Archive for May, 2007

Changed apps to work without allow_url_fopen

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

For some time my apps on ctrlw.net failed to work, after the admins had changed allow_url_fopen to false. That’s fine since it increases security, but I had to spend some time now to make everything work again.

The Geocoder wasn’t much hassle, basically following the instructions on http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Allow_url_fopen and replacing the fopen call by a few lines with curl commands.

The online kaleidoscope took more time, but it was worth it. The rework also improves speed and caching a little bit, while for security reasons I now only allow pictures on flickr’s servers to be kaleidoscoped. And I moved everything to my Dreamhosted domain ctrl-w.net, the same place as this blog.

Ah, and I just created a small page about the kaleidoscopr in this blog, which explains the basics of its use.

Summer in Berlin

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

It’s been a while. In the meantime I’m back to Germany, exploring Berlin, enjoying the summer-like weather and looking for a life here.

Yes, the year in Spain is over, and while I never considered to stay there for good, a few incidents within short time made us move to another place just now. One of these incidents was someone entering our Madrid flat by breaking the window, and leaving us without laptops, cameras and even the backup on the external hard-drive, so most of last year’s data is lost. Bad luck, but just the beginning, though I won’t bother you with the rest.

Apart from the negative impacts, it was a good experience having been there. I met many interesting people, made good friends and learned quite a lot. Madrid offers so much in culture and events that it’s hard to come along, but even if you only see a small part it’s amazing. One of the best exhibitions was the one of M.C. Escher’s work, but also the big museums (Thyssen, Prado, Reina Sofia), temporary exhibitions, special events or small galleries, it’s just so much and really good stuff. Then the bars. I think I’ve never seen so many bars and restaurants in such a small area, and they’re always crowded. There were so many places to go out just around the corner that I’ve hardly seen the other parts of the city, or just the public ones for botellon. Besides the worldly pleasures of fun and parties my friend David introduced me to the world of hacklabs and frikis, and made me learn new stuff about FOSS. Working at the Fundacion Bip Bip was very interesting as well. They’re doing a great job refurbishing and distributing computers to NGOs and have a fair number of interesting projects. But the best were the colleagues there. I miss you guys! And just to mention, the regular bouldering.

Ok, so far for the past, there’s much more to be told, but now I’m here in Berlin, typing a new entry on my freshly installed new Ubuntu-Thinkpad, enjoying better weather than the Spaniards and looking forward what this change may bring. Currently I’m both looking for a job (software development, research, web 2.0) and for flats (there’s a good offer here, but at the moment we’re mostly interested in a temporary place to get organised). If you know about any, tell me. :-)