Nov 2007

Click here to see this homepage in a "light" color scheme, if you rather read black text on white background. I will implement a simple dark/light CSS switcher on all pages sometime soon.

192

Indro De — Mon, 19 Nov 2007

I am leaving for Montreal (wikipedia) tomorrow. My first Canada trip! I will be back on November 26th.

190

Indro De — Fri, 16 Nov 2007

The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO "describes the working basics of PC-class computers, Unix-like operating systems, and the Internet in non-technical language". Very good read.

189

Indro De — Thu, 15 Nov 2007

Benchmark test follow-up of the article that describes how to built your own Hackintosh Mac/PC running OS X Leopard. Looks very interesting.

188

Indro De — Wed, 14 Nov 2007

Here is a very practical IE CSS hack I wasn't aware of yet. It is called the "Underscore Hack" and works like this:


body {

    background-color:#ccc;

    color:#333;



    /* the next 2 lines are only used by IE */

    _background-color:#660000;

    _color:#fff;

}

Of course, the CSS code won't validate when you use this hack, but most of my CSS code doesn't validate anyway, because I tend to use the "x"-prefix a lot to "disable" a CSS property.


p {

    xfont-weight:bold;

    color:#222;

}

I like those prefix-hacks and I wonder why I never came across the very useful Underscore Hack before.

187

Indro De — Fri, 09 Nov 2007

Here you can see how you dynamically resize a textarea field using JavaScript. You may need it at some point.


		fArea.style.height = 0;

fArea.style.height = (fArea.scrollHeight -2) + "px";

And you can also remove the scrollbars and turn it to an invisible form field. You may want to make it readonly too. style="overflow:hidden; border:0;" The text area can now be populated and manipulated on the fly using JavaScript.

186

Indro De — Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Almost two thirds of the people who acquired Radiohead's new album In Rainbows didn't pay anything for it (Radionhead didn't set a price but instead let the listener decide how much they wanted to pay for the download version of the album). I must confess, I didn't spend any money for it either when I "ordered" my download the night before the release. I got my link in the email and listened to the album on my way to work the next morning.

185

Indro De — Tue, 16 Oct 2007

Not a lot of news, but at least the new logo is ready. It's kept very simple, using the Diavlo font by Jos Buivenga.

184

Indro De — Tue, 02 Oct 2007

Yeah that's right. Two and a half months later... Just putting back my old stuff while I work on something permanent to put here.

183

Indro De — Tue, 02 Oct 2007

Check out these Common Illnesses at the Vatican. Hope they have good doctors.

182

Indro De — Sun, 15 Jul 2007

It was a very busy (but good) week. I will fill in the missing days later today.

181

Indro De — Tue, 10 Jul 2007

That's one big mushroom.

180

Indro De — Fri, 06 Jul 2007

I am temporarily disabling my email contact form, because of ongoing spam pollution. If you want to contact me, check out my Facebook profile or drop me an email: indro dot de at gmail dot com.

179

Indro De — Thu, 05 Jul 2007

Did you know that Samuel L. Jackson's middle name is Leroy? Now you know.

178

Indro De — Wed, 04 Jul 2007

Happy 4th of July! Haha.

177

Indro De — Tue, 03 Jul 2007

I went to the Longwood Gardens today. "Purchased by industrialist Pierre S. du Pont in 1906, Longwood offers 1,050 acres of gardens, woodlands, and meadows; 20 outdoor gardens; 20 indoor gardens within 4 acres of heated greenhouses; 11,000 different types of plants; spectacular fountains"... and so on.

176

Indro De — Mon, 02 Jul 2007

My Athena surround speakers and an Infinity center speaker arrived today, which means that my new home theatre speaker setup is almost complete.

175

Indro De — Mon, 02 Jul 2007

Continued from previous post: Anyway, to make a long story short, the iMac is back up. I played around with my screwdriver on the logic board and came across 8 little pins that seemed to respond to my screwdriver. I was actually able to turn on the Mac while touching a combination of those pins with my screwdriver. The display still failed, and once I removed the screwdriver the Mac lost power. Anyway, lots of magic later, I somehow got it to work. I turned it back off, replaced the back cover and gave it another try aaaand... yes! I just saved myself a few hundred $$$.

