Microsoft: the not so evil empire?
Recently I came across this review of different digital music services. The bad news is of course that except for e-music, all services requ...
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Saturday, December 20, 2003
The Software bots will takeover the Internet.
The robots will not overtake the world anytime soon, but the software robots might. The googlebot of course already rules a big part of our...
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Google as Url Protocol
After half a year of running this website, I’m finally there. DouweOsinga.Com is the Osinga. Yes, search for Osinga at Google and I’m nu...
Monday, December 15, 2003
Surround sound and wireless current
I love watching movies with my wife, preferably on a big screen with surround sound. At home so far that meant that the rear speakers where ...
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Visited Countries
Visited Countries , my project for this week, is a little Web App that allows you to enter that countries you've been to and it generat...
Friday, December 12, 2003
Saving the world, plan B
The current plan of saving the world from global warming, called the Kyoto protocol, isn't going so great. The countries that signed, re...
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Didn't help us in War, won't help them in Peace
The US seems to have decided that the countries that didn't help with the war effort, shouldn't profit from the reconstruction. ...
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Disco's and blogging
When I grew up, going out meant going to the Disco. I was never good at it. I felt that disco took away the things I was good at. Intelligen...
Monday, December 8, 2003
Google News Map
I was working on World66 , the open content travel portal, and got my hands on a list of coordinates of countries. Why not use them to proje...
Sunday, December 7, 2003
China and Job Creation
Populist in the US complain about the growing importance of China. A giant sucking sound of jobs appearing overseas, unfair trade policies, ...
Saturday, December 6, 2003
More on ungoogle numbers
Two days ago I was writing about an idea by Hjalmar Gislason : the smallest number that cannot be found on Google and how hard it is to fin...
Friday, December 5, 2003
Infinite numbers
Hilbert's hotel has an infinite number of rooms and they're all full. A guy shows up and the desk clerk says: we're all full, b...
Thursday, December 4, 2003
Blog To Build: Business Card reader for my Phone
If you have an idea for a product that you think does not yet exist, you can do two things. You can build the product, market it and then ma...
Wednesday, December 3, 2003
The Sum, The Parts and our consumer society
The whole might be more than the sum of the parts, but the whole is cheaper. At least when it comes to dishwasher and such. Mine broke down....
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
What is the smalles ungoogle number?
What is the smallest number ungoogle number, i.e. number that cannot be found on Google? Hjalmar Gislason came up with this intriguing ques...
Monday, December 1, 2003
Caerfai Chemical Simulation Available
Caerfai is a first attempt at simulating chemical reactions. The model is much too simple to be useful for medical research, but it does pr...
Sunday, November 30, 2003
The Geeks should inherited the Earth
Ever since the first humans started to hunt Mammoths together, the question as to how best run an organization has been central in the think...
Friday, November 28, 2003
Why Convergence means we have to rewrite the law
A couple a days ago , I was writing about how I was busted in an Indian museum for bringing my phone, because it had a camera on it. No came...
Thursday, November 27, 2003
The Florida Google Dance
It is that time of year again. The leaves have fallen, there is this cold creeping in the air and Google has changed its algorithm. Somebody...
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Social Security is broken and you know it
Peter S. Heller has written a book about Long-Term Fiscal Challenges, called Who Will Pay? The basic message is: on the long run we're ...
Monday, November 24, 2003
Google Talk syndication
I created a version of GoogleTalk that people can put on their own websites. It is just a few lines of code and should work in most systems:...
Friday, November 21, 2003
Technology and traveling
I was dragging quite a bit of technology around, while traveling through India; a digital camera of course, a laptop to store and sort the i...
Thursday, November 20, 2003
One to one marketing and unclear markets
Naively one would expect the Internet to make markets much clearer and simpler. Everything is open and out there, right? Froogle and friend...
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Music on phones
Not that long ago, storing music on a computer was something only for the rich music industry. Hard disks were small and CDs large. Harddisk...
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Bloggin from India
Talk about mob blogging. I'm writing this in the train from magauo to Cochin, both in India on my 3650 hunt-pecking the weird round keyb...
Saturday, November 1, 2003
The poor and free market thinking
They're called social democrats or socialists in Europe and liberals in the United States. They're no fan of the free market, they w...
Friday, October 31, 2003
Visual Poetry Revisited
A couple of weeks ago, I published Visual Poetry , a Google hack to use image search to translate a sentence or a poem into a series of ima...
Thursday, October 30, 2003
That can't be good
According to the New Scientist , a US government funded scientist developed a extra deadly mouse virus, simlar to small pox, that kill mouse...
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Nigerian e-mail scams
Ten years ago I received a fax from a Nigerian businessman with a proposal: he had 5 (five) million dollars and if I arranged for a bank acc...
Monday, October 27, 2003
Iraq as a terrorist trap
When Bush said he was going to attack Iraq as part of his War on Terrorism, this didn't seem very convincing. Sadam did not have a lot t...
