filling the void

Production Values

2011-05-10T09:59:00.003+02:00

Yesterday and today I came across some short movies. Some were fan made, others were not. Some were in between. None of them were "real" movies, in the sense that they were feature length, or big hollywood productions. While the acting, props and settings were all fine, you could see that there was a distinct texture difference between them. One of them (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf75iUZVn7Y)(1) had a very professional look. The other (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9UwlAAnlmg)(2) did not. Sure, the budgets were different, but the acting seemed similar in quality, and a behind-the-scenes look at the latter one revealed perfectly professional looking equipment, lighting and make-up. Therefor, I wonder, what's the difference in end result? Why do they look fundamentally different? Clearly it's not just a "throw more money at it" issue. Neither of these are simple home videos, they are more-or-less professional productions. The movie in between (http://kinostalker.com/?lang=en)(3) was more professional, and probably longer, than the second, but clearly suffered from the same home video look. Is this a matter of post processing or using filters or lighting or what? I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts.

Ken Jennings Answers Questions On Reddit

2011-03-04T20:54:00.003+01:00

This is all sorts of awesome: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fwpzj/iama_74time_jeopardy_champion_ken_jennings_i_will/
Ken Jennings, it turns out, is not just awesome at jeopardy, but also just an awesome guy. And, for those people who keep track of these sort of things, racked up 47k karma on reddit with a single post. Guy's an instant internet hero.

Android Launcher Replacements

2011-02-09T10:04:00.003+01:00

I just tested a bunch android replacement launchers (Android 2.3 Launcher (Home), GO Launcher EX, ADW.Launcher, Home++ beta and LauncherPro). I was giving them a spin to see if any of them could make a good replacement for the sense launcher that I'm currently using on my HTC Desire Z. The thing is that I like the whole Sense integration with email, contacts, facebook, twitter, everything. My problem is with the launcher itself. It has one huge phone button, an apps button, and a horribly useless "personalize" button (a function with is otherwise only 2 clicks away). I had been browsing the forums and reading stuff online about which launchers might be best. It came down to the ones listed at the top. I installed each one of them, and gave them a try.

You know the saying "you never get a second chance to make a first impression"? Well, the first impression I got from all these launchers was horrible. They were all slower than molasses. Clicking icons to start apps would take 2-3 seconds before the app actually started. I'm not talking about the startup time of the app itself here, I'm talking about the time it took for the launcher to understand that I had pushed the button and to start launching the application.

While these launchers deliver some extra things in the launcher part itself, it cannot possible make up for the incredible slowness of the applications themselves. Such a simple thing as populating the app drawer, something sense does immediately (certainly fast enough for me to not notice any delay) would take several seconds with these launchers.

They may be pretty, and they may offer increased functionality, but when it comes down to it, speed is king. When the launchers get down to millisecond start times, I might take another look. Unfortunately, though, I doubt that's going to happen any time soon.

Hackers Are People Too

2011-01-29T10:44:00.007+01:00

What a fitting price for such an item. Taken from Amazon.com

Blue buttons in firefox

2011-01-27T23:31:00.004+01:00

Turns out I got a bit more than I bargained for when I ran firefox in XP compatibility mode. Loading local HTML files is difficult, and mouse button (back & forward) navigation no longer works, along with a slew of other small nitpicky problems. I guess I'll have to find another way of making firefox not look like ass in Windows 7.

Edited: Solution: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xp-on-vista/

No more blue buttons in firefox

2011-01-25T21:46:00.003+01:00

I recently started using windows 7. When I did, I noticed that the look of firefox had changed. In windows XP I was used to the back and forward buttons being green, the stop being red, etc. In windows 7, everything is the same godawful blue color. "How do I change firefox in windows 7 so that it looks like it did in windows xp?", I asked myself (and googled for). Well, it turns out that the answer is quite simple. You run it in the windows xp compatibility mode. By setting the compatibility mode to windows xp, service pack 3, the nice familiar look came back. I don't yet know if it'll have any adverse effects, but I'm assuming I'll find out later. Problem solved, and the internet at large was absolutely no help at all. A friend of mine on IRC figured it was worth a try and he was right. Thanks, friend!

As an aside, I can't write for shit these days. It should like someone else is blogging for me. It's like I only have something to say, and I type it up. No sense of style of cadence or anything. It's terrible. In this case, I wanted to share my new-found knowledge with the internet (since a google search gave me nothing). Normally, though, ... Well, like I said, I've got nothing... Maybe next year...

The result of playing the whole "cyan - transmissions" album with the windows speech recognition running

2010-12-11T17:07:00.001+01:00

It's as from the FFFFFFFFF and FFINFFF if it passes F FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF F and its chief its fans aren't FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF still has a high FFFFFFFFF F F F FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF if FE FE and peas F F if this if FFFFFFFFF at FFFFFFFFF, half F F S S F F F FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF is up and found this is an FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF and peace and if the FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF has FM and an F F FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF F's and push and push FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFF|f hub pa has

Drive-by downloads

2010-10-11T19:03:00.003+02:00

I consider myself a fairly computer savvy user. I block ads via my hosts-file, I don't click on untrusted links, i don't run flash except by whitelist, I don't click on punch the monkey. I've never had any viruses, never been infected with any trojans. Until today. Today, I got the "AntiVirus 2010" virus. It's a variation of the other similar viruses that circulated in 2009 and 2008. It basically shows fake virus alerts, prompting you to buy the full version to clean all the fake viruses off your system. Obviously, the only virus, is "AntiVirus 2010".

I was very surprised to get this virus, as I'm a firefox user. I always keep both my windows installation and my firefox installation up to date. I thought I was immune to this crap. I was wrong. I got it by means of a drive-by download. I was visiting fairly innocuous sites, looking at some pictures, and them BAM, out of nowhere, this thing is already downloaded and installed on my machine. There are .exe files everywhere, and it lives in my system tray. I never saw a dialog box or anything.

Perhaps it's my own fault, for not running any anti-virus, but quite frankly, most anti-virus solutions are total fucking resource hogs, and since they are only actually useful in extremely rare cases, they are a total waste of money and cpu cycles (hey, run-on sentence, what the hell, man?).

So I ask you now, what can I do to prevent this shit? Obviously the bad guys are getting smarter and the good guys have their hands full. Clearly being up-to-date is not sufficient anymore. I've installed no-script, but last time I did, I got so frustrated with how bad the internet worked, that I simply disabled it. I guess we'll see how long it lasts this time.

what if adobe prevented photoshop from running on os x

2010-08-26T17:47:00.002+02:00

what if adobe prevented photoshop from running on os x, just like apple prevents flash from running on the iphone? If nothing else, just to stick it to steve jobs. Who would blink first, apple or adobe?

My life's been up and down since I walked from that crowd...

2010-07-13T17:50:00.000+02:00

Amen, brother...

Social Networks Share Information Without Permission

2010-05-21T08:35:00.003+02:00

Facebook caught sharing secret data with advertisers (arstechnica.com)
Facebook, MySpace, others, sharing personal information w/o permission (wsj.com)
Major social networks (yes, Facebook) sending data about you to advertisers (mashable.com)

Are people actually surprised when shit like this happens? What could make you possibly think that the valuable information that you gave to these companies (facebook, myspace, etc) would not be used by them for profit? No matter what a company says in their policies or EULA or whatever the present you with before taking your personal information, these companies will use your information for profit if they find that the reward is larger than the risk. Either they lie to you and do it behind your back (greater risk) or they simply say "fuck you" and change the terms that you both agreed on (if there was ever any actual agreement. This could simply have been a statement on their website, in which case it's not exactly binding) and share it anyway.

