Running Code

Twenty Procrastination Tips

2011-10-07T00:00:00Z

Don’t expect Tips against your Procrastination. Instead I’ll provide you with some ideas on what to procrastinate with. This is my personal List of Shame with things I did in the last week in order not to work and actually learn for that last exam which is coming up rather soon.

So here you go, in no particular order:

Update Software on all available Devices.
Clean up Documents Folder.
Check HackerNews, open a couple tabs, get lost in the interwebs.
Tag unnamed faces in iPhoto (holy crap, I have 11.417 unnamed faces left, might have to come back to this one).
Shop for new Music, which you believe may make you work more efficiently, on Amazon MP3.
Browse the Productivity Category in the AppStore. Figure to get nothing new.
Go to the grocery shop.
Invite friends for dinner and cook.
Again: Check HackerNews and open tabs, get lost – this is just too easy.
Watch a week worth of The Daily Show episodes (5 times 21 minutes = 105 minutes).
Check activity on all your bank accounts.
Check your monthly spendings and find ways to save up (actually not that senseless).
Clear out your clothes.
Review privacy settings on Facebook.
Accidentally (you may also do this on purpose) smash the glass inset of a door, take care of glass splinters, organizing the repair and insurance.
Do sports.
Sell stuff on eBay (btw: My 24" iMac is on sale).
Check your backup-strategy, on all devices.
Clear out your clothes, a second time because this actually is not that easy.
Write a blog post on your own ways to procrastinate.

Hope you found some inspiration, you may also print this list and check items one by one as you work your way through.

And please, share your ways to procrastinate in the comments. I’d love to know more.

Great: with that out of the way, let’s do some real work now!

Wallpapers - August 2011

2011-08-18T00:00:00Z

Short update on my Wallpaper Collection. Some Additions to my random rotation, maybe you find something you like:

For Reference, a handy GitHub Gist Wallpaper.md.

From top left to bottom right:

NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour’s launch at night
Visualizing Facebook Friends by @paulgb
Golden Gate Bridge by Night by @ginader
Andy’s room by @mantia
Barcelona
bonsai_2560.jpg, can’t find the original source though :/
Left Brain – Right Brain
Octocat Wallpaper by @github
Concrete by @antonpeck
Eclipse
private
Flow by @bartelme
Haltestelle by @96dpi
Hardwood with Lights by @zkl
Helena Christensen
Helveticon
HTML 5
Crab on the beach by yours truly
Flowers I by yours truly
Flowers II by yours truly
Box made out of recycled paper as seen in Weltladen Andernach by yours truly
Elizabeth Taylor
Joseph Beuys, Schottland 1974 by Robert Lebeck, via @lumas_de
Lake (dead link sadly)
HLS World by @briansuda
Olivia Wilde
Opportunity Mars Rover, via @big_picture
Door in France by yours truly
private
Sleeping pad by yours truly.
Rosario Dawson
I <3 Typography by @evolve8
Typomaps by @DSnulldrei

Please note: All Rights belong to the corresponding owners of the imagery. If you don’t like your work shown here, please drop me a line and I’ll remove it from the list.

Everbody else, enjoy!

Fresh Setup of OS X Lion - a walk-through

2011-08-18T00:00:00Z

Setting up my MacBook Pro with a fresh install of Mac OS X Lion – a brief walk-through. I’d like to do a fresh reinstall, which means I’ll wipe the disk.

First things first: What do I need to backup?

Turns out it’s not that much in 2011, especially for my Laptop which I use as a secondary machine only. Good place to start is the personal Users folder.

I like to keep my Desktop empty, so nothing here to save
Documents is symlinked into my Dropbox, so nothing to save here as well
Downloads: had some misc stuff here, turned out it all could be deleted
Dropbox: Okay, this is important. But it’s in the Cloud anyway. So: next!
Movies, Pictures & Music: I currently don’t have actual files on my Laptop, only on the iMac, so nothing to save here (Note for Pictures: PhotoBooth saves its Library in a separate file in there, there wasn’t anything of value for me, but you might have to check)
Custom Folders: I keep a Code Directory in my Users folder. But browsing through the contents reassured me, they are either cloned public GitHub repositories, thus can be retrieved at any time, or are private repositories. Just ran a quick git status to make sure there are no unsynced changes.

Looking good!

Next up: Applications!

