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A Blog With No Name

It's good to be back in the game

STICKY POST

Why A Blog WIth No Name?

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How did the name come to this blog and what is it about? Let's try to answer that.

As many people I had problems coming up with a name to the blog, not wanting something simple as "Quinnuendo's blog" or "Donny's Blog". And then I thought of "A Blog With No Name", which is in part a pun to "A Horse With No Name", a song by the band America. The subtitle of the blog is from The Simpsons when Ned Flanders sings it as "I've got a date with a girl with no name, It's good to be back in the game".

The blog is not really thematic. There are posts about technical stuff (Opera and otherwise), internet (again Opera and otherwise), sometimes programming and algorithms, of course about music and movies here and there. I try to tag things so that topics are easily found so don't forget about random stuff.
In the photos of cats I tried to tag them with the names of the felines on them.

DST, again

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I really don't like DST, and have already written about my arguments against it.

I would just add that we should be careful of stuff that sound so similar to STD.

Tapping into your keyboard

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This just sounds freaky. Great fuel for the paranoid mind.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8147534.stm

Different Opera, different IMDb?

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For a while now I have been testing the new Opera 10 (quite pleased with it by the way :smile:). Somewhere along the way I have noticed that IMDb has changed the layout of the movies page a bit. It didn't look to bad, maybe it is better this way. But now running in Opera 9.62, I found that the old layout is back. Then I thought that maybe just some page have new layouts, or they are experimenting. So I opened the same page at the same time in Opera 10 and Opera 9.62, and behold they are different:


Normal layout in Opera 9

New layout in Opera 10 - less detail before the cast, the cast is also aligned left, not center.

I tried to check around but haven't found anything. I am logged in with both browsers, I have tried to search through preferences, but found nothing. Weird aye?

Gmail out of beta

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Interesting news, after five years of development Gmail is finally out of beta status, as well as Docs, Calendar and Talk.

For those users used to seeing "beta" written below the Gmail logo, they have created a Labs feature that displays the logo with the familiar gray text. I've been a user since late 2004, but I doubt I will enable this feature :smile:

Speaking of Labs, a definite cool addition is the "Inbox Preview" lab feature. It will show a static view of the inbox while the "loading" message is displayed, so you can see if there are new mails or not before loading. If you haven't experimented with Labs yet, you will find them under "settings"->"labs".

Hurt

"Hurt" is a song written by Trent Reznor (of the band Nine Inch Nails), first released in 1994. Later it was covered by a number of bands. The most famous cover, that this entry focuses on, was by Johnny Cash in 2002.

Trent Reznor later said, that at first the idea of Cash covering the song was flattering, but also a bit worrying, being that he is a country artist. But when he heard the version, and saw the video, he said "that song isn't mine anymore", because Johnny has made into something different, "but every bit as pure".

The lyrics are the same, the main music motives are the same, yet Johnny now tells about his life, himself being at the end of his own. The video and the song were the last that were released before Johnny died.

Following is the video that received a "Best video of the year" Grammy, and also a "Best single of the year" title from the Country Music Awards.

Read more...

Geekness, vol 2

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Being that my description as MOTW highlighted the geekness test I took a year and a half ago, I decided to take it again, and see if things are worsening. It seems they have, but not by much. I got a "40.8284% - Major Geek" result which is about 1 % more than the last time I took it. I would note that a lot of these questions are a bit USA oriented, since some of those stuff are quite rare outside the states, but still the concept is interesting :wink:

Common Sense often lies

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'Common Sense' don't always make sense. On cracked.com there is a good article about the 5 most common ways it lies to us everyday. It starts with reminding us that Albert Einstein defined common sense as a collection of prejudices acquired by the age of 18.

I'm going to list these five major logic fallacies in thinking in short here, and you can go and read in more detail at the original article.

* The Historian's Fallacy
This is when we look at past errors and think how people were stupid when making them, not trying to see it from their point of view, and forgetting they didn't know what we know now. Like thinking how totally and obviously stupid it was to sail the Titanic north and causing the sinking.

* The Nirvana Fallacy
Thinking how something is not worth doing if you can't do it perfect. Like why would you feed a homeless person when it won't fix poverty.

* The Appeal to Probability
Misinterpreting probability theories in a fuzzy way, like "if something can happen, it probably will". For example buying lottery tickets and justifying it with "somebody's got to win, why wouldn't it be me?".

* The Regression Fallacy
Seeing patterns where there are none. Thinking that A is cause of B, just because it happened at the same time. This is the reason for most of the superstitious beliefs.

* Special Pleading
Making an exception out a general rule without any justification except that it suits our needs at the moment. The interesting thing about this one is that we apply it to itself. We may allow ourselves to do it, but when other people do it we say it's wrong.

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I picked up this article a few months ago from Ze's blog, and I thought it was interesting enough to share, so I finaly did :smile:

Top 250 movies from a different angle

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Bumped into this today on imdb. Linked is a subway station type of a map that connects the 250 top movies on Imdb.com based on genres. Not too usefull, but interesting anyway.

http://blog.vodkaster.com/2009/06/25/the-top-250-best-movies-of-all-time-map/

Member of the Week

This friday I had an interesting suprise to see on the my.opera homepage:


It's an honour to be MOTW, and even more joining the ranks of some of my very dear friends who were MOTW before.
I thank the team for choosing me, and I thank to the many people wishing me well and congratulating me. You can also see in the comments on that page that there are more users from Serbia, so maybe we'll see more MOTW from here soon :smile:

The only thing I am sorry about is that I haven't been posting too much lately, because there was never time. Maybe now I will catch up a bit :smile:
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November 2009
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