Codecat

Ah, time to whip up a new theme for the SonyEricsson k800: Wu from Jade Empire. Download the theme [drain file 2 url here]. Note that this file will not work with other phones.

…you can always do a WordPress update, and make a post about that.

Gee.

Romero Britto visited Berlin today, opening an exhibition of his works at the Galerie Mensing. He promoted his painting “Together” (which can be seen on the right picture), of which the proceeds go to the Rudolf-Walther charity for children. During the welcome speech it became clear that Romero Britto supported over 300 charitable causes last year.

Click on images to see larger version

This visit nearly marks the end of his stay in Germany, and again he took the time to pose for photos, sign invitations, books - and, of course, also his paintings. Overall, the event was well visited and the images he brought from Miami were colourful, inspired, and uplifting.

Tomorrow, his journey continues to Düsseldorf. I really hope he will come back to Berlin soon (or I will get another chance to travel to Miami, which is, in a way, my preferred option for some reason).

Recently I needed to calculate the distance between two points. Not too difficult by itself, all you need is the square root of the X/Y distances:

sqrt( (x1 - x2) * (x1-x2) + (y1 - y2) * (y1 - y2) )

Thing is: CLDC 1.0 does not have a sqrt function, only CLDC 1.1 has… Plus, double and float are also both CLDC 1.1 - which is OK, since I only needed an integer value.

Wikipedia proved to be a good source of information, once more, so I found that I could implement the Newton Method to achieve the desired result. Since I had no luck finding appropriate code with Google that I could employ, I wrote the function myself. See code below.

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Hm, ok, so I did not manage to post as many updates as I wanted. But I did upgrade my Wordpress version. Hooray…

On another note, a colleague at work pointed me to a pretty nifty plugin for Firefox, IE and Safari (what, no Opera? Grmpf!): PicLens.

This nice helper makes image browsing much more fun, and it looks really spectacular. When you search Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, … for images, the results are displayed as a 3D wall. Now you can scroll along this wall, zoom in/out, all with a flick of the mouse.

You could also integrate a server-side implementation into your webpage or blog - there even is a Wordpress plugin. Unfortunately, PHP 5 is required. Which my webspace does not have. Yet.

So, my suggestion is: head over to PicLens, install the plugin, and give it a whirl.

This post is more for my own benefit than for the public out there. Whenever I do some coding (rarely, which is part of the problem) I come across a problem and, after some trying & researching, possibly a solution.

However, after some time this solution is lost in the depths of my source codes. And a new research is sometimes futile - plus I reject the notion of going through the hoops again, since I already should know what to do. So, now I’ll drop little code nuggets here, so I can find them again with less effort. It’s certainly not an entertaining post, but it helps me.

First item: toggling boolean variables

I like to work with boolean values, and sometime I need to toggle them. So a true becomes false and vice versa. Of course this should be a short oneliner. Not an if-else construct. A good approach is:

boolean = boolean ? false : true;

I tend to use the ?: operator ad nauseum… so  an even better approach is (and my preferred way to do it):

boolean ^= true;

What is this? A XOR assignment operator, similar to += or -= If boolean is true, then the XOR return false (because it is not an inclusive OR). If boolean is false, then the XOR returns true. Mission accomplished.

Ok, it has been awhile since the last update. I will blame that on the current job activities. Since I do not really have anything major to report (I have, however, an idea in the back of my head), it gives me chance to test stuff.

For example, this post has been written with Flock, the "social" browser. Meaning it integrates support for a number of Web 2.0 sites, e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. So you can keep track of what your network is doing without having to click through a dozen pages.

Painfully missing though is the integration of Xing - curiously, MySpace is also not present. But no loss there. At least for me.

The first impression is positive. I tried to test a few extensions, but the Flock site is currently revamped. Anyways, if creating posts really works, and the blog integration holds up to the promises (drag&drop media and links to blog them), Flock might just stay for a bit longer on my harddrive.

It’s not easy being green, but considering the ongoing discussion about global warming, it makes a nice buzz.

SimCity Societies, the newest installment in the Sim City series to be released in mid-November, received help and money from BP. The money was paid by BP to include the logo in the game, as a form of in-game advertising. Help was given to the developers so players could "understand the role of electricity in climate change", as reported by Scientific American. What is really new about this?

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LOL-Cats always has funny pictures to offer, but this one takes - in my opinion - the cake! If you don’t know who Leeroy Jenkins is, you can catch up with the lore on Wikipedia or see him in action on YouTube. Some degree of nerd humor is required to find this funny…