Research and Destroy

Just had to share… harharhar!

I’m known to be a big fan of last.fm. Though I’m no subscriber I found a lot of new bands I did not know before.

The more interested I was when I found out about steereo.de, a new and somewhat similar service comming from germany. They, integrated a nice player bar at the bottom of their page, and over all it’s a pretty funky page. Not, as tidy as last.fm, but it will work.

The most interesting part of this all is: They didn’t want to let me on their page. I think I use a pretty recent browser for my day-to-day portion of web surfing, but not as new as they want me to:

As it seems, they just support recent versions IE + FF, but no Safari. I thought we’ve passed this to implement major browser-dependend tweaks in our pages. As it seems I was wrong.

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.

Bug they will never understand…

Via Techdirt.

I hope mine does not fly away like this one day…

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.