Lars Pind

Ok, so here’s another one, and this one does have wifi. Square on Halmtorvet 18, Copenhagen. The fare is pretty standard (just had the burger, it was good, the potatoes not so much), but fine, the service is friendly, and the laptop people seem welcome. There’s hardly anyone here today, which also means no smoke. Two access points within reach. The large windows give a really nice view of the square and the crappy weather outside, the music isn’t too loud.

Technorati Tags: wificafe, copenhagen, denmark, vesterbro

With my last post, I can now claim the first edgeio listing from Denmark (there doesn’t seem to be a way to link directly to a listing filtered by country).

Edgeio looks like a really good idea. The interesting part is, it’s a model that’s been talked about for a while, only they are the first to launch it.

I’m offering my Roland JV-90 keyboard for sale. It’s got nice keys and many of them (76), some pretty good piano sounds, and lots of other funky sounds. I’m selling because I stopped playing it a while ago. Condition is excellent. Sells for DKK 5.000 or make an offer.

UPDATE: Fixed the links, which didn’t go to the right page due to frames.

Tags: listing, roland, keyboard, forsale

Meyers Deli seems like a great place to get work done during normal business hours: Excellent food at reasonable prices, wifi, obviously (I haven’t verified, I asked a waiter), and most noteworthy: A no-smoking policy. Thank you!

No word on how busy they are during normal work hours, or how welcome the laptop people are there. They serve breakfast from 8 AM on weekdays. Very busy on weekends, not for laptoppers then.

UPDATE: Strike that. They do have wifi, but it’s secured and only for internal use. Repeat: No public wifi. Bleah.

Technorati Tags: nowificafe

Awesome, my favorite writer, Malcolm Gladwell now has a blog, as of 3 days ago. Apart from having read all of his book and most of his New Yorker articles, I also had the pleasure of seeing and hearing him live in New York last spring. He didn’t let me down. Subscribed! (Via Tara Hunt.)

I was introduced to Wagamama in Amsterdam about a year ago by Stephen Donnelly, who was then project manager for the CMS that I built for Greenpeace. I absolutely loved the combination of a surprisingly great taste, fast service, informal atmosphere, and how good I felt after eating there.

It’s a complete surprise, too, because it’s a streamlined fast food restaurant with a standardized menu and computerized ordering, yet the food is both great tasting and healthy. Not your typical fast food place.

Today, I found and bought the cookbook by chance, and I’ve read most of it, and am really excited about getting started cooking stuff from it.

But best of all, as I was doing research for this post, I noticed to my great delight that they are opening a restaurant in Copenhagen this spring. I’m going to be there as soon as it opens and see if it’s as good as the one in Amsterdam. Yay!

If you, like me, like to have tons and tons of tabs open, and have more than once by accident hit the dangerous Cmd-Option-W combination which causes all tabs but the current one to disappear, here’s a trick to make less likely:

Go to the Keyboard & Mouse panel in System Preferences, and setup a more convoluted shortcut for that menu item. Here’s how I did it

Continuing from my last post, here’s more Mac software I just found.

Inquisitor is quite amazing, from the same David Watanabe that brought us the beautiful NewsFire (which I decided to dump in favor of NetNewsWire, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful). Inquisitor does live searches from the toolbar in Safari. I think it’s something I could get addicted to. And it looks smashing.

The other one that stands out is Witch, an app that does window switching, not just application switching, with option-tab, and also lets you add shortcuts for things like Zoom, which is quite useful on a 12” inch laptop, where you pretty much want things zoomed all the time when you’re working on them.

It’s so much fun with all these apps. At one point, when I was still stuck on Windows, I thought the desktop software market had died. But then I switched and realized that it’s all live and well, it’s just a forest of many small pieces of software. (Via TUAW.)

The More Internet Preference Pane lets you easily change which application opens up various URL protocols, like “aim:” and such. Me, I wanted to change “aim:” from Adium to iChat as I was playing with the MAKEbot. (Pref pane via Mac OS X hints, MAKEbot via digg.)

If you’re running Typo and want to show off your photos from 23, I’ve now posted my 23 sidebar plugin for Typo as a patch.

UPDATE: Matthew Hitchinson is the first to add the 23 plugin to his sidebar.

I saw this spiffy new Typo theme over at Jamis Buck’s site, and decided that it was time finally to update to the latest Typo code, put on a theme from the Typo theme contest, but most importantly, play with svk.

Since I heard about svk from Sean a while back, I’v been wanting to try it out. It seem like a great way to manage projects that build on top of other projects. It’s like Tom Lord’s gnu arch, only with subversion, which the whole world seems to have decided on as the successor to cvs. I like.

Anyway, so this blog is now using the lucid theme. If you want to use the same, beware there are some changes that need to be made to make it work with the latest Typo. I found out the hard way.

