B10[mg]

In February this year (2006, still), I wrote Business::TPGPost , a module to calculate the shipping costs based on information provided by TPG Post (the Dutch postal agency).

What I didn't realize back then, was that the name "TPG Post" would soon be changed into "TNT Post". Stupid me, for this was announced even back in 2005!

I just had to update the name (which just sucks). And what better time to do it than when implementing the new tariffs for 2007? Yep, everything got even more expensive, starting tomorrow, but I'm quite used to that pattern. This time everything just seemed to get a lot more expensive.

I've chosen to keep the Business::TPGPost module on CPAN for a while, so users can still find it, yet now it's a mere wrapper around the new module, Business::TNTPost::NL. Don't expect it to work well, I barely tested it and it will not get updated.

So, if you use the module Business::TPGPost, please do upgrade to Business::TNTPost::NL tomorrow!

perl, cpan, Business::TPGPost, Business::TNTPost::NL

As a X-mas present, my company offered us all a nice dinner and tickets to the Blue Man Group

I've seen advertising for these guys before and never really cared for it too much. It was, however, pretty darn good! Pretty funny show that was tailored for the Dutch audience (even playing a cover of Frans Bauer).

... Blue Menno Group, yes ...

blue man group

On my previous blog (nanoblog), I had a little graph showing the comment spam blocked by simple hacked up spam protection.

With this "new" blog, I use Akismet and although the performance can be seen at the bottom of the menu of this blog, a little graph would be nice.

I always wanted to try out XML/SWF Charts so this looked like a good way to get started.

And because BOK lacks a graph, I've included his blog/spam block count too ;-)

The data is refreshed every day at noon (GMT+0100)

comment spam, akismet, spam karma 2, xml/swf charts

I'm a lazy guy and when I can look something up online instead of getting out of my chair, I'll do it.

Today I was listening to my mp3 collection of Bruce Dickinson and I wondered about the lyrics of a song called Devil On A Hog. So I searched for lyrics "Devil on a hog". Luckily the query returned a lot of results.

The first search result showed me the lyrics of this song, but I was puzzled by all of the '?' characters. Was the original author not sure? Did the site scrape these lyrics from some other place and did something wrong with encoding? Some of the lyrics didn't even make sense!

So it was time to get out of my chair and look the lyrics up in the CD booklet (yes, I have the CD too, I just think mp3 is easier. Lazy, remember? ;-). The lyrics in the booklet showed me something completely different.

Let's look at a few differences:

...and it goes on and on full of errors.

Now I don't see a big problem when one guy writes down wrong lyrics on a drunken night, yet it scares me when these bad lyrics somehow appear on a lot of lyrics sites.

Since this torrent or retiring kind seems quite unique, let's construct a fun query.

Yahoo returns 14 sites when I search for "devil on a hog" "shy or torrent kind". Google shows us only 9.

Apparently, these sites are simply crawling each other and uploading incorrect lyrics.

Oh well, lesson learned. Bruce Dickinson does not sing about a "torrent" kind, nor about "handling wider". He also didn't say "I guts like hand". This should be enough proof to become less lazy and get out of my chair more often. Then again, the correct lyrics can be found online too ...

lyrics, bruce dickinson

I'm a lazy guy and when I can look something up online instead of getting out of my chair, I'll do it.

Today I was listening to my mp3 collection of Bruce Dickinson and I wondered about the lyrics of a song called Devil On A Hog. So I searched for lyrics "Devil on a hog". Luckily the query returned a lot of results.

The first search result showed me the lyrics of this song, but I was puzzled by all of the '?' characters. Was the original author not sure? Did the site scrape these lyrics from some other place and did something wrong with encoding? Some of the lyrics didn't even make sense!

So it was time to get out of my chair and look the lyrics up in the CD booklet (yes, I have the CD too, I just think mp3 is easier. Lazy, remember? ;-). The lyrics in the booklet showed me something completely different.

Let's look at a few differences:

...and it goes on and on full of errors.

Now I don't see a big problem when one guy writes down wrong lyrics on a drunken night, yet it scares me when these bad lyrics somehow appear on a lot of lyrics sites.

Since this torrent or retiring kind seems quite unique, let's construct a fun query.

Yahoo returns 14 sites when I search for "devil on a hog" "shy or torrent kind". Google shows us only 9.

Apparently, these sites are simply crawling each other and uploading incorrect lyrics.

Oh well, lesson learned. Bruce Dickinson does not sing about a "torrent" kind, nor about "handling wider". He also didn't say "I guts like hand". This should be enough proof to become less lazy and get out of my chair more often. Then again, the correct lyrics can be found online too ...

lyrics, bruce dickinson