174

Indro De — Mon, 02 Jul 2007

I was close to giving up on my 2+ years old iMac G5 yesterday, but now it's back and running. Here's the whole story: I am rearranging my room and turned off the iMac (doesn't happen too often). Then the bad surprise when I tried to turn the computer back on again. Nothing happened. Using my MacBook, I found these throubleshooting instructions on Apple's support pages, and after going through all the steps I thought I'd needed a new logic board. TBC...

173

Indro De — Sun, 01 Jul 2007

Resolute Wal-Mart shopper attempts to self-checkout $5 plasma.

172

Indro De — Sun, 01 Jul 2007

I'm starting to get spam through the (zen punch) contact form. Currently, I only get about one to two spam messages per day, but I think I'll soon have to think of some measurements to prevent those robots sending me their crap.

171

Indro De — Sat, 30 Jun 2007

It has arrived. The Emotiva LPA-1 amplifier looks amazing and weighs a hefty 63lbs...

170

Indro De — Sat, 30 Jun 2007

"There were lines and crowds—a mixture of eBayers, the techno chic and the techno geeks—but once the dust had settled, once the fog of war had cleared... there were still giant piles of iPhones left." Haha, plenty of iPhones are still in stores.

169

Indro De — Fri, 29 Jun 2007

More important than the iPhone. My Emotiva LMC-1/LPA-1 separates are arriving today. I'm pretty excited about that.

168

Indro De — Thu, 28 Jun 2007

The iPhone is Apple stores tomorrow and I wonder how many people will spend the night waiting in line to spend $600 on A PHONE! Granted, the iPhone is pretty nice, and can't really be called a phone anymore, but I never understood why people camp out in front of stores or movie theatres to be the first to get their hands on a Playstation 3 or on Star Wars Episode I.

167

Indro De — Wed, 27 Jun 2007

Reading and researching about speakers, set-ups, audio electronics and the such, I came across an interesting website on Speaker Wire - A History. Interesting read.

166

Indro De — Tue, 26 Jun 2007

I am currently in the process of upgrading my speaker system/home theatre. My Infinity Beta 50 speakers (in cherry) have arrived today, along with an Emotiva BPA-1 stereo amplifier. I will use the Emotiva amp for a 2.1 setup in another room. For the living room/home theatre, I will have the Beta 50s in the front, along with an Infinity center speaker and two Athena surrounds.

165

Indro De — Mon, 25 Jun 2007

This is something for my roommates, because they can't live without an air-conditioner (and I really like the hot weather). Here are tricks to keep your house cool this summer. My electric bill has almost tripled since summer weather has kicked in...

164

Indro De — Sun, 24 Jun 2007

Back from D.C. and a trip to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. I took tons of photographs. Expect some of them to appear on Lucid Heavens soon.

163

Indro De — Sat, 23 Jun 2007

I am in Washington D.C. today and tomorrow.

162

Indro De — Fri, 22 Jun 2007

Here are a few useful tips for those getting started with Ruby on Rails.

161

Indro De — Thu, 21 Jun 2007

The Floater is a very nicely designed aluminum device for those lucky people who own a Macbook Pro and use a larger external display. The Floater is a perfect example of excellent form and function combined.

160

Indro De — Wed, 20 Jun 2007

CSS Tip of the Day: CSS has a text-indent property to indent the first line of an element such as a paragraph. Now what if you want to keep the first line as-is and indent the remaining lines? Easy solution:


		text-indent: -2em;

		margin-left: 2em;

The entire element gets a margin assigned to it, and the first line gets a negative indentation of the same value. It is therefore moved to the left.

159

Indro De — Tue, 19 Jun 2007

I ordered a pair of Infinity Beta 50 floorstanding speakers. Can't wait to receive them and try them out.

158

Indro De — Tue, 19 Jun 2007

Check this out: Plasma Pong, a variation of the famous Pong game “that utilizes real-time fluid dynamics to drive the game environment.” It's like pong on drugs.

157

Indro De — Mon, 18 Jun 2007

This looks like a cool idea. The shirts don't look too shabby either. I haven't figured out though why anyone would actually text message to that number on the shirt.

156

Indro De — Mon, 18 Jun 2007

I came across this interesting approach of aligning text vertically with CSS. Horizontal aligning is easy with text-align:center. In the following approach, to align text vertically, you assign the line-height of your paragraph the same value as the height of your box. I haven't tried this out, but supposedly the text will float in the middle of the box.

155

Indro De — Mon, 18 Jun 2007

Paul McCartney turns 65 today.

