News items for tag fridayafternoon - Koos van den Hout

From the spambox:

How are you doing today, I am miracle 24 yearls old girl, i saw your profile today at googlesearch cpan.cse.msu.edu - i like it, then i decided to contact you for going into deep rellastionship between me and you

I know CPAN is a lot, but I never saw it as a dating site.

koos@greenblatt:~$ export ☃=COLD
-bash: export: `☃=COLD': not a valid identifier

I like this Film1 promo I see fly by on 13th street. It uses auto-tune in interesting ways. Kudos to Fedde Wapstra.

With all the recent news about Osama Bin Laden I had to dig up this bit of comedy: The Taliban telemarketeer attack. Copied all over the Internet in mp3 and flash and I can't find a real original source for it. The best source is here: Taliban Takes on Telemarketers (Taliban Telephone) by Sector 8 Animation.

This must be why the building had no phone lines or Internet, to avoid this weapon.

Friday afternoon, so I tried to make Ubuntu talk to my bluetooth headset. I couldn't get it to work in my own (non-gnome) environment. The pairing worked, but alsa-bluetooth didn't get active. In a gnome environment I could select the bluetooth as default audio and get delayed and bad-sounding audio events in one ear. But playing an mp3 caused just a bunch of noise.

A very nice example of "why let facts get in the way of a good story": Google mapping team gets 'lost'.

EVEN the boffins behind Google's revolutionary Street View can get LOST.

This employee was snapped reading a roadside MAP despite being on a mission to collect images for the world's most popular photographic database of towns and cities.

They were forced to pull over on the side of a remote stretch of road in Elsrijkdreef, near Amsterdam, where one of the team had to get out and consult a map as well as appearing to call for help.

With a photo credit(?) for Newsteam.co.uk.

Image (C) google streetview

The angle / view / granularity of the picture combined with the fact that the cars are not pulled over at all made me think it is a streetview photo itself and browsing around the Elsrijkdreef in Amsterdam shows this nicely: lots of images with three other streetview cars in the picture.

My best guess is that there were four streetview cars, with the picture from the first one and they passed a bystander who was peering at the map. I can duplicate the situation with streetview but I can't (at the moment) get the correct deeplink. So a screengrab will have to do.

If you want to look at your apache logfiles in Hollywood-style, try logstalgia which makes apache look like a sort of pong game. Needs a videocard with OpenGL. And access to the access_log of a busy server.

Some time ago I wrote a script for the posting of urls via @fridayaftURL on twitter. The script also seems affected by the new authorization system on twitter because I can't post anymore. The weird thing is I thought I checked the return status from the post call, but it never failed before. It does now. I had to update the return status check for this, to make it fail correctly (and not set the urls in the database to 'tweeted').

Implementing OAuth will be something I need to make time for, so for now I'll just stop posting the friday afternoon urls to twitter. Too bad.

The Friday afternoon URL page itself works fine, so find the URLs over there!

Diversificatie

In de huidige crisis tijd moet je als it-bedrijf wel zoeken naar andere richtingen voor je bedrijf.

In mijn werk heb ik natuurlijk ook veel te maken met de universitaire automatiseringsprojecten. Vandaag las ik een prachtige filosofische beschouwing van het leerlingvolgsysteem: God bestaat en zijn naam is OSIRIS.