About first kisses

I was writing this blogpost and started over about 4 5 6 7 times. The hell with it.
I just wanted to get the following off my chest:

Life is simple (and most people won’t agree)(watch me totally not care): Go after what makes you happy. Nobody is there to stop you. You only live once. Make it count. For your own sake and for everybody who fought (and died) for our freedom and the privilege of making your own choices.
People will tell you not to do things at some point in your life because it’s wrong/childish/stupid. Forget about them. Go with your gut instinct. If shit hits the fan at some point, you won’t be sorry. You did what you believed in. And that’s what counts. (People telling you otherwise are just too scared to actually take a leap and try to fly)

Go out there, live life and do what, you believe, will make you happy. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. It’s the only way to get better at whatever is you’re doing. Go out there and make a difference. Life is a one-time deal. It’s the only first kiss you’ll ever get. So you have every right to be excited about it.

And while I’m at it: It’s not wrong to remain a child all your life. Grown-ups don’t dream like children do… And they’re boring anyway.

Thanks for inspiring me. Whoever you are: You rock.

Section 3.3.1: Fuck off, devs

Well, if you haven’t heard about section 3.3.1 by now, you probably lived on another planet for the past 24 hours. Yesterday Apple gave a developer preview of what they’ve been working on for the next generation iPhone OS. It was a pretty great preview at first: They announced multitasking, folders, iAd, Game Center, etc. All pretty great stuff. Everything well executed as far as we could see.
As expected: Apple still says no to Flash, but nobody really expected something new on that subject.

After the keynote, developers were enabled to get their hands on the iPhone OS 4 SDK. That’s when they had to agree to the new PLA (programming license agreement) which stated the following at some point:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

If you’re not into reading legal stuff or long and very boring statements, let me translate and summarize it for you.

Hey you non-Objective-C writing prick: Fuck off. Go play somewhere else.

What Apple did here is not to make sure the apps on the app store are of a good quality. They literally told every creative Flash/Unity3D/etc developer to either learn Objective-C or to sod off and create apps for Android.

I don’t really know why Apple is doing this, other than to piss off Adobe (in particular) and make sure every developer thinks twice before even considering building apps for the iPhone platform.

Some people on Twitter suggested for Adobe to postpone the Adobe CS5 Mac release.
I’m sorry: What? Read the rest of this entry »

A perfect example

‘This is a perfect example of go home and do it again… You know what I mean?‘
Not too long ago, I wrote about how Smashing Magazine and their business was kind of “destroying” the internet. Today I ran into the perfect example of what disgusts me the most. Take a look at this:

What you see here is a page of TheNextWeb magazine. And let me start by stating the following: I love that site. The content is relevant, relaxing and not too serious all the time. So I do like the philosophy of the site. But would you mind taking a look at that screenshot? The red square shows the actual content. Everything else can only be described as

1. Ads. Really. Advertisements. Hey… It’s okay. They gotta make money somehow, right?
2. Their own social profiles: They mention every single one of them at least 3 times on that page. I think they might have forgotten they put it there twice before…
3. Social sharing links: They want you to push their content as far into the web as possible, using any social service they can get their hands on.
4. Egotripping data: After you shared this article with every living soul on the planet, they tell you what you have done. A thousand diggs! A million retweets! And a billion RSS readers!!! This actually makes me wonder: Does anyone actually care?

Because that overall look of the page annoyed me so much, I made an effort and measured the whole thing up. This is what I came up with. Read the rest of this entry »

What happens in Amsterdam…

… doesn’t stay in Amsterdam. In fact it returns all the way to Kortrijk in a big bus with a lot of exhausted people. FITC was great. We had a great time in Amsterdam, although the weather was pretty damn cold.
It’s the second time I attend FITC Amsterdam and again I’m a very delighted I did. I met lots of new people, had a few very interesting conversations and I saw lots of cool shit (which is in fact why I am there).

Day 1

I thought it would be a good day to keep my habits going in Amsterdam, so I turned up 15 minutes late for the beginning of the first day. Happily I didn’t miss much new stuff. In fact, I didn’t miss a single thing.

Ever since I started going to conferences, they always began with the Adobe Keynote. Today would be no different. Adobe would come on stage and talk about their latest numbers and how fast the latest version of the Flash Player is spreading among the internet’s users. 2 years ago, I would listen with full attention and be amazed by all those details. However on monday: I couldn’t be bothered. It’s great how fast the player is spreading but it’s really not worth half of the duration of the Keynote…
The rest of the keynote would be about the Flash Player on mobile devices. I think it’s a great step forward and I’m looking forward to future development on that aspect of the platform but the guys on stage just couldn’t interest me. So I left the keynote early. Read the rest of this entry »

I lied

I lied! I actually did! I lied when I told you everbody was going down. Because ever since I said so, the server has been up without going down at all. The server has been up for 3 days now, which is about 3 times longer as the longest uptime before that.

I think it’s safe to assume that the issues have been resolved at this point. The question that many people might want to see answered: What was the cause of all this? A hacked script.

BBclone to be exact. BBclone is a great script to keep count of your statistics. It’s free, it’s PHP based (so it doesn’t matter whether your visitors have Javascript enabled or not), it can be included using .htaccess rules, it’s simple to use, etc. Basically it’s a good script to show you basic statistics of your website. However it’s vulnerable: People can access a modified script URL to include a personal (and probably hostile) scripts (RFI exploit).

That happened to a client of mine who ended up with a nasty script residing in the BBclone folder. That script added cron jobs that ran some other nasty stuff… Very uncool as you can tell from my unstable server.

I removed those cron jobs, got rid of the hostile files, deleted BBclone and did some other (minor) stuff… The server has been up ever since.

I want to thank everyone who helped out and suggested what to look for. It would’ve taken me ages to figure out those things myself. Seen as everything is running smoothly, I can get on with what I really wanted to do: New stuff!