In short, if you can't stand loosing your personal information, don't give it to somebody else!

Maverick Strada XB

2010-05-14T18:29:00.004+02:00

I have a new hobby. An old one, perhaps I should say. I've recently gone out and purchased something that I used to have, but then did not use for a long time. I've gone and purchased a radio controlled (or rc) car. I've had two Kyosho cars before. One electric buggy, and one nitro Corvette. I think my nitro Corvette is still somewhere in a box in my moms storage or something. Too far away for me to play with, in any case. My new car is a buggy. A Maverick Strada XB, built by HPI. It's what's called a "Ready To Run" (or RTR), which means that it came fully assembled with a radio and battery, charger and everything. While I prefer building these things myself, kits are considerably more expensive than RTRs (why?), so I opted for something cheaper now in the beginning.

Today was my first day out with it. I had 4 fully charged NiMH batteries, and I was ready to go. I went downtown to a larger abandoned square, I can't remember it's name, where I had previously seen people drive RC monster trucks (that experience was the first in a series of events which led to this recent purchase). When I arrived, I saw that something was not quite right. This place is made up of cement plates, connected by metal things. These metal things are like lids for the gutters that form between the cement slabs. The problem was that a good 90% of these metal plates were missing or protruding from the ground at odd angles. I decided to try it out anyway. It turns out that, due to the nature of my car (buggy, lot of ground clearance, big tires), these missing plates proved to be nothing more than a nuisance. Driving across them (perpendicularly) was absolutely no problem at all. I flew over these gaps like they did not even exist. Occasionally, I'd hit one going parallel to it, which caused my car to stop, but that was easily fixed by simply lifting it out.

I decided to run two batteries there, and two batteries in the park. Said and done. I'm there, running close to the end of my second battery, when disaster strikes. As I mentioned previously, some of the remaining metal covers were protruding from the ground at odd angles. Unfortunately, I hit one of these. It was sticking out of the ground at about 30-45 degrees. Had I come from the "good" side, this would merely had made it a ramp. Unfortunately, I accidentally hit it from the other side (don't ask me how, I don't even know). This would probably not have been an issue, had it not been for the fact that I hit it full blast, with a fairly sensitive part of my buggy, and it got stuck. Pulling it free, I instantly saw the damage done. My front left shock absorber had a nasty bend in it. So nasty, in fact, that I couldn't even compress the shock. I had effectively gone from 4 nice shocks to 3 nice shocks plus one solid metal stick. Luckily, it didn't impact performance that much, but I felt it sucked that I had to get a new shock absorber after my first day.

Luckily, this is not the end of the story. After coming home and cleaning the car, I went to town on the shock absorber. I got out my meanest tools (read polygrip) and started manhandling the shock absorber in an effort to make it straight again. This would have been considerably easier if I had been able to actually remove more than just the top mount. I had to do this with the bottom still attached to the linkage assembly, and with the spring still attached. Pulling that spring up all the way and holding it with your hand while you exert force on the tower with a large tool is not as easy as it might seem. After about 15-30 minutes, I had gotten it to a place where it would compress almost smoothly. At some point I could compress it fully, but then it would not shoot back out again. Hardly an optimal situation to be in. In its current state, reattached fully to the buggy, it will compress and expand with a small bit of resistance in the middle. I'm going to consider this to be fine for the moment. If another shock breaks, I might buy a set of 2 and replace this one as well, but for now, this will have to do.

As for the driving experience; it was childlike fun. I spent about 1½ hour out there, running down 3x3000mAh and 1x1800mAh batteries. The park was infinitely better than this square, so that's where I'm going back next time. I absolutely love driving radio controlled cars. There was a time when I thought I wanted a helicopter, but cars are simply too much fun. Why I've been away from the sport/hobby for so long, I don't know. I'm back, baby! I managed to get 3 teenage boys to ask me if they could drive (and I let them, since I was such a nice guy), another group of people asking me how much I paid for it (roughly 230 euro), yet another two 4-or-so-year-olds chasing after it with childlike glee, and finally a small puppy playing with it as well. It was a hit for me and the park as a while. I can't wait to go back. Cezara even thought it looked like enough fun that she considered buying one at the same time as me so that we could drive together. In the end, she opted not too, but I think that she might change her mind when she starts playing with mine...

Now all I have to do is to find a track and a club, and I'll be as happy as a fish in water! =)

Bing maps

2010-02-14T19:45:00.002+01:00

While I haven't actually tested this myself, there's a TED talk from 2010 about Bing maps, and it looks absolutely fucking amazing. Google maps is NOTHING compared to this. In case you don't believe me, and have 8 minutes to spare, watch it yourself and get blown away

They killed my laptop!

2009-12-15T16:06:00.003+01:00

Yeah, this is totally a reasonable thing to do: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/15/airport-security-guards-kill-literally-kill-a-macbook/

I realize that things might be a bit tense down in Israel, but wtf?! I don't know the whole story, but from what I can read in the article above, it seemed pretty unwarranted. Shoot the woman's laptop then let her go? If you shoot the laptop and take her in to custody, I could have imagined that something was wrong, but just shooting it and then telling her, essentially, to fuck off?

"With all due respect, ma'am, you can go jump off a bridge,"

2009-11-17T10:46:00.002+01:00

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/11/16/pledge_of_allegiance/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature

I used to live in the US once. More than 10 years ago now. I was, in essence, also sent to the principal's office when I both refused to recite the oath, and when I didn't want to stand. I got out of reciting the oath, what with me not being a citizen and all, but I had to stand, because the other students were jealous of me sitting down when they were all forced to stand.

Torchlight

2009-11-06T08:21:00.002+01:00

Welcome to Diablo 2.5! After having spent only a handful of hours with Torchlight, I can already proclaim, with a fair bit of certainty the best game of the year. It's made by many (if not all) of the same people who made Diablo 2. I have played countless hours of Diablo 2. It was my goto game for several years, before WoW took hold of me. Anyway, Torchlight is a lot like Diablo 2. So much so, in fact, that anyone who has ever played Diablo 2 might think that this is simply a sequel.

What does differ from Diablo 2, however, and what makes Torchlight a better game (so far anyway), is primarily that there seems to be a more open quest system. As some of you may recall, Diablo 2 had a fixed set of quests that you repeated in all difficulties, until you were "done". This was a fairly small set, 30 quests per difficulty in the last expansion, if memory serves, which made the Diablo 2 end-game more about loot hunting than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I liked that too, but having played a lot of WoW, I really like the almost endless supply of quests that you have. Sure, Torchlight won't be like that, most likely, with a comparatively smaller world to explore, but it does feel like they've given this particular part some though. The other very nice part is that you can have a pet companion that not only can carry things for you, it can go back to down and sell them for you! No more having to TP to town every 3 minutes because your inventory got full. You can also equip your pet (a dog or a cat) with rings, amulets and spells. It's like a better version of the hirelings that you could have in Diablo 2.

For everything else, Torchlight is exactly like Diablo 2. Similar game mechanics, similar interface, hell, even the hotkeys are mostly the same. This, of course, makes Torchlight, for someone who loved Diablo 2, a wonderful experience. If you didn't like Diablo 2, though; Torchlight is probably not for you.

So, if you were not completely against playing Diablo 2, there's a fair chance that you will love Torchlight. I know I already do. Start playing this game today! You won't regret it!

It's OK to not write unit tests

2009-11-05T13:08:00.002+01:00

This guy is 100% correct. It's perfectly fine to not write unit tests for everything.
I don't even know what to write here. This guy is just so fucking right. Read the article, and follow some of the links. Do it! Stop being a slave to dogma!

