Quote of the Week

"The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"

- Anonymous

GoogleNet

Google seems to also want to become an ISP, according to some reports. Is Google slowly becoming the new Microsoft? Their credo could reassure you, to me they do have an air of - I kind of trust these guys. We do have to be realistic here and keep in mind we're talking about a company and a company's goal is to make profits, the question is, will they do so at the expense of my privacy?

Gmail soon no longer invite only

Gmail is no longer exclusive. Anybody with an American cell phone can send an sms message and receive an invite. Soon enough though, it will also be freely available to the rest of the world. If you have an American cell phone, get an activation code here.

Genealogy - WikiTree

WikiTree, a collaborative effort to catalogue a complete lineage of Mankind. Rather bold task I suppose, but just imagine the absolute wealth of information available; life expectancy, migration, average family size, etc. It is not affiliated directly with Wikipedia, although they do use the underlying software infrastructure called MediaWiki. I think I might add my family info to it also. I would like to see more graphs and statistics on the page though. This is definitely one to bookmark though, I foresee a bright future for WikiTree.

Wiki's are becoming increasingly important, despite criticisms.

Google vs Skype

Google just launched Google Talk, an Instant Messaging client that you can download for your pc. You can talk for free with anybody else on your list, right now, those will only be other gmail users. Skype has just announced SkypeWeb en SkypeNet - new tools for website designers to incorporate the power of Skype in their websites. Skype is still a privately owned company, but apparently Rupert Murdoch had offered a staggering $US 3 billion. For a company that's been around for almost 2 years, that's an average of $US 4.11 million a day since it's existence... that's AMAZING! Google is selling some more of it's stock and will have about $US 7 billion in it's war chest, enough to buy Skype?

Back from Madrid

Back from Madrid, had a fantastic time and met really interesting people. The trip wasn't that long and I'm sure there's plenty of Madrid that still lies to be discovered, as we just scratched the surface, but we still did a helluvalot (you won't find that in a Dictionary). Feel like travelling cheap throughout Europe? Next stop: Prague.

Madrid

Will be gone for a few days. Off to Madrid.

Internet dependent

How internet dependent are we? What would happen to world economies if the Internet would be down for an extended period of time? Check your own addiction rate here. How often have you had RSI in your hands? Why did I never have this in High School?

A good article about the Interet itself... growing segments on the Net now... only been saying that for 2 years now ;-)

Iran defiant

Iran is talking tough now, and the US is determined to stop Iran's nuclear program, one way or the other. I'm just hoping that no airplanes will get shot near the Iraq/Iran border anytime soon. Dangerous times we live in. Both the Axis of Evil countries have been in the news recently, coincidence?

Flying is a health hazard

A Cypriot airliner, an Air France airplane a Tunesian charter crash, all within 2 weeks of each other. Is a patern starting to emerge? Just 4 days before I board an airplane myself, I'm starting to wonder if it's such a good idea. There is speculation if the Cypriot airliner might have been hijacked. Two F-16 fighterpilots, following the airplane, described events "saw a situation that was not normal in the pilots' cabin." All 121 souls have been lost, according to the last reports.

UPDATE: Seems that the pressure was lost in the aircraft. An sms was sent saying; "The pilot has turned blue in his face. Farewell cousin, we are freezing." Horrible way to go.

Mars or bust

NASA has been in the news a lot recently, happy that their acronym will not be interpretted as the morbid "Need Another Seven Astronauts" - after the unsucessful reentery of spaceshuttle Columbia and the omnipresent stigmata of the Challenger disaster.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was succesfully launched today. Mission: to explore Mars like never before, seeking water and mapping the surface. The exploration of Mars has been underway for a bit now, but this $ 500 million aircraft will be an artificial satellite around Mars and make pictures of the next 4 years.

Can we expect a Google Mars soon? They've mapped the Earth and the Moon already.

Civilization IV, coming soon

There has got to be some sort of Freudian explanation for my addiction to the Civilization series. Megalomania I'm sure. Anyway, as the game title suggests, you need to create an entire civilization from the dawn of history which can survive the test of time. The graphics are phenomenal and if the gameplay is anything like the previous versions, I'll be spending some time in Gaming Rehab.

Civilization IV promises to be another excellent game, I can't wait for Q4 2005 to arrive... will be on my harddrive the second it hits the stores, that's for sure.

Best compression -> bst cmprssn -> 7z

Compression is a technique used to compact data into smaller units than the original, without significant loss when unpacking (decompressing/unpacking). When it comes to data compression, there are several protocols, some are better than others. Without elaborating the intricacies, it basically removes redundancies. There are various types, depending on what you intend on compressing.

