“Serial Experiments Lain” is an Anime series consisting of 13 parts called layers.

The protagonist is Lain, a 13 year old girl, that at first doesn’t know anything about computers and doesn’t care about them, either. She begins to use her computer when her classmates tell her about a mysterious e-mail they all got. Gradually she dives deeper and deeper into a network called “The Wired”. She finds out that somehow there is a counterpart of her in “The Wired”.

This series - produced some time before the first Matrix movie - explores the same grounds as the Matrix but in totally different fashion. The series doesn’t try to answer all questions it asks and its conclusions are more logical than the ones of the Matrix movies. While Matrix is primarily an action film trilogy, Lain is a sometimes melancholic series with philosophic aspects.

I liked watching this series very much and recommend it to anyone.

Sebastian once showed me Ian’s Shoelace Site. Back then I thought it was funny and an example of what curious sorts of sites you can find on the web.

Some weeks ago I returned to that site and actually tried out Ian’s Secure Knot. You have to get used to it. At first it’s a bit of fumbling around with the shoe laces, but after a while it’s one of those hundreds of routines you execute daily without thinking about it. And this knot really works. Since I began tying my shoes this way I have no problems with loose shoe laces.

Counting downloads is totally in now. All the world is in frenzy about how often something was downloaded. “Spread Firefox” was one of the sites to start this all. Firefox has reached 50,000,000 downloads today. And now after the release of Opera 8 the Opera guys are also counting.

Everyone knows that download counters aren’t a measure for how much people actually use something. I’m for example one of those more than 1,000,000 people who downloaded Opera 8. I have played with it for 1 hour and said to myself “No, I’ll stick with Firefox and Thunderbird” But it’s always better to have some people at least consider using one’s software.

So, I’m happy to announce that yesterday for the 10,000th time someone downloaded Squareness or OverlayDesktop from wincustomize.com.

Have you ever dwelt in the CSS Zen Garden staring amazed at all those nice designs and asked and asked yourself how the hell you could learn all those neat tricks that made the designs possible. Surely one of the options – and till now the only – is to simply read the CSS code for each design and try to distill the piece of code that makes this design special.

“The Zen Of CSS Design” is a guided tour 36 hand picked design. In this guide the authors Dave Shea – the creator of the CSS Zen Garden – and Molly Holzschlag tell you what you can learn from each design and also give useful background and further tips on the topics they talk about. The references to online and book resources are very useful for example.

This book is a full color book. There’s no limitation on gray scale tones or a fixed number of say 4 colors. It’s printed in true color. So it’s also pretty nice to look into. I think this book wouldn’t work in gray scale. It is about design and what effect it has on the people seeing it. Seeing the designs in gray scale would destroy the effect of many designs.

This morning - Well, it actually was still night at 0:15 - I watched Steamboy in its original Japanese version with English subtitles. To make it short: This movie wasn’t worth staying up that late.

Steamboy is an anime by the Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo. Akira was a huge success when it was published in the late 80ies. It is a very nicely drawn and painted anime and the story isn’t bad either. While I never was a fan of that anime, I’ll admit that it’s at least OK.

Katsuhiro Otomo and his team spent the last ten years on this project. It is at least as well drawn and painted as Akira – maybe even better –, but the story is horrible. Even kids should be bored. The plot is very simple and very foreseeable.

The story mainly takes place in the London of the early 19th century. Steam engines power everything and inventors come up with new means to use them. There is a boy – Ray Steam –, who’s a bright inventor himself. And there is the invention his father and grandfather made – the Steamball. Naturally there are some nasty guys, who want to possess the ball. And here the story leaves the ground of realism and becomes some kind of science fiction in the old world. Robots and all sorts of machines - all powered by steam engines - fight against one another and against Ray. On a side note London is demolished.

The film begins promising and becomes boring very fast. I took a nap once or twice - it takes two hours from start to end -, but it was quite easy to get back into the story, since there is nearly none.

Last October in my post about KlipFolio I have been telling you how great a rss aggregator KlipFolio is. While KlipFolio is still great, I’ve abandoned it and am not using it anymore. One of the greatest reasons for me not to use KlipFolio anymore is that I’m spending a lot of time away from my personal computer. The job I’m doing - on site software development at the client’s place mostly - causes that I don’t have an own computer at work. It’s as unpredictable which computer I will use the next week or even tomorrow as it is unpredictable with whom I will do pair programming on it.

