This short video / interview looks at some general aspects of the concept of fair trade and the brand with the same name.

Welcome to a very unfair edition of the Telegraph’s video show “Holy Cows”.

Click on the image below for the link (multimedia)

More information:
The Telegraph article and video

The Swedish web site forskning.se together with a group of Swedish environment and research agencies has created an excellent interactive animation on fundamentals, issues and problems of the planet we’re living on.

Click on the image below for the link (multimedia)

“…From The Planet web site:
The Planet is produced by forskning.se in collaboration with the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning, Swedish Environment Protection Agency, Swedish Energy Agency and Swedish Research Council. Our aim is to enhance public awareness and knowledge about the Planet and our future, to show the limits, threats and possibilities we are facing today…”

More information:
The Planet web site

From time to time there are stories passed around how a single tech employee is holding a company or agency hostage over a personal dispute or after being fired. This time its a story about an senior admin from San Francisco.

As the SF Chronicle reported yesterday he was arrested by Police this weekend and is being hold in jail on a USD 5 Million bail. He’s accused of having tampered with San Francisco’s new fiber network that provides access for officials to government documents, their emails and the administrative systems.

From the SF Chronicle article:
“…Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said…”

Officials claim there had been some disciplinary actions against him recently and that they “tried to fire” him. It is also reported that he has created some kind of monitoring system to check what other admins were saying and doing regarding his case. And there is of course the story of fearing that documents etc might be destroyed.

The SF Chronicle reports at length how much the city has paid the guy most likely to create the impression that he was treated fairly. It also seems from other details mentioned that the dispute must have been going on for a while. One commentator suggested they should have done the checking before they handed over the pink slip to him - well seemingly that’s what they tried and how they got into this situation.

While CEOs and other top managers have their golden parachutes of hundred of millions USD, tech people sometimes do have their own “insurance policies”.

More information:

SF Chronicle reporting on the case

Techdirt post with some interesting comments on the topic.

Our brief contribution to the squandering festivities for this year’s French national day (Fete National - 14-July-2008) in Paris.

Click on the image below for the link (multimedia)

This clip is actually from an Japanese advertising but really a great watch. 26 basic Judo throws demonstrated by an Japanese Judo master (with another one thrown of course) and showing all the throws in record time. Finally you know how to pronounce some of them like a Japanese without getting bruised.

Click on the image below for the link (multimedia)

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During the current renovation of Duvet-Dayz (the next parts come online after the weekend) we have used one great tool extensively - Firebug.

Like with other debuggers or development tools there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember. But forgive us, when you’re working with many different tools - from Photoshop to Development IDE’s to debuggers, not everyone can remember 150 different keyboard shortcuts and then use the right one at the right place.

So like many others we work with cheat sheets aka help sheets - short summaries of the most important commands on one or two pages that are available for almost all tools we use. When we started using Firebug we search on the Internet but we could not find a cheat sheet for this tool.

There is of course the documentation on the Firebug web site, well done but quite a few pages to look through whenever you just need a quick glimpse with a help sheet.

So we created our own Firebug cheat sheet and would like to share it with everybody.

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A link to America’s all time classic - “A horse with no name”.

Can’t get tired of listening to this song after all the years and it seems I’m not alone with that. Everytime when its played at some place spirits go up and people are starting to sing along the lyrics.

Click on the image below for the link (multimedia)

“…After nine days I let the horse run free
‘Cause the desert had turned to sea
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
there was sand and hills and rings
The ocean is a desert with it’s life underground
And a perfect disguise above
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground
But the humans will give no love…”

More information:

Lyrics of this great song
Wikipedia on the song and album from America

If Contact with Jodie Foster was your kind of movie then you should have a look at the real-life version of sounds and noises recorded in space.

Watch the video for the sounds Gaja sends out into space that might be heard by other “aliens” on their planets.

Click on the image below for the link (multimedia)

More information:

News article describing the phenomenon
Link to the video on Space.com

Enough said or to much noise around you - click over to Simply Noise. This web site allows you to enjoy “auditory zen” - white noise in configurable comfort zone(s).

Click on the image below for the link

One more entry to our list of Dada web sites.

Do you hate it when - during the night - flies and mosquitoes buzz around in your room. Well there are these devices you can plug into a power socket to drive them away. But what will you do when you’re in a hotel room or you don’t want to buy one of those weapons. Now there is a web page that drives away mosquitoes with its color and beeping sound (you might not find much sleep while it’s running but most likely the mosquitoes will be gone).

Click on the image below for the link

“…Do you also hate it when flies are walking over your computer screen? Now there is a simple and free solution: Load this page and those little pesters all soon will be gone!
The page emits an ultra high frequency which is not attractive for mosquitos and flies.