Artful Code is Andrei Maxim's tumblelog about programming, photography and other interesting stuff. If you dig it enough, you could take a sip of RSS or browse the archives.

• May 17th

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  Eurovision 2009 winner. I really like the song a lot.

• May 14th

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  via radicalisrad

• 23:22

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  Tennis Serving Rituals: Three Balls

  Did you notice pro tennis players ask for three balls when they serve and always keep just two and throw back the third one?

  The reason they keep two balls is that in tennis you’re allowed to repeat the serve if the first try was out (and you are forced to do that if the serve was OK but the ball touched the net) but I was always puzzled why they ask for a third one.

  Looking around you’ll see that some people suggest that the player that’s serving is looking for best ball, meaning the one that’s not so fluffy so that it will travel faster and be harder to return. I don’t think that’s true because in pro tournaments you get new balls every nine games so the current balls are virtually always new.

  The other reason is that you force yourself to think less about the point that just ended and focus only on the next serve.

• May 13th

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  I should start doing that.

  I discovered this photo when reading Giles Bowkett’s “Won’t Somebody Think Of The Noobren” blog post and eventually got to the Flickr-hosted file via FFFFOUND. It’s one of Hunch’s whiteboards.

• May 10th

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  Really old skool DJ battle

• May 9th

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  UNKLE - Rabbit in Your Headlights

• May 7th

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  via web.me.com

• May 4th

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  Programming Ruby, 3rd Edition.

• 9:53

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  Windows Internals Fifth Edition

  Russinovich and Solomon’s Windows Internals book is the only way to learn about the inner workings of Microsoft’s current operating systems. This book covers Vista and Windows Server 2008.

  But I’m not linking to it because I’m a Windows developer: besides the two authors already mentioned, there is another person mentioned in the book: he’s Alex Ionescu, a contributor and a student at the Concordia University in Montreal. And “Ionescu” is a name of Romanian origin.

• May 2nd

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  IntenseDebate, the alternative to Disqus, uses a crappy piece of JavaScript that’s supposed to add a div with id = "idc-container", but only if I have at least one div element with the class post or posts.

  Otherwise it breaks.

• 16:17

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  I’ve been using Let’s Freckle as my time tracker of choice, but $12 per month seems expensive for a single person punching in some numbers at the end of the day (and I’m pretty sure that I can copy around 80% of the features in Let’s Freckle in a small Rails application, but I’m saying that only because Let’s Freckle made time tracking look so simple).

  A poor man’s time tracker can be done with a form in Google Docs. I used three form elements, similar to what Let’s Freckle has. It automatically adds a timestamp so I don’t have to worry about the date. If there are several people in your group, you can set the form to automatically log the username.

  I also started making use of The Hit List, one of the applications that came in the MacHeist 3 bundle I bought a while ago. What’s really cool about THL is that you can mark a task as started and it will show a tiny time tracker that will run in the background.

• 0:19

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  Rails Maturity Model

  With all due respect for Obie Fernandes and his crew, since when is a DVC system considered a best-practice?

• Apr 25th

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  I was reading Tom Ang’s book and got to the still nature assignment where he shows some sample photos. The ones that really pop up are a bit under-exposed and use a black card as the background.

  But what if you have to photograph a dark object? There’s also a brilliant black and white photo of a pair of shoes, but the background seems to be wood. The pure white background seems to be a bit too clinical for me and I tried to replicate the effect using my F100 as the subject and my wooden table as the background. Compare this photo to the one I took months ago, but using a white background.

  For those interested with the technical details, the photo was taken using a Nikon D40 with the standard kit lens (18-55mm f3.5-5.6 G) at 40mm and f/8. I used an external SB-28DX flash that’s right in front of the F100 lens (you can actually see the catchlight in the lens). It was placed just a bit to the right so the actual body of the camera is in shadow because of the lens but the white markings, like “F100” and “Nikon” stand out. I actually moved the flash a bit so I could get some more light on the “Nikon” marking between the petals of the lens hood.

• 14:04

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  Evented Programming With jQuery

  Yehuda Katz illustrates how evented programming using jQuery, can be used instead of the more traditional object orientated programming.

  (via matthewlang)

• Apr 23rd

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  City Lights (via my flickr account)