My mac is feeling exceptionally sluggish this morning. Is this part of a larger conspiracy to get me to upgrade to the MacBook Pro?

OSx86 Project: “It’s all quite predictable – nothing is getting done because the sharing of information has stopped. Were there no contest, IRC channels would be full of dedicated developers sharing what they’d learned through trial and error, swapping ideas and encouraging each other. I’ve talked with some people who are very close to success… but their efforts are not public. As it stands, sharing what you’ve learned could cost you $12,000.”

It’s logical, and very interesting. I’ve long been fascinated with and involved in open source software, and there’s just so much more and better progress when knowledge is shared. Like we experienced it back in the Age of Enlightenment. (Via TUAW)

OhmyNews goes global. There are a lot of us out here who have been impatient waiting for citizen journalism to take hold on a large scale outside of Korea. Perhaps this will help? (Via Memeorandum.)

SIGNAL VS. NOISE: “The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with photoshop or vim, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter. That’s where the real gains are made.”

“Most of the time you spend is wasted time on things that just don’t matter. If you can cut out the work and thinking that just doesn’t matter you’ll achieve productivity you’ve never imagined. It’s there if you just don’t pay attention to the things that don’t matter.”

Not much to add here. It’s so much more effective to drop a “nice-to-have” feature or task completely, than it is to do it, but do it cheaply. The trick, of course, is in deciding and agreeing on what those essential features are.

I enjoyed using a bluetooth headset (Nokia HDW-3) with Skype on my Mac for a while, but got fed up with all the complaints from people that the sound was bad. Just this week I bought the Jabra JX-10 after having read some reviews lauding the sound quality.

Well, I’m off it again, after just a few days. People kept complaining. At first, I tried switching it to the ear nearest the computer, and even moved the computer around for the next call so I could have the headset on my left ear, which I prefer, but people still couldn’t hear me. With the built-in microphone in the PowerBook there are never any complaints. Even the microphone in the iSight is noticeably better.

I’ve given up on bluetooth now and put in an order for the Sennheiser M145 instead (which, interestingly, is nowhere to be found in the US store).

What do you do when MySQL complains about “Too many connections”? It seems you can just restart mysql (/etc/init.d/mysql restart), and the Rails processes will simply establish new connections transparently, with no requests lost at all.

This happens every few months for me. It seems that when I use switchtower to reap my FastCGI processes, they’ll leave the connections behind. Not sure if there’s a way to make them close them first, or if it only happens when a process crashes.

This interface really is nifty. Go try it now, just hit g then l, and it’ll pop open. Neat. (Via Ajaxian.)

Technorati Tags: webapp, design, ajax, user interface

It’s interesting to see how 37signals the company has progressed in the technical challenges they take on. First, with Basecamp, they solved the traditional web application problem. I’d been doing web apps, as opposed to web sites, and when Basecamp came out, it felt like they’d just nailed it.

Then with Ta-da list, they got their feet wet in AJAX, and found that it could make for effective user interfaces, but was clumsy to develop. Enter the AJAX support in Rails, which renders things server-side, and uses innerHTML to update the page. This was so much easier to work with, that they built Backpack with AJAX everywhere.

Next came Writeboard, which tests how they can do smaller applications and integrate them into their other offerings. A neat way to increase the value of a feature: Integrate it into for-pay products, making those more attractive, as well as running it as a for-free teaser like Ta-Da.

And now, with Campfire, we’re seeing them tackle the keeping-an-open-connection-to-the-server type of AJAX app.

This, of course, is just speculation on my part, I’m sure they’re really focused on the customer problems they want to solve, but it does look like there’s a thought behind it.

It’s good news for Rails and friends, as it keeps them moving forward.

Technorati Tags: webapp, product, 37signals, design, strategy, ajax

Campfire has launched, and it’s looking very good. I’m working with people in both New York and Silicon Valley, and having a standing, logged chat room is going to be really helpful. The 37s guys should know, they work that well, too. I’m looking forward to trying this for real, when my partners wake up.

Interestingly, I found this at Om Malik, the announcement hasn’t been made at SvN yet. It seems like it might be a conscious strategy: Let it trickle out through the blogosphere, rather than blast it out yourself. Maybe people are more likely to blog it, like I just did, when they haven’t. Makes it feel like more of a scoop?

UPDATE: It’s official.

Technorati Tags: launch, webapp, product, 37signals, chat, im, scoop

Wow, talk about flipping. Google buys MeasureMap before it’s even out of closed alpha. I mean, it’s nice and all, I’ve been using it for a while, but still, that’s pretty early in the process. Amazing. No word on the price yet. Congratulations to Jeff and the other four he’s taking with him from AdaptivePath. (Via Om Malik).

When I’m looking at a web page with Safari, all I have to do is hit Command-P and save as PDF, and I have a nice PDF of the page.

