Andreas Wacker

Hover is just awesome.

With Godaddy and Network Solutions I have to battle through an ever increasing amount of screens that try to sell something when doing even the simplest things.

Yes, it’s as painful as that last sentence.

Hover is a wonderful. Even if the others were OK Hover would still stand out. It is really nice.

A domain would auto renew next week. I don’t need it anymore. So Hover sends an email asking me what I would like to do. The others just auto renew.

I really like that. Treating your customers right. Looking for what they could want. Instead of looking for upsell opportunities.

Very very nice.

I found this today on a web site of a pewspaper:

Countless publications show the same AP story.

What is the problem with this?

According to the latest numbers China grew by 8.9%.
Since this is China one could also say: grew only by 8.9%

The US GDP grew 1.7% in the same time.

The headline of the AP story says something else.
So does the first sentence. And 8.9% growth are being called ‘anemic’

This is a very simple thing: growth did decline by 0.3%. Growth did. NOT the actual output.

I wonder what happens to the 99% of topics in the news that are more complex and faceted than this China statistic.

After I wrote this I went back to google news. On CNN one can read that the economy slowed:

I think following this kind of ‘news’ is a complete waste of time.

It is time that we start taxing sugar. R. Lustig and C. Brindis published a very compelling opinion piece in the current issue of Nature. (Vol 482)

It is ALSO high time that Nature stops paywalling ALL articles. Op pieces like this one SHOULD be public on the net.

Science and Nature are both on this idiot pay-wall trip. They need to get over that.

The should be ways so that they have their content online for all and still give extra for people that pay now for the content.

So glad I found this great introduction and overview of medical imaging.

I liked the article since it gives a great overview of different techniques together with their genesis. Stuff like a PET scanner does not rain down on humanity. Lots of people needed to work hard to realize it. Ideas, Patents and -as it turns out- the Beatles were needed and involved.

I personally found it fascinating how much ample computation power has enabled. Nothing that mattered in the last 40 years would have been conceivable without massive numerical processing. Even 99.999% of computing power is wasted on Facebook and games it is just awesome that we people deviced instruments to compute so cheaply.

It is probably impossible to estimate the impact that technologies like DfMRI will have on our knowledge and picture of ourselves. The microscope changed the world and each of our lives in the most radical ways. Which might only have dawned on people in the 17th century.

Of course the link was found in Wikipedia. After having set up a monthly donation to them and knowing how good it feels now and will do in the future I wonder why I did not do so earlier. Specially learning new things most Wikipedia pages allow a quick overview about the topic. What I personally really love is how detailed yet concise even very specialized topics are being documented. Quiet brilliant.

I made a map of the current ecoli outbreak in Germany.

There is actually also a german version: Ehec Karte Deutschland

Ars Technica describes how an IP address gets turned into a name at Comcast and TWC.

I really like email. It works well for me. One thing that I grew accustomed to was the abillity to postpone email. To set up quick reminders easily. I used ‘replylater.com’ for this. Unfortunately last month they stopped working for me.

I decided to just implement the same features myself: Mail Me Later works pretty much like replyater.com.

The ‘problem’ is, that once a tool works for me I completely start to rely on it. Having a topic delegated to a service like ‘mail me later’ means that I will entirely forget about it. Good since it saves hassle, really bad if that service fails.

Having this part of me workflow now in an environment where I can quickly verify its operation makes me very happy.

I found the first case where Bing is the better search engine. Which is good, since that means that there will be competition in search. The case where I found bing results to be relevant is a specific one. It is about an ongoing / developing story. Google is really fast with getting new pages into the index. But their ranking does not show them on the first page. (Ever since they added preview the ability to see 100 results has gone away, sadly). The term in question is ‘SORBS’. If you search for this in twitter you get a good glimpse about what is going on right now. SORBS is a blacklist that is broken. Since November 29th. And they are unable to fix it . Basically since it is a hack written by one person in perl. GFI bought them last year for around 0.5 Million. But that didn’t result in any improvement. So as a searcher you are most likely looking for the current state of SORBS. Bing does a good job in that it links to this comprehensive writeup about the SORBS debacle. Google however does not show this yet on the first page. Only 6 links that are not from SORBS itself are on that page. Not many people click through to the next page.

I should rephrase the title in saying “bings first page is better than googles first page”. Right now.

People trust those pixels a bit to much: Nicaragua / Costa Rica Border

Allot of work has probably gone into the creation of this comparison chart of Javascript UI libraries. Which is great and appreciated.

Tragically the author didn’t specify the meaning of the X axis. With benchmarks both can be the case. (Here it is apparently shorter is better). The comments on the post do point this out. Oddly the author did not fix the page. Would have taken 1 minute.

It might also be that not having a meaning on the axis’ caters to the biggest audience: People looking for this page might already have a favorite. So, let’s say you embrace YUI (shivers) then you come to this page, look at the long bars and click away just having confirmed that YUI is best. (Firmly ignoring what should have been a give away that protoype does even have longer bars).