Blast From The Past

2009-11-02T09:33:00.000+01:00

I came across this name the other day on the internet: Keill Randor.
It rung a bell, so I started investigating. It turns out that he's a character in a book I read ages ago as a "young adult" that I loved. I no longer have the book (I wonder where all those books went), but I remember it fondly.

Since it is written for "young adults", I doubt that I would like it, should I re-read it now, but it was still quite funny to happen upon this little nugget of my past.

10/GUI

2009-10-16T17:49:00.003+02:00

Holy shit, welcome to the future!
Click that link and spend just under 9 minutes seeing the future of human-computer interaction.
I shit you not.

Photography Is Hard!

2009-10-12T23:26:00.003+02:00

I'm two months in to my D90 ownership, and I'm totally in love with this camera. What I'm not as excited about, however, are my pictures. I have zero creative vision. I can look at other pictures and go "ohh, that's a nice one", but there are very few of my own that elicit such praise. From me other others (in fact noone else has said that about any of my pictures, but then again only very few of them are online). I suppose I could whore around for comments and faves on flickr, but I'd rather have pictures that I'm really happy with myself, first. Then (if ever) get the recognition of others.

I think one of the reasons for my lack of creativity is this terrible city that I live in. Brussels has got to be the grayest, most boring, least interesting place on earth to live in. Shit, a hole in the ground probably has more things to look at. Don't get me wrong, I have a great life... ...I just wish I was living it elsewhere... =/

Anyway, drop by (flickr) and leave a comment, if you feel one is warranted. Or if you just want to cheer me up ;)

Obama Wins Peace Price

2009-10-09T14:16:00.003+02:00

So, Barack Obama won the Nobel's Peace Price. What a fucking joke! I mean, he's a great man and all, and he's definitely working towards peace, but it's not like he's actually accomplished anything worthy of such an award in his one year in office.
Sure, after one term in office, maybe two. A political life's worth of fighting for peace and succeeding. Then, and only then, does it make sense to award someone the peace price. As it stands now, we don't even know if his initiatives will actually bear fruit. Hell, for all we know, he might invade Iran in the coming 6-18 months!

Clearly leaving this decision in the hands of the Norwegians was a bad idea...

Nikon Owner

2009-09-13T17:52:00.002+02:00

I am now a Nikon owner. I have wanted an SLR for a large portion of my life. When I was young, I couldn't afford one. When I got older, I could afford one, but couldn't really justify buying one. I still can't really justify buying one, but I did it anyway, and I love my new camera! It is absolutely wonderful. I bring it everywhere with me now. Ok, maybe not to work or to the grocery store, but pretty much everywhere else. I have created a photostream on flickr, hoping to showcase some of my work, and get some feedback on the pictures I take. Why don't you head on over and take a look?

I purchased a Nikon D90 with an 18-105mm lens. I really love the ergonomics of it. I was considering the d5000 for a while, but the d90 gave me access to more things without having to go through menus, so I decided to spend the extra money. It was totally worth it!

I've been learning a lot, too. I've been all over the net, hoovering up any information I can get my dirty little hands on. In particular, there's this group on flickr called Nikon Digital Learning Center, which has been a fountain of good stuff.

Anyway, I'm very happy taking pictures, and I hope you'll be happy looking at them.

TED: Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars

2009-08-15T14:57:00.003+02:00

My friend sent me this link a while back. It's a talk about electric cars and the infrastructure we need to support them. This was about 4-6 weeks ago. Being a TED talk, I was sure it would be good, but I also thought to myself "hey, I know a bit or two about electric cars. Maybe there's not a pressing need that I watch this. How much new stuff can this person possibly have.

That was a mistake. An error in judgment. I just watched it now, and I was overcome with a feeling of hope and wonder, as he laid out his plan for the electric car in the future. At the end of the talk, when the audience game him a standing ovation, I almost felt myself rise out of my chair and doing the same thing. Absolutely brilliant. Not emotionally moving, as most things that get standing ovations are (Think Christopher Reeve at the Oscar's), but just absolutely brilliant.

If you have 18 minutes (and I can't imagine anyone who doesn't), you really need to watch this. Don't postpone it like I did. It really is worth watching. Perhaps even twice.

What do you do with the pictures you take?

2009-08-11T10:41:00.003+02:00

What do you do with the pictures you take? Say you go on vacation, or attend some event, or just take a walk somewhere and take some pictures. Provided that taking photos isn't actually what you do for a living, in which case I can fully imagine what you do with the pictures you take, what do you do with the pictures you take?
Do you view them often? Do you perform any post processing? Remove some red eyes, do some cropping, maybe enhance some of the colors? Do you keep an account on flickr or any other photo-sharing service? Picasa perhaps? Do you put your images online for the world to see, or do you keep them to yourself? Do you discard bad photographs and only keep the good, and if so, how do you determine what constitutes a "good" photograph?

I recently went on vacation to Portugal and Spain together with my girlfriend. We visited different cities, hung out on the beach, met some friends, and, of course, took some pictures. All in all we took around 450 pictures. Based on the adage that you might get one good picture per roll of 36 images (from the good old days, before the age of the digital camera), that leaves us with only a handful of "good" pictures. Should I keep only these, or transfer only these to a special album, perhaps? If I were to delete the others, I've lost any chance of ever changing my mind about a picture. If I keep them, I'm using up unnecessary space retaining things that I may never look at again. The questions about what to do with the pictures you take are, to me, endless. That's why I want to hear from you. What do you do with your pictures? Do you think that what you do, whatever it may be, justifies the resources you dedicate to taking the pictures.
In the case of carrying around a small point-and-shoot, or even taking pictures with your mobile phone, the resources spent are very small. If you carry around an SLR, potentially with multiple lenses, and do lots of post-processing, the resources spent are very large (if you can say call resources 'small' and 'large').

One of the reasons I ask is that I've always wanted an SLR. Even before the concept of digital cameras was something the common man new about, I've wanted a real camera. I've drooled over these things since my early teens, and yet I can't bring myself to buy one. Sure, they cost a bit, but that's not it. I have a hard time justifying to myself why I should own one. After all, I keep all my pictures, even the bad one, and do virtually no post processing. I look at my pictures often enough to know my collection by heart, but that's all I do. Last night, I asked myself: "what would I do with the pictures I take, if I had a great camera?". The answer was "nothing". This is the final nail in the coffin of my longing to own a real camera, I think. I could probably create a very nice looking smaller collection of "good" pictures based on the 10000 or so pictures I already have, but I don't. I don't sit down and spend the time and nurture my pictures to perfection. Probably because I know that virtually noone will ever see them. Granted, perfection is a goal in itself, but like any creator, I want an audience for the things I create. It's the same thing with software (which I'm considerably better at then photography). Without users, the light lit at the beginning of a project fades fast after the first 1.0 release. The same, I think, would happen after the "toy" period of purchasing a new camera.

Anyway, enough about my purchase anxiety. If you want to share what you do with your pictures with the rest of the world (read "my meager readership"), then please post a comment below. I would love to hear from you.

The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die

2009-07-03T19:58:00.003+02:00

Invaders Must Die is the new album (and single) from The Prodigy. It is, in a sense (for me at least), a come back album after a fairly long period of silence and rumors of breakups and other nasty things. I recently heard this album (and I'm listening to it now), and I must say, what an album! It has all the ingredients of classic prodigy music. Much more so than the last two albums. It feels like they paid their mothers a visit and went rummaging around in whatever basements and attics there may be, digging out the instruments, synthesizers and samplers that started the whole thing so many years ago. It's like a mix between the experience and fat of the land. Old instruments, but with a new feeling. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Much better than their last album (Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned). Long time fans of The Prodigy will instantly feel at home in the songs. This album contains all the little quirks and twists and turns that the first two albums contained.

