Beyond the Net

Apple, Adobe and Google

2010-05-19T15:39:00.000+02:00

When two dogs are fighting over a bone, the third runs away with it? Is that what is happening with the Apple/Adobe/Google fight over Flash and video on the (mobile) web? A good read on what the business reasons may be for Apple to keep Flash off its iPhone, and Adobe's reason to try to save Flash as a platform is here The whole idea of Apple is to create closed, proprietary platforms and make

Viewing from a distance: the Euro Crisis

2010-05-16T18:44:00.000+02:00

Now that I'm in the US for a week to visit Google IO later this week, I get the feeling that the Americans understand the European Euro crisis much better than we Europeans do ourselves. Really great interviews on CNN (with the PM of Greece!) asking real questions, better coverage in the newspapers, and even on stage yesterday, they made jokes about the euro in a way that shows real understanding

Problems with Wordpress

2010-05-13T20:17:00.000+02:00

I used to use the Blogger FTP service to upload my weblog to my own web server. This allowed me optimal control of the layout of the site, and ensure it works seamlessly with the rest of the web application. Since May 1st, Google no longer supports this method. I wanted to try to use Wordpress on my own server, but ran into terrible installation and configuration problems (and I am supposed to

IIS worker processes

2010-03-12T12:33:00.002+01:00

For a project I wanted to make optimal use of the significant server resources I had: 16 cpus and 24Gb of RAM. I implemented a custom HttpHandler that spawns a lot of requests, and used Apache Ant to request images rendered in 25 parallel threads.This took quite some time, and I noticed that the server was not actually doing anything; mostly using 1-2 cpu's a little bit during this process. Why

How to tweet beyond i-am-eating-a-banana

2010-03-05T11:19:00.003+01:00

Everybody is twittering nowadays, and too many still use it only to broadcast messages about what they are doing; the "i am eating a banana" tweets. No problem with that, and in fact, I like to know when my friends eat bananas, especially when I'm bored waiting in line or in a train. So, please my friends, keep posting all the strange and stupid things you are doing, and let me be the judge of

5 lessons I learned today on image processing in .net

2010-03-03T19:46:00.005+01:00

I'm working on a web application to create a large set of tiled images based on an immense data collection. For that really great project (can't show you what it is though until it's live) I had to refresh my image processing skills again, after I've done several image sites before.I chose to use ASP.NET as the application, with a virtual immense canvas, working with C# 3.5, and still staying

Can I have your supermarket cart?

2010-02-10T11:57:00.003+01:00

I'm not sure how common this is outside of The Netherlands, but here all supermarkets have carts that require a coin to operate. The carts are locked together in a long line, and you need a coin of 50 euro cents to free it from the line. Fortunately you get it back after you're ready shopping. Here's what it looks like:Well, the main idea is of course to ensure that more people actually return

Is Content king? Or is the User king?

2010-02-02T16:48:00.008+01:00

If I have something that you want, you can give me money for it. So if you're hungry, and I have an apple, I may give you that apple for some money. I'm more likely to do that when I have a lot of apples, or have cheap access to apples (or other forms of nutrition) and I want something else that I do not have and this money may help me get that from someone else.This is easy when the things are

Why movie and music distributors will die

2010-01-23T21:20:00.002+01:00

I like watching movies, and as I'm blessed with no long-term memory, I can easily enjoy a good movie over and over again. The past weeks my 11 year old daughter and I are watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy; one of the classics I believe should be a central part in the education of all children.We did have an issue last night with the DVD menu; we could not get it to set to Dutch subtitles

Do I need an Archos 7 video player?

2009-12-23T22:33:00.003+01:00

Wondering whether I really need the Archos 7 portable video player to watch movies on boring plane and train rides... still not sure

How I lost 7.5 kg

2009-11-06T20:08:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow is my birthday and I'm glad to say that my bold statement some months ago about loosing weight has paid off.It is quite normal for men over their thirties to gradually gain weight. This is caused partly because of physical changes in how the adult body consumes energy, and partly because of the eating and exercising habit of men with busy families and a demanding job. The weight gain

When is multitouch coming to the pc?

