Switzerland has managed to go down by CHF 6.7 billion with their debts. That’s a reduction of more than five percent. With that we’re back to our level of debts of 2003. But actually half of that reduction is due to selling a lot of Swisscom stocks - the government earned CHF 3.2 billion from that. Even after paying the debts, there is a surplus of CHF 2.5 billion. Official media release in German and French. ...
I have written about quick search in Firefox before. The same thing is possible in Safari with Saft - a must-have plugin if you actually want to use Safari. There is an additional feature there which Firefox doesn’t have: you can enter multiple search terms with a quick search. A good example where you want that is SBB. Right-click in any of the form fields there and select the option “Add as Saft shortcut…”. Then give it a good name and shortcut. The URL is already prefilled. For the SBB example it’s ...
TextMate, my editor of choice, has the ability to blog directly from the editor. Not sure yet whether this is actually better than using MarsEdit, but is definitely quite high on the coolness factor. This article is basically only a test to see whether this actually works.
I’ve been using DEVONthink Pro for writing notes and cataloging my know-how for a year now. I’m trying to copy news I read and want to keep there. Using the internal web browser of DEVONthink it’s possible to copy web sites as rich text into DEVONthink. But it’s a hassle to copy first the web site link into DEVONthink, then open it, and from there create the rich text note. So I’ve always wanted to do that from Safari directly. ...
As a web developer I often have to find out the exact color that the designer gave me to implement. I always used to do that with opening the image in the Gimp and then using the color picker. Now I find that OS X actually comes pre-installed with a tool for that: Digital Color Meter. It’s in your Utilities folder and allows you to find out the color of anything on the screen. ...
At local.ch we’re looking for a developer in the area of PHP/XSLT development. You will take over work regarding all user-visible aspects with technologies such as PHP, XSLT or Javascript. A job at local.ch gives you a lot of freedom to explore, find good solutions, learn new technologies, bring in your opinions and knowledge. We want a developer who knows how to write clean XHTML and CSS, has experience in client side Javascript and is well-versed in XML. We will gladly teach you XSLT on the job but if you already know to program in XSLT so much the better. ...
Vor einigen wenigen Wochen ist meine Freundin in die Schweiz gezogen. Hier alles angemeldet, etc. Gestern kam nun vom schulärztlichen Dienst der Stadt St. Gallen folgender Brief an: Der ausgeschwärzte Name meines Sohnes / meiner Tochter ist der meiner Freundin. Und damit kein falscher Verdacht versteht: sie ist erwachsen. Leider konnte ich den schulärztlichen Dienst telefonisch noch nicht erreichen, die sind momentan in den Kindergärten unterwegs. Ich melde mich, sobald ich mehr weiss… ...
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. ...