Is there a way to do this automated and server-side on a standard linux system? I need to have a web app generate these PDFs dynamically on the fly. And they need to look good, with different designs, etc., so it’s more than just getting text to show on a page.

I’ve come across HTMLDOC, and it does the job in theory, but only for crummy HTML—supports most of HTML 3.2, some of HTML 4.0, and no CSS. Not great, if I also want to produce reasonable HTML output.

Are there any other options out there that you’re aware of? Is there code in Webkit for this, and would it be possible to get some of that to run on a Debian box? Hm, doesn’t sound likely.

Jarkko’s post tonight finally pushed me over the edge: I had to try out this Selenium testing thing. I’m working on an app which makes massive use of AJAX and Javascript, and it makes regular functional testing quite tricky, which was making me uncomfortable.

I installed the Rails plugin, followed the README, and found the reference documentation, and boy is this easy and slick!

I’m looking forward to getting full coverage for the dynamic parts of my app as well. This is very cool. If you haven’t already, do try out selenium. Thanks, Jarkko!

We need more immigrants like Sean, who is contributing actively to our society, economy, and helps build valuable bridges between this country and the rest of the world. How shameful and stupid it is to kick him out—and with a 30-day notice to boot. Holy cow! Sean, we hate to see you go. Time to get into politics or get out of this country.

I finally figured out how to get Quicksilver to catalog all of my documents: Preferences > Catalog > User > Documents, then click the small “i” in the bottom right corner to open the drawer. At the bottom of the drawer, click “Attributes” and click “Create Copy”. Select the copy, which will be at the bottom of the list in the main window, then click “Source Options” at the bottom of the drawer, set “Include Contents” to “Folder Contents”, and finally set the Depth slider to infinite. As a finishing touch, click the “refresh” circular arrow next to the “i” to have it rescan the catalog immediately. Phew, that just took me 18 months to figure out.

If you’re still unsure of the difference between web 1.0 and 2.0, there’s no better way than a side-by-side comparison.

Compare the Web 2.0 version of this site to the Web 1.0 version. The 2.0 version comes complete with rounded corners, less clutter, a personal story, and a blog that’s been running all of 10 days. The product itself, of course, is pretty one-oh. (Via an ad onSvN)

Jeg har lige opdaget den her “Mennesker og Medier” podcast (XML), som min ven Nikolaj Thyssen er med til at lave. Den seneste med Uffe Ellemann er ganske forrygende radio. Subscribed!

The most annoying thing about the services menu, apart from the fact that I never use it, is that the apps have a habit of hijacking your keyboard shortcuts. Well, not anymore.

I just ran into ServiceScrubber, a really easy tool to clean up that mess by turning off entries, removing them completely, or just changing or removing the hotkeys. Very useful indeed, and much easier than modifying the files directly. Oh, and it’s dontationware. Thanks!

I found this very handy ReCSS bookmarklet by David Schontzler (via planet::dojo), which reloads the stylesheets for a page on the fly, so you don't have to reload the whole page for each change. Especially useful for AJAX page, where you may need to do a little clicking to get to see the styles you are changing.

I had to fix it up a bit to make it work with Rails and Safari. The fixes were:

• Accept titlecase "Stylesheet" as the value of the rel attribute, which is the Rails default.
• Use URL encoding for the backslash in \?, because Safari for some reason insisted on converting it to a forward slash.

Click here for the updated version, which you can then drag to your toolbar or save as favorite. (I'm posting it on a separate page because my blog software munges the URL so it doesn't work).

As soon as David updates his version, I'll kill mine and link to his instead, so don't link to the above page.

UPDATE: David has updated his version. Thanks, David.

UPDATE 2: Textile/RedCloth really doesn't like ~'s in URLs, I just realized the original post was messed up. Fixed now.

Technorati Tags: webapp, design, ajax, css

I use this handy little script to open up the Rails log file for a project in Console.app:

#!/bin/bash
open -a console log/${1:-development}.log 

This HTML validator came as a godsend recently when I was at the beach house with limited internet connectivity. Really simple: Place it in your dock, open a page in Safari or Firefox, save the HTML file to the desktop, then drag it onto the icon in the dock, and Validator tells you all that’s wrong with your markup. Very handy indeed, and faster than those browser-based ones where you have to upload the file first.

TUAW has a tip on managing menulets, the little things on your menu bar that show battery status and the like. Something I didn’t know here was that you can command-click them to move or remove them. Pretty handy if you happen to want them in a different order, which I sometimes do. Now, of course, the Skype, Adium, and Quicksilver ones don’t respond to the command-click—maybe their authors didn’t know about this. Interestingly, the Plazes one does.

I can’t go, because my wife just underwent surgery and I have to stay home to take care of her and our 6-month old daughter. (She’s okay, but she can’t carry anything.)

I can give my ticket for the Summit away, if you happen to be in London in 2 days and want to go.

Let me know.