Engineering Manager | Trail Runner | Stockholm, Sweden
XKCD's latest comic hits the nail on the head.
Read the EFF's whitepaper: Dangerous Terms: A User's Guide to EULAs.
Reader License Agreement: By reading SeSam.hu (henceforth: the site) you agree that you shall, in three business days, transfer all your earthly belongings to the owner of the site...
Michael Chrichton passed away.
Many obituaries praise him as a writer who got kids interested in reading with his techno-thrillers. I really liked most of his books I came across (maybe with an exception to Next). My first Chrichton novel was, as I'm sure for many others, Jurassic Park. It had the very same effect the Potter-books achieved later on: I simply couldn't put it down. I think the world is a poorer place now by losing him.
Apparently an awful lot of people think otherwise. Phrases like "airport lounge lit" and "pulp fiction" are thrown around. There are also people advocating that commercial success should not be equated to literary worth and - as a general rule of thumb - writers who perform well commercially are usually very bad ones.
It's ok not to like a writer's work but I find it distasteful to disgrace him right after his death. I'm also curious how many of those who insist that Chrichton's books were shallow, poorly-written and worthless read more than one of them, either just to sneer afterwards or because despite all the literary snobbery they couldn't just put them down...
I hate that I can't keep my window open. My room - a 4 meters by 6 meters hole that locals call an apartment - always lacks fresh air. It gets stuffy and stale in matter of minutes.
Right in front of my block there's the back gate of a primary school. Which means every morning a dozen supply trucks come in quick succession, stop without shutting down the engine to open the gate, then enter. So if I keep the window open for the night it's guaranteed I wake up to some exceptionally noisy lorry puffing away almost literally an arm's length from my balcony.
During the day I am forced to listen to the noise reverberated between and amplified by the walls of the school's gymnasium. They also hold orchestra training sessions there which even penetrates the otherwise quite soundproof window.
And there is the Japanese habit to leave the engine running whenever they stop the car somewhere. In the summer and winter I suspect it's for the air conditioning to continue, but really they do it all the time. Like a while ago a car stopped right under my window and I was forced to close it after listening to the low rumbling of the engine for a good fifteen minutes.
Magdi told me that once a truck stopped in front of her dorm room and the driver forgot to change the gear, which meant it played the warning message and chimes that most trucks do in reverse in an endless loop for hours on end.
And to think that my agent had the audacity to tell me that the surrounding area is very silent...
This morning I was shuffling towards Yoshinoya peacefully, spacing out to One of These Days thumping from my Sennheiser PX-100s (very good choice for iPods). I like walking this way, filtering the noise of the crowd by loud music, insulating myself from them.
This was when an old Japanese man crept up behind me - not that much stealth was needed - and shouted in my ears from behind "My meishi!" And he waved his business card in my face. Needless to say it made me jump.
This is still the way some people here think is appropriate to make friends with a zoo animal foreigner.
I received a very ugly photocopied paper in my mailbox informing me that the Rules of Garbage Collection have changed and Failure to Comply will result in Severe Punishment. From now on garbage can only be placed at the appropriate Clean Stations in the Kobe City Municipal Designated Household Garbage Collection Bag (神戸市家庭系ごみ指定袋). The bags can be purchased at local supermarkets in three types. Red for burnable garbage (including plastic), green for non-burnable garbage (glass, chemicals), and finally blue for cans and PET bottles.
Now don't be mistaken: there are still separate locations for the different garbage types. One can't just place any bag at the closest drop-off point. The collection is still done on three distinct days at separate designated points once or twice a week between 5 am and 8 am. There is just the added requirement to use the new plastic bags.
My biggest problem with this all is that the bags are just huge: 45 liters. I probably produce 45 liters worth of litter in two weeks or so. So now the options are either to let the garbage rot until I fill the bag or just use a fraction of its capacity. The bags are of course pricey.
Exactly what this country needs is More Rules.
A weird coincidence or just the courtesy of fall that last week two friends - both of them in my year of studies - told me separately how they feel permanently down lately. As if our time here has taken its toll. I'm mostly of the same mood. We're going through the motions, dazed and confused, comfortably numb. This is the life.
