Archive for the 'tool' Category

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Caffeine and error messages


made with Atom Smasher’s Error Message Generator

Programming is the process of converting caffeine into error messages.
(via Joel on Software)

Live traffic info


Yahoo just announced that they now have live traffic information on their mapping service:

In a milestone for Internet-based traffic services, Yahoo! has beefed up its existing mapping services to allow customers to plot a route from one local destination to another, and overlay traffic data such as road speeds and potential delays.
(via cnn.com)

When you live in a city like Brussels, you know how unpredictable and unnerving traffic can be. Here in Belgium we also have some services that give up-to-date traffic info:

  • radio1.be gives some info on Brussels and Antwerp in text-format (not much really)
  • verkeerscentrum.be gives an map of Flanders and traffic condition for the main arteries
  • vab.be shows the traffic map info of the whole of Belgium, based on police information.
  • wegeninfo.be also gets info from the Federal Police and show it in a blog-like text-way (reverse chronological).


In France they have something much better: on parisrhinrhone.com they have 10 webcams watching the Paris/Lyon/Dijon motorways and anyone can see the live feed. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words!

William Beaty has his theory on how defensive driving helps solve traffic congestion.

That’s the whole point. We WANT people to merge ahead of us before that other lane comes to an end. If I fear that someone will leap into the space ahead of me, or if this makes me resentful or angry, then I close up ranks and prevent everyone from merging. If I try to become the “vengance police” and punish the cheaters who zoom ahead, then I close up ranks and stop all merges. Closed ranks create traffic jams. “Cheaters” don’t trigger traffic jams, it’s the people who try to punish the cheaters who do it.
Lane-jumpers are not the real problem. Traffic jams are commonly caused by people who attempt to punish the lane-jumpers by eliminating all spaces! In the merge-jam animations, the goal isn’t to maintain the empty space under any circumstance. The goal is to ALLOW PEOPLE TO MERGE AHEAD OF US! Closing up the ranks is what produces that jam in the animation.
(from amasci.com)

To see an accurate simulation of how a traffic jam is born at an highway entry, check the Martin Treiber java application.

Mappy has aerial photo overlay


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)

Port redirection in Windows

We use port redirection/proxy often on our platforms. In the production setup, separate (Linux-based) servers take care of this, but for our development and testing environment, we need port redirection for Windows system. I generally use 2 command-line packages:

  • stunnel.org: TCP proxy for adding or removing TLS (tunnel encryption aka SSL) from a stream
  • rinetd: plain TCP proxy for that accepts TCP connections and just transfers them to another TCP/IP address/port

    Typical use of stunnel:

  • adding TLS to a non-secure server (you will need a server certificate for this), HTTP to HTTPS, SMTP to SMTPS, POP3 to POP3S, FTP to FTPS, … stunnel -d smtps -r localhost:smtp
  • adding TLS to a non-secure client, e.g. a mail client without SMTPS
  • tunnel an existing non-TLS capable protocol through a TLS tunnel (e.g. DNS)

    Typical use of rinetd:

  • transfer a site on port 8080 to another IP address on port 80, to get rid of server:8080 side effects
  • transfer a port 88 to port 80, so you can have different Network Load Balancing policies on both ports, while they both run off the same site

    Claire Forlani
    Meanwhile on the other screen: Claire Forlani in ‘Meet Joe Black’. Mediocre movie, lousy acting by most of the crew, but mmmmm, that face.