It is no secret that I use casings for the portable stuff I carry around. Some people dislike these things as, according to them: why slap a cheap case on an expensive, nice looking device? This is a good point, and: that’s why I like my casings to be well designed.

A while ago I bought a Noreve case for my mobile phone. They have models for many phones and a wide range of colours and materials to choose from. If you like your phone to dangle around your waist: they have nice clip-ons for that as well. As far as my casing is concerned, the pros: well designed, solid and has a nice feel to it. The cons: colour gets a bit darker after a while, the edges are not very well protected, and there’s a useless, overly tight, pocket inside for holding business cards. However, I am nitpicking, overall I am happy with it.

Another casing gem that my brother pointed me to is a Dutch designed case for holding credit card sized cards: the secrid card protector, winner of a red dot product design award. The cards `fan’ out of the case making them easy to pick out without even opening the surrounding wallet cover: see the image below. It is a very small wallet, which is actually a good thing: I found out that I carry a lot of useless stuff around, and a smaller wallet forces you to make choices and kick-out the things you hardly ever use. Furthermore, because the shell is made of metal it prevents unwanted reading of RFID chips that are being embedded in such cards at an ever increasing rate. The pros: small, rigid and looks pretty. The cons: it’s a bit heavy, the slide-out mechanism seems robust, but it uses a lever which may wear down over time. Additionally, it only holds up to about six cards, which may not be enough for everyone. Even though they have a `double’ version available: that, for me, kind of defeats to point of having a small wallet. Nevertheless, if you’re concerned about RFID, or just looking for a new stylish wallet: the secrid is recommended.

Internet memes are `cultural’ phenomena which quickly gain popularity and, as a result, rapidly spread across the Web. These usually take the form of images or videos. Although not the first, the earliest one I can remember is “All your base are belong to us”, based on a mistranslated Japanese video game. It became popular to put this phrase in all kinds of photos. An other particularly prolific meme is the so-called Rickroll: hidden behind a possibly interesting link is the video of Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. There is even an 8-bit and an Obama version.

Although I can give many more examples, a friend pointed me to the so-called Nyan Cat, which has recently become a very popular meme. It consists of an animation of a flying cat with a Pop Tart as body. This showed up on YouTube which even changed their video slider to mimic the shape of the cat and the rainbow trail! :

There is also a browser based version that keeps track of how long you have been listening.

The looped tune in particular, of Japanese origin, is an addictive ear pleaser, but one is left to wonder: why?

This has been in theatres for a while now, and I have to be honest and say that it is certainly one of the best teaser trailers of the year. The idea of taking something the whole world has witnessed: the moon landing, and then suggesting that some covert operation took place when they went dark: great! We still have to wait a couple of more days, but here is the trailer that shows what director Michael Bay has in store for us with Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

As the name implies, this is the follow-up to 2009′s surprise hit movie The Hangover. The creators kept predominantly the same cast of main characters as the original, which really is a good choice. I admit I am impressed by Bradley Cooper’s recent work particularly in Limitless and to a lesser extent in The A-Team. Unfortunately, the creators of the Hangover recycled nearly the same format as used for its predecessor, which is a bad choice and leads me to the main point of criticism: the movie fails to surprise. The sequence of photos, revealing what really happened during the night out, shown at the end of the movie, got the most laughs of the audience, which is not a good sign: this is supposed to be an entertaining movie after all, and not a funny slide show .

The first half is slowly paced and contains relatively sparsely placed jokes. There are a couple of laughs, although too much of these are already revealed in the trailer. The second half has more energy and seems somewhat better developed. Although, both Ed Helms, known from The Office, and Bradley Cooper deliver a solid performance, it is Zach Galifianakis as Alan that really steals the show with well-timed jokes, over the top bluntness and double interpretations.

Even though I liked the first movie, I felt it was somewhat overrated, perhaps this was because of its, then novel, storytelling. As far as this follow up movie is concerned: Even though it is entertaining, I can not shake the feeling that it was developed solely for cashing in on the first part’s success. Understandable perhaps from a commercial point of view, but a disappointment for movie goers.

