A Day in Paradise

Americans are stupid

BERLIN (Reuters) – A naked American tourist raised eyebrows when he went for a walk through a German city and told police he thought this was acceptable behavior in Germany.

“We have been having unusually hot weather here lately but, all the same, we can’t have this,” a spokesman for police in the southern city of Nuremberg said Tuesday. “The man said he thought walking around naked was tolerated in Germany.”

Many Germans enjoy nude sunbathing which is allowed in public parks. The 41-year-old was carrying his clothes in a bag when police stopped him Monday evening after complaints from pedestrians.

The tourist was not under the influence of drugs, said police. They made him get dressed and pay a 200 euro ($269) deposit pending his investigation for indecent behavior.

ahhh, sweet stereotypes!

Funny Stuff. Funny youtube Mac vs. PC video included.

In the footsteps of a couple good friends I’ve decided to make the first blog entry of the new year yet another year in review round-up for the year 2006.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already done with 2006, this one went by fast. A lot happened, and due to the overflow of work, I missed a lot of what I did last year (specifically LinuxWorld Expo and LinuxTag).

One of the big work-related events is a new venture that I’ve been working on this year. <project-pimping>HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation was officially launched on December 1st, however about 18 months worth of work had gone into the product and building a client list before the site launch. The sprang out of my work with HedgeCo Networks which involved a the development of a high-end statistics/graphing package which generated quantitative statistics for Hedge Funds. After deploying the product on their flagship product, they started receiving request to license the package on various other website platforms, so the package was reworked into a slimmed down edition which can be deployed in smaller sites.

As we started deploying the product we realized the potential, and reallocated some of the design talent that we had been working on other project into creating entire websites and Hedge Fund start-up consulting/compliance packages. Since our Dec. 1 launch we have had a fantastically profitable month (to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing check out the Hedge Fund Websites blog)</project-pimping>

All of the above required me to reallocate my own time away from other projects, until the point that for the last year I have done little else. So as of Jan 1, 2007 I am officially working full time for HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites… Freelancer no longer! This year I’m also moving my family up to West Palm Beach, Florida and will be working in the brand new HedgeCo offices (will post pics of when we move in later this month).

OK, so now that I’ve spent all my time pimping my current project I’ll skim through the news.

January: Slow month, Sid officially joined our family as “brother”. I weighed in on the PHP Security debate du jour wondering when good security verges on paranoia and the side effects.

February: Traveled to UK for PHPLondon conference. This was a fantastic event (looking forward to next year), as far as I remembered there were about 250 geeks attending the 1-day event. Got a cool new LCD. In defense of PHPNuke (and other applications of low repute whose name starts with PHP*) I responded to Marco’s post reminiscing about how great PHPNuke was back in the day.

March: Slow month… google releases finance portal, barra stops reporting S&P numbers and screws up my webservice. Tom Fox is Executed.

April: Gearing up for the world cup 32Cards PHP-based card game is released. I start using backpackit to organize my life (note to reader, I stop using it in a couple months, when it stops scaling with my needs). I spent 10 days in Florida, unfortunately missing PHPTek by 10 days.

May: I question open-source for highly specific niche applications (more specifically my statistic package). I enjoy Scott Sigler’s “Infection” which is in full swing. I start watching theshow with ze frank.

June: DSL CRASH!!! I try to “upgrade” my connection by switching providers which turns into 3 weeks on dial-up. During this time I camp at friends houses during all night product launches, and drive everyone around me insane. I finally return. World cup is in full swing, and Germany is World Cup CRAZY! I take pictures.
I travel to Norway for the eZpublish conference & PHPVikinger. Ammar Ibrahim comes to Frankfurt, we watch some football!

July: A slow month… I try Fedora Core, only to get frustrated when I can’t mount my ntfs external drive with the correct permissions (worked fine in root, was able to find no usable explanation). Infection ends. Put out a notice for css code monkeys get more response than I can handle. Macs Rock? During one of the hottest months on record the kids have chickenpox and we are confined indoors.

