Al wie "Gij ook, Brutus?" nog vertaalt als
Tu quoque, Brutus ?
heeft zijn Latijn van de pastoor in de sacristie geleerd. De vocatief, jongens en meisjes, maakt dat de correcte vertaling is :
Et tu, Brute ?


Ga heen, en doet er uw voordeel mee.

Have you ever been tricked by ads for food ? I, for instance, vividly remember the day I walked into an English Subway, ordering a turkey sandwich, and receiving something horrible with several kinds of black greasy sausage slices. And everyone knows about the wafer-thin burgers you get in every burger restaurant.


Pundo3000.com started with some real-life examples of this kind of food trickery. It features 100 pictures of junk food ads, accompagnied by a real-life example of the advertised goods. Needless to say, with a high WTF factor. If you don't feel like wading through 100 examples, head over to The Guardian, featuring a fine selection. Warning : not for the weak stomach.
If you're still hungry, check out some of the earliest pioneers in this trade, with some older examples of fine junkfood cuisine (including my Subway turkey sandwich).
Bon appetit.

I just finished the Riftwar saga by Raymond Feist. It consists of 4 fantasy novels describing a fictional universe featuring the worlds of Midkemia and Kelewan. Human magicians and other creatures on the two planets are able to create rifts through dimensionless space that can connect planets in different solar systems. Midkemia was originally created as an alternative to Dungeons and Dragons, and I recommend the saga to everyone interested in fantasy of this kind.


As most fantasy books, the Riftwar saga got lots of fansites; starting with Crydee.com, named after the city where the first book starts of, which is the official website of Feist. Other fansites include the familytree of the rich character set of the books. The most interesting place to go, is the Elvandar.com website, featuring maps of most continents and places this strange world consists of.

De laatste tien dagen een Rhodesian Ridgeback op logé gehad. Ridgebacks zijn kortharige grote honden, met een gekweekte borstel op de rug. Martine denkt zwaar aan hondenopvang, en een hond die bij de oorspronkelijke hondencreche niet terecht kon wegens te druk, leek ons het best om eens te kijken of hondenopvang ons wel lag. Het resultaat mag zeer positief genoemd worden : alleen het vele wandelen was wat onderschat, maar het heeft ons tenminste nieuwe wandelwegjes opgeleverd. En de Ridge had na zijn week verlof blijkbaar zelfs heimwee naar zijn opvangouders :)

Wat hebben wij westerse mensen toch een fixatie met eten; zelfs onze verzorgingsproducten moeten tegenwoordig volop met eten gelinkt worden : shampoo met fruitextracten, douche gels met yoghurt, tandpasta met kruidenextracten. Carrefour heeft nu een douche gel lijn uitgebracht die volledig in de culinaire sfeer liggen : geuren (smaken ?) op basis van citroentaart, creme brulee en tiramisu. Nooit om een culinair experiment verlegen, besloot ik om de fondant editie mee naar huis te nemen.


Deze douche gels ruiken dus echt naar eten : de fondant verspreidt een lekkere chocolade saus geur af, en zeker na contact met water. Met mijn kop vol witte shampoo en me inzepend met schuimende chocoladesaus voel ik me een beetje als een gigantische Dame Blanche. Ook na afspoelen en afdrogen blijft een subtiele lekkere chocolade geur hangen. Een vreemde gewaarwording, zeker voor wie de normale geuren van bloemetjes en eau-de-cologne gewoon is. Voor wie er geen graten in ziet om ruikend als een paasei door het leven te stappen, kan ik deze douche gel alleen maar aanbevelen. Ik krijg er wel zin in chocolade van : eigenlijk dus alleen maar een uiterst slimme zet om mensen op een subtiele en onbewuste manier meer te laten consumeren.

When a whisky gets 'finished', it means that it gets transferred from its first cask to wooden barrels, mostly ex-bourbon barrels to mature during a large amount of time. Traditionally, the type of barrel is always the same, but during the last decade, some distilleries have experimented with other wood finishes in order to get new taste into their whiskies. While I applaud this creativity, I sometimes get the impression that many non-conventional wood finishes are just marketing tricks in order to boost the price up and create a false sense of whisky collector items.


The folks at Glenmorangie are seen as pioneers of the 'wood finish' trend that has come to the world of whisky over the past decade. This is part of the old wood finishes range (burgundy, madeira, port, sherry) that has been replaced in recent months by a new trio of finishes. Port is now called "Quinta Ruban", sherry finish is "Lasanta", and a Sauternes finish called "Nectar d'Or". I got my hands on an older Madeira wood finish; I like Glemorangie, and the Madeira sweet taste blended into the light Glenmorangie seemed an interesting combination. The price was awesomely high, but probably because spanish oak casks that once held madeira are about 10 times more expensive that bourbon casks and still significantly more expensive than wine or wine spirit casks.