2009-10-06T09:29:00.002+02:00

Ever since the early days of the computer mouse (that was seen initially as only a kids toy, not to do actual serious business with), we've been interacting with our computer in the exact same way. Sure, we have a webcam, a microphone, but nothing really changed the way we tell our computers what we want to do.That is, until the iPhone changed all that and gave us the touch screen, and of course:

jQuery or Prototype

2009-09-10T14:07:00.002+02:00

All programmers are religious zealots. So when it comes to the question of which Javascript framework to use, they will attack and defend furiously.I've been using Prototype a lot, but recently the jQuery framework has become famous too. When one customer asked another customer recently why they insisted on using jQuery, they answered: "well, jQuery is the de facto standard":-) a really

Infected

2009-09-07T09:20:00.002+02:00

The bad guys are disguising themselves as the good guys. Interesting and dangerous.Monday morning means coffee and visiting news sites and weblogs. When I visited one of them, my browser redirected to a page that, after some animation, looks like this:A perfect copy of a windows explorer with evidence of viruses and trojans. The popup looks so real, I had to drag it to see it could not get

Lazy and Lucky?

2009-09-03T16:43:00.003+02:00

Sometimes even typing an entire query in Google is too much work. And then, you have to press search, and then... oh terrible you have to press the link of the results too.Now that is no longer necessary with BeyondTrees LazyLucky(tm). If you are lazy (like all good programmers are) and you're searching for something that others are searching for too, you can just type in the first letters, and

The end of page based searching?

2009-09-01T12:33:00.002+02:00

Google and Bing are both playing around with new search APIs that will allow for a much more responsive search experience than the old fashioned edit-search-viewresults-clickresult paradigm: ajax search.You can play around with one simple example of what it feels like using the Bing Ajax API here. A bit useless to start searching for all prefixes of the query you're after, but still fun to see

the @whitehouse listens to people #healthcare @blurb : the true power of #twitter

2009-08-25T19:41:00.004+02:00

Image you're a president leading a couple of million people, all with a voice of their own, and want to boldly go where no president has gone before: reform the Healthcare system of the United States. Of course you have a Twitter account @whitehouse and occasionally tweet about what #obama is doing, who he is meeting, and post pictures of his dog Bo.Well, that is all normal, though somewhat

Is the Lottery tax on the Stupid?

2009-08-21T16:07:00.003+02:00

Often we get calls by people trying to sell lottery tickets. These call agents are often students who follow a pre defined script to lure people into their business by relating to their fear of loosing. The students themselves (and most people) have no idea on statistics, and (like all people) have no good understanding of low probabilities. This is why we feel afraid to get on airplanes, while

Augmented Reality is Real

2009-08-20T13:14:00.003+02:00

The new hype of 2009 is augmented reality: live video enhancing; see Layar. If you've never seen it work on your computer, do the followingprint out this PDF stargo to http://sodiuminteractive.com/dropbox/flar/allow Flash to open your webcamhold the printed paper in front of the camera and move itMake sure you have your speakers on; the Flash script will generate a 3D sound animation on top of

Error messages

2009-08-18T14:21:00.004+02:00

Back from vacation and back to work. Today has been a day of error messages. Well, a day in which I was reminded that having good error messages and safeguarding mechanisms in your code is imperative.I was installing a latest Shindig release on Tomcat. Followed instructions, the service was starting up correctly, but I got 404 errors on the sample URL. On any sample URL from the shindig web-app,

Caching and Expires

2009-07-23T11:03:00.003+02:00

How does the Expires HTTP header work together with browser cache settings? I did some tests today because I thought I was going crazy. A customer of mine questioned my advice on installing mod_expires on their central server to avoid long load times on static content on high latency times. I tried to find a weblog on the subject, but could not find it. Most people seem to simply explain how

Bouncy

2009-07-21T20:51:00.002+02:00

Eliza is still alive! Turns out my little quick fix yesterday was not good enough. I mentioned I used a static singleton and recognized there was an issue if the server restarted? Well, it turns out this is just what happens on AppEngine; Google decides to restart the VM, probably once every 24 hours, so using VM statics for persistency is not very good. Yes, I know, I know. But I had very little

Shut up, Eliza!

2009-07-20T13:22:00.003+02:00

Ha! Something happened that I had not anticipated. Remember I told you about the Eliza shrink robot I created a few weeks ago for the Google Wave?Well, she is still alive, and used every day. However, because in the beta release of Wave it is not yet possible to remove participants from a Wave, a single funny user who adds Eliza to a public wave, will cause enormous amount of Shrink Spam in a

My first Android app: Shackr

2009-07-19T12:47:00.002+02:00

One of the things I wanted to try out was programming for the Android platform... to see how easy it is to create native applications for my new HTC Magic smartphone. The SDK is based on Java, and with a nice Eclipse integration.I decided to create a Flickr application, similar to my successful Flickr Wallpaper program. It allows you to set a tag or term (or series of tags), and it will use the

Nonsense generator

2009-07-17T11:49:00.002+02:00

I created a small little program called Monkeys a few months ago, that can generate nonsensical documents based on word ngrams. It requires some sample text as input, and will generate new texts based on the word by word transition frequencies so the text looks like normal text. It works best on large English business type documents, but this morning I tried to use some Blof lyrics as input. I've

to DDMMYY or MMDDYY, that's the question

2009-07-16T20:34:00.002+02:00

besides the little and big endian dispute in computer land, one of the largest problems with computers that have to cooperate over the world (i.e. the Atlantic): is the date format problem.Americans have a completely stupid system of saying it is 7/3/2009 meaning July 3rd, so they use MM/DD/YYYY. This is stupid because it does not make sense as the faster changing day-of-the-month is now in

beyond tree structures

2009-07-14T14:59:00.002+02:00

I'm currently working on optimizing my Linx scalable network engine based on Lucene. I believe it has some interesting features that no other engine has, and may be helpful ifyou have a large (>1M nodes) networkthat changes continuouslyyou have many queries that are more complex than just asking "who are your 1st level connections"Anyway, I'm having great fun in implementing this. Now I am

Chrome OS

2009-07-13T09:08:00.002+02:00

Last week Google announced a long expected an announcement (we were actually expecting it at Google I/O): they are entering the operating system market with an OS that consists of merely a browser: Google Chrome OS.I think it was about time. The computer experience is more and more about what happens inside the browser, connected to the cloud of the Internet, and less about the apps that you have

Nice evaluation of open source search engines

2009-07-07T14:22:00.002+02:00

Interesting article on the comparison of a couple of open source search engines, comparing indexing and search performance for a set of Twitter data.Of course Lucene comes out as the fastest. And the indexing performance measurements are not really comparable because Lucene allows for incremental indexing (only indexing the changes or adds) and some of the other tools only allow you to do a full

The Google Brainwash

2009-06-29T14:53:00.002+02:00

Yesterday Kars helped me out with migrating my BeyondTrees email account to Google Apps... and that was surprisingly easy to do. I used the free standard version for now, but thinking about upgrading to the premium $50/yr account later.I was worried about migrating my email history (note I was using Mozilla Thunderbird), and indeed got some problems with the Google Email Uploader; something about

My first Google Wave Robot: Eliza

2009-06-10T09:24:00.009+02:00

As I've told before, I continue to be very impressed by the vision of Google Wave, and its underlying architecture. Yesterday I decided it was time to see if I can make my own robot. I had never played with Google AppEngine too, so it was a double first for me.With my background in AI, I decided it would be nice to use the old Eliza program to create a Google Wave robot that acts as a shrink and

