Monthly Archive for November, 2004

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Soy un sucker por todas las cosas latinas

Published on November 21, 2004 in Tango. 2 Comments

¡Hola! Just spent a week in Salamanca, Spain, para aprender a hablar español. I attended a curso superintensivo at Don Quijote, and did pick up some basic conversation skills after just a week, mostly thanks to the excellent teachers: Virginia, Isabel and Yolanda.

Mia Maestro - Tango, no me dejes nunca
In a previous life I probably have had some hispanic influences, for I am a total sucker for all things spanish. My guess would be: a passionate love affair with a Buenos Aires femme fatale, let’s call her Elena, who happens to be involved with, say, Angelo, the local maffia godfather. When the latter finds out about our liaison (a kiss, a glance, a restaurant bill?) , he consequently makes me swim with concrete boots, and thus returns my pasión-drenched soul to the reincarnation tredmill with a longing for someone to susurra palabras dulces en mi oído.
(The femme fatale in question would resemble Mia Maestro in Tango, no me dejes nunca.)
Paz Vega
Another girl with a definite positive influence on men’s heart rates (well, mine, for one) is Paz Vega. I did a test in Salamanca: if she were to play in a really bad movie, would I still enjoy it? The answer is yes – no surprise there. The movie was “Di que Si” (I won’t even bother linking to it), and it was really horrendous. Not all spanish directors are Almodovars, Amenábars or Medems, it would seem. But the flick had Paz dashing around in a tiny white tank top (a ‘marcelleke’ as they say in Belgium), so I didn’t care.
I also bought El otro lado de la cama on DVD, featuring Paz Vega; and “Lujo Iberico”, a CD by Mala Rodriguez, that contains “Yo marco el minuto“, from the movie “Lucia y el sexo” with … you guessed it!
Like Penelope Cruz, she has now crossed the Atlantic and is soon appearing in “Spanglish“, together with Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni.

Comment spam on my wwwcoder blog

Published on November 10, 2004 in spam. Closed


Well, I knew it was gonna happen at some point: I got comment spammed on my winAdmin blog. Apparently someone has a script running that looks for blog posts that contain a link to another page and then posts the contents of the link’s destination as a comment. The purpose being of course, to include a link to crappy medication sites as the homepage of the comment author (and boost their Google PR in that way). The content of the comment looks (and is most cases is) relevant to the blog post, so any Bayesian filters might mistake it for an on-topic comment.

Unfortunately, much as I love the Bayesian hammer, comment spam isn’t a nail. (…) There’s just nothing for a Bayesian filter to get a handle on: the only thing that’s spammy is the URL, so a Bayesian filter will actually be worse than just a blacklist, since you’ll inevitably get false positives trying to use a Bayesian filter on something where the actual text is completely insignificant.
(from rawbrick.net)

This intelligent job is apparently outsourced to India. Bahut Shoukriah!
Tracing route to dsl.Har.074.31.101.203.touchtelindia.net [203.101.31.74]
over a maximum of 30 hops:(...)
17 428 ms 440 ms 438 ms 61.95.250.5
18 427 ms 422 ms 424 ms 203.101.83.198
19 * * 436 ms brasdel.touchtelindia.net [202.56.215.10]
20 504 ms 492 ms 490 ms dsl.Har.074.31.101.203.touchtelindia.net [203.101.31.74]

The traffic on this particular blog is limited, so I just switched off comments. For my other blogs, I use Blogger, and their redirection trick seems to make comment spamming useless (fingers crossed).

Mappy has aerial photo overlay

Published on November 9, 2004 in Belgium, Brussel, tool and Web2.0. Closed


They might already have it for a while, but I hadn’t noticed: Mappy.com can add an aerial picture of the neighbourhood you are searching. The street map is then overlayed on the aerial picture and you have a slider to manage the transparency of the street map. I stopped using Maporama one year back, because Mappy was just better but I hadn’t realised how much better.

Justitiepaleis/Palais de Justice
See the above result for my neighborhood (Marolles, Brussels).

You can see Rue Blaes & Rue Haute, the Breughel place, Place Poelaert, the Palais de Justice on the bottom right, a tip of the Vossenmarkt/Place Jeu de Bal in the left bottom corner.

[Listening to: "Songs for you" - royalgroove.org] (via punkey.com)

IT Conversations: podcasting feeds your brain

Published on November 8, 2004 in Apple, hardware and podcast. Closed

There’s only one way to check if podcasting can change your life, and that is by diving completely into it. Since last week, I am the proud owner of a 20GB iPod, (the first Apple product I have ever bought) and it is hard not to be enthusiastic about it. It might not be the cheapest hard-disk MP3 player around, but it is by far the most funky. Especially the user interface was very intuitive, which is important for the ain’t-gonna-RTFM person that I am.

Anyway, I also installed iPodder and Doppler. Doppler is really nice, but depends on the .Net runtime, which might be a turn-off for some people. iPodder is based on Python and has just released a great upgrade 1.1. It includes the iPodder.net OPML directory and something I want to play with: executing custom commands on each MP3 that is downloaded. I’m thinking about: setting the ID3 ‘Genre’ tag to ‘Podcast’ so they show up in my ‘New Podcasts’ Auto-playlist, or converting to 64kbps-mono to minimize size (for those who ‘only’ have a Mini-iPod, or a Flash 256MB player).

The Gillmor GangI’m obviously subscribed to the classics: Adam’s Daily SourceCode and Trade Secrets. But my biggest discovery was IT Conversations: a podcast with contributions on politics, media and technology, and how they influence each other. This is where podcasting shines! Instead of listening to idle chatter and stupid music on the radio, you can now spend your time in the car in a very productive way.

Some recent shows I particularly appreciated:

Here is the IT conversations RSS feed: .

Conclusion: although it is not necessary to have a portable MP3 device to participate in podcasting, you won’t fully appreciate it until you do!