Research and Destroy

This entrepreneur does not suffer from the financial crisis, as it seems…

Via Failblog.org.

Recently I found the pretty cool package logstalgia on Debian Times. It is a nice way to visualize access logs of your favorite http daemon as a pong game, every bullet being a single request, listed by client. You can also get into pause mode and view details to the single requests. But see for yourself:

Awesome, somehow. Isn’t it?

Now, Facebook went one step further by displaying all activities in the facebook network on a globe, distinguishing events by colors, and stuff. The project is named Palantir, like the crystal ball from LOTR which Saruman used as means of communication with Sauron. See the demo video. Most astonishing: Palantir is implemented using JavaME!

This all looks pretty neat. Facebook users mentioned that Google has something similar to visualize searches for years, and even my old employer CortalConsors visualized all trades with volume and location in the lobby for about 2-3 years! But still, the Facebook Palantir awesome!

I just found a video which demonstrates a quite interesting approach how to multiply numbers using pen and paper just by counting some cross-points in lines. Check it out!

via Ehrensenf.

Bohemian Rhapsody from Queen covered on Computer "Junk".

Looks quite real… is it?

Oxygen from Christopher Hendryx on Vimeo.

Funny video about the chemical interaction of oxygen with other elements. Check it out.

… at least software updates:

Why is it so hard for Microsoft to implement such a update mechanism? I really was astonished: one click, one reboot – up and running. No harsh feelings, no pain in the a**. It just works. I like software like this.

Eva, a friend of mine from new zealand, continues blogging about raw food. Her creations look quite delicious to me, but it would be an even more delightful experience with some meat in it. That’s at least my point of view. OK, I respect vegans. More meat for me :-)

So, to counter the green waves comming over from NZ, here what was served last night at my table at home: Meat Loaf Wellington:

The Recipe is acutally quite simple:

• 500g ground beef
• 1 carrot
• 1 onion
• 1 pole celery
• a handful of peas
• 4 wigs rosemary
• 1 egg
• a little olive oil
• puff pastry (about 30x50cm)

Cut the vegetables into pieces (about 1cm), fry it with a little oil and the rosemary. After the vegs cooled down a bit, knead them with about the half of the scrambled egg into the ground beef, and add some salt and pepper.

Then, put the mass into the rolled puff pastry, use some of the remaining egg to glue the edges and coat the whole loaf.

1 hour by 180°C should do the trick in the oven. Enjoy your meal!

Everyone following the gadgetosphere knows the Kindle, the Amazon ebook reader. The concept is great: Free wireless access to wikipedia and some blogs, downloads of (available) books onto the device and a pay-per-convert service for documents of the user, which are converted and then sent to the users’ device via amazon.com’s cloud.

But the ture origin of the device was revealed recently:

via xkcd.

Like any Unix system, files in OS X are hidden by default in directory listings when the names start with a dot ".". This also counts for the Finder. There seems to be no way in the Finder configuration to change this configuration, so there’s a little hack in the shell to modify this behaviour:

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
$ killall Finder

As you might guess the first line sets the option somehow and the second line kills all Finder windows belonging to the current User. As the Desktop also is a Finder process, it will restart immediately.

defaults seems to be a small CLI to some kind of user preferences service within OS X. You can list e.g. all preferences for the current user from the finder by invoking:

$defaults read com.apple.finder

The result will look a bit like a cascaded associative array. I think there’s some more to fiddle with.

Via Lifehacker.