Building a popular web community

Being involved in some forum software myself, I'm always interested in reading what people have to say about related topics. Venturus published an article on how to build a popular forum community, which contains some useful tips. I don't agree with everything said, but there are definately some valid points in this article. Basically, I agree with points 1, 2, 4 and 5, and just disagree with point 3. I don't like lying. Anyway, worth checking out.

Illegal downloader spends more money on digital music

According to this article on BBC, people who get the most of their music through file sharing, are also the biggest spenders when it comes to buying legal music online. This basically means that the music industry is starting to sue their best clients. In what kind of world are we living then? Again, I will reiterate the fact that I'd love to buy my music through legal online music stores if only these stores were available to me (a linux user). Of course, there is Bleep and eMusic, but these don't give me the occasional top 40 tune that I like. Time for the music industry to change the way they handle digital music and file sharing, maybe?

PostCrossing

After BookCrossing, now there is PostCrossing. A nice way to receive a random postcard from all over the world every once in a while. Pretty fun, if you ask me. It doesn't cost much (I mean, how much does it cost to send a postcard? Not a lot eh?) and it brings some fun when you receive a postcard.

BitTorrent

Don't you love BitTorrent? I just got myself 20 cd's worth of material by The Beatles. Most of these I already own on vinyl, but I was too lazy to actually do the whole digitalization myself. Some great material that I didn't yet have though, such as 2 cd's of live recordings at BBC. Nice!

London again

It's all over the Internet by now. More explosions in the London tube. I was not planning on giving it any attention, until coming by this Flickr picture. The picture itself isn't what caught my attention, but the text with the picture is definately worth a mention. I think it gives a good insight on the feelings of everyone.

At last weeks vigil one of the speakers (don't know who) read a poem he wrote and from that my favourite quote was 'Defiance a four letter word spelled with the middle finger' For the last two weeks Londoners have basically been giving the terrorists the finger -" F'U we ain't scared and we are not intimidated..." It felt like today they gave us the finger back... and I am not impressed.

Scotty got beamed up

It seems Scotty got beamed up himself. James Doohan, Scotty in Star Trek, passed away. Now the real beaming can begin...

Wannahave

Now this is something I'd like to have. What a beautiful keyboard! And useful as well, being able to map the keys and not even that, also to map whatever the key says! Very cool! I'm sure it's going to be expensive, but if it's not *too* expensive I might actually get one.

Boards of Canada

We are extremely proud to announce that Boards of Canada have finished and mastered their new album, to be released in October - their first release since 2002's Geogaddi! The album is very much classic Boards, building on themes and sounds that can can be heard in their intervening remix work for Beck, cLOUDDEAD and Boom Bip.

Furl

So finally I actually started looking into those link-sites, and decided to sign up for Furl. Don't ask me why I chose Furl, I just did Not sure if I'm really actively going to do something with it, but starting from now, you can find my recent Furl links in the sidebar on the right (just below the Flickr badge). Enjoy.

AJAX with OpenRico

The last week I've been playing around a lot with the javascript xmlHttpRequest functionality that is these days better know as AJAX (what a name!). A client requested me to implement it, or at least look at the possibilities of implementing it, in their intranet. And I must say, there are tons of possibilities where using AJAX could highly enhance the user experience. No need for reloading your page anymore. AJAX will take care of it. I've been using a very specific AJAX implementation called OpenRico, which is a very useful library with lots of possibilities. Very flexible. Very useful. Using AJAX, I must admit that I've seen a renewed need to get into javascripting. Indeed, OpenRico provides an implentation that ensures I won't have to do all the very complicated javascripting, but still implementing it into a system will still require you to at least know some basic javascripting. Most of it is pretty basic stuff, with sometimes slightly more complicated stuff for specific situations. But still, it was a good reason to get my some basic javascript skills.

Justus

So, for the past few days, Justus was at our place. He's travelling through Europe for months and we planned on meeting eachother while he was in The Netherlands. He ended up accepting our offer of a place to sleep for two nights. It was quite nice. Justus is a really cool guy. On friday, I picked him up at Amersfoort trainstation, and basically we just stayed at our place for the day. On saturday we went to Utrecht, to walk around, for Justus to take some pics, and to arrange a bed for him. He's gonna stay in Utrecht for a few days before travelling further. It was quite nice. I'm gonna meet up with Justus in Amsterdam in a few days. On thursday, we'll be going to 5 days off to see Amon Tobin, maybe a bit of Funckarma, Speedy J (in 5.1 surround), Richard Devine (in 5.1 surround), Autechre, and then maybe check Luke Vibert for a bit. It's gonna be fun, that's for sure.

The Witch Hunt

It seems I missed out on another fun Internet thing lately: The puppy poo girl. A girl who had her dog with her on the subway, and he dog dumped some crap right there. She only had a a few words to spare for the elderly people asking her to clean it up: "fuck off". What happened next was someone with a cameraphone taking a picture, posting it on a popular website, and the hunt was on. Shortly after, they found out all information about the girl, and a public shaming campaign started against the girl. This whole situation started a discussion about the ethics of such a public shaming campaign. I'm not sure yet how I feel about this. On the one hand, if you know something like this can happen, you might be more careful in your response in a situation like this (maybe even do The Right Thing™ and actually clean up the mess). On the other hand, is it ethical do ruin the life of someone in this massive way? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. I'm not sure yet about that. (Here's the image)

AudioFlickrScrobbler

Some people come up with great ideas. For instance to combine data found on different places on the web. AudioFlickrScrobbler is one of them. It combines the last 5 songs you played on AudioScrobbler, and uses the Flickr API to find pictures with that. A very cool idea! And so I now have my own AudioFlickrScrobbler page. Enjoy

Forecastfox

In the category 'cool and useful', I'll today present you with a nice Firefox extension called ForecastFox. Using this nice plugin, you can get your local weather forecast as nice little icons in your firefox Statusbar (or in various other locations in Firefox!). Very cool, and pretty useful if you want to know what kind of weather to expect.

Sauron exists!

You better believe it. Sauron exists. The hubble telescope brings us the proof. Quite scary, huh?

Packt phpBB book

Packt publishing, quite an interesting publisher with books very specific (open source) software, has released a book about phpBB. Now that alone is worth a mention. I've had the honor of being a technical reviewer for the book. I received the book about two weeks ago from Packt, but I haven't really had time to do a check of the whole book. However, it does look quite good.