Received the email below today - allegedly from Apple:
Not a good fake. For one Apple would never leave a typo in the subject or use full caps for that matter. Checking the source there are a number of clues as well. The from email address is forgeable by a three year old so I leave it at that.
Return-path: <dont_reply_@apple.com> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT Content-type: text/html; charset=Windows-1251 ... Received: from fwspcorp.com ([216.38.98.119]) Received: from User [41.220.75.3] by fwspcorp.com with ESMTP (SMTPD-8.22) id A0A1136C; Sat, 01 Nov 2008 17:56:49 -0400 From: dont_reply_@apple.com Subject: IMPORTANT UPDTAE Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:58:37 +0100 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Message-id: <200811011757753.SM04028@User>
No emails from Apple are encoded in Windows-1251, nor do they use Outlook Express to send automated mails. Fort Wayne Structural Products Corporation is either a fake as well, or one of their computer acts as a zombie for sending out phishing emails. Definitely not from Apple though.
Educate yourselves about phishing not to fall victim to such scams. MobileMe has a page to help as well.
I read over at doransky's that MTV opened its music video site which contains most of the videos that have ever been played on MTV. All videos are free to watch. I guess if anyone MTV can do it, being the biggest player on the music video distribution market on television. I encountered some 30 second clips, but the rest I saw were full length.
I have always been mostly ignorant of music videos. My main source of new (and old) music used to be the radio, then later switched over to the internet. When I was a teenager we moved from our flat to a house with no cable for a while. By the time we actually had MTV I already went to university.
One of the few videos I've seen is Weapon of Choice with Christopher Walken's unforgettable dance moves. I was happy to see Another Brick in the Wall there with Arnold Layne. However, Money for Nothing I've seen for the first time. I knew the Knopfler brothers have Hungarian roots but I was surprised to find a reference to that in the video. I challenge you to spot it. I also remember listening to The Man Who Sold the World's unplugged version back in my high school years a lot. You've just been rickrolled, too.
MTV Music is a fun site.
It's been a while I stumbled upon Bart-Jan Verhoef's site and his three-part tutorial on how to create a worn look to a site. He was kind enough to share a template page to show how he built up the final design. I liked it instantly and decided to implement it for WordPress.
You may remember I have been dissatisfied with how the journal was designed for a while now. I wanted something cleaner, wider, more serious and less emo. Bart-Jan's worn look is just like that with the additional perk of keeping the aged papery texture of my old clumsy design. So here's how SeSam.hu will look from now on.
I was trying to be as faithful to the original template page as possible. However WordPress has some specialities and it needs to integrate a wider array of functions which made it necessary to move a few pixels around. (The IE bug that prevents elements from floating properly in rows is a prime example. That one took hours to fix and caused a significant headache.)
I have to admit, building a template for WordPress is not an easy job. Unlike when I was just designing for myself a proper distributable template needs to be a lot more flexible and adapt to all the different blogs out there. The design must be prepared to handle a plethora of data structures. It remains to be seen how well I did to achieve that.
Not all the features I wanted are included, but I felt the design was ready for a live beta. Please if you encounter any quirks, malfunctions or errors do contact me or comment to this post.
Features or functions missing that I'd like to implement:
Features unlikely to be implemented:
I'm sure as soon as I press publish a dozen more will spring to my mind.
Anyway, if you like it and would like to use it I ask only a little bit of your patience just yet. Before making a downloadable version I'd like to sort a few things out and add the missing features. The reason why I applied it to SeSam.hu is that I'd like to test it live. Naturally since the whole site is licensed under creative commons if you insist on having this beta version email me and I shall send it to you.
The part of the internet who's not yet apathetic about Microsoft's announcements is happily blathering about the new features. Well it's interesting enough - in my opinion - that the inclusion of options for the user to switch annoying notifications off has to be considered a feature...
Also, it might be just me, but the new taskbar reminds me of KDE's (especially KDE 4's) a great deal. Also it's hard not to notice that with the Libraries added the folder view is increasingly reminiscent that of OS X's. I'm quite sure Steve won't fail to mention it in the next Keynote.
Not passing judgement here, just saying. It'll be interesting to see by the time W7 ships (promised 2011) how linux desktop systems and Mac OS would look.