Douwe Osinga's Blog: February 2004

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Georgia and the our big world

This Thursday I'm leaving for Georgia (the country in the Caucasus). In the unlikely event you'll be there too next week (and you...

Saturday, February 28, 2004

The Economist: The Case for Gay Marriage

The Economist is my favorite magazine. I like their style , the humor and their optimism. The can write an article about the war in the Con...

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Happiness and God

The BBC has a an interesting poll on what the World thinks of God . The results are as you'd expect, with Nigeria the most religious and...

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Why Google is a verb and Yahoo isn't

For years Yahoo has tried to push their motto, 'Do you Yahoo?', trying to make their brand name into a verb. Google has been trying,...

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Google Random Image

A new project. Google Random Image is a little javascript code that scans the html of the page it is on and uses that to find a matching im...

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Countries and currency risks

The European leaders complain about the weak dollar and how a further weakening dollar could hurt the still vulnerable economic recovery. Co...

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Google as research substitute

Mediabistro has an interesting article about Lies, Damned Lies and Goolge. How journalist more and more use the number of hits on a Google ...

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Google Date

The latest in the series Google hacks , Google Date lets you enter a date (day, month, year) and it will return what Google has to say abou...

Monday, February 16, 2004

Collective Poetry

A new project on these pages, collective poetry . The flash applet on the page behaves like one of thos magnetic poetry sets that allows you...

Sunday, February 15, 2004

The Big Guys are Scared (and getting bigger)

The take over attempt of Disney by ComCast and the planned merger of Sony Music and BMG make the promise of the End of Big Media seem like a...

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Homophobia

In the US the republicans fire up the troops by insisting there should be a constitutional change, banning gay marriage (how does that belon...

Thursday, February 5, 2004

Beating my own spam filter

How did it ever come to this? The growing spam problem forced me to install SpamBayes , a very smart and well done in Python to block spam b...

Wednesday, February 4, 2004

How the Internet cuts in the middleman

Back in the day when Wired preached the long boom gospel , people talked about disintermediation . Before the Internet, large parts of the ...