If you have sent me an email in the last two days, you will likely have gotten a bounce like “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender“. Please resend your message because your mail server is indeed right: my email addresses @forret.com were unavailable this Friday and Saturday.
The reason: I was too late for the renewal of my domain smoothouse.org so it expired, my Coditel broadband connection was down so I didn’t notice that my mails stopped coming in until Saturday. I did some emergency DNS adjustments, changed those, and then still did some other stuff, and so this is the situation 24 hours later:
- my email addresses @forret.com are now served by Dreamhost and they should work. (when all DNS updates have propagated through this universe)
- my DNS management for forret.com is now also at Dreamhost, which makes life a lot easier for me now (e.g. creating barcamp.forret.com was a piece of cake – with an external DNS that’s always a bit more tricky)
- my web tools are now at web.forret.com/tools instead of at www.forret.com. In short: the domain www.forret.com can not be hosted by someone else than Dreamhost, but my web tools have to run on Windows (ASP), which my Dreamhost account does not have. Hence: web.forret.com, which is my Windows hosting account. However, since www.forret.com now runs on Apache, I can do automatic redirects with mod-rewrite, so that *should* be transparent to users.
- I’ve lost my domain smoothouse.org – must check with Hostbasket if I can get it back during the DNS holding period.
- my Smoothouse content can now be found on xampled.com/smoothouse (e.g. my collection of house podcasts)
- my Smoothpod Mashup podcast has moved to www.xampled.com/smoothpod.
UPDATE : and it has now moved to mashup.xampled.com
- The Webjay wizard has moved to my web tools, where it belonged anyway.
- my HTTP header analyzer has also moved to the web tools, together with it’s companion the Squid Cache policy checker. (I bet you don’t have one of those, right?)
- I have at last been able to give my sister and father back their @forret.com address (long story). And I gave my mom a new one, for Mother’s Day!
So: please resend your messages, certainly if they were about Barcamp Brussels.
Wired just released an article on digital camera technology: why megapixels alone are not a good indicator of camera and photograph quality.
For years, resolution was considered the main measure of image quality in digital photos, but continual improvements have only shown up the fallacy: Grainy, blurry and underexposed photos look just as bad at 8 megapixels as they do at 5.
Camera vendors are concentrating on other fields to enhance camera quality:
- Low-light shooting
- While camera’s used to be limited to a sensitivity of 400 ISO (i.e. almost worthless in night situations), new image processing algorithms and larger sensors allow newer models to go up to 3200 ISO
- Flash
- Soft-flash (Casio) and i-Flash (Fujifilm) are ways to use a flash without ruining the natural lighting completely.
- Zooming further in, or out
- By using a right-angle construction within the body of the camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1K can get to a 10X optical zoom (35 mm to 350 mm). Kodak uses two 5X zoom lenses to get the same zoom capability
- Keeping steady
- Image-stabilization technologies, both optical and gyroscopic, avoid blurry photo’s.
- Capturing bright and dark
- enhancing the dynamic range of the sensors by using e.g. variable pixel size
- Protecting shooters from themselves
- Find the face in the picture and focus on it, or advise the photographer on how to improve his pictures.
And I would add to that: networking. Kodak, Canon and Nikon already have cameras with built-in Wifi, and for the ‘old’ ones that don’t have it, Eye-Fi might have a solution (via Scoble).
Read the article @ Wired, or dive even deeper in thetechlounge.com
Who wants to join in for the September Rails Conference in London? Let’s set up a nice Belgian delegation!
We can get a group discount:
- 5 or more delegates and get 10% discount
- 10 or more delegates and get 15% discount
This is the reason why I’m asking this now:
- May 15th and pay just £400/delegate
- May 30th and pay just £425/delegate
- June 30th and pay just £450/delegate
- July 30th and pay £475/delegate
- August 30th and pay £525/delegate
- September 10th and pay £575/delegate
So: leave your details here if you want to join: if we get to 5 people by May 15, we take the 10% discount (£360 = 526 euro), if we don’t, but we get to 10 people by May 30th (Barcamp Brussels might help), we take the 15% discount (also £360), if not, it’s everyone to themselves.
