Why -> How -> What. That is all. [embed]http://embed.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html[/embed]

If you want to be successful, you have to listen to your audience. On radio shows people call in. With news papers, people write letters. On blogs, people find you on Google. I always figured that if I would be an authority on anything, it would be something computer related. Programming, perhaps. But as it turns out, I’m not. Or maybe a bit. According to Google I’m an authority on…

PushMail is a nice, reasonably priced (2.49 euro, so I guess that’s about $2.99) iPhone application that is intended to realize push mail notifications (see update of my GPush post). It does so by giving you an @dopushmail.com e-mail address. Any e-mail sent or forwarded to that address will not be stored, but rather pushed to your iPhone. Any mail you send to it. So I wrote this little bash script, called push-notify:

(via BoingBoing)

I have owned an iPhone for about a month now and I’m very happy with it. Its mail application is acceptable, but it’s not very Gmail-esque. It does not have the conversation view, archiving e-mail means having to move it to “All mail”, which is a bit annoying. Ergo, it works, but it’s not perfect. The Gmail web application on the iPhone is very good, it works just like the desktop Gmail web client and it’s fairly responsive for a web app, it’s only missing one thing: the ability to check for new mails every x minutes.

Last week, I received the following e-mail: Yesterday, I received the follow-up: My first reaction was: why am I being contacted about this? I started YaBB 9 years ago and left a year later. I have not been involved at all for 8 years. Plus, these people, who I never knew existed, met on a site I never even heard of: krec.com. But I guess this is the power of releasing some software for free to the world to use: you don’t know what’s going to happen to it, you don’t know who’s going to use it and you don’t know who’s going to meet through the use of it.

Wolf Gnards: An important concern in journalism is that when newspapers such as the New York Times fold, because it is too expensive to maintain a large staff of journalists like that, who will do investigative journalism? Who will not just copy whatever somebody else has been saying, add a few ROFLs and past in a funny cat picture, but actually do the hard work? As of today, I’m no longer concerned about that.

When I was 16 I ran a simple website listing free stuff available on the internet. Free stickers, free webspace, free e-mail. My site wasn’t the only one doing it, there were many others. Of course, I borrowed stuff listen on other sites, which was not always appreciated. One of my competitors felt threatened, and started a crusade against me. Wherever he could he badmouthed my websites and removed links.

While talking to a colleague today about programming we did when we were younger, I all of a sudden remembered about a game that I developed with a friend when we were about 10–12 14–16 years old: Adlez. A puzzler written in Turbo Pascal, with pretty much everything developed from scratch: the VGA graphics library was written by us (I wrote the PutPixel implementation in assembly even), the fonts were “designed” by us.

They always crash photos when you pose in front of marvelous scenery. (from National Geographic.)

Google Reader added some nifty features just now, which are very welcome to those who still read RSS feeds, as I do, occasionally. It’s a bit 2007, I know. First, each item now has a “Send to” option, to easily link to a post on various social networks, e.g. facebook and twitter. I tested the feature with twitter in the latest Chromium alpha and Safari 4, but it does not seem to work.

Just found this great NoSQL db comparison with an, I think, dead-on conclusion:

I’m writing this using the latest Mac build from Google Chrome. A lot has happened since my last post. It is much more stable, flash works, although not always, passwords are saved correctly. Clearly, the Mac version of Chrome is getting ready for prime time. One thing that does not seem to work yet, ironically, is Google Gears support. I cannot use offline Gmail yet, it seems. Update: Gears seems to work fine using Google Reader.

Yes, after a few months I decided it was a good idea to revive my website. And to do it properly I moved all of the content that I posted on ZefHemel.com and Zef.me before over into one website. Also, all links pointing to ZefHemel.com now redirect to the correct post on Zef.me. I also added a Publications page, which my boss told me to do. Who knows, I might in fact post some fresh content soon!

Funny. I have been a heavy emacs user the past months at my job (and not because everybody else is using it, they’re not) and it’s been quite great. During my recent formatting on my laptop to make more room for my Linux installation (I only Linux installed on my Macbook now) I accidentally removed my .emacs file (which contains all the customizations) and I realized how depentent I am on that.