August: I subscribe to Gail Orenstein’s Flickr feed during her trip to Israel. cool pictures (quite possibly NSFW) with political commentary. Two talks are accepted for ZendCon. I manage to squeeze into the PHPConference schedule at the last minute. We take the kids on a mini-vacation to Legoland and then visit some friends in Switzerland.

September: Catch Mark Nemcoff on in a 5-minute-review. I deploy a site using eZpublish, blog about lessons learned. RIP Lilo. Do some myspace defending.

October: The Pear book is out!. I speculate about google world domination, and yahoo opens up the login api. Spend a week in WPB Florida, then fly to LA and drive down to San Jose for Zendcon.

November: Conference season. Meet Scott Sigler!!! Give talks at Zendcon, fly back home and give tutorial at IPC2k6. After seeing that the Zend Framework is more than hype I take a look at it and start my Zend Framework Hidden Gems article series. I dump backpackit for google docs (which I am still happily using). When is it a good time to rewrite your platform?

December: HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website launch. Fantastic month on the work front, however not a whole lot of time for anything else. David (CPUNerd) on the other hand has way too much time on his hands, and immortalizes me in kilt.

And that’s about it… probably the longest blog entry ever! I’m looking forward to this year as being the craziest yet. I’ll be flying to WPB next week, and for this first quarter will probably spend more time on that side of the pond.

A big THANK YOU to my readers (let’s make that anyone who made it this far into the blog entry). And most of all thanks to Stella, Annie and Mia for putting up with me during this hectic time.

I wake up this morning, and like all mornings read my utterlyboring newsletter.

I click on the link to the story about The Bored Leg Cult (click 1). I follow the link to the Bored Leg Cult Photo Pool (click 2). I click on the Pool Members Link (click 3). I view the profile of Barry Price, which was on the first page of group members (click 4). Scroll down a bit to look at his Thailand 2005 Group (click 5). Then scroll down a bit more to find a picture of my good friend martin playing with some lizards (click 6).

Martin is selling a 130kg c-3PO on ebay, c-3PO was played by Anthony Daniels who acted in Star Wars with Garrick Hagon who was a voice actor in Balto with Kevin Bacon.

Now I’ve forgotten what this blog entry was initially about… oh well, it’s a small interweb!

This is an email that I sent to someone who needed something to manage a small mailing list. I have used Worldcast in the past so I wrote up this simple how-to.

Worldcast is a free (for non-profit use) or cheap for business use mail sending program.

How to maintain a mailing list using WorldCast

1. Create New Project
To create a new Worldcast project, start Worldcast and go through the Configuration Wizard. To complete the configuration wizard, you’ll need your name, email address, the format of email you want to send out (HTML is recommended), transport protocol (SMTP recommended), and SMTP Server.

The final question is whether you want to send the emails or just validate the email addresses. You most probably will want to send only.

At the end of the wizard, once you have entered all the information you have the option to import contacts from a file or type them in yourself. You can import or add addresses at any time.

Worldcast imports files in the comma seperated value file, or another worldcast file.

Before you import your first batch of users, you should check your settings by manually adding your own email address and sending an email to yourself.

2. Sending an Update to your Mailing list
When you have your list prepared you can enter your subject and body message in the supplied area. If you chose to send an HTML message then you will be able to use HTML message formatting.

You can insert any of the feilds (Firstname, Lastname, Email) into your email by clicking on “Message->Insert Field” and selecting the data that you want to insert into the email.

Once you have sent your email, or created your project, save your project for future use.

3. Managing Unsubscriptions
If a user chooses to unsubscribe from your list, open your project click on the status column for the email address which you want to unsubscribe and change the status to Unsubscribed.

4. Merging Lists
When you are ready to send a new Mailing, export a new version of your contact list and import it into Worldcast by clicking on “File->Import Recipients”.

The users will be imported into your system and then the system will ask if you want to check for duplicates. It is important that you remove the duplicate email addresses, this will maintain your unsubscription lists.

Last Saturday, I splurged and bought myself a 19inch LCD monitor. I liked my old CRT but it was getting old, and taking up a LOT of space so I figured I was well over due for an LCD.

