Published on
June 21, 2006 in
Belgium.
I.T.Works, one of Belgiums leading technical training organisers, has cooked up its first RubyOnRails seminar on Thursday July 6th. Alain Ravet and Werner Ramaekers, both experienced Rails developers, will talk about the advantages of this application development framework.
If you want to understand the logic behind “convention over configuration”, “flexibility is over-rated”, “constraints are liberating” or even “PHP is the devil; Ruby on Rails is the angel”(*): be sure to attend and learn why RoR is so successfull. I, for one, was already quite thrilled to discover Python some years ago, but getting to know RubyOnRails has been a way more exciting experience. It really lets you do cool stuff in less than 15 minutes (see numerous screencasts). Also, if you want to meet some of the early adopters (developers as well as agencies) of RoR in Belgium, the seminar is a good place to start. I will also be there!
Published on
June 16, 2006 in
spam.
(This is a blog post about an Austrian spammer. The reason I did not put anything more offensive in this post’s title, is because there is another Mark Hostetler, a Florida-based Wildlife Ecology professor. He’s probably a nice guy. I’m talking about a scumbag who lives in Vienna)
Belgian spammers?
I was just looking at today’s catch by my Akismet comment spam filter. BTW: the existence of spam filters like Akismet and Spam Karma is the only reason blogs can still be interactive. I already have more than 2600 detected spam comments since I migrated to Wordpress: that’s 2600 in 3 months or 30 a day on average. Since it’s an accelerating thing, I guess I must be at 100 spams per day now.
I noticed a lot of .be domain names, which seemed kind of new to me:
Are there really Belgian spammers, with Belgian addresses that you actually could go to and throw bricks through the window? Not really. The first traces went to Poland:
A Mr Pikod Darek from Poznan (Poland) has registered a load of .be domains on Dec 7th, 2005 through EuroDNS. The DNS registration was last updated on May 29th, 2006, probably because they were ready to start spamming then. All these .be sites are hosted at theplanet.com with 70.87.15.* IP addresses. I doubt Pikod hired multiple dedicated servers himself, he probably just bought a minimal shared hosting from a reseller. Why minimal? Because the only thing the .be domain does is forward you to an URL like http://www.find.fm/?aid=4077. Who is behind this ’search engine you trust’? Enter Hostetler!
Continue reading ‘Mark Hostetler, Austrian spammer’
I’ve been reading quitea lot on Myers-Briggs for my previous post “Myers-Briggs typology“, and some of it is too good not to post it here, so here is my second MBTI post! I’ve also made an new MBTI web tool for my web tools collection, that you can use to quickly check the facts for each type.
MBTI at first sight?
Get this: according to socionics, it is possible to do Visual Identification (V.I.) of the Myers-Briggs type. They prove it by showing 4 pictures (Malcolm McDowell, Sting, and two familiar actors-I-can’t-name) with -granted- similar features, and they’re all ISTJ (Sting a duty fulfiller?). I’ll be honest, I don’t buy this. I know that you can sometimes guess character traits from someone’s face (e.g. a ‘kind’ face vs. a ‘hard’ face), and I can understand how your physical attributes (pretty/ugly, thin/chubby) might influence your behaviour and consequently your MBTI type, but I’m not sure this method would withstand a critical scientific eye.
Continue reading ‘More fun with Myers-Briggs’
Background
I have never been a big believer in astrology. I am not convinced the location of stars at the moment of your birth is that important to your personality. I’m a Virgo, but I don’t feel that defines me that much. But some years ago I discovered a ‘labeling’ system that was based on the actual behaviour of a person, whose result was much more significant: the (Jung) Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI):
According to Jung’s typology all people can be classified using three criteria. These criteria are: Extraversion/Introversion – Sensing/Intuition – Thinking/Feeling
Isabel Briggs-Myers added a fourth criterion: Judging/Perceiving
from humanmetrics.com
A good explanation of each criterium is:
- 1. Where, primarily, do you prefer to direct your energy?
