and I mean it
You appreciate the finer things in life. You have a split personality – wild or conservative, depending on your mood. Wherever you go, you like to travel first class. Luxury, style, and fun – who could ask for more?
Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.
If you take a low-res picture, and you want to blow it up to a higher size, there are different algorithms to do the calculation of all those new pixels. I talked about this earlier in “How to upsize an image“. I went a bit further now and took a 100×100 pixels detail of a Roos Van Acker picture by Filip Naudts and enlarged it five times: to 500×500. The tool I use, Irfanview, has 6 algorithms to do resize:
Contrary to what I expected, it was not the Lanczos filter (slowest and ‘best’) that gave the best results, but the B-spline algorithm that’s supposedly a bit worse. With Lanczos you get an rastering effect (check her hair), with B-spline it’s more even.
Continue reading ‘To upsize a picture, use the B-spline algorithm’
Imagine one would have a certain amount of money on one’s Paypal account, and one would like to spend that on hardware or other physical goods. Let’s now limit that to shops active in Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg. What are your options? Well, not a lot, it appears.
Computer/photography/electronics
My favourite is Pixmania: they have a big collection of all kinds of devices and good prices.
shop.cdfreaks.com sells blank DVD/CD and printer ink and also accepts Paypal.
Apart from that? Foto Konijnenberg: no. Thomann: no.
Books/CD/DVD
Amazon: no. Proxis: no. Azur: no. Bol.com: no.
Personally, I find this list quite short. Even if we would extend our choice to any shop that does not charge high shipping costs to Belgium, what are the options? The sold product should not be too obscure (no “shop with books on the noble art of patchwork”). Do you know any?
French hospitality #1
I’ve just spent a great weekend with the family in France. A couple from Antwerp has restored a “gentilhommière” (small castle) in Le Thurel (Picardie) as a gite d’etappe and turned it into a pleasant bed-and-breakfast!
Long walks on the beach, excellent food and abundance of wine. Splendid!
Continue reading ‘French hospitality’
When I search for Roos Van Acker (in the Google sense of searching), I have 2 sites that show up in the top results: a blog post of mine and the Flickr picture you see at the right. My blog has a Pagerank 6, so that explains why it can score high in searches, but I was sometimes surprised when my Flickr pictures showed up high in Google results; until I noticed that my Flickr stream also had a Pagerank 5. So maybe I had more PR firepower that I suspected. I decided to make an inventory of all sites under my control and see how high their PR is: my Pagerank inventory.
(for more info on Pagerank, check google.com and wikipedia. In short: Google gives each page a ‘weight’ or importance indicator called Pagerank. Pagerank 4 (PR4 in short) is OK, PR7 is kinda hard to get (right, Bart?), PR9 is only for sites like yahoo.com and ebay.com, and PR10 is the absolute maximum (the only site I know with a PR10 is google.com). Continue reading ‘My own Pagerank inventory’
When the .eu domains became available to the general public, I decided I did not want forret.eu. That means that the domain was available to be grabbed by someone else, and indeed it has been. I received the following email today:
This has all the professional charm of the mafia offering “protection”. The guy hides behind the Gmail of Luxembourg, kmail.lu . A DNS search shows me that KJ stands for Kurt Janusch from G-1 Ltd, 175-177 Newland Avenue, HU5 2EP, Hull UK. His name also shows up in a Eurid dispute (Eurid is the registrar that manages the .eu domains), but with an address in Germany. In another dispute with Altova, he is considered to have registered a domain name “without rights or legitimate interest in the name and in bad faith”.
Further, there were almost 3,000 other eu. domain names registered and offered for sale by the same “seller”, Mr. Kurt Janusch who, nevertheless, acts on behalf of various companies in this regard
Mr. Janusch is what they call a “domain squatter” or cybersquatter. He is of the same moral fiber as US counterparts like Jeff Burgar and John Zuccarini (the latter has been arrested).
Bring a scarce resource onto the market and what do you get: speculation. This is one of the reasons why Bob Parsons from GoDaddy refers to the launch of .eu domains as the .EU Landrush fiasco.
Get ready for a lot of acronyms in this post: “How to create a good XML-based API for MRTG sensor data”.
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. It is widely used around the world to generate web pages containing images that provide a live visual representation of this traffic. MRTG is mainly a Swiss open-source product written by Tobias Oetiker from ETH Zurich with some help from others.
When used in its basic form (without RRDTOOL), it generates output like the following:
While MRTG was developed with network devices (routers) in mind, it can be used to show the trend of any numeric value over time. For that, it has a very simple input API: it expects 4 lines of text:
Line 1: current state of the first variable, normally 'incoming bytes count'
Line 2: current state of the second variable, normally 'outgoing bytes count'
Line 3: string (in any human readable format), telling the uptime of the target.
Line 4: string, telling the name of the target.
So there’s maximum 2 variables, which should be the same order of magnitude (or the automatic scaling of the Y-axis will make the smaller one undistinguisable of 0). The uptime and name show up in the “at which time ‘rou-rz-gw.ethz.ch’ had been up for 160 days, 8:02:55.” in the header of the HTML page.
In this world of REST, XMLRPC and SOAP interfaces, this seems so limited. Let’s try to make an XML format that allows the following:
This could be a minimal implementation: Continue reading ‘MRTG data in XML format’
A site I use often to keep a view on “what’s happening” is popurls.com. It show lots of links, pictures and videos (Flickr, Youtube, iFilm, Wired …) but the part I use most is the top of the page: the 20 new hot links from the social bookmarking sites Digg, del.icio.us and Reddit.
I also find that I use the right part of the page (Reddit & del.icio.us) much more than the left (Digg) – just see the clicked (light-gray) links on the screenshot above. Today I read “Digg is for kids, Reddit is for grown-ups” and let me try to formulate why Digg seems to have less appeal for me.
The three services work differently: on the del.icio.us part, when you click on a link, you go straight to the actual page. This means that the owner of the site sees a “popurls.com” showing up in his referrer stats. Reddit links you to a Reddit URL (e.g. http://reddit.com/goto?rss=true&id=xuvx) which immediately redirects you to the actual page. So on the surface, you can’t see the difference. Digg, on the other hand, insist of sending you to the Digg page first, where a too shirt description of link invites you too click through. No instant gratification.
Both Reddit and Digg do more than just collect links, they also provide the platform to have a conversation about them. There is a difference in level of civility in both sites. While a Reddit user might add “I don’t agree because …”, the level of Digg comments is often more like “You loser! Whata pile of bullsh*t! …”, probably due to a younger audience. Since Digg forces me to see these comments when I click one of the links, I see too much of that.
I won’t deny that I’m a bit of a geek myself, but I like my news to be more of a mix of IT, human, political and cultural topics. To my feeling (that might be subjective) the topics on Digg are less interesting to me. Reddit is sometimes too much about American politics, but the rest of the topics are a mix better targeted for me. Del.icio.us is also quite my profile.
So that’s why I almost never look at the left column anymore. When there are interesting topics there, they typically also show up on the other two.
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