arnekolja’s current stuff

Is there still anyone in need for a Google Wave invite? Seems like Google gave me some, so I'd be glad to spend them to anyone. First come, first served.

Somehow the last two weeks it seemed like the hype is already over... haven't noticed any questions for invites on Twitter or something. Anyhow, Wave is quite cool, so if you want to check it out just let me know.

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I don't want to start a flame war here between smokers and non-smokers, really. Of course I know that I am not allowed to say anything against cigarettes in this world though, right? ;-)

Anyway. You all read some news about Apple not repairing a smoker's Mac, right? I only have one single question about all those news these days: Why the heck is everyone talking about "permission to smoke in front of your Mac", instead of focusing on the damage of the machines the news were about? All magazines and all blog articles mention the damage, but then ask for terms and conditions for smokers which just isn't the point here. The point is that smoking in this cases caused self-imposed damage, not that people aren't allowed to smoke any more.

The problem's the damage. Not the permission to smoke. The damage. Goddammit. Damage! Smoke as much as you want, as long as I don't have to buy your smelly, yellowed Mac afterwards ;-)

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Now this one is funny. My intention was to show you how much I paid for Wing Commander 3 in 1995 and I almost missed the funny "name" at the bottom.

And yes, it has been very expensive for 1995, too. Don't know why I spent that much money on that game, but when thinking about it - it's been absolutely worth it!

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So thanks to http://dac-xp.com/ I'm activated for Google Wave now. I so much wanted this but... and now? Don't know what to do with it without having any friends activated for it too. Doesn't anyone want to make my buddy Ulf and me a present and send him an invite too, so I can really try it out? I assume there isn't anyone out there able to give another invite, as Google is not giving out any new ones these days, right? A bummer.

Anyhow - anyone having an account too and want to connect? Just let me know!

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Whenever your web application is going to offer user management, you might want to install at least a default admin user when creating your database. I searched the web for ideas to implement this and most of them come up with adding fixtures to your migrations. That's a really good one, of course, but I bet there is no way to dynamically hash your password using a fixture. I am using restful_authentication right now and this plugin does not only hash your password using SHA1, but adds a salt too. So a fixture is not what I wanted.

Instead I included the model itself in my migration, so the hashing and validation methods are used automatically. Hope this snippet is going to help others who are seeking for the same stuff. Let me know if it came in handy for you :-)

require 'app/models/user.rb'
class LoadDefaultUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    say "Trying to insert default user(s)..."
    user = User.create( :login => 'admin', :password => 'password', :password_confirmation => 'password', :email => 'admin@site.com' )
    unless user.errors.empty?
      say "Could not create admin user, see errors below:"
      user.errors.each do |e|
        say e
      end
    else
      say "Admin user created"
    end
  end
  def self.down
    User.delete_all
  end
end

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Just adapting @ulfklose's posting as a template here, as my setup is quite even to his:

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I don't get it. When taking a look at the internet culture I am always fracked by being German.

Social networking with Germans is always a pain in the ass, because they always do something special and avoid getting connected to the rest of the world this way. I know it's a matter of opinion somehow, but I can't really get the point when it comes to building up a special German clone called "MeinVZ" or "StudiVZ" instead of just using Facebook like every other person on the planet does. You may always argue that you shouldn't roll with the mainstream or you shouldn't give a single service too much power, which is perfectly right. But when just building up a German version of it these arguments don't fit in. In the end it's just the Germans being isolated from the rest of the world's and this is exactly the pain in the ass that I am talking about.

I want to do social networking with my friends and my family. There's no way around it, I'm just having too much fun doing it to just leave it. But why the heck do they need to spread over dozens of websites and tell "I don't want to be on Facebook, I'm already registered with too many websites" instead of just joining the right one? lol. Sounds like I'm doing advertising for Facebook, but I'm not. Not taking any money for it anyway, I'm just pissed. I don't want these bad clones. And they actually are bad, that's for sure. Whoever is reading this and doesn't come from Germoney, be assured: I'm envious of you about not knowing these sites and the pain they're causing.

