Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Tonight was a fun night of experimenting with web stuff.

I'm in London this week, and this morning I got an email from the office that they changed my mobile plan so I could use mobile internet abroad for a flat fee per day, and since I have a fancy phone now it was playtime tonight!

I turned on my iPod, left the hotel and set out to do some sightseeing. Took the tube to the Embankment station and took a cliche picture of the Big Ben. Using the 'upload to flickr' feature of my phone, I uploaded it to my flickr stream.

Roughly 7 minutes later the upload finished and I was able to twitter about my accomplishment. The reason it took 7 minutes was that my phone had switched from HSDPA to GPRS, which is pretty sluggish, and the fact that my phone's cam is 5MP.

I got hungry, and used Google Mobile Maps to find the Hard Rock Cafe (always a nice place to dine when you're not with company), and the way to get there.

By the time I passed the large Pepsi Thingee at Trocadero, I had found out that my phone can scale down the image before posting to flickr, so my picture of the Pepsi Thingee uploaded a lot faster.

At trocadero I used an underpass to cross a road, at which point my phone not only disconnected, but completely crashed. I had to take out the battery to reset it.

Anyway, on to the Hard Rock Cafe.

I arrived at the spot where the Hard Rock Cafe was supposed to be according to Google, but there was only a really small street and I didn't see anything resembling an HRC. But a closer look revealed a small door with a Hard Rock Cafe logo in the back of a sort of alcove. 'Wow', I thought, 'must be the smallest HRC ever. Without Google Maps I would never have found this'.

So I went in and about 2 steps inside I encountered a guy, sitting on a staircase eating fries. Hmm, this must be the weirdest HRC I've encountered so far.

He looked as stunned at me as I looked at him, and after an awkward silence I said:

"Are they closed or what?"
"Closed? You want to eat?"
"Eh, duh!"
"Sure we're open. but USE THE FRONT DOOR!"
"Ah, eh, hmm..." (quick! think of an excuse that doesn't make you look foolish!) "Google Maps sent me here!"
"Well, Sir, then Google Maps IS WRONG."

I walked around the block, had a lovely dinner, twittered some more, checked up on my email and eventually used Google Maps to find my way back to the hotel.

So it was a nice mobile-assisted night.

And now I'm here in my hotel room, typing this post in a local textfile because internet at the hotel doesn't work and the building seems to block my cellphone signal.

Some drawbacks: The battery of my phone, which was full when I left, was nearly empty by the time I got back. And on my laptop I noticed that the pictures I took were way more blurry than I could tell on the mobile phone screen.

But all-in-all, I think the mobile web is fun. In particular the popular web 2.0 sites do a decent job of providing a proper mobile version of their services.

A few people on twitter advised me some alternative mobile software (mobypicture) that should make it even easier, so I'm going to try that out on my next sightseeing-with-phone tour. I'll try to use some more websites next time as well, such as a website that can plot my route using google maps, and try uploading to youtube from the phone. It would be nice if there was a site that combines google maps, twitter, youtube and flickr. Ideas anyone?

After my new website was online, it took spammers only 4 days to find it and flood it with comment spam.

So I decided to implement a captcha. But, to turn anti-spam measures into something useful, I decided to try out reCAPTCHA. This project helps archive.org with their effort to scan books. OCR is not 100% accurate, and reCAPTCHA helps to decode the words that the computer can't decode, but humans can probably read.

What the captcha basically does is present you 2 words: one that it knows how to decode, and one that it was unable to read. If you got one word right, it's going to assume that you also know how to read the other, and will use your interpretation for the book scan. To prevent abuse and improve quality, it can send the same word to multiple people.

I haven't used it much myself, and encountered it only on a few sites. If you are having trouble with commenting on my site because of this captcha, let me know. (How can you let me know if you can't comment? You probably know my e-mail address and if you don't, you can easily guess. )

If you like the way it works and want to support the project, add it to your own site. If you use WordPress as I do, it's very easy to setup: you can download a WordPress plugin here.

I used to host my blog on achievo.org/blog. Since the blog didn't really have a relationship to the Achievo project management tool anymore (except for the occasional release announcement), and since Achievo.org will soon be completely redesigned, I decided to move my blog over to a new domain.

