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Last weekend, my girlfriend and me went to Wandlitz for a short trip. Wandlitz is a small town close to Berlin and has two lakes around it, namely “Wandlitzer See” and “Liepnitzsee”.

We decided to hike around the “Wandlitzer See” the first day, which was pretty nice at the beginning, where there was a promenade. But after 1km, the promenade turned into a normal road and started to drift away from the waterside, which is not exactly what I imagined of a hiking tour around a lake would look like. Anyway, I found a quite interesting sign next to an intersection after walking around half the lake lying on the ground, most probably knocked over by some car, saying “Watch out for children!”. I hope the children are still doing well unlike the sign…

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As my new community project is using a lot of Javascript and Flash Communication, I rely on Flash’s ExternalInterface. ExternalInterface allows me to create simple functions in Flash, which are callable from Javascript. I developed everything using Firefox, where everything worked just fine, but when using Internet Explorer, I encountered the problem that no ExternalInterface functions would register, breaking the Flash/Javascript Communication completely.

After endless hours of testing, I found out that for ExternalInterface to work in IE, 2 conditions have to be met.

1. The Flash needs to visible. Loading a flash into a hidden div does not work.
2. It has to be loaded before the document onload event. All Flash files loaded after the onload event can’t register any functions with ExternalInterface.

There seems to be an issue with transparent PNGs (with alpha channel) in IE 7, too. I had some ugly black background in the pictures even though other PNGs worked just fine. The reason was that it the div was hidden first. I guess IE 7 has some serious issues with invisible divs.

Adobe Photoshop is pretty much the standard program everyone use to edit images. It is a great piece of software, but unlucky, incredibly expensive. It has a lot of features, but sometimes, I just want to quickly crop an image or change its contrast and it is annoying to wait ages for it to load. Anyway, while searching for a way to allow users of my German Anime community (animechat.de) to edit their avatars online, I stumpled upon pixlr.

WOW! I never knew that it is possible to edit images that comfortable in my browser. The best thing is that it starts instantly. No need to wait at all, I can just open it up and use it. Perfect. If only Photoshop could be like this… Anyway, pixlr supports a lot of features, not only the basic ones like Painting and Cropping/Resampling. You can use Layers and apply quite a lot filters to your image. I strongly suggest you giving it a try.

It also offers an API to integrate their image editor to your page for editing Images on your website. I am using it on my community now. You can see some more screenshots of pixlr on the tutorials on the community site.

Some of you have probably read my article complaining about the Logitech product quality. Well, after my third diNovo Keyboard ended up looking like crap after short usage, I decided to get myself a different keyboard. Just like the one before, the rubber from the palm rest started peeling off. Take a look at the picture, does that look like a € 200 keyboard to you? This wouldn’t happen to a cheap € 2 keyboard after 1 week of usage, but on a € 200 one? Paying 100x and getting 100th life time? WTF? Logitech Service worked, unlike the products, flawless (again) and replaced it within 3 days. So after I received my fourth (!) replacement, I decided to sell it on eBay and get myself something different.

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The first time I used 2 display on one computer was around 1997, with Windows 95. At that time, one of two computers at my home broke, so there was one monitor more than computers. As I was trying to fix the broken computer, I wanted to test whether the graphic card was broken, but as I was too lazy too remove the old one in the working computer, I simply plugged them both into one computer (they were all PCI at that time). Once plugged in, I played around with the settings and then suddenly realised that I had just doubled the working space of the computer. This is quite a lot at that time, where we only had tiny 14″ CRT screens. As I was playing around with Winsock at that time and was creating something like VNC at that time, it was really helpful having two instances of a IDE running, one on each screen, to test the communication. But as monitors were incredibly expensive at that time and as I couldn’t convince my dad to buy a new monitor for the next computer, I never used a dual-monitor setup again until a few days ago.

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I’ve learned about an interessting illusion called McGurk effect. It shows how your brain is not only using your ears to hear things, but also your eyes. Sounds crazy, but it’s really like this. A specific example of the McGurk effect is hearing “da da da” with eyes opened and watching the video, but hearing “ba ba ba” once you close your eyes.

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It is now possible to get the keys for Windows 7 Beta Activation Key under this URL: (German 32Bit Link)
https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/productkeys/win7-32/dede/default.aspx

You will need to have kept the technet registration process window open from yesterday to get the key.

Maybe it’ll work if you are signed on Technet too.

UPDATE: Downloads are now possible too.

I have the Intel U2500 (2x 1,2 Ghz) in my notebook (Toshiba R400), which is simply to slow for developing heavy Javascript applications (like my Wordpress plugin qTranslate). Most of the time I was sitting in front of my computer and waiting for it to react. this made me realize that I need a faster computer. But what to do if I don’t have much money left? Luckily, I still had a case and 2 harddisk left from somwhere, so I only needed a CPU, Mainboard, Power Supply, RAM and a CPU Cooler. So I started looking for pieces to put together for a really cheap computer, yet really silent and fast.

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! I have released qTranslate 2.0.2 for you all as my little Christmas present. Thank you all for supporting me, especially those who bought me really nice gifts, send me greetings cards or donated some money! Thanks a lot! I really appreciate it!

I’ll be playing “Junta” and “Siedler” over my holidays all day long.

Temporal masking describes the effect of your ears missing quiet sounds after hearing a loud sound. This effect is probably known by most of you (temporal post-masking), but did you know that this also happens before you hear a loud sound (temporal pre-masking)? How can your brain know when hearing a quiet sound that there will be a loud one coming and dismiss it beforehand? Magic? Can our brains peek into the future?

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