Peterbe.com

Great, yet small and neat, article here on web standards. Worth a read if you're still not convinced.

Basically, web standards are (as I've understood it) when you develop your HTML code without layout and use the power of cascading style sheets fully. Not only for colour and text styles but also for positioning. This very site is done with with very basic HTML and style sheets for layout. Admittedly there are things I need to learn still but at least I have a new copy of "Designing Without Tables Using CSS" here on my desk which I will read as soon as I finish my current book.

My Secret Life As A Prostitute is a blog by a woman who claims to be a real prostitute. Not the kind that stands in streetcorners but the kind that acquires clients by email and various "dating" websites.

She blogs almost every day and it's often very interesting to read. Some entries are just about how stupid men are, but a lot of entries are her answering questions from curious readers. So, if you've ever considered to become a prostitute, read her website first to get a feel for it.

Go to Songsear.ch to search for songs from lyrics.

Just experimenting with my new digital camera and a pair of binoculars. Sadly I don't have a tripod for neither the camera or the binoculars, which would make the picture quality even better. It was not my binoculars but I'm sure they were a good pair.

All of these photos were taken from my balcony. On the first two photos the non-resized part of St Pauls cathedral was not resized.

Many many years ago our math teacher at school left us with a little quiz to think over until the next class. We mustn't use a calculator and back then MS Excel didn't even exist. He told the quiz as a story about the famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.

When Carl went to school their math teacher gave the students a numerical task to solve and he who could calculate the answer the quickest would receive an apple as a price. The task was to sum up all the numbers from 1 to 100. So you start with 1, then 2 and the sum is so far 3. Next you add 3 so the sum is now 6 and so on. All the pupils started calculating really hard but Carl raised his hand and answer the correct sum without even writing anything down. The teacher of course asked if Carl had cheated or otherwise how he did it.

So what is the sum and how did Carl managed to calculate it so quickly? You won't need any formulas or any other advanced mathematics to work it out. If you want to use a computer, feel free but do you really have to?

This little site has some interesting measures on the amount of calories in McDonald burgers.

"Filet-O-Fish - 470 calories with 26 grams of fat. That is one fat fish!"

I got this in an email from a friend. It's one of several "I AM ...", but I thought the American one was the funniest:

> I AM AMERICAN
>
> Wassup...
> I'm not particularly intelligent, open-minded, or well-liked.
> And I don't live in a safe place, eat a balanced diet, or drive very
>well.
> I don't know Shakespeare, Da Vinci or Gutenberg,
> although I'm pretty sure they were American.
>
> I drink beer, not water, I am outspoken, not opinionated,
> Guns settle disputes, not discussions.
> Winning isn't everything, it's the ONLY thing,
> And it's pronounced RUFF, not ROOF.
>
> I can proudly sew my country's flag on my backpack, unless I go
>somewhere.
> Burger King IS fine dining. Washing after peeing is for LOSERS,
> Twinkies and Moon Pies ARE GOOD for breakfast,
> I have a SHED, NOT a GARAGE, and WWF ACTION IS REAL!
>
> The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is the ONLY country in the world,
> The FIRST nation of IGNORANCE,
> And the BEST part of SOUTH AMERICA!!
> MY NAME IS JIM-BOB, I am married to my sister,
> AND I AM AMERICAN!!!!!!!

Suppose you want to find information about Jaguar cars dealerships here in the UK. First you go to the search page and then click on any of the dealerships own sites which all look the same and remain under the jaguar.com domain name. Now, suppose you've got the currently best web browser which of course is Mozilla (I use Mozilla Firefox); you will then be told to piss off!

"We have not been able to identify the browser you are currently using. This could be due to the browser either being too old or too new."

Later I realised that there was a little puny link at the bottom to carry on despite the warning. Did it work then? Of course it did.

When I saw the in-your-face sorry, I reluctantly started Internet Explorer but that crashed a little later when I clicked on used cars, with a message that I should restart windows.

Two conclusions: 1) Accept minor differences between browsers. The content is what matters, not the pixels. 2) Jaguar should reconsider their web development team for a better one.

Last Wednesday the 19th of May I finished my university degree with my final exam. It's been very stressful and I've studied hard the last couple of weeks despite the wonderfully tempting weather.

Three years of Mathematical Science with Computer Science at City University. Right now I feel a bit bored with the whole thing because it's been on my mind day and night for the past two weeks so I can't be asked to write anything lengthy on it. I doubt that I will miss it a lot. I've got a really good job which allows for much freedom so I do not fear getting stuck behind a desk from 9 to 5 every day.

On Monday morning I start work again. The company is still Fry-IT working as a web developer/programmer. It will be primarily to program Python server side code for the Zope web application server with email, SMS and relational databases.

Now I've done something relatively useful with my PageRank algorithm written in Python that I'm actually quite proud of. It's not rocket science but at least I've managed to understand the Google PageRank algorithm and applied it to my own setup. This application is very simple and not so useful as one could hope but at least I prove to myself that it can be done.

I call it PlogRank. As you might have noticed, most blog items here on this site have on the left hand side, beneath the menu, a list of "Related blogs". These are from now on sorted by PlogRank! Cool, ha?

The "Related blogs" work by specific word matching. Every blog item has a list keywords that I define manually through the management interface. The selection of keywords is helped by another little database that filters out all typical words. E.g. "PageRank" is a particular word and "page" is not; so selecting these keywords is very easy for me.

Anyway. What I do now, once every week, is that I load a huge matrix of all connections between pages. If this blog item has a link to PageRank in Python then that page increases in PlogRank. It does not effect this page. I then feed this into the PageRanker program I've written which calculates the corresponding PageRank for each blog item. Easy! The whole calculation takes only a couple of seconds with 30 iterations. The calculation is actually only a small part of that time because reading from and writing to the database is the real bottleneck.

So, the end result is that every blog item that has related links will show these links in PlogRank-sorted order. Isn't that neat?