Lies, damned lies and Google trends

Yesterday I was browsing through my freshly arrived Tufte book “The visual display of quantitative information“. One example of “garbage in, garbage out” that he gives is the London Stock Exchange index (which went way down one year in Dec) and the solar radiation in that same year (which obviously also went down in the winter). Plotting both lines in the same graph gives the impression of correlation (Stock Exchange went down because of lack of sun).


Bouncing email

You've got mail
If you have sent me an email in the last two days, you will likely have gotten a bounce like “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender“. Please resend your message because your mail server is indeed right: my email addresses @forret.com were unavailable this Friday and Saturday.


Beyond the megapixel

Clemence_Ballet 137
Wired just released an article on digital camera technology: why megapixels alone are not a good indicator of camera and photograph quality.


Mission Impossible III: largest digital release ever

Add one more superlative to Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible: III”: it is the largest digital release ever, playing on more than 170 digital cinema screens throughout North America. And all digital preparation and distribution to those screens was handled by Kodak Digital Cinema.
from http://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr.aspx?newsID=487


Barcamp Brussels: 10 days to go!

Saturday 20 May


Database war stories: DB vs _square_ files

Plug and PlayI’ve been following the Database War Stories of O’Reilly Radar: how companies use text-based alternatives to classic relational database systems in order to cope with huge volumes. Check out the stories of Findory/Amazon, Google File System, Flickr and Second Life. Anyway, this seemed like a good moment to share some of my database war stories. Let me take you back to the early nineties.


Youtube bandwidth: terabytes per day

Youtube (Blogpulse)
Youtube seems to be losing some of its early adopters: Coolz0r quits the service, while Nathan even embarks on a grassroots activism mission to ruin the company (by getting its most popular uploaders banned – I have mixed feelings about that one). The issue is: to protect themselves from lawsuits, Youtube is taking the approach of deleting videos and even users upon first suspicion of (copyright) problems. They already received an ultimatum from NBC in Feb, then a proof to Jason Calacanis that it was ‘not a real business‘.


Play us a slow song

I remember when I started DJ’ing and going to parties (that would be the previous century, yes) that we used to have this whole ‘slow-dancing’ routine. Every couple of hours the DJ would play ‘La Bamba‘, sweaty teenagers would check each other out for a quick dance and a stolen kiss (on the cheek), and then there would be 3 to 5 ballads, or ‘slows’. Fifteen minutes of one boy slow-dancing with one girl. For those of you who have never done that: with the right kind of partner it is awesome.


100 essential movies

Jim Emerson has listed the 100 movies (103 actually) one should have seen to form an opinion about film
grace kelly


Click to hear the MP3 (playlist)

More than a year ago, I wrote an piece on Playing mp3 with an embedded Flash player. Things change quickly in this area, so it’s time for an update.