This week I finally introduced some small design changes to this website which had been floating around in my head for a while.

The first thing you might notice is that I changed the menu items. I replaced "news" with "blog" because I did not feel like my posts are reflecting something new. There are just thoughts about the topics I am interested in. Moreover I decided to merge the about and contact page into a new section called "info". The contact page just never had same importance as the other menu items.

Secondly, I introduced a new section called "shared". In this section you will find interesting or inspirational articles from other websites. The way it works behind the scenes is simple I use Google Reader to follow my favourite websites. When I like a specific article Google Reader allows me to mark this article as shared. In the end my website pulls all the shared articles from Google Reader and displays them here.

The main reason I introduced the shared section is that now my friends can easily see what I found interesting. This removes the need to send emails to them when I think something is worth looking at (push versus pull). Hope you like it.

At the airport in Seoul I saw the following slogan which made me smile. It certainly sounds a lot nicer than "Live everyday of your life as if it would be your last".

Did you ever wonder why text messages are limited to exactly 160 characters? Who came up with the limit and is there a logical explanation behind it?

It turns out that it is a technical limitation imposed by the GSM standard. As always Wikipedia has a nice article on the topic.

Transmission of short messages between the SMSC and the handset is done using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol. Messages are sent with the MAP mo- and mt-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signalling protocol to precisely 140 octets (140 octets = 140 * 8 bits = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet (shown above), the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UTF-16/UCS-2 alphabet.[18] Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual Short Message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters (including spaces).

Read the whole article here.

The documentary Boxes gives you a little insight into the life and genius of Stanley Kubrick. The famous director responsible for movie classics like "2001: A Space Odyssey" or "Full Metal Jacket".

I highly enjoyed it. If you are a movie fan make sure to give it a go. Direct Link