synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

Yesterday I decided to give Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails a try and installed it. It was dead simple to set it up and to deploy rails applications with it. I’m now using it for several “small” applications, for which the whole overhead of setting up a cluster of mongrels and...

News I try to keep up with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, even if I’m not working with one of them at the moment. These are the three feeds helping me to get the latest news: PlanetRubyOnRails.com, not to be mixed up with PlanetRubyOnRails.org, is a simple feed aggregator with...

Script.aculo.us includes a nice effect called Effect.DropOut, which let’s the element fall in an “invisible trap” underneath. Surprisingly there isn’t an opposite effect. Calling Effect.DropOut with Effect.Transitions.reverse as transition, doesn’t work either. So what to do? Effect.Emerge to the rescue! 1 2 Effect.Emerge = function(element) { 3 element = $(element);...

... and messed it up. Last week I’ve been giving a talk (in german) about the project I did during my internship at the Human Computer Interaction Research Center at the university of applied sciences Fulda. This was the first talk I gave (not counting those I had to do...

I got my thesis’ topic last week and will start to write it within the next few days. I decided to write it using TeX as all my attempts to write large documents in OpenOffice.org caused very bad headaches. The TeX approach fits my needs much better and I can...

During the last week I built a new design for both the blog and the website. The website isn’t finished yet but today I decided to update the blog’s design. I hope you like it as much as I do. Additionally I updated the underlaying Mephisto Blog and added Sven...

Andreas Wolff recently released RSpactor, a (up to now) command line tool similar to autotest. Nevertheless it differs from autotest in two points. First it’s focused on RSpec and secondly it’s using Mac OS’ FSEvents to monitor file changes. According to this it only runs on Mac OS. To get...

Typing SSH passwords again and again can be a real pain. For example: Lately I started to use Capistrano to deploy my rails applications. If I want to set up the maintenance-page on the server I’ll type cap deploy:web:disable which of course prompts me for the SSH password. Then I...

I’ve had a great weekend again, seeing Nightwish doing two amazing shows. First one on saturday in Leipzig, the second one in Frankfurt on monday. I took several pictures and uploaded a selection of them to the Nightwish.com Gallery: Photos of the Leipzig show on saturday Photos of the Frankfurt...

I’m a total moron when it comes to web- and screendesign. I totally lost the ability to build visually appealing websites (or maybe my demands just grow) over the last few years. Unfortunately a good looking design is a must for every website or -application. I’ve some ideas in mind...

I just played a mms-stream using mplayer in the console. After it was done I read this in the console: Everything done. Thank you for downloading a media file containing proprietary and patented technology. (Looks like this is my shortest blog entry ever … ;-))

There is a great article by Jason Long on Vitamin called ‘Streamline your forms with widgets’. In his article Jason Long describes a nice looking way to clean up a lot of checkboxes into multiple dropdown widgets. What I really liked was the idea to have some summary about the...

It took a little longer, but finally here’s the sourcecode for Angelica. Download AudioVis.tar.gz (302,4 KB) If you want to include lyrics, the file must contain data in this format: 1 [00:31.09] Finally the hills are without eyes 2 [00:34.50] They are tired of painting a dead man's face red...

This is the first processing sketch using audio visualization I built. It was created as a final project for a Processing course at the University of Applied Sciences Fulda. As one might guess, it was inspired by the amazing works of flight404. All frames have been rendered into pngs and...

This one started as an homework for university but I really started to like it. The original task was to built a fuzzy controller using Matlab in groups of 2 or 3 students. I joined Benjamin and another fellow student to create a simple fuzzy controller for flying a plane...

As my current term at university is crammed with projects, presentations and term papers, it is quite hard to remember every deadline. I was constantly worrying about them and pretty badly needed a way to manage all my tasks. As I mentioned Getthing Things Done on this blog some time...

I’m currently attending a course called “Animation programming with Processing”. It’s a blended-learning course lectured at my university. I heard about processing before but never looked at it closely. Processing is a simple programming language build on top of Java and comes with its own, simple IDE. It includes some...

We’ve just updated nightwish.com’s design to match with the new album “Dark Passion Play”. We also introduced to new languages: swedish and portuguese. Check it out! ;-)

Note the fork! Recognizing someone?

I’ve spent a fuckin’ great weekend in Hamburg … again! I finally met Jarmo and Sushi Patrol Nightwish did an amazing concert in the “Delphi Showpalast”. The venue was quite small but very nice. There were just about 300 people but they rocked they house. It was the first time...