154

Indro De — Sun, 17 Jun 2007

You can already preorder Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on Amazon. Release date of the version will be during the month of October.

153

Indro De — Sat, 16 Jun 2007

Safari 3 passes the Acid2 Test. Opera 9 can do it too. Why didn't Firefox catch up yet?

152

Indro De — Fri, 15 Jun 2007

Blinksale is one of those well designed, very functional, and simple web applications. With Blinksale you can easily send invoices to your customers. It even has Basecamp integration and its own API.

151

Indro De — Thu, 14 Jun 2007

The Windows version of Apple's browser Safari 3 has been downloaded one million times in the first two days of its release. Hopefully this will be another step to wipe out Internet Explorer, because Safari is about the best thing that has happened to Windows browsing

150

Indro De — Wed, 13 Jun 2007

I'm a big fan of 37signals and their web-based productivity applications. Since a few days ago, I'm an avid user of Backpack to organize my life, and I'm also using a Writeboard to coordinate tasks for a web project (let my customer add change requests and communicate in one place). Another thing to mention and another reason to use their applications is that all of 37signal's products were built with Ruby on Rails.

149

Indro De — Wed, 13 Jun 2007

France finally has his drunk Yeltsin! This is hilarious.

148

Indro De — Wed, 13 Jun 2007

Another attempt to update (zen punch) on a more regular basis. We'll see how that goes.

147

Indro De — Tue, 12 Jun 2007

So far, it didn't make much sense getting an HD subscription and an HD TV if you were watching TV most of the time. But apparently, HD channels will be in full bloom in the near future.

146

Indro De — Mon, 11 Jun 2007

Everybody knows that you can create style sheets that get triggered when a visitor wants to print a website.


		<style type="text/css" media="print">

Most of the time, you don't want unnecessary graphics or layout elements to be printed. You'll probably want to get rid of multi-column layouts too. Another thing that doesn't make sense is to include hyperlinks, but you may want to print out links instead. Here's how you get this done:


		a:after {

		    content: " (" attr(href) ") ";

		}

This writes out the link and prints out the link URL afterwards. You might also want to add a text-decoration:none; to your anchor style.

145

Indro De — Mon, 28 May 2007

Facebook has launched Facebook Platform, a platform to allow users to develop applications that can integrate into Facebook. I'm a little bit sceptical about the number of useless applications that will appear. I will keep you updated.

144

Indro De — Sun, 27 May 2007

Alonso, Hamilton, and Massa make the podium in this year's Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix. Alonso made a hattrick (pole position, winner of the race, and fastest lap). I miss Michael Schumacher

143

Indro De — Sat, 26 May 2007

I enjoyed watching some of the 2007 Aussie Millions Poker Championships coverage with Gus Hansen triumphing over Jimmy Fricke and taking home $1,200,000. The event was held back in January (I think) and was, umm, pretty damn good, especially when it came down to the final table.

142

Indro De — Thu, 24 May 2007

We finally got our wireless internet installed and set up with a Linksys WRT54GX4 Wireless-G Broadband Router (bought it from newegg.com though). It needed some research online to get everything run flawlessly and even now, my roommate laptop which unfortunately runs on Windows XP has some problems, but that's more due to the fact that the college messed up his network settings. I'll have to look into that sometime soon.

141

Indro De — Thu, 17 May 2007

Anyone tried CODA? It's Panic's new "one-window web development" solution, including Transmit, my FTP app of choice.

140

Indro De — Wed, 16 May 2007

Check out Icon Buffet, a good place to get high quality icons for your webdesign/application ventures.

139

Indro De — Wed, 16 May 2007

The college next door is done for this school year. That means I will have more time to actually get things done. Expect massive upgrades to this website soon, a geckostyle redesign, and some other things.

138

Indro De — Tue, 15 May 2007

Dirk Nowitzki is the first European to ever be awarded with NBA's Most Valuable Player title. Good job, next year the championship ring.

137

Indro De — Wed, 25 Apr 2007

I'm now the proud owner of a shiny, new LG VX8700 cell phone (view slideshow). Very nice so far.

136

Indro De — Wed, 25 Apr 2007

Woah, update! Sorry for the luck of updates recently. I will try to fill in the missing (17) days from time to time, but things will be hectic until after the 12th of May.

