Schonhose

Every year great commercials are proceduced for the Superbowl. This year features a remake of a 1993 McDonalds commercial featuring Michael Jordan and Larry Bird.

Here is the original from 1993:

The followup from 1994 includes Charles Barkley as well:

And this years version, featuring Lebron James and Dwight Howard:

This week the guys and girls from Defensio have released the 2.0 version of their API. Not only a SPAM filter, but Defensio can now eliminate malware and other unwanted or risky content from your blog. The best part is Pixelpost supports the latest API version through a new release of the Defensio addon for Pixelpost.

A major difference is the way content is evaluated. The old version depended on an instant results after querying Defensio, sometimes resulting in comments not being processed when the service was hammered with request. Therefore the content is now evaluated asynchronous, sending the content to Defensio which will provide a callback when the processing is done.

Initially all comments for Pixelpost make it into the Defensio Quarantine. These comments can basically have two statuses: FAIL and PENDING. The later means that the results through the callback are not in yet (you can issue a query to fetch them right away). The status FAIL means that for some reason Defensio could not be contacted (either the service is down or the API key is invalid or..). In that case you can send these comments to Defensio for an evaluation.

The major drawback of the 1.0 version of the addon was that each comment that had failed had to be rechecked manually. This issue has been resolved with the addition of a new button that processes every comment with a status of FAIL or PENDING for the last two weeks. Obviously the buttons to send either HAM or SPAM to Defensio remain in full effect.

For more information about the new Defensio checkout the “What’s new with Defensio 2.0?” or the video below. You can also download the latest plugin for Pixelpost.

Anybody who is at least somewhat familiar with basketball has heard the name of Phil Jackson and probably knows who he is. Phil Jackson coached the Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, to six NBA titles in the nineties. After taking over the LA Lakers, he has coached them to four NBA titles, the latest in 2009.

I own several books, either authored or co-authored by coach Jackson, and in one of his books he mentioned something about the ten-and-two conditioning drill. This drill is a great drill to improve conditioning of the team, but further details were not revealed. Since it has caught my interest I decided to search the internet for some references but I was unable to find them.

As a fan of coach Jackson and the LA Lakers I follow several players and people from the management at Twitter. Unfortunately coach Jackson doesn’t have Twitter, but his girlfriend Jeanie Buss does. So I decided to ask her through a tweet if she could ask coach Jackson for more information about the ten-and-two conditioning drills. Both miss Buss and coach Jackson were nice enough to respond so know I do know what the drill is about.

I find it absolutely amazing one of the best coaches in the NBA history actually took the time to answer the question and relaying that info back to me through miss Buss, who also works for the LA Lakers in management.

To end the post with a basketball related quote, courtesy of Dick Vitale: “Awesome baby! With a capital A!”

It came to my attention I have neglected my blog far to long. As always I tend to forget to update the blog whenever I’m busy doing other things. One of the things I have been busy with is my new computer. As mentioned in this blog I was working on transforming my old case to a new case. I’m happy to report that I actually got the whole setup working (despite some iitial memory problems which have been solved) and it is quite stable.

It sure is a major improvement over the old computer in terms of memory (8Gb) and speed (Quadcore). Not to mention I installed it with Windows 7 64bit and I have to admit I’m quite happy with this. Despite the normal hiccups, like old hardware not being supported and the quest for new drivers, I managed to get around 95% of my setup working again. Only thing left is the webcam which isn’t supported anymore by Logitech. There will be no more drivers for the hardware so I’m hoping to find a generic driver pretty soon.

If you know a solution to install a Logitech Quickcam Messenger under Windows 7 64bit, be sure to let me know.

Today I got confirmation the Dutch trains ride on a track, never on time.

Let’s just leave it at that.