For the last 2 years or so I've been looking for the perfect desk that doesn't belie the beautiful design of the iMac that will be standing on it. There are some really good models but unfortunately most of them can't be ordered from Germany. Here's a list of those that can.
Today I was faced with an interesting question: How can you tell if an email-address exists? Yep, not if it's valid (that's easy with some regexp-magic), but if it actually exists. I came up with a simple Python-solution.
Wow, the Apple store is down! Well, it's Tuesday afternoon here in New Zealand and no one really expects anything more than, say, maintenance. But anyway, I caught myself reloading the page every few seconds. Hm, there has to be an easier way.
Ever since I'm here in New Zealand I've been using the free WiFi at every Mc Donalds. Great! Free WiFi! =)
But wait, what's the catch? Well, it's limited to 50MB data per day. Uhm. Sounds like a challenge, doesn't it? ;)
Earlier this week I discovered Phonegap when I got a beta-invite to their new build-service. To those who never heard of Phonegap before: It's
an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app storesOne of the awesome things about Phonegap is the extensibility with plugins caused by the nature of open source. Even though the built-in features of Phonegap already are very well-engineered, there are some cases in which you have to write your own plugin in order to achieve the functionality you want.
I'm sure you know WhatsApp, the super-awesome chat-allrounder-SMS-replacement-tool for your mobile phone which soon will be replaced by iMessage. If you're like me, you're interested in what you've written in the past. Fortunately there's this amazing "Email Chat History" feature under settings. But wait, is this really so amazing? Nope. It isn't. It only sends you the last 3 months or so.
We're currently in the planning phase for our next "Vorabifeier" (we're celebrating our future Abitur) and we created a Facebook-event-page to keep track of the expected guests. The reactions were huge, so we thought "Hey, couldn't we use this system to collect some information about the attendees?".
Yesterday a scientist from Lüneburg published details about his webcrawler which he used to crawl about 1.6 million datasets from the social network SchuelerVZ including the name, the name of the school, the school id and the url of the profile picture. So, how did he do this? He created over 800 accounts which he used to bypass the request-limits. He and the media called this a "Datenleck".