The new design was created by Almer Kaasschieter. I think he did a great job. Almer, thanks!

If you subscribed to my previous blog, I would like to advise you to update the feed url to http://www.jansch.nl/feed (or click on the subscribe link in the upper right corner).

There are times when I don't blog about PHP but about other subjects, so I've created a separate PHP category so readers of planet-php or other sites that syndicate my blog can use the separate PHP feed:

http://www.jansch.nl/category/php/feed

I also switched from Serendipity to WordPress. It's not that I'm unhappy with Serendipity, far from it (still using it for our corporate blog) but I wanted to gain some experience with WordPress as well.

Any feedback on this new blog (negative or positive) is very welcome.

Lately I've been having these crazy thoughts about what the implications would be if the world as we know it wasn't really real but a computer simulation. (This is heavily inspired by The Simulation Argument and The Thirteenth Floor).

I found it kind of fun to discuss and ponder the subject and I needed a place to write down my thoughts, so I installed a wiki. The wiki soon was filled with stories and ideas, and I decided to get a domain name for it, and somehow the term 'Simulism' seemed appropriate and the domainname wasn't taken yet, so here we are:

http://www.simulism.org/Simulism

It's almost like creating your own religion, only, it isn't.

And it's not like I have nothing else to do, but it sure is something different for a change.

Probably it's only a matter of time before men in white uniforms come to take me away.

Ah, is that the doorbell?

Ok, this post has no use whatsoever, but I need to get this out of my system. I was in an incredibly dull meeting the other day, and at one point, I had on my sheet of notes 3 randomly placed dots:

 
.
 
             .
   .
 

For some reason, I don't know why, I started to wonder if there would be one or more circles that have an outline that touches these 3 dots. Yes I am a nerd (just imagine how boring the meeting was).

To put this puzzle in other words: is there, for any given set of 3 points, a 4th point that has an equal distance to the first 3 points?

My preliminary conclusion is that for each three points, there is exactly 1 circle that has a matching outline, unless the 3 points are positioned exactly in one line. I lack the mathematical background however to prove/disprove this in theory. I discussed this with a fellow nerd and he also concluded that there should be exactly 1 circle for each set of 3 points (as long as they are not in a straight line).

Now I'm curious. Am I right in the 'exactly 1 circle' assumption? If so, what would be the optimal way of determining the center of the circle? In other words, how would you implement:

 
/**
 * Determine the center point of a circle whose outline strikes 3 given points.
 * @param Point $a
 * @param Point $b
 * @param Point $c
 * @return Point The center point of the circle outlining point $a, $b and $c
 */
function centerpoint($a, $b, $c)
{
  ....
  return new Point($x, $y);
}
 

On to something else. The rumours of the Zend Framework are spreading quickly. I haven't been contacted by Zend so it's not going to be Zend ATK. I'm wondering what it is though. Whether it's anything like a business framework, or more of an IDE kind of thing, or just a set of classes providing some API.

Finally an update on ATK: we're wrapping up RC1 of ATK 5.3. It should be out real soon now.

The past few days, I have had several reasons to celebrate.

Last friday, my sister Debby got married. She got married to my colleague and good friend Peter, who some of you know from his Achievo and/or ATK contributions. He's the original author of, among other things, the atkDateAttribute, the locking feature, the PostgreSQL abstraction layer and his latest achievement for ATK was the atkMetaNode. And now he married my sister. Where is the world going...

I got to be her witness, and I drove the wedding car. They both looked really nice in their wedding suits, and they had a very nice party (pictures online soon). Congratulations can be sent to debby at debby.org and peter at achievo.org.

A few days earlier, I passed my Zend Certification Exam. Although I'm not a fan of the questions in the exam (they tend to demonstrate ones ability to learn things out of a book, rather than ones ability to write good code), I'm happy that I didn't flunk it.
My employer decided to get all their php developers certified. I think this will be a strategic advantage over our competition. Right now, of the 27 certified engineers in The Netherlands, 9 work at ibuildings, with 3 more colleages getting ready for their exam next week. We rule!