Upon hearing the album, I immediately went looking for concert tickets. It turns out that they played here in Belgium yesterday (fuck), and they'll be playing in Lisbon the day after I leave (double fuck). My best shot is now one of their fall gigs in Luxembourg or Holland.

If you haven't already, you need to out and get this album. It's a must have, almost regardless of who you are. It goes to 11...

Degrees

2009-07-01T19:04:00.001+02:00

32 degrees C in my living room with the fan running and the windows open...
Gotta love weather like this =)

The Earth Is Dying, and It's Our Fault!

2009-06-05T20:55:00.003+02:00

The fact that the situation the earth is in is grim should come as a surprise to very few readers of this blog. Most people who (I can imagine) read this are at least somewhat aware of the environment (another assumption, since pretty much only people I know read this). The problem isn't you, though, it's everybody else.
I just watched a very good video on youtube entitled "HOME". It was a video (movie really) about the sorry state our planet finds itself in. Not just global warming, but over consumption, overpopulation, deforestation and a host of other calamities that the world faces. All brought on by man, and our (some times lack of) technological advances. Did you know, for instance, that it takes 13000 liters of water to raise 1kg of beef? I didn't (ok, I did, but not until I went to an expo here in Brussels where I was told). "That's impossible", you say. "Cows don't drink that much!". This is entirely correct, they don't. What they do do, on the other hand, is eat. Lots. This water comes from the crops that are grown to feed the cows. Agriculture uses up 70% of the world's water consumption. Scary figured, but we've got to eat, right?
Back to the problem at hand; you don't need to be told that the planet is in peril, you probably already know. The people who need to be told are the people who would never go out of their way to watch a 93 minute movie about the state that the planet is in. Partially because they don't care (the bad people), and partly because the thought hadn't even crossed their mind (lost souls in a sense, people who might actually be willing to help save the planet, if they only knew it was in trouble).
I want you to show them this movie, and others like it ("An inconvenient truth" by Al Gore comes to mind). I want you to tell them that the planet is dying, and something had to be done quickly, lest we all die with it.
The mantra that you should live in the now and appreciate life is correct. It's also, at the same time, terrible advice. If you only live in the now, with no thought to past or future, your eyes only ever on the present, then you wouldn't see what is happening to the planet. You wouldn't see the progression from bad to almost infinitely worse.
People need to know that the planet is loosing resources faster than we can put them back, and people need to know that there are things they can do, small things and large things, that can help make things right again. Examples of small things are: take your power company up on that offer for green power. Sure it might be slightly more expensive (ours weren't, we saved 25% by switching) but it's good for the environment. Another thing is: leave the car at home. Especially in summer (and especially if you live in brussels! for fuck sake people, it's like a zoo here!). Take the subway or bus or even walk. It's a nice day, enjoy it while you can. Before you know it, the oxygen content in the air you breathe might be too low (ok, that probably won't happen for a long time, but it's coming).
You could also consume less. I'm not just talking about putting down the fork (I'm looking in your direction America, you fat fucks), but also just buy fewer things. If you consume less, the world has to expend less resources making the shit you purchase. If we could recycle everything with 100% efficiency, consumption wouldn't be a problem, but since we're a bit low on nano-disassemblers at the moment, you're just going to have to buy less shit. I'm sure your existing TV is good enough. You don't actually NEED to buy a brand new car. There are literally thousands of little things you can do to make your planet a better place (if you're reading this from off-world, I'm sure there are things that you can do to make whatever planet you're on a better place too). Think about how you live, and what you consume, and how much waste you produce. You might not think about it, because you don't throw it away in the garbage can, but you do produce a lot of industrial waste by the things you choose to purchase. Vote with your wallet. Buy environmentally friendly stuff, if you have the option.
I could talk forever on this subject, but in closing let me say this: you cannot pass the buck on this, and expect others to do it for you. If we don't all get together and start making the world a better place, there won't be a planet left to sustain humanity. Please think of what you're doing, and think about the planet.

Illegal Democracy

2009-04-10T10:32:00.002+02:00

How things like this can be legal, I will never know, but I believe it is practiced everywhere.

Calling a vote for a new law when nobody is around to vote gets the law passed. This should be criminal. It is nothing short of an abuse of democracy, and the people who use it should be ashamed. Better still, they should be imprisoned.

The Credit Crisis

2009-04-10T10:31:00.001+02:00

Interesting visual presentation of how the current credit crisis that we are in works, and what causes it.

On Passwords

2009-03-26T09:12:00.002+01:00

I commonly think of myself as someone who has the security mindset. Someone who is aware of the security risks around him. Recently I borrowed an ADSL modem/router from work, since my provider was taking their sweet time delivering mine. I used this borrowed equipment for about a month, and then yesterday, I put my own stuff together, router, modem and wifi, and today I returned the stuff that I had borrowed from the office. As I'm handing the stuff back to my colleague, he asks me "so, did you reset your password?". My mind froze. Of course I had not reset my password, it hadn't even occurred to me to do so. Not because I had some reason to not reset my password, as I trust my co-workers, but I had just not thought about it. I realized, then, that the security mindset I operate is clearly not as tuned as it should be. Granted, I doubt anyone here would do something with my password, but that's not the problem. Just the fact that it remains on the device, should it become available to someone else, is the problem. Luckily, I'm not the only one to make such snafus, however.

As I leave, he tells me "don't worry, I'll reset it for you"...

Thought crime = hate crime?

2009-03-17T17:29:00.003+01:00

I was reading about Bishop Richard Williamson on wikipedia as a result of reading some article where the pope had said something stupid about condoms, Africa and HIV/AIDS. Anyway, this bishop, it turns out that he denies that the holocaust ever happened. Not only does he hold that view, but he's said so in public interviews. According to his wikipedia article, holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. I found this to be incredibly strange. Why should it be illegal? Personally, I think that the holocaust happened. There is no doubt in my mind that it happened, nor that it was a terrible thing, but I don't think that it should be illegal to think that it didn't happen.

Why should it be illegal to have this belief, when it is not illegal to hold any other belief (in most civilized countries anyway)? If we take the holocaust for a provable certainty, as we should, then we can compare this disbelief to the disbelief of any other provable fact. For instance, if I held the belief that 2 + 2 actually equaled 5, should I be labeled a criminal? Clearly these two issues do not carry the same emotional charge, but they are both opinions, after all. This, I believe, falls squarely under freedom of opinion and speech. It's not illegal to be a Nazi (hold the belief that national-socialism is the way to go), to take something related, so why should it be illegal to hold this particular belief?

This isn't about this bishop. People should be allowed to think what they want without being labeled criminals. Maybe there is more to this particular illegality than what I have discovered, and if so, I would very much like it to hear your opinions about it.

Capacitor Crisis

2009-02-28T13:44:00.003+01:00

So I recently bought a new computer. A really nice thing with an i7-920 in it, a GTX260 and an ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard. It had been working fine for about a month, without a single issue. That is, until last night. I was playing wow,just minding my own business, and at times it would shut down, just out of the blue. I didn't think more of it, so I just rebooted and continued playing. About one our later it happened again. This time I opened my case to see what the problem was, but my initial inspection revealed nothing. It wouldn't let me power back on, so I had to disconnect and reconnect the power cord, and flip the PSU switch. After this it would let me power back up, but almost as soon as it did (a couple of seconds later), I saw a blue flash of light and my computer started emitting smoke. This may sound like a bad joke, but this is actually what happened. Blue flash of light and then smoke.

