Peterbe.com

This is my first attempt on trying to describe some of the technical mechanisms of this site. I will try to keep it updated as I change the website.

Hopefully I will also write a little something about me, myself and I when time allows.

This article is almost old but it applies timelessly today as well. The article deals with why you shouldn't expect to much from your web development.

Make sure you read 9 sinful points where you'll find:

Envy. You hate it when a site has a Flash intro. Your competitor gets one. Your other competitor gets one. Against all your better judgement you buy a book called "How to Learn Flash in 3 Days".

Tom has more articles link from his weblog

This must of course be taken with a pinch of salt, but someone has decided to sell fast food restaurant condiments such as "BurgerKing Ketchup" and "TacoBell Hot Sauce". Hilarious!

I know little about eBay but it looks like the guy has pretty decent reviews from before. Now he/she claims to have lost his/her job and will need the money, hence selling these things.

But sure to check out the little bonus he's ready to throw in if a bet of $25 or more is but in. Read towards the bottom.

Translated (by me) from a Swedish science magazine I bought when I flew back to the UK a couple of days ago:

"How old is your dad?" Karin asked, "he looks much older than my dad". "Ridiculous!", Betty replied somewhat angry over her friends insensitivity, "but now you'll see if you can work it out. His age is three times the first digit plus five times the last." How old is he?

If you can work it out. Don't just tell me an answer you've come up with by testing several numbers. Show me some proof!

PythonPoint is a piece open source software that converts XML to PDFs that looks like presentation slides.

"Essentially, it converts slides in an XML format to PDF."

Here's a 270Kb sample PDF document.

This took some time to figure out (found answer here)and it might come in handy sometime in the far future so I write it down here and now.
To create a user for the postgresql database on linux you have to do that from the linux user called postgres.

This would not work:

peterbe@computer:~$ createuser peterbe

What you need to do is this:

peterbe@computer:~$ su -
...log in as root...
computer:~# su postgres
computer:/root$ createuser peterbe

Now I know!

Vivisimo is an engine that "auto-categorise" the search results from several other search engines. I don't know how but I don't care too much either. What I like about it is that it shows several categories of the search results; as opposed to Google where all returning items are listed one after another. When I search for Peter Bengtsson it then creates several categories such as "Zope", "Family", "Peterbe.com", etc. Some don't make sense but suppose a friend searches for "Peter Bengtsson" but is only interested my person stuff, or a Zope developer is interested in my stuff on Zope then this clustered search engine beats Google.

I also like the "preview" option that you see for each search result.

Truly remarkable footage of our neighbouring planet Mr. Mars.

"This is the first color image of Mars taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It is the highest resolution image ever taken on the surface of another planet."

Does anybody remember why the marsian atmosphere is harmful for us people?

I've never understood how the US zipcode system works like but this gives me a good idea. You start typing a number and it gradually starts focusing on the area that contains it. This is also good if you want to get an idea of where a certain state or town is reading from a US postal address.

The site requires Java and takes a while to load.

One of the best Christmas presents I got was a set of two yo-yo's. Great fun. I've hardly even tried it before. I know about as many tricks as I have fingers on one hand, but I hope to learn more soon.

This video clip shows some amazing footage from the Japan Yo-yo competition. Takes a while to download but sure worth it.