Take my books!

Update: Now you can filter the book list by language. After a gentle nudge by Nicole in Lübeck.

OK, the plans are in the works, banks are involved, and now the library comes tumbling down: we are moving to Nørrebro, which is another part of Copenhagen. After the summer, we will live in better-planned apartment.

This entails me and Luisa giving away books. Yes, we have more than 100 books in storage, all different kinds. To make things easier for us and you, we indexed the books in an Excel sheet when we stored them in the attic. This data was a goldmine, because it was a breeze pouring it into a database, and topping up with a small web interface for the users to tell us that they want a book. Then they get to come and pick the book up at no charge over at our house. Go reserve your new free books today!

When you reserve a book, please say something about yourself in the personal message field.

*Bad form*: “Um, I was at some sort of programming website, and there was this link and… the rest is history.”

*Better*: “At the Python Geeks website I found your profile, went to the blog and then booked a book. I’ll pick it up next week, since I live in Copenhagen.”

Caveat! The books have no other info than what it says there on the info card. (JFGI, or “Google is your friend”.) And, you need to pick them up, in person, at our doorstep.

(The application is built using the Rails-like PHP web framework Cake, which is rather entertaining to use.)

My buddy does Web Forms 2.0

It turns out that the inimitable Olav Junker Kjæer is now implementing Web Forms 2.0 together with three other heavy-weights of IE JavaScript manipulations.

> We’ll be building things like the new date/time input controls, the datalist element, a range control (slider), well, all of it in fact.

This is a very cool and welcome development. They started nine days ago, and their Sourceforge page says little about the whole business.

Question you might ask: **OK, so what is this Web Forms 2.0?**
Continue reading “My buddy does Web Forms 2.0”

Design book hints found in unusual places

Lars Pind is an entrepreneur in the Copenhagen Internet business climate. A force to reckon with, he founded the company Collaboraid, which won the Startup of the Year award at the conference reboot 6 in 2003. Their website’s jobs section has interesting literature tips:

> These books are considered required reading, because they
> explain the values that we believe in and work by.
>
> **The
> inmates are running the asylum** by Alan Cooper because we want
> to make people happy, not make them feel stupid.
>
> **Visual
> Explanations** by Edward Tufte, because we like being easy to
> comprehend.

Black Diamond exterior

After reading that, I went to the Royal Library’s homepage, found both books, booked the first one (I’ll get it later this year, perhaps coinciding with a period of time when I have the time to read things!), and saw that Tufte’s book was for reading in the Royal Library only. Cool, sitting in the Black Diamond, reading design philosophy. I could get used to that.

Click the image too see fancy shots of the Black Diamond.

Exploring with Wiki

Today I started reading a book (Extreme Programming Explained, by Kent Beck) that I borrowed from Brian (Kodehoved).

It was inspirational. It brought a tear to me eye, literally. It makes me want to start the Test-driven development tomorrow. And I will. No procrastinating.

And source code control. SVN > CVS, I think. But how do these fit in?

* Perforce
* Darcs

And this, lovely, lovely Ward:
Exploring with Wiki