Might as well do some clean up along the way and abolish never-used Apps…let’s open AppCleaner.

first victim: Adium. You served me well but iChat is just too nice, especially since I don’t need all that multi-messenger stuff anymore – Jabber ftw!
Eclipse: you served me well, too. But as long as I don’t need to do Java-y stuff I’d rather keep you outta here.
Flickr Uploadr: Hardly ever used you, the UI needs a major makeover…and the web-interface is just fine.
R: You are cool, but our University course on Analysis & Visualization is over.
Scribo: Textmate works great as a Latex Editor, though I might get back to you.
TrailRunner: Hardly ever used you.
BetterTouchTool: I’ll try without you, Apple finally improved the multi-touch settings in Lion. Not sure this will be a permanent decision.
OpenOffice: This will be interesting. Recently purchased Pages.app in the AppStore so I have this aspect covered already. I’ll try to use Google Docs for everything else.
Xbench: I already know my SSD is pretty fast. Just ran a quick check to see if this is still the case on year later and yes, good results – even a tad better then the last time I ran it. Thank you.

Cool, this alone cut down the list by 9 entries and freed 867 MB disk space (I don’t have that much to waste with my 50 GB SSD).

Let’s quickly check the other Tabs in AppCleaner.app:

Widgets: DeliveryStatus is the only thing I care about.
Others: AppCleaner lists media-conversion components here, as well as custom Preference Panes. Perian, Growl are there to last.

Let’s save what we have as screenshots: Applications I, Applications II

2011 – the year of the AppStore. It’s possible to re-download all Applications without fuzz but let’s take a screenshot to know which were actually installed: AppStore Installs

Keychain & SSH

Forgot this once and while it was not too hard to recover the lost credentials I wanted to get this right this time. Turns out your keychain is located in ~/Library/Keychains/ – the file is probably called login.keychain but there may be more – just backup them all. Reference: Apple Knowledge Base (though this is for 10.4 it’s still the same).

Okay, great. So what’s (purposely) missing?

All things Browser-related: I sync Google Chrome with my Google Account so I’m safe here.
Dropbox
Settings: I’d like to start with a blank slate and build up from there. May be different for you.
Contacts & Events: Yep, in my Google Account.
Printers: I’ll have to set them up once again, not sure if you can properly “export” them but I don’t really mind.
Drivers: there are none. YES!

Great, looks like we are nearly ready to go. But…let’s run a quick ls -la in ~ to check what’s hidden there…

I don’t care for the various dotfiles which got stuck here over time – as said before, I’d like to start with a blank slate. But I do mind ~/.ssh however! Let’s back that up and save it in a secure place (that is, not in Dropbox).

Cool. I’ll save the passphrase for my current Wifi somewhere so I don’t have to actually stand up and walk down and look for a cable or check the password on the router before the first sync with everything cloudy.

Let’s restart in Recovery Mode (by pressing ⌘+R on startup) and try to install some fresh Lion. See you in a minute.

(Snap! Turns out it took me a bit longer, it’s 18th August now)

Oh well. The problem which took me a while to figure out was the Firmware Password I set on my Macbook Pro about a week ago, along with the installation of Prey. I’ll save this issue for a dedicated blog-post…

Fresh Install – Partitions

In order to have a truly fresh install I created a separate partition and installed 10.7 on there. Afterwards I deleted the old OS and merged the partitions again. Simply running Install will only upgrade your old OS.

Up & Running

Google Chrome, setting up Sync
Dropbox, starting Sync
AppStore: XCode, Pages, MPlayerX, CloudApp, Caffeine, Soundcloud, The Unarchiver, Twitter
Download & Install: 1Password, Mailplane, PeepOpen, Pixer, GitHub, Arq, Alfred, Textmate, Firefox, TaskPaper, Skype, Sequel Pro, VirtualHost X, Perian Preference Pane, Growl, AppCleaner, Prey, TotalTerminal
Install brew and oh-my-zsh, enabling some Plugins
brew: MacVim, rvm, wget
Move my Dock to the left, decrease Magnification
Remove extraneous Icons from the Dock / Finder Sidebar, solid Menubar-Background
Running Software Update
Turning on the Firewall & File Sharing
Wiring up 1Password and Dropbox, installing Browser Extensions for Dropbox
Setting up my Google Account in Mail, Contacts & Calendars
Setting up my Google Account with Address Book (why is this not the same…?)
Getting familiar with the Trackpad Settings
Setting up Wallpaper Rotation
Setting up Prey, testing Reports
Creating ~/Code and checking out my private Repositories in there
Enabling PHP5 in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf & restart Apache
Restoring ~/.ssh form my Backup

I didn’t install all the Applications I had before and will just install them when necessary.

