A quick update on Opinion

Since there were quite a number of people having problems with installing any of the newer Opinion Revisions (o2), I put Rails and the HTML Engine plugin to the repository. There seemed to be some who would not receive those automatically even though they were set to externals.

Anyways, if you have tried to install Opinion lately but couldn’t run rake db:migrate (because you only had Rails 1.6 locally) then you should svn up it and give it another try.

This should also fix it for people who would download the archive from the trac.

The trac has become no fun to work with since I can’t seem to get the upperhand against that one stupid bot spamming new tickets faster than I can (or want) delete them. Until we’ve come up with a better solution you can always leave me a comment or mail (or a comment in a mail).

posted by daniel 0 comments
Posted on November 1st | read on

Black versus Grey

I know you’re writing it Gray here in North America. Patrick McNeil says about Grey:

It(Grey) isn’t bold, powerful or intense, and it is more about the lack of color then having it.

In a later edition of his Design Meltdown he adds that

One really cool thing about grey is how it can make other colors really pop out.

This is something that is also true for the colour black (black is actually not a colour since it is the absence of any colour). So what are the big differences between dark grey and black?

Almost none:

My second computer screen (after having to bear with a Hercules monochrome screen) was a VGA screen that I think had a lousy maximum resolution, an even worse refresh rate and a pitiful black. A black on this screen was maybe a medium grey. And still – if there would have been a picture of a pitch black raven on it, I would have said: the colour of the raven is black.

My TV here at home is a TFT (and not the fanciest one) – so the black is actually just a dark grey. Still I will recognize any darker shades of grey in a movie like Nochnoy Dozor as black. Being a smart ass, I could say that whenever anything is slightly lit by whatever lightsource, it is de facto not black anymore. The tolerance of what our brain interprets as black is quite high.

I even used to call all my washed out black shirts – which were in fact closer in colour to around RGB (102, 102, 102) – black.

So – since you can trick anyone’s mind by showing dark grey and pretending it is black, you can achieve pretty much the same things with both. The big advantage when using grey and not peeking into the ultimate nothing (in terms of colour) is that you always have something darker to back it up. For instance the bar that you see in the bottom of my page stands out since it is the only pure black element on this page while even without it I sometimes heard people refering to the colours of my blog as black.

Since both dark grey and black are so great in contrasting vibrant colours you might want to make use of them to avoid monochromatism. Now, dealing with light grey (car dealers like to refer to it as silver) is a completely different story.

posted by daniel 2 comments
Posted on October 21st | read on

Ninjistix

A while ago I was writing about our participation at Railsday 2006. We, that are Tobi, Cody and me. The concept was quite simple: a team of up to three people had 24 hours to create a Ruby on Rails project from scratch.

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Now the judges have concluded the results after dealing with gazillions of entries. Against all odds we did more than just an honourable mention: we won 1st place – in the category Most Creative. Evan Weaver is almost right by saying we’re standing too much in the sun. The weirdness that let us produce this grotesque abomination of something was caused by dehydration and a wicked mix of 2/3 German Humor (that no one understands, not even Germans – that’s why we seem to be so stern all the time) meets 1/3 Albertan madness. All day long coffee and adrenaline is very obviously reflected in our changelog (as the changelog teaches us that meditation is a baaad thing to do).

At the morning, when we started (after breakfast) we only knew one thing: we wanted to do a game involving ninjas.

At the end of the day, when we were running out of time, we only then realized that we did not have written any instructions yet. I wonder if people ever figure out how the game was supposed to be played (it did not quite work exactly as we planned it to). We included a “next turn” button that should not have been there in the production version of the game as every turn was meant to take – I think – 4 hours. So you could log in and fill up your ninja’s timeslots and forplan up to a maximum of 24 hours (similar to the usual browser kind of games).

posted by daniel 1 comment
Posted on October 20th | read on

Why I shouldn't let anyone proofread my articles

I admit it. I am not not a native English speaker (in case you haven’t figured out so due to my phantastomaniac expressions). I am German – well half at least. Anyways (or anyhow [‘e-nE-hΓΌ] as people outside of Canada like to think Canadians say and pronounce it), having someone proofread my flawed writing would make me feel compelled to keep up a certain level of writing – ultimately leading to fewer posts because maintenance sucks.

edit: Just in case you didn’t realize, my English sarcasm isn’t that great either so don’t take this seriously! ;)

posted by daniel 0 comments
Posted on October 19th | read on

The Studio

Andrew and I have had the chance to learn more about studio photography (thanks Dmitri!). We just need to wait a few more days and we should have our own studio passes. Booyah!

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Having control over so many lights and flashes is purely awesome. It is more exhausting than I thought it is. Being on your feet for five hours, setting up, assisting, shooting, etc. can be challenging. Especially since you can only book it for so and so long and by a certain time you have to be done to allow other people to set up.

This also was only a small set. On a regular shooting you’d also have to consider the hourly cost of models and makeup artists (if you don’t have friends to do either). Any volunteers in the Ottawa area please step forward ;)

On a sidenote: the Ball Handlers’ (our volleyball team) first game last night was quite successful with a minor defeat of 1:2.

posted by daniel 0 comments
Posted on October 18th | read on

Say Hello to my D80

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It’s not shiny – it’s matte. It comes in a compact size but don’t let that fool you. For the past few days that I’ve been testing and using it, I am very happy with the results (pictures are to follow). A fast f/2.8 Tamron tele lense protects the 10MP sensor from the environment and does an equally good job.

In fact, the D80 has many similarities with the substantially more expensive (and excellent) D200. The built quality is great and the bright LCD received some praising comments from a 5D user.

Unfortunately, OSX does not know how to handle the D80 RAW format yet but I suspect that will only be a matter of a couple of weeks.

If you are interested in some pictures that I took with it, you can go to my flickr page.

posted by daniel 3 comments
Posted on October 17th | read on

Redesign

I have made a new design for troubleseeker (portfolio and about pages still to be done). Onwards on the neverending quest to beautify the web: my friends over at infogopher have launched their blog today and the next nightsessions will be spent making their space more rodent-friendly.

posted by daniel 0 comments
Posted on October 17th | read on

Mephisto Blog

While it is a great learning experience to have written your own blog, it is kind of pointless to keep the own engine up to date when someone else (in this case Rick Olson and Justin Palmer) is doing a so much better job and offer it to the world.

So I decided (with no regrets) to say goodbye to my old blog (my first Rails project) and fire up the devil that’s called Mephisto.

Since we’re using it for our pixelsoup, I had enough time to play around with it and I really love the admin interface. That it is capable of rendering Liquid is a big plus. I am looking forward writing my future posts with 66something and finally feel obliged to html that new theme of mine – gonna see that soon.

posted by daniel 0 comments
Posted on October 12th | read on

Opinion2 (o2) launch

Today we merged the o2 branch to the trunk of Opinion. The o2 branch has plenty of improvements and fixes. If you are running opinion on edge, make sure to read the information below (from the Opinion trac):

*Important Notice to previous Opinion users*

If you followed the branch development for o2 in the timeline you probably can guess that Opinion has undergone 
some serious internal changes. With the migrations I made sure that your old forum data would still be working once
 you update to the newest version. However, keep in mind that a few things have changed:

* Removed the remote user login system (see no further use in it right now)
* Users are now systemwide, not only users "per area"
* Area is called Forum
* Internally, most things are CRUD'ified
* Feedlinks have changed due to the previous bulletpoint
* Removed quite some AJAX where it did not make sense
* Layout is more robust
I hope you enjoy the changes.
posted by daniel 0 comments
Posted on October 11th | read on
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