devgrind » geekery

Perl programmers are psychopaths

Christopher — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:28:21 +0000

I always suspected that anyone who likes to write Perl programs can’t be a healthy human being, but I didn’t know what evil, murderous psychopaths these people really are until I read this headline:

How to optionally kill a child and capture status if not killed

How could killing a child ever be optional? It’s illegal! It’s disgusting!

We must not tolerate these criminals in our midst any longer. Now is the time to put an end to that vicious disease called Perl.

Green and Calm

Magnus — Wed, 02 May 2007 09:04:09 +0000

There are few things in this world more soothing than the green bar of a project-embracing JUnit test suite after moving to a new platform.

iCal meets Google Earth

Arne — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:34:02 +0000

Some days ago I had this idea of a calendar browser showing my upcoming events in a 3D perspective, i.e. events of next week are close by while events some months away are far in the distance. The purpose is that I get an intuitive impression of things to come, their sequentiality and relation – something I miss in the typical grid-like calendar views offered by iCal and Outlook.Â I talked about it to some of my colleagues and when I tried to explain the idea, I said something like “It should be like looking at Google Earth from a tilted angle, events placed on a sphere which I can roll back and forth“. It took me some moments, then it hit me: It’s easy to place markers on Google Earth by using KML files – and by using Google Earth as a platform, I get all the UI features I need for free.

Fast forward to one and a half days later: A very basic implementation of the “iCal meets Google Earth” mashup is ready, which I call einstein, well, because what it does is some kind of joining space and time. I used Ruby (of course), employing the vpim library for extracting iCal data and XML builder templates for creating the KML output. In the end it was almost too simple.

And this is what it looks like (by now):