Last year I spent some time looking at the movie ratings people made at moviepilot.com. They are stored as a list of numbers with millions of rows:

• user 22 gave movie 12 a rating of 80
• user 09 gave move 03 a rating of 95
• ...

That endless list of numbers just did not excite me and I wanted to turn it into something I actually enjoy looking at. So I went ahead and turned a long list of numbers into a colorful image (inspired by this forum post).

In this image every movie is represented by a white dot: The more popular a movie is, the bigger and brighter it's dot. The line between movies express how similar the are to each other. Two very similar movies are connected by a greener line, while the lines between not so similar movies are red. Please take a look at the big version of this image.

There's also an interactive_map available! It contains the movie titles (in german). You can drag the map around and use your mousewheel to zoom.

Gerade beim Herrn Lickalot gelesen, dass ihm sein MagSafe Netzteil exploidert ist. Äusserst erfreulich. Und ich hatte mich schon geärgert, als bei meinem 90€ Netzteil das Kabel abging (was mir Apple erst nach 30min Streit an der Hotline auf Garantie ersetzte).

Das ist fast noch toller, als dass man sich mit einem MacBookPro Netzteil den MacBook Akku zerstören kann...

But it's so shiny.... 

While switching workstations I ran into problems with a rails project I'm working on. Suddenly the rspec test suite failed with hundreds of errors.

The cause was an ArgumentException with the message "one hash required", thrown by the svenfuchs-i18n gem. 

The solution was to downgrade from the 0.2.0 version of the gem to 0.1.3. 

Gerade beim fefe gelesen, und für toll befunden:

With the shiny new apple notebooks becoming more and more popular, everybody talks about trackpads with support for multi touch gestures. They can come in handy in all types of situations like resizing or rotating images, scrolling in any direction, you name it. 

Here's a little wrap up on the world of finger gestures before multi touch trackpads were invented.