Needless to say, something had just broken terribly. My initial suspicion was the PSU, which I started removing from the case. Because it was the middle of the night, however, and my girlfriend was sleeping, I didn't want to continue with the racket, so I let it rest for this this morning. When I woke up this morning, I proceeded to remove the PSU. As luck would have it, though, I can't remove the PSU without removing the motherboard, and this would prove to be serendipitous, as it turned out that it was not in fact my PSU that had broken, but rather a capacitor on my motherboard. I found scorch marks on my motherboard plate, and the burned underside of a component with some copper sticking out. This was clearly the fault, and also the flash I had seen when my case was open.

I had been lamenting the potential (if outside warranty) cost of a new PSU, but this was even worse! Anyway, I take it to the store, hoping that they'll say something like "Ohh, this is a warranty issue, we'll just take your card and give you a new one." Unfortunately, as you might have guessed already, that was not the case. It sounded more like this "Ohh, I don't think this is a warranty issue. I'll have to check with ASUS, in any case it'll take at least 3 weeks". How this can now be a warranty issue is beyond me, but warranty or not, the "at least 3 weeks" easily turns in to "more like 2 months, if you're lucky", I know from previous warranty issues. The concept of being without a working computer for that long was not something I liked, so in the end I bought a brand new motherboard. In my best case scenario I get a new motherboard from asus which I can resell for some money. In the worst case I'd have to buy another one anyway, in which case I'd be out of the money anyway, AND have had to wait several weeks. Hopefully I'll get a new one form them, but you never know. I'd like to think that burning capacitors might be covered by warranty, but you never know.

There's no snazzy end to this. I realize, as I'm writing, that there's no way to sow this bag up neatly, so I'll just leave you with this: fuck...

Othello

2009-02-13T00:02:00.003+01:00

We went to the theater tonight to see some Shakespeare. Othello to be precise. It was performed by the BSS, or Brussels Shakespeare Society. It was here in Brussels, and it was in English. The whole thing took just over 3 hours, I think, and the performances by the lead roles were absolutely amazing. I don't remember the names of the actors, but the two leads, Othello and Iago, were great. The supporting cast, however, I'm sad to say, were very bad. There were some acceptable performances, but I don't know their characters' names'. The biggest problem, I think, was the fact that most of the supporting cast did not have English as their first language, or even their second. Their delivery was also very bad. Othello however, and Iago, and to some extent Iago's wife, who only really got to speak properly in the second half, were very good. Excellent delivery, lots of passion, and inlevelse, to use a Swedish word. It was all very dramatic and extravagant, but then again it's Shakespeare, so it is supposed to be. Unfortunately I'm quite tired, otherwise I would ave written a proper review, but I'm sure you can wikipedia the play to see what it was about. It's also too bad that I don't know the names of the actors. I doubt that my site ranks highly in theater circuits, but they'd at least get one more hit on google...

Crazy Awesome

2009-02-11T16:02:00.000+01:00

Factories are cool

http://www.bouncingredball.com/2009/02/10/12-fantastic-photos-of-factories-in-japan/

Dirt-cheap web browser tablet

2009-01-19T15:17:00.002+01:00

This is cool stuff: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-update-prototype-b/

The idea is to get a new type of device into people’s hands for as cheap as possible (we were aiming for $200, it looks like $299 is more realistic). It fits perfectly on your lap while you are sitting in front of the TV, so you can look up stuff on Wikipedia or IMDB as you channel surf. It plays Flash video flawlessly so you can watch movies and TV shows on Hulu or Joost or wherever. Or listen to music on MySpace Music. Or use TokBox to have a video chat with your parents. Then check email and call it a day. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Hulu, Wikipedia, Google Docs and Gmail are the killer apps for this device.

I want one. I want one of these much more than I want a netbook. Battery life remains to be seen, but on the whole I like it. I would like to see them hit the $200-250 mark. Any higher than that and people just won't buy it.

Published author

2008-12-31T14:01:00.003+01:00

There we go, my very own ACM citation. I am now a published author. My thesis work resulted in a paper called Dynamic optimization of Bluetooth networks for indoor localization, which was submitted to and accepted for the AASN'08 Conference in Paris earlier this year. Googling for "markus jevring bluetooth" shows not just this paper but also my thesis, which is available through my university.

From all this, I'm sure you can gather that I have finally completed this stage of my studies. I am now a Master of Science in Computer Science, for whatever it is worth. I'm currently not looking for research positions, as I thought I would be, but that may change in the future.

I know I haven't posted in a (criminally long) time, but hopefully with this "catch up" post, I'll be able to start posting more often. I'll be able to get back to the mindless rants you come here for soon. I just felt that I couldn't do one before detailing the next big step in my life (that sounded less corny in my head, just now). Anyway, I now live in Brussels and I write software for a stock broker called Petercam. I really like the work, and I get to do cool stuff almost on a daily basis, so I'm happy. Our apartment is far from wonderful, but we are currently looking at alternatives, and we estimate that we'll be in a new, more acceptable, one my mid-February.
Being in Brussels, of course, means that I've left the Netherlands behind me. Two years in Enschede was quite enough. Anyway, time to get back to work. I'm almost alone in my section here today, as most people are on holiday. It's quite pleasant to have a somewhat calmer environment. Now if I could also get a properly sized monitor, everything would be just peachy...

On Academics

2008-08-14T22:21:00.002+02:00

As in people in academia:

Most academics, however, are only academics. In the course of their careers, they have been paid a salary only by a university; they are one-dimensional people. They therefore have not had the breadth of experience to give them a sense of the reality of international relations; nor have they had the depth of experience to give them a sense of its tragedy. These are the hollow men, and the shallow men, too. For such people, there are only a few kinds of achievements possible in regard to international relations. One of them is to sit down and spin out theories that fellow academics will praise as being rigorous and original. (Merely being realistic and responsible, in contrast, will not evoke their praise.) In truth, most academics are only concerned about the good opinion of about a dozen other academic specialists in their particular sub-sub-field

Kurth, James. “Inside the Cave: The Banality of I.R. Studies"

The man speaks the truth, bitches!...

Cryptonomicon

2008-08-01T10:42:00.006+02:00

Several years ago, I read a wonderful book by Neal Stephenson called Cryptonomicon. It is a book about the things I absolutely love to read about, WWII and cryptography. I consider this to be one of, if not the best books I have ever read. Quite frankly, if I could read only one book ever for the rest of my life, this would be it.
Now, the copy I read was my brothers. It looks like this, and has the following ISBN number: 0099410672. This book has long been out of print. It was first printed in 1999 or 2000, and the best thing about it is that it has an incredibly soft spine. It is a paper back, and yet I can bend it to extreme angles without the cracking or breaking that you get with most cheaper paperbacks. In short, it's the perfect binding. Now, I've been looking for this particular edition of this book for a while, and I finally found the proper edition with the right ISBN, and a dealer that actually seemed to have it in stock (the picture even matched).
So I go to this dealer (bokus.com) and I order this book. I make damn sure that the ISBN is the right one, so that I wont get the other edition that most stores have. I shall refer to this as the "wrong" edition. It looks like this, and it has the following ISBN number: 0099410676. As you can see, the ISBN numbers are terrible similar. This, possibly along with some stocking error or ISBN merging (having multiple ISBNs pointing to the latest edition of the book you have in store), bokus.com sent me the wrong book. I was a bit disappointed, as I was looking forward to getting my hands on the good edition once more, and reading it. So I email bokus and tell them about my predicament. They say they're sorry, and since they don't actually have they don't have the real book in stock, and neither does their supplier. Fair enough I think, it is a fairly rare book this long after the original publication. So, they tell me, we've clearly sent you the wrong book, would you like to return it for a complete refund? I say yes, unfortunately this isn't the book I want, how do we solve the return issue. It should be noted that I ordered this book from a Swedish retailer, and I currently live in the Netherlands, so they had to ship it for more than the book was worth. So, I've told them that I want to return it, and could they please instruct me as to how. The next email I get from them says something like "lets do this, it's probably going to cost us more to ship the book back than the book is actually worth, so you can just keep the book and I've already refunded your money".
Lets let that sink in for a minute, they were not only nice and had a swift response, but they were also apologetic about their mistake and they GAVE ME THE BOOK FOR FREE in the end! How cool is that! That's not something you see every day. Needless to say I was very pleased with this evolution of the matter so I wrote them a nice thank you letter, and now I actually have a free copy of the cryptonomicon. Wrong edition as it may be, they were so nice to me, and it was free in the end, so I really can't complain that much. Now if the rest of my problems could solve them selves with such ease I would be a happy man.

