Cristiano on Tech/Life

• Dpreview launches lens reviews – Finally, DPReview (my favorite source of digital camera review knowledge) will start to offer reviews of lenses! I wonder how they will grade the new Nikon VR Kit lens.
• Nikon Nederland – D60 Body – The new Nikon D60 is out. A bit disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Still depending on AF-S only lenses.
• Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building – Lego is over 50 years old. Interesting read on the history of Lego.
• The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You – One of the coolest ever visualizations of how blogging works.
• M+B Gallery – Very cool series of fake “celebrity” photography. Genius!
• Account Sign-in: 8 Design Mistakes to Avoid – Interesting essay on 8 (actually 16) common mistakes made on websites with account sign-ins.

So, besides organizing a Geek Dinner I thought it would be nice to organize another Werewolf Night. Same venue and time as the Geek Dinner, just 2 days earlier (the 5th of February). If you haven’t ever played Werewolf, take a look at the (incomplete) wiki, and then join us on the night. The more players the merrier.

Let me know if you are coming, either here in the comments, or on the upcoming page.

After finishing The Long Tail a few weeks ago I started on Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. I must say that audio-books are starting to grow on me. It’s like having a 20 hour podcast with a more structured content. I had gotten the book for Christmas so I switched between audio and the book once in a while, but the audio really helped me speed things up.

The book was an interesting read but less of an inspiration than The Long Tail. As the author of Freakonomics said: this book is strangely without a strong theme. Freakonomics is about why people are often fully unable to understand how real life phenomena work, confusing cause and effect, and clinching to conventional wisdoms. The book highlighted some things I already knew: real life correlations are often far more complex than they seem and people are very bad at understanding them.

I finished the book with a bit of mixed feelings, as there was no real inspiration to take from it, no better understanding of the world, but more of a better understanding of peoples lack of understanding of the world. Up next is “Fooled by Randomness” by N.N.Taleb.

Yes, the time is near! A Geek Dinner is at hand.

I have been trying to get one going for a few weeks now, after Ian pushed me to try it and take some weight of his shoulders. With the help of Ian and Glyn we managed to get Prof. Richard Clayton from the University of Cambridge to talk about:

“Evil ways to make money on the Internet”

I am still trying to confirm the availability of the venue but somehow there is never anyone present to confirm the reservation for me. For now thoug, put the date (February 7th) in your favorite calendar application. The Geek Dinner will probably start at 7pm and go on until we get kicked out. Food is £5 as usual and make sure to either let me know you are coming here in the comments, or on the upcoming page.

One of my photos I took last year has been used on Schmap!!. I don’t really know what Schmap!! does but they like my photo so why would I care.

Since I wrote this article I added a followup article fixing a small problem with this script. Read the article below first though!

This tutorial is really most of all a reminder for me, and some of my friends who use Site5 hosting. It has a few flaws which I will get back to in the end. This site is intended for small sites, like Wordpress blogs, running on shared hosts. The main idea is this: backup all the data of your website daily, automatically, to an offsite location.

Step 1: Get Access to a Subversion Repository

The great thing about Subversion is that it offers incremental backups, allowing you to go back in time as far as you need to restore any problems you might run into. Assembla.com offers free subversion hosting (besides all the other things they offer), which is virtually unlimited. They do charge corporations, but with my current use (4 sites doing a daily backup) I haven’t had any problem with them contacting me or something.

Simply sign up and set up a “Space”. Ignore most of the settings but make sure to setup a Trac+Subversion package for your space. This will enable Trac support and subversion. Once the site is setup, go into the Trac/SVN tab and check the Subversion URL. It should be something like this:

http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/<your_site_name>
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• ATP Photo Finder – Quite a good GeoTagging solution
  This is seriously becoming something i would love to use. Best GeoTagging solution so far. No software needed and compatible with virtually every camera.
  (tags: photography gps geotagging gadgets photo hardware tagging)
• How to backup and import a MySQL InnoDB database
  I am trying to automate some backup features on my webservers. For now this tutorial has given me a decent backup solution.
  (tags: Mysql Backup innodb database SQL mysqldump db)

• Building a .com in 24 hours
  interesting website on how to build a .com in 24 hours. lots of tips and tricks
  (tags: development programming startup webdesign howto business rails)