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Official Site | IMDB | Wikipedia

Trailer hosted by YouTube, Copyright © Warner Brothers.

I replaced my relatively static previous homepage with a dynamic content focused blog. This time I decided to swallow my pride: not building the whole site from the ground up myself as I did before. Yet, I still performed a fair bit of customization. Hence, this took a while to make. I have to say that WordPress really is a superb tool for making these types of sites. By the way, this is not the first time I maintained a weblog, I had an Advogato Blog years ago when I was very active in the open source community. That could be seen as the hacker circle predecessor to the wide array of social networking sites available today. Anyhow, check back here for regular post on interesting topics.

When the first X-Men movie came out in 2000 it stood out particularly because of its intelligent, character driven style. This was not so common in those days as critically panned movies, like Batman & Robin, seemed to mock the superhero genre, rather than making a worthy contribution to it. The trend set by X-Men was nicely followed by other movies in the superhero genre, like Spider-Man and Batman Begins. No longer were these filled with cardboard characters, no: these were people that we could actually care about. Director Bryan Singer managed to raise the bar even higher in the second X-Men movie. However, the third instalment in the series, and the movie dedicated to Wolverine, both made without Singer’s involvement, were less well received.

Luckily Bryan Singer was attracted as a producer for X-Men: First Class, and this undoubtedly has had some positive influence on the development of the movie. Although the CGI-heavy trailer might have you believe otherwise, it is a good cast, realistic characters, and a strong believable backstory that make this one of the best X-Men movies yet. Recommended, even if you don’t particularly like ‘superhero’ movies.

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Official Site | IMDB | Wikipedia

Trailer hosted by YouTube, Copyright © 2011 Marvel Studios

I also found this excellent fan-made introduction animation on Vimeo:

Director James Wan is perhaps best known for directing the first Saw, a franchise of horror movies that spiralled out of control to end up being more about gore than about scare. Movies like Paranormal Activity have shown that you do not need a lot of blood to scare an audience. So it is a good thing that Oren Peli, the mind behind that movie, was involved as producer for Insidious. The movie’s first half is undoubtedly best and effectively builds tension. The power of suggestion is often used: that what the audience can not see scares them the most. Hence, this is not a movie for the faint of heart. I was in a particularly easy-to-scare mood, so I admit to shielding my face during the build up to some of the movie’s most intense moments. Unfortunately the creators also resort to cheap tactics such as using loud audio to jump you out of your seat. This is not helped by a very cheesy title sequence with supposedly scary (annoying) music. The second half of the movie has its moments, but is a bit messy. The plot is certainly interesting. However, it is stretched too far in the end which breaks suspension of disbelief. Nevertheless, the creators know how to scare an audience, and that is what most people come for anyway

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Official Site | IMDB | Wikipedia

Trailer hosted by YouTube. Copyright © FilmDistrict

In early April I went to a rallysprint event in Ede with a friend. He captured the event with his photo camera, the result of which I am sure will show up soon on his photostream. I joined for filming with my trusty camcorder. We had a good day at the rallysprint although the layout of the place, an abandoned military base, was somewhat confusing. We unfortunately missed the spectacular jump point, but nevertheless I was able to capture some nice footage. The excellent music used is from the Fireproof Babies.

Search Result Caching in Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval Networks
Tigelaar, A. S. & Hiemstra, D. & Trieschnigg, D.
In Proceedings of IRFC 2011, Vienna, Austria (pp. 134-148).

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Abstract
For peer-to-peer web search engines it is important to quickly process queries and return search results. How to keep the perceived latency low is an open challenge. In this paper we explore the solution potential of search result caching in large-scale peer-to-peer information retrieval networks by simulating such networks with increasing levels of realism. We find that a small bounded cache offers performance comparable to an unbounded cache. Furthermore, we explore partially centralised and fully distributed scenarios, and find that in the most realistic distributed case caching can reduce the query load by thirty-three percent. With optimisations this can be boosted to nearly seventy percent.

Presented at the Information Retrieval Facility Conference 2011 on June 6th 2011 in Vienna, Austria.