Inbox Zero, Outlook, Thunderbird, GMail
I’ve become a big fan of Inbox Zero recently, yet I was unable to really do it because I was an Outlook user. Yes, laugh at me if it makes you happy :) Outlook sucks bigtime if you want to keep your inbox clean, and what Inbox Zero doesn’t promote is OUTBOX Zero! – which is what I do as well. In Outlook, for each mail I had to search for all mails having the same topic in order to find the sent mails as well, then delete all of them. Now, I’m a Thunderbird user, and I can view mails as threads, how cool is that? A feature I’ve always missed in Outlook, although it’s not entirely impossible to do this with Outlook, it sucks really bad. So with Thunderbird, I can delete entire threads by just one click and *bing* the inbox looks better. This requires to make reduced use of a “sent” folder of course. Now here comes Google and its GMail philosophy: “do not delete, just remove the label. The ‘all messages’ folder will serve as an archive for your messages” (this is not a real quote, it’s only meant to represent the idea). What the heck? This is absolutely contrary to the Inbox Zero principle. Thus, I’ve decided to ignore Google’s recommendation and make Thunderbird move deleted mails to the trash folder, from where I can exterminate them. Kind of disobedient, but who cares :-)
Sports log
Thanks to my employer, I can go to McFit for free. I started my “real” training on Monday, and I’ve been there another two times since. The first training resulted in major pain for the rest of the week, the second and third time I came out really relaxed. It’s a great means of getting your head back on the ground, and it’s good for the overall health too ;) Nick, you’re a little behind, let’s keep going ;)
Episodes From Liberty City
Once again, I used the source (Amazon UK) and ordered “Episodes From Liberty City”, the DVD edition of the two GTA IV addons “The Lost And Damned” and “Ballads Of Gay Tony”. Both episodes are playable without the original GTA IV which was not the case when TLAD was released as DLC on XBOX Live. I have to say that first impressions of BOGT are really great, especially because one of my most intimate dreams has become true: mission replay. Each mission has a couple of targets like time limit, max allowed damage to the character and other constraints, and you are presented with a rating at the end of the mission. You can later choose individual missions to play again. I’ll keep reporting as I make my way through the second episode :)
Upcoming games
I recently spent a lot of time playing video games, partially due to one week of being infected by a trojan horse carrying the flu (luckily, no H1N1) – the last game I played with a perverse intensity was Fallout 3, a nasty time killer, yet very entertaining. The next couple of weeks will bring quite a lot of new games to my collection, I’m almost in a state of fear already :)
- The Ballad of Gay Tony – the second addon for GTA IV
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii)
- New Super Mario Brothers (Wii)
- Forza Motorsport 3 is definitely an option
- Assassin’s Creed II
- Some time next year, Red Dead Redemption will be published
- Maybe I’ll look at Brütal Legend
Red Dead Redemption and the two Mario games are already ordered. Currently, I’m playing Assassin’s Creed on the XBOX 360 which is a really nice game with lots of historic background, so I’ll probably be heavily eager to play the sequel; Forza 3 appears to be a must-have but I’m unsure if I’d like to play it with a gamepad; Red Dead Redemption is a must-have just because it’s a Rockstar game; Brütal Legend looks funny but of course I can’t play 24/7 so I think I’ll stick with AC and Mario for the next couple of weeks :) Obviously, this is kind of a luxury problem, just like the question “New XBOX or PS3 slim?”. In this case, I think I’ll keep the running hardware and spend the money for christmas presents instead.
Java and blue moon
From the Hibernate-DEV mailing list:
Java 6 doesn’t support making the moon blue, you’ll have to use Java 5.
> When I get hibernate to build, I’m very pleased, as it happens once in
> a blue moon.
Nice reply.
Google Advertising failure
Article text in german only, sorry – taken from this article in the Heise newsticker, I’d like to present a case of general failure when it comes to online advertising:
Article-Ad-Fail
If you are lucky, you can see this – just go to the source. :)
HTML forms: field naming
Never do this:
<form name="form_xy" action="" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="submit" value="whatever" />
</form>
or this here will cause errors:
document.form_xy.submit();
The hidden input’s name “submit” results in a “form_xy.submit is not a function” error. Gnah. (Guess how long it took me to find this error) :P
SVN – about branching and reintegrating
I recommend this article – it provides some valuable information.
SVN fubar
Trying to merge a branch back into the trunk, I’ve been getting this:
Merge operation failed.
RA layer request failed
svn: REPORT of '/svn/xyz/!svn/bc/9110/branches/whatever-module/my_cool_branch/whatever-module': Could not read chunk size: Secure connection truncated (https://www.failhost.com)
for days and days from both Eclipse/Subversive and Tortoise (Tortoise provided a slightly different error message, but it was essentially the same). Suck… Becoming convinced that this is a permanent error and being not very interested (to say the least) to file a support request with our customer about that issue, I resorted to command-line SVN – motivated by pure frustration and the intent to give it one last try – and say what? It worked. Painless.
$ svn co trunkURL
$ cd workingCopy
$ svn merge -r 9059:HEAD branchURL
$ svn ci
<enter message and GO>
$ mv sophisticatedTools /dev/null
I suppose that this might have been a double tool fail, look at the error message: maybe the tool(s) attempted to get revision 9110 of the branch which does not exist, maybe something else – I don’t care too much – I tried several combinations of options (normal merge vs. reintegrate in Subclipse etc.) – it did not work – I ran the errors through Google several times – didn’t find any hints except some Apache DAV module memory leak voodoo – I think I’ll simply ALWAYS use the command line client for merging in the future. EOF.
Next “Meet the Experts” at codecentric
The next “Meet the Experts” is due to happen 09/04/09, see the codecentric blog for details! The first event, focused on performance, was a great experience, so maybe you’d like to join the next one and learn something about agile methods? I’m sure it will be fun.