Confirmed speakers:
The conference is already packed with exciting speakers, including the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, best-selling author and passion maven Kathy Sierra, Rails core developers Jamis Buck, Marcel Molina, Jr., Thomas Fuchs, Rails authors and trainers David Alan Black, and Chad Fowler, Rake author Jim Weirich and many more to be announced.
(from europe.railsconf.org)
Just strolled onto this post: “Converting a colour photo to a single layered stencil with Photoshop” (via furl.net) and I thought: you don’t need no friggin’ Photoshop to do that! Let me show you how it’s done with (free) Irfanview (Windows):
START
We start with the same picture as the Photoshop procedure above (actually I blew it up to 4x the size, double width, double height):
STEP 1: convert to grey
Use Image\Convert to Greyscale: Continue reading ‘Converting a color picture to a stencil’
Saturday 20 May
Like M.A.R.R.S. said: “Countdown is progressive“. Ten days from now we’ll be frantically preparing the International Press Center for Barcamp Brussels. This is the progress report:
- We have found some very helpful sponsors (including Skynet) to help us with catering and equipment.
- Everything will be recorded and made available afterwards. Ine will be coordinating the audio/video podcast efforts.
- We have just jumped above 40 attendees on the Barcamp attendee list. Fifty would be an even nicer number. If you still know other people that could be interested to attend, just ask them! (more details on the concept here!)
Checklist
If you want to attend, this is what you should do:
- add your name to the attendee list
- add your topic/speech/demo to the topic list
- prepare your topic (Powerpoint, web demo, panel discussion)
- show up on Saturday May 20th!
(also check She Good Writer #2)
Sarah Brown is a free-lance writer from NYC. Judging from her blog, Que Sera Sera, she’s the kind of woman you’d like to have on your team in any verbal combat. Switching back and forth between self-mockery and sarcasm with the occasional pinch of misanthropy, she transform the small bumps in her life into amusing tales of (kind of) good and (mostly) evil.
She also hosts a reading series Cringe in New York: “brave souls come forward and read aloud from their teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence“.
In the next part she details her advanced seduction skills:
Originally it was just me being rude, but now that I know where it’s coming from, it’s combined with a powerful middle school urge to hide in a closet whenever I see him coming, and if I can’t, I just say the meanest thing that pops into my head. I get fucking flustered and I hate it. For some reason, he keeps talking to me, but I fear that if it ever progresses to the point where he goes for the lean in, I might end up breaking his kneecaps before I can stop myself. This makes me nervous when he tries to make small talk, and then I end up blurting out things like, “What, were you raised in an orphanage?” And I don’t say this in a playful or sarcastic way: it comes out of my mouth in this disdainful, curt tone like I am seriously insinuating that his parents gave him away when he was an infant because they didn’t want him. But oh man, apparently I do.
from queserasera
I’ve been following the Database War Stories of O’Reilly Radar: how companies use text-based alternatives to classic relational database systems in order to cope with huge volumes. Check out the stories of Findory/Amazon, Google File System, Flickr and Second Life. Anyway, this seemed like a good moment to share some of my database war stories. Let me take you back to the early nineties.
1993 @ Ukkel
I arrive at Sopres, one of the larger direct marketing / database management companies in Belgium. Fresh from university (and 1 year of military service), I expect to see RDBMS everywhere and dive into SQL. Imagine my surprise when I see that, yes, there are a lot of Sybase SQLServer databases around, but the bulk of the work is done with something they call ’square files’ (see below). They have built a whole set of tools to work with those and by using them myself, I learn to appreciate the advantanges of the system (speed, mainly) and grow a fairly accurate intuition for things like queries, indexes and outer joins.
Continue reading ‘Database war stories: DB vs ’square’ files’
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