Less then 20 steps for a fresh and slightly customized system. Gone are the days of juggling with multiple CDs and driver installations and stuff. You’d be screwed without broadband though.

21.6 GB still free on my SSD. Feels snappy!

Problems

When installing brew on Lion, use a modified install-script to avoid problems when running brew update (Reference, Issue 6886).

Other than that, I didn’t run into serious problems caused by 10.7 – looks like all Developers took care of compatibility before the release.

Do it!

Upgrade if you haven’t yet. This post doesn’t focus on all the nice small improvements in Lion but I think Apple delivered a good Update – no revolution – but reasonable additions, needed improvements & some really nice UI-refinements. Exciting times, the roll-out of iCloud will certainly make some of Lions hidden features more apparent.

Phew, you made it this far? A rather boring and imageless post but maybe you found a tidbit or two which helped you improve your setup. Get oh-my-zsh and TotalTerminal if you use the command line more than once a day. Feel free to share additions in the comments!

London 2011

2011-08-07T00:00:00Z

Sitting in the train back home (finally! after 4 months) and what to do? Maybe just writing down all the thoughts spinning through my head after a busy week in London.

London by _dChris, on Flickr

A dear friend of mine had to catch a flight from LGW to ORD and wanted to spent some days in London before. Lucky I met a Londoner last year on Kecil Perhentian / Malaysia who we could crash with. We did no planning beforehand, as the end of the term in University was bloody busy, but hey – planning?!

Our spontaneous itinerary roughly ended up looking like this:

Monday:

Late Arrival: trying to find our host at Victoria station. Huge one. Not an easy task but finally successful.

Tuesday (sunny!):

Renting Barclays Bikes: took us a few minutes to grasp the system but were experts afterwards – helped at least 4 Tourists & Londoners to rent bikes.
Walking westwards on the South Side of the Thames: Gabriels Wharf has nice places for short breaks along the way
Being lazy in Green & Hyde Park: get some supplies before heading there. Finding a supermarket might not be the easiest task around London. Marks & Spencer isn’t as expensive as you might think.

Wednesday (sunny!):

Renting Barclays Bikes
Borough Market and some traditional fish & chips
Fresh Avocados (4 for 1 £?! What a bargain.) in Green Park
Sushi followed by people-watching around Leicster Square

London Bridge (Tower Bridge) : Reflection on the River Thames by Anirudh Koul, on Flickr

Thursday (rainy!):

Tate Modern: free entry, the Miró exhibition was well worth the extra entrance-fee. Huge collection in general, impressive architecture but sometimes a bit too much in one room but nevertheless inspiring in between. Looked like a great place for families with small children.
Tower of London: get tickets online to save a few pennies and avoid the queues (you can pick up the tickets at the group-ticket counter with you credit card)
Tower Bridge: feels so small up on the walkway, good views anyway.
Splashing out around Covent Garden at night: bring ID or it may get difficult. And a Credit Card surely helps as well (see further below).

Friday (sunny, mostly):

Being just in time for a flight from London-Gatwick
Borough Market, again: come here, especially busy with extra stands on Fridays – great but slightly overpriced food. There is an Ale-shop which sells German beer, amongst some strange other brews.
Walking around Old Street: Probably been to the most hipster place around – Look Mum, No Hands. The sign on the sidewalk read “Cold Drinks, Hot Drinks, Coffee & Bike repairs”. Vintage bikes and fresh tomatoes in the front window, oh yes.
Drinks at a Pub

Saturday (sunny but rather cool):

Walking around Brick Lane: Been to Berlin Prenzlberg and found the look of people around there interesting? Forget about them, come here. Those hipsters in Berlin would hide in shame of what is cool around here. Seriously, the commonly known measure of hipsterness for an area, hipster-per-squaremeter or h/s in short, is just so damn high here.
Marocanian lunch: guess this is only on Saturdays but you can’t miss the huge factory building with the chimney on Brick Lane. Inside are ~10 stands with surprisingly good Asian and European snacks. The burmese shop didn’t sell original fare though.
Shopping: this is the area for vintage & 2nd Hand stuff, if you’re into this. Found a nice shop for simple shoes which was rather my thing.
Indian dinner: best Indian food I had in ages, if you happen to live nearby or want some take-away, consider them: New Dewaniam

Sunday:

Rushing to London-Luton: catching the flight back home. If you have the option, choose Gatwick over Luton – far easier and faster to get there.

I felt in need of some real holidays after these busy days in the end of our term in July. Some days in a big city aren’t really holidays but I enjoyed it really much.