135

Indro De — Tue, 24 Apr 2007

Secret passageways in your house? Disguised as bookcases? Pretty damn awesome if you ask me (thanks for the tip, O.).

134

Indro De — Fri, 13 Apr 2007

I'm back to working with some ASP/VBScript. So yeah, here's something I was looking for which might be useful for someone somewhere. DateSerial(Year(Date()), Month(Date()), 1) This finds the first day of the current month. You actually need this sometimes, for example if you want to display data of the current and the next two months (instead of the next three months, which would leave out everything in the current month so far...).

133

Indro De — Thu, 12 Apr 2007

American novelist Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday in his New York home. Official website here.

132

Indro De — Wed, 11 Apr 2007

Facebook looks so different now. But I like most of the changes made to the navigation, inbox, and network pages as well as the many small interface updates.

131

Indro De — Wed, 11 Apr 2007

Instead, I'm taking care of Liz' parakeet "Snowcap" until Sunday night. Cute little bird.

130

Indro De — Wed, 11 Apr 2007

Still waiting to get Lucy back. The girls that took care of her while I was in Germany don't want to give her back to me. Seriously, this is not cool at all.

129

Indro De — Tue, 10 Apr 2007

So here I am back in the States. Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Things got pretty busy lately. I'm hoping to wrap up some projects in the next days, so I'll apologize in advance if I'm late on updating this page.

128

Indro De — Wed, 04 Apr 2007

I am flying to New York City tomorrow.

127

Indro De — Tue, 03 Apr 2007

"U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced today, that it has received enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap for FY 2008." Here's the official press release (PDF)

126

Indro De — Mon, 02 Apr 2007

This guy attached a 50,000 gallon fish tank to his house. I would put a few hundred Caribe Piranha in it and feed them a cow once in a while.

125

Indro De — Sun, 01 Apr 2007

I went to the Duisburger Zoo today and took no less than 299 photos. Expect some of them to appear on Luicd Heavens soon.

124

Indro De — Sat, 31 Mar 2007

Take the challenge and name that hair-metal band. I only got Cinderella wrong. And Skid Row, but that was because one of the guys was wearing a Kiss shirt.

123

Indro De — Fri, 30 Mar 2007

I'm back from Frankfurt. The trip was a success and I will have time to look at other things now (such as updating this website). I'm also working on some new projects. More about that soon.

122

Indro De — Thu, 22 Mar 2007

Sorry! No updates until March 30th. In the meantime, check out my brother's website geckostyle, or check what I'm doing on my twitter page which I'm gonna update from time to time.

121

Indro De — Wed, 21 Mar 2007

As expected, Internet Explorer screws up again. The embedded YouTube music video (on the left side) is not working, and YouTube's code broke the validation of my page (this is not IE's fault). As usual, everything works fine with a good browser.

120

Indro De — Tue, 20 Mar 2007

Something else that's not yet on the live site, but running on my machine locally are tags. This and much more coming soon.

119

Indro De — Tue, 20 Mar 2007

I had to do it again. And I didn't want to wait, even though nothing is complete. Welcome to yet another redesign of (zen punch). Looks alright in all standards-compliant browsers, but I haven't looked at it with the Internet Explorer (I don't want to have nightmares tonight). And of course there are still a few things to do, such as: actually put links behind the images on the left, fix some broken links, reduce some image file sizes, rounded corners, etc. I'll leave that for tomorrow. Good night!

118

Indro De — Mon, 19 Mar 2007

This is a good one too: Businesses that failed to duplicate the success of "I can't believe it's yoghurt." There are so many other good lists. Check them out.

117

Indro De — Mon, 19 Mar 2007

Prescription drug or Metal band? Take the test. No matter what they say, I'll name my next Metal band Armour Thyroid.

116

Indro De — Mon, 19 Mar 2007

Twitter lets you share what you are doing with other people. It's just like leavin a global away message on the web. And, Twitter won the 2007 SXSW Web Award!

115

Indro De — Mon, 19 Mar 2007

Every year on June 17th, Diego Golberg, his wife Susy, and their kids take portrait pictures of themselves. They have done this since 1976 (back then they didn't have any kids). Take a look at this.

114

Indro De — Sun, 18 Mar 2007

Mac OS X never seizes to amaze me. I came across some PostScript documents which I wanted to convert to the more widely used Portable Document Format (PDF). Just open the .ps file with Preview, the standard PDF viewer that ships with Mac OS X, and it will convert the document to a PDF. You can then view and save it

113

Indro De — Sat, 17 Mar 2007

Apparently, XHTML 2.0 markup will look something like this.