The Last Lecture

2008-07-31T20:08:00.002+02:00

Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), who's been in the news lately about his "last lecture". He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and told he had about six months to live. This was a couple of months ago, and sadly, this brilliant man has passed away. I had heard about this last lecture before, thinking it was a cool thing, but I hadn't actually watched it. Then I was having dinner the other night with a friend of mine who goes to CMU and he mentioned Randy in passing. Then earlier today, talking to a friend of mine, he also mentioned Randy's lecture and told me that I might find it interesting. "Might find it interesting" was the understatement of the century. Watching it just now, I was completely blown away by not only this man's genius and insight into life, but also his incredible humility. It was truly a treat. While this man is a computer scientist, and many of you may not be, watching this 76 minute talk will fill you with such awe and wonderment, while at the same time filling you with such clarity and wisdom that missing this should almost be criminal.
I really had no idea what this talk would be about, and I certainly did not know that it would be this good. It is an absolute jewel, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have just seen it, even though it was a webcast. The talk is available on YouTube here. This man is absolutely brilliant, and the world is a worse place without him. Watch this talk! I don't care if you do anything else in your life, but you watch this talk. It is that good. Such wisdom, such insight, such delivery. I really cannot say enough good things about this man!

Worldwide Employment Market

2008-07-15T11:15:00.002+02:00

I'm currently looking in to finding a job in a nice country. In most of these countries, they speak a language that I am unfamiliar with. They also have different cultural differences, and ways of doing business. What they also have, are different ways of finding work. Most countries have some websites with listings, and this is where the problem begins. I'm very happy that these websites exist, but the problem is that there are so many of them! Why not consolidate? Why not just make one or a few incredibly large sites that have everything in them? The government does, and it seems to be working for them.

I would especially like a worldwide site for this, or at the very least a continent-wide site. something like europejobs.com that would list ALL available jobs in Europe. It's not difficult technically, and it would be easier for both employers and (prospective) employees, since it would all be gathered in one place. Especially since we're supposed to be in the EU now, with free movement of people, services and capital. It should be a breeze to hire someone from a different country in the EU. It would certainly make life easier for expats like myself. It's not that I don't want to do the work hunting for jobs, I'm just saying that it would be easier if everyone pooled their resources.

Sadly, I know that this will never happen, because there are issues of bikeshedding and "not written here" syndrome evident throughout the world. The inability of people to get along and reach a solution that is beneficial to all parties involved is, on a larger scale, the reason for most of the troubles in the world. I suppose this is painfully obvious, if you think about it. If there is no disagreement, there would be no problems. Disagreement is inherent in humans, but I wish people could set some of it aside for the greater good, in some cases. Especially when it comes to helping people. People who are in the business of helping other people should be able to get along and work together instead of against each other. It would cut down on overhead, and would increase the amount of help they can dish out, regardless of what this help could be.

Make my life easier, please. Make everybody's life easier. You can you it, you have the technology!

Firefox 3 revisited

2008-07-04T10:15:00.003+02:00

I'm back to Firefox 2 again. Firefox 3 had such different behavior and look compared to Firefox 2, none of which was customizable, that I just couldn't stand it. Also, the fact that Firefox 3 was a HUGE memory hog didn't go over particularly well with me either. It's not unheard of to see FF3 use 2-3 times as much memory as FF2 for the same set of tabs. They also added their own custom widgets, because there were some behavior problems with Mac, that this is where the slippery slope to hell begins. it is VERY rare that you have to make your own widgets. The scrollbars and buttons that come with the OS are excellent, work great, and in the vast majority of cases do exactly what you want them to do. Apparently that wasn't good enough for the FF3 team, so decided to roll their own, to the detriment of all their users. While I did find a plug-in that would let me use Windows native scroll-bars, it just wasn't the same. It felt like they were fucking me over, simply because they could. FF2 is crisp, clear, fast, and doesn't cause my mouse to freeze up when I play wow. FF3 is none of these things.

All in all, FF3 is an absolute horror and a mess, and I really hope I see a 4.0 soon that takes care of all the fucking garbage they put in to FF3. I'd stick with FF2, but they stop support in mid-december 2008, which is mere months away. Most companies continue supporting their old products for a lot more than 6 months (Windows XP will be supported with security patches to 2014, if I'm not mistaken), but apparently not the Firefox team. What with the 8 million downloads on release day, maybe they don't give two shits about people still running older version. Then again, I did run Netscape 7.2 for ages until I finally switched. I think I can do the same thing with FF2.

Firefox 3.0 Tamed

2008-07-01T11:35:00.003+02:00

My recent gripes about firefox 3 was that it looked like hammered shit sprayed with glitter. The graphical design was an absolute abomination (except for the back and forward buttons, they were nice). What I've now found, however, is an extension called "Classic Compact Options", which will let me return to the beautiful look of firefox2.

Dialog boxes are still ugly, but they're not as bad anymore. I think I'll move to FF3 at home too, now that I know that most problems can be remedied.

Bullshit Technicalities

2008-06-26T11:44:00.002+02:00

As some of you know, my girlfriend is currently doing an internship for the European Commission in Brussels. As a result, I travel down there about every other weekend, and she travels back the remaining weekends. This seemed like a good deal, because the EC had promised to pay for our trips, since I'm her "significant other", and she was actually leaving "home" to do this internship.

It now turns out, however, that definitions matter a great deal to the EC. Because we were not officially living together, and that she didn't return to her registered address (that she moved out of when she left for Brussels) when the came back here (but rather to me), it doesn't count, so we don't get out money back. None of it, not a cent.

Not that I hadn't gone down to see her as often as I could even if they hadn't promised to pay, but you just feel fucked over by the government, once again, when this kind of stuff happens. When we were first told about the reimbursements, I thought to myself "hey, maybe there is at least some good in government circles", but I was wrong. The government keeps screwing you over at every chance they get. They get by on doing the bare minimum required, and often not even that. In the immortal words of Leo Getz, "They fuck you at the drive-thru!"

I feel properly and fully rogered. Thanks EU, this is just what I needed. A good ass-fucking to show me who's boss!

Lack Of Sunlight Kills

2008-06-24T10:05:00.002+02:00

I knew it! Finally I am vindicated! Living in countries like my own (Sweden) is detrimental to your health! You heard it from the horse's mouth.

The second comment mentions this:

This is EASY, people. It's not like they don't sell UVB 2% up to 10% daylight CPF screw in light bulbs at any decent pet store that carries reptiles.

Perhaps I shall look in to it...

Firefox 3.0

2008-06-18T18:54:00.003+02:00

Firefox 3.0 has hideously ugly widgets, and is slow as hell.
I thought installing it in a different directory would let me keep two version around, but no...
Firefox 3.0 clobbered my settings, raped my add-ons, and dropped all my carefully collected cookies. Was a backwards compatible version that hard to do? Did you have to change to much that you couldn't possible coexist with the previous version?

