Monthly archive: September 2008

1. Shots, props and costumes from Battlestar Galactica were reused in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
2. Google Chrome's concept of 'one process per tab' is nothing new: IE7 on Vista already prohibits mixing security zones in the same process, and IE8 creates one process per tab.
3. The North American video games market crashed in 1983 due to market saturation with low-quality games.
4. Increasing thread count over 300 adds very little comfort. Via Kottke.
5. The iPhone GUI does not let you turn off voicemail. You can either call your provider to disable it, or use the standard GSM codes.
6. All four members of Kings of Leon share the same family name (Followill), as they are three brothers (whose father and grandfather are called Leon) and a cousin.
7. Jools Holland was a member of Squeeze (1979 hit 'Cool For Cats', skip to 2:39 to see Mr Holland) from 1974 to 1980.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Best of the Best: The Hive Five Winners
  An extensive list of the best software (or, occasionally, pen and paper) for a multitude of jobs.
• ResizR – Easy online image resize
  Free online image resizer for .jpg files. Keeps proportions. Has a Firefox extension.
• Iphone Video Encoding setting and program for windows – GohTech's Weblog
  'So many of you have an ipod touch or an iphone and want to put videos on it. I have a easy method well kinda…. I think it’s easy enough well let me try to help step by step.'
• The Linking Open Data dataset cloud
  'This image shows some of the datasets published in the Linking Open Data community project. Clicking any of the datasets will take you to its project homepage. It is also available in PDF and SVG versions.'
• BBC TV on the web redefined – BBC Internet Blog
  'Today is a big day for BBC television on the web with the launch of brand new websites for BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four as well as an updated BBC Three site (building on February's relaunch) and a new TV homepage.'
• SIMILE | Timeline
  'Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Below is a live example that you can play with. Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.'

I love courgettes, I love Marmite. Once I tried mixing a teaspoon of Marmite into stir-fried thinly sliced courgettes, and it was yummy.

It works well with a bit of garlic and pepper but make sure you do not add any salt.

Ingredients (serves two)

• 3 courgettes
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 teaspoon Marmite (or Vegemite for a more delicate flavour)

Preparation

1. Heat oil in frying pan
2. Fry garlic clove until golden
3. Add thinly sliced courgettes
4. Cook until soft
5. Stir in Marmite or Vegemite

1. British physicist Dr. Brian Cox used to play keyboards in D:Ream.
2. Apple has granted another two-month free extension to MobileMe users because of poor service, bringing the free trial up to four months now. Mine expires on 7 December, perhaps by then I will have won the lottery and switched to a Mac for my main machine and MobileMe will be worth it.
3. Strawberries are not berries but bananas are.
4. The vocals on Mousse T's 'Horny' are by 'Nasty Girl' Inaya Day.
5. Apparently, Opera was supposed to be the default iPhone browser.
6. 'So Strong' by Meck feat. Dino samples (from the 2:14 mark) the 1994 track 'Hold That Sucker Down' by the O.T. Quartet. Skip to the 2:37 mark for the exact bit that was lifted.
7. Egg breakfast enhances weight loss. But as usual, only within a calorie-controlled diet. So put your fry-up down now.

I often ask my mother if she would like to come and see me in London (she lives in Italy), and she always says no. She either feels tired, or ill, or too old to travel.

A couple of weeks ago she said yes – darn ;-) – so I booked her flights before she could change her mind, and Dr B.'s parents insisted we go and see them when she is here (they already met last spring).

She has travelled on her own in the past but was not too sure about it now that she is 83 years old (she had me veeery late), so I found a service that escorts passengers from the aircraft to arrivals and helps out with formalities and luggage. She asked instead if I could go and pick her up.

In Italy.

So I'm flying there today and back with her tomorrow, and in a week I'll fly her back to Italy and spend a few days there. Things a good Italian boy would not do for his mamma, eh?

