A few weeks ago I explained how making decision lead to a new place to live (But then I decided).

A little more than a year ago when I started to work for Gameforge, I walked past the building and said to myself "I want that corner office."

It was the office of our CEO Alexander Rösner. So what I really was thinking was "I want to become the CEO."

I deciced on the spot to get that office. Only realizing my mistake just a few days ago.

Last week on monday we did the usual round of office sokoban and by pure luck - well, I had decided - I got exactly that office.

The lesson learned?

Be clear when you decide. Your subconsciousness will listen to you, but it will hear what you say, not what you mean.

My next decision? Become the CTO.

... that my place was just too small.

For the last 3 years we've been living in a single room 30sqm (~323sqft) flat. It's on the top floor of a 11 story building and has a magnificient view, but still 30sqm is just not enough for two (and a half).

The other problem is that shared between the two of us we have to drive around 160km (~100miles) ... per day. Resulting in over 3000km (~1864miles) per month or 36000km (~22370miles) per year. That's a lot of gas - and not very "green".

So in October last year we wanted to change that. Easier said than done, since our budget for the change was around -200 Euros, yes, that's minus 200 Euros. We were already overspending, but that's a different story.

And we wanted to change it big time. Not just doubling up to 60sqm (~646sqft) and two rooms or tripling to 90sqm (~969sqft) and three rooms. No,

• we wanted big.
• And we wanted to fix the driving problem.
• And we wanted to fix the overspending.

So what did we do?

We decided to change it.

If you decide to achieve something and you go after it, you will succeed. That's a basic rule of the universe.

(And you can quote me on that!)

Yes,

• we spent 9 month looking at
• thousands of offers online and
• checking about 200 candidates,

but in the end we made it.

In three weeks we'll get the keys to our new loft.

• It has more than 4 times the old size (>120sqm, ~1292sqft).
• It has more than 4 rooms.
• It saves us around 100km (~62miles) per day, that's over 1900km (~1180miles) per month or 22800km (~14167miles) per year.

Oh and I nearly forgot. (If we combine the slightly higher rent with the saved driving costs and "other" stuff, e.g. uneeded external storage)

• It saves us >300 Euros per month.

And all we needed to do was

decide what we wanted an go for it.

Ten weeks ago I switched to the Motorola Milestone as my main phone.

For the last to weeks I've been taking notes to write down my experiences with Android, so this Gizmodo Article was just the kick I needed to write it down for you.

1. iPhone OS only runs one application at a time.

Sure multitasking on a desktop PC or notebook is nice, but on a phone I want to have full control over what is running (and sucking battery power).

The only thing I want running on my smartphone while I'm using an application is "the phone", so I can always receive calls, no matter what I'm doing. The only exeception to this rule might be the music player, so I don't have to carry around an extra MP3-player.

At the end of my workday I usually have around 6-8 apps running on my Android phone and my battery is down to 5% (aka shutdown).

2. iPhone OS keeps your homescreen clean.

On my iPhone the apps are always nicely lined up in a grid and all icons have a common look.

On my Milestone I have to manually add the apps to the homescreen and no matter how hard I try after a few days it looks like a child has turned over his box of legos.

I don't want to freedom to make a mess. Force me to keep it tidy!

3. iPhone has a better app market.

True, out of 200.000 apps in the iPhone market 95% are pure crap. But, out of the 50.000 apps in the Android market 99.99999% (yes, 5 nines) are pure crap.

I love the fact that apple is tightening up their rules about application submission. Yes, it will slow down the app number growth, but will improve the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.

And for all those who think censorship is bad, go talk to those Android Tetris Developers.

4. iPhone status bar is cleaner.

My android status bar usually contains about 10-15 icons. Around 8 of these I just can't remember the meaning of. (Friends tell me this gets worse once you install more apps.)

My iPhone status bar contains network-quality, time and battery. What else do I need? Remember: It's a phone!

5. iPhone has fixed hardware.

As a developer Android is a total nightmare. Every day you get new hardware. The CPU performance changes, the memory size changes, the screen resolution and aspect ration keeps changing. Hitting one moving target is hard, but hitting 200 moving targets is impossible. Which might explain the low quality of android apps.

6. iPhone supports all carriers.

At least in europe, but so does Android.

7. There is only one iPhone OS.

Again (like the hardware problem): To many different paremeters make development and consitency very hard. The consumer will suffer from this.

8. iPhone has a single place for settings

Android scatters your settings all over the place and some of them are only reachable via extra apps/widgets.

I spent over an hour looking for the facebook app setting for the resolution of uploaded photos. It doesn't exist. On my iPhone I open settings, go to facebook and there it is.

9. iPhone has better social integration.

iPhone has an official twitter app with push notification. iPhone has an official facebook app. iPhone has it's own social network.

10. iPhone is cheaper.

In the first 10 weeks with my Mileston I spent more than twice on apps what I spent in 2 years in the iPhone appstore. And I don't have everything I need yet.

Hardware cost is the same and (european) carriers have the same data plans for both.

All in all a clear win for iPhone so far.

The omni-mad.com website needs a forum. I have used phpBB in the past, but was more than dissatisfied with it on many occasions, so I started to loom for other solutions.

A quick check at forum-matrix.org lead to this shortlist:

• FUDforum
• MyBB
• NextBBS
• Phorum
• phpBB
• Vanilla

All non-Ruby and non-PHP forums where excluded. All forums not supporting Postgres where excluded. I wish they had info about Nginx support.

Let the elimination begin...

Vanilla

The website looked slick, but took ages to load. The "Community" area (Powered by Vanilla) didn't catch my eye at all. it felt a bit like the old phpBB 1.0. Sorry. Vanilla is out.

NextBBS

Fast load for their website, but it looked a bit .... lacking. Fast load time in their forum (N2 powered), but didn't find the downloads and documentation. Sorry. N2/NextBBS is gone.

MyBB

Fast loading, good looking website. Found the info I needed (docs + downloads ) very fast. Even found the demo site immediatly, but ... nope. Loading didn't feel slick enough.

phpBB

You knew this was coming ... didn't you? Opened the phpBB demo/community forum. And that was it. One look and I knew I just couldn't stand it. It might be better than 1.x and 2.x, but the memories just spoiled it.

Phorum

Not really sure why, but the karma coming from FUDforum just was better. I might give phorum a try when I find some time for experimenting, but right now I need something that works.

FUDforum

The winner. So far. I will let you know in a few days if everything worked out.

While trying to get LSI running for related posts, I stumbled over jekyll crashing when converting certain files.

In the end it was some wrong characters inside my posts.

The old posts from wordpress were encoded in ISO-8859-1 and an ä (E4) resulted in bad UTF-8 which jekyll expected.

The quick fix:

  find . -name "*.markdown" -exec iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 {} -o {}.new \;
  find . -name "*.markdown" -exec mv {}.new {} \;

I might better get busy fixing jekyll to not crash and just ignore invalid characters though.

I endured over 2 hours of Black Hawk Down.

Writing some code for the new game and had "The Rock" running in the background.
When that ended "Black Hawk Down" started and I stopped coding.
Years ago people were very enthusiastic about the movie.

Disclaimer

While I do remember some of the real happenings from 1993 and I could have easily refreshed my memory by some research, I decided to base the post entirly on the movie.

With the movie wo can talk about the facts.
Reality has been twisted by politicians for nearly 20 years.

The brief

This movie has to be one of the biggest pieces of shit ever filmed.

The mission

US troops invade Mogadishu and kill civilians. Some of the troops survive and become heros.

You don't agree?

When the troops entered mogadishu they did so without an UN mandate and even without checking or informing their allies.
They did so to kill Aidid. Not to extract and bring to justice. No, just to kill.

If I took 20 soldiers and entered texas to kill George W. Bush you would probably call that an invasion.
It doesn't matter how many people Aidid killed.
The mission was an invasion.

US soldiers are stupid

First they talk about the mission which leads them into the most dangerous area in Africa.
Next they decide to leave their flak jackets and other essential gear to avoid excess bagage.

Over the whole movie I saw about 20 scenes that would have a real soldier laugh or cry.
There are some thing you simply never do:

• If one man is down and under fire in an open area, you cover him from a safe point.
  You don't run back into rifle fire to "help".
• Watch your back. Don't keep staring in the wrong direction. Especially if nobody is covering your back.

I could go on and on, but I guess you just have to watch the movie to think "they are stupid".

Colored people are evil

(Not my message! The one of the movie.)

So these somalian civilians get attacked by US soldiers without reason and start firing back.
That's evil. If you are shot by a well feed, clean dressed US soldier, you better die!
Don't protect your life or your family.

In one scene one of the soldiers shoots an unarmed civilian without any reason.
What's the point?
"I work for the good side, everything I do is right"?

19 americans are worth more than 1000 somalians

In the trailer each of the 19 dead soldiers is glorified.
The 1000 dead civilians are mentioned as a sidenote in a single line.

Conclusion

I wonder why a movie like this runs on television.
Showing this to any under 18 year old should be considered a crime. Showing this at all is stupid.

Questions?

• The somalians had weapons, they must be evil ... or?
  No. While I consider everybody owning a gun potentially evil,
  I still consider civilians carrying a gun in a warzone civilians.
  The soldiers are paid to kill.
  The civilians just protect themselves.

As you probably know I recently switched this site from wordpress and wml to jekyll.
And while I really like what Jekyll does out of the box,
I still have a few features that I would really use.

Since Jekyll is on github it's very easy to create your own fork.
And maybe one day my addons will go back into the master tree :)

Right now I'm updating the ruby on my MacBook to be able to build the Jekyll gem.

Rewrite

I decided to do a full rewrite of this post.

Stay tuned.

Last week I wrote that I'm switching to jekyll and now the time for the switchover has come.

The pages still don't like I want them to look, but I feel that they look good enough to replace the old site.

This will also mean I'm moving to a new server. (The old one has been running since 2004 and is getting a bit dated.)

This will also mean a switch from Apache to NGINX.

Cut me some slack and give me some time to really clean things up. As long as the text is readable you will find what you need.