Spring
The sun is out and the temperatures are rising. Dylan has forgotton Legoland and the Museum and wants to head for the playground every day. I went with him on Wednesday, Friday and Yesterday. All other days he went with my wife. I've got some photos that I'll post to Picasa later.
A year ago he wouldn't use a slide. Be Autumn he would, but he often couldn't get to them. Somehow the tradition of building steps or at least ladders is - as far as the architects of playgrounds think - completely out. You have to climb obstacles, ropes, poles and run catwalks to get to the top. Dylan yesterday managed after a few attempts to climb to the top of a ship-like structure. On deck he headed for the slide from the bottom of which he could start all over again.
Style, rounded Corners and Testing
Oh, times were so simple when there was only one browser around to test your pages with. Did those ever exsist? I'm fairly sure that in the early days I only tested with IE. I'm a Firefox User, but I've got IE 7 on this machine and IE 6 at work (really!). My lovely rounded corners were handled with a table and somehow the table, CSS etc. got nicely screwed somewhere. Anyhow the site no longer worked at work so I checked with IE 7 at home and that wasn't working anymore either. I don't no what I altered that crashed it but I've seen myself forced to dump the rounded corners. So this is now pure CSS. Be happy with it. I'll tweak the colours a bit morein the next few weeks.
Sunday, April 5th 2009
Deutsches Technikmuseum
Dylan enjoys heading for the Museum. We went there today for a few hours. I shot some lovely pictures and will be posting some to Picasa in a few minutes.
Dylan loves using my camera. It's a Nikon D70, I set it to automatic and attach the fantastic 50mm/1.8 lens. I don't know how he manages to shoot so many pictures out of focus but some are really fantastic. So I'm opening a new category in Picasa for those shots.
Sunday, March 29th 2009
Dylan guitarist
Dylan has a guitar and loves playing it. His songs are quite short, often just one senseless line. Today he walked into to the with a chair and did a short guest apperance whilst I was envolved with tax homework. My camera was at hand with the reliable 50mm attached. Enjoy. I'm going to upload the same but uncut image to the picasa site.
Quiz #114
Went ok, I had lot's of fun and I think all our guests did too. And here is the quiz as a PDF.
Legoland Model Builder Workshop
So Ok, I'm a grown-up. And an engineer (Software Engineering is more engineering than science or art allthough it is a bit of all three). But still I enjoy building their modells with Dylan. They've got three at the moment the Berliner Dom, The Reichstag - both roughly 20 brick mini modells suitable for 4+ - and a modell Fernsehturm that goes beyond many 8 year olds. I put a list of Berliner tourist atractions together and thought which ones could be built with that many stones. I built the Brandenburg Gate on the Photo. it's possible to buy any stones you want at Lego.com. But they don't really assist you in picking them. My latter humble creation needs 165 bricks.
Sunday, March 22nd 2009
March 1st
Today is both St. David's Day and the first day Martenitsa is traditionally worn - I've got one tied around my arm right now. By pure chance we ate leeks this evening.
Quiz #114
My 114th quiz is planned for Thursday March 19th start is half past eight. All friends and foes are wellcome. The fun for everyone including me is at it's height when the place is crowded. For those who can't make that date: Murrays pub quiz is every Thursday, same time.
Album List
I've got an old long script that goes over my drive and creates a list of all the albums (and tracks) in my collection. Unfortunatly it was getting a bit slow - it read the MP3 tags from all files every time the script ran. I had known from the start that I should have used a database or at least used an elder version of the list itself as a database (I think that was my original plan). Anyway. 4 years later. I added a database, it's now a lot faster and I only had to change a handfull of lines! In other words: Whenever you start something in Perl, consider using objects. I only altered one object 'track.pm'. It was the only object that read the MP3 tags. I used BEGIN and END blocks. I choose DBI and SQLite. The only real problem was finding suitable example code. Because the database can be built from scratch I wanted to be able to create the DB and table within perl.
$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=albumlist.db","","", {AutoCommit => 1, PrintError => 1, RaiseError => 0}); $dbh->do("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS tracks (Filename PRIMARY KEY, Mtime, Album, Artist, Track)"); $select = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM tracks WHERE Filename = ?"); $update = $dbh->prepare( "UPDATE tracks SET Mtime=?, Album=?, Artist=? Track=? WHERE Filename=?"); $insert = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO tracks VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)");
All lines taken from the BEGIN block. Using precompiled SQL is supposed to be faster, but I did it because it takes the weight of having to escape odd characters off my shoulders. All that has to be done is calls like $select->execute($filename) and $select->fetch().
Of course I'm not finished there: Now that I have a database I should write a script to search in it. Before that I have to remove unwanted data from the DB (did you notice I haven't checked out DELETE yet?). When it comes down to programming I can always find something to do.
Sunday, March 1st 2009
Fasching (carnival) at the Kita
More a tradition from the catholic Rhein area Fasching has been catching on in Berlin since the government moved from Bonn to the capital. It's easy to understand why it's picked up at the Kitas: It's a reason to have fun and dress up! Dylan was totally against dressing up until the evening before the event. He then told my wife he wished to dress up as a space ship with a rocket engine ("Rakete mit Triebwerken"). Thanks to the NASA-Logos on his wings he can be easily identified as a spaca shuttle.
What is a Kita?
Kita is the abbreviation of Kindertagesstätte which as German comes is well worth being abbreviated. It's one of those strange things that language does sometimes. Kindergarten is a German word too, but it's no longer used. When Kindergarten is meant Kindertagesstätte or more likely Kita is said. Probably one day, not many decades ago, a politician woke up one morning dreaming of changing the entire kindergarten system to the better of every child. After his (or her - you never know) endless efforts were accomplished the system remained roughly the same but had a new name. This is of course a completely fictional story. I'll look up the truth one day.