I am about to leave and am very excited, but I will probably be fed up with her so quickly that my Twitter tweets (or Facebook status updates) later this afternoon are guaranteed to be on the rantful side.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Spectacular Sticky-Note Experiment
  Fun with 280,951 Post-it notes from the Mentos guys.
• Gyminee Food Search Engine For Firefox
  Custom search engine that searches the Gyminee food database.
• Dabbleboard – Interactive whiteboard for drawing & team collaboration
  Dabbleboard is a powerful interactive whiteboard that's actually easy and fun to use. With a revolutionary new interface, Dabbleboard gets out of your way and just lets you draw.
  Draw with flexible tools. Reuse previously-made drawings. Share and collaborate in real-time. All as naturally as using a marker or a pencil.
• Radio Pop – social radio listening from BBC Radio Labs
  Radio Pop enhances your BBC radio listening – enabling you to create a personal record of the programmes you hear, and see what your friends and everyone else is listening to.
• Pick Anything | Giftag
  Similar to Amazon's universal item wishlist, but built on open standards.
• Greasemetal: Greasemonkey for Google Chrome – ReadWriteWeb
  Japanese developer Kazuho Oku found a way to run userscripts on Google Chrome. While its functionality is still limited, Greasemetal is already showing a lot of promise and works exactly as advertised, even though it is not compatible with all Greasemonkey scripts yet.
• SweetCron Reviews and Resources Roundup | Lifestream Blog
  A roundup of the best articles on SweetCron, an open source Lifestreaming blog software you host yourself.
• Linked Movie Data Base | Start Page
  The project aims at publishing the first open semantic web database for movies, including a large number of interlinks to several datasets on the open data cloud and references to related webpages.

Possibly even better when viewed in the context of Mr G – The Musical (song starts at 2:28):

1. Basshunter started to produce music in 1999 with the computer program Fruity Loops (Now: FL Studio).
2. As of 2007 there were 200 million dead blogs.
3. Google Reader trends has a 'starred' tab, often a better indication that I have saved a post for thorough reading at a later stage, than simply skimmed to check if there was anything of interest in it.
4. You can stream live radio on iPlayer but you cannot download radio programmes on iPlayer for rights reasons.
5. You cannot play radio programmes on iPlayer on the iPhone and iPod Touch yet.
6. The iPhone takes screenshots of everything you do to create the window-shrinking effect when you press the 'home' button.
7. The dollar sign probably comes from the Spanish coat of arms, but there are several other possible origins, none of which is certain.

Yesterday I told you my name. Today I thought I'd show you my face.

I have been fascinated for a long time by people who take their own picture every day and then paste them all together in a video, like 200 Days in 20ish Seconds and Living My Life Faster. So much so that between 1 January 2007 and 29 March 2008 I took a photo of myself almost every single day.

Did I put them all together in a nice movie? Did I bugger. I tried once with Windows Movie Maker but I found it too fiddly. I tried Photoshop so I could achieve pixel-perfect alignment but the task was monumental. I uploaded them in batches on my lucabelletti account on Flickr (don't bother checking it out, there are no public photos now), but the free account photostream only shows the last 200 pics and I did not want to upgrade to pro.

Last March I discovered Daily Mugshot and found that it does exactly what I need. I gave it a few tries, by using a webcam, or uploading a picture from the hard drive, or sending one from a mobile phone, but it was only when I got an iPhone that I found the method that suits me the best: snap pic with iPhone, email to Daily Mugshot, pic appears in my 'mugshow':

I'll grant you it lacks the perfection of manually assembled examples where pictures are resized and perfectly centered, but it was a very easy choice between having 'nothing out there' and 'something that updates automatically whenever I email a photo to it'.

Cherry on the cake: the guy who developed Daily Mugshot is a star (I had a question on how to do something, and he did it for me straight away). Thanks Keith!