We were lucky to be hosted by a friend which quite frankly is the best option to visit any place. You instantly feel connected and at home, get views normal tourists would never have and finally have someone to ask about the one or the other strange british thing.

London is expensive, but not as crazy expensive as it was several years ago. People use their credit cards for just about everything which felt a bit weird at first but got really convenient in the end. Now curious about my next bill… DIRTYMARTINI - 32.00 GBP – what the…? Ah, that night.

Public transportation is great.

We borrowed Oyster Cards and topped them up every now and then. Our host told us the system automatically charges the cheapest available option – if e.g. you travel quite a lot on one particular day you may be charged the price for a day-ticket if this is cheaper than single fares. The tube is one of the probably best known features of London and it worked well. The air-condition isn’t as good as in the Skytrain / Bangkok (the best!) and most of the lines don’t run at night but other than that, really good service.

Empty Barclays Cycles by BuhSnarf, on Flickr

Another thing our host made us aware of are the Barclays Bikes / iPhone-App (didn’t use it and seems to require data connection but looks handy, as finding the nearest stations was a bit tricky at times…). Rather new, hundreds of bike-stations were introduced by the Mayor of London with support by Barclay all around town. The charge is 1 £ / 24 hours use plus usage-fees. The first 30 minutes are free, so if you can get to your destination in 30 minutes and return the bike in time (we made it!) you can get around London for 1 £ for 24 hours – good deal, I’d say. Subscriptions with special keys are also available. The system works with credit cards. The user-interface of the stations is a bit counter-intuitive and could be vastly improved but the good prices and surprisingly many dedicated bicycle-lanes make this a healthy alternative to using public transportation.

Oh, we didn’t notice any of the riots by the way.

I can imagine living in London for some time in the future. Fascinating city with huge diversity in culture (food, languages, religion, habits, that is), lovely parks and busy night-life all week.

A shame I managed to break my camera the first day and the flash card of the other camera might have gotten lost somewhere along the way from London to Germany. Well, there is a backup somewhere… So thanks to the three photographers of used Creative-Commons imagery from Flickr!

Good times, maybe you can get some inspiration or tips for your Trip to London. If I missed anything you enjoyed in London, let me know!

T-Shirt slogans, fork away

2011-05-01T00:00:00Z

I’m not sure when, but quite some time ago I started to write down slogans. Short sentences, lyrics & quotes that inspired me, that have a meaning to me. Maybe it’s part of the geek in me but I always felt like they would do great on T-Shirts. I’m big on typography and minimal design but the list also includes some links to geo-related infographics. At first I stored this list in SimpleNote. Then In Taskpaper. A few days it struck me while marvelling about the usefulness of git: the only place this should be is in the public, easily shareable. So today I put this list in a Gist on @gitub, where it should have been all along.

So what know? Currently I’m too busy to check for great printing options (high-quality shirts, proven printing method, eco-friendly, fair-trade…) but I might use this as an excuse for some procrastination sometime soon, ha!

If you happen to have good experiences with printing shops please let me know. Oh, and I’m no designer – so if you feel like helping out on this end, you are more than welcome.

This reminds me, I should clean out my wardrobe this week.

On Writing.

2011-04-10T00:00:00Z

This blog is a challenge to myself. Not only on the technical side – using vim & git on Heroku – but first and foremost because of writing. As you can probably tell by reading some of the articles here, neither is English my mother tongue nor am I used to write texts.

During our studies (Computer Science BSc) we are not asked to do a lot of writing. I guess it will be hard for the majority of our term to put together a Bachelor thesis which is required to be ~60 pages long. I don’t blame the University but I think it is very important to stay in the loop, to keep practicing which eventually pays off. Not only in terms of style but also to let the mind wander, phrase thoughts plus be able to get comments on all this.

The trigger

Rather by accident, I discovered I enjoy writing. A few months ago in November 2010, I got to know an Erasmus Exchange Student who I would do exercises for one of our lectures with. She didn’t speak German very well, so we did our work in English.

She is a math genius and was able to solve all the mathematical exercises we were given; she has a strong scientific kind of mind. For me, solving these kind of problems requires way more effort.

But exercises not only demand results, they also demand proper presentation. I was the one who had to express our findings in short and concise answers because she simply wasn’t able to – at least she said so, ha. “You do great exercises but beat around the bush too much” read one of the comments on an answer in the very beginning of the semester.

