Category: Blog News

News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.

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The Dustbowl

I stumbled on a mention of something called a dustbowl via a picture on shorpy (see the comments for more pictures) – I didn’t really understand what they were talking about, and some research led me to these articles :

  • dustbowl and the great depression (Wikipedia)
  • NY Times Review of a book that also mentions the dustbowl

It seems this was a huge man-made ecological disaster in the 1930’s that was caused by (over)plowing the wrong way and not taking care of the soil, leading to soil erosion. All this soil became enormous dust storms that had many people fleeing to the cities.

Fascinating reading about a major ecological disaster.

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Reminder : exponential growth is not good

First a reminder to self for later : to calculate the doubling time of a steady growth percentage increase, divide 70 by the percentage to get the doubling time; the doubling time is the time which it takes to double in size using that steady growth percentage.

I got this from this very interesting (and depressing) lecture : Dr. Albert A. Bartlett’s presentation on “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy.”

It’s in eight parts, you can find each piece in youtube on the right-hand side.

I wonder what world my kids will live in, and wether I shouldn’t invest *now* in solar energy…

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Summer project : build a housie

Last summer I foolishly embarked on a quest to build a small play house for the children, using leftovers from constructing our attic floor.
I had constructed a basic floor with solid beams (as seen in the picture below)  as I wanted this to survive any assault from my twist boys. The sides and floor frame were filled in with osb plates and painted white. Just before the winter last year I put a roof on it.

This year I finished most of the outside by buying some den with pre-made grooves which I attached to the outside. It’s looking a lot nicer now.

Still need a few more sunny days though, to finish it. I would really like to fit some plexiglass in there or other protection for the winter times. That way it can double as a storage shed for the kids stuff.

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A group is it own worst enemy

A very interesting article. Published in 2003, but very very relevant and worth reading if you are at all interested in group interaction, how this reflects on the internet, and what the results may be in the future.

An extract :

we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern. It’s really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you’re not interested in the themes of emerging democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said “I am frustrated. I’m sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these conversations in real-time with one another. I want to have a group conversation, too. I’ll start a conference call.

“But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I’m going to bring up a chat window at the same time.” And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said “Well, I’ve also opened up a wiki, and here’s the URL.” And he posted it in the chat window. And people can start annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.

So, suddenly you’ve got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated. So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are. Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone’s like “Oh, can I — no, but –“, everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.

It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. “Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so’s work.” Or “You should look at this URL…you should look at that ISBN number.” In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out — “No, no, no, it’s w w w dot net dash…” In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: “Go over to the wiki and look at this.”

This is a broadband conference call, but it isn’t a giant thing. It’s just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It’s different from: Let’s take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.

Found via vowe.net

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Crossover Games on Mac

Well, I’ve been a Mac user for over 4 years now, and I can definitely state that I’m not going to go back to windows (any version), so far !

But there is one thing that I miss : windows games. I’ve bought myself an xbox with a seperate screen, which is fine and sometimes better for playing games, but some games only come out on windows, like Team Fortress, Crysis or The Witcher or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Broken Sword and those are all games that I like playing (whenever I can find the time which is, frankly, not a lot).

I bought Parallels Desktop for Mac, hoping that I could play windows games, but they seem to have stopped developing for dx9 games compatibility, and their updates have been become very slow. So recently, when Codeweavers announced Crossover Games for Mac, I snapped it up and have been using it since. Admittedly with mixed results, but boy when it works for a game, it works well !

Crossover Games For Mac is a specialised version of Crossover (which is based on Wine, the not-an-emulator of windows that recently reached 1.0 status) that has been fine-tuned and built for Mac. Of course you can install Wine yourself, but on a Mac this is not exactly an easy thing to do. Especially the OpenGL stuff seems hard to get to install (at least this is where I got stuck when I tried).

Codeweaver (which is a major sponsor of Wine) has list of games for which it is compatible here. Guild Wars, Eve Online and Half Life 2 are all pretty major games, and these and quite few more from STEAM are guaranteed to work.

Highly recommended if the games you want to play are officially supported by them. There is also a compatibility database that you can check for all the other games in existence.

I’ve gone one step further, and have become an advocate for testing 3 of those games (Broken Sword : Angel of Death, Jade Empire and the Witcher) against each new beta. So far, none of them have started magically working, but I keep hoping…

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Back to my old theme

I have restored my last theme, as well as some images, courtesy of my backups and a fresh backup that I got from Priorweb, my hosting provider, who have been very helpful and have reacted promptly.

