Monthly Archive for March, 2007

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Printing an MP3 on A4′s

Published on March 19, 2007 in technology. Closed

Empire State - QueenRoly
Look wat ‘experts’ are still telling in the courtroom:

The HP Pavilion computer obtained from McGuire’s attorney’s office had a 60 gigabyte hard drive, and not all of it was searched by Seymour.
She told the jury that it is known in the computer industry that if information stored on a 12 gigabyte computer was put on paper it would create a stack of paper higher than the Empire State Building.
from dailyrecord.com

There was a time once when PCs were just overevolved typewriters and it made sense to express everything in “number of pages”. That time has long gone. Let’s convert that 12 GB into today’s storage currencies:

  • 12 GB is the equivalent of 17 CD-ROMs of data (700MB)
  • not yet 3 full DVDs (4.7GB)
  • Not even one HD-DVD (15/30GB) or Blu-Ray (25/50GB) disc
  • 4000 3MB (+-8 megapixel) pictures in JPG format
  • 12 days of MP3 recordings (at 96Kbps)
  • 16 episodes (not even one full season) of Lost, Prison Break or Heroes

Moreover, a conversion to typed-out A4s only makes sense if you specify font-size, spacing, margins and usage of duplex printing, in which case it remains an impractical antiquated unit.

A jury full of technophobes/non-experts shouldn’t be baffled with exaggerations like a “tower the size of the Empire State”. If you do not take into account the operating system, programs, images, music and movies, what remains on a hard disk of searchable data created by the owner? Maybe 2-5 gigabytes, thanks to MS Office’s bloated file formats. And the most important stuff for computer forensics is maybe 5MB: browser history, cookies, IM transcripts, emails and Office documents converted to text.

Govern yourselves accordingly

Published on March 16, 2007 in spam. 24 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I just received the following email:

Attention Mr. Forret,

It has been brought to our attention that you published or caused to be published an e-mail communication and/or internet bulletin containing words that are false, misleading and defamatory to our firm. More specifically, these publications can be found at:

blog.forret.com/2004/12/domain-registry-of-america-scam/

More specifically your statement “Domain Registry of America scam”. That statement is false and misleading in many ways:
1) The title of the publication accuses Domain Registry of America as being involved or perpetrating some type of scam, which his false.
2) Domain Registry of America’s mailings do not “urge” or “scare” anyone to take any action towards the mailing. It informs domain name holders that they now have the option to “transfer and renew” their domain name with any Registrar of their choice and take advantage of lower pricing and better service.
3) Your use of the phrase “it’s a scam”
4) Unaware to you, this mailing has been approved by the Federal Trade Commission as clearly describing it meaning and purpose. (PF: Actually they’ve done quite the opposite)

Your publication has caused and continues to cause Domain Registry of America irreparable damages and we intend to hold you responsible for these damages both past and present. You are hereby notified that we demand these false, misleading and defamatory statements mentioned above that you have published or have caused to be published be removed by no later than 15 days of your receipt of this notice.

If we do not receive written notification that these publications have been removed by the above deadline we will without further warning, advise our lawyers to commence a lawsuit in an Ontario court for damages and a permanent and interlocutory injunction restraining you, your employees, agents and representatives from making and publishing such publications. Domain Registry of America/Canada has successfully taken legal action in the past against other publishers of similar false, misleading and defamatory statements.

Govern yourselves accordingly,

Domain Registry of America/Canada
Relations Department
legal@droa.com

Continue reading ‘Govern yourselves accordingly’

The Top 20 bloggers in Flanders

Published on March 16, 2007 in Belgium. 1 Comment

Bloggers love lists. Bloggers adore lists of bloggers, certainly when they’re featured in the said lists. I started making top 30 and 60 lists of Belgian bloggers a way back, and somewhere in Nov 2005 Bruno took over the position as ranking specialist. He has just finished making a new list based on Pagerank, Technorati backlinks, Bloglines subscribers and some other indicators. I came out #3, which proves that the bribe worked as expected.

Let’s take a look at only 2 of those indicators for the top 20: Pagerank and Technorati backlinks (using the Pagerank checker)
Vlaamse Bloggers top 20

Two surprises jump out:

  • the good position of U2U’er Patrick (#11) which must be deserved through some other indicator, because a PR of 0 and 24 backlinks aren’t to write home about (*)
  • the low position of Flanders’ premier shockblog (and provider of premium bootie) Zattevrienden (#13). They go through all that effort collecting pictures of crashing bikers and naked blondes, frame those delicately in contemporary culture through intelligent conversation, but are not sufficiently rewarded for it. Oh well …

In any case: if you want to meet some of the bloggers in the top 20 and buy them a drink, talk about interesting stuff or maybe even get a back link, put the following dates in your agenda:
>> March 23rd, Bwards, Antwerp
>> May 5th, Barcamp Brussels, Brussels

url.rewrite for WordPress on Lighttpd

Published on March 15, 2007 in Wordpress. 6 Comments

LightyThis blog now runs on a Lighttpd (Lighty) webserver instead of Apache, and this means the configuration for ‘pretty URLs’ or permalinks of WordPress doesn’t work like it used to.
(As you might have noticed, I use permalinks like /2007/02/this-is-permalink/)

Whereas WordPress can automatically adapt the Apache .htacccess file to something like
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
it does not do anything automatically for your Lighty .conf configuration file (which is logical, since an application should not be allowed to mess with a central config file).
Continue reading ‘url.rewrite for WordPress on Lighttpd’