Peterbe.com

Ever wondered what Brazillian Portugese or Indonesian or Swedish sound like? Look no further. This German site has lots and lots of small soundclips where people around the world read a small paragraph from Le Petit Prince.

The site seems to be only in German but you get by relatively well without knowing German. I can imagine that this site will grow with time so soon they'll map a lot more of the interesting languages in Africa. So far, they've collected some 100 languages on this site. Well done!

At Kittenwar.com they show you two pictures of kittens with a big clear "vs." between the two pictures. You vote for wich one you think is the cutest. The "battles" are randomly selected and sometimes you have to say that an not-so-cute kitten is the winner even though you'd rather just pass that battle.

This idea is really clever because with the random element it does a "randomly permutative" comparison between as many pictures as possible. This is much better than sites Hot or not where you select on a Lickert scale how much you like each picture.

But for this to work, it must be dead clear what the criteria is that you're comparing with. If the criteria on kittenwar.com was "finest fur" the results would be very different.

I'm a big fan of Wikipedia despite being a bit slow. There is even a page on it about your's truely that I threw in for fun when I wrote a few paragraphs about the IssueTrackerProduct

Now, there's a site called Explore (which I refuse to link to) that has basically ripped "everything" from Wikipedia and wraps this into their own website with Google Adwords and unblockable pop ups. It does say that it takes the content from Wikipedia in the footer but I that's not good enough for me. In a sense, what they've done is not immoral or illegal but it's just crap. Apart from the footer they make it appear as if it's their content.

Even worse, they refuse to make external links. That means that they are not generating any PageRank for real content and robots won't be able to use the Internet they way it was meant to be used: webbed.

Cheeky fuckers! I hope Google drop their PageRank right down so that when I search for "Peter Bengtsson" I get the Wikipedia one (the original source) rather than the Explore one (legal rip off).

UPDATE: Roy from Explore explains to me that Wikipedia actually encourages mirroring of content which is something I did not know. Sorry Roy. However I still think it's cheeky of them not link to external sites and that they only have server side redirect back to Wikipedia (something Wikipedia says must be corrected)

I'm almost speechlessly impressed with this site. It's a collection of bible stories told as a slideshow of images with imagetext and speech-bubbles. The images are all real lego sets and the attention to detail is impressive.

It appears that some of the stories exist as books that you have to pay for (done via Amazon.com) but I don't what format these books are. Perhaps their just more stories on their site or they are glossy dead-tree books. Doesn't matter.

I'm not at all a biblical person but I must admit being very drawn into some of these stories and it's easy to spend some time here clicking Next, Next, Next and read on. Some of the stories are to me quite educative since I obviously didn't pay enough attention to religion classes in school.

Some are contemporarily controversial and some are sexy. Just go and have a look. You won't be disappointed.

A new feature has just recently been added to MOBi Phonebook that I developed for our client (the owners of MOBi) for free in my spare time.

The reason for this is that I use MOBi myself a lot and I needed an easy way to export my contacts and later be able to import it again. So I used the Excel HTML solution and simply added a bit of formatting to it. It opens in right up in Excel (or like in my case, OpenOffice oocalc) which makes it damn easy to edit the contacts.

If you need to put this back into MOBi you have to save your spreadsheet as a comma separated CSV file. Fortunately that importing is pretty smart. It can add and update new data and everything it can't handle (conflicts) it shows you for manual editing.

The good people of plone.org uses an instance of CMFCollector for keeping taps of all their bugs. The interesting thing is that they call it "Issue Tracker", unlike the Zope.org site where they call it the "Issue Collector". (didn't used to be called just the "Collector"?)

This I find very interesting because I've often thought about the name of my little precious IssueTrackerProduct and how instances of it should be named and titled. At the time of writing, the current default Id is blank but the default Title is "Issue Tracker"; incidentally the same as the plone.org site.

Both the plone.org Issue Tracker and the Real Issue Tracker could be called "bug trackers" because they are heavily used for software development and most things entered are bug reports. I guess, what justifies not calling it a "bug tracker" is the influence all stuff that isn't bugs.

I'm a big fan of Ned Batchelder and his blog which is quite similar to mine. His is also about Python but with other spices added from what we geeks refer to as: life.

Anyway, his wife has written a book about autism that looks very buyable. An interesting thing about this book is that it's not written by psychologists/doctors in lab coats but by a mother of a family with an autistic boy.

From her website:

"My oldest son Nat was diagnosed with autism at the age of three in January 1993. At the time we were told that autism is incurable and that the right educational approach would make all the difference. I still believe that and as a result we have changed Nat’s education programs six times, searching for the best fit. He is currently thriving at a vocational school. He will probably never go to college or get married but he did have his first playdate this past year, so with autism, never say “never.”"

Learned something new today that will come in very handy next time I'm about to pick up a manual or search the PostgreSQL documentation with Google.

In psql if you run \dC you get a list of casts. Here's the header:

                           List of casts
   Source type    |    Target type    |   Function    | Implicit? 
------------------+-------------------+---------------+-------------

This is very handy when you need to know, for example, which cast to use when to cast a value of type date to timestamp without time zone you use timestamp. Most of these are pretty obvious and the PostgreSQL book is never far away on my desk, but the interesting thing is that I came across this function by accident when running psql.

(was this the most boring thing I've written here in a long time?)

Me and my friend Andreas accidently went to see Kingdom of Heaven yesterday. We had extremely low hopes having seen the trailer but thought we'd give Ridley Scott a second chance.

What a load of crap it was. It was constantly unrealistic and pathetic. All the bladdering about honour, love and pride made us sick. One word summorizes Orlando Bloom's character: pretentious!

There's a moment when he speaks to the soldiers before a war like we've seen so many times in Braveheart, Lord of the Rings etc. except this time I get uneasy in my seat because it's so god damn embarrasing. Don't get me started on the recurring theme where the main character tries to prove that you don't have to a lord or knight to accomplish this and that.

I feel sorry for the people who kind of people who like stories like this. It's been done a million times before but those other times much less pretentious and often with a hint of humanity.

There were some impressive scenes I must admit but I'm hoping that Ridley Scott just got trapped with his wonderful camera techniques in a shitty screenplay given to him by senseless executives.

I believe that the London Review of Books is a magazine that is also a physical bookshop and a pretty well crafted website. Anywho, on their website they have personal ads that are quite different from the usual personal ads you flick past in newspapers. These are written and read by sophistos who read the London Review of Books.

Many of them are just as intimate and randy as any other personal ads except they're then often written with wit and/or humor. Have a look at some of these: