Peterbe.com

Which came first?

Does it matter?

A friend of mine found a nice car she on www.enterprisecarsales.com so she copied the current URL from the address bar and emailed that to me. The URL was: http://www.enterprisecarsales.com/carsales/vehicleDetails.do?carIndex=1&vin=1GCHC24U36E112452 which by the look of it (notice the /vehicleDetails.do part of the URL) takes you to a page that says "Sorry, we are unable to complete your page request since the page you are trying to access no longer is available." How stupid is that? Come on, web developers made those kind of mistakes in 2001. Not 2010.

This means that people can't talk to each other about found matches on the site and this is something people want to do. Especially if you're going to spend $thousands on a car.

Come on Enterprise web team: install Django or something and give users what they want not your excuses.

It's of course a simplification but is it not true? Come on, admit it, isn't there something to it?

What do you think? As a man I must admit that it does feel like that. I don't know about the girls perspective so I'd love to hear what you think (keeping it mind that it's an exaggeration)

Check out these all free icons

Last month I marveled over the cute LastGraph which shows you a visualization of what artists you've been listening to on Last.fm lately in a neat way. Today I discovered this cute visualization: Tube Tags

I think it's only for paying Last.fm users since it says "VIP" next to the link. My understanding is that it shows the genres of music you've been listening too recently in a London Underground type of map way. Very neat.

Here's mine (31Kb PDF)

If I've understood it correctly, this is a mashup made on Guardian's API made by someone not at the Guardian. More photos here

What's interesting about this chart, which I've never seen like this before, is the last one where they show how much money various countries pledged versus how much they actually delivered. It's something I've also wanted to see because it opens up a whole new dimension of truth to the equation. For example, Canada has pledged USD 130m to the Haiti Earthquake but they only delivered 51% of what they pledged to the 2004 Tsunami crisis.

Spotted this website called Healing Food Reference which is what the name says; a reference of food and their healing "power". From the home page:

"This site is part of a public education project created by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and hosted by Truth Publishing. Its purpose is to educate and empower consumers with information they can use to prevent and even help reverse degenerative disease. There are no commercial sponsors of this site, and neither Mike Adams nor Truth Publishing was paid anything to create this site."

Basically click on a type of food, for example tofu and you get a list of things it can help with such as fever and then from the fever page you can more foods that help.

At first I was a bit taken aback by the home page and huge amounts of text on it but once you're in it is so easy to use. Perhaps the reason the home page is jam packed with content is for his search engine optimization.

I've been a big fan of Yakuake for a long time. It's a terminal you have open all the time in Linux that is shown and hidden, over any other windows, by a simply hit on the F12 button.

But as of more recent versions of Yakuake it has become really slow. It sometimes take 2-3 seconds from F12 press till you can type on the terminal. So I uninstalled it and tried Yeahconsole but I uninstalled it equally fast as I understood it was broken and didn't work at all despite being in the Xubuntu apt repositories.

Last but not least I ended up using Guake which not only works but also works really really fast. Screenshots here

If you want to just remember one single password and you want to use different passwords for different site then Oplop might be right for you.

This cost me some hair-pulling today as I was trying to write a custom test runner for a Django project I'm working on that creates a test Xapian database just for running the tests. Basically, you can't do this:

os.mkdir(database_file_path)

Because if you do you end up getting these strange DatabaseOpeningError exceptions. So, here's how you do it:

import xapian
xapian.WritableDatabase(database_file_path,
                        xapian.DB_CREATE_OR_OPEN)

Hopefully by blogging about this some other poor coder will save some time.