I also take a picture of me in underwear (front and side) every month to record my desperate attempts to combat the inevitable sagging that old father time is cursing my body with. Check back tomorrow for those. Er, scrap that actually, I think I'll spare you that one.

Daily Mugshot

When I started writing this blog it was completely anonymous. I wanted it that way, I did not necessarily enjoy it because I wanted everyone I know to read it, but I felt that it had to be that way and that I had no choice.

My first ever web page in early 1999 had all my details on it. It was personal but at the same time since it was entirely hand-coded it was meant to me looked at by potential employers or consultancy clients in the IT business. It had a photo of my cat (a must at that time), it talked about my boyfriend, it even had my home address so people would know where I was based.

I sent all my contacts a link to it, and a friend came back to me horrified that I had published my full address. He begged me to remove it, and I did, and I am glad I did, because at that time the last thing I needed was a stalker.

Fast forward to 2002, when I made up a unique blog name (bitful) and started connecting to a blogging community (the way we use to do it, by linking to each other's blogs, since FriendFeed and Facebook were at the time but a twinkle in Tim Berners Lee's eye). I kept everything separate even when it took a lot of effort, and only disclosed my blog's URL to very close friends. Similarly, I would never post pictures of myself or of my friends on my bitful account on Flickr, and maintained two separate Yahoo! accounts, one for mail, the other for social stuff.

A lot has happened since then. I am probably more comfortable with myself. I also am very lucky to be doing a job I love in an institution I respect, with colleagues I trust. And little by little, the boundaries I had carefully drawn to separate my two online identities became blurred. I have always been much more active online as bitful than as lucabelletti, and I was eager to connect to people as bitful to create connections between them and my online identity.

I have come to a point where I am perfecly happy to feature my name openly on my blog. I feel it is for me a very natural progression, as I cannot see the point of hiding it any longer, and the public and private identities are now one and the same. They serve different purposes perhaps, but they complement each other, as two facets of who I am. I know many people who are still terrified of such openness, and I respect their position, but I know this is right for me now.

And after all, if you search for my first and last name in inverted commas on Google you already get links to my FriendFeed, delicious, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, and (empty) personal homepage/sandbox for work projects (as well as stuff from other people I share my name with).

So yes then, my name is Luca Belletti, I run a blog called bitful, and you are very welcome to my life.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Unitasker Wednesday: GoateeSaver
  'Tired of the constant struggle every morning trying to get your goatee to look perfect? [...] Just slide [GoateeSaver] over your mouth and shave to get the perfect look that women will admire and men will respect.'
• Firefox: Enable Chrome's Best Features in Firefox
  'many of Chrome's best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility.'
• Querying DBpedia – bobdc.blog
  Using SPARQL to extract 'a list of things written by Bart on the school blackboard at the beginning of a collection of Simpsons episodes'.
• Image Metrics : Performance-Driven Facial Animation Solutions for the Digital World
  '…quickly and efficiently converts measurements of the face into animation [...] to any digitally-created character for your video game, visual effects of CG feature film project'.
• Google Chrome vulnerable to carpet-bombing flaw | Zero Day | ZDNet.com
  Google Chrome uses an old version of WebKit that has since been patched by Apple.
• Google Chrome comic book
  A comic by Scott McCloud that was initially only sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and motivations for the new browser but was leaked online prior to launch.

1. Google is not the first search engine in Russia, China, South Korea and the Czech Republic.
2. Dogs drink via a 'reverse slurp'.
3. You can tweak the AwesomeBar's suggestion algorithm in Firefox 3, and rank some items higher than others, for instance bookmarks higher than history.
4. The faux swear word 'frak' used extensively in Battlestar Galactica was originally spelled 'frack', then changed to a four-letter word by producers of the current show.
5. The Pro version of Instapaper (one of my favourite free iPhone apps) lets you scroll up and down a page by tilting the device. I have not tried it and cannot decide whether it is a gimmick, or worth the extra USD 9.99?
6. The ken and barbie gene in the Drosophila fly takes its name from the fact that its mutations cause genitalia to be malformed (most often they remain inside the body).
7. There is a 'Master Password' option in Firefox that auto-fills all saved passwords but asks for an additional master password the first time you access a website in a Firefox session.