Smell : starts interesting with an explosion of caramel, chocolate, apricot and raisins.
Taste : what a disappointment. All the subtleties of Glenmorangie are blown away by the crude taste of Madeira wine. It just tastes like someone mixed a gallon of port wine with some whisky blend, and nothing more. Alcohol exploding in the mouth and leaving you gasping for air. Awefull lot of pepper in the aftertaste.


Sadly, this combination doesn't work (for me). The Madeira finish takes away the mild whisky taste, and is so unexpected, as if you suddenly get smacked in the face by a 10 year old schoolgirl.

I personally think that Nintendo screwed up with the Wii. Sure, it has a revolutionary interface, but the possibilities for end user experiences with this console were endless. If they only could have released a Youtube channel, a movie trailer channel, ... It would have lifted the Wii up from the simple game console it is now, to a multimedia Home Theater interface that could have been a smashing success. But instead, Nintendo chose to reinvent Mario Bros for the 10^6th time; Virtual Console ? Come on, Nintendo, was this all you could give us ?


So maybe your Wii has been resting too much time at your TV side too ? Do you want to give it a second chance ? Then the Homebrew Channel might be something for you. It is an application loader to run unofficial Wii software, which behaves as a separate channel. Most of the software provided are simple games, but with some, you can transform your Wii into a FTP or web server or transform it into a home theater solution with MPlayer CE, which runs on top of a slim Linux distribution.


Unfortunately, the Homebrew Channel isn't delivering what Nintendo failed to do : I would love to see Youtube support get provided as a simple application, or get better integrated into the MPlayer CE app. And most of the gaming applications are emulation softwares for eg Nintendo64 or Sega games, which mostly provide ... Mario Bros games. Sigh...


A word of warning before you head over to the HomeBrew website : it uses hacks and bugs in the Wii software to run these kind of softwares, and with the installation, there might be a slim chance that you brick your Wii.

Internet savvy people will know this problem : you have a blog, are using microblogging tools as Identi.ca or Twitter, and of course have a Facebook or Netlog account. But what about your target audience ? Do you expect them to follow you wherever you post something on the internet ? And as more and more people are using Facebook as a medium, the less popular blogs are becoming. Sure, some people use a feedreader for this, but it requires extra software to be installed, and feedreaders are sooo 2008 anyway :) In this post, I'll show you how you can use a single channel for the display of all your internet publications.


First of all, we must choose a consolidation channel. In my case, I'll be using Facebook for this. It has the advantage that it has lots of features which can help you realize many of your consolidation efforts.


Let's start with your blog posts : we want our blog posts to be displayed on our Facebook wall. This can easily be achieved by using the RSS feed aggregation that Facebook is supporting. To activate this, Go to your Profile, choose Actions, Imported Stories. In the first section, you can use other social networking sites as Youtube or Flickr to be imported. To import your own blog, simply head over to the second section, and choose Blog/RSS,and enter the feed URL of your website. A disadvantage of this is that Facebook imports the whole story and stores it internally : typos that you have made cannot be corrected this way, even if you update your blog post. Just use a good spell checker (default in Firefox) to minimize the damage ;) Another thing is that everything you post on your blog gets drawn into Facebook, which might be a disadvantage. This can be solved by creating categories or taxonomies for Facebook posts only, but it requires your blogging engine to support this.


In a next step, we want our Twitter feeds to be displayed also on our Facebook wall. Facebook supports many Twitter applications, from which I personally like Selective Twitter Updates the most. You can select which tweets are to be displayed on your wall by ending them with a #fb suffix. It looks a bit weird on your Tweet list first, but this is something you're getting used to quickly. Selective Twitter Update has the advantage you don't submerge your wall by every tweet you're publishing.


There you have it : some simple steps to steer all your internet posts to a single distribution channel, which might help you save some time.

Symbian still uses certificates to sign applications. In the case you want to roll out your own Symbian application, you need some way to sign your app. Turns out the certificates can easily be created on your own by use of the OpenSSL toolkit :

$ openssl genrsa 1024 >my.key

$ openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 3650 -key my.key >my.cer

After entering the second command, you are prompted for various bits of information about yourself that is embedded into the certificate. This process only needs to be performed once, and the generated certificate can then be kept for future use with CreateSIS or SignSIS.

Green datacenters are hot (pun intended). In every RFP we send out, we must add an entry about power consumption and heat dissipation. Sun has put up a page with different power calculators per system, giving you the Watts and BTUs your datacenter crew needs.