Author: rolfje

Hex color picker for OSX

2008-12-24 rolfje No Comments

If you’re working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found:

First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected color in Hex.

To reach the color picker, you usually start up any application which uses the standard OSX color picker and just choose “choose color”. What you can also do, is have the OSX color picker behave as a standalone application in 3 simple steps:

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Apple, Software

Programmer Quotes

2008-12-19 rolfje No Comments

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth:

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Rick Osborne

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” – Brian Kernighan

These two quotes are briliantly summing up the usual rant I always use. “if my phone rings at 3 a.m. for a prio 1 production issue, I want to be able to easily read the code. And I’m not going to be awake or cheerful at that time of night.” I guess at that time of night, it’s easy to awaken the violent psychopath in me, and so it better not be “smart” code. CVS blame support anybody?

Software

Wiimote Whiteboard

2008-12-12 rolfje 7 Comments

For people wanting to have an interactive whiteboard but don’t have the money, Johnny Chung Lee has found the solution. Using a Wiimote, he can track an infrared lightsource (like an LED) and use that to control the mousecursor. I tried some software on the Mac and the PC, and I actually got both to work without too much trouble.

Micro Victories

2008-12-11 rolfje 1 Comment

Trophy The last few weeks I was frustrated about not being able to write any code for the project I am on at work. My days are filled with email, spreadsheets, documents, discussions and distractions. All important stuff, I’m sure, but none of it has got to do with actual coding.

I tried to write code during the evenings for that project, just to get my kicks. Two things happened:

Frustration grew, because I feel that this is the kind of work I should be doing during the day.
As I worked the late night hours, I realized I could never get it all done because the blocks of work were simply to large and required too much research to be done during a few evenings.

Brilliant TV

2008-12-08 rolfje No Comments

People who know me know that I’m not a big fan of commercial TV. It hasn’t got any depth, it usually underproduced, overmarketed and makes an insulting assumption on the viewer’s intelligence. (Wow, all in one sentence 🙂 )

So I usually get my information elsewhere. Most of the stuff I find interesting is provided through RSS feeds. Some of it is made available through audio podcasts, which is brilliant when commuting. As for video, youtube looked promising, but the messy interface and sheer overload of people making silly movies with their mobile phones has made it hard for me to find actual interesting video there. The rating system with YouTube did improve the past week, but it’s still hard to find stuff that interests me.

Enter the TED talks. These are brilliant video’s mostly of a presentation, or sometimes music. But generally, the TED talks are just that tiny bit more interesting than TV, without commercials, and with real contents.

Just now I finished watching Mena Trott’s entertaining presentation on how blogs are building a friendlier world. The TED.com site is really clean, easy to browse and contains tons of video’s about remarkable people with very interesting stories to tell. If my TV died, the only way I’d notice is when I switch on my PS3 to play a video game.

Fun

Monkeys: How to get rich.

2008-11-23 rolfje No Comments

I recently got an email with a brilliant little fairytale about how to trick people into happily giving you all their money. I wanted to share with you, but it was in Dutch, and the origin was cleary not the original author.

Today I was rummaging around the internet to see if I could find the original author, and I did. I found out that the Dutch story was freely translated from an English source. Here’s the original story from that English source, unaltered (and with reference):

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Fun

Let Me Google That For You

2008-11-20 rolfje No Comments

We’ve probably all had it. Just when you thought you found the right number of Palindromic Square Sums, you receive a mail from somewhere up the chain of command with a cry for help. The rather lengthy mail contains 3 paragraphs on why this mail was so important, why it was sent to you and why you need to reply “immediately”. At the end of the mail, there is a fairly trivial question like “How many pounds is in one kilogram”?

So you search Google and find out that 1 kilogram is 2.20462262 pounds. Depending on your irritation, you mail the information, or a link to the google results (because it is a top hit). For people not taking the hint of your Google url, there’s now another nice option, called “Let Me Google That For You”.

It’s a bit more obvious to the hard hearing, and less blunt than a similar service I used a few years ago. Here’s the empty link so you can roll your own: letmegooglethatforyou.com

Fun

J-Fall 2008

2008-11-13 rolfje No Comments

Last wednesday I was at J-Fall 2008, a fairly large event for Java programmers in the Netherlands. This event is organized by NLJUG. You can read some of my notes on the different sessions in my public evernote.

Zoom Experience 2008

2008-11-11 rolfje No Comments

Last sunday, I was at the Zoom Experience 2008 in Utrecht. The organization has learned a lot since last year’s debute of the Zoom Experience. There was plenty of room to walk, lots of places to sit down and talk, and the talks were in seperate areas with less noise.

This is what the Zoom Experience looked like on Sunday morning:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy8mXREd7Lo]

Hardware

Transporting Oracle CHARs over a dblink

2008-11-04 rolfje 1 Comment

At work, we’ve got two Oracle databases and a Java web application. One of the tasks of the web application is to copy tables over from one database to the other. Last week we ran into a funny problem which turns out to be an Oracle bug.

I’ve posted a question about this last week on stackoverflow.com but it seems that not many people are affected by this particular problem, or at least not many people know the answer to this particular little problem. We set out to tackle this and we did.

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Software