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I'm currently preparing my private domain arnekolja.de for a total change. So for now I'm disabling the comment system as all of the important stuff goes on somewhere else (Posterous, mainly) and I can keep my inbox clean by not having those comment spam moderations generated. The next step will be the total change I mentioned above. Just need to have some free hours for finishing the first release of my nice little piece of software to do so. Hope this will happen within the next four weeks, stay tuned.

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QuickTime X in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard comes with a handy feature for taking screencasts. Now there's one problem with that: You can only capture your whole screen, but not only an area of it. That may be a problem if you want to show only a small application window to your viewers, especially if you're running a huge screen resolution as for my iMac 24" with 1920x1200.

 Well. I hope that Apple is going to add an option for that in the future, but until then there's a quite usable way to do it anyway: You can make use of the screen zooming feature. For me that one is triggered by using the control key and my mouse ball/wheel. QuickTime X will capture the screen exactly like you see it, so zooming is pretty neat for working around that issue.

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On the day Leopard was released it immediately found its place on my hard disk. At first it seemed like there haven't been any problems with it, but within the next few days I stumbled across keychain problems again and again. Sometimes I had to enter my MobileMe password again, or my Mail.app passwords couldn't be saved and things like that.

 I tried to fix it using a method I found on the web, which was deleting the default keychain (called "Login") and creating a new one manually followed by making the new one the default keychain again. And it seemed to work quite good... well, but it worked only in the first place. When I synced my MacBook with the same MobileMe account again, the keychain got totally borked. My iMac's Snow Leopard couldn't even use the trash any more. Instead of moving files to the trash every file had to be removed immediatly - and permanently.

 When this problem came up, I searched for permission problems of any kind, using Finder, Disk Utility and even the Terminal. Permissions seemed to be correctly set, but I still could not use the trash any more and the keychain didn't work only temporarily, too.

 I tried everything that came to my mind, primarily resetting my MobileMe sync data with fresh keychains and such, but it all didn't help. Either the iMac or the MacBook didn't use the keychain I created and if one actually did, it threw errors or didn't save the passwords I typed. Even without syncing the keychains at all I wasn't able to use the keychain I created correctly.

 I already thought about installing Snow Leopard again, but luckily I tend to find the problems when it comes to the hard steps ;-)

 I played around with the first aid option of the Keychain Access application and found out, that the newly emerged problems seemed to have something to do with me following the guide of resetting the default keychain. I deleted my new default keychain again and ran the first aid on my keychains again. And well, how shall I put it? It fixed everything. The first aid with no (!) default keychain recreated it for me and after this one was created, everything worked fine again. Of course I had to make sure that MobileMe wasn't syncing the bad data again, so I reset the keychain data on the MobileMe side again, disabled syncing for the time I ran the first aid and then manually synced the working keychain back again.

 But now everything works again. I just had a small "problem" again, which turned out to be just a setting in the keychain itself. Every five minutes my Mail.app and the MobileMe sync client asked for a password to use the keychain again, but this could be fixed by disabling both security options the keychain offers. These two options are usually disabled by default to avoid this "Windows Vista madness" of too many security checks bugging the user, but were enabled when the first aid wizard created it for me.

 I don't really know what went wrong here, I can just guess that it's got something to do with my user profiles not being the same that I used on Leopard before. When I installed Snow Leopard I created the same users again, but I didn't restore them from my backup but created them using the installation wizard. Maybe the data that got synced from MobileMe had different ownerships or something like that. Two users with the same username don't have to be the same user from the UNIX point of view, so maybe that was the problem, I don't know. But what I know is that I've got a smoothly running system back!

 So if you run into keychain problems after migrating to a new Mac OS X version I suggest to clean up your default keychain like I did. Luckily all my really important passwords reside in 1password and if it's not the same for you, you may want to manually migrate some of your keychain items. But it can be essential to remove the keychain and let it be recreated by the first aid wizard. Don't create one manually, just use the wizard and I hope you'll be fine :-)

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