Peterbe.com

Now this is excellent use of an iPAQ; he updates his weblog every day from the nordic pole via a satellite phone. The site is pretty fantastic but maybe mostly to adventurous people unlike me.

I've had a Palmpilot, Psion and iPAQ myself and they've all been failures in the context they were aimed for, i.e. not just being technologically curious. But I doubt that it's the PDA's fault. Instead, it's just that I've really never needed it. I've always had computers near me and when I don't I should use computers anyway.

But this guy gives some meaning to wireless computing. Keep up the good work mate! And good luck with reaching Canada.

Very bloody and violent Flash game from the Kill Bill film. I don't speak a word of Czech but press the far left button of the three buttons you see when the page has loaded.

I doubt this game will be released here in the UK. Too violent.

ZopeZen keeps funny quotes from the Zope community. This one, I must admit, is one of the best I've seen in a long time.

I've been using XEmacs on windows a lot lately to edit .zpt and .dtml files (template files for Zope) and to get automatic html-mode on these files you need this in your .emacs or 'custom.el':

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.zpt$" . html-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.dtml$" . html-mode))

This is not the first time I've had to add this. Better write it down so I've got it documented somewhere.

Did a quick analysis on all the referers to my web site. Referers being when web users click a link to my site from another site instead of manually typing in the URL. The result is not surprising but quite sad. About 5% of all referer visits to my web site is from other normal web pages. All the remaining is from search engine results such as Yahoo, Google etc or other obscure web services.

The sad truth is that very few people make a link to my site :(
The good thing is that my site must be very findable.

The most important conclusion is probably that people don't surf the web anymore. Instead they search it. I for one trust Google so much that I sometimes search instead of digging up the URL written down somewhere. This proves the importance of being findable on the web. You have to make your pages findable otherwise you don't get any hits. So, redesign your sites so that Google can index them accurately and avoid silly things like frames or images with text in them.

Here's a nifty little program that counts the number of words in a LaTeX document. This isn't always obvious because a LaTeX document will most likely contain other words that are just LaTeX commands.

Did this on my 25-pages dissertation and the result was: 6710

Now I have finished and submitted my dissertation. A great relief. The journey through it has been really interesting and I'm very please with it.

The title is: Building a web application for an on-line mathematics journal and the abstract reads:

"This project is about how to build an on-line journal for mathematics. This was done using the web application platform Zope and the programming language Python. It is now possible for people to register as members on the site and upload papers and write descriptive text for these papers that can be used in various abstraction methods. The report describes what technology techniques were used to accomplish this and the object structure that was applied. We will conclude by listing the shortcomings of the delivered web application and aspects that can be improved and some suggestions to possible solutions to this."

This really is spectacular. The winner-photo is really breath taking. One can stare at it for a long time. The second most spectacular is also really impressive.

How come I haven't seen these until now. They're great. Much nicer than the usual photography winners of photos with crying bombed palestinian children, whom I care for whole heartedly but it's a bit sad.

Download the Powerpoint presentation file

This video-clip shows you an unusual way of folding clothes that is very effective. I watched it several times over to try to learn it this way. Now that I do know how to fold clothes much faster I fold all my clothes.

It must be said though that it's not always that you can lay the shirt flat on a table like that. In those cases, maybe the old-fashioned way is better.

Alternative link

Last week Fry-IT released CheckoutableTemplates which is a templating module add-on for Zope. It includes a module called slimmer.py which can compress XHTML, HTML and CSS. The CSS had a flaw in it that I hadn't foreseen. This flaw arises when you use M$ Internet Explorer hacks like this for example:

#centercontent {
   margin-left: 259px;
   margin-right:249px;
   voice-family: "\"}\"";
   voice-family: inherit;
   margin-left: 271px;
   margin-right:251px;
   }

Now that bug has been fixed, so I give you: The XHTML, HTML and CSS compressor It's a little application of slimmer.py so that the compressing can be tested and so that one can see the effect.