Tsunami alert: Google Wave

2009-06-01T20:33:00.002+02:00

If you haven't heard about Google Wave by now, you have probably been off the Internet for the past days, and off Twitter...After a mind blowing presentation at Google IO in San Francisco last Thursday (which I attended :-)) more and more people on the Net have seen the presentation (please take a coke and view this 1.5 hr video today if you haven't already) and are beginning to write about what

Looking into the future

2009-05-19T10:02:00.002+02:00

I have some time now to do some software development of my own, actually quite busy doing that. A very handy XML based functional testing tool is ready, I just need to write a manual for it before I put it online. Manuals are tedious work... but the tool is very handy I use it myself over the past year all the time, and I cannot find anything on the net that does what it does. I named it XTest,

Meeting new friends

2009-05-14T08:44:00.002+02:00

As I told before, in 2 weeks time I will visit the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, really looking forward to that. Just this week I was invited to meet up with the people from LucidImagination, a company aimed at giving Lucene and SOLR training and high end consultancy for Lucene, by some of the main committers of the Lucene project.So now I have a meeting in California too, with some of

Google I/O

2009-04-24T15:52:00.003+02:00

Hey I just booked my flights and hotel to join the Google I/O conference in San Francisco next month! Looking forward to it.Going with my brother Kars and his colleague Leisure Suit Martin... we'll have a great time. And I do have some time to see the city too, never been there. Do you have tips what I shouldn't miss?

Mice

2009-04-23T14:17:00.002+02:00

I have to admit I have sort of a mouse fetish. I like mice and think they are one of the most important accessories of a computer. I always own many mice (woo I love that plural) and try out new things. I do not like a cordless mouse though... mostly because I've had trouble with the reception and I don't like that it takes batteries which are so bad for the environment.The past years the mouse

New template

2009-04-23T12:57:00.002+02:00

If you've been here before you may notice that I changed the weblog template to fit in to the design of the entire website, so it feels a bit more like it's a part of it. With some JavaScript tricks finally was able to change the ordering of the archive links as well, so that very old bla from 2000 is no longer on the top

New daily read

2009-01-14T09:37:00.003+01:00

A friend pointed me toward what will become a new daily read for me: http://xkcd.com/ with a daily cartoon filled with humor that will only humor the nerds of the world. Excellent :-)Note that for years now I start my day reading HollyComics, a daily comic written by my friend Larissa, in which I occur at times as well

Finally got my website up

2009-01-08T11:18:00.002+01:00

It took me 8 months to finally have at least some content on my own company website. Is that a good sign or a bad sign? One reason was that I have been too busy doing actual work to create this site, and another that I've had quite some issues getting past all the unintelligible error messages from IIS...But its there now, and I'll try to keep it up to date. A section about the services, products

G*

2008-09-03T09:40:00.002+02:00

And there it is. Expected for years, it's the GBrowser, name: Chrome. Google created their own open source internet browser. We have all learned not to under-estimate the big G, so let's see how this works.A nice 20-odd page cartoon explaining what's new about Chrome can be found on the Google site:Microsoft is dead, long live the new Microsoft

Database locking on SELECT

2008-08-25T18:33:00.002+02:00

Why indeed are databases locking rows on SELECT; see excellent description in Jeff Atwood debugging deadlocksI have never understood why this type of pessimistic row/cell level locks on READ are the default. I think using both READ and UPDATE snapshots should work much better for the Isolation part in ACID.It should be possible to make a much faster database engine in this way for the 80/20 read/

Multi faceted web search

2008-08-22T11:56:00.003+02:00

Everybody is doing multi faceted search nowadays. It seems you cannot claim to have a good website without it anymore.Many companies do make a lot of fuzz about this technology, about its complexities and performance issues.I cannot see why. Why should facetizing query results of a reasonable database of 100k-1M documents take more than 5 ms? Anyone telling you otherwise is just not smart enough