I got the and LG, it had nice reviews, specs and of the LCD monitors on display it was certainly the most pleasing on the eyes.

After hooking it up, adjusting all the color levels (these things are BRIGHT) I noticed a dead pixel in the central bottom section of the screen. I called up support and they told me that depending on the gaurantee of the individual monitor I could might be able to take it back under the gaurantee. Thankfully, here in Germany we have a 10-day, no questions asked return so today we drove the 40km back to the Media Markt where I bought the LCD and traded it in for another of the same LCD.

So I get home fire it up and this one also has a dead pixel, in almost the same position as the last one. When talking to one of the techs at the store, he said that most gaurantees only apply after 3 or 4 pixels. Are dead pixels something that LCD users just have to live with? or am I supposed to keep returning these damn things until I get one that I like?

Thankfully, the the good part of this story was that we decided to check out this wooden bar that we had seen and liked last week, and today they were having a 25% discount on all their furniture. So we went ahead and bought ourselves the bar along with a matching table and got shipping free

What I need is a firefox extension which will make a blog entry with links to all of my open tabs. THAT would be great for bloggers who enjoy doing “linkdump” posts.

Anyway, I’ve been up to my neck in Excel’s statistical functions the last couple hours and wanted to jot everything down before I forget them.

Using Excel Statistical Functions
Microsoft Excel Statistical Functions
Excel statistical functions: VAR
Description of improvements in the statistical functions in Excel 2003 and in Excel 2004 for Mac
Microsoft Office Excel 2003
Excel Statistical Functions: GAMMAINV
Problems vith Statistical Functions and Large Numbers in Excel

And finally, the Open Office source file with the source of just about everything I need! Christmas!!!

VoipStunt and VoIP Buster

These look like interesting VoIP providers. They have a fairly large list of countries to which land-line phones are free.

Anyone used any of these services?

Print Story – canada.com network

This just caught my eye because it made me feel REALLY old…

Nickerson said that while many compare the DVD format wars to the battle a quarter century ago between the Betamax and VHS formats, another analogy might be more useful.

Could that _really_ have been a quarter of a century ago? I’m feeling old.

Somewhat on the same topic, I’m in the market for a new TV, we’re redoing some of our rooms and moving our sitting room into the upstairs “studio” where we will have more space.

Obviously to make better use of the space we want to sort out something smaller than our current bulky TV set. The obvious option is a plasma screen, but the other option that I thought of would be to get a beamer and make good use of the fairly big white wall that is available.

Price-wise they both work out about the same. That is about EU1 – 1.5k The plasma screen will need to be lower-end but you can get a fairly good beamer for that price.

Now my question is if anyone has any experience with what types of beamers to look for. Is there a “power-up” time? I know often during conferences you have to turn on the beamer half an hour in advance, obviously this wouldn’t be ideal for a home entertainment system.

Are there any other options?

Oh, well… time to get back to work, a new home entertainment system is pretty far down on the old priority list.

ABC News: 16-Year-Old Wins Science Scholarship

Now, not to brag… but as soon as I saw the headline on google news a little voice in my head said “home schooled”.

A 16-year-old, homeschooled California boy won a premier high school science competition Monday for his innovative approach to an old math problem that could help in the design of airplane wings.

Michael Viscardi, a senior from San Diego, won a $100,000 college scholarship, the top individual prize in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

Viscardi tackled a 19th century math problem and his new method of solving it has potential applications in the fields of engineering and physics.

Reminds me of a US spelling bee which made news because the winner wasn’t home schooled

‘Exorcism of Emily Rose’ is surprise runaway hit – Sep. 11, 2005

“The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” a courtroom drama loosely based on true events, scared the demons away from the historically lackluster late summer box office by registering the third-biggest opening for a September, according to studio estimates issued Sunday.

Looks interesting… watched Red Eye on Sunday, pretty simple story, they try and sell the “this is a scary movie on an airplane” but it turned out just to be your regular action movie with the vast majority of the “story” taking place on an airplane.

Expected a bit more from Wez Craven. Oh well…

Apple – iPod nano

Actually I want an iRiver for the recording, but the nano is pretty friggin cool. Someone should hack it into a universal remote control. Why do those things have to be so friggin big.

