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Last night my flat mate and I finished the code for a project we participated in for about 4 months (it’s a ground station software for an UAV/ Balloon/ Zeppelin thing called The-Fleye, check the link out if you want to know about it). We did one thing you should not do in software design: we decided to put in a new feature less than a week before the release. I did code nine hours a day for the last two days without doing anything else than sleep (and drink some beer ;) ). What can I say; we finished it yesterday - well in time.

After that, we decided to take a walk along the city’s harbor to cool down and free our minds. It’s been past midnight and thus a good opportunity to test my new camera-lens. See the results in the gallery link below and shots from the new lens and the program we both did in this article’s gallery.

I’ve been watching a few new movies recently and wanted to give my five cents on them.

Street Kings – yet another Keanu Reeves good cop bad cop undercover cop movie. Good to watch but don’t expect anything extraordinary.

In Bruges – very good movie about good and evil and how the human mind may struggle with both of them. A refreshing other kind of movie.

Zombie Strippers – The best worst movie ever seen. No further comment. Ah except; my advice: you better have some cocktails before watching!

Plane Dead – just like Snakes on a Plane but yet better… Although it’s a B-Move. Common zombie movie – just on a plane. Sums it up.

How to Rob a Bank – and nine good advices to get away with it. Also a very, very good movie. Expect a movie in the style of Fight Club and/ or Snatch rather than Chaos Theory or some other tense action movie. Yeah, I really think you may watch it with a girl and both parties will have fun watching :)

Futurama: The Beast with a Million Backs. The common Futurama fan is desperate for nothing but more Futurama. So… a must see for me. Too bad it’s not as good as the previous movie - Bender’s Big Score - and not as good as an average episode of one of the five Futurama seasons. Disappointing story but funny dialogues Futurama is known for.

21 – Twenty-One. Some smart ass MIT wannabe student counting cards in Vegas and actually thinks he will get away with it. A nerd taking the comment ‘Get a Life’ too serious. The story is trash in my opinion, but the style of the movie makes up to it. All in all a good movie.

Vantage Point. Yeah I know. Not quite a new movie. But I didn’t manage to view it earlier. THIS is a good action movie. Also, some serious plot may be found in the movie. Watch it. Don’t ask. Just watch it.

What few of you may know and many may not know is the fact, that I do a cooperative study. I work like six months per year and study the other six. This time I was lucky, because my university is located at the Bodensee – known to many Germans and Non-Germans as a nice place to spend one’s holidays – and this semester I am here at this great place to be in summer. So, basically all I wanted to tell or to show are some photos I took the other day. Have fun viewing!

Two days ago I felt like going on with this page. So I downloaded the current online version to my local drive, made a backup of it and started the happy coding. Happiness turned into pure anger and despair as I progressed with my work. I had a more recent version of the page source code from few weeks ago and while trying to merge the online and the newer version, things started to get messy. I ended up re-coding a lot and cursed even more. Some may blame the alcohol, but that would be way too simple! Blame weariness, stupidity or the fact that I work on the page only every now and then.
Thus I decided to take the whole page to versioning. Subversion is a common tool in almost all of the software projects (smaller and bigger ones) I participate in. All basics and prerequisites exist making me wonder why I didn’t come up with this idea earlier.

Using subversion in web design is a little trickier than in “normal” software projects, as you have one live system the source code has to be deployed to (plus some other things like databases). Yet another time the internet helps preventing an own thought and a SitePoint Blog entry explains very well the difficulties and provides a good (but complex) solution.
I set up my environment a little less complex, as I work alone on the page. There is only one working copy on my local machine, the repository on my private server and the live version of the page. Once I finished some new, shiny features, I can upload (i.e. commit) these. Any commit creates automatically a new version and I can revert a current version to an older one (when I failed hard). Last thing to do is simply copy the page from my repository to the live (domain) folder. I will maybe automate the last step by a trigger (every commit triggers the copy step), but I didn’t make my mind about that yet.

Hello fella! And welcome to my shiny, new page. It's as usual not done, yet. Actually, there is plenty of work left and many TODOs sticking around, but your computer should not explode while browsing this page - which I call progress :)