meiadeleite is switching to a new server over the weekend. “things might get a little shaky for a couple of days”, my systems administrator tells me. (i forgive him because he’s cute).

see you all on the other side!

so finally, after 1 year or so on the works (and the meter getting close to the “1 million postcards received” mark), there’s a fresh new face on postcrossing.com, and a ton of new features.

(congratulations!, maybe now we can enjoy a bit of free time? :P )

… is more stickers! :D

click on the image for an overload of notes on flickr. oh, and do you have stickers to trade? let me know! :)

(previous version, a couple of months ago.)

snuznluz (to be read “snooze and lose”) is an alarm clock that connects via WiFi to your online bank account, and donates YOUR real money to an organization you HATE when you decide to snooze.

the people at thinkgeek have finally found out a way to make you want to wake up on time. with the snuznluz, everytime you press snooze when the alarm goes off, you donate a minimum of $10 to a charity you hate.

the clock is connected via wifi (or cable) and comes with an embedded configuration browser utility, that lets you set your bank details and to which charity you’d like to donate.

for example they say, if you’re a butcher you might want to donate to PETA, and vice-versa.

i’m more of a morning person, so snoozing doesn’t happen all that often… but how efficient would this be to you?

seen on bb-blog. shame on me that i’m so late on this april fool’s joke… but it would be such a great item! :)

did you know the most common name for a city in the world is “oktjabrskij”? or that there are 11 cities named “springfield” in the usa, and another 11 named “clinton”? :)

here’s a ranking of the top-20 most frequent names of cities, freshly squeezed from postcrossing‘s database (might not be totally accurate):

impressive redundancy if you ask me, but then again, except maybe a couple of countries, all the others on this list are pretty big… perhaps they just ran out of imagination?

anyway, there you go: one more reason never to forget the zip code! 8-)

when i failed to join the air force and had to choose another career, i picked informatics, journalism and astronomy, all in the same application form – that’s how clueless i was towards my future. in the end, informatics won, and 7 years later, here i am, still clueless but with an engineering degree! :)
every now and then, on the most improbable situations, the informatics/mathematics part comes in handy, like for instance (and ironically) when i have to fly.

here’s the formal definition of a common problem, known as packing. the next time your mom tells you to stop procrastinating on your packing duties, you can properly explain her how hard that is – and hopefully delay the task a little longer!

• you have n kinds of items, 1 through n. each item j has a value (sentimental or of importance) p_j and a weight w_j. the maximum weight one can carry in the suitcase is c, and according to british airways, c=23 kgs.
• the number of each kind of item in the suitcase, x_j, is restricted to zero or one (for simplicity purposes).
• mathematically the problem can be formulated as:
  maximize
  subject to

this is called a 0-1-knapsack problem, which is known to be a np-complete problem. np stands for non-deterministic polynomial time… and that translates into “very hard & time-consuming problem”.

another np-complete problem is called bin packing, which consists of neatly placing different volumes in as less bins as possible. no time-efficient solution has been discovered for these problems.

so there you go. combine the two and you have packing! :D

(and now, back to the suitcases…)

ps – images from wikipedia, more on the subject here.
ps2 – who was stephen cook?

“TechCrunch answers to no one. Your complaints fall upon deaf ears oh puny startups. We will select five of you to put on our pedestal, but only those five who will wash our feet and … you get the idea. We don’t need to stick to deadlines, yes we said the 17th, but it could be today, tomorrow, or a week from now and there is nothing you can do mwah ha ha ha.”

an ironic comment on the crunchies awards blog, after 2 missed deadlines (17th, 19th dec) for the release of the nominees. no explanations given, whatsoever.
not pretty, if you ask me.

ps – it’s not the fact they haven’t released the nominees yet. it’s the fact they had 82k votes and dare to miss 2 public deadlines without an explanation – knowing they have all those people waiting on them.