I'm sticking with 2.0 until ff3 starts behaving. It's bad enough that I had to drop Netscape for this, now they're fucking their own customers over...

What the hell is wrong with me?

2008-06-18T18:39:00.004+02:00

Why can't I run? Why can't I, after more than two months of regular running, run without leg and/or lower back pain? Two months is what it generally takes people to get fit enough to run 5km without stopping. I have to push myself to the limit to run 5km in 800m intervals in 30 minutes.
You would have thought that I would have settled in to a nice pace and stride by now, but no. It's an eternal fucking struggle against the pain and the awkwardness of running.

I can imagine that most people, after running for a couple of weeks, settle in to something akin to walking at a higher pace. You don't really have to think about the technique, you just do it. Me, on the other hand, I have to think about every fucking step. It doesn't matter what I do, I can't seem to get a good thing going.

As if that wasn't enough, the pain just keeps coming back. I recently took a week off from running to heal my legs. I started back up on Monday, and it took about 500m before the pain was back again. Same locations, shins and calves. Not to mention the lower back, but that doesn't set in until about 750m.

The worst things is that I know what causes all these problems, and I've done everything in my power to alleviate the problem, but nothing works. I've tried long stride, short strides, hig knees, straight legs, landing on my heel, landing on my full foot, landing on my toes, landing with my leg straight, with my leg bend. Nothing I do takes the pain away, NOTHING!

What the hell am I doing wrong? I've read just about everything I can get my hands on about my problem, and tried everything therein to fix it, but it has all been for nothing. I'm going to give it a couple of more months. If I can't run 5km without stopping and without pain by the time fall rolls around, I'm going to consider running a dead sport to me.

The only thing I can think of that could be causing this would be my crappy bio-mechanical conditions. My foot arches are different from each other, my feet are of different size, my legs are of different lengths, and I have suffered from a lot of back pain in the past, due in part to this. Getting a proper chair fixed almost all my back problems instantly, but apparently that doesn't extend to running.

I hate the situation I'm in, and I don't want to quit, but I'm affraid that I might have to. If I do quit I won't do it without having given it a proper try. By the time september rolls around I will have been running for five months. If my problems haven't been solved by then, I'm affraid I'm going to have to admit defeat.

Fragility

2008-06-10T20:27:00.002+02:00

Why the hell am I so fragile? Why isn't 24 hours enough to recuperate from 30 minutes of running? I've been running 2-4 times each week now for little over two months, I have proper shoes fitted by a specialist, I run on a soft surface (track), and I still end up with sore muscles after each run. I need 1-2 days of recovery in between sessions to not break down completely, and it's pissing me off!
You would have thought that my body would have adjusted by now, but noooooooooo. I'm doing everything by the book, yet I still break my body each time I lace up. I's incredibly frustrating, especially since there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to get better. While my stamina has increased (5km in 30 minutes, with some walking inter-spaced), I can't seem to get fit enough for mu muscles to handle this simple thing of a run a day. I'm not asking much. I'm not asking for hours each day, or a triathlon each weekend, just grant me 30 leisurely minutes of running each day, is that too much to ask?
Here I am with an ice pack on my shins, having to cut my run short after 20 hellish minutes before admitting defeat in the face of having to spend 1-2 weeks not running at all should I continue and completely trash my legs. Today it even got to the point where my thighs started hurting. My thighs! My thighs never hurt, normally. It's always my calves (less so lately, however), and my shins (always a fucking pain). I stretch and I do toe-raises as my desk daily, but that doesn't seem to help the fact that my shins never get with the program. I guess I could spend 2-3 weeks completely off running and physical exercise to let them heal, but then I'm back to square one again. I will have lost my stamina, my remaining muscles will have weakened, and I have to start building them up again, which inevitably will kill my shins.
It's a vicious cycle, and I don't know how to break it.
Help me Obi-wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!

Empirical testing and salt

2008-06-09T18:14:00.001+02:00

I have come to the conclusion that salt poured into the water before the pasta is boiled does a lot more for the taste of the food than salt poured on top of the food when it is ready. I decided to try to cut down on my salt, and one way of doing this was to skip the pre-salting of my food. This culinary experiment resulted in a tasteless disaster. Having gone without pre-salted food for about a month, and then accidentally switching back the other day, I can proclaim that I have seen the light, and it is salt in the pot before the pasta goes in!
You would think that putting the salt on the surface of the food instead of infusing it into the food would taste more, since your taste buds would touch the surface of the food more than the inside, but apparently that is not the case. Chips and cookies, for instance, have stuff on the outside that will hit your tongue first and trick you in to believing that the entire cookie or chip tastes the way the outside tastes. Things like cookies would be even more unhealthy if they tasted as delicious all the way through.

Salt is delicious, and so is sugar. I can imagine very few things in the world I would be less likely to give up.

Gnarls Barkley - Going On

2008-05-28T21:33:00.002+02:00

Bäst just nu:

I just love the pale and faded colors of the surroundings. They've got a certain 1960-ies school house thing going on. No doubt because that's likely what it is, and when it was built.
It looks relaxed and yet intense. Kick-ass song!

5km in 30 minutes

2008-05-28T20:39:00.002+02:00

I just got my first small victory on the way to my big goal.
Today I ran (and partially walked) 5km in 30 minutes. This might not seem like a feat to many, and perhaps it isn't, but it's a big step for me on my way to be able to run 5km without stopping.
I did this run in a series of 600m runs, followed by 100m walks. I did cheat two laps and did 300+100, but that isn't much out of the 12½ laps I ran (which makes each lap 400m, but you might have already known this).
It did take all my energy, and I wouldn't be able to do it again so soon after, but I'm hoping to repeat it tomorrow. It's possible that I passed this barrier on Monday already, but as I didn't keep count of the laps, it doesn't count.
New shoes and a proper surface to run on has done wonders for my legs. There is still a bit of pain now, but that's from exhaustion, not improper leg use.
This week and next I'm doing Monday + Wednesday + Thursday running, and the rest of the week off. This might seem like an odd schedule, but I'm usually in Brussels on the weekends, which puts a stop to an otherwise leisurely every-other-day routine.
After these two weeks I'll move to a Monday to Thursday schedule (4 times per week) until I can run 5km without stopping. After that, who knows. At least it feels good to know I'm making progress.

Ahh, Old Times

2008-05-18T18:18:00.002+02:00

Even though I write code day in and day out at work, it's not the same as doing it on your own.
I sat down today with one of my pet projects and started writing and listening to music.
Writing and listening to music, two things that I haven't done in too long a time. I've been stuck playing wow every waking our of my life, and I hate myself for it. Coding and music are two of my biggest passions in life, so why the hell am I playing some crappy game.
I feel quite like Golum. I both love and hate the game, much like Golum loves and hates the ring.

I should just write more code and listen to more music. I never listen to music at work, I hate headphones.

Shin Splits

2008-05-05T20:37:00.002+02:00

I recently started running. I've been running for about four weeks now. I even got new shoes.
There is, however, a very annoying problem. I've got anterior shin splints, and they don't seem to want to go away.
I've tried different running stiles, different strides, different landings, different knee motions, different breathing patterns, different running material, nothing helps.
Here some people will say "dude, you have to rest and they will go away..."
But dude, I did! I stayed off my legs for a week (ok, 5 days, I cheated a bit), but they still came back in full force. As soon as I took the first step at any speed over walking, they started creeping back until they were like little goblins banging on my tibea with sharp rocks. As soon as I stop, though, they go away. The pain is not pervasive in any way, but it really keeps me from running.
I also don't want to wait for too long (without running, to recuperate), for fear that I'll forget what motivated me to run in the first place, and the flame will die. I do want to run. I used to run when I was younger, and it's a great way to stay in shape. The problem is that it hurts like a motherfucker, and I have no idea how to stop it from doing so, short of not running.
Any suggestions are welcome.