You know I like to log things about me, right?

Then do you think I would miss the opportunity to record a daily summary of my activities and get pretty charts to boot?

Of course not.

So now you can find out how I am doing and feeling, how little I sleep, if I stick to my rule 'no alcohol on school nights' and if I am still caffeine-free by checking out my Morale-O-Meter:

I have been using Google Chrome (open source web browser developed by Google) for the last few hours, and my initial overall impressions are very positive.

It does not appear to be significantly faster than Firefox 3 or Safari, but that is acceptable for the first iteration of a Beta product.

I appreciate enormously the streamlined look without menus, with just three icons, very limited options and the tabs at the very top. It looks like they took a page from Apple's book of interaction design, and it feels very much like a Google product.

And I absolutely adore the Omnibox, the all-in-one address bar and search bar, in particular its Tab-to-Search feature: just type amazon (or youtube, or any other website name that offers a search functionality) into the address bar, then 'tab', then keywords and you are searching within the site, with auto-suggestions popping up underneath your search as results come up.

If you want to read a full review, which very interestingly compares Chrome to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (in which, surprisingly, IE does not come out badly at all), try First Test of Google’s New Browser.

And if you are one of the many people who are worried about Google collecting more and more data about your life, I recommend Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?

Other useful links:

• download Google Chrome;
• read about Google Chrome on Wikipedia;
• read the Google Chrome comic book.

Given that

• it takes thirty days to install a new habit
• I suffer from a lack of a bedtime routine, and
• you increase your chances of success when you are publicly accountable,

from today I am going to do the following every night:

• take out contact lenses
• brush teeth
• clean gums with interdental brushes
• put on bruxism mouthguard
• lay out clothes for next day
• pack gym bag
• switch off computer

and post the progress on Joe's Goals (the web equivalent of Benjamin Franklin's 13 personal goals):

And if you are wondering why there is so much oral care in my routine, well, you would do it too if you had spent a fortune at a gum specialist over the last year.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Gmaps Pedometer
  A hack that uses Google's mapping application to help record distances traveled and calories burned during a running or walking workout.
• delicious blog | using delicious on your iphone
  Drag bookmarklet to Safari toolbar on desktop, sync bookmarks to iPhone, use bookmark to post to delicious from iPhone as I am doing this very moment.
• Semantic Web 2.0: the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox
  The Ubiquity plugin for Firefox makes it possible for users to type in standard language commands to retrieve information from the Internet or to interact with web applications. (Things such as "email this to bill", "translate this into german" or "calculate".)
• Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise | The Register
  Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default.
• Share Your del.icio.us Links With WordPress | The Reader Appreciation Project
  A step-by-step tutorial on integrating your del.icio.us links with your WordPress (2.2 and up) installation.
• TV.com: Heroes' fourth volume named
  Series creator Tim Kring lets slip the title of the next chapter of NBC's sci-fi hit, and it signals interesting times for our super friends.
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Fact Sheet: An overview of the features and benefits of Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8.
  It feels like I am enjoying most of the 'new' features with Firefox 3 already. It is particularly pleasing to see that IE will finally support CSS 2.1 (about bloody time). Web slices sound promising too.
• Creative Commons Licenses – Creative Commons
  The following describes each of the six main licenses offered when you choose to publish your work with a Creative Commons license.
• Choose a CC License form
  Answer three questions and find out which Creative Commons license is best suited for your work.
• Morale-O-Meter
  'Keep track of, and share, your morale, health, sleep, alcohol consumption, and caffeine consumption. Compare your day with the days of others. Customize a free graph of your morale trends to put on your own site.'