Who is going to win the world championship?
May 30th 2006 Posted at General
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Me: Who is going to win the world championship?
Ben, 4 years old: What world championship?
Me: Soccer!
Ben: Me!
technozid
A fun ride through the cyperspace
Archive for May, 2006
UCSD-Pascal sourcecode released
May 28th 2006 Posted at Getting older
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heise.de reports that the University of California , San Diego (UCSD) has released the sourcecode of their UCSD-Pascal to the public to be used for educational purposes.
UCSD-Pascal was the first programming language I got taught – the first I learned on my own was Commodore Basic. I was in the first age-group ever who was offered courses in information technology at my school. We were a selected group of 12 pupils, and we had – tadaaaa!! – 2 (two!) Apple ][ computers to our disposal. Well, disposal is not the right word – they were jealously guarded, and one of them had to be borrowed from the principal’s office prior to each course. They had two floppy drives – one for the operating system, with the floppy always inserted, and the second for the Pascal environment and for saved files. The floppies stored 180 KBytes if I recall it right…
Our Math teacher struggled hard to stay ahead of us knowledgewise – about half of the kids in the course had Comodore VIC 20 or Commodore C64 computers at home. Nevertheless she managed to teach us the Pascal programming language with the UCSD environment, and I became quite fond of it.
Actually I considered the structures inside of Pascal as far superior compared to the Basic daialect on my Commodore C64 that I actively looked into a Pascal compiler for the C64. Some while later, the German software company Data Becker(they still exist as an outlet for cheap software and books) released such a piece of software. Unfortunately it could in no way be compared to UCSD Pascal, so I started to re-design the UCSD toolbox with its look and feel for the C64, using the Data Becker Pascal compiler as its core. Today I probably would get sued for such a task, but back in the early 1980ies I participated at the Jugend Forscht competition and came in as runner up for my whole province. My career choice for Information Technology however has to a very large extend been shaped by UCSD Pascal.
Enough walking down memory lane for today.
On a sidenote: This is actually a funny coincidence. Jona came to my office the other day and during the initial smalltalk to “break the ice” (little breaking was necessary) I enquired about their IT lessons at school. Once he finished, I more or less told him the above story, and later I thought that would make a nice blog entry…
Animated music video from my childhood on YouTube
May 19th 2006 Posted at Getting older, Music
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Thanks to BoingBoing I just saw the video “Love is all (at the butterflys ball)” on YouTube:
Trippy YouTube cartoon of “Love is All,” featuring a psychedelic children’s song performed by Elf/Rainbow/Black Sabbath singer, Ronnie James Dio.
I recall seeing this music video at the age of 13 or 14. We got French television where I lived, and French pupils – going to school for a whole day – had Wednesday afternoons off. There was a music show each Wednesday that I quite liked, and as BoingBoing writes: the song is quite catchy. It was aired next to Brian Eno, Robert Palmer and “Plastique Bertrand” songs though, which makes it quite bizarre in retrospect. Nevertheless it was fun watching it again.
Matt Cutts Firefox extensions
May 16th 2006 Posted at Internet
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Recently Googleblogger Matt Cutts talked about the nofollow-tag. While what he reported was about 90% of what a Google rep emailed me several months ago, what immediately caught my attention was a screenshot he had posted. I took the liberty of cropping the interesting section of it:
This gives quite an interesting insight into what Firefox extensions Matt uses.
- Greasemonkey – which is kind of interesting since there have been incidents in the past when Google “sabotaged” certain Greasemonkey scripts
- Search Status – an extension I use myself which offers certain webmaster features, among others Google PageRank and Alexa rank display.
Interestingly enough, Matt obviously seems to only use the PageRank function and has switched off the Alexa rank. I can tell this from the position of the PageRank display, which is the default position for the Search Status extension. I pretty much assume that he is using the Google toolbar as well. Maybe he wants to check the Search Status results against the original.
I personally have switched off the Google PR and only use the Alexa display of Search Status. - No clue what the grey orb is…
- ProxySwitcher – I recently swapped it for FoxyProxy which has a silly name but more functionality.
I can’t stop repeating how important proxies are for professional webmasters. Up to my knowledge it’s the only reliable way to circumvent geotargeting. And despite the official way proclaimed by Google I use it to check AdWords for different regions.
I can only speculate for what Matt uses it. Probably to disguise to sites that he’s coming from Google. I often wondered if Google had a general proxy for their employees which makes the come from an unsuspicious IP address. I would have thought that it was more centralized though, and not up to the discretion of each employee. But probably they have both.
I’m looking forward to seeing more screenshots from Matt’s browser.