By default it’s not possible to use a database-column called “type” for anything else than single table inheritance. To change this, simply use set_inheritance_column() and read_attribute(): 1 class TypeTest < ActiveRecord::Base 2 set_inheritance_column(:something_else) 3 4 def type() 5 read_attribute(:type) 6 end 7 8 def type=(value) 9 write_attribute(:type, value) 10 end...

I’m currently in Gemünden visiting the Up From The Ground Festival to shoot some photos. The weather is – unlike last year – great. Unfortunately the light on stage isn’t that good and it’s hard to achieve good results. In addition I’ve some auto-focus trouble with my Sigma lens and...

Watch this (sad) video on YouTube. It’s the winner of the Agile Advert video contest. The other videos are available at agileadvert.org [ via ]

Since last week I’m using ClockingIT to track the time I spent on client-projects. Some of the features are (taken from clockingit.com ): time tracking & reports milestones & due dates timeline & activity log notifications, rss & iCal integrated wiki english, brazilian, french, german, spanish & norwegian languages The...

I’m now working for the mac-fans at bytebetrieb.com. Thanks to Moritz and Stefan — who contacted me using Xing — for giving me the chance to do some useful stuff! ;-) I’m primarily working with their in-house CMS called Fast Publishing System (FPS). Check out their website and blog!

Seen by benholio

I needed a way to get a list of the subclasses that inherit a specific. Unfortunately there is no method like Class.subclasses (there is Class.superclass, though) so I had to look for another way to achieve this. Let’s say, we want to have an array containing all subclasses as a...

Yes, I know. I didn’t blog for some time now. Sorry! I stumbled across Getting Things Done today. It’s a self-management method invented by David Allen. As I’m currently having my term’s exams (again ;-)), I didn’t have the time to take a closer look. Although what I read about...

It was planned to be the 30th, but in the end everything was a week earlier. The great rush of many fans to nightwish.com in order to see the band’s new voice. It all started on 23th with the leaking of Nightwish’s new single “Eva” on some online music stores....

I’d love to have some right now :-)

This short tutorial is going to show how to set up Lighttpd with fastcgi on Debian 4.0 (Etch). Actually it’s nothing special but I hope it demonstrates how easy it is. ;-) What is Lighttpd? Lighttpd is a light (I bet you already guessed that … ;)), fast and secure...

We had your monthly Linux Usergroup Fulda meeting yesterday. As always, it was nice. ;-) Simon brought some presents for us: Homebrew OpenCola! It’s a recipe for mixing the popular soft drink. The best thing is: It’s under the GPL! Get the recipie here ...

Somehow a funny story … but actually: not at all. I was sitting in car and traveling to the train station when I received the first SMS. The Nightwish.com server is getting slow. As we posted the studio dairy of Nightwish’s new vocalist on Sunday, I wasn’t much surprised and...

I just finished upgrading nightwish.com to Debian 4.0 Etch. Took me some time, but worked without any notable problems. (Thanks to the excellent documentation) This was just another step in embattling the server for the 30th of this month. We’re expecting a lot of fans overrunning the website, as the...

It’s done! My first Rails application is online. Hope it works fine … :-) Go visit http://shop.uftg.de/ and order some merch …

I’ve been visiting Hamburg for two days (Sunday and Monday) lately. It was great. It’s been a while since I last visited the city. (I think it must be about four years or something) Surprisingly not much changed, at least the at the places I visited again. I’ve also had...

I just finished reading this article by Paul Graham. It’s quite interesting so take a look at it!

I cleaned my keyboard today … disassembled it completely. Every single key has been brushed and cleaned. It’s like new again! I should do that more regularly as it was quite dirty. How long ago did YOU clean your keyboard? ;-)

While traveling by train last friday I noticed this (german) advertisment at the station in front of a bakery. Click here for a bigger picture. Later, in the train, I was sitting next to a guy with a very old and very huge notebook. I didn’t know people are still...

Since a few months I’m working on a project at university. We are creating a browser-based whiteboard-like collaboration plattform called ‘EduCs’. The university told us to use the waterfall approach. We spent the whole last term creating documents and just finished the design-phase about two weeks ago. I already hated...

Today I modified Mephisto’s default theme. It’s a little bit more individual and synatic|net related now. Hopefully you like it ;-) Nevertheless I could still need someone with professional webdesign-skills who knows XHTML, CSS like his/her own pocket. Maybe one of my few (future) readers out there matches these criterias?...

I’ve tried it before, but never continued for more than 2 weeks: running a blog. I just wrote my last exam for this term about an hour ago so I’ve got some time to spend. I’m planning to write about my current side-projects (mainly webapps/websites), linux, programming, software development and...