Dear Ulf Schwekendiek,

Thanks for contacting the MOO Print Team.

I’m sending this email to confirm that your enquiry is in our customer service queue, and that a real, human MOO Service Agent will get back to you by the end of the next business day (that’s Monday-Friday, excluding Public Holidays).

Remember, I’m just a bit of software, so please don’t reply to this email. You’ll find our Service Agents far more conversational.

Best wishes,

Little MOO
Tireless Print Robot

I think this is the cutest, nicest copy-text for an automated email response I’ve ever read!

Update:
Stay with me. It turns out that there real customer support is even better. My problem was solved immediately. The error was on my side, but I still got free express shipping. Feeling very happy. #thatshowcustomerserviceshouldbe

Example:

time_ago_in_words((125).seconds().ago().getTime())

results in

"2 minutes ago"

Note: You’ll need the http://www.datejs.com/ library to run this fancy example.

Check the video: http://www.viddler.com/sceablog/videos/1989/

Here’s the coffee script version of it:

AutoBind =
	auto_bind: ->

		funcs = _.functions(@constructor.prototype)
		protoFuncs = ['auto_bind', 'constructor'].concat(
			_.functions(Backbone.Collection.prototype),
			_.functions(Backbone.Model.prototype),
			_.functions(Backbone.View.prototype))

		_.each funcs, (f) =>
			if f.charAt(0) != '_' && _.indexOf(protoFuncs, f) == -1
				@[f] = _.bind(@[f], @)

_.extend Backbone.Collection.prototype, AutoBind
_.extend Backbone.Model.prototype, AutoBind
_.extend Backbone.View.prototype, AutoBind

1. sudo port uninstall ImageMagick

2. sudo port edit ImageMagick

3. Add –disable-openmp to configure.args (near line 100)

4. sudo port install ImageMagick

5. Remove rmagick:gem uninstall rmagick

6. Install rmagick:gem install rmagick

That should do it.

The game we wrote should teach players fractions. Bubbles, with fractions in them, are falling down. The player controls a number line and can extent fraction on that number line. An example number line is 1/3, 2/3, 3/3. The player has to find the suitable fraction on the number line for a given bubble. For instance, if the bubble is 6/18, suitable spots for fractions on the number line would be: 6/18, 3/9 and 1/3.

The game is written in Unity3D and uses OpenNI hand tracking. Currently there is no Unity3D plugin for OpenNI/NITE that works in Mac OS X, but at least drivers are available. These, including some examples, are available in OpenNI’s github unstable branch. I modified the PointViewer sample app from NITE and added UDP package sending to a server, which I implemented in Unity3D. Checkout the files for that here: https://github.com/sulf/KinectHandTracking

Here’s a video of the game. You will be able to download it from the social game lab soon.

I thought it might be useful to give a summary of it here as a blog post and point you to the complete work.

This thesis is about the design and validation of an A/B testing framework for mobile devices. In my thesis I introduce A/B tests and discuss the design and architecture of an A/B testing framework I developed.The framework is split into a back-end and front-end component.The back-end will enable any mobile and non-mobile platform to monitor and run A/B tests.The front-end is developed for Apple’s iOS SDK and demonstrates the use of the back-end API. It enables iOS developers to add A/B tests to their applications, to verify their UI decisions, and to improve their designs. In the following chapter, I describe how an example application is created and enhanced with A/B tests. After that, I describe test-cases I designed for one of my App-Store applications “FOUND magazine” which is running currently two A/B tests and test devices report back to the back-end.The back-end was developed on the Ruby on Rails Web application framework. It is currently installed and running on a cloud-based Web server available at http://www.abmob.net. Lastly, I summarize my findings and describe current open questions and possible future work on this topic.

If you are interested in reading the full thesis, download it.

If you want to get some beta access to http://www.abmob.net, shoot me an email.

I also want to thank my external committee member Richard Ting once more for coming to my defense and giving me great hints and feedback.

I am determined to continue this projects as time permits and keep you posted here on my blog.

A lot of people asked me to give them help with git and I thought it might be helpful to summarize the general response I give to them in a short blog post. I’m using git only Linux and Mac OS X only, so I can only really give advise for those operating systems.

So, what is git? Git is a distributed version control system, that was developed by Linus Torvald. Check out his talk about it here.

My projects branching models is mostly based on this great best practices guide from Vincent Driessen. I maintain a development branch for current development work and branch from it sometimes feature branches if the feature takes some more time. When I release I merge those changes back into master and tag the release.

A lot of people also ask the difference between rebase and merge. Fortunately this was answered already on stackoverflow.

Some people also ran in the problem of adding a tracking branch to a local branch. Just use git 1.7.0+ and type

git branch --set-upstream local_branch remote/remote_branch

The last question I often get is, which tools I use. I mostly use the command line, but found those tools for Mac OS X very helpful:

• GitX – this is a very lean git client, that installs a command line extension “gitx”. I use it to look at diffs, stage changes, and perform commits.
• GitX Experimental (thanks Marcello)- there is another branch from GitX that is much more advanced. It supports sidebar, fetch, pull, push, add remote, merge, cherry-pick, rebase, clone, clone to in the GUI. Note, that if you want to build it with Xcode, you have to clone it and not download a snapshot from github, because the build script will automatically checkout some sub-modules.
• Tower – this great client is still in beta and hence sometimes real buggy. It visualizes a large set of the git features and is very good for git beginners.
• Git gui – this TCL/TK gui comes with the git Mac OS X installer and can be invoked through the command line with “git gui”

For collaboration I use github, which is really fun for social coding.

I hope you enjoyed my short post and ping me with any questions you have.