from time to time i get a phone call (at work) from a certain person.
what makes it different from other calls, is that this guy actually starts a conversation in the triple-handshake procedure:

he: “hi, this is _____ .”
me: “hello, sir!”
he: “hello.”
he (again): “i’m calling, because…”

 
from the first day, it reminded me of this part of my graduation paper (written in german):

TCP connection esablishment

Host A: SYN seq=”n”
Host A asks Host B to synchronize sequence numbers (n).

Host B: SYN ACK “n+1″ seq=”m”
Host B acknowledges the request with the next sequence number (n+1) and asks for synchronisation of it’s own sequence number (m).

Host A: ACK “m+1″
Host A acknowledges Host B’s SYN. the connection has been established in both directions now.

notice any analogies?

here are a few firefox shortcuts that i find really handy:

everyone (hopefully!) knows that [ctrl*] and [tab] switches between the tabs ([ctrl] [shift] [tab] works through the tabs in the opposite direction). but using [ctrl] and a digit-key [1] – [9] lets you directly access a certain tab without having to go through all the tabs between the active and desired tab.

[f6] isn’t really an insider’s tip, but i’m sure a lot of users don’t know you can jump to the address field. alternatively you can use [ctrl] [L].

you can reach the built-in search field in your navigation bar by pressing [f6] and [tab]. another (easier) option is to use [ctrl] [K].
the search-engine can be changed pressing [ctrl] [Up] and [ctrl] [Down].

* [ctrl] (“control”) is called [strg] (“steuerung”) on german keyboards, just in case you start searching desperately :wink:
 

for a complete list, visit www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard.

some time ago, i read about this cool new google feature called “google maps” at eric’s journal.

recently, an even cooler feature has been added to google maps: switching between the maps and the realistic satellite views. this is also possible for the rest of the world (the mapping system only works for northern america), but there’s only a vast overview available.

 
so here are some interesting locations that my brother anton and i have looked up:

• the very large array, new mexico — when zooming in, all the dots you see are giant satellite dishes, resulting in the resolution of a single antenna 36km across)
• arecibo radio telescope, puerto rico — they made a giant satellite dish of a valley (some “eupeptic” information)
• the mauna kea telescope complex, also known as the “heavenly twins” — the two white dots in the middle are the twins, and there are a lot more facilities up there! however, i believe that the white *area* is a cloud…
• area 51, nevada — probably the world’s most famous secret
• mount st. helens, washington state — recently showed a lot of activity again; i was there in september 03!
• steward island, new zealand — i’ll have to get back to that topic sometime…
• denia, spain — our holiday apartment is just above the mainland’s east cape

yeah, we really got lost playing around…

i can finally check something off my website-related to-do list:

i’ve successfully tested and activated my new image search script. this should be especially useful for all of you who are looking for images they found through google…
the script’s core was “borrowed” from the built-in wordpress search-feature, which handles multi-word queries very, very efficiently.

 
something else: i just added this link to the right menu-bar of the blog. apparently it’s a trap that catches spambots (the email address collecting type). or, as the folks over at spampoison.com like to say:

E-mail collecting robots will be sent in an infinite loop and will get dynamically generated fake e-mail addresses, adding enormous quantities of bogus data to the databases of the spammers, thus poisoning those files so badly that they become essentially useless :-)

OR they just want to get high google-ranks so they can earn money through advertisings…

but since i got a lot of referer-spam lately (which is highly likely to coincide with bots – think about multi-functionality), so it can’t hurt to link there

about two weeks ago, google’s image-crawler hit my site and was given a tasty meal. actually it was manipulated a bit, so it would find my photos, because the galleries are not (yet) fully accessible to searchengine-bots.

since google indexed my pictures, there has been a constant number of about 70 visitors a day, most of who came looking for certain photos.
besides, many users have come here in search of time-lapse stuff – so that’s a dramatic rise in daily visitors!

on a little side note: apparently, the bot that revealed itself as “Googlebot-Image/2.1″ in the past, has been renamed to “Mediapartners-Google/2.1″. maybe this is the first sign that google is preparing to index more kinds of media. this is of course just vague imagination, which was triggered by somebody at google stating that they were peering to index the part of the net that is not yet accessible to searchengines… (see the relatively new compatibility of .ppt-files, for example)

haha – speaking of the devil:

date: Monday, 11.Apr.2005 @ 20:59:13
hostname: crawl-66-249-65-208.googlebot.com (ip: 66.249.65.208)
browser: Mediapartners-Google/2.1

hey everybody – check out my fancy new guestmap!

it’s a freeware-script that brainerror.net offers. thanks, dude!

i’ve built in a little section called “blogs i read” in the right bar menu. it’s a selection of websites that i visit more or less regularly…

here are the websites that are featured for now:

• caroline chen: i hate pink!
• eric cheng: amazing travel reports, lots of stunning underwater photos, infrared photos, …
• escapisms: photoblog
• heimatseeker: more than just pursuing abstract german nouns (check out sibylle’s photoblog titled “i witness”, too!)
• matthew robertson’s photoblog