Hi,

I thought I would introduce this to my weblog. Every month a collection of 3 songs which I like or just find funny. 2 of these will be non-mainstream, so you can actually broaden your horizon of musical taste. This will be the first and last music post for 2008.

This month, we have Bob Guetto, Olivier Miller and Guru Josh Project.

Bob Guetto: This is the result of an artist trying to make fun of Bob Sinclar and David Guetta. If you know french, and listen to the lyrics, it’s too funny, not to say hilarious. Look at the small details, like the whisteling, the small kid, the haircut and the glasses.

Olivier Miller: A song that criticisizes the new generation, which only loves through the internet. It has a nice rhythm to it.

Guru Josh Project: What is it about women and power-tools? It’s like in Satisfaction by Benny Bennassi. I just don’t get it? Why would she have a huge hammer? Makes no sense to me. Ow, and she’s hot.

I just came back from London city, where I spent the evening at Sun Microsystems.

Sun held an event dedicated to scaling for startups. As scaling is something very interesting for Flosoft.biz, I popped into London and joined the event. A huge white building. A gigantic reception with one guy sitting behind it. Sun was the door on the left.

Inside I met up with Artur from Tigase who also joined the event. The evening then started off with a few talks from Last.fm and Sun. Here’s the Agenda of the evening.

18:00: Registration/Networking
18:30: Last FM
Why you should scale and lessons learnt
Mike Brodbelt
18:45: Sun Microsystems,
OpenSolaris- ZFS, Dtrace: Scaling and more scaling the easy way
Phil Harman
19:15: Break
19:30: Proven Scaling: MySQL
Optimise and Scale, now for the future
Mike Griffiths
20:00: Fav.or.it
Why I thought about scaling from day 1
Nick Halstead
20:15: Q&A Roundtable
20:30: Beer and pizza

I just love these events. There’s nothing wrong with Beer and Pizza. It’s a pity that the Pizza was gone quite quickly, about 3 slices a person, but I think that it wasn’t meant to substitute dinner. At this point, I would like to quote Alex: “The only thing that doesn’t scale well, was the Pizza”.

From this event I’ve learnt quite a bit about ZFS and Solaris, and will definetly play around with it the next few days. Also the MySQL scaling parts we’re interesting.

All in one, an interesting night.

If you are studying Computer Science, you should definitely read this. Take a pen and paper (or a small texteditor) and count your score. At the end of this, I would love to know what score you got out of the 50.

1. Install a hard drive in a laptop
2. Perform a clean OS install on a machine with two OSes
3. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone
4. Jailbreak an iPhone
5. Wire your house for Ethernet and Coax cable
6. Use BitTorrent and RSS to automatically download new shows from trackers
7. Use an A/V receiver to its fullest capability (every port is taken)
8. Calibrate an HDTV without the manual
9. Use a DSLR in full manual mode
10. Hack the encryption and mooch your neighbor’s Wi-Fi
11. Solder cleanly enough to get around a circuit board
12. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point
13. Shove the guts of a modern game console into a retro game console
14. Design a webpage in HTML by hand that features a picture of your cat
15. Use Photoshop to imperceptibly doctor a photo
16. Abstain from buying extended warranties
17. Know where to buy cheap cables and accessories
18. Fix your parents’ computer over the phone without looking at a computer
19. Enter the Konami code
20. Comment on Engadget from your phone
21. Type quickly using T9 texting
22. Program a universal remote
23. Contribute code to the Linux kernel
24. Hide porn from your significant other
25. Avoid DRM on everything
26. Know how to back up your data to networked storage—and actually do it
27. Watch TV shows on the internet for free
28. Edit together digital video ripped from YouTube
29. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator
30. Reset expired trial software by messing with the registry
31. Hackintosh your PC
32. Download pre-release movies from Usenet / Torrents
33. Hack the Wii to play homebrew games
34. Get around web content filters on public computers
35. Get into a Windows computer if you forgot your password
36. Securely erase your data so it can’t be recovered
37. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network
38. Build a fighting robot
39. Write your own Firefox plugins
40. Navigate and reorganize the files on your computer in DOS / Bash
41. Get something on the front page of Digg
42. Get through to executive customer service
43. Rip a CD to lossless quality AAC or FLAC
44. Rip a DVD to DivX
45. Build your own computer from parts
46. Swap out the hard drive in your DVR for a bigger one
47. Get an NES cartridge working again by blowing in it
48. Calibrate a 7.1 surround-sound system
49. Play downloaded games on a Nintendo DS
50. Talk about things that aren’t tech related

GOooooooOD morning!