Then again Wikipedia writes, that that Kindergarten is a Kita for Kids between 3 and 6. At least I can put the history straight: It was invented in... Hungary ...or Germany. Depends which Wikipedia article in which language you're reading.
Tuesday, February 24th 2009
2,000 hits
Surprisingly we've been getting a lot more hits over the last few weeks than ever before. Sure, I updated the Site and have been posting more regularly than before. But I'm still surprised.
Tuesday, February 10th 2009
Kann man drauf Hüpfen?
This is Dylans favourite question when querying the properties of things. It roughly translates to: "Can you jump up and down on it?" or "Can you bounce on it?" We were thinking about going to the planetarium today, but dropped the idea. When Dylan queried "Kann man drauf hüpfen?" in reference to the planetarium, I broke out laughing. Therefore I thought it would be worth an honory mention here.
Sunday, February 1st 2009
Dylan can Count
Today Dylan surprised me be counting nonstop and error-free from one to eleven. Not to ten, no - to eleven! He then walked into a florists and asked for a yellow flower. He got a yellow rose (but not from Texas). I gave him the money and he paid for it.
We went to Legoland again on Friday and during Dylans stint at the model builders workshop having a go at the Reichstag, I put the camera on remote propped it up with a packet of tissues and made shot after shot while the Reichstag was assembled. Eventually Dylan took the remote off me, so I ended up with lots of pictures of Dylan pressing the remote. I've refined the 66 pictures down to a sequence of 8. Here is the eight picture sequence.
Saturday, January 31st 2009
Quiz #113
Ah! I really love to be the quiz master - having everyone dance to your words! I think everyone enjoyed themselves finely. Midgame was music - I can't publish that here, but I've uploaded a PDF with the questions.
Of course the turn out is far from what it was "in the good old days" of the Emerald Isle. But people still come to the quiz and enjoy it.
This Site with Internet Explorer 6
So sure enough, I tested this site before I published it with Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. But the people I work for have obviously preferred not to install version 7. Version 6 can't handle the alpha channel of the PNG graphics correctly. Quite surprising really, as PNG has been around well over a decade. So if you see a white square around the green lego crocodile - it should be transparent! I suggest you get yourself firefox or complain to the user help desk that your system isn't up to date.
On writing this Site
Earlier versions of this site were created with the help of a large stiff Perl script. It gave me multi language support and posted my photographs directly here. Well I've given up on that completely and have returned to home made HTML (with the help of Selfhtml). My faovrite editor is vi (i.e. vim). No that I'm entering cyrillic directly I had to configure it to handle unicode correctly (that is: My version of correctness). I had a stint at it before but didn't get it right. And it's so simple - I'm just surprised it wasn't configured that way out of the box. My mistake was that setting the encoding to utf-8 isn't enough - you should use a font that supports the code points you wish to see! All I did was add these lines to the .vimrc file (in Windows it's _vimrc):
set encoding=utf-8 set guifont=Lucida_Console:h10
Saturday, January 24th 2009
Legoland, Again and Again
Dylan and I often go to Legoland Discovery Centre at the Sony Center near Potsdamer Platz. Now that we've moved to Kreuzberg it's only one stop with the S-Bahn away. We've got seasonal tickets, so it doesn't even cost to get in. We were there three times in the last two weeks. It's basicly a tourist place for kids - mostly boys. One room with modells of tourist atractions and the rest one huge playground full of Lego bricks.
At the moment he insists on going to the Model Builders Workshop. Yesterday he built the snowman and the Reichstag both twice!
On the Website
This version of the website is now a bit cleaner - I've taken a lot of the markup out, gut a nicer menu with optional logos. I somehow can't get that crocodile over to the left without moving the picture of Dylan over there too. But it's not causing a big headache.
Saturday, January 17th 2009
Sunday, January 11th 2009
I've uploaded two new images of Dylan to Picasa.
I'm still fiddling with this updated site but I'm going to try and upload as is and then rework it later. The background image fits the typical "work in progress" theme quite well. BTW: It was shot in the underground station Gleisdreieck.
Friday, January 2nd 2009
The web being the neverending story it has been since creation I've had to redo our website once again. Don't worry all the elder stuff is here somewhere. Anyway: The new site is hand written HTML, scrapped up from the older versions of the site. No fancy new stuff and no multilanguage support. Sorry for all those who enjoyed reading this stuff in German or Bulgarian.
Christmas regards
I sent out all cards on time. I sent the e-mail to all my collegues a little late. I didn't send the mailout to everyone else. To late to catch with that now. So here are the greatings just for you:
Честита Коледа и Щастлива Нова Година
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Frohe Weihnachten und ein gesundes neues Jahr
Quiz
So I gave up the quiz after exactly 111 quizes. The Emerald Isle closed down in what we might call a midnight run. It was then I said that I'm out. But the quiz refused to die and so it was first reincarnated at a different site and later moved back to the premises now know as Murrays. I've been there once or twice since then, played the quiz with William & Friends and decided it's time for number 112. After a little chat with Gundi - who has taken over organising everything - my quiz was on 23.10.2008. Of course I enjoyed myself very much. So I asked politely for another date in 2009. So quiz number 113 will be January 22nd 2009.
Address
My wife, Dylan and I have found the most wonderful place to live. It's a four room flat in Kreuzberg not far from the Deutsche Technikmuseum or the Tempodrom. In fact it's near everywhere while remaining a quiet side street.