It is still 1996

2008-08-20T09:08:00.002+02:00

I remember working with an application server in 1996, I believe it was one of the first versions of IIS, using ISAPI DLLs. It was quite hard to get your first "Hello World" application running.Today it is 2008. We live in the Internet 2.0 age. It should be easier now. Right?Well, maybe it is me getting old or stupid. But why is it so hard to make an aspx file that actually does something dynamic

Busy

2008-07-17T16:24:00.002+02:00

The BeyondTrees site looks just like it did a month ago: empty. Sorry for that. But I've been so busy just working, I did not have time yet to update the site. Also, the logo is still not ready (mostly because I'm really critical at what the designer designs of course)All is very well with the company. Just today I paid my first VAT amount to the tax office. Really nice to be able to pay that

Networking

2008-05-23T10:05:00.002+02:00

It feels good having my own company. Enough interesting work already, and an incredible number of people from my network contacting me with things like "hey Anne; great you started your own company; btw, we have this project that we need someone for..."Good, but I'm already quite busy now and really need to take enough time to do administration, finally create a website, start doing some stuff,

A new beginning

2008-05-07T11:38:00.003+02:00

After 6 years at MatrixOne, I have left the company and started my own company called BeyondTrees. It consists only of myself now and I plan to do work in the areas of software development optimization and business process optimization and technical project management.I'm sad to leave my great colleagues at MatrixOne, but also excited to take on new challenges. A lot of things come my way these

Templar traffic

2006-06-21T20:49:00.000+02:00

I really get a lot of traffic on my site with information on the Knights Templar. I just tried a simple search for "Knights Templar" on Google and found out that currently my site is listed 5th out of 2,170,000! I should update the site and make it a bit more interactive

Easier to buy on the Internet?

2006-06-21T16:08:00.000+02:00

I am trying to buy a simple CD player capable of playing MP3 CDRs for my daughters so they can continue playing 'disco' in their rooms. The old microsystem broke, of which Esther reminds us by adding a yellow note with "broke" on it...I want a simple, small radio with cd player capable of reading CDRs with MP3 songs, with ID3 tag display and no cassette deck (why are there still these things). I

How Bloggers brought Dell Down

2006-06-16T15:02:00.000+02:00

Read BuzzMachine: Dell Archives from the bottom up, and if you still want more, you can read all pages of Dell Hell to see how a single (though powerful) blogger has caused a lot of turmoil in the customer support arena of a large company Dell. I agree with many of the points he is mentioning about how large companies should see blogs and customer interaction as a benefit and not a threat.O, and

Ruby on Rails: nice try

2006-02-17T13:29:00.000+01:00

I really like the way Ruby on Rails tries to solve modern web application design problems. Some of their design patterns are really nice. It is however, a nice try with many pitfalls, as described in this detailed post on limitations of Rails.Now please let somebody try it again, and now good. And make some better use of XML and a more modern programming language

If Google gets angry

2006-02-06T13:06:00.000+01:00

If you don't follow the webmaster guidelines of Google, you can get banned from Google like what happened to BMW

Understanding XML: Will AJAX Replace Java and .NET?

2006-01-13T11:17:00.000+01:00

A very intersting article on the way programming in general is evolving and what the next steps will be: Understanding XML: Will AJAX Replace Java and .NET? I agree

The Million Dollar Homepage - Blog

2005-11-28T10:47:00.000+01:00

Read this blog bottom up for an amazing story of the power of the internet

Blue Ball Machine

2005-11-21T11:33:00.000+01:00

Nice animated gif with blue balls that fall through a complicated machine. Similar fun to the falling woman of some months ago (see prev post)

Evil Sony

2005-11-17T11:35:00.000+01:00

Sony has used a new DRM (Digital Rights Mgt) tool on common audio CDs that makes use of a rootkit to hide itself from the operating system. This is evil and dangerous as others can make use of the same cloaking device to gain control over your computer. Sony has stopped doing this and recalled their CDs. Wow. Can't believe they were so dumb to see this side effect

