04 Feb 2005
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:
31 Jan 2005
The major differences from the first top 25 are:
25 Jan 2005
This story illustrates the birth process of the Apple Mac user interface from 1978 to 1982, as told by Andy Hertzfeld. Lots of Polaroids to document the progress. The whole Folklore site is full of early Apple inside stories, for instance on Steve Jobs’ “Reality Distortion Field”.
24 Jan 2005
Luc Van Braekel has developed a service called Blogium.be, to find new emerging ‘hot’ links on the front pages of Belgian blogs. His start database is obviously a big list of URLs of Belgian bloggers. I think that a good additional function of Blogium could be to display a ranking of these, ordered by some kind of meta-calculation over things like: Google Pagerank, #incoming links for all search engines, posting recency/frequency (so deserted blogs disappear from the ranking in time), intra-belgium link traffic, …
21 Jan 2005
Here we are, back at the scene of the crime. Yes, I know it’s been a while. And the task of the day is:
20 Jan 2005
Have you ever wondered how difficult it is to beatmix 2 records? Does one actually have to have skills to be a top-notch DJ like Roger Sanchez or Fat Boy Slim?
18 Jan 2005
Dave Winer seems to be very excited about something but he can’t say yet what it is:
16 Jan 2005
I recently rediscovered Meshell Ndegeocello. I had been really disappointed by the concert I had seen of her last year on the Blue Note festival and hadn’t listened to any of her CDs for that time. Basically I was disappointed to see such a talent go to waste.
10 Jan 2005
While he was still a sceptic in October 2004, Russell Beattie has taken the Pepsi Challenge and tried out listening to podcasts in the car:
09 Jan 2005
I have an extensive collection DJ mixes on my hard disk, and a while ago I discovered in one of them a catchy tune. It starts as a laidback (112 BPM) love song, a crooner voice singing “Just a little lovin’, early in the morning, just a little lovin’, early in the day …“. It then turns into a groovy re-edit of the same song, with the voice nicely cut up to match the new tempo (124 BPM). There are some added vocals that are a bit silly (clearly a non-native English speaker), but the chorus is really addictive. For some reason it stayed glued to the back of my head, I caught myself whistling it several times a day. But what was it?
