08
Mar 10

oscarazzie!

Sandra Bullock wins the Razzie for worst actress in ‘All About Steve’

Sandra Bullock wins the Oscar for best actress in ‘The Blind Side’

Sandra Bullock Says Her Best Actress Oscar Will Go Right Next To Her Razzie For Worst Actress


07
Mar 10

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

In case life is more than a dream to you, you can visit Abu Dhabi Yacht Show or contact WHY Yachts


06
Mar 10

An eye for details

The gowalla.com homepage was nicely redesigned recently and even the source code is crafted carefully.  Take a look at the gowalla ASCII Art logo.


06
Mar 10

Just got faster…

People visiting a (cached) page of this blog, can experience up to 493% improvement. Only change so far was installing and activating the WP Super Cache plugin. This should enable this blog to get back into the “fast lane” below 1,5 seconds.


04
Mar 10

This blog is too slow…

Compared to other pages on this server, the time required  for database look-ups and the images used, this WordPress blog is respectively slow. The 2.28 seconds required to return the homepage illustrated above is not even a worst case scenario (sometimes it takes more than 4 seconds to load). In the coming weeks we will further look into this and try to improve.

According to Google Webmaster tools there are already some improvements (but these measurements are only estimates with low accuracy because of the limited data points).

google webmaster tools - vancouteren.com

There are a lot of resources available on-line:

Many suggestions are related to reducing the number of php-functions (making the site more static), database look-ups,  HTTP & DNS requests and of course cache-ing. As for now it is not possible to isolate all factors, this will only be an experimental journey.

All your feedback is welcome, feel free to register and provide your feedback and or suggestions.


01
Mar 10

Your not in control, you are the controller

Xbox Natal was announced by Microsoft in june 2009, and should be available as of Holiday season 2010. Will this become the Wii-killer? TIME:Microsoft Whacks the Wii: A First Look


23
Feb 10

When I see an elephant fly

Hard to imagine that seeing an Elephant fly actually could get you into college (Tufts Now Accepts YouTube Videos as Part of College Application)

As a reference the original dumbo version from Disney


23
Feb 10

Can somebody make the sun shine?


Vespa, originally uploaded by gvancout.

Can somebody make the sun shine? in belgium.. Please
(Nice and easy integration between Flickr & wordpress blog software)



21
Feb 10

“Belgian winter olympics”

When searching for “Belgian winter olympics” google returns a quick summary: 0 gold, 0 silver, 0 bronze,… Thumbs up for  Karen Persyn and the Belgian Bobsleigh team in order to change this.


10
Feb 10

Belgian “Dez Moma” at “De wereld draait door”

Belgian music formation “Dez Moma” performs in  “De wereld draait door”,  a talkshow hosted by Matthijs Van Nieuwkerk on VARA (Dutch TV station) .

Additional recording