Anne needs a group of at least 6 people

2005-10-12T12:08:00.000+02:00

Here's a great and philosophical use of the internet called the google need meme Go to Google and type in "[your name here] needs" and select the top results from that page. Don't forget the quotes. Here are my needs: - Anne needs a job - Anne needs help!!! - Anne needs a group of at least 6 people [true] - Anne needs this yesterday - Anne needs to provide the current working draft [so true at

Flickr daily interesting

2005-08-03T11:35:00.000+02:00

Flickr is getting more and more interesting. Here a link to a daily list of interesting photos from the community. A beautiful start of photo exploring.

Escher and Lego

2005-08-02T15:54:00.000+02:00

Somebody (original site seems to be down) recreated some Escher 'impossible' paintings in Lego; no photo trick here. Beautiful; though I believe the angle of photography will be very important to get a nice picture

Music Machine

2005-07-18T13:31:00.000+02:00

A beautiful music machine to spend superfluous time with...

Falling bikini

2005-07-06T12:39:00.000+02:00

One of the examples of why Western civilization is the greatest of all is because now you can watch a girl in bikini fall endlessly on your computer. Click here free when she gets stuck

Fractal programming

2005-07-06T11:50:00.000+02:00

I like programming languages. I collect compilers. I write languages (I know; I'm a nerd). Just played with Context Free; a fractal generation language interpreter. Can I just say: WOW? Download, look at Example "Lesson" and play around yourself. You will feel like an artist

To innerHTML or not to innerHTML

2005-06-27T16:02:00.000+02:00

I liked reading the pros and cons of using innerHTML in Javascript/DOM environments.

Anti fishing revisited

2005-06-15T13:51:00.000+02:00

If you know what you are doing and are a bit nerdy, you can actually hack a phishing website by normal methods... great.

How the Usenet was saved

2005-06-07T13:22:00.000+02:00

Here's a nice (old) story about how Usenet was saved as it is now searchable via Google. This is my first post that was saved: my first post (at least; that was saved): on November 16, 1998.

Scambaiting

2005-06-02T17:14:00.000+02:00

I am still waiting for my millions from that Nigerian lawyer who wanted to temporarily put his money on my bank account.Seems that he was not serious at all but pulling a scam! Fortunately the Internet has something against that: scambaiting in which ordinary people reply to these people with fake information, keeping them busy and thus increasing cost and noise-to-signal ratio for their '

Google Maps - Area 51

2005-05-26T10:56:00.000+02:00

Played around with the Satellite feature of Google Maps. I think it's great; just go to a place you know and zoom around (I used Manhattan). Easy to switch from map to satellite view and search for hotels etc. I wondered how the US government would like people to use this feature to plan terroristic attacks. Or other UFO hysterics to finally zoom in on Area 51 Satellite Picture. This is how they

CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders Module

2005-05-03T20:33:00.000+02:00

Rounded rectangles have been created on the web for a long time. Background images are avialable, with css and even some javascript solution to insert lots of divs at runtime. But the w3c is not standing still; take a look at CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders Module working draft (look at other part s too). Can't wait.

The nonsense of HDTV

2005-04-07T12:04:00.000+02:00

Television makers have been focusing on HDTV ('breedbeeld') more than on digital tv over the last 10 years. This is stupid marking bla. Take a look at excellent analysis of Dutch tv usage and differences between regular and hdtv TV versus breedbeeld (in Dutch only) (click on TV link on the left, sorry no deeplinking) I did some math too. Apart from the black lines or stretches you get, and the

USB Fondue Set

2005-04-06T11:24:00.000+02:00

I have always wanted to fondue with a USB powered fondue set

MP3 player

2005-03-24T10:05:00.000+01:00

Just opened my brand new MuVo Slim (512 MB) MP3 Player. Unfortunately a couple of days too late to use in my trip to Switzerland but still very nice. I looked for a simple mp3 player with at least 512 mb memory and no batteries but an accu. This one is really flat and light and got good reviews. My next airport waiting trip will be less dull

