B10[mg]

Joffie pointed out last night that his team is currently taking the lead in the infamous Derby Dead Pool.

The Derby Dead Pool is described as:

"The sickest site on the Internet...a ghoulish competition..."
"Arguably the world's most popular 'Dead Pool' competition"
"No-one gets hurt in this game of death"

I however would like to describe it as "a game for people who have way too much time on their hands", like Joffie ;-)

It's all about predicting who will die within a year. For each death you predicted, you get points. That is, the death must be mentioned in a British national newspaper or on the BBC News website. Extra points are credited for originality, unnatural causes, age of the celebrity and other things.

Too bad Joffie didn't list Geert Wilders, then again, it's not a wishlist ;-)

Joffie's team is called "Death from Above" which, if I recall correctly, had nothing to do with Marduk's song Baptism by Fire

Congrats Joffie, keep it up!

derby dead pool

Pipes is being hyped, so let's feed the hype a little.

When I first noticed the mail announcing pipes, I immediately thought: "This sounds a lot like Plagger" (a killer Perl app I should have blogged about before, sorry Tatsuhiko ;-)

Pipes does what Plagger does, only with a shiny web interface. As usual, I find eye candy fun for a second, but can never make them work ;-) So far, I have tried to create a "pipe" at Yahoo's version, without any result. With Plagger, on the other hand, I had my first example running in seconds (not counting installing half a terabyte on CPAN modules ;-)

What struck me most though, was the name. Pipes ... why pipes? Was it a direct theft from Plagger? After all, Plagger's tag line is "the UNIX pipe programming for Web 2.0". "This must piss Tatsuhiko off", I thought, but it looks like he's ok with it.

I'll have to let these pipes sink in a little. So far, I'm not too impressed by what I have seen, but since it's now up to the users, something cool might come out of this.

yahoo, pipes, plagger

Every now and then, there's a need to find horrible songs from the past. Think Vanilla Ice, Kriss Kross, Jason Donovan, and many many others. I tried to top this by old Dutch songs, and went searching for "Brandend Zand", a Dutch song by Anneke Grönloh

But searching for just the title and "mp3" led me to the page of George Welling

Soon I realized this guy is awesome! Let's look at his page translated (by babelfish.yahoo.com).

First of all, the title of his CD is "Erg he", which is hard to translate, but I hope I can catch it with: "Bad, ain't it?". It's always good to see an artist who - unlike many rappers - think their music isn't all that. Ok, agreed, it's not the best singer ever, but neither is Wesley Willis (another one of my heroes).

The fun part of George's site though, is that you can browse each directory. That led me to his pictures of Indonesia

Those images are quite recent and it's funny to see him take almost the same trip as I did (I have never been to Aceh (?) nor to the top of the Bromo before though). Let's compare some pictures (I hope he doesn't mind me mirroring smaller copies of his images, if so, George, let me know and I'll remove them from my server!).

George	Me

Now, for those who wondered. Here is the original Brandend Zand (by Anneke) and the cover by George

George Welling, Anneke Gronloh

As you undoubtedly have noticed by now, Indonesia is, once again, being tortured by Mother Nature. After a tsunami, many earthquakes, volcanic activity, we still lacked this act: flooding.

Flickr has some beautiful images on this:

What can you do besides waiting (and/or playing ?). I hope the water level soon drops, so normal life can be restored. Take care Jakarta!

Update: the first picture is not from this year's flooding, it's from 2006, but it's just too nice to remove ;-)

jakarta, flood, banjir

Today I was surprised by Yahoo Mail. Usually, I can access the beta version without a problem, but for some reason, Yahoo deemed it necessary to block linux users. Why, oh why? It was working rather well!

image hosted by photobucket.

The solution? Get MS Windows or a Mac. Yahoo, why hast thou forsaken us Linux users?

Update: another, simpler solution workaround is to use the User Agent Switcher Extension (and set it to FireFox 2.0, WinXP).

yahoo mail beta, linux, firefox

Today I was surprised by Yahoo Mail. Usually, I can access the beta version without a problem, but for some reason, Yahoo deemed it necessary to block linux users. Why, oh why? It was working rather well!

image hosted by photobucket.

The solution? Get MS Windows or a Mac. Yahoo, why hast thou forsaken us Linux users?

Update: another, simpler solution workaround is to use the User Agent Switcher Extension (and set it to FireFox 2.0, WinXP).

yahoo mail beta, linux, firefox

Good blogger Bok noticed a major decrease in comment spam by blocking a single IP address. Of course, I had to see if this host was also spamming the heck out of my blog, but no. The IP address was not present in my logfiles, so I assume I'm still out of his/her reach.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking that blocking certain IPs might help stopping comment spam. I log the IP address and time stamp of each spam attack in a certain logfile (format: timestamp|IP address) so a list of top 10 offenders was easily created:

$ awk -F"|" '{ a[$2]++ } END { for (i in a) print a[i]":\t"i }' spammers.db  | \
  sort -n -r | head -10
604:    81.95.146.162
120:    69.46.16.231
74:     195.225.177.3
52:     85.255.119.74
50:     209.160.40.114
42:     72.36.226.10
41:     85.255.119.130
40:     66.36.229.227
35:     72.232.37.250
33:     75.126.21.163

I've added these addresses to my pf blocklist. Let's see if it'll work.

... why am I not surprised to see the ISP that refused to do anything about botnets at number 6?

comment spam, layeredtech