Do you feel tired? Do you have to live through some horribly boring morning lectures? Ofcourse you bring your laptop, but you always put the bag under the table or onto the seat next to you.

Those times are over! Now you have the NapBook. It allows you to sleep through lectures with the comfort of your nice pillow at home.

I am currently trying to get my hands on it, but it seems to be difficult as it’s sown and sold in Reykjavik. But as soon as I do, I’ll give you some more info on it. Until then, you just need to bring your pillow with you.

One question remains: Is there a black version?

Good night and sweet dreams,

Florian

For everyone who is looking for this file.

mn100-ws3-upload

A few days ago, I found this picture of a dog. You have to admit, it’s a cool dog.

I was over at a friends place, and he had tons of these funny pictures with the black border and white text. So I quickly got a copy of them because some of them are just too funny.

If you are at work, I wouldn’t click Read More. Some people might be offended.

If you are sitting at home, go ahead and click!

Continue Reading »

I am sure you have been following the US elections over the last year or so. Barrack Obama had his campaign slogan: Change. Yes we can.

Well, let’s look back 10 years or so, when the famous Budweiser commercial first aired.

Times change. So here’s the 2008 version of that commercial. Just click read more.

Continue Reading »

Evening guys,

for the last few days I wanted to write this post, but just didn’t get around to publish it.

Before you continue reading, you should of have read my last post about Spotify a few months ago: Spotify - Last.fm on crack!

Then there’s a small video about Spotify here:

A few days ago, I was sitting together with a few other CS students, and we got to talk about Music. I immediately showed off my favorite music player, Spotify.

- Ow, you use Spotify. Looks cool to play back your Music… Woow, you have a huge Music Library. How many Gigs is it?
- No idea, it’s not on my Laptop.
- Huh? It must be, it can’t be streamed off the internet. It plays instantly!

After 30 minutes of traffic dumping and analyzing, we all agreed that it’s magic! It’s not possible that you can play a song instantly and skip to any place in it without buffering! It defies the laws of the internet! Ping? Packet Routing? Delays? Spotify has never heard of it! It plays as quickly as my local iTunes!

So one of my friends decided to call up Spotify, who’s HQ are in London, so it was a local call

We got a very nice receptionist, whom we asked about Internships. She clearly noticed that we loved Spotify and asked what we love so much about it.

- The Speed! It’s awesome!
- Heh, Yeah, we do that.

I mean, come on! A kind laugh! As if it would be normal. Let me tell you now, it’s not! So that evening, I remembered Peter Saint-Andre mentioning that he knew the CTO of Spotify, Andreas Ehn. He immediatly sent out a mail introducing me to Andreas, and I got a reply shortly after that.

In reply to my accusation that Spotify would be magic and package routing, he just had the following song: http://open.spotify.com/track/4ONTc23rNiTCBqP833K6rc

He also said the following:

Seriously, though, we’re not doing anything magic. Short buffers, lots of capacity, light-weight client application, light-weight streaming protocol minimizing the number of round trips (despite using TCP). And of course there is a local cache, but Spotify is pretty quick for stuff you’ve never played before, too. We do have a bunch of rather good developers.

The thing that I am missing in Spotify is some of the brand new music, and the possibility to see who added what to my collaborative playlist. For the rest the app is perfect! And I don’t say this often

I hope that I’ll meet Andreas Ehn at FOSDEM this year, as I seem to have missed it the last time.

The thing I don’t get, why ask for £9,99 per month for the Premium Subscription. It’s too much. The price Last.fm asks is decent. For 2,5€ I would immediately get a Premium Account. But as it stands now, I don’t see why I should pay that much for so little more.

At this point I just want to say two more things:

I’m sorry, but I don’t have any Spotify invites left So I can’t give out any free accounts anymore.

And second: Spotify definitely redefined music!

And now off to bed

But before I leave, I specifically asked, and I am allowed to post Screenshots this time.

Hey,

I finally got around to configure my WordTube plugin.

Here’s a demo.