So I cannot install KlipFolio on any computer I might be using. Only a web based solution seems to be the right one. I have tried “Bloglines” . It’s OK. I somehow don’t like it’s appearance, though. Those washed out blueish colors are just horrible. And the formatting of the feeds is also very basic. It’s said to be the leader among the web based rss aggregators.

Then I discovered “NewsGator” . You can use it for free (BTW: That’s also true for Bloglines) and it has a very clean and appealing appearance. The formatting of the posts is very good. If the post contains any images, they will mostly also be shown in NewsGator. If you have a feed with complete articles (unlike The Register or the likes with only the first one or two sentences), you don’t need to visit the originating web site to read it.

I have been using it for two or three months now. It’s quite nice to pass the lunch time by reading the newest geek news in NewsGator.

It’s been some time since my last post. Much has happened in the meanwhile.

First the fan of the power supply of my computer just stopped spinning. Fortunately I was browsing the web at that time and suddenly became aware of the fact that I smelled something getting warm. It smelled like some motor working at its limits and getting hot because of that. And suddenly I also wondered why it was so surprisingly still. I followed the smell to the power supply and woke up the fan with a fierce knock. The stillness was replaced by the familiar roaring of the power supply which began to get rid of the hot air inside it. I didn’t trust that power supply anymore and bought a new one the next day.

Two weeks after installing the new power supply I switched on my computer – like I always do after returning from work – to find a text console informing me that some important windows registry could not be found. I tried to restore Windows, but it really didn’t help. That looked like an omen. So instead of buying a new hdd, I bought a new computer.

So now I’m back on the road and I feel like posting some bile for the new start. I’m not going to change this into some kind of “BileBlog” , though. Hani’s blog fills this gap more than aptly.

So as you probably have noticed the topic of this post is “Idiots on TV”. It’s amazing how many idiots can be seen on TV. There are even shows specializing in presenting different specimen of ’em in action. There are people talking publicly about what usual human beings would call the most private and intimate affairs. And then there are people talking and acting like idiots.

There is the classic where an older woman answers the question on whether she would tell anyone that she’s a heterosexual in the following surprising way “I would never tell anyone that I’m a heterosexual. I wouldn’t do it even if I were heterosexual, though I’m definitely not”. Well, maybe that’s not really idiocy, but only the fear of admitting the ignorance of a certain word.

For some time now I have been thinking about changing the way my site is built. The problem was that whenever I wanted to change some general part of the site – the side bar for example – I had to do it in each template that is used in MovableType. That is fairly tedious and error prone work. Now the first idea I had was to use some scripting language. MovableType would generate the script which would then call some external code to generate the side bar, the header, footer etc.

I’m making my living out of software development in Java. So JSPs and servlets are natural choices for me when it comes to web application development. Unfortunately my hoster doesn’t support Java as very few web hosters do. You have to have an own server which hosts your site to be able to use Java on it.

Let’s look what’s available then. Hmm, PHP. Why not? So I got some book about PHP5 and read through it. Well, PHP5 does have some object-oriented aspects. It knows classes and objects - hurray. But somehow those aren’t really first class citizens. It looks like the PHP developers wanted to get a part of the OO hype and just threw in classes and objects into PHP. PHP is still an imperative programming language looking very much like C and borrowing some ideas from Perl.

The next one was Ruby . Ruby is a real object-oriented language. In many aspects it resembles Smalltalk. I haven’t used Smalltalk, but I have seen enough of it to recognize a language that takes a similar path. In Ruby you can write something like this

(1..10).each {|i| puts i}

This will iterate from 1 to 10 and put out the numbers on the console each on its own line. There’s also a for loop for people not feeling comfortable with this very object-oriented loop variant. Ruby is nice and fun to code. It’s dynamically typed which gave me some headaches, but then there’s no scripting language with static typing.

So I started coding my web site in Ruby. There is no really good IDE for Ruby. There’s something called Ruby Development Tools , which is a plugin for Eclipse. Compared to the Java IDE’s like IntelliJ IDEA it’s only little more than a text editor with syntax highlighting.