I read loads of English texts on a daily basis – mostly (technical) stuff on the web I’m afraid, but also magazines & fiction novels during the holidays. Besides, I try to watch movies with the original audio and also enjoy watching English presentations / interviews I stumble upon when surfing the web. I think this all contributes to my vocabulary and style of writing. It may not be the best way but it seems I can get a lot out of this.

This is how I got to write most of our textual answers and the results satisfied us both. Our combination worked out pretty well, an appropriate score paid us off. And I do believe we both learned something new, besides course material, during the term – either how to solve mathematical problems more efficiently or how to keep answers short and to the point.

She also encouraged me to keep this up, I had “a gift” she insisted. I blushed.

This blog is a continuous challenge to myself. So bear with me but please let me know when something is just plain wrong.

I’m glad I got things started here.

Thank you, A.

Berlin short-trip

2011-04-08T00:00:00Z

Flatmate: Hey we still have these cheap railway tickets which are only valid through 30th March. Let’s visit Berlin!

Me: Uhm, great – let’s do it!

So two friends and I spent 3 days in Berlin in late March. We had a good time and it was worth the rather long trip by train (note to self: make a reservation and do so earlier than 10 minutes before departure).

I haven’t been to Berlin for ages, for sure not alone without parents. Luckily we three share similar interests and also aren’t too much into planning. So off we go!

Deciding on where to base ourselves in Berlin for trips and going out wasn’t easy but we ended up staying in Prenzlauer Berg in the hostel Pfefferbett. Friendly staff, nice community area, clean rooms, good breakfast & great location – what else to wish for. We paid 15 € per night for a 4-person-dorm which I think was excellent value. So if you look for a place, consider them – full recommendation.

We did a walking tour around Berlin to explore Street-Art and other hidden places. Our guide, an irish artist, had excellent knowledge and shared many interesting tidbits along the way. The tour itself is free but you tip as much as you feel the tour was worth at the end. An interesting approach and it seemed to pay off for her in the end. See below for some impressions. So full recommendation, as well: Alternative Berlin Tours.

Night-life had to be explored as well

The Berghain has quite a name and standing in line observing the bouncers denying access to some guys remembered me of the old days when we we were indeed too young to legally enter a club… And leaving at 6am just to see the line didn’t get any shorter was also an experience. We may not have had the best night music-wise but other than that, recommended. I can’t really compare to other places though, talking to other people I had the feeling the club is a bit overrated. But go see for yourself, I’ll do so again someday.

Luckily my company and I share another interest as well: food! We had, in no particular order, japanese, thai, ethiopian, turkish, lebanese and indonesian food. All good, no exceptions. Okay, I’m hungry now.

Some impressions of Street-Art and the city

Link to flickr-set

Really like how the shot of the Brandenburger Tor at night turned out. Didn’t have a tripod but hooray for image stabilizers!

Berlin, I’ll come back sometime soon. It was a pleasure.

4000 and counting

2011-04-08T00:00:00Z

Four thousand. That’s the number of Tweets I posted between 3rd September 2007 and 22nd March 2011. 1269 days. That makes 3.15 tweets per day. Okay, that’s statistics and as an observation may be true – but for me it wasn’t love at first sight.

In the beginning it was just yet another registration for yet another service. Twitter was the cool thing on the web that time and yeah, I had to see what it was. Sign-up, test-tweet, looking for people I knew and boom. Silence. How is this helping me? I don’t know anyone here. Silence.

It took me quite a while to figure out how to use Twitter to my gain. At least I think it actually is my gain now…anyway: fast-forward 3.5 years and let’s see how that went.

My way

For me, it didn’t turn out to be yet another service but instead became kind of an integral part of life and work, as funny as it sounds. A service were you post messages in less than 140 characters to share with random people in the world. It’s funny to explain this concept to your family or other less techy people.

But somehow I enjoy it, it’s not just putting stuff out there but getting something back. I like the direct form of communication, I can directly reach a big corporation like Adobe (they do listen! Proof) in the same way I have small conversations with friends. You explore & take part in the same time. And because it’s so fast, it actually became a very important source for daily news (thanks @zeit_online for doing such an awesome job!).

Maybe something more specific to me: I try to keep the number of Followings small because I want to read what they have to say, I follow them for a reason. Most of them are tech-people who do cool stuff and it’s nice to stay in the loop. Then there are a number of software-companies & bands who post updates via their accounts. Finally there is a – admittedly – small number of people who I actually met in real life. I can still count them with both of my hands but I do hope that number increases significantly, either because Twitter gains even more traction among my friends or I start meeting more of the people I currently follow.

