The Love Injections web sites

Now that Valentine is over, can we please proceed with the serious matter?

I programmed the websites for the release of the Love Injections book, written by Kim Brusselmans. Here are the English version (Love Injections) and the Spanish version (Inyecciones de Amor). This book might be described as "an original attempt to inspire people to boost their relationships", but to get a better idea of what that means you should check this page: Example pages.

The book is on sale in a few shops in Spain and Belgium, and after the crazily successful book presentations in Barcelona and Ghent, we also opened online shops for both countries.

The sites were done in Drupal, with a fairly simple Ubercart setup to deal with the shopping part. The minimalist graphic design was done by Luxoa and programmed as a subtheme of the Zen theme.

The silent MP3: To bed with the iPod Shuffle or Zen Stone

Flaws in products call for hacks, so that's why I tried to solve the following annoyingness.

Lots of people listen to their mp3 player in bed and fall asleep with the music still on. "Shuffle" players like the iPod Shuffle and Zen Stone don't have a "do not repeat" option, so they just continue playing songs until the battery dies. That will most probably disturb your good night's rest, and apart from that you will wake up with an empty battery. And we don't want either of these, do we.

I figured that a small hack could solve both problems: put a very long silent MP3 in your playlist. You could peacefully sleep over it and it wouldn't drain your player's power either. So I generated a set of MP3 files that occupy just 3.5 MBytes per hour of true quality silence. They are encoded at 8 bits, mono and 8 KHz (the minimum sound quality playable by most players). The links are at the bottom of this post, packed as .rar archives. This is how it works:

1. Determine how long you want to sleep, e.g. 7 hours.
2. Download the corresponding silent mp3 file and put it in your playlist just after the track by which you will likely fall asleep. If you don't have a playlist, simply rename the mp3 so that it is played after the last music track you want.
3. Go to bed with your favorite music, fall asleep and enjoy the silence.
4. Get up, switch off your mp3 player, and have a croissant.
   

Suggestions are open for other uses of these silent MP3s. So onto the next problem now: avoiding being strangled by the headphone chord while sleeping.

Files (compressed with RAR):

• sleeper1.mp3 (1 hour of silence: 3.5 MB unpacked, 2.83 KB packed)
• sleeper2.mp3 (2 hours of silence)
• sleeper3.mp3 (3 hours of silence)
• sleeper4.mp3 (4 hours of silence)
• sleeper5.mp3 (5 hours of silence)
• sleeper6.mp3 (6 hours of silence)
• sleeper7.mp3 (7 hours of silence)
• sleeper8.mp3 (8 hours of silence: 28.1 MB unpacked, 17.7 KB packed)

Update 16th April 2009: Due to popular demand I'm adding a complementary set of shorter MP3s, for all you sleephackers out there. This should cover your napping needs.

• sleeper.01.mp3 (1 minute of silence: 58.9 KB unpacked, 239 B packed)
  
• sleeper.03.mp3 (3 minutes of silence)
  
• sleeper.10.mp3 (10 minutes of silence)
  
• sleeper.30.mp3 (30 minutes of silence: 1.7 MB unpacked, 1.26 KB packed)
  

License: Silent MP3 by Steven Van Vaerenbergh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Hosting Uptime/Downtime Calculation

While searching for hosting companies for a number of websites I'm working on, I noticed that a lot companies in Spain try to sell 99.5% guaranteed uptime as being very little downtime. Since this seemed like less than the average to me, I figured I might do a little calculation.

guaranteed uptime	max downtime	downtime / week	downtime / month	downtime / year
99%	1%	1.68 hours	7.2 hours	3.65 days
99.5%	0.5%	50.4 minutes	3.6 hours	1.825 days
99.9%	0.1%	10.08 minutes	43.2 minutes	8.76 hours
99.99%	0.01%	1.008 minutes	4.32 minutes	52.56 minutes
99.999%	0.001%	6.048 seconds	25.92 seconds	5.256 minutes
99.9999%	0.0001%	0.6048 seconds	2.592 seconds	31.536 seconds
99.99999%	0.00001%	0.06048 seconds	0.2592 seconds	3.1536 seconds

While most of these scenarios are not really realistic, it is interesting to see what companies are really offering. Reading about the recent Amazon S3 outage makes one want to place things into context. Amazon's goal is to offer 99.9% uptime, which means a maximum of 0.1% downtime and therefore not more than 43.2 minutes of downtime per month. The outage took little more than 2 hours which qualifies it as a 99.5% host this month. That's a long way from the 99.999% they should be offering for cloud computing indeed.

