Cat on a hot coffee machine roof

Once, it was one of the most amazing cool sites on the web. Now, everyone can do it from the comfort of his own home. Here’s a live updated video stream of my coffee machine:

(Well, actually, it’s not live. But most of the time my cat likes my coffee machine more than i do).

Google Maps – (some of) my places

Although Austria hasn’t made it yet in to Google Maps (well, here is Vienna, Austria), there are some places in there that bear memories for me.

Like these:

• My brother’s current location (he goes to Hockey School there!):
• The house of my late grandmother
• Long ago, I visited one of those lakes (can’t rememeber which)
• And I suspect this to be a gas station I happen to know a funny story about (but won’t tell you)

I hope Europe will be added soon…

Note: Google Maps is perhaps the finest example of Ajax use on the web. It really shows what you can achieve. Look Ma, no proprietary plug-ins…

Delicious Library 1.5

Yeah! Delicious Library 1.5 will come out soon (that is when the Tiger is let out into the wild)—and they promise support for international users, too!

That’s a good thing, as my books and DVD collections seem to shrink from time to time as I borrow something out and forget about it don’t get it back afterwards…

Inspect and visualize style sheets with ease

If you’re looking for a (very) nice way to inspect CSS, give Xylescope by Cultured Code a try.

A beta version is available as a free download (requires Mac OS X 10.3.9).

Some light relief…

Sometimes, program errors can make you happy. What? You don’t believe me?

Then hop over to Fehler10, a site dedicated to documenting the most humorous Mac OS errors known to mankind.

Yes, it’s in german, but that shouldn’t pose ein großes Problem big trouble.

Update: There’s a collection of the funniest ‘in english’ errors too. Thanks, Nils!

Made the switch: Typo 2

So, welcome to version 2.0 of mir.aculo.us!

Running on Typo 2.0—check out the best Ruby on Rails blogging app out there!

There’s a bit of me in Typo, too. Thanks to some Ajax magic, I’ve added live previewing to the admin interface (thanks to the Typo developers to getting the bugs out of this!).

Rails- The killer app for Ruby?

Sam Newman writes: ”Ruby and Python need to start seeing some decent tools and API’s that mark them apart from others. And it’s possible, just possible that Ruby might have found its first killer app in Rails. But for Ruby to make more inroads, it has to be the start of a process that will see further tools, libraries a knowledgeable workforce follow.”

True, so true. So start using Ruby on Rails and develop these great tools and libraries. And don’t forget to share them!

Live demo: Upload progress bar with Ajax and Ruby on Rails

Sean finally unveiled his live demo of the upload progress patch for Ruby on Rails on his site.

Also, “check out the “making-of movie, showing how easy it is to add this functionality to your Ruby on Rails app!

TESTERS NEEDED! Call to arms: The patch needs exercise. Please install it, test it in your environment and report your success stories!

New Safari 1.3 – a look inside

Some cool new things you don’t need to wait for Tiger to use them are there right now with Safari 1.3 (which is included in the Mac OS X 10.3.9 update):

• Higher performance (Page loading, Javascript)
• HTML editing support for those WYSIWYG textareas
• Much improved CSS and DOM support
• XSLT

Also, many, many rendering bugs seem to have been fixed, so don’t hesitate to fire up those effects!

Offtopic: How to fix an unmountable external harddisk in Mac OS X

So, I got this external drive which was not mountable anymore. The system log complained about a corrupted disk journal. Fire up Google and find this nice little article, which will give you your drive back (and you don’t have to buy expensive bloated disk utilities)—try mounting it writable, then ejecting via the OS X Disk Utility, unplug firewire cable and plug in again.

This should do it. Of course, if you’re not the adventurous type, try mounting it readonly and backup your data somewhere first. Thanks a lot, Christian Fries, this saved me one or two headaches.

UPDATE: I had this problem now once with 10.4 Tiger, and the Disk Utility repaired everything for me—no need to hack around in the Terminal anymore.