Monthly Archives: March 2007

Over here you can find a (slightly outdated) presentation given about Flickr. Apparently it is implemented in PHP 4 using MySQL as a database. Some interesting stats from the presentation: 60,000 lines of PHP4 code 60,000 lines of templates 70 custom smarty functions/modifiers 25,000 DB transactions/second at peak 1000 pages per second at peak NoteContinue reading “Flickr Technology”

The Dutch insurance company FBTO is putting its logo on the roof of its main office. The white lettering on a bright blue background should attract the attention of the users of Google Earth and Google Maps. The text, which spells “FBTO.NL”, the insurer’s company website, is very readable from a 300 meter height. “WithinContinue reading “Advertising on Google Earth”

Remember the Truman Show, the movie made barely 10 years ago? Well something very similar has now actually happened, but not without the “Truman” (his name is Justin) knowing about it. Justin is a guy walking around with a camera plastered to his face that is broadcasting live to his website: Justin.TV: http://justin.tv/widgets/embedded.swf And heContinue reading “Good Morning! And in Case I Don’t See Ya…”

The first thing I thought when I saw Twitter was, “meh, how is this new?” As so many people, I didn’t see it. But as time passed and people just can’t seem to stop talking about it and it even appeared in the financial times, me too started to see the power of this idea.Continue reading “Twitter: the New Communication Platform?”

A great fragment of the Daily Show on the YouTube vs Viacom lawsuit. Basically Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion because of copyright infringement, as people uploaded lots of Viacom stuff (Viacom owns, among other things, Comedy Central which creates The Daily Show and The Colbert Report). Watch it.

I found out about the Gizmo Project when I really had no use for it. Gizmo is a free Voice-over-IP program using the SIP protocol, which is an open standard for VoIP. At that time I used Skype which implemented its own proprietary VoIP protocol, but even with Skype I didn’t have that many peopleContinue reading “Gizmo: Not Bad After All”

I recently found out about stikkit and have been thinking about it ever since. It’s premise looks very interesting to me. They take the idea of a post-it note, but start to discover structures in it. For example if you write (it’s all plain text): Stuff to do – Go shopping- Feed the dog- TakeContinue reading “Structuring Your Notes with Stikkit”

To show that I’m actually doing different stuff than computer science-related things, here’s a something linguistic that even many computer scientists will appreciate: The Third Annual Simpsons Linguistic Roundup. One example: Bart’s watching a TV entertainment news broadcast called “Hip-Hoppenings”: Rapping Anchor: Yo yo yo, here now the nuhzooz! The top artists of hip hopContinue reading “Simpsons Linguistic Roundup”

Freebase is a new semantic web database of, well, everything. I think a kind of semantic Wikipedia would not be a bad name for it. I have been doing some things with semantic web technologies for my M.Sc. thesis and I got to see the importance of metadata. Tim O’Reilly has given Freebase a tryContinue reading “Freebase”