Audio: ogg vorbis, mp3, wma
Data: 7z, rar, ace, zip

My personal favourite is rar. One of the best techniques is 7z. There are better ones, but this is still relatively well known.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a collaborative effort to collect the sum of human knowledge, thus creating a free-content encyclopedia available in all languages. They are still growing fast, extremely fast in some cases. Encyclopedia Britannica is not amused with Wikipedia's growth and has often claimed the information unreliable, this is true though? Why this amazing popularity? Maybe because we live in a society where we don't necessarily accept answers given by the authority (read: Britannica) and set about creating our own answers, these will be checked/corrected by peers, keeping the whole system in check... just a thought. Companies have noticed the importance of Wikis too. In any case, you can't quote from Wikipedia, since it's always changing... but wait, doesn't this apply to the whole World Wide Web also?

RSS

Really Simple Syndication, what the heck is it anyway? Well, it's a way of quickly viewing content to a site without having to actually going to that site. Firefox has a little button the bottom right of the screen indicating that you can subscribe to an rss-newsfeed. You can manually add them also, if you have the right rss-url (these typically end with .xml). RSS is a hype now, share them here. If you don't use Firefox, you can use one of many RSS readers. Or just go to Bloglines and view it straight from your browser. My RSS (actually Atom, small difference) is here.

Goodbye Esperanto, hello gTranslator

Esperanto’s goal is to make possible for everyone to communicate with each other, but it looks like Google might come with a tool which will do so, but then online of course. The concept is simple, cross-link translated documents and have a machine learn all languages. Read more about it here… very interesting. You could of course get it straight from the source and view the webcast.

Europe, a great idea

Europe, stemming from the Semitic word for sunset (erebu: land where the sun sets... duh), is a great place to live. Like a giant with 25 independent brains though, it's a bit schizophrenic.

There are huge differences between the richer Western European countries and the poorer Eastern European countries. Just saw a great documentary on Dutch television, most of the commentary is in Dutch but chunks are in English also - it can also be viewed online (top right). More facts, draft Constitution and national anthem.

Google Index

Google, who doesn't love those guys? They brought us the best search engine in the world, gmail, google maps and google earth, Blogger and many many more nifty toys.

Today I realize that Google's homepage is a bit different, the number of indexed sites has increased. None of the regular tech sites have noticed it yet... haha, am I one of the first?? Anyway, they have increased by a sloppy 100 million sites or so.. There are, however, plenty of sites which can't be found using Google, or any other (large) search engine for that matter. This is called the invisible web, and there are ways of tapping into this relatively unused resource.

I'm a loyal Google user when it comes to searching, but when searching for particular info, other sites might be better. Or sometimes a visual approach works best (uses Google, ;-) ). A good Firefox extension can also do miracles.

4-fourths cake

I just did the impossible! I made a cake! It's called a 4-fouths cake. Rather simple to make, even I could do it.

Ingredients:

- 4 eggs
- 400 grams of sugar
- 400 grams of flour
- 400 grams of butter
- 8 grams vanilla sugar
- 40 grams cocao powder

1 - Seperate egg-white from egg yellow.
2 - Mix egg white until hardend.
3 - Add vanilla sugar to all the sugar. Add egg-yellows to this, and mix it!
4 - Add a small amount of flour, then add some butter and gradually do so until all the flour and butter is mixed.
5 - Seperate about 3 large spoons of this dough into another bowl & add the cocao powder. Mix some more.
6 - Divide 1/4th of the mixed egg-white to the cocao mix. Add the rest of the egg-white to the remaining dough.
7 - Butter up the cake mould and fill up with the (yellow) dough. Cocao dough comes on top.
8 - Cover mould with alu-foil and place in a pre-heated oven to 180°C for about 50-60 mins until dough is dry (check dryness with wooden toothpick, sticky isn't good yet).

Voilà, enjoy! See the result :-)

Blogging

Main Entry:	blog
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called Weblog, Web log
Example:	Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.
Etymology:	shortened form of Weblog
Usage:	blog, blogged, blogging v, blogger n

Source: Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6)
Copyright © 2003-2005 Lexico Publishing Group, LLC

This report says it all, I'm just a statistic. In case you'd want to learn more about blogging, Blogging 101 can help you out.

Skype - newest version

Niklas Zennström's brainchild, Skype, has been upgraded to version 1.3.0.60 for the Windows environment. There are other versions available, in case you're not a fan of Microsoft. Check their site, they also have flavours in Mac and Linux. Symbian will come soon, according to the guru.

Alternatives include:

- Voipbuster
- Project Gizmo

Googlicious

First post. Just trying out this medium instead of sending endless emails to you guys, just keep this bookmarked and check it out every now and then.