Viral in the bad sense: MessengerChecker
04 Feb 2007I just received an email on my Hotmail account from someone that normally never contacts me. The email itself is clearly generated by an automatic process:
I just received an email on my Hotmail account from someone that normally never contacts me. The email itself is clearly generated by an automatic process:
Have you ever gotten into a discussion with a woman on colors? It seems that, while some people have ‘absolute hearing’ (pinpoint any frequency to the right note), there is also a kind of ‘absolute color perception’, and women seem more often blessed with it. While us men have the habit of calling anything with a red/blue mix ‘purple’, life is actually not that simple. There are many shades of purple: violet, mauve, orchid and half a dozen variations on those.
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:
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.
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).
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”.
Get ready for a lot of acronyms in this post: “How to create a good XML-based API for MRTG sensor data”.
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.
Lots of people have been taking pictures on New Year and this clearly shows in the stats of incoming pictures at two major photo hosting sites: Flickr and Smugmug.
Flickr reached a peak of nearly 100.000 pictures/hour (97.1 k#/h) and Smugmug a quarter of that (22.7 k#/h). That is 50% to 100% more than regular days.
