oxygenite

Wow, I finally got around to finishing the redesign that I started several months ago. This time I actually brought both this blog and my photoblog along for the ride. This means that for the first time ever it’s possible to see that the sites are related to each other.

Perhaps I’ll get some blog posts written now that I can actually stand to look at it again.

I’d appreciate comments on the design! There’s no way else to learn.

Cold turkey

I stopped drinking coffee last Monday. Cold turkey.

I’m on the fourth day now and my head has almost stopped hurting. But here’s the interesting part:

I feel much more alert

I’ve always had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Often having to be dragged out, kicking and screaming, by my wife. Now it seems that I just wake by myself earlier than I used to. It seems like I actually need less sleep when not drinking coffee.

A bit of background

When drinking coffee the body adapts to the caffeine, restoring normal functions like a finely tuned PID regulator (yay engineers!). This means that if you inject the same amount of caffeine each day into the system, it works like it did before the caffeine. Note that when always injecting the same amount of caffeine you never get that oft sought after caffeine high! In order to notice any “benefit” from the coffee you need to constantly increase the dosage, which is not possible in the long run.

The theory

Fortunately I didn’t drink that much coffee. My intake varied between about 1 and 4 mugs per day. Non-coffee-enjoyers will now be alert enough to notice where I’m going.

Thinking about the way caffeine works with the human body I realized that drinking different amounts of coffee each day will actually make me tired most of the time! The mornings would logically be especially hard, since all systems are waiting for that first injection of caffeine before being able to function in full. Coffee fail.

But what does it mean?!

I came to the conclusion that I can either drink the same amount of coffee each day and not enjoy any other benefits than the (wonderful grrglaaaahgll) taste.

Or I can stop drinking coffee and just enjoy life.

I choose the latter.

I couldn’t help it when I saw Mary Roach’s TED Talk titled “10 things you didn’t know about orgasm”. You really should watch it. It was great :)

Click here if you don’t see the video

Update 26.5.2009: fixed the size of the embedded video

A Valentine’s Day Card to the Media Companies: “In thinking of me as an untrustworthy thief, you’re missing some great opportunities. There is a holy trinity of things I want desperately from you, because I can’t get them anywhere else: availability, quality, and metadata. By availability I mean give me access to full catalogs of content. More is more. If I can’t get it from you, I’m going to have to go elsewhere, and you don’t want that. Secondly, give me quality: why would I go to you for SD content when I can get HD content elsewhere? Why would I go to you for ad-laden content when I can get ad-free content elsewhere? Lastly, give me rich metadata: reviews, related content, recommendations, transcripts, and credits. And give me an API interface to that data. In return I will give you my money every month, and I’ll rub your feet at least once a week.”

(Via XBMC on OS X.)

I couldn’t have put it even nearly as well as elan did…

Yup, I just set up a photo blog.

There’s only one photo at the moment, but I’m going to try to update it more often than this blog :)

I set it up using wordpress and the yet another photoblog plugin.

Now if I could only find out how to post using MarsEdit I’d be one happy camper…

Blogging is hard. So I just started trying out this twitter thing. And I’m only about a million years late to the party, but better late than sorry – or something… :)

I’m at http://twitter.com/zch

I can promise the occasional bad joke if you start following me ;)

A short note on a small epiphany I just had:

The lack of Firewire on the new MacBook Pros effectively close the security hole, where passwords can be retrieved through the firewire ports.

Could this be one of the reasons for dumping Firewire, or is it just one of the few nice side-effects?

Let the rumors begin :)

Toolkitr is now deployed on a server provided by my employer, so everyone can have a shot at it and try it out!

Toolkitr

Syntax documentation

A short example:

panel ("Goggles") {
    horizontal {
        text_field "Search"
        button "Search"
        button "I'm feeling it!"
    }
}

Ahve fnu!

Isn’t it interesting that finnish YLE points out that a tragic event that has been reported in Finnish media has been picked up by media around the world – namely CNN and BBC? (as heard on the radio, so no link…)

“Finally the big boys see us”

And the very same event makes our dear prime minister wish to increase surveillance of the internet (finnish).

It’s good to see that intelligent people are on top of the situation.

oxGalry is a custom online photo gallery that I developed simply because 1. I was keen on trying Ramaze 2. All gallery software that Google could find contains millions of features I don’t need.

oxGalry is simple. It only shows photos arranged in albums as they are on disk (i.e. folders == albums). The only description of a photo is it’s filename. Aaah, bloat-free bliss.

Facts: - 139 lines of Ruby code (including whitespace and comments) - 72 lines of HTML templates (including whitespace) - 62 lines of CSS (including whitespace)

Check out cute puppy-pictures or touristy photos from our trip to Toronto at oxgalry.oxygenite.org. I’ll post more photos later.