Another software release just became reality - today Mathias Tschopp and I submitted MedCalc for iPhone to the iTunes store, it should be available for download within a week or two (hopefully).

I am very proud to finally announce the release of Fernsehen 2.0! It is a major rewrite of the popular 1.8 Version of our TV widget, get it for free now from the Widgetschmiede Website.

I'd like to thank TVStar for the opportunity to use their data as data source, this is a very generous gesture and we greatly appreciate this!

The new version sports an enhanced user interface with tons of improvements, is faster thanks to CoreData and has a much better channel management. When channel definitions change these changes will be offered to download right from the widget without the need to update the whole widget.
Also really improved is the detail view of a show, especially feature films. Try it yourself, I hope you like it!

I didn't find a good LaTeX color reference while googling, so I made my own short color overview.

By default there are 6 colors available within LaTeX: red, green, blue, cyan, yellow and magenta (as well as the "non-colors" black and white).
By using the colors package, another 66 colors become available. You can then use these colors to colorize some pieces of text or - more practically - change the colors of the links generated by the hyperref package.

Using the MCPKit is one way to use MySQL from your Cocoa Application, and I decided to do just that. But there is that one problem since the project seems not to be all that alive - the compiled version is PPC only, no Universal Binary. Well, I thought, download the source and build the Framework on your own. I finally succeeded, but not without running into some troubles first.

It's done, I just finished uploading my first iPhone application to the iTunes Store named Eponyms. It still is under review, but it's finally up there and scheduled for release July 20 (if it's accepdet by then). The app is an application to look up medical eponyms and is based on the eponym database created by Andrew J. Yee (www.eponyms.net/) featuring more than 1'600 eponyms. It's released under the Apache 2.0 License and therefore Open Source, you can checkout a working copy at the project site:

code.google.com/p/eponyms-touch/

I sell the app for 2 US Dollars but offer the same app as a free download for students. There will be no check if anyone indeed is a student, let's see how honest people are. :)

I hope you like it!

You can't download the app on your own because distributing iPhone applications is done exclusively through iTunes, here the links:
Eponyms Eponyms (for students)

I'm currently working on an application for the iPhone/iPod touch and decided to use SQLite as storage for the data. The app will display medical eponyms and must fill the database on first launch and when new eponym data is available from an XML file. It parses the XML file and fills the SQLite database, which currently results in 27 entries to a categories table, 1'623 entries to the eponyms table and 3'281 entries to a linker table (4'931 entries in total). The whole database weighs only 394 KB.

Read the full article to see how I sped up the import process by a magnitude of more than 10.

So, I decided to finally watch the Doom Movie. And since I really loved the games (Doom and Doom II) I expected the movie to be cool in some way. At least a bit. Turns out I was absolutely wrong.

I mean, in the beginning it's like in every stupid action movie, too dim narrow hallways, insane creatures coming from above or below, flashlights failing in the wrong moment; as usual. I can watch those movies. But about halfway through the movie, when the action is in full progress, soldiers are in groups of two searching the area, one dude seriously needs to - shit. He needs to shit! Holy crap! He abandons his colleague and goes to the toilet. Seriously, to the fucking toilet! Now how stupid is this?? I'm sorry, but this is just plain stupid and utter ridiculous.

I actually stopped watching the movie in the middle just to write this down. And it gets not a tiny bit better: Easily one of the worst movies ever. Don't bother watching.

A year later than everyone expected it's now official - Swisscom will launch the iPhone in Switzerland later this year.

This fits very well to the current rumors of a new iPhone being unveiled at the WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference), to be held from June 9th to June 13th in San Francisco, California.

Oh well, that's almost hilarious. You might remember that last summer, NBC pulled its TV shows from the iTunes store after Apple denied them the rights of more flexible prices, bundling content and building harsher DRM into the iPods. Basically, NBC wanted Apple to become more evil and controlling its iTunes users further. It wanted iTunes to bundle popular shows with less popular shows so those would sell more. There's no other point behind bundling, is it?

Apple denied this (hey, there's still good in them!) and consecutively NBC pulled the shows from the iTunes store.

Since yesterday, those NBC shows are available from the Zune store (the Zune is Microsofts iPod counterpart). And guess what - with the upcoming software update to the Zune, there will be a Copyright Cop in every Zune. Mr. Perrette, NBCs president of digital distribution, said that they create “filtering technology that allows for playback of legitimately purchased content versus non-legitimately purchased content.” Great, now that is great! Thank you, Microsoft, thank you, NBC. For the sake of having those shows available and making money out of them, you're ready to fuck your customers once again. Great!

I am really wondering: Today I installed the 5th beta (login required) of the iPhone SDK, so this was the fifth time I installed a beta of this SDK. And for the fifth time, I received the following error:

"The following install step failed: run preupgrade script for CHUD. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance."


I have no problem running the SDK, everything seems to run fine, but I wonder why googling for this error returns zero results. Not even a suggestion to search for something similiar, just zero results.

Does nobody else have this problem? Or am I violating some non-disclosure-agreement by posting this?

Edit: I filed a bug report, in case anyone wants to take a look at it, Bug ID is 5916392

Update: As of iPhone SDK beta 6 this issue seems to have been fixed, at least for me. Good.

Wow. Three weeks ago, I was stunned to see that my main Gmail account now receives slightly more than a thousand Spammails a day (~33'000 per month), but luckily only 1 to 2 make it to the inbox. Today, I checked again to see how many spammails I received in the last 30 days:

49'557

Great, thank you all who contributed.

I don't really belief in the power of homeopathy myself, and to date there are approximately zero studies which were able to proof that homeopathy works better than simple placebo medications.

Now it looks like homeopaths themselves doubt the power of their medications: The FairDeal Homeopathy website states that homeopathy works through the placebo effect, that it requires belief in order to work and on the question to "What conditions can homeopathy treat?", they state that "treat" in no way implies "cure".

Good to see some honesty there. I can live with that. :)

Just stumbled upon this on Sebastians Blog, worthy to share:

That's it, folks, the HD format war is over, Toshiba today officially announced to bury HD-DVD. That makes Blu-Ray the de-facto standard for the rising HD movies market.

While working on a script (in Perl), I discovered that MySQL performs very differently depending on the method used to retrieve a data row. What I need to do is walk through a set of 5000+ rows of a table with 110 columns. I have tried four different versions, and instead of elaborating and discussing, I will simply write down the method used and the execution time

So Apple keeps shutting down consumers complaining on their forums. What a shame!

Update: After a second Firmware Update, this seems to finally be fixed!