Peterbe.com

"More Shit: Jif will get you excused from military conscription. To prove his mental unfitness for duty in Vietnam, Frank Zappa squeezed peanut butter up his ass prior to the draft physical. During the exam, he casually put a finger up his bum and then sucked off the brownness."

Ever wanted to know everything about feces, poo, poop, diarrhea, or why Elvis got so fat? If daringly so, read the article (note: no pictures but finish your lunch first)

"Tom writes about"n:http://dev11.otherworks.com/theotherblog about Share Your OPML. A very clever idea, but is it useful? It's nice to be able to see what blogs other people have in common with you, but where do you go from there? I guess one application is to see what blogs I might have missed.

Ever had a what-to-wear-panic before going out? Then browse through this site first so that you know what not to wear.

This is apparently some sort of art project. I couldn't be asked to read enough on it so don't ask me what's going on.

Stu's Site has a nice example of a way of preventing email harvesting by writing the email in reverse and then letting stylesheets reverse it when rendering. The HTML source looks like this:

<style type="text/css">
.backwards {unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;}
</style>
<span class="backwards">ku.oc.u7s@uts</span>

And the result is: stu@s7u.co.uk. It works on in my web browsers (win, linux), but the nasty effect is that if you select the text, copy and paste; when you paste it pastes it as ku.oc.u7s@uts. Pretty annoying.

My site uses hex encoding so the HTML looks like this:

<script language="JavaScript">eval(unescape('%64%6F...lots of these...%29'))</script>
<noscript>Peter, mail(at)peterbe dot com</noscript>

The result is as if no anti-harvesting effect had been applied.

Sadly I bet that spammers have tricks to get around both but what matters is how few spammers have yet to come up with the solution. I'm thinking of keeping my method and adding something that scrambles up the encoded string to break spammers regular expressions. But the effect mustn't be as bad as the example on Stu's site.

Look at this picture for example. They're actually knitted. How; I don't know.

Unfortunately it doesn't say on the website how she does these so I'll just optimistically assume that she actually does them by her very steady hands. Amazing. The site contains lots of pictures of knittings that I fear is more attractive to engineers than to people who actually like knitted stuff. Well done Althea!

I've been looking for good CSS (stylesheet) articles that don't just teach the basics which I already know. This one looks pretty good so I write it down for later reading.

A List Apart has many good articles for high-level web development. Sadly many of the CSS articles are pretty old so there's (with todays measure) too much talk about non-supporting browsers. I suspect a lot has happened in the last year that will enable me to try the bleeding-edge CSS techniques.

Water from Sweden and California was voted: best water in a recent international test.

"Each sample is weighed on six points: appearance, odor, flavor, mouth feel, aftertaste and overall impression." How can a water have appearance, considering that all water good enough to even test must be crystal clear?

But here's the odd thing: "Five countries, 25 states and the District of Columbia were represented in the contest." Not very representative, is it?

Another odd thing, The Star Online says: "Ice Mist bottled water from Morarp, Sweden and tap water from Desert Hot Springs, California, were ruled the best in the world"; but USATODAY.com says: "Tap water from Desert Hot Springs, Calif., was ruled the best in the world"

Here you can watch a theatre play in 360 degrees. I'm not a big fan of the Real player but this is pretty cool. The camera is sat in the middle and the actors are acting all around in the camera. It is your job to spin the camera around so you can see who is talking. I think it's called the "Be Here plug-in" which installs automatically if you've got the Real player.

It's something we haven't seen since before the multi-media-internet. We've seen panoramic pictures and streaming video before, but this is a mix of those two. It obviously becomes a one-man-viewing experience but it's pretty cool. When you think about it; never before has the audience of any play been able to do this.

Unfortunately "120 Seconds" is a Flash site it's impossible to copy the exact URL so you have to follow the link and click on "Experiments" in the menu and then one of the five little buttons to find the one for "Neon-Brite". Enjoy.

"The IssueTrackerProduct"n:http://www.IssueTrackerProduct.com is my proud open source project that actually has become quite popular. My survey has received more than 150 reviews; some with comments like "Yours is by far the best thing i've seen".

I was starting to loose interest in it but the motivation is back again. People appreciate it and there are several new web development areas I have yet to discover and do more research in. For several months I've been thinking about a way to integrate a Knowledge Base into it and finally I think I have come up with a solution. It's all in my head so far but getting it there is a much bigger challenge than actually coding it.

Now I've written a little Future Plan that I intend to work by and keep updating. The pace will be sporadically slow until summer since I need to focus hard enough on my last university year, but I will not give up and there is also the plan of trying to make money on this through my company. (Don't worry, it'll still be Open Source, but we might charge for customisation, corporate features or ASP)

Ploggle is a site where people can collect photos and videoclips they take with their mobile. You sign up for free and then you take a picture with your mobile and send it to Ploggle or your can send images by email.

All in all I think Ploggle is great. I happen to know one of the founders, Daniel Light, from the Kung Fu club. I know that he is working hard on it and recently they've updated the code quite a lot.

The site is really user-friendly which of course is highly appreciated. From a marketing point of view I think they do a great job making it easy for people to sign up. The service is free but if you want to upload more than 30 pictures you'll have to pay a small amount. You can also password protect uploading of pictures.