The Human Clock

2005-02-21T11:48:00.000+01:00

Another brilliant yet simple idea: The Human Clock - A Photo for Every Minute of the Day. Click on the "view the clock" image on the top of that page for a very alive clock that displays a different image with the current time every minute. Users can upload their own images. Just keep it open in the background for a couple of minutes. Great idea for a live presentation on a billboard

underneath google maps

2005-02-15T09:23:00.000+01:00

I was planning on doing a view-source survey of Google Maps but (un)fortunately someone did a nice job describing how Google Map works.

OrganicHTML

2005-02-04T16:27:00.000+01:00

Type in your favourite url at OrganicHTML (you need flash) and a plant is created from the colors and html on that site... nice

no-follow

2005-01-27T12:55:00.000+01:00

Google announced that its spider now uses the no-follow attribute of hyperlinks to disable comment spam pagerank abuses. Will take work for the blog and comment software to automatically do this. But it's good that it has the attention. A previous version of my blog here had that problem too when I used Greymatter.

the Architecture of the World Wide Web

2005-01-21T13:50:00.000+01:00

A must read on the Architecture of the World Wide Web; review of W3C architecture document

Drag and drop javascript

2005-01-14T09:50:00.000+01:00

Do you want to move all your furniture? Please do a view-source and marvel... (works in FF too)

Dhtml

2005-01-07T15:52:00.000+01:00

Why are so many developers surprised that you can do nice stuff like Good Old Adventures with only DHTML and Javascript? These capabilities have been around for years and years now and still most of our web applications look like they were designed in 1996 with frames and forms and server roundtrips...

Britney Spears

2005-01-04T11:32:00.000+01:00

Happy new year! Google has published the Zeitgeist 2004 list of most popular queries in different categories. Guess what the most popular women searched for is? I just try to improve my PageRank rating by adding this keyword here ;-)

Detailed ripper guide

2005-01-03T20:59:00.000+01:00

Here's a guide to ripping audio to mp3.

Copier watermarks

2004-12-23T11:51:00.000+01:00

Its been known for a while that Copiers and printers leave identifying watermarks on your paper using small yellow dots. These dots encode manufacturer, type and serial number of your copier/printer. I have never seen it used in court as evidence but it helps law enforcement agencies (including the CIA and NSA) to nail you down. Because these things are not visible to the eye, I am wondering if

Buzznet visual communities

2004-12-22T11:39:00.000+01:00

A picture says more than a 1000 words... Take a look atBuzznet where online photo albums are taken to a new level. Communities, automatic buzz word linking and sharing pictures with your mobile phone directly... this is great!

podcasting

2004-12-17T12:50:00.000+01:00

Mix the ingredients MP3, Apple iPod, RSS syndication and Adam Curry and what do you get? Its podcasting with iPodder. Great new idea for delayed, weblog style radio broadcasts.

Silent Media

2004-11-30T12:27:00.000+01:00

I think I really need a Hush Technologies Media Center PC that can replace my dvd, radio, vhs and music collection on a fanless pc... Well I'm a fan already. Combined with a TFT monitor/tv this will work great. Now how can I convince my wife to spend so much money...

Nmap attracts the Feds?

2004-11-25T17:09:00.000+01:00

SecurityFocus HOME News: Hacking tool reportedly draws FBI subpoenas This is dangerous and will happen more and more now that the US is blessed with the Patriot Act(s). Nmap is a great tool I use it for many things, most of them very beneficial to my environment...

Top 11 Firefox Extensions

2004-11-25T16:40:00.000+01:00

Here's the Top 11 Firefox Extensions; i like the MajorityNow extension

Trouble with the neighbors?

2004-11-24T15:41:00.000+01:00

A neat animation called Neuro shows what can happen if you have trouble with your neighbours. Nicely done.