112

Indro De — Sat, 17 Mar 2007

Apple just released iTunes 7.1.1. It's only a minor update. Use Software Update to upgrade to this version. If you don't have a Mac, then I'm sorry.

111

Indro De — Sat, 17 Mar 2007

"An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto one blade of grass to keep from falling off the earth." - Irish saying. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

110

Indro De — Fri, 16 Mar 2007

"Facebook Exporter for iPhoto is a free plugin for iPhoto that enables you to export photos directly to your Facebook account." You can add captions, tag friends, and everything else right out of iPhoto. The first really useful application coming out of the Facebook Platform.

109

Indro De — Thu, 15 Mar 2007

Why is it called "March Madness" anyway?

108

Indro De — Thu, 15 Mar 2007

March Madness is starting tomorrow. Of course, I have filled out my bracket (on Facebook) even though I have not followed NCAA Basketball at all (there's no college ball on German TV) this year. My choices are pretty random (more or less).

107

Indro De — Wed, 14 Mar 2007

I received my first spam message from the (zen punch) contact form. The message suggested that I should consolidate my debts by doing online gambling. Genius.

106

Indro De — Wed, 14 Mar 2007

This is how you can change the standard "Welcome to Darwin!" message of Mac OS X's Terminal. Open the terminal and do the following:

cd /etc


		      sudo cp motd motd_ORIG

		      sudo pico motd

In between you enter your password and then edit the welcome message and exit (^X and Y to safe). The next time you start the terminal you'll be greeted with "All your base are belong to us" or whatever else you entered.

105

Indro De — Tue, 13 Mar 2007

Yeah, I know. This post is a little bit late too. I'm extremely busy these days (one level up from being "somewhat busy").

104

Indro De — Mon, 12 Mar 2007

I'm a little bit late with this post, because I've been somewhat busy recently. Here is a formula on marinating meat, a Stop Smoking QuitMeter for those who want to stop smoking, and photos of cats getting washed for your general entertainment. Enjoy!

103

Indro De — Sun, 11 Mar 2007

Sweet-ass sand castle.

102

Indro De — Sat, 10 Mar 2007

Lucid Heavens is my photo blog. Just wanted to share this. I will try to post new images more regularly from now on.

101

Indro De — Sat, 10 Mar 2007

I was close. My bet was a K.O. in the third round, but Vladimir Klitschko knocked out Ray Austin in the second round to defend his IBF heavyweight title in front of a "home crowd" in Mannheim, Germany.

100

Indro De — Sat, 10 Mar 2007

One hundred posts! And a branding change: Zen Punch is now (zen punch).

99

Indro De — Fri, 09 Mar 2007

Engrish is a grammatically incorrect usage of English especially common in poorly translated Japanese video games. Some favorites: "A winner is you!", "To push start only 1 player button", and the classic "All your base are belong to us".

98

Indro De — Fri, 09 Mar 2007

SXSW Interactive is starting today in Austin, Texas. Panel members include web/design/development greats and idols such as Andy Budd, Dave Shea, danah boyd, Jeff Croft, Molly Holzschlag, Shaun Inman, Jonathan Snook, Jason Santa Maria and many more... Wish I were there.

97

Indro De — Thu, 08 Mar 2007

A neat gallery of the movie 300, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller (opening tomorrow, March 9th).

96

Indro De — Wed, 07 Mar 2007

I changed the font of my logo, because I stumbled upon a website called zenphoto which also uses Helvetica Neue in ultralight for writing out "zen". Here's the old logo. I may come up with another solution in the next days.

95

Indro De — Tue, 06 Mar 2007

Hello! I'm Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google). Haha yeah, and I'm the Pope. Seriously, the author (quote: "I like to browse web pages in Internet.", "i want my real friends to find my new site theirselfes, and i to be one of you.") could have tried a little harder. Nevertheless, it's funny and now we know that Sergey Brin has a GMail-account!

94

Indro De — Tue, 06 Mar 2007

Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is released on DVD today (only in the U.S. and A.). Very nice!

93

Indro De — Tue, 06 Mar 2007

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is a well-written and funny book introducing the basics of the programming language behind RoR. I also have the PDF-version of this book, but couldn't find it on the website. Contact me if you want it.

