The website itself is WordPress; the survey runs on Surveymonkey. I like the design a lot; it’s playful and something out of the ordinary. I would love to pile more features onto this website but unfortunately that is out of scope.

If you speak Nederlands and are older than 10 years old, I encourage you to participate in the survey!

It’s sort of sad that I bought this thing–I did go out to buy a more or less normal espresso maker but just couldn’t help myself. This Magister simply smiled at me and I caved.

I must admit it’s awesome: all the hot steam you’d like, instant hot water for tea, but most of all a brilliant cup of espresso, god damnit I am becoming a barista as we speak! I can even whip up a jug of steamed milk pronto!

That thing there next to it is the grinder. Supposedly it’s ‘teh l33t’ since its discs are flat. Well, it works and it grinds away like nobody’s business.

NuPlay is a brand new open-source application for creating LIVE 3D audio/video performances and interactive installations. It can be used to combine music and visuals in a very direct way. Using all kinds of interfaces to control the 3D visuals and audio.

NuPlay consist of a set of software tools for hooking up all kind of devices (MIDI, audio analysis / FFT, arduino / RFID, Reactvision / tag detection, gamecontrollers / wiimote) and a modification of the Quake 4 engine.

Here’s a good old Ruby 1.8 hash:

lame_hash = {  ne => 1, :two => 2, :three => 3 }

And now the new and improved version:

sexy_hash = { one: 1, two: 2, three: 3 }

Damn, beautiful!

When I saw his keynote about crud/rest a while ago, I was sceptical. After all, writing controllers in Rails is not exactly a pain, anyway. Why change the current m.o. to use methods like put and delete, when they’re not even supported by browsers?

But restful development didn’t go away and I read more and more about it in the Rails community.

So after upgrading to 1.2.1 I decided to give it a go. And what do you know. It’s actually easier than regular development in Rails! I am telling you one day web applications will simply write themselves. Of course, this kind of sweetness would not be possible without convention over configuration, but still the Rails folks are definitely onto something.

I literally added one line to config/routes.rb and three–count ‘em–three–methods to the new controller. That’s all it took! I am amazed.

I’m still not refactoring my old controllers though. Well, not yet.