Why is it so popular?

⌥ tab, brain dump, ⌘ ↩

The key to Twitters success is it’s ease of use.

A simple input box with a limit of 140 characters
A send button
The basic concept of Followers & Followings

That’s it, nothing else. My dad gets that in 3 minutes. But yeah, he would doubt the whole underlying concept of social structures and usefulness in the following 3 minutes.

To him it’s not apparent who actually cares about what I post as @leomelzer. My response always tends to be something like: I care and that’s enough.

Another significant feature is your Twitter login. Nowadays loads of services integrate with the login via OAuth, sometimes just for the sake of authentication, most of the times for tighter integration though (find friends, utilize your tweets in whatever manner etc…). It’s widely established but still is the underdog in the battle with Facebook Connect as the de-facto standard login on the internet. Where is OpenID by the way?

But not only through the login, also via the API tons of applications extend Twitters usages. There are a bazillion ways to post updates and also the official applications – Website, Desktop & Mobile – are well done.

Twitter Inc.

Twitter as a company still has this startup-smell, at least from the distance. Important politicians and musicians visiting the HQ and the presence in old-media (they love it! They even get their own news from there, ha.), maintaining OpenSource projects plus the occasional Failwhale.

Though recent experiments like the Dickbar weren’t as successful as they probably wished to be, it still showed this startup-spirit to, well, experiment.

While Twitter still has to find a viable business model I do believe they deserve credit for helping shape the internet as it is today. There are things to come, I’m sure.

You can follow me on you-know-what, @leomelzer. Keep tweetin'.

PS: @twitter you’re taking interns for later this year, right? I’d like to join the flock.

Wallpapers.

2011-04-03T00:00:00Z

It’s spring, so why not get some freshness on your Desktop? As of now I have 29 images in my Wallpaper folder which syncs via the amazing Dropbox. OS X shuffles my wallpaper every 30 minutes — this may seem a bit distracting but most of the times the applications I use cover all the screen real estate anyway and if I catch a glimpse, I enjoy something fresh. The rate of change with ~30 images is just allright.

Interested? Here’s where to get them, from top left to bottom right:

NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour’s launch at night
Visualizing Facebook Friends by @paulgb
Golden Gate Bridge by Night by @ginader
Andy’s room by @mantia
bonsai_2560.jpg, can’t find the original source though :/
Left Brain – Right Brain
Octocat Wallpaper by @github
Concrete by @antonpeck
Flow by @bartelme
Haltestelle by @96dpi
Hardwood with Lights by @zkl
Helveticon
HTML 5
Crab on the beach by yours truly
Flowers I by yours truly
Flowers II by yours truly
Box made out of recycled paper as seen in Weltladen Andernach by yours truly
Elizabeth Taylor
Joseph Beuys, Schottland 1974 by Robert Lebeck, via @lumas_de
Leafie Mod
HLS World by @briansuda
Olivia Wilde
Opportunity Mars Rover, via @big_picture
Door in France by yours truly
private
Sleeping pad by yours truly.
Rosario Dawson
I <3 Typography by @evolve8
Typomaps by @DSnulldrei

Please note: All rights belong to the corresponding owners of the imagery. If you don’t like your work shown here, please drop me a line and I’ll remove it from the list.

Everbody else, enjoy!

"We're in the most ridiculous industry on earth."

2011-03-10T00:00:00Z

I stumbled across Zach Holman’s blog via a post on Signal vs. Noise. It was about his screencast Automating Inefficiencies, you should check this out as well.

Anyway, I skimmed the headlines in his blog and ended up reading quite some of the articles. Not sure what happened last October but I somehow missed Facelette, his one-hour project which hit TechCrunch in three hours.

In the post he points out he did Facelette for the sake of hacking, not to start the-next-big-thing™ what indeed was what some people thought about it.

Instead, for him…

We’re in the most ridiculous industry on earth. You can whip something up in a few hours and before you know it, people around the world will be using it. That is insane. An architect or a fireman or a lawyer or anyone else can’t say that for their profession or their hobby.

Zach Holman

Read the whole piece, there also is some wisdom by _why in there.

Okay, what is my point again? @holman is a cool guy, yes.

But reading those lines made me also realize once again, tools and the cleverest plans don’t matter – execution counts. Hack something up, flip the switch and see how it goes. This also confirmed me again, studying Computer Science and especially being creative & curious about related subjects enables me (at least potentially, let’s see how that goes…) to be in this industry, the most ridiculous on earth.

And who wouldn’t want to work there?