92

Indro De — Mon, 05 Mar 2007

The Krefeld Pinguine, the local professional hockey team of the city I'm currently living in, made the (pre-)playoffs (comparable to a wildcard series). I went to my first hockey game in Krefeld more than 12 years ago. Maybe I will catch a playoff game while I am in the area. The opponent is Hamburg, btw.

91

Indro De — Mon, 05 Mar 2007

Figuring out IE6 hacks reminded me of the following: Kill Bill's Browser. Take back the web. With a vengeance.

90

Indro De — Sun, 04 Mar 2007

Nasty bug in Internet Explorer 6 (and lower): when floating DIVs, negative margins do not work and the content just gets cropped from the page. The solution is easier than expected. This only works in good browsers: margin:-200px 0 0 0; So instead of this, use the lines below to move the DIV 200px to the top.

position:relative;
top:-200px;

As for (zen punch), I used this hack to move the right sidebar to the top of the page in order to overlap with the title bar image.

88

Indro De — Sat, 03 Mar 2007

For a cleaner, more Mac-like appearance of Firefox, get the GrApple (Eos) skin. Make sure that you use the standard feed icon (check here).

89

Indro De — Sat, 03 Mar 2007

If you are using Opera, my favorite skin is Sofa King, which is again based on the Safari's default browser skin.

87

Indro De — Sat, 03 Mar 2007

This would have been a lot of help the first time I chatted with Japanese people over AIM (especially Yukiko): Japan's Top Thirty Emoticons.

86

Indro De — Fri, 02 Mar 2007

When in Amsterdam, make sure to visit the Heineken Experience. It's supposed to be a tour of the Heineken brewery, but I didn't see much of the brewery. Instead, it's an interactive "voyage of discovery" (according to their website). Whatever it is, it's not bad and you get free beer (even though it's nasty Heineken) and a little present.

85

Indro De — Thu, 01 Mar 2007

I will be in Amsterdam today and the next few days.

84

Indro De — Wed, 28 Feb 2007

"The Online Dictionary is Reborn" according to the makers of Word Source. And yes, it adds several new and unique features and sports a clean, usable design. I have created a Word Source search engine (will install directly) based on the OpenSearch XML format, which you can add to your Firefox search engines.

83

Indro De — Tue, 27 Feb 2007

Running a Mac without Quicksilver is like [insert some witty analogy; c'mon, help me out here]. One of the most useful applications ever once you get the hang of it.

82

Indro De — Mon, 26 Feb 2007

I get bored of a design fairly quickly. So here it is. A new logo and some layout changes which will hopefully last for a little bit longer. Not tested under IE7/Windows yet.

81

Indro De — Mon, 26 Feb 2007

Martin Scorsese got Best Director and The Departed won Best Movie. Ok, it's a good movie and all, but last year's best? I didn't see any of the other nominated movies so I can't really state an opinion, but it sure must have been a pretty bad movie year if The Departed wins (full coverage).

80

Indro De — Sun, 25 Feb 2007

My Dreamhost-hosted websites (including this one) were down for almost 8 (!) hours today. After a planned power outage a few other things went wrong. Not good. Not good at all.

79

Indro De — Sat, 24 Feb 2007

Lothar-G?nther Buchheim (eng) - author, painter, and art collector died yesterday. He wrote the novel Das Boot which was later put into the movie Das Boot by Wolfgang Petersen. One of the best movies ever.

78

Indro De — Fri, 23 Feb 2007

I wanted to strip all HTML tags from the search results of this site's live search feature (not yet online). This is how it's done in Ruby where 'resbody' is a string: resbody.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "") This replaces everything between < and > symbols with an empty string. Long live regular expressions.

77

Indro De — Fri, 23 Feb 2007

What's the deal with the Mac OS X Finder icon? It really looks like two people making out, doesn't it?

76

Indro De — Fri, 23 Feb 2007

I'm not really impressed with Happy Cog's website relaunch. Sure, the site looks nice and does its job... but c'mon, we're talking about people like Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Daniel Mall. Maybe my expectations are just too high, but it's definitely not the best designed page ever as some people seem to think...

75

Indro De — Thu, 22 Feb 2007

Something else from the unlimited resources of high-quality freeware Mac applications: Aurora 3.2 is an alarm-clock with iTunes integration, remote control support, etc.

