According to about.com, my name in chinese is spelled as:
Funny to see that in Chinese, my name is only 1 character shorter.
Category: Fun
Great Read: The Graphing Calculator Story
On one of my Google quests, I stumbled upon a great story about a few guys who got fired by Apple, but continued to sneak in and out of the building, finishing the software they had been working on. It is a great read, and I think it would make a nice adventure movie. It will probably will not be a box office hit, because the rest of the world does not know what programmers feel when being “in the zone”. It will probably end up in DVD shelves next to Office Space, one of my favourites.
I really enjoyed reading The Graphing Calculator Story, I hope you do too! Be sure to check out the screenshots 🙂
Airbus 330 Entertainent system
I recently went to Vegas, which is a very long trip (about 20 hours including stopover). I don’t like flying that much, my ears hurt and it is very boring to be crammed in a chair for 10 hours, with a headrest that makes your chin touch your chest no matter how you adjust it. However, on this flight (and the one back) there was a nice personal entertainment system installed in each chair.Below are some images of the personal entertainment system which is installed on the Airbus 330’s of Northwest Airlines. These are a real treat on long distance flights. There is a fair selection of on-demand movies, music, some simple games and flight information. It lets you choose a movie, and you can pause and skip as much as you like. You can use your own 3.5mm jacked headphones, no more of that adapter-buying-if-you-are-lucky-you’ll-get-stereo crap you see in the older planes. The menu even contained an item called “email”, but it was not functioning at the time I tried it. Besides you had to swipe your credit card for it, which I didn’t find worth trying even if it would work.
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| Nice little game, Bejeweled | The controller (has to be turned 90 degrees sometimes, confusing!) | Guess where we are? Travelling at 950km/h there 🙂 | Watched Chicken Little. It does not live up to it’s commercial by a long shot. |
Funny thing is, that my wife’s entertainent system actually crashed during flight. It got stuck for about 5 minutes, after which it automatically rebooted, and guess what? I saw a Tux! It is actually a Linux system. A bit of googling revealed that a few people even have seen the system crash on all monitors at the same time. Good thing they aren’t using this system for the flight controls yet. 😉
But it does make sense. It doesn’t cost anything, and being open source, Panasonic (the manufacturer of the system) has full controll on getting all the glitches out. Now they actually do need to do that still, but I bet they got a nice (remote?) update procedure for that. After all, they also need to upload new movies every now and then. Maybe they use the same connection as they use for email? 100% remote update would be nice. No “downtime” for the planes!.
I for one liked the system very much. It actually has games which let you compete with other passengers, but that didn’t seem to be popular on my flights to Las Vegas. I didn’t even had to get my PSP out of my bag 🙂
Now if they only could make those stupid headrests removable so I can put my head back when I want to sleep (like most normal people), flying wouldn’t be all that bad.
Google Talk with your browser!
For some reason I’ve been selected my the google company to have the new interface of gmail, where you can use google talk without even installing it! Yes you’ve read that right. When I log in to Google, I immediately see a quick contacts list of people who are online (on googletalk), and I can chat with them as if I was using the actual application! Only voice is missing, but I don’t use that anyway (Skype fan), so I am really happy.Now I can google-talk with my friends on *any* computer without having to install plugins, upgrading MSN otherwise contaminating the host’s computer. I am really impressed and amazed (for the past 3 hours or so). Go Google! I feel like buying a t-shirt now 🙂
Oh yeah, and it works in both FireFox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. And I am not kidding.
Auch, and I just missed the scoop on Slashdot… I could have been a succesful submitter. so close, so close.
My movie rating
Found out about this link by accidentally browsing accros Ian Lewis’s blog. You can find out what your movie rating is. It seems I’m not for “all ages”. 🙂
Suitable for 12 years or older. Starting to get interesting now, with more adult-themed storylines, but we’re still talking in mild doses. You may find more colourful language, some human flesh, and maybe even some violence. Nothing creepy though.Examples: Batman, Naked Gun 33 1/3
Pomphouders dupe van ‘spookliters’
For those that can read Dutch. This is a nice example of Dutch gasstation owners wanting to be compensated for the fact that gasoline (or any other fluid you can sell) schrinks when cooled.
Fun at “automatiseringsgids”
Even companies pretending to know about ICT, writing about companies doing it right or wrong, get it (very) wrong sometimes. People who have an account at De Automatiseringsgids know the login screen. But have they also noticed how their username and password are sent to the server in plain text?
Another funny thing a colleque of mine discovered is the really wierd way of displaying error messages. The server returns the error message as part of a redirect. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. No serverside things here guys, must keep memory usage down. No sessions here, move along… A really funny thing you can do is display your own error messages, like so: De automatiseringsgids with weird error
I think somebody will start playing with this, because you can do a lot more (very bad) things. Should they have it fixed allready when you are reading this, I saved a screenshot for you. You would have got something in the lines of this:
After discussing this wierd construction, we concluded that the programmers wanted to do a “post-by-redirect” construction, where you make the server return a redirect to the browser jsut after a post. This solves the “reload problem” where the browser asks if it can re-post the data for you. Since a redirect is a GET, the browser will just reload the page. Normally you solve this by storing thing in the session on the server and send a session reference to the browser. Combined with HTTPS, this would give you a relatively strong, and still not to expensive protection against scripting and spoofing attacks.
A fine example of what happens if you trust an external company to build your web application, but you “forget” to check that they’ve delivered something that’s up to your standards (or at least the standards you paid for). Have fun playing around with this, and let me know what interesting things you found. (hint: Iframes and javascript can do a lot on this page 😉