People probably roam the Internet looking for ‘information’ that confirms what they were thinking all along. Since the Internet is pretty vast this works better than it ever did in history. There are 22,000 pages about unicorns and postage stamps.

A new cable gets dropped into the atlantic to save 5ms on a 60ms delay. And High Frequency Trading will pay for that. You know that it really has taken off when they start considering a straight tunnel between London and New York. As impossible as it is, it WOULD save at least another 15-20 ms.

Wiredrive is a system that operates in a similar space as INTERDUBS. Naturally their press releases get my attention.

The last one announces that
Wiredrive recently dumped its open source, clustered storage system in favor of Isilon.

I don’t think that it would be appropriate to go into detail here why INTERDUBS uses a different storage solution. Or why I think that such details do not matter for the clients, as long their data is 100% protected. Isilon works, I would not exactly title it meaner and leaner myself, but people can feel about what they do in any way they want and express it accordingly. Would not be worth the blog entry.

The question that is worth being raised is how Wiredrive using Isilon is newsworhty at all. This Wiredrive document outlines how Isilon is in use. While it itself is not dated it references the 2006 Olympics and 250GB hard drives.

one picture

We bought some very nice pictures for our living room:

I really like the work of Siebe Warmoeskerken. It is nice these days that one can buy things directly from the artist. No need for a Gallery getting in the way.

In order to operate the ZTE K3565-Z under OS X 10.5 or 10.6 you need to set the
network preference settings yourself. The Software defaults are wrong and will not work.
Vodafone phone support refers to debitel for this product. Debitel charges $1.55 a minute for support.
The bigger problem is that they don’t support OS X. They just say that they don’t know anything about it.

In the end things got working with these settings collected from the Internet and applied with a bit of luck:

When you insert the USB stick you get a volume with

Vodafone MC Installer

I ran this. I think it is needed. Also since its distinct crappyness will give you a taste of things to come. After you installed this the volume will no longer be mounted when the stick is being inserted.

Under 10.6 I got lots of messages about extensions not being working / being compatible. Both after the install and after the reboot this POS installer felt it needed.


Vodafone Mobile Connect.


should launch after the install. It fails the first time under OS X 10.6, complaining that it can not find a the stick. Just start it again.

The Vodafone Mobile Connect junk-app is good for one thing only: it lets you enter the PIN of the stick. The “Activate” / “Aktivieren” button is actually plain evil:
it will overwrite the network preference settings for the K3565-Z with non working defaults. Don’t click it.

Since we are talking crapware here the Network control panels gets populated with three devices for the ZTE stick. You can ignore / remove the ones ending in ATPort and DiagPort.
One should read “Vodafo…565-Z”. The number is *99***1#. That’s ok.

In order to make the ‘Connect’ / ‘Verbinden’ button sing for you have to change settings under ‘Advanced …’ / ‘Weitere Optionen …’.
In the Modem tab choose for the

‘vendor’ / ‘Hersteller’ the setting ‘Generic’ / ‘Allgemein’

then for the

model pick “GPRS (GSM/3) ”

for the

APN: event.vodafone.de

just like your Grandma always told you. Make sure to hit “Apply” / “Aendern” before you try to connect. If you “activate” the card with the mobile connect crapware then your settings will be overwritten.

people don’t know how fast their Internet is

I hope that it takes a while before the couple of last mile vendors adopt their upgrade plans accordingly.

Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.

After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:

I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.

But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.

Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:

Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.

Readwrite web wrote about Facebook login

Which happened to bring them high in the google search results for “facebook login”.

Then facebook did a re design. I didn’t notice much difference. But some people got confused and looked for the “facebook login” on google. And as we all know
clicking on the first result is what one should do (not). Enough people were so convinced that what they actually saw was facebook they got very mad and left comments in this direction.

Two things become apparent:

Everybody has computers now. And I mean everybody.
And many people delegate everything (including their thinking) to google.

No wonder adsense scams are so profitable.

Eric Alba shows some shelfs

And -as so often- he has a point.

As we are running slowly out of IP addresses addresses are being used that were deemed to be reserved. This wouldn’t be the internet if this would go smooth. See pollutions in 1/8 for the details (thanks David for the hint).

Turns that out that 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4 and not so awesome choices for an IP. Others thought so before.

Remember the look of corporate Videos?

Well, things change.

I found this video for Cooper Union on The C47.

In the right hands you can make some very compelling images with a camera body that retails around 2.700 $US.

I had hopes that miniDV would spawn new content, due to the leap in quality of the recording technology. It didn’t work out that way.
I am hoping again that the 5D Mark II and similar devices do that.

At least wedding videos will look better than they used to.

just found

iptraf

and it is real nice and handy tool so see what is going on the network ports.

Very helpful.

Just saw the Boards Summit opening reel:

They made a big deal about the QR Code.

But INTERDUBS clients