74

Indro De — Thu, 22 Feb 2007

iConcertCal checks your iTunes music library and generates a personal calendar of concerts in your city or area. The new version 1.1 supports international searches and lets you define an iConcertCal playlist for artists to include in your concert search.

73

Indro De — Wed, 21 Feb 2007

So you have your (RoR) web application ready for production on the web? If your site is hosted on Dreamhost then take a look at this very good guide to deploying a Rails app with Dreamhost.

72

Indro De — Wed, 21 Feb 2007

Magnetic Floating Bed anyone???

71

Indro De — Tue, 20 Feb 2007

Once more: if you must use Microsoft's browser Internet Explorer, then please download the newest version (7.0). Even better: get a real browser like Firefox or Opera so you can browse happy. Even better: get a Mac.

70

Indro De — Tue, 20 Feb 2007

Big shock after I downloaded Multiple IEs for Windows to test some website I made recently. First of all, Multiple IEs is a great tool because it allows you to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same computer. I wanted that to test my websites on IE6 which - unfortunately - a lot of people still use. And I really underestimated how much IE6 sucks and therefore how differently and erroneous some pages looked. Die, IE, die!

69

Indro De — Tue, 20 Feb 2007

Kurt Cobain would have turned 40 today.

68

Indro De — Tue, 20 Feb 2007

Yesterday, the third track leaked off Nine Inch Nails' 6th studio album “Year Zero”. This time it was found on a flash drive in Barcelona, Spain. Very interesting marketing campaign. You can get all three mp3s on this website.

67

Indro De — Mon, 19 Feb 2007

I have completed most of my RoR backend for this website. (zen punch) CORE is an ultra-customized content management system. From time to time I'll reveal more about this project.

66

Indro De — Mon, 19 Feb 2007

Some dude (actually, his name is Van Mardian) found a way to declutter his computer desk. Pretty neat (literally).

65

Indro De — Mon, 19 Feb 2007

Gravatars (globally recognized avatars) are those little pictures of you that show up next to your comments of blog posts (like it's already common in forums/message boards). A few days ago, Gravatar 2.0 was released. In case I ever enable commenting on this site, I need to figure out how to implement those little things in Ruby on Rails.

64

Indro De — Sun, 18 Feb 2007

I'm in pain. I won't guarantee any significant updates the next few days.

63

Indro De — Sat, 17 Feb 2007

In my AOL IM buddy list in Adium, someone just showed up as being -31 minutes idle. Does that mean that he will come back in 31 minutes? How does the computer know? Scary.

62

Indro De — Fri, 16 Feb 2007

This other flickr picture is not really funny, but pretty cool. It's M.C. Escher's “Crazy Stairs” (as Stewie Griffin would call it).

61

Indro De — Fri, 16 Feb 2007

Hahaha!

60

Indro De — Thu, 15 Feb 2007

I came across a very interesting and useful post about native color profiles on Macs. Also, check out this browser test on Safari.

59

Indro De — Wed, 14 Feb 2007

Some Norwegian dude named "John" registered zenpunch.com on January 31st. Damn, last time I checked it was still available. Whatever, I'll keep (zen punch) under indrode.com.

58

Indro De — Wed, 14 Feb 2007

Finally out of beta stage: Disco, the hottest disc burning utility for the Mac. It works well and also looks nice.

57

Indro De — Tue, 13 Feb 2007

The world's most famous Wing Chun Gung Fu artist Randy Williams is coming to the CRCA Lopez academy this weekend (2.17./2.18.) for a two-day seminar.

56

Indro De — Tue, 13 Feb 2007

Exactly one month after the launch of (zen punch), I have released the first major update. It includes a pretty nice contact form with AJAX-effects. Try it out and send me a message (check out “Contact Information” on the right)! Btw, all code is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.

55

Indro De — Tue, 13 Feb 2007

So far my only complaint about the MacBook and Apple's design decisions: the USB ports are too close to each other. When connecting an iPod shuffle to the first USB port, the second one becomes useless. Unfortunate, because I usually have my mouse attached to my Mac via one of the USB ports.

54

Indro De — Mon, 12 Feb 2007

Brigitte Monhaupt (english) is free. The “most evil and dangerous woman in Germany”, who was sentenced to five times life-sentence + 15 years is now leaving jail early after 24 years. She was member of the infamous RAF terrorist group from 1971-1982.

53

Indro De — Sun, 11 Feb 2007

In case you get bored on one of your transatlantic flights, why don't you crash the in-flight entertainment system?