Photo tricks pt.2: Fun with Escher and Droste

un excès de bricolage
Originally uploaded by Steven2358

Last weekend I dropped some of my pictures in the weirdly whirling image manipulation device that is the Droste effect. It looks fun, it is fun, and it isn't that hard to achieve at all. Just follow the steps in this fine Droste effect tutorial and get confused faces in no time.

Spring is in the Air - I'm finishing some websites

AdventureImagery.com, the online shop for extreme sports and related stock footage. Check out the crazy videos! I particularly like the skydiving, kite surfing and bicycling footage.

Santander-Unico.com, the "quality guide to Santander". Indispensable for anybody visiting Santander (Spain). Includes some google maps and the nice shadow hack tastypopsicle made of the onion skinned drop shadows.

AulaDeOratoria.com, the first Spanish portal for everybody interested in getting his message to his audience.

La Ring 01

(... or how to destroy your inner ear cells)

Ever noticed how difficult it is to hear your mobile phone in a noisy place like a sports stadium or crowded bar? "That's because there's a lot of noise" you think. But there's an additional factor: polyphonic ringtones are a lot harder to hear than the good old monophonic ones.

The problem with polyphonic ringtones is that since they divide their output power over the complete audible spectrum, they get easier masked by environmental noise. Monotonic ringtones stand out, putting all their power in a single frequency at a time. Anyway, polyphony is here to stay, so let's make the best out of it.

Here's how to make a ringtone that you can hear well in noisy situations (requirements: audio editor software + mobile phone that can play mp3s):

1. Take your favorite song that has a lot of high frequencies (audio fx, percussion, hiss noises,...) and chop it up a bit. I took Vitalic's "La Rock 01" but you might as well try out some of Dave Tipper's stuff.
2. Remove bass frequencies and add treble, e.g. with a filter like this:
   
3. Transfer it to your phone, sit back and wait until you get called.

My ringtone is available right here, ready for download and transfer to a mobile phone. You can preview it with the applet below, although it sounds different on a pc speaker than on a phone. And be warned: listening to this kind of stuff a lot is not good for your ears.

Tags: mp3, cell phone, audio, diy

Wedders with Hollywood ambitions

You like movies and you're about to get married? Enter the fine initiative of the people of bodametraje.com, who cast the pair of you in the roles of real movie stars, making a complete short movie with you as the stars/ heroes/ villains/ whatever suits the script. The idea was launched in Spain by bodametraje.com, and the wedding guests really seem to appreciate the dvds with the short films (which are mostly handed out at the wedding). Or, to quote the production team:

"Bodametraje.com ofrece la posibilidad de dar un toque inovador y exclusivo a su boda mediante la realización de un cortometraje de cine protagonizado por los novios, un "bodametraje".

Usted elige un tema y la organización se encarga de escribir el guión. El tiempo de rodaje suele ser de tres días aproximadamente, y no es necesario saber actuar, un buen trabajo de postproducción conseguirá un resultado espectacular.

El cortometraje podrá ser proyectado en pantalla gigante durante el cocktail de recepción o en algún momento del banquete o bien se repartirá un DVD con el mismos a cada invitado como recuerdo de los novios sustituyendo los típicos puros, bombones, o figuritas... (que tampoco nos sorprenden).

Sus familiares y amigos quedarán impresionados al descubrir su lado más Bond... y les agradecerán la originalidad, pues quién quiere ver otra boda estándar?

No solo tendrá el corto sino que además podrá disfrutar de las tomas falsas y entrevistas tipo Hollywood. El DVD tendrá un total de 30 minutos."

I programmed the flash website, easy and to the point. Check it, there's a nice shortfilm under the "ofrecemos" menu.

Tags: hollywood, wedding, short film, boda, cortometraje