(I pay them good money for this, of course, but it always nice to be helped along quickly and efficiently).

So. The website is back up, Google has done a site review and have deemed me clean of adware and infectious spirits, and I hope to stay that way.

For now, no other plugins. I’m gonna wait a day or two before activating and installing any plugins, and I certainly won’t do it using the backups directly – it seems that every php page was infected with javascript code.

The code is obfuscated ofcourse, but I would like to plough through it and understand it some more, what it does. I’ll let you know if I find the time and motivation (both of which are in short supply for the moment, work taking up quite a bit of my spare time and going to take even more next week.

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The blog got hacked.

The blog got hacked, it seems somewhere around the end of june. That’s what happens when you take a long vacation, both away from your computer and out of the country.

Dammit !

My apologies to all those who were affected by this. I’ve since deleted all files and have replaced it with the latest version of wordpress.

For now, no new themes and no new or old plugins until I’m sure that this has been solved.

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It doesn't have a wienie !

Yup, I totally get the message. Attention to detail is what counts, and that includes making it work juuuust right. That’s the way I try to execute my projects, with attention to detail. So what is a wienie ?

The wienie is the seamless way the glass fits into the metal on an
iPod. It's the solid slam of a Mercedes door closing. It's the "Easter
Egg" on that DVD you just bought. It's the glow of the logo on the back
of my MacBook Pro.
The wienie isn't what you must do  It's what you want
to do. Its delightful impact arises from the sheer joy of its creation
and the desire of its creator to share that joy with others.

I think more and more people are switching from an i’ll-buy-it-if-it-is-cheaper-than-the-rest to a stance where they buy or want something that is made with quality and with love. Where before the only thing that counted was the lowest price, now the quality comes to the fore.

When you buy something that is really well-made and well-thought-out, it’s a marvel.

In the beginning you’ll admire the way the designer thought about this object and the effort he put in it, without really knowing why he did it just that way. You’ll just get a good ‘feeling’ about it.

Then, after a while, you will start to appreciate WHY he put that effort in it. Only now you’ll realise the reason why the glass was beveled just so, or why the shape of it is molded just that way so it better fits in your hand.

And suddenly, weary old me is thanking that unknown designer for his cleverness, once more filled with childlike joy again, marveling about this object.

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Twinkle, Twinkle, little star…

??????
If there is not a lot of activity currently on this website, that’s because I’ve discovered Twinkle : a combination of twitter + location awareness using the iPhone.

For those who don’t know what twitter is : it’s sorta like sending text (sms) messages to friends, but you can see them all at the same time. You can choose to just post status messages (going out with some friends, now out for a bite to eat, preparing for a big presentation) so that people interested in you can follow your ‘tweets’. But those other people are doing the same thing, so you can decide to ‘follow’ their tweets as well. And that’s when it becomes interesting.

Twitter allows you different views : your personal view which shows your tweets and those you follow, and a public view, where you can see ALL the tweets from that current moment, from all over the world. It’s easy to read something and just fire a few words back, and then you get interested in that persons life, and you start ‘following’ them as well.

And suddenly you are in this microcosmos of lives of other people where you get glimpses of what they are doing and how they are feeling, and man! is it ever addictive !

You can even use it from your mobile phones and cell phones, if you set it up right.

Twinkle for iPhone adds location awareness (using triangulation of the cell phone towers your phone connects to) and by doing so takes Twitter to the next level. You have an additional view where you can specify the range around you (unfortunately, so far only in miles) in which you want to see other people who are using Twinkle.

That plus the ability to post a picture next to your post allows you to discover a lot more friends or similar-minded people who are living in your neighborhood, and are using Twinkle as well. And suddenly you have a lot more things to talk about. The weather, where are you hanging out, cool picture I didn’t know that place before.

It’s a friend (or at least contact) making machine !

You can find me via twitter with my handle “Lexstok“.

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Upgrade to WordPress 2.5

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 – the interface is a lot more streamlined, but as in any good product that gets an upgrade, there is always an accomodation phase where you suss out where your favourite menu options have gone to.

I took me  10 minutes to find the plugin section again ! I can blame my large 24inch screen though. With my browser window stretched across almost the width of my screen they are completely on the right end of it, in plain view all the time.

I’ve also disabled self-user registration. Since the xmlrpc hack, there are several spammers/robots who sign up and test if they can use you for sending spam. Comments can be made on any of my posts without signing up, so user registration is nog longer needed.