52

Indro De — Sat, 10 Feb 2007

Even though I won't implement it on this website, sIFR 3 is worth mentioning. sIFR stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement and can be used to display any fonts on your website and make them behave like normal text (it uses the DOM to replace CSS styles). You can download the latest nightly and take a look at the sIFR 3 Wiki. You also need to have Macromedia Flash installed to edit your font movies.

50

Indro De — Fri, 09 Feb 2007

Locomotive and MAMP work like a charm for local RoR development. However, to avoid weird mySQL database connection errors, the following steps need to be made. In the Locomotive preferences, add the following to the “Additional Paths” field: /Applications/MAMP/bin/mysql4/bin Then, in database.yml of your Rails application, the only file that needs to be configured, add the following line to the development database configuration: socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock This will make everything run smoothly. In my opinion, Locomotive, MAMP, CocoaMySQL, and Textmate are by far the easiest, most convenient development tools combination for Ruby on Rails applications.

51

Indro De — Thu, 08 Feb 2007

This is also essential if you are doing web development on a Mac. MAMP is the abbreviation for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP, and exactly that's what you will get when you install this package (well, at least the former three items). Currently in version 1.4.1.

49

Indro De — Thu, 08 Feb 2007

Controversy about the name of Biathlon World Championships mascot "Bumsi" (picture). You have to understand German to understand this or this. Hillarious.

48

Indro De — Wed, 07 Feb 2007

Ruby on Rails is the new big thing in web development. I'm doing some offline application development on my Mac, but didn't want to go through the tedious setup process. The following programs make it a lot easier: 1. Locomotive, the one step Ruby on Rails solution. 2. CocoaMySQL, an open source MySQL manager for Mac OS X. 3. TextMate, the preferred text editor for Ruby.

47

Indro De — Tue, 06 Feb 2007

Johannes B. Kerner to Pascal Hens: “You have scored 47 goals during the World Cup. How many K?lsch did you have since then?” - Hens: “More than that.

46

Indro De — Tue, 06 Feb 2007

So yeah, I watched the Super Bowl but without the commercials. But it was interesting to see how the players kept themselves busy during the breaks. Some watched TV, the Colts offensive line played a game of badminton. I think Urlacher was solving sudokus.

45

Indro De — Mon, 05 Feb 2007

Super Bowl (a.k.a. Rain Bowl) on German TV without commercial breaks. Surreal.

44

Indro De — Mon, 05 Feb 2007

Germany made it! Handball World Champions 2007! I'm speechless. Heiner Brand is the Messiah. What is the Super Bowl again?

43

Indro De — Sun, 04 Feb 2007

The opening party of CRCA Moers was a great success, from what I heard (unfortunately, I couldn't attend). I will have some pictures and videos up soon.

42

Indro De — Sat, 03 Feb 2007

I am taking the rest of today and tomorrow off. No computer for me. Have a nice weekend everyone!

41

Indro De — Sat, 03 Feb 2007

The best instant messaging client for Macs, Adium X, is now available in version 1.0, moving away from it's long beta status. Check out all the changes in this version. Of course, Adium stays free to download.

38

Indro De — Fri, 02 Feb 2007

Crazy game! Germany beats France 32-31 after double overtime. Poland is the other finalist. The big game is on Sunday (and later there's the Super Bowl).

39

Indro De — Fri, 02 Feb 2007

This site is so not ready. Stay tuned for more changes. But first there's the grand opening of CRCA Moers, my brother's academy for close range combat. Go visit his academy tomorrow and Sunday at 3pm for some martial arts presentations, food, and good company.

40

Indro De — Fri, 02 Feb 2007

President George W. Bush: “I understand that we need to make sure that when a smart person from overseas wants to come and work it's in our interest to allow him or her to do so.” Apparently, the president supports more H1B numbers.

37

Indro De — Thu, 01 Feb 2007

Skype 2.5 for Mac has rolled out and now features text messaging and conference calls with all of your friends (for those of you with just 10 friends). Strangely, when I use Skype 2.0's “Check for Updates”, it tells me that I already have the newest version running.

36

Indro De — Thu, 01 Feb 2007

Three Bundesliga coaches have been fired/stepped down in the past 24 hours. Felix Magath, Jupp Heynckes, and Thomas Doll. Like that's gonna change anything...