- If you prefer to direct your energy to deal with people, things, situations, or “the outer world”, then your preference is for Extraversion. This is denoted by the letter “E”.
- If you prefer to direct your energy to deal with ideas, information, explanations or beliefs, or “the inner world”, then your preference is for Introversion. This is denoted by the letter “I”.
- 2. How do you prefer to process information?
- If you prefer to deal with facts, what you know, to have clarity, or to describe what you see, then your preference is for Sensing. This is denoted by the letter “S”.
- If you prefer to deal with ideas, look into the unknown, to generate new possibilities or to anticipate what isn’t obvious, then your preference is for Intuition. This is denoted by the letter “N” (the letter I has already been used for Introversion).
- 3. How do you prefer to make decisions?
- If you prefer to decide on the basis of objective logic, using an analytic and detached approach, then your preference is for Thinking. This is denoted by the letter “T”.
- If you prefer to decide using values and/or personal beliefs, on the basis of what you believe is important or what you or others care about, then your preference is for Feeling. This is denoted by the letter “F”.
- 4. How do you prefer to organise your life?
- If you prefer your life to be planned, stable and organised then your preference is for Judging (not to be confused with ‘Judgemental’, which is quite different). This is denoted by the letter “J”.
- If you prefer to go with the flow, to maintain flexibility and respond to things as they arise, then your preference is for Perception. This is denoted by the letter “P”.
from teamtechnology
Continue reading ‘Myers-Briggs typology: I’m an ENFP’
One of the memes going round for the moment is a guy whose girlfriend will let him live his dream (a threesome) if his website pleasemakethiswork.com receives 5.000.000 hits by the end of this year. It’s a bit like the million-dollar-page but with a (sexy) twist. I first read it through Littl’ Q (where she gets her info from, that’s a mystery) and when I saw it hitting the Belgian mainstream Standaard Blog, I took a look at the page.
First impressions
As one would say in French: “plutot sympa”. You see the couple: Richard Green, an ex-cricket player and Rachel Greenwood both smiling in the camera while they draw up the paperwork. They look like ‘regular people’. The site is very simple (1 page, 1 image of the contract, and a small home video of the two confirming the deal) and the layout looks like it might have been done by a non-webdesigner. To be honest, real beginners tend to be overenthusiastic with fonts and colors but this site is not like that.
Continue reading ‘Please make this pay’
I just updated one of my web tools that definitely needed it: the Blogcentral Blog Dashboard.The idea is to give the relevant data for your blog (blog name, blog URL, feed URL, author name) and then get a dashboard page (that you can bookmark) which gives you easy access to all blog search engines, rankings and ping services.
I have been using the old version for quite a time already (mainly for Technorati stats), but now it even includes Alexa ranking, Egosurf, BlogPulse, -Digger, -Lines, -Shares, Google/Blogger, Sphere and Icerocket. Try it out and investigate that blog ego!
I was reading a magazine on affordable GPS systems and one of the features they stressed a lot was the support for TMC (Traffic Message Channel). This is the reception of real-time traffic info that is digitally transmitted alongside an FM channel. So I wondered where that data came from: how sophisticated the traffic detection schemes were.
Continue reading ‘Estimating real-time traffic speed’
If you were wondering why I posted so little this week: I was collecting presentations, sorting through pictures (Flickr and Lifeblogger) and movies (Google video and Dailymotion) and posting the reviews of the Barcamp topics. The collection is still not complete (let’s say that I’m at 70%), but I’m still waiting on feedback from some of the speakers/podcasters.
Here they are:
Barcamp Brussels speeches
I have video footage for a dozen presentations (thx to Maarten!), Powerpoint or PDF presentations for over 50%, and in the worst case only some pictures. At least there is proof that the speaker was really there. I’m still waiting for video’s from Bert (Netlash) and audio interviews from Alice and Irene.
And then: start preparing the next Barcamp Brussels!
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