Happy Birthday, Mike Oldfield
May 15th 2006 Posted at Getting older, Music
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This is probably the ultimate outing as a nerd, but one of my favorite musicians, Mike Old field, has his 53th birthday today. Cheers Mike, thanks for the music!
I discovered Mike Oldfield for myself at the age of – uhmm – 13 or 14. This was around the year 1980, some eight years after Oldfield’s debut album Tubular Bells of 1972. I don’t know where I heard it first. It could have been either on the radio, at a friend of mine or at friends of my parents. But I still know what effect it had on me. I was mesmerized, and I couldn’t get the main theme out of my head.
It was the beginning of my puberty. In retrospect, that was the cruelest part in my life so far. Worrying body changes, moods no grown up could understand – or stand at all. Thunderstorms in the brain. Nothing fits, everything is awkward. Plus my parents moved to the countryside so it was 1 hour by bicycle through mountainous terrain to see my classmates. I felt locked away.
Mike Oldfield was the key to my prison. He made my mind fly, and calmed the stormy sea. I could listen to the tapes (we didn’t had CD’s back then and I didn’t had a record player so someone copied me the vinyl discs onto tape) for hours after hours. I played the air guitar on Ommadawn and I drummed with my hands to the rhythms of Hergest Ridge.
Puberty gladfully ebbed away, but Mike Oldfield kept on writing the soundtrack of my life. Platinum, QE2, Five Miles Out and Crisis where the next albums, but then something odd happened: the music didn’t touch me anymore!
Don’t get me wrong – the old albums still were important to me, though I didn’t listened to them as religiously as before anymore. But it was as if Oldfield has thrown away the key to my soul. My parents gave me Earth Moving for Christmas, but it was (and still is) one of the worst albums I ever listened to.
I have not dared to listen to newer works. Despite critics warnings, I got myself Tubular Bells II and Tubular Bells III and I liked them. I also got The Songs of Distant Earth because I liked the book which was the inspiration for the CD. But up to now, I didn’t dare to listen to any of his other releases.
Mike Oldfield was an early adopter of computer technology, and nowadays he produces strange – but artistically beautiful – computer games. I think at some crossroads he and myself took different turns, but during a critical period of my life he was an important and reliable companion.
You know what, Mike: as a birthday present to you I will order your latest CD. Maybe we can meet again, after all that time, and have a Whisky together and dream of the songs of a distant past…
Trying to get rich, part II
May 15th 2006 Posted at Internet
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So the magic spells to create gold in the information age go like this:
Oh, mighty Sergey, I will always buy peritoneal mesothelioma, never talk to mesothelioma lawyers even though I ask myself “what is mesothelioma”? Oh, might Eric, if I need to consolidate loans, or if I am refinancing my mortgage, or if I need a tax attorney – all I need to do is take some mesothelioma. Oh, might Matt, if you have the choice than make ME rich and not my car accident lawyer, even though I don’t have an ameriquest mortgage. Thank you, mighty Larry!
According to BoingBoing, checks should be arriving soon 
Minivan sales in Redmond, WA
May 14th 2006 Posted at General
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The leading German IT newschannel heise.de reports that Windows Vista developers will get paid 100 US$ in cash for each bug they find over the weekend. The bounty was announced by Senior VP Brian Valentine on Friday, according to heise.de.
Scott Adams had a similar idea back in 1995 for one of his Dilbert strips. Some people thankfully committed copyright violation for me, so check out the strip here. This will also answer the question why minivans are mentioned in this posts topic…
Google Trends
May 12th 2006 Posted at Internet, Typo3
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Steve Rubel did a nice list of “25 Things I Learned on Google Trends“. I couldn’t resist to do a few on my own:
- Linux is more popular than Windows XP
- WordPress is more popular than Typo3
- Mambo is less popular than Typo3
- Canon and Sony battle head to head with HDV camcorders
- 3DS Max is still more popular than Cinema 4D
- Angelina Jolie is more popular than Brad Pitt
- Red (in blue) is par with Blue (in red)
And finally:
- George W. Bush is only slightly more popular than Osama bin Laden, but bin Laden gets more press coverage.
Oh, and by the way, yes, Mark, your 15 minutes of fame are clearly over… here is the proof!
Are you an internet addict?
May 11th 2006 Posted at Internet
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The Center for Online and Internet Addiction put a test online (ha!), which helps you to find out if you are an Internet addict. While having to work with and on the Internet as a major part of my job I had nothing to fear, but still I was a bit nervous. But it worked out – for me:
Score: 29. You are an average on-line user. You may surf the Web a bit too long at times, but you have control over your usage.
Anyone dare to post her/his results?
Via Lifehacker