Peterbe.com

I'm back! My dear little website is back up and running. This time on a different computer on a different network.

What happened was that the poor little old laptop that my computer was running on completely screwed itself up after a hard restart. Everything on its memory became totally random. When it managed to boot up I had several gigantic folders, some with equal name that couldn't be opened. My friend Jan Kokoska helped me eventually run a few disk-checking programs and eventually we could see my non-backedup files again. With a Linux LiveCD we managed to copy the data across to another computer and eventually it got up here on this server.

The culprit was faulty RAM. Jan did lots of tests on it with software and eventually we managed to isolate that the extra 128Mb memory I had in the computer was broken. We took it out and threw it in the bin.

Now this new server is one of Fry-IT's. It's a dual Xeon 2.4Ghz box and not on some silly 256Kbits/s connection that I had before. Let's see how it goes.

Findory Blogory is an index of weblogs categories much like Google does with Google News is an index of news. I must admit that I like it. I like it a lot.

The absurd thing is that they're free-riding on an existing layout so that users can skip over the getting-familiar-with-new-interface-stage. As long as the content is different I see no ethical errs in copying the layout like this. In fact I think it can only enhance the user experience. I have done it too, I copied the only menu nav that Google used in my IssueTrackerProduct design as seen in these old screenshots.

Those who know me well know that I have a problem remembering birthdays. I still don't know why this part of my brain is not functioning but it's often an embarrassing problem. Now here's an attempt to solve that problem:

http://www.BirthdayAlarm.com/dob/23390136a996018394b362

Clicking the link should ask you for your name and birthday. That way you'll automatically be added on my birthday reminder calendar. Thank you.

Because I'm reconfiguring my anti-spam filter at the moment, the protection is a bit forgiving and a spam email slipped through. Here's an extract:

"DURING THE PERIOD OF MY ACTIVE SERVICES, I DISCOVERED ONE STRANGE BIG TRUNK BOX,WHICH WE SUSPECTED TO HAVE BEEN IMPORTED BY SOME BIG BUSINESS MEN.

WHEN I TOOK THE BOX FOR CROSS EXAMINATION I DISCOVERED THAT IT WAS CONTAINING CODED UNITED STATES OF AMERICAN DOLLARS VALUED TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS(USD$20,000000)."

This "Angolian" man or woman also adds: "...IS 100% RISK FREE"

Now the reason why lowlifes keep sending out spam like this is that it must still be profitable. There must be some idiot out there who actually responds to this and thinks he'll get rich. That, should be a crime. Don't you think?

Now, how do you make this a law? And how can we police it? Until that is sorted out formally, I think it should be allowed to beat these kind of people up as much as we like.

This is an idea I've been juggling in my head for a long time. It's a web application where anybody who feels like it can sign up. Once you've signed up you write the email address of your friends and family who you usually forget to keep in touch with.

I'm confident to say I'm not the only one who has a long list of friends in different places on the globe where the best and sometimes the only contact is email. You write a little email every now and then to show your "interest". Or rather, to prove you haven't forgotten about them, because you don't want them to forget you. The problem is that as the list grows your email-sending-frequency stagnates with time. You might even remind yourself, standing in the shower, that it's been months since I last emailed my grand-father but by the time you sit by your computer you have completely forgotten what you reminded yourself of in the shower.

Here's my discussion for a solution

Fantastic little site this about footballer (soccer to you americans) and their appearance. I particularly liked the mullets section and the Famous Look-a-Likes and for the brave surfers who are not at work, check out the Ugly injuries

Be warned; this is quite addictive. Such a simple little flash game with lovely calming music. I guess the best thing about it is that nothing like this has ever been done before. Or has it?

A lot of people say they're really bad in mathematics and number theory and I believe them, but after having read this article about a tribe in the Amazon I realise that the people I hear saying this are wrong.

These Amazonian people don't even have the notion of numbers.

"The word he [Gordon] translates as one means just a relatively small amount, the word for two means a relatively bigger amount," he said in an interview from Brazil.

And more interesting facts about the Piraha people:

"the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.

They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day."

I often find that typing in text in some textarea boxes on webpages that the size of the box is too small and I wish I could expand its size like I can with a running GUI program like Notepad or XEmacs. Here is now my experimental attempt of solving that problem. I've only tried it in Firefox (Linux) and Konqueror (Linux) so far. It did not work in Konqueror :(

The obvious risk is that having controls like this will confuse newcomers; and you can't use excessive and intrusive text to explain what these controls do.

Obviously this needs to be couple with some sort of cookie feature so that the desired size is remembered; but that's not the issue here.

Have a play with it

My friend Jacob Lundqvist of Galdrion today showed me a nifty little method I did not know about in Python, namely the inspect module. It allows you to find out what the name of the method was that called the method "you're in". Allow me to show an example:

import inspect

def foo():
    caller_module = inspect.stack()[1][1]
    caller_method = inspect.stack()[1][3]
    print caller_module, caller_method
    return "Something"

def bar():
    foo()

if __name__=='__main__':
   bar()