last.fm is a (omfg! web2.0) service that tracks the music you play. You just install a plugin for your favourite music player and all songs you play will be send to the site. They will create nice charts, make recommendations and lots of other fun stuff.
Oh look, it even has got syndication! (my recently played tracks)
You can see nice charts about my music here.
You’ve got to love the web2.0 impact on aprilfools:
A search engine in a few lines of code with SQL on rails.
The .tgz you can download is (deliberately) corrupted. You can still recover some amusing stuff from it. Give it a try.
Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.1, which was way too easy:
# in my blog.w-nz.com htdocs folder
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xvzpf latest.tar.gz
cp wordpress/* . -R
Visit the upgrade script, which consisted out of one simple click and I was done.
Great stuff.
PS. I reuploaded my logo and google analytics code too, but they don’t count, really (even though they consisted out of more work that the rest of the upgrade).
After a long night wrestling with alfa source code, I’ve managed to install Xgl.
Xgl is a Xorg-X11 layer that uses openGL to achieve some nice stunning effects.
One of these is to be able to switch desktops by pressing ‘Ctrl+Alt’ and dragging your desktop-cube.
There are a lot of other things that I can’t show with screenshots. Take a look at the Xgl release post. These things include that all forms behave flexible. If I drag a form it’s like it’s made of rubber instead of concrete. Also every form pops up gently animated. There’s also a mac osX expose-clone, which is really helpfull.
If you want to install it yourself then the gentoo wiki article and hanno’s blog post should be very helpful.
Mulholland Drive is a great film. If you haven’t watched it yet, just watch it.
Those lucky enough to be astounded and puzzled by the film have all came up with their own interpretation of the movie.
The most common interpretation is that either the first or the last part is a dream of the opposite part. I’d have to disagree with that for both parts are just too bizarre to be real. However, both parts are pseudo-opposite.
Just take the ‘119′ on the firetruck for instance that hasn’t been mirrored, but still reversed.
It keeps you thinking in any case.
I’ve complained a lot when I worked with PHP about PHP’s terribly inefficient design; I’ve complained about it, just because it was PHP. The things I missed most in PHP, it seems, were actually there all along!
Behold shared memory and yet more IPC.
One reason PHP really sucked was that you need to load small data from and to databases or files if you want to share it between page views. The whole concept of handling a request per page view is ridiculous too, IMO.
With those two libraries however, PHP pages could be way more efficient.
I wonder why the big PHP software haven’t used it. Lets hope it isn’t portability.
Spam, again on this blog.
It seems those nasty spammers are now using actual people (or an automated browser) to post spam comments, subverting the protection wp-hashcash delivers.
Luckily it are only about two per day, which is very managable, but still annoying.
Like DRM and most other copyright protections, SPAM protection is inherently insecure, for the original openess required to allow a not-spammer to use them is, well, too open.
One interesting thing is that we can fight back now that they are using full javascript VM’s. Matching the spam-ip and letting it execute a rather ‘memory inefficient’ little program would certainly make me smile.
The game Freelancer uses hashes a lot in its data files, which gives modders a hard time.
I’ve put a database online, which modders can use to look-up hashes.
I’ve successfully installed vpopmail, qmail and courier today, after some hours of work on this server.
From now on you can send e-mail again to @w-nz.com adresses, which won’t end up in /dev/null. (like bas.westerbaan@~)
To the users of the server: if you want an email-address, mail me.
While testing my smtp server whether it would receive incoming email properly I was harshly confirmed by it being spam instead of my test mail entering my mailbox first:
It’s pretty funny to see spam junk in an ancient text-mode mailing program.
If anyone experiences problems with any application not mailing you any verification as it should, please email me. It could very possibly be that the qmail-send isn’t configured properly to allow unauthorized local mails.
Update: More good news, the amount of RAM on my virtual server has increased to 120MB! Which means that my server won’t be swapping instead of working all the time anymore.
For unkown reason lighttpd decided to pump out a log file of a few GB’s, which totally filled the last single piece of free memory on my server, resulting in the malfunction of several server daemons crashing the server.
Anyone has experience with this problem?
After a long afternoon I’ve got lighttpd to work with my current apache based layout.
This means I can choose whether to run apache or lighttpd.
Lighttpd is a webserver, like apache. The key advantage of lighttpd over apache is that lighttpd is very light on your server. It uses a lot less memory, which is very nice espacially when considering that my server only has got ~90mB of memory.
The drawback of lighttpd is that it is light and doesn’t support as much as apache does.
It doesn’t do .htaccess files. Everything needs to be configured in the lighttpd.conf, which doesn’t support everything, or at least not in the same way as apache does.
However, lighttpd is pretty easy to configure when you get the hang of it.
One particulair pain in the ass is getting old mod_rewrite using .htaccess to work, for instance the one used by wordpress of this blog.
I’ve added this in my lighttpd.conf:
$HTTP["host"] =~ "blog.w-nz.com" {
url.rewrite = ( "^/(page|archives|comments|search|feed)/" => "/index.php?error=404" )
}
One interesting thing to note is that the configuration file is nothing more than a script being executed for each request.
I’ve just upgraded my blog to the new wordpress 2.0, which seems to work properly.
Espacially the back-end has got a face lift, which looks and feels really nice.
Update: redid the logo and changed the theme to show the author
And offcourse: Happy newyear!
Merry Christmas!
What would you do when you need to perform something ‘nice’ on a christmas celebration of your high school?
This is what my brother and Noud did.
Hopefully I`ll be able to grab some photo’s soon and upload them of the stunned faces of the suprised people there.
Recently a lot of people seem to be switching from Apache to Lighttpd, which is a webserver that is said to be a lot faster, but even better it is said to have a constant low memory footprint.
I`m currently compiling lighttpd on my vserver (on which this blog runs), and I`ll switch to lighttpd – which should be as easy as setting some configurations for lighttpd to fit in with the current /var/www model I`m using and simply switching off Apache and switching on lighttpd.
I hope there won’t be a lot downtime.
Update Lighttpd and fastcgi don’t seem to really go together on my server configuration, so no lighttpd for a while 
.
Google’s new service to information domination, Google Analytics, it a traffic tracker for your website, originally used with their adwords service, seems pretty nice.
Well.. if it would be responsive, that is.
Worse than being slashdotted, a lot of high-traffic bloggers link to it.
Unintentional Distributed Denail of Service.
My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?
A new anti-wordpress-spam release of Elliott Back: HashCash 3.0.
Basicly it uses md5, javascript and a bit of AJAX, which is very hard to force except when a spam bot executes the actual javascript.Basicaly it just keeps an “undecipherable†secret which in theory you’d need javascript to decode. The problem with that is that it takes some time to execute the javascript and hopefully will scare the spambot away.
The method isn’t intrusive (although it does require javascript to be turned on), and pretty effective.
Good work Elliot!
I`m back indeed.
Rome is a great city.
Giolitti’s ice-cream tastes great as does tazza d’oro’s espresso.
Best building I visited was the pantheon. I like it more than the sixtian chapel, which is overrated in my humble opinion.
(Go Bernini! Boo Michelangolo)
Anyway, I could fill a few pages with my experiences, but I`m to lazy and too excited with my new toy: google reader!
I’ll be on a school excursion to Rome for 10 days, from tomorrow Thursday the 6th of October untill Saterday the 15th of October.
NB Contact my twin, Bram, if you would have contacted me.