B10[mg]

This isn't really a 'metal' posting, yet this wiz drummer, 12 years of age, might as well become a metal drummer in the future.

Amazing stuff ...

As someone who occasionally messes with websites, I know the struggle of error handling. If you do exactly as the programmer intended the software to be called, there is no problem. But, there's always the l-user factor.

How far does one have to go to explain what exactly went wrong? I'm all for brief information, for I am just a lazy guy.

Today I was looking at http://forum.pocketinfo.nl, a forum on PDAs and other gadgets. When I tried to search, I got this error:

It translates to this:

System Notice

You aren't logged in, or you don't have the permissions to view this page. This could be due to one of the following reasons:

1. You aren't logged in. Enter your name and password in the fields and try again.
2. Possibly, you lack the appropriate permissions to view the page. Are you trying to alter someone else's post, use administrative tasks or to use another protected system?
3. If you're trying to post, there's a possibility that the administrator has disabled your account, or it's still waiting on activation.

Well, it's always nice that they state I'm not logged in, due to the fact that I didn't log in.

Clearly the programmers went to far with this error handling. And they weren't too clever. The difference between a lack of user permissions and not being logged in at all shouldn't be too hard to figure out... Why then not just say "You aren't logged in yet" instead of all this craziness?

Oh well, it's always fun to see useless repetitive error messages, like this.

I always notice new stuff way too late, but also know some people are even worse than me, so this is to them ;-)

Yesterday I've seen some parts of Ghostrider. (yes, you can download parts here and there too). It's about an insane guy with a death wish, or so it seems. On a bike (motorcycle, not bicycle) he's racing throughout Europe, doing the most crazy maneuvers thinkable. Going around Paris in 12 minutes? No problem ... Often the speed goes past 300km/h. And yes, it's hard for cops to cope with that speed.

Anyways, the two cameras on the bike (front and back) are fun, but after a while, it gets pretty boring.

Did you know Happy Birthday is copyrighted and the copyright is currently owned and actively enforced by Time Warner?

Did you know that if you sing any copyrighted song:
...at a place open to the public
...or among a substantial number of people who are not family or friends
You are involved in a public performance of that work?

Did you know an unauthorized public performance is a form of copyright infringement?

Note to self: inform people about this when they force me to sing along ...

Nowadays there are just too many passwords to be remembered so a password management system is quite useful.

I've been using pwsafe for a while and it always seem to suit my needs. Then I noticed MyPasswordSafe, a GUI for pwsafe and oh joy, you could categorize your passwords, making it easier to look up stuff! So, happily I started to reorganize my stored passwords. Unfortunately, MyPasswordSafe somehow messed up my entire 'database', deleting most of the 'folders' I just created... and of course, I didn't backup the files. (Note: I probably did something wrong myself, but don't know what, so I blame the software ;-)

Time for a new system and I found a good substitute in Ked Password Manager. It supplies you with both a GUI and a CLI. The CLI works really nice (it simulates a filesystem, so you can use ls, cd and mkdir). The GUI is shiny as a GUI should be. If you're looking for such a system, KedPM is something you should check out.

... and while we're spitting out semi-usefull Greasemonkey scripts, why not a Link Warning script? It appends small icons to mailto and PDF links, basically like QBullets.

Of course, you can test the script.

Greasemonkey is just cool for Firefox users. It allows you to easily add JavaScript to specific websites.

Out of boredom, I now wrote a new script called GonePhishing. It checks all links on a website and checks whether the linked text really is what the link is pointing to. If the linked text is different from the real link (the host part, not the full URL), the linked text will be replaced with the real link, a yellow background is added and three asterisks are appended, with a title attribute of the originally linked text.

For this script, I also wrote a tiny little test page

I also noticed (finally?) a new repository of scripts, on which I now have an account: my userscripts.org account.

I'm a geek, so I should like statistics, and yes, in a lot of cases I do like shiny graphics and a boatload of numbers. For example the linux counter, distributed.net, or Seti@home; all great!

Yet today, I accidentally followed some links in some mailing list archive on screen scraping, which pointed me towards: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count

The site displays detailed statistics on the number of casualties in Iraq. From statistics on casualties and gender to ethnicity and coalition country. All well, yet I lose my interest when they present a table with detailed information on the poor souls. Name, rank, hometown, cause and location of death, everything seems to be there.

Numbers are fun, but don't turn numbers into people.

I am not a number I am a free man!

You know how it goes: you stumble upon a great website, forget to bookmark it (I can recommend insipid for bookmarking) and really want to find the site again later.

http://no-www.org/ is one of them (or should I say http://www.no-www.org/ ;-)

No-www.org philosophy

No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com.

Get rid of the horrible the WWW !