When you deploy a piece of software it's easy to get something wrong. The server may not be set up to specification, or you may have a typo in your configuration. For simple applications these errors are easy to identify and standard test procedures should weed out the most obvious culprits. However more complex functionality is harder to test, and errors may be harder to identify. First I'll talk about a typical error, then I'll discuss a solution.

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I needed to use the Google Calendar API in a project that was built with maven. I  needed to make 7  jars available to maven by importing them to my local maven repository. This is fairly standard stuff  but needs lots of typing, so thought I'd post it in case anyone else needs it.

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Jean Jaques Rousseau

This evening I needed to get a list of unique words for a captcha tool. I decided to start with one of my favourite books of all time: 'Confessions' by Jean-Jaques Rousseau. I grabbed the text courtesy of the Gutenburg project and then had to figure how to extract the words. Rousseau was not only an eloquent writer but posessed a wide vocabulary (even when translated into english).

I googled for some scripts, but then just decided to pipe stuff together on the command line. here's how it looked:

grep -o '[a-zA-Z]\{4,12\}' rousseau.txt | 
    tr A-Z a-z | 
    sort -u |
    tr '\n' ';' > rousseauWords.txt

this processed the whole book in less than 2 seconds  and gave me a list of all uniques words longer than 3 characters and shorter than 13, stripped of punctuation, turned to lowercase and seperated by a colon.

Not particularly eloquent, and I'm sure there is some repetition but it does the job nicely

Atmospheric animation for marketing department "12 above" of german pharmacy company Grünenthal.

The short animation visualizes key sentences like "providing strategic orientation" in form of a flog of birds forming different shapes in the sky.

Tuesday, 5th of January 2010, 8-11 pm

The first Talk About The Weather in 2010 will feature the following speakers.

Werner Kranwetvogel is a commercial director and photographer and will show us his latest work on North Korean Mass Games, the world’s greatest show with over a 100.000 participants. After his first trip to Pongyang in 2005, he returned in autum 2009 to realize a second series of pictures with a much closer look on the performance. Due to an unparalleled foto-permission he was able to take pictures, that haven’t been seen like this before.

http://www.anightinpyongyang.com/

100 leather and metal parts from 40 different suppliers, around 30 different production steps and up to 15 hours manual work by 5 specialists. Unlike most other top-fashion brands, the CELIACZERLINSKI brand is not backed by external investors or major corporations. The brand thus embodies Celia Czerlinski’s vision and her own personal sense of direction - from the initial idea right through designing the products, selecting suppliers and manufacturers and marketing the products to the end-customer. The result is uncompromising quality.

http://celiaczerlinski.com/

Michela Vieser is trend scout, producer and author of ‘Tee mit Buddha’. She will talk about one of her most recents projects. “Overlooked Sights. German Places.” is a richly illustrated roadbook to yet undiscovered places in Germany.

http://www.driftingfriends.de/

Tuesday, 1st of December, 8-11 pm

Florian Siepert has worked in a number of dying industries, from print media to the music business. He is now with Hamburg based software developers mindmatters, a food blogger, involved in Hamburgs coworking scene and trying to co-shape the future of where and how people work together. His talk “That’s how we do things round here” highlights the dangers of old knowledge and customs in a rapidly evolving society and the fun that can be had by being open and forward-thinking.

http://mindmatters.de/

Michael Hecken will talk about the story behind his product GRACE. Launched in November 2009, GRACE is a unique high-performance e-bike with full road approval. The combination of speed and full technical road approval distinguishes GRACE from conventional power-assisted bikes, and ushers in a new era in urban mobility.

http://grace.de

Okawari will serve delicious Tokyo style finger food.

Meyer, Miller, Smith consists of highly creative individuals ranging from advertising creatives with decades of experience in analog media to square eyed digital age specialists who all share the same passion: Helping to shape the brave new world of networked communication and turn it into an exciting, meaningful, loving and entertaining place.

Although our services include print design and production, film, video and motion design production, we do not create classic advertising first, to later base a website on. Unlike traditional agencies we have a holistic approach that includes interactive media right from the beginning, usually as the key component. Our core competencies include design and implementation of interactive websites and applications for online, offline and mobile devices; Flash- and HTML-based websites; intranets; online games; multi-user applications.

We also believe that our future lies in collaborative work. That’s why we maintain a growing network of friends and collaborateurs, including strategic alliances with partner companies and creative individuals which helps us to look outside our world, explore new horizons, and add our own visions to say things in new ways, with new craft.

A mindset like this is best cultivated through creating exemplary products, services and experiences, some of which you will find on this website. Because when you assemble a group of smart, funny, fearless people infused with boundless passion, you can create work that rocks.

Which is why we believe this is a very exciting time for all of us.

The built in Image Editor with CKEditor is really great and the documentation sure did a great job of explaining how to switch on 'upload' feature. In a matter of minutes I was successfully uploading images onto our server, and seeing the results sent from the server.

However I had no way of knowing what response it expected from the server. Simply returning the image url, or an image tag didn't work. After hours googling, reading forum posts, and finally the source code form a couple of open source projects I finally got the thing working.

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I'm really excited to be typing the first post on our wysiwyg editor - CKEditor, the next generation of the popular FCKEditor. This is the third rich text editor we've tried and I have to say I'm really impressed.

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We've just heard the great news that the Falling Walls Conference, for which we developed the corporate design, website and trailers, has completely sold out of all tickets.

We'd like to congratulate the team at the Einstein Foundation for all their hard work, and wish them a wonderful conference next week.

See you there!

Why have we chosen to call our new Blog Product Figaro? When discussing what the Figaro is and how it should work I had one of those high-low cultural inspiration moments. 

I kept thinking of a line from Peter Shaffer's Amadeus film of 1984. there was a scene where the young mozart is trying to justify to Emperor Joseph that he is writing an opera out of Beaumarchais' Play 'the Marrriage of figaro'

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We've chosen Slimbox to provide a javascript lightbox effect. it's clean simple and very lightweight. It provides not only features for viewing an enlarged version, but has a slideshow feature which works nicely.

It's based on our favourite javascript Library MooTools and at about 4kb it's very lightweight, with a code-design that makes it very simple to implement. There are a great many Lightbox clones out there, but I found this very simple to use, and they've made the effort to upgrade to Mootools 1.2, so I had no extra compatabilty headaches.

More details can be found on the SlimBox website

Torsten has built a sharp new looking video player.

The inevitable cheesipuffs movie

It can easily be embedded into blog post. you simply have to upload one of the supported formats, in same way as picture. We show many videos post with no problem

The Blog Administration recognises it video, and builds that render player when visitors look at blog. 

Currently formats are:

• Quicktime (mov)
• Flash (flv, f4v,m4v)
• Mpeg4 (mp4)