Finally, after more than 2,5 years, I restyled this site. It took this long because I was quite happy with version 4. Not because of its great design, but because it just worked.
I did keep the Wordpress installation up to date and because of that, some parts slowly started to fail. So it was time for an update.
Read the rest of "Version 5" »
Version 5
What is in your spam?
In August 2007, the amount of spam was just below 70% of all e-mail on the internet (rising from 66% in July). That is a whole lot of data and most of it is coming from Northern America and Europe. But spam about what are you most likely to encounter:
- 26% about Products, this can range from clothes, makeup, devices,…
- 18% Internet services, from web hosting, web design, to even spam protection software.
- 15% Financial e-mail: stock investments, credit reports, loans… (this is actually firm decrease from 21% in May 2007)
- 12% Health services: pharmaceuticals, medical treatments, herbal remedies, …
- 9% Scams: pyramid schemes, chain letters, foreign investments,…
- Remaining 18% contains adult oriented content (6%), fraud (6%) like account notifications and credit card verification and finally leisure oriented e-mail (6%) like games, online casinos, vacations,…
Favorite icon
Making your site look more professional is in the details too.
By adding a favorite icon for example.
With this generator it’s easy to create a favorite icon from a picture.
What is Typography?
A nice movie that answers the question: what is typography?
End of local storage?
Is local storage coming to an end?
With hard drives getting bigger and bigger, yet cheaper and cheaper more people can afford to have a vast amount of storage space available to their PCs.
Microsoft, however, is launching a few new products that suggest that all those gigabytes you’re using won’t be directly connected to your machine.
The first product I’m talking about is Windows Live Skydrive (which is currently running in beta). They offer you a nice free 500 megabytes that you can use to store and especially share your documents, photos, videos,… with other people. Those 500 megabytes is not enough to store all of your photo’s but it makes sharing them a lot easier.
The second product is the new Windows Home Server. This is basically a “smart” server that is always on and hosts your common files to your local netwerk. Basically a central storage for your documents, photos and video so they can be accessed from your home network or Xbox 360. It also functions as a central backup spot for your windows installation. Prices for these systems are probably going to be (release at the end of September 2007) between 600 and 800 euros, depending on whether you want 500 GB or 1 TB.
So is local storage really going to go away? I think not. Especially files that are on the net will be the ones that we want to share. Private documents, we still want to keep close.
Wii-mote prototypes
A nice show-’n-tell at Gizmodo of how the current Wii-mote came to be: Wii-mote Prototype Designer Speaks Out, Shares Sketchbook.
[Via: ForeverGeek.]
Site Update
Nothing much to report, just updated the Wordpress of this site.
5 well-known decision-making traps
Everyday, we get questions. Question that need answers, so we need to make decisions. We seldomly make the best decision because we are often caught in these 5 traps:
- Anchoring: When we consider a decision, our minds are influenced too much by the first information we come across.
- Confirmation: through the search and selection selected, we subconsciously seek information that supports our current point of view, thus rejecting contradictory data.
- Memorability: We are influenced too much by recent or dramatic events. Events that are repeated by one or more sources, influences belief, memory and judgement.
- Status quo: When making a decision, we show a strong bias towards to keeping a status quo. We are looking for reasons to do nothing.
- Sunk cost: To admit mistakes made in the past, we make decisions to justify those past choices.
[From: Ambient Findability
Bye Bye PHP 4
PHP 4 has been arround a long time, since 2000 actually. On July 13, php.net announced that PHP 4 (which has been in maintenance-only mode for 3 years) will be discontinued, because PHP 5 has been available for 3 years and PHP 6 is on the way.
The adoption of PHP 5 has been slow, but there are initiatives starting to show up like GoPHP5.org that have set a date (February 5, 2008) on which a list of major PHP based programs will no longer support PHP 4.
Also, other signs signify the end of PHP 4, like in a newsletter from my webhost that they also will switch over to PHP 5.
Guess I better check my scripts on PHP 5 compatibility 
Top 10 UK .Coms to watch
Here is a nice list from Guardian Unlimited with the top 10 dotcoms in Britain to keep a close eye on.
- Dopplr: A social networking for frequent travellers.
- Extate: An intelligent search-engine of property websites.
- Garlik: An online identity management site.
- MindCandy: An alternate reality gaming.
- Moo: Printing on demand: cards, notes and stickers.
- OnOneMap: A map-based property search.
- Touch Local: Local directory services.
- Trusted Places: User-created local information.
- Zopa: For peer to peer lending.
- Zubka: 2.0 Recruitment.