One Hundred Million!

2008-04-24T12:14:00.004+02:00

Imagine that I found 100 million euro somewhere. In cash.
I found them, no one else is going to claim them, they are mine.

How would I go about inserting that money into the economy of the world?
How do I get them from their fairly unwieldy current form into something more usable, say, a bank account? I can't very well run around and use cash all the time. The economy just doesn't work that way. Besides, what if I get robbed?

How would I go about it? How would you go about it?
What are the advantages of the various ways? How do you do this without having to either pay undue fees, or get the government breathing down your neck about the whole thing (the suspicious, tax collecting lot that they are)? Would I have to launder it, even though it is mine?

Please provide your answers below.

For that matter, if you know, what is the physical size of 100 million euro. A wad? An attaché case? A crate? A truck?

Google Gets It Wrong

2008-03-26T08:31:00.004+01:00

I regularly search for the words "context management" on google.
The concept of "content management" is well known and prolific, and as a result, google always asks me "Did you mean: content management?", and then proceeds to assume that I did, by just showing me hits from the "content management" query. I didn't even click the link that suggested I may have made a mistake. Sure, in most cases this works well, but in my case it makes it impossible to actually search for "context management".
The should have a link that lets you say "No, I actually want to search for this".
They could just provide you with a link to what they thought you were searching for, and leave the original query in the original results, but no.
Sometimes they do, when I misspell other things for instance, but in this case, it never happens.
It is incredibly infuriating, as my whole thesis hangs on me being able to get information about this particular topic.

I'm a Switcher

2008-03-13T09:10:00.002+01:00

Those of you who are somewhat tech savvy might have heard that expression before in connection to something else. You can rest assured, I'm not switching to Apple (although I had two delicious granny smith apples yesterday, with only a mild allergic reaction).
What I'm switching is my internet platform. As I have mentioned before, I have always been a staunch supported of Netscape. It was my first browser (there might have been some mosaic before, I don't remember), and for the rest of my life it has been my only browser. I have sometimes been forced to use Internet Explorer, and I have tried on my own accord to use Opera, but the conclusion has always been that Netscape is the king of the hill.
Unfortunately, Netscape hasn't come out with a good browser since Netscape 7.2, which was several of years ago. That, coupled with the fact that Netscape has now kicked the bucket has left me little choice. While I could keep the Netscape I know and love, I have run across Thunderbird here at work, and I've also gone over to using Firefox here, and I must say that my previous reservations about Firefox have all but disappeared. Thunderbird is even, dare I say it, a better email client than the one built-in to Netscape 7.2.
As a result, I have decided to switch my internet platform at home to a combination of Firefox for browsing and Thunderbird for email. It is with a heavy heart that I lay the legacy of Netscape to rest. We have had some good times. We've shared laughter, we've shared sorrow. Netscape has been my companion as I have explored the internet from its relative infancy in the early 90ies all the way up to today.

So good bye Netscape! You have served me well. You will always have a special place in my heart, and I will never forget you.

I'm Ready

2008-03-07T14:49:00.002+01:00

I'm ready for my life to go on.
I'm ready for the life I'm living now to be complete so that I can move on to the next phase of my life (whatever that turns out to be). Right now it only feels like I'm going through the motions. There's no real joy in what I do (even though it is fun), and I feel like it's all just a means to an end. It's a very annoying state to be in. Motivation is low, and the sense of accomplishment when something actually happens is met with, at most, a "meh"...
I don't know what life holds for me on the other side of my M.Sc. degree, but I feel like I need to get there. I've been in school since 2001, and it's about fucking time I got out. I need to start living the real life, making money, having freedoms, rather than just waiting to be judged by people who can choose to hold up my life at their whim.
There's no doubt in my mind that I'll make my deadline (more or less, anyway), and that I will actually get out, but it feels like if that day could come sooner rather than later, I would be a happy Markus.
Here in Holland, more than anywhere else, I get the feeling that one day is just exactly like the other. Nothing ever changes. The hamster wheel is ever present, and nothing I do or say will make the view from inside the mental cage that is my reality change. Having been on the other fence, having had a job and things to do, I know that all life isn't like this. I know that it is actually possible for it to be different. In fact it is possible for it to be very different, but "different" isn't a word that is very common here in the Netherlands. I think people here are afraid to stand out. They think that if they do, they will be rejected by society, and their life will turn to utter shit. In a way, I think they are right. When you live in a society where you are afraid that people will judge you for a certain thing, then you are bound to judge people for that very same thing yourself. As a result, there is very little spice and color in everyday life in my current world, and I think it is dragging me down with it. It makes me sad, but most of all it makes me apathetic.

Weird Work Week

2008-03-06T15:09:00.003+01:00

I seriously can't wait for this week to be over.
It hasn't necessarily been bad, it's just been very weird.
I can't seem to focus, I have no motivation, and I can't come up with a single creative though.
It also feels like the hours are just dragging along here at the office, which normally isn't the case. On any normal day I'll sit down at my computer in the morning. Before I know it it's lunch time, and after that, the end of office hours comes almost instantly. No such luck this week I'm afraid.
I don't know why either. Granted, I was sick last weekend and the beginning of this week, but I came out of that pretty quickly, so I didn't think it would affect me. Maybe it's something else, I don't know. Maybe it's nothing.

On a lighter note, I got a new toy the other day. I have migrated away from my Samsung d900 into the warm welcome, almost pornographically enticing arms of the Nokia E51. This is an absolutely wonderful little machine. It does everything you can possibly think of. Since I'm still in the toy stage I'm playing with all sorts of things (this is my first smart phone), but I'm sure the novelty will die down in a couple of weeks. Event without the coolness of all the features (it has WiFi people, WiFi! How cool is that?!) I really like it. It's got an incredibly good look and feel. It's a solid piece of industrial machinery, yet nimble, light-weight and elegant. I have so far only found one flaw, and that is that I can't seem to find an egg timer on it (which my d900 had), but other than that it is completely without blemish. Subtle yet powerful. A master piece, really.

Such Beautiful Symmetry

2008-02-29T11:00:00.000+01:00

KitKat: 60 cents, number 46
CocaCola: 60 cents, number 64
The perfect snack.

The Wind

2008-02-28T09:17:00.004+01:00

I was checking out gizmodo today, which I normally don't do (I read engadget instead, they are almost the same), when I came across this. It's an excellent (and apparently award winning) advertisement about wind power. At the beginning it just seems good, but when they hit the punch line, and for a couple of minutes after, it dawns on you that it's not only good, but it is in fact excellent. It is both subtle and yet at the same time clear.
Everyone can get it, but unless you think of it before hand, the genius of the portrayal will not be immediately visible.
I suggest you check it out for yourselves:

FIRE FIRE YEAH!

2008-02-17T20:41:00.001+01:00

fire!

It Has a Name

2008-02-13T17:19:00.004+01:00

I have long been interested in the way computers reason about things. I've wanted to make computers make better and more informed decisions about things to make them easier to use and more robust against unexpected events.
This has been an interest of mine for many years. I've been interested in artificial intelligence for as long as I can remember, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for multi-agent systems.
It turns out, that all these things that I like are now being lumped together under the umbrella of Autonomic Computing. The concept was outlined by Paul Horn, Senior VP of IBM Research in a paper a couple