Schonhose

With the basketball season almost over it seems I’ll finally have some time to pursue photography again. I know I have been really lacking in this department, not only due to being a coach, but also due some stuff in my personal life. Selling the house and moving into a new place takes up more time than planned. But all is well now and I do have some fun photo projects planned.

It seems the Giro d’Italia is starting in Amsterdam this year and will come through most of the province of Utrecht on May 9th. I’ll probably will try to get a good spot near the route and will take some pictures.

After the Giro we have a couple of weddings ahead, but before that we have the bachelor parties. These should not only be loads of fun but hopefully will provide some decent shots as well. To top things off I have a small trip planned to Paris, France so as you can see there are more than enough photo moments throughout the upcoming weeks.

It has been a while since my last post and like always I managed to find a good excuse for not posting anything. The last month (!) I have been busy trying to solve a riddle which involved the Defensio addon. As you have probably read on this blog or somewhere else on the web, Defensio is used to protect a blog against comment spam. A few months back I was very excited about the version 2 release of the api and I modified the plugin for the photoblogging software Pixelpost for this new version.

About a month ago I noticed that huge amounts of spam were actually published in my websites. Pretty strange, considering Defensio was active to prevent this behavior. It took some long nights to discover that my hostingcompany had disabled the fsockopen functionality, something that is extensively used by Defensio. So we had to switch to Curl, although that wasn’t completely operational just yet. The guys at Defensio put in some extra hours and provided me with a working test version. After some modifications Defensio was yet again stopping spam in my photoblog.

However, I also have a WordPress blog (you’re reading it) and that also attracts tons of spam. So much in fact I updated some core files of the WP addon with the newly programmed files and a fresh copy from GitHub to enable Defensio again. To bad it didn’t work. Over 100 spam comments a day where published on my blog and had to be removed manually. It took me and Camilo from Defensio about three nights debugging to catch the offending line of code and finally the plugin (which stopped working at March 21, 2010( is fully operational again since last night.

Finally all spam is getting caught again which frees me up to do some more bug hunting in some code I wrote instead.

In the light of today’s game, which we won by the way, I just came to a realization:

Being a coach is pretty much like being a referee. No matter what you do, at least someone will disagree with you and feel left out.

I’m pretty sure this is valid for all kind of sports at every level. Does this realization make it easier to handle? No, actually it does not. Does it make it even easier to do? Not even close. Does it make me feel good? No, it never feels good to disappoint one of more individuals.

So, what is my take on it for basketball? Well, first and foremost basketball is a teamsport and not an individual sport. The catchphrase here is “There is no ‘I’ in team”, meaning there is basically not much room for the individual. What does that mean? You have to occasionally set aside your personal aspirations for the benefit of the team.

On the other hand, and this creates a nice paradox, you need individuals to form a team. This fact is a really good basis for a conflict of interest and most certainly a starting point for disappointments.

As a coach the thing you have to focus on should be first and foremost the team. All decisions are made with the team in mind. Some of those decisions might be good and others might not be so good (in retrospect) but seemed to be ok at the time. It is inevitable to disappoint individuals while performing sacrifices for the team. But making individual sacrifices is also part of the concept of a team.

As a member of a team you have to set your personal goals aside so the team in whole can flourish. For example, as an individual you might want to play as many minutes as possible. As a teammember you might just get limited minutes. But the minutes aren’t really the issue here, the real question is: what can you do in that limited timeframe to help the team? Can your actions in those minutes be the turning point of the game or be an inspiration to one or multiple teammembers?

I know what I always wanted as a player. I would rather play limited numbers, score zero points and win the game than play the whole game, outscore everyone and loose. Because in the end it is after all about the team. And nothing hurts more than loosing.

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.