How to try out Linux

2004-11-24T13:54:00.000+01:00

Just downloaded the 700Mb iso cd file from Knoppix, a custom linux distribution that is bootable from cd. Great stuff, now I could finally try out Linux without having to get a new or old machine or hard disk. Just boot from cd and it leaves the windows hard disks alone. It worked immediately, including usb input devices, sound and wifi internet access...

To PayPal or not to Paypal

2004-11-11T09:58:00.000+01:00

PayPal seems to be the winner in online non-credit card transactions. A proper review of PayPal can be found here.

Wblog

2004-11-05T20:10:00.000+01:00

I think it's great that even though I'm in a hotel in Brussels in the middle of a training, I can actually wirelessly blog with my Blackberry

Java 5 atomic thread synchronization

2004-11-01T09:07:00.000+01:00

Many Java developers that know about the issues concerning thread synchronization, believe that an operation on primitives is atomic and thus thread-safe in Java. So code like otherobject.stopcondition = true; is expected to always be noticed by another thread looking at that variable. This is not the case! VMs will store copies of these variables in local memory and not keep it up to date

Q42 Coolest Company 2004?

2004-10-29T15:10:00.000+02:00

Help recognizing sheer ingenuity in internet interface design by voting for Q42 as Carp.nl's Coolest Company 2004. Don't take my word for it, look at Q42 yourself...

Subversion versus CVS

2004-10-29T10:58:00.000+02:00

I have been using (and liking!) Subversion for some time now, both privately and professionally. Many people still have second thoughts; see anti-subversion questions and answers for a good FAQ

Dubya Proxy

2004-10-27T13:29:00.000+02:00

(see previous post) Of course using anonymizer we can use technology to see georgewbush.com via ProxyWeb...

Foreign policy and George Dubya

2004-10-27T13:26:00.000+02:00

Since this Monday non-US visitors receive a 403 from the website georgewbush.com. Take a look at the report from Netcraft Seems that since the move to Akamai last week this was done to limit the bandwidth requirements for the US elections. Or is this what we can expect from the 2nd Bush administration as normal foreign policy?

Censorship revisited

2004-10-22T09:34:00.000+02:00

Ever wondered why the comments page on SlashDot pages are of such a high quality? I did. My previous greymatter weblog on my site did have comments ability and was completely shutdown by spammers and erotic advertisements. /. receives even more attention and is read so much more. Here a Slashdot FAQ - Comments and Moderation that explains exactly how the system of moderating and even

An end to email domain spoofing?

2004-10-18T09:31:00.000+02:00

Great! Finally some of the anti spam measures such as Signing Email with DomainKeys (From /.) are starting to work. Let's hope the world versus spammers is coming to a 1:1 score now using long known technology such as digital signing.

Home made digital photo's

2004-10-08T13:02:00.000+02:00

Many Sony digicams use names like DSC00001.jpg for their pictures. Many people just upload them to their websites. Google can be really helpful here, Google Search: "DSC00001.jpg" shows up an interesting mix of pictures. I like these kind of new uses to Google that the site owners did not think of

Lemmings

2004-10-08T10:05:00.000+02:00

Remember that great Lemmings game? Now it has been written in DHTML to run in your browser! Wow. Note the URL is an IP address so availability of the link is limited. It seems to work best in IE.

Download.com Firefox poll - Spread Firefox

2004-10-08T09:56:00.000+02:00

Mozilla Firefox download figures are incredible. Over 3 million in the last couple of weeks. It gets high exposure too: Download.com Firefox poll - Spread Firefox And why shouldn't it? A great browser. I switched after a 2 week side-by-side comparison. My reasons to switch: 1. Faster; because images are rendered even before they are complete, you see the pages faster. Just as it was in the old

Portrait Google

2004-10-06T14:52:00.000+02:00

If you're tired of googleing in landscape mode, try Google Rotated Only works on IE though; my nice Firefox shows nothing special