Monday, January 24, 2011

John Lennon + Van Halen = Imagijump!!!

Imagine an impossible hybrid song, take John Lennon's classic Imagine and cross it with Van Halen's jump, what do you get? an absolutely hilarious mix that actually sounds good (at least it did to me)
Listen up here.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Virus alarm on Facebook.



One day like any other you log in to your Facebook account to check what's new, suddenly it goes 'ping' and a chat window opens. A friend writes 'funny picture' or 'hey, you look so weird in this video' followed by two smileys and a link, you get too curious and click on the link to see what your friend meant, in the worst case you're lost: both the picture and your friend's message are fake, organized cybercrime is behind this and other tricks.
Facebook is with over 500 million users the world's most popular social networking platform on the Internet and a perfect playground for cybercriminals to spread viruses and trojans. Using security 'holes' in the browser they get access to unprotected user login data and through
them they send a message with a link to the user's friends.
As soon as a friend clicks on the link, he comes to a modified website where a virus 'sneaks' in the users computer, his mission: get in that user's facebook account and send messages to his friends list, this way the virus reproduces itself and spreads around.
Facebook says: 'as soon as a message is sent around at a unnormal speed in a short period of time, it gets block automatically by our systems' but that doesn't seem to be enough, so how can you protect yourself without depending on Facebooks system?
-Keep your browser updated, Get the latest release of Firefox or Google Chrome, if you are using internet explorer 6 or 7 (yuk!!) get the newest release asap (or just uninstall it and get yourself one of the two mentioned before), a good antivirus program is a must have, (ask God... er, i mean Google for enlightenment)
But even the best antivirus program is not good enough, the best weapon you have is yourself, don't open everything that is sent to you, specially if you're not expecting such a message or if your 'friend' is just someone you just met online in a chatroom or over Facebook, make sure the message is coming from a trusted source before opening it or you may be the next victim :-)   



Monday, January 17, 2011

10 years Wikipedia

How many meter does a sea mile have? 
What does 'lamprophony' mean?
You don't know the answers? well, me neither, but that doesn't matter, because since 10 years we can rely on Wikipedia giving the answers to these and millions of other questions and it has become a part of our lives as common as toasted bread and traffic jams.
Today kids can barely believe that there used to be a time when you would have to actually open and read a book (or many ) whenever you needed some information on a particular subject.
Wikipedia is one of the best examples why the internet so wonderful is and why we couldn't picture life without it anymore.
But lets go back 10 years in time and witness the 'birth' and humble beginnings of Wikipedia.
It was January 15, 2001 when Jimmy Wales put Wikipedia.com online, 'the free encyclopedia', back then it was unthinkable that some hobby author would pretend to deliver the same knowledge quality of for example Microsoft Encarta, and the editors of Brockhaus & Co. simply laughed their butts off at this crazy 'pioneer' of cyberspace (since Wikipedia's founding, Microsoft stopped issuing updates to its Encarta encyclopedia.  Microsoft didn't blame Wikipedia as the reason, but did admit it)
Wikipedia is in my opinion the ultimate source of knowledge nowadays and nobody at Brockhaus & Co. is laughing about it anymore.
Here are just a few numbers to show you the massive growth of Wikipedia the last 10 years:
  • It's been translated in 260 languages.
  • It has more than 10 million articles.
  • The English Wikipedia is with over 3,46 million articles the world's biggest.
  • The German Wikipedia receives every hour 2,56 million calls, almost twice as much as last year and almost 52% of these calls come through Google and other search engines (are there really other search engines??)
  • 99578 authors were registered at Wikipedia until September 2010
The biggest part of Wikipedia's articles are about art and culture (33%) followed by biographies (15%) and history (11%) and is in permanent expansion, making it mankind's ultimate knowledge collection and something we just couldn't live without, happy birthday Wikipedia.


Monday, January 3, 2011

Free and Open Source audio application.

The Open Source world has a gazillion free applications to offer, here are some of the best audio applications offered, be it an audio player, a very profesional drum machine or a audio editor, you may find something to your liking.