Hybrid CD: making it run on Mac and PC

Just write it on a CD” can mean a lot of things. There’s the plain audio CD (also ‘IEC 908’ or ‘Red Book‘ standard – 74 minutes of audio), the CD-ROM (or ‘Yellow Book‘ – 700MB of data), the CD-R (‘Orange Book‘) and I’m not even gonna go into stuff like SVCD (Super Video CD – up to 60 minutes of video).


QuotePlay and portable SMIL

Matt Round had released QuotePlay, a Flash-based MP3 player for playing specific parts (‘quotes’) of an MP3 sound file. A bit like <blockquote> for sound, and a handy way to cite podcasters.


Domain names in Flanders and Wallonie: the digital divide

DNS.be, the Belgian non-profit organisation that manages the .be domain, has published new statistics on domain name distribution in Belgium. They added geographical statistics for e.g. the domain names per inhabitant in 2004. Some numbers:


CD-to-MP3 ripping speed estimation

As every sensible car-owner in Brussels, I rip my CDs to MP3 so I can put copies of them in my car. As every self-respecting geek, I have multiple PCs at home. Which brings me to following observation: not all PCs rip alike. On one PC the CPU maxes out at 100% for the whole ripping procedure, and on the other, I never get above 75%. So I started wondering: what are the elements to define the maximum ripping speed you can get on a PC?
My hunch:


Sue your customers

(Post in Dutch)


What women want

Things you learn in bars: the list of things girls look for in a guy (or, in this case, as cited by Nathalie and An).
I use the following scale: 1 = nice to have … 3 = definite bonus … 5 = really important, and 6 = conditio sine qua non (if you don’t qualify, forget it). I averaged the weights of both authors. In all cases, the desired answer is ‘yes’.


Tango steps and Twister

Simple salida (exit)
I have been looking for a while for the best way to describe tango steps and figures. There are quite a number of steps out there, and at some points you end up totally twisted around the lady without a clue of how to unravel.


Popular Belgian Blogs: version 3

What’s new?


Folksonomizer: generic folksonomy service


Just read a post on Paolo Massa’s Blog, where he requests to add a Flickr/ del.icio.us/ Technorati style of tagging to Webjay music playlists. In hip speak this practice is called a “folksonomy“.


Binary confusion: kilobytes and kibibytes

When I created my Bandwidth Calculator, easily the most popular web tool I ever made, I came across the following problem: in computer technology there is a habit of using kilobyte (kB) as 1024 bytes (as KB), megabyte (MB) as 1024*1024 (1.048.576) bytes. Most of you might think this is correct, but it’s not. The International System of Units (SI) (that defines the kilo, mega, giga, … and milli, micro, nano prefixes) uses only base 10 values. A kilo is always 1000, even for bytes. In order to find a solution for the IT ‘contamination’ of using kilo for 210 instead of 103, the IEC introduced new units in 1998: