Ayer por la tarde Hugo Mancha falleció. Yo trabajé con el en el Diego Thomson en Lima, Perú. Allá el era profesor en informatica. El también se tomó tiempo para mostrarme Pachacamac por un día. Me da mucha pena escuchar esta noticia, y mando muchos saludos a su familia y sus amigos. Que Dios les ayude en este tiempo. Yesterday in the evening Hugo Mancha died. He was a computing teacher at the Diego Thomson and a friend of mine. I worked with him during my civilian service in Peru last year. During my time in Peru he also took some time off to show me the historical place Pachacamac. All the best to his family and co-workers and I hope that God helps them through this time of sorrow.

I’m currently counting down to one of the most important events in my life. Most of my friends by now know what I’m talking about. But I always forgot to update my Skype mood message - that’s where my friend circle counts days nowadays. The following 8-line Ruby script takes the problem away from me. #!/usr/bin/env ruby deadline = Time.local(2007, 01, 20, 22, 05) seconds = deadline - Time.new days = (seconds / 60 / 60 / 24 * 1000).round / 1000.0 cmdline = "osascript " + "-e 'tell application \"Skype\"' " + "-e 'send command \"SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT " + days.to_s + " days left\" script name \"Countdown\"' " + "-e 'end tell'" `#{cmdline}` Save that and put the following into your crontab (accessible with crontab -e on the command line): ...

I’m quite picky about my photo management. The thing I’m most picky about is my folder structure as I want to be able to live independent of a single photo management application. So far iPhoto did not allow me to keep my own structure and still use it. But that became possible with version 6 of iPhoto and as it came pre-installed on my MacBook Pro I’m now using it. Today I spent a short while to get it nicely integrated into my workflow. Without my strict folder naming requirements I could just set iPhoto to download my photos automatically and import them whenever I connect my camera. To move them into my own structure it’s a little bit more work - but not much. ...

In Switzerland most men who serve in military have a weapon and some ammunition in their home. Whenever the Swiss talk about those weapons, the consensus is, that those weapons cause far less dammage than you might think. Well, think again. As reported by the NZZ newspaper a study by Martin Killias of the University of Lausanne found that 300 people die a year because of those army weapons. I was not able to find the study on the UNIL web site unfortunately. ...

In the past few weeks I was mainly busy creating the new local.ch market. It’s actually in cooperation with Fundgrueb, a very well known and traditional classifieds newspaper in the German part of Switzerland. I created a longer posting on the local.ch blog which also contains some information about what’s different from other such platforms. The nice upload is thanks to Chregu’s Upload Progress Meter PECL extension by the way (forgot to mention that on the local.ch blog post).

The new version of Firebug is now available. It’s the 1.0 beta release. It contains some great new features and I’d advise you to try it out if you develop web sites. Joe was pondering to make the new version a commercial release. Instead he has now decided to leave it Open Source but asks for donations.

For the next phase of local.ch E-Mail processes will play a central role. So I wanted to include those processes in our Selenium tests. It’s actually quite easy to do. First create an account where test mails can go to. That account should be accessible by one of your scripts. I use a normal IMAP account for that. Then write a script which always outputs the newest mail on that account. I include some of the important headers plus the body (body parts for multi-part mails). I also made that page refresh itself every two seconds. ...

As a web developer I often have to debug HTTP problems. At local.ch we also do the frontend/backend communication using the HTTP protocol, so sometimes I also have to debug that. So over the whole time I’ve been doing that, some tips have accumulated. LiveHTTPHeaders LiveHTTPHeaders is a Firefox extension that allows to see the headers exchanged between the browser and server. It adds a “Headers” tab in the page information. This window can be accessed with Apple+I on the Mac or Ctrl+I on Linux and Windows. The headers tab shows a list of the headers that Firefox sent to the server and a separate list of the response headers sent by the server. ...

The last few weeks I was on vacation - in Peru again. That explains the absence of posts during that time. I uploaded a few (very few) pictures on Flickr. I’ll add many more during the next days once I have time to catalog and label all of the pictures taken.

Shinzo Abe is now the new prime minister of Japan. His first policy speech sounds reasonable enough though there is one thing that worries me. Abe wants to change the pacifist constitution and allow military operations in other countries. This started under Koizumi who sent self-defence forces to Iraq. Those similar to the Swiss troops in eastern Europe are only allowed to defend themselves - the Swiss troops are not even allowed to do that. ...