I was nearly finished with the whole framework for my site and was coding the templates, when I began having some security concerns. Think about the following Ruby code

commentbody =<< 'END'
<$MTCommentBody$>
END

That’s a really good idea at the first sight, but look twice. Ruby will read all after “<< ‘END’” until the next occurrence of “END” into the variable commentbody. But what happens if the comment body looks like the following

blah blah
END
`do something nasty`

Fortunately Ruby will report a syntax error on the second END. The worst thing that happens here is that the page containing this code won’t show up in the browser. It won’t execute “do something nasty” (backticks are used in Ruby to enclose commands that are directly executed on the shell). But a page that doesn’t show up because some user wrote some hackish code into a comment isn’t acceptable.

So back in MovableType I saw for the first time the section titled “Template Modules”. I don’t know why I didn’t see it earlier. The documentation concerning template modules is very sparse. It only tells that they can be used to define blocks of HTML code that can be reused in the templates. It doesn’t tell you that you can have MovableType-tags in there and that you can include template modules into other template modules. So in the end, template modules – being a rather simple thing – where what I really needed.

That said, I’m not leaving Ruby behind. Ruby is still a cool language. I have some ideas for things where Ruby can be pretty handy. I’m currently trying to create a new archive index. I’m trying to do it with a MovableType-plugin, but currently have no success with it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll probably take Ruby for this task.

I came across two other applications which directly support Squareness Look And Feel.

The “Magic-Project” is a computerized version of Magic The Gathering, a very famous collectible card game, that can be played in a LAN or over the internet. The Magic Project comes preinstalled with Squareness Look And Feel and other look and feels. I’ve never played Magic and so I don’t understand the program, but it looks good - especially with Squareness switched on :)

WordRider is a text editor for a very special text format that can be read on the TI-89 calculator. It’s base installation package doesn’t contain Squareness, but there is a link to Squareness on the website and Squareness will be available in the “Look & Feel”-menu if you put the jar file in WordRider’s lib directory.

In the meanwhile I have released an update to the look and feel, which fixes a bug reported by the author of the Magic-Project. Strangely there was a recursion that only occurred on JDialogs that used look and feel painted window decorations (border and window buttons). Fortunately finding and fixing the bug only took about 6 hours.

I think finding it was so fast because of YourKit Profiler. The bug resulted in 100% CPU time consumption. So I started the profiler, had a look at the findings and nearly immediately got the idea what was wrong. Without the profiler I would have been forced to use System.out debugging or real step-by-step-debugging, which probably would have been a bit difficult. But so, it was a breeze. Somehow I never used profilers before, partly because they nearly always look very complicated with all their graphs and partly because they are mostly very expensive. Those two statements aren’t true of Yourkit Profiler. The personal license is rather cheap and the generated snapshots are very clean and readable.

Back to Squareness: I also released an updated version of the Windowblinds skin. It has been quite some time since the last release. I originally planned to make a 2.0 release that would come with some new color schemes and would be accompanied by a finished Colorizer. But that will take some more time and this new release contains some bugfixes and improvements which I just didn’t want to keep from the public any longer.

The Firefox ad has finally made it into the New York Times. Like 8000 other Firefox users I have donated 30$ to make this real. Unlike many who have the bad luck of having their name written wrongly or even not at all in the ad, my name made it into the ad without any bugs.

With 8000 names having to share the space of one page, there isn’t much room for each individual name. So the names are printed in a fairly tiny font. I have printed the ad out on an A4 page and need a magnifying glass to read any of the names on it. If I remember correctly the New York Times uses a somewhat bigger format than A4. So in it’s original printed form the names might be readable.

From an economical point of view 30$ for that little space is much money. But on the other hand it doesn’t really matter to stand out and be clearly visible in this case. More important is to be part of a bigger movement. I wonder if this movement will be strong enough to overthrow MS Internet Explorer. I surmise those 8000 people are mainly geeks and nerds. Many internet users still don’t know what Mozilla is and that there are alternatives to IE. This and other ads are a good starting point to make it known that there is something besides IE. One problem still stays: Many users just don’t care which browser they use. They use IE since it is preinstalled on Windows.

Here’s the ad in a reduced size with its upper left corner magnified to show off that I’m really in ;)