Usually make me fuzzy. I hate it to be WHAMed, but you have no chance when going to a christmas market. The first time I got caught was on an AirBerlin flight, where the famous song was played while boarding.
But there are also nice variations I actually like. Seen on the day after our christmas party in Berlin-Mitte I found a guy playing christmas songs on wine glasses. Lots of glasses, REALLY lots of them. See for yourself:
Genuine idea, totally awesome, and much better than the usual street musicians which I usually hate.
Everyone knows about the recent conviction of the Piratebay-crew. Even if we have to see whether, or how long, it will last. (You know, the probably biased judge…)
At least this trial might make some of us think about copyright and such things. There is a hudge discrepancy between what the crowd does and what the IP organizations want us to do. Once more I think Lawrence Lessig brings it to the point best:
In the analog times you had to buy book, a newspaper or a disk to gain access to the story or the song. So, making copies of books or songs was actually hard work back then. Nowadays, creating copies of digital content is easy peasy. In fact, everytime you view a digital content from the web, you actually get a copy.
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!
Blurps