Other than the form factor, there isn’t much in these things. Sure they look cool, but they cost just about as much as a whole computer these days. Anyhoo, if someone has one laying around just send it on over

Opera 10-year online anniversary party – Opera Web Browser

Get them while the Party Lasts!

So instead of stressing over some code issues I’m going to take a couple minutes out to reflect on life, love, the pursuit of happiness, and what the guy in front of me is so busy doing on his laptop. This guy seriously needs a life, sitting on the train, could be reading a good book or enjoying the scenery wooosh by, but instead he’s busily tapping away on his laptop, like the world depends on whatever drivel he’s typing so earnestly. I be he’s one of those “self-important-moron” bloggers.

He could be podcasting, which I guess would be worse. Unless he was Father Roderick, who I believe would make and awesome traveling companion. I just listened to his first sound-seeing tour in Rome today, my only complaint about his podcasts are that they make me so damn hungry. The bit when he was in turbulence was also pretty funny. Don’t they make you turn off your electronic devices while the seatbelt signs are on?

While we’re on podcasts, I’ll throw my two cents into the mix. I think the podcast counterpart to link-blogs are a total waste of time, as are the braindumps. I was just listening to a Don and Drew show and they were talking about “that movie they talked about in that one episode” they had no idea where it was… what is the point about talking about random things when there is no easy way to search through the data for things you are looking for? Now with the Catholic Insider, each podcast has a VERY clear theme, and further “indexing” is not nessesary. So it would be conceivable that someone would be looking for data on a subject through google, find the page using a text search, and then get the information they want by listening to the podcast which is entirely on the subject that they are interested in. Of course it won’t be long until google indexes audio files as well, then you can find results like “The word Wormus is used in the 23rd minute of this podcast, click hear to open this file in Google Media Player”. Anyway, with podcasts, it’s a hit and miss game… but the problem with the length, is that I can forsee it being quite difficult for quality podcasts to float to the top of the heap… I guess that’s where the link-blog podcasts and the promos come in handy.

I am on my way to LinuxTag… I missed a couple trains due to some last minute work that came up, but am finally on my way. First I RUN to the S-Bahn only to realize that the S-bahn I wanted to take doesn’t go on that hour, so I wait for the next one. Stella calls and she says she’ll drive me to the next stop, which has a lot more trains coming through it. After meeting up we decide that it doesn’t make sense to leave this station when the train is coming in 5 minutes… there was a very real chance of me missing this train at the next station as well.

This S-bahn would give me 3 minutes to find the ICE train at the main Frankfurt station and I’m pretty sure I can make it. So all is well, until the S-bahn stops in the tunnel for about 2 minutes… during which time I’m thinking about how I’m going to miss the last tram to the hotel in Karlsruhe and have to do the 15km walk in the middle of the night (strangely the trams stop at 10pm). I had to consolation that Lukas would be whizzing down that road at midnight on his bike, so if worst comes to worst I could always hitch a ride Finally the train moves again, and surprisingly makes up the time that we lost, giving me 2 whole minutes to find my train.

In one of those cruel twists of fate, I make it on time, but the train is delayed 5 minutes. Anyway, that pretty much brings us up to date. I’ve still got my programming problem to sort out and I think I’ll get on with it.

Heh, that guy in front of me is still typing away… probably writing his longest blog post ever. It’s pretty weird, we must be going through a thunder storm as ther eis a lot of lightning outside, but we can’t hear a thing… That is pretty awesome, silent thunder… the name of my new rock band… I really should shut up. Or start a podcast…

Here’s a little idea of how many visits WTS gets. These are counting Unique visitors, not hits or pages served.

Jan: 11904
Feb: 17148
Mar: 12757

the stats for the same period of last year are:

Jan: 3871
Feb: 4990
Mar: 5575

The reason for the spike of google visits as seen on Feb 05 was due to my google whoring and these two pages. They got a LOT of hits. March I had 12.9% of my visitors come in from google, Feb it was 17.6 and Jan it was 11.5%.

The point? Google Whoring works!