There’s no business like live business
Today, two months, after joining the 2dehands.be team, we released code on which I contributed a significant amount of code for the first time. Considered I’ve been learning Perl along the way, and my last experience with a reasonable high- traffic site was at fabchannel.com, it was thrilling to see a big change being pushed to the live servers, watching the logs as they scrolled by and monitoring the new change. It did feel like somewhat of a swan-song to me.
The change we just pushed has been a big change, as it directly touches the users who interact with our site. For years, 2dehands has been running after a “firewall” of captcha’s and smart anti-spam measurements without actually asking any sort of confirmation from our users, contrary to most sites, where user-interaction starts with password-confirmation.
Our intial barrier for using the website may have been raised by demanding e-mail confirmation, but I am convinced it’ll offer a better overall user-experience in the long run. Having confirmed users means we can slacken some of our anti-spam measurements, improve the quality of content and reach our users when we need to.
However, the most exiting part of this change was monitoring the live data, as it reflected the change: seeing registrations being confirmed as users clicked the links in their e-mail just seconds after the change went live.
Billy is here
Billy is the name for my simple-invoicing-and-billing application.
The idea behind Bill is to provide a simple web-based application for invoicing for small businesses and freelancers (me) – and besides generating invoices it helps me to keep track of past due invoices. I’m planning on fixing the generator so I have a one knob solution for recurring bills. So Why Did I Do A RYO Again? Well, of course, the usual reason, but also for other good reasons: In the past, Silke was in charge of sending the invoices. As she’s a designer, everything she does, she does in illustrator. Even writing invoices. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but in the end it just ook her too much time. As we’re picky about how things look, I decided that my templating system would produce an almost perfect copy of her hand-crafted invoices, she is a designer, after all.
Even tough these arguments are good arguments (don’t you think so?) , I must add that the task of getting this right was a little more then I had anticipated, but, hey, it’s free, as in “free beer”, and it’s written in Python and runs on Google Appengine, and after my last proof-of-concept, I wanted to get a better feeling for Appengine.
Current state of affairs is that it’s almost good enough to be used by other people then me, so it’s available for live demo over here, and sources are here.
A HTML5 doodle…
This little project started out as trying out some HTML5 canvas demo, but soon I became amazed with the speed I got up to coding and actually focussing on what I was trying to achieve. I had been playing with the canvas before, but suddenly it “just worked” as I expected – and that’s a relief coming from a web development background.
Building the 3d scanner from plywood
This article was written for http://fablab.waag.org/
1. Introduction
At the Waag Society, and Fablab Amsterdam, together with Miguel Jimenez andKarim Amhali I have developed a 3d laser triangulation scanner.
3d Scanner for Architektoon
I have been working on a really exciting project last year, that’s in it’s final stages right now. It’s a 3d scanner based on laser triangulation ( laser what? ) for a project called “Architektoon!”. There’s sourcecode, instructions and pictures, available here, here and here.
Altough the technique has already been developed in the 1970′s, I still had to figure out a lot. The quality of your scans depends a lot on the resolution and image quality of your camera, the number of rotations, focus and proper calibration and framing. So it helps to have a trained eye for video. The biggest challenge was to build something robust enough to be transported over and over again, and to be used by many different (non technical) users. Altough I frankly must admit we haven’t really left prototype stadium yet, we’ve had two scanners operating on our workshop recently, and even without me being present.
It’s funny how you can stay under the radar for a long time, and then somebody suddenly just puts up a short youtube clip with your name on it ( actually, it has my face in it too ) and it pops up on my first page of google already :0)
Slicing on Google App Engine
Ever since Google Appengine came out, I’ve ben wanting to try it for some of my own projects. Since I’ve been learning Python as a part of my graduation project, and I finally have some spare time on my hand, I decided to give it a try.
Whenever I code something, it’s usually something I need. This is no different: since I’ve made the transition from MacosX to Ubuntu professionally, I’ve been looking to replace fireworks, an essential part of my workflow when it comes to getting front-end work done. The slicing part of fireworks is so well tuned, that you’ll never want to return to Photoshop once you’ve mastered it. It allows you to point to each individual slice, set the filename, optimizations and colorspace options. I always keep my slice documents around as part of the project documents, and it’s been proven handy: in cases where only cosmetic changes were made to websites I’ve done (read: images), all I needed to do is import the new desings into a separate set of layers, and export all the slices again.
There’s nothing on Ubuntu that comes close: Gimp doesn’t have slicing, Inkscape is not very handy with images, and that’s about the alternatives that we have. So the first app I made on Google Appengine is just about that: slicing. Slicing images, in a similar way that Fireworks allows me to do.
It’s not even near ready, but I’d like to present it as a pretty function proof-of-concept, to be elaborated when more time arrives, maybe. And yes, I’ve used it a couple of times already 
( furthermore, source code is here )
Dada code…
Code style among programmers touches a sensitive subject. It may be hard to understand for an outsider, but code style can make the difference between grasping the function of a piece of code within seconds, or having to plough trough each line individually, correcting or changing markup as you go. Even while typing, a certain way of “doing” things may influence the logic you’re writing down.
RYO – I’m an apprentice
(RYO – roll your own)
Suddenly, on some rainy sunday afternoon I decided to start buildingmy own “Web Application Framework”
It did not start out as a framework immediately, more like gradually formalizing code I’ve written before into a library, removing overlapsand stubs and cleaning up naming, as a part of a small, quick codeproject I need to finish. With building “my own application framework” I mean that I set out tocreate code for other people to read and use, with a public coderepository and real documentation.The first question, of course, is WHY.