Douwe Osinga's Blog: October 2003

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...