Ariejan.net

I get a lot of questions about how I bought my Kindle and what it cost to get it shipped to the Netherlands. So, for all those Dutchmen (and Dutchwomen) who are considering a Kindle, here’s a short how-to in Dutch:

From stopsoftwarepatents.eu:

Our petition aims to unify the voices of concerned Europeans, associations and companies, and calls on our politicians in Europe to stop patents on software with legislative clarifications.

Your webshop is already patented!

The patent system is misused to restrain competition for the economical benefit of a few but fails to promote innovation. A software market environment is better off with no patents on software at all. Healthy competition forces market players to innovate.

European court decisions still accept in many cases the validity of the software patents granted by national patent offices and the European Patent Office (EPO) that is beyond democratic control. They not only continue to grant them, but also to lobby in favor of them. Despite the current deep crisis of the patent system, they are unable to reform and put at risk too many European businesses with their soft granting policy.

On 2005 the Commission appeared to be more supportive to the interests of major international conglomerates than of small and medium sized enterprises from Europe – who are a major driving force behind European innovation. The European Parliament rejected at the end the software patent directive, but has no rights for legislative initiatives.

We urge our legislators

• to pass national legal clarifications to substantive patent law to rule out any software patent;
• to invalidate all granted claims on patents that can be infringed by software run on programmable apparatus;
• to also strive to propagate these rules to the European level, including the European Patent Convention.

Sign the petition now!

For some time I have been eyeballing Sony’s e-reader in the local bookstore. I tried it a few times, but I didn’t like it – actually I had serious doubts about e-books in general because of the experience. Sony’s e-reader was not really easy to use with only one next-page button in a not-so-easy to access place. It also had a slow e-ink screen. It took a second to a second-and-a-half to show the next page. I didn’t like it and had serious doubts about buying any e-reader at all.

But, reading about all the “epic win”-stories of the Kindle by @johnnybusca I just had to give it a try – I bought one.

Okay, I’ve wanted to make a custom TextMate theme since I first installed the thing on my MacBook in 2006. Today I present you with ‘Epic’.

Installation

Grab the theme here: EpicBlue.tmTheme.zip (1.5k). Unzip it and open it with TextMate. That’s all. Enjoy!

Git is quite common nowadays and a lot of people are asking me how they can create a patch file. Creating a patch file with git is quite easy to do, you just need to see how it’s done a few times.

This article will show you how to create a patch from the last few commits in your repository. Next, I’ll also show you how you can correctly apply this patch to another repository.

Codaset is openly asking its users to comment on what pricing strategy they would like most. I’ve spotted this before, but again, there are two types of users. Those who see a great service and know that it will make their job easier, so they are willing to pay for it. There are also those who want a trillion repositories, unlimited disk space and what not for $1 a month (or less). This post is for the latter group of people.

Some developers claim they need to use all of 37Signals’ apps, have the biggest Github plan available and buy that new shiny 17″ MacBook Pro (or that 27″ iMac, I know). With all those tools and hardware available, how can your brilliant plan not succeed? All the successful people you’ve heard of use them. So, with all that setup, you’re golden! Right? Then they check the price tag. It’s huge!

I got git problem: error: unable to create temporary sha1 filename when pushing to a remote repository. The fix is rather easy.

There’s bit of a discussion between me and @ludooo about which word has the most significance when measuring the greatness of something.

I say epic is bigger than awesome. @ludooo says awesome is bigger than epic (he’s not right, of course).

Please help us decide!

You have probably seen URL shorteners that use short, seemingly random strings to identify sites. These strings are not random, they are encoded integer values. My valerii gem allows you to easily and quickly encode and decode integer values. Let me show you.

Today I had the very pleasure of giving Codaset.com a try! Codaset is being developed by Joel Moss in Ruby on Rails and could be a real Github killer!