internet

I found this interesting article on Slashdot today. Three mathematicians at MIT proved that Tetris is NP-complete to solve. That is: if you know in advance the exact order the pieces will fall, it is NP-complete (ie: there is no smart algorithm for it) to maximize your score. The original article is here, it's quite readable for non-mathematicians too.

In the past similar results have been established for other games (for example Minesweeper). Pacman however, has 1 perfect solution (to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 will give you a total of 3,333,360 points).

Does anybody know whether the plural of beurs is beurzen or beursen?

When you search on Google for both words you'll find many companies that didn't seem to care and are using them both on the same webpage..

E-mail I received from a very good friend today:

"Joepi!!!

We hebben hem gekregen! Bug Bear! Neergeschoten door Good Old McAfee! We'll drink on that!"

(Yes!!! We got it! Bug Bear! Shot down by Good Old McAfee! We'll drink on that!)

Everybody knows that Amsterdam and New York are two of the most important cities in the world.

They are remarkable alike, as you can see on www.nycasd.com, a website comparing pictures of Amsterdam and NYC.

Beautiful pictures of "bag-carriers": men doing shopping and being bored.

It's a picture collection of Het Parool [source: tonie].

Google is celebrating it's 4th anniversary today.

They are now the most popular search engine on the web, and still growing in popularity. A feature they are currently testing is their news website, a digest of about 4000 news sources. The cool thing is that it's generated automatically, without any human intervention.

Okay, okay... I'm at work now but I just couldn't help noticing this interesting article on CNN.com.


There will be a sex-museum in New York! Big news of course. The museum in Amsterdam is also briefly mentioned.

Like I wrote about a week ago, the Dutch parliament can be viewed online.

Accidentally I found out that the British Parliament also has such a webcam, see here. Quote from today's debate: "terrorism is wicked and must be stopped".

Turns out that President Bush and Churchill are related. See this article on Ancestry.co.uk.

My father send me an e-mail about Opera, the browser he uses. They claim they are the "fastest browser on earth".



Don't know about that but they surely have a nice feature. They support CSS2 and when you switch from normal browsing to full-screen mode it will display a presentation version of your website, just like a PowerPoint show.



Here are two screenshots. The cool thing is that it's the same HTML code, it's just using CSS2 that they achieve this effect. Try it yourself at OperaShow (get Opera first).