I always liked ASCII-art, and it seems that this spammer was inspired by it too:
Anything to get exposure for the famous SPAM-drugs, I suppose.
Want to make your own art piece?
Check out this site to make ASCII-Art of your own!
Page 4 of 6
IIS 6.0 – Indentifying application pools
Ever wanted to know which application pool was behind that one w3p.exe process that always clogs up your Windows 2003 server?
Now you can by running a simple IIS script.
On the console, enter the following command:
cscript %systemroot%system32iisapp.vbs
This script wil then print out a list of all the running application pools and their corresponding process ID.
I made a batch file for on my desktop that paused the script so that the popupped window doesn’t disappear straight away.
Toyota – the Human Touch
Came across this hilarious and ultimately effective commercial by Toyota: it expresses the brand’s attention to the customers needs by giving all the gadgets and features of their cars a "personal" touch.
It’s just fantastic to watch!
Soapbox – Microsoft’s attempt to rival YouTube
Microsoft has just launched Soapbox.
This is a new beta they are using as a testbed for an Atlas-powered alternative to the plethora of video sharing sites on the web.
In normal speak: Microsoft wants a piece of the YouTube/Google/Yahoo video pie ;).
On the homepage, you see nothing but a loading screen until youactually log in with your Microsoft Passport account. Then, you aretreated to another rendition of a nerd in an MSN butterfly suit (an MSNbeta wouldn’t be complete without it!).
The service is open to a select group of users (invite only), although you are encouraged to request access too. Luckily the boys at CNet have a had a quick browse through the working version of the site.
One word of caution: when signing up for the beta you are very strongly advised to read the legalese. The most significant thing that caught my eye: entire chapters devoted to payed placement of content and how the billing works. I”l be interested to see if this approach can help build the content library!
I always enjoy taking a website apart and seeing how i can have at the assets. Sadly, I’m new to Atlas and AJAXin general, and I gave up after skimming through the 6 or sojavascripts and 4 flash movies full of ActionScript. Maybe that will beone to return to in the future.
Links:
Multiple websites in IIS 5.1 (Windows XP)
IIS is easy to use for MS development.
Sadly, the most annoying thing about IIS 5.1 is that you are only allowed to run one website.
But wouldn’t it be nice to have multiple setups for different types of websites?
Thanks to the admin scripts in the Inetpub-folder folder of IIS you can!
To be able to add multiple sites we use the adsutil.vbs file.
(the file is located in the folder C:/Inetpub/AdminScripts).
Here’s an overview of its usage:
Show a list of current setups
adsutil.vbs enum w3svc /p
Create a clean setup in a new website (make sure the sitenumber is free!):
adsutil.vbs create_vserv W3SVC/2
Copy an existing setup to a new site (including Virtual Directories!):
adsutil.vbs copy W3SVC/1 W3SVC/2
Delete a setup:
adsutil.vbs delete W3SVC/2
================
You could also use the the free IIsAdmin.NET tool, but this only creates empty sites and can’t copy settings from one site to another.
Prinsengrachtconcert 2006
Last saturday, I was in Amsterdam to attend the Prinsengrachtconcert.
This is a classical music concert held on an actual canal in the centre of Amsterdam. The atmosphere was fantastic, with lots of boats bunched up close together and many hundreds more people (there were some 1,500 in all) along the canal and on the bridges.
This year, the festival celibrated its 25th anniversary with theperformance of world-renowned pianist Lang Lang. He played extremelywell: there was such an amazing a mixture of ferrocity and gentleness and not tomention his incredible speed and accuracy. He just blew me away!
Earlierthat evening I also came across a rock band that was playing from ontop of their own 60’s Pontiac Bonneville cabrio. It turned out thatthey were playing for a wedding on. What a great location that was: onthe middle of a bridge over a canal in Amsterdam. Brilliant!
Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to find out the name of the band; they were rockin’!
Anyway, Lang Lang played the following:
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano sonata KV 330, part 1
- Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov: The flight of the bumble bee
- Frededric Chopin: Nocturne in Des gr.t.
- Franz Schubert: Marche Militaire, featuring Lucas Jussen (piano, 4 hands)
- Franz Liszt: Liebestraum, S 541, number 3
- ‘Horses’, arr. Lang Lang and Lang Guo-ren, featuring Lang Guo-ren on the erhu (video:quicktime 134kb)
- Franz Liszt: Hungarian Raphsody, number 2 in cis kl.t. (arr. Horowitz) (video:quicktime 234kb)
- Robert Schumann: Traumerei from Kinderszenen
- Aan de Amsterdamse Grachten (video: quicktime 234kb)
Watch the Prinsengrachtconcert online! (controls in Dutch)
New 538 Dance Smash Hits CD – a Big Disappointment
Lately, I haven’t been following the popular house music scene as much as I’d like.
So when I recently came across the CD "Radio 538 Dance Smash Hits 2006.03". I thought I’d give it a go.
After listening to the whole thing I realised I’d missed so frighteningly little. There was just so much crap on this compilation!
Songs like "From Paris to Berlin" should be banned. Eastern european 18 year-olds calling themselves "Infernal", trying to "sing" in English is just so far removed from cool.
There are a few tasteful tracks on the CD though, most worthy of mention is BobSinclar‘s "World, Hold On".
Sadly this CD has more sh** than hits on it.
What a shame.
MacSaber – Take the Force with you…
Just came across this geeky but oh so call app for the new Apple laptops:
When you run the aptly named programme "MacSaber", you can use the laptop as a light saber as if you were a Jedi Knight; the software taps into the inbuilt motion sensors in the devices to simulate a light saber with light and sound effects.
Check it out!
Help! Unqualified, incompetant Bush cronies!
I just came across so zillionth article about the mess that GW Bush’s adminstration seems to cause:
It turns out that a junior spokesman at NASA’s Washington headquarters was implicated in altering scientific releases from NASA to better communicate his christian-conservative viewpoints.
The New York Times reported that the 24-year-old George Deutsch amongst other things softened articles about global warming and "lobbied NASA colleagues to refer to the Big Bang as a "theory"in their communications with the public because NASA could not discountthe role of "intelligent design" in the formation of vast star systemsand planets".
Where could this unethical behaviour have been learned?
Well, for one, his résumé falsely claimed an undergraduate degree in journalism from Texas A&M University, even though he never graduated.
So he didn’t finish it completely. Fine. But lying that you have a degree, that’s just wrong.
I guess his lying is what got him places: he had joined NASA after working on President Bush’s re-election campaign.
Is there no end to Brownie, DeLay, and who knows what else?
Thankfully, he was fired more quickly than most.
The Fifth Element still rocks
I’ve just come back from me weekly movie with a big smile on my face(I often stay behind at work to watch movies on the company beamer witha few colleagues 
) .
We watched an old campy science fiction flic which I hadn’t seen in a long while: the Fifth Element.I had almost forgotten how much I loved the movie: it has great pace,comedy a dash of gratuitous violence but also romance and a moralcritique of where our society is heading.
In short, I was once again thoroughly entertained by this movie.
If you haven’t seen it: get thee to a video store now!