Sunday, October 26, 2003
Two new projects
I put two projects online I had laying around for a bit. ZAmazon is a zope product, allowing you to do Amazon searches from within Zope. Si...
Saturday, October 25, 2003
What are the chances?
This just in. The actor that plays Jezus in a controversial movie was struck by lightning during the shoot. Unlikely, but stastically expl...
Friday, October 24, 2003
Cool Stuff
I have no ambition to be the first blogger to write about this, but some stuff is too cool not to blog. First a real laser printer . Versa L...
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Computers: so fast and yet so slow
My first computer was a BBC Micro (ok, it was my parent's). 2 Mhz, 32KByte. If I recall correctly, wordprocessing wasn't much slower...
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Mind World Map progress
Daniel Moore comments on the lack of progress in the Mind World Map project here. If you look at the map, you'll see that a reasonable...
Refactoring the Law
Computer programs tend to start out small and as time goes by, features and new functionality is added. This makes old code more complex as ...
Friday, October 17, 2003
Best Month To Visit by Google
After I wrote about a failed project to use Google to find the best month to visit somewhere, I went back, had a look at the code and tortur...
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Using Google as Common Sense engine
Hjalmar Gislason has an interesting piece about Google Miner. Basically, Google Minder uses Google to extract common sense from the web, us...
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Internet history
The Internet doesn't forget that easy. Especially on Usenet, the original discussion forum of the Internet predating the web, there are ...
Open Movements that closed
Nowadays, if you insert a CD in a computer and the CD isn't copyright protected, chances are that the computer will retrieve the titles ...
Monday, October 13, 2003
Steven Berlin about email
Steven Berlin writes about saving email by better organizing it. All I want is two things: faster search in Outlook (why does it take minute...
Google Hacks
A look at my referer logs showed that quite a few people come here for one of the Google Hacks , so I added a new category with six projects...
Friday, October 10, 2003
Do we need Digital IDs
Kevin Werbag predicts the coming battle whether we'll Digital IDs will become mandatory. A lot industries will be asking for them, with...
The weird European stability pact
Why again do we have the European Stability? The Germans feared the Euro might be a weak currency, weaker than their D-Mark, if other countr...
Thursday, October 9, 2003
Bombing the Vatican
Whether or not Sadam Hussein had the weapons of mass destruction, most opponents of the war agreed that in principle removing a head of stat...
Wednesday, October 8, 2003
Google Talk
Another Google project online. Google Talk . You type a sentence of three or four words and Google find the fifth based on the first four, a...
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
Why jobs moving overseas isn't so bad
The same people complaining that economics isn't a science tend to not understand the writings of Ricardo about competive advantages. An...
Monday, October 6, 2003
Archean on runme.org
Yesterday my archean project was added to runme.org , a website about software art. Archean is certainly a beautifull project. The patterns...
Sunday, October 5, 2003
In favour of Digital Rights Management software
The beauty about a society where a lot of the production is actually information production, is that the economies of scale in an informatio...
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
Visual Poetry Ready
Poetry is supposed to project images in your mind. VisualPoetry translates any text into a series of images by looking up the words on Goog...
Friday, September 26, 2003
TV has to get worse before it gets better
When I grew up, we had two TV channels, both run by the state and filled by special foundations with members to cater for. If you didn't...
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Evil Bill strikes again
If ten 747s packed with young children would crash into the Kilomanjaro every day, you'd think people would notice and try to do somethi...
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Buddhism good, Islam bad?
It is common knowledge that Islam is a harsh religion where the hands of thieves are cut off routinely, while Buddhisme is the religion of ...
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
PhoneCams outsell conventional cameras
It is official. PhoneCams have outsold conventional cameras. According to Mobile Commerce Worldwide, mobile phone makers shipped 25 million...
Monday, September 22, 2003
Completing the RSS Revolution
RSS is great. Recently we've added a RSS stream to our companies website tracking all changes. So now anytime somebody modifies an artic...
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Copying CDs and open standards
Somebody throwing a party had asked us whether we couldn't put some of our music on CDs to play at the party. Should be legal, right? As...
Thursday, September 18, 2003
The fashion world innovates without copyright protection
NPR has an article about the fashion world . Like in the software world, here things happen fast. Stuff that is new now, is uninteresting to...
Verisign's self-describing webservice
Verisign succeeded in pissing off a lot of people by redirecting mistyped urls to their own page. Go to this link to see what they say about...
Monday, September 15, 2003
Making MP3s legal
Music and the Internet make a cool combination. Audiogalaxy, now defunct, got me back interested in music. Before that, I just played the CD...
Sunday, September 14, 2003
Micropayments and Free Content
Clay Shirkey's latest essay asks a valid question: why Micropayment schemes don't work. Even if you don't agree with Shirkey...
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