The battle for a google wave invite has started

google_waveIn about 3 to 6 hours, Google Will start sending out 100.000 free Google Wave invites to people already using the sandbox and the ones who offered to help report bugs.
They already announced this on their blog on 20 july.

You might recognise this way of selling their product from the Gmail launch.
By using the invite-system they create some kind of temporary ‘exclusive’ product, and it works!
Back in the time when Gmail was launched, people sold their accounts for huge amounts of money, or traded the invites for a cell-phone.

I wonder if they’ll have the same result with their Wave-invite scheme.
As things are going now, it seems like it’ll be a success.
On Reddit, each topic on Google Wave is resulting in a mass request for invites.
Ofc, Twitter has the Google Wave plague too…
They’re even getting trough to eBay (at the time of writing, at $202 with FREE SHIPPING).
But I guess these guys are pure scams, as there are no invites send yet!)

I just can’t wait to get my hands on to this service, but I won’t pay for it.
In a few months we all get a bunch of free invites to give away…. Don’t forget they’ll try to conquer the internet with this.
To get to this, they’ll have to provite enough invites for the whole world!

So for those not getting the invite, be patiënt…. (I’m more talking to myself right here 😉

[Update] Websites’s put up for sharing invites or people selling invites are pure scams (if they’re still running their service)!
The Google Wave team has confirmed that they’re not allowing anyone to share invites.
You can read so on the twitter status of one of the mayor developers: twaphanie

How Jesus should be displayed by the church! [comic]

Until recently, my favorite comic figures were Spawn and Witchblade, but now there is another member… J. Christ.
He’s awesome!
If you doubt this, you should read the bi-weekly web comic by Eric Peterson and Ethan Nicolle: Jesus Christ: In the Name of the Gun.
In short, J.Christ has an argue with his dad (God) about all the bad things he didn’t prevent from happening on earth.
So he decides to solve all these things all by himself. The problem he’s wiping out in the first comic, are nazi’s.
How he’s achieving this, and his suffering by doing so are just… amazing.
This could be the new way of displaying J.Christ in a few hundred years, when the church has ‘modernized’.
By taking this as an example, they could get more followers for sure!
But for now, I’ll stay a proud pastafarian.

Here’s a little taste:

Page 8
J. Christ – In the name of the Gun (Page 8)

How to change the DNS servers in Ubuntu

You might want to change the DNS server if your ISP’s servers can sometimes be slow or outdated.

sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf

and change or add the lines:

nameserver your_DNS1
nameserver your_DNS2

You can add as many lines like these, but two should be enough.
Test the used domain name servers careful!

#dns-nameserver 192.168.0.1
#dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.2
#dns-search somedomain.org
#dns-domain 192.168.0.1

Edit: Serge’s comment (the first one) made me search a little bit.
After searching google it wasn’t totally clear if the DNS should be configured in resolv.cof or /etc/network/interfaces, so I took the GUI for a spin.
I’ve set up the DNS trough the GUI and checked the changes inside both locations.
The DNS servers I addes, became listed inside the /etc/resolv.conf file.
So after all, I was right.
But as the configuration file starts with the line #Generated by NetworkManager, I was wondering if these settings would get overwritten by the NetworkManager.
So I wiped all configured interfaces from my computer and let the NetworkManager try its evil.
It worked like a charm and just added the line ‘domain morraye.local’ to the file, without erasing my dns settings.
This was tested on Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10.

You might also want to play with these settings in your resolv.conf file

# dns-domain 208.67.222.222
# dns-nameserver 208.67.222.222
# dns-nameservers 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220
# dns-search wikipedia.org

Note: When you’re behind a router, you should change the dns server at your router (unless it uses pass-trough DNS lookups)

Bulk resizing and reformatting of pictures in an easy and fast way

I went to a BBQ yesterday and took some pictures with my cheap 10 Mpx camera.
This resulted in some nice pictures I’d like to share with friends. (not trough facebook, tough)
The problem of today’s Mpx-hype is that pictures are two to three times bigger than my computer screen.
A .JPG picture of Width: 3648 pixels and Height: 2736 pixels results in a 4.8MB file.
One night of pictures can take several Gigabytes.
The problem of this is when you want to upload them to the internet, or you want to mail them to some friends, they’ll take too much bandwidth or eat your download-limit.
When not using picasa, flickr or facebook or some sort of internet service that is.

So for resizing all the images to something more reasonable, we could use The Gimp with the batch function (included in the gimp-plugin-registry package)
But as these are a lot of large images this would simply take too long as each picture has to be opened/displayed.
Instead I recommend the ImageMagick (set of) program(s) to edit all the pictures at once.

Use the mogrify program to resize images and replace the originals. If you like, you can also change the format (extension) while doing so.
If this is the first time you play around with the ImageMagick programs, you might want to make a backup as you could damage your files irreversible.

Go to the directory where the pictures you want to resize are located.

cd ~/Pictures/TestPictures/
mogrify -resize 40% *.jpg

This will resize all files ending on .jpg to 40% of their original size. Note that the original files are replaced!

Now, if you want to convert all the .jpg files to .png’s as well, you can do this by using mogrify’s -format option like this:

mogrify -format png *.jpg

You can even do these two steps in one single command:

mogrify -resize 40% *.jpg | mogrify -format png *.jpg

So now you can relax and lay back till it’s done. 🙂

#!/usr/bin/pythonmo