Andreas Wacker

so few answers

Yahoo continues to buy good things. Their purchasing team almost rivals the one from Trader Joes by now. This move makes allot of sense for both sides:
Konfabulator survives the complete rip off that 10.4 is. And Yahoo get’s a reference implementation for their XML services. Which puts them more in the middle of things. There were rumors that google builts its own browser. Yahoo has now something a little bit apart from a browser, but fully supported,
with developer community and known javascript. Nice.

I am personally a little bit attached to Konfabulator, since I wrote the first game that my son designed in it.

no comment

vista , Billy …

A while back somebody figured out that it would look neat if you take a line of pixels and repeat it over the screen.
It is very sad that MK12 still makes an entire music video based on this simple gag in 2005.

I liked the effect. When I saw it in the first 3 commercials and videos. I am still surprised how people will over use everything. MK12
did some really nice work. How sad that they seem to be trapped in their own concepts.

in Germany you might get prosecuted for saying something like that

It’s called “Volksverhetzung” and Germany has very good reasons to restrict the freedom of speech, where it’s damning entire populations.

surprise

a hack that I wanted to do since a long time

ICE

that’s what they are
looks terribly familiar.

this looks odd in light of the general reaction of people in england towards the recent terror attacks.

interesting editorial at ars technica
about the Apple IBM to Intel switch. IBM has reveal dual core Laptop G5s today.

lot’s of them

There are still lot’s of formats out there for video encoding and pakaging. I have he decided that I will not download any more codecs or players. No content is important enough that I would bother with more programs that need updates etc etc.
So, dear content provider, if you care about my precious eyeballs, then please encode your clips either in

quicktime

or

windows media


Quicktime is preferred. The best looking content on the web is encoded in quicktime. Streaming should be avoided: You don’t have the bandwidth. Repeat after me: No matter how many servers and connections you might have or dream off: You don’t have the bandwidth. Unless you are Apple, but that is a different story.

If you do streaming, please do not use wmv. It simply does not work right.

Realplayer?
Yikes! If somebody uses realplayer then you can be pretty sure this was a decission made by a big corporation trying to protect it’s ‘precious’ content. It will be protected alright: Nobody will care about it. No matter how many big media outlets have wasted years with pushing this junk. Real is dead. Nobody wants it. Case closed.

Flash?
Oh, everybody has flash. And there are lots of “web developers” who actually just click around in the Macromedia UI. So writting 4 lines of html is too hard for them. The problem with flash is not only it’s bad quality. The UI of the player is always different. Maybe nice for the ego trip of a 23 yo “web designer”, but not good for usability: Remember it is a player. Not the center piece.
Nobody paints pictures on their TV cases. Ok, not many people do. Flash looks way ugly, can not be linked to, and really does not work.

AVI with some obscure Divx revision encoder.
Yeah, whatever. People pushing this content love to install the latest greatest codec some kid came up with. Nothing ever blew
me away. OK, not bad for a school kid in denmarkt. But definitely not worth the trouble.

So, please, quicktime.

Thanks

lots of them

via we make money not art

BlogsNow has changed significantly. Now that I have more views active based on Version 2 I changed the design a little bit as well.
The update frequency has been changed to sixty seconds. Why not:
The new database design is pleasently fast.
I also droped the reference to “Version 2″. I certainly looks differently enough for people to realize that this is indeed new.

With a friend I started a little Ad Agency in 1990 called “Thema”.

We sold ads in computer games. Made games to promotes ads in them.

Now it would work:
pong

But now everybody is doing it.

120,000 cows on one image

via BlogsNow via sprol

over here

This is a sad day. The terror in London is on everybodies mind.

BlogsNow was written to be a fast reflector of what is going on in the world. Right now 64 out of the 100 links are related to the events in London. The top 17 links are all about it.

Here how other tools look right now:

technorati
people search allot for it, but the link list still focuses on yesterdays olympic nomination

blogdex
as usual blogdex has no clue, and it will be like this for a while

daypop
same here

BlogsNow
I wish I could have done this comparision with a more positive event.

3 hours later:
Server crashes. Again. Now I know that it is mysqlhotcopy when making a backup. While running the mysql repair I run out of disk space. All those bin-log files. Then I am stupid again and ctrl-c the repair. It would have waited for disk space. Then I tried to move the mysql data dir to another disk. Which takes some while. Then mysql does not want to start from that disk. Since I have no time for a dive into the manual I move things back and start it again. With the result that BlogsNow now shows results from 24 hours ago. Maybe I should learn something here?

Right now I like blogdex’ Version of the latest news much better. It is yesterdays. Yesterday was better than today.

as BlogsNow fills with London links

BlogsNow Version 2 started with a clean and new database. During it’s one year of operation Version 1 had seen close to 7 Million weblogs. BlogsNow follows ping lists like most other tools. These list became more and more a resource for spammers to inject their content. BlogsNow Version 2 jumped from three to almost four Million weblogs within one week. It turned out that two IP addresses alone had created 600,000 new ‘blogs’. All of them made just to spam whomever they can.

Many websites tracking weblogs will claim how many weblogs they track. It appears as if those 11 Million you find right now are actually an accumulation of all weblogs seen, regardless if active or not. And, at least a certain amount, of bogus blogs only created for spam should be takn into account.

Those inflated numbers are being used wherever people like to put an extra boost on the blog phenomen. There are definitely millions of blogs.
But the active blogging community may be just a few hundred thousand people.

might be tricky in this case


The boom was driven by record truck sales, which increased 69 percent. Chevrolet's Silverado full-size pickup led the industry as its sales more than doubled, GM said.

from

sure, that’s we need right now: More SUVs and big trucks.

Great consumers, not the smartest workers though.

venetian cementary

containers in Hamburgs harbor

built for the 1972 Olympics

On the right you can find a Car factory, probably the only visible corporate logo in google maps:
BMW museum

Just added six more views to BlogsNow. Most of the Version 1 views are back now.
And then some.
see for your self

Violence in games is a good thing is the title. And it is written by a person who went to Columbine.
This get’s people to read it. I don’t see an satisfactory argument for the claim of the title in the text. But it illustrates a couple of aspects about gaming. And that makes it worth the read: Games are what is surrounding young people. If you grew up a while ago like me you have no idea what that really means.

if you are in a different country, then google really really wants to show your their localized version. Which has different search results and, for my purposes, pretty much does suck.

Adib< /a> pointed me a while back to this fix: http://www.google.com/ncr will fix the problem and let’s me use google.com even if I am not in dot-com-land. Phew.

Bush likes to keep it

OK, it’s a myth that Mr G. claimed that. But a nice myth.
Next stop for Al: reinventing TV, by prooving that viewers are not needed.
Next stop for George: Breaking the net, by brute forcing the control of the DNS root servers and then messing it all up. Finally we will have those internets that he has been talking about. Some
that work and others that don’t.

4:20 this morning. The computer that runs BlogsNow freezes.
Not the first time, but it was doing ok in the last 2 months.
Tricky problem to fix: The error frequncy is so low that you would know after a year or two if a change fixed the issue or if you just were lucky. Sigh.

Good thing: mysql and it’s wonderful mysqlcheck auto repair.

Does in minutes what took days on the old server.

those numbers are fishy

The article does not say what version and which circumstances.
But yes: if you would find an unopened PC box from 2001 somewhere, open it and connect it to the internet then it would melt.