Category: internet

delayed

communication internet marketing

Rushed to the airport. Packing took longer than expected. La Cienega made up for the time lost. It always does. I love La Cienega. When I park at Red Rabbit I have to turn once!

Of course the flight is delayed. Four hours delayed. Luckily I get a ten dollar NWA mail-in voucher. Score!

The next time Northwest will get in touch to sell me something I will remember that they could not be bothered to contact me, when I could have gained from it. They have my email. It’s freaking computers running airlines anyway. Why can’t they just
send an email out to let me know that the flight is been delayed. Hell, I would not even mind when they always would send me an email. 21% of this specific flight is actually on time. While they are at it they could also let me know which movies they will be showing. Which gate I will arrive where (so that I can forward this info to a person that picks me up). Sure, they could be somewhat smart and allow me to give them an email that would be notified about any changes in the arrival.
Once set up these things cost close to nothing to run.

where are you?

communication history internet technology

a very nice map of the entire internet
The implementation is maybe soso, but the actual idea to put all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses into a grid is really nice.

A couple of week ago a high res map of internet connections was widely linked to.

Which does remind me of Aaron Koblin and his“Flight Patterns”.

interesting maps
interesting data visualisations

around the net

internet

a half Tunick

When thou goest to Comcast, take thy hammer.

hk47

lol

internet technology

I am sitting here and code. Since hours. It’s what I do, and I like it. But sometimes I wonder how weird I really am. Since I am alone I had no reason to speak. The phone didn’t rang either. It might sound grim, but I really get allot done, and I like it quiet like this.
Then I read:

my $min = ($x, $y)[$x > $y];

somewhere, and I said “ha!”. I think it’s a bit weird if the first visible emotion in a couple of hours comes from reading ($x, $y)[$x > $y]. Geek!
It is a neat hack though.

those virtual worlds

history internet

19 months ago there was Leroy:
(Mr. Jenkins is acting out the essence of Mr Bush foreign policy here, with bigger success I might add)

a year ago some kid did this:

and now Toyota released a truck commerical playing in Wow:

A while back “Second Life” was all the craze. Journalists were mumbling about it. Endlessly. Companies were spending money to be in those virtual world. I think it’s one of these hollow stories that got too much attention despite a total lack of substance. As a journalist you felt all hip and trendy if you would do a piece about it. That’s why so many were done.

In the meantime there were millions (litteraly!) of people just hacking away on WoW. it’s what people do. Naturally ads do follow them. But the basic premise of WoW is not that it’s ‘an alternative reality’. It just seems to be a game that is fun to play for many people. Not enough news for journalists, unless it involves chinese gold farmers, but a pretty thick trend. And one that will continue.

flash and it’s stuttering

internet technology

Recently Flash for video delivery might look less appauling, since Adobe overhauled the codec. But it still pretty much sucks ass if it comes to playing while there is less than the required bandwidth is available. Quicktime on the other side just goes ahead and downloads the movie, until enough of is on the local computer so that it can play smoothly. From start to finish. With flash you are often just out of luck and have to sit through some ridicolous stuttering. Which is basically unbearable. Of course you can still fuck up in Quicktime by not enabling progressive download when you encode it. Why the default is not to have progressive download is always on is beyond me. There is no downside. It does work since years. Real well. Not like that Flash crapp. Maybe one day people will test their sites and movies on actual internet connections, not while they practically sit on the server that they develop it on.

actually, this is brilliant

internet media

All good ideas are simple. Like this one. You create a page or a site. Right there. Just write some text, maybe or maybe not add formating. And that’s that. Very nicely done. Now go and play with Jottit.

another missing google feature

internet not existing yet

Google does a great job in keeping an index of those internets. Despite some obstacles. One of them being that two different things can share the same name or label. IMDB deals with it, by adding roman numerals after peoples names.

Google has done little to use it’s dominance to establish semantic additions ot the internet’s structure. Actually it should, as long as it never makes any moves to lock it’s competition (which, ahem, would be who exactly at this point?) that would be broadly welcome.

If a specific term would be used for two or more different things, then Google could allow the registration of a disambigiotion (sp?) string. An example: My name gets used for a couple of people. We really have nothing to do with each other. Mostly the case for people with the same name.
There is only one search result. If I could go and register one variation that I would ad as an invisible comment in html pages about me, then google -or any search engine for that matter- would be able to clearly seperate the indexes for all those possible results. Wikipedia deals quiet
well with this issue for instance. While search engines usually don’t.

convert: Non-conforming drawing primitive definition `image’.

confessions of a pixel pusher internet

ImageMagick is a nice collection of image manipulation routines. It’s free, and somehow it should be. It’s powerful, but also works and fails in miracolous ways. It just wasted twenty minutes. My Minutes. It would have taken the person writing the code probably 2 to make the error message a little bit more meaningful. To cut to the chase: When ImageMagick tells you:

convert: Non-conforming drawing primitive definition `image'.

then it’s probably only telling you that it can not open the image you like to draw. In plain command line that would be:

convert -size 700x500 xc:black -draw 'image Over 0,0 400,300 directory/image.jpg' output.jpg

This will fail. It turns out that ImageMagick needs to have a local file NOT with a path component. To sucessfully do what you wanted to do you would have to:

cd directory ; convert -size 700x500 xc:black -draw 'image Over 0,0 400,300 image.jpg' ../output.jpg ; cd ..

Possible, sure. But a hint like “can not open file directory/image.jpg” would have been nice. The best would be path support as suspected. It works everywhere else.

Of course it turned out that this is supposed to be a feature. In the end things start to work when you quote the filename, like in:


convert -size 700x500 xc:black -draw 'image Over 0,0 400,300 "directory/image.jpg"' output.jpg

Otherwise a filename like 123_3x4.jpg would also get you in trouble.

born in 1989

history internet

Of course everybody has seen Miss South Carolina. Here she is a week later on TV Skip to 3:46 to find out what her future plans are. If she should ever work where I do, I will make sure to wear this.

Nothing wrong with stupid people. But when they start to be on TV or try to do jobs that they are not fit for (like Prez) then they are a problem.