From December 2009 till the 14th of February Mozilla’s new design challenge will take place. The challenge is to design the new interface (or purpose) of the so called “home tab”, a new feature in Firefox 4 that will replace the home button. The home tab can be seen something such as Safari’s top sites feature or Google Chrome’s welcome page, but in a different way. The goal is not to mimic those features, but to create something new only seen in Firefox.

Since I quit my study and not having a job at the moment plus being a Mozilla fan, I decided to give the challenge a try. However, with every challenge comes a problem. In this case it’s getting information about what should go on the home tab, and that’s why I need you (yes, you). I decided that before I would start designing at all I needed some feedback from browser users. To make your life a little bit easier, I’d love if you would be able to answer the questions listed below.

• Do you use the current home button, if so, how ?
• If this so called home tab would be included in Firefox 4.0, what would you want it to show ?
• What do you do on the web. I’m not interested in your porn addiction, I just want to know the general use of your browser (e.g. watching movies or checking facebook).
• Do you use extensions, bookmarks or your browser’s history viewer ?
• Are you interested in geek related information, such as system info or the amount of webpages you’ve visited over the past 2 weeks ? (optional)

Read more

By default Python gives developers the ability to retrieve system related data, such as the platform, using either the os or platform module. The problem is that there’s no cross-platform module (or function) that enables developers to retrieve the true operating system of the machine on which their application is running. However, there are 3 functions that can retrieve the operating systems name, version or distribution (in case the OS is a linux based system). But again, all of these functions are platform specific.

This is why I wrote platformlib, a small Python module meant to solve this problem. It uses Python’s built-in platform module and hardcore nerd power to retrieve the name, version and codename of the operating system on which it’s running. No longer do you have to deal with system names such as “Darwin”. Instead, the platformlib will return “Mac OS X 10.6.2” if the users is running that specific operating system.

Supported Systems

* Mac OS X (>= 10.4)
* Microsoft Windows (XP or newer)
* Linux based systems (Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc)

Downloads, Wiki, etc

All of this can be found at the project page: http://www.yorickpeterse.com/projects/projects/show/platformlib

As of today I’m starting to migrate my website from Antagonist’s shared hosting service to a VPS at VPS.net. I’ve always loved the service provided by Antagonist and I doubt there is any other Dutch webhost that can match it, but there is a day that you realize that shared hosting just isn’t enough. The main problem when I started looking for a VPS was that I do not have a credit card (as you have to be 18 for one) and 90% of the available webhosting companies do not accept Paypal, VPS.net does.

Expect several downtimes throughout the week.

Update

Site has been migrated and everything is working fine.

My Family is a series of photos shot for a school assignment. The assignment was to take 10 pictures of either family members or friends, in this case I asked my imaginary family if it was ok to take photos of them. I didn’t want to take “regular” pictures of relatives or friends as you see them often, not because that would make the pictures look ugly but simply because it’s boring as hell (and has been done before, A LOT).

For example, there was a student who simply took photos of a person without actually being able to tell what she did, and more importantly why she did it. Not that taking photos of people without knowing why is bad however, when you’re doing it for an assignment and it simply doesn’t make sense it can get quite complicated. On top of that I just happen to find it boring as hell (which you’ve probably noticed by now).

The new photos can be seen in the My Family album.

So I decided to open up Mozilla Ubiquity to do a quick google search for the word “mary” to see whether I spelled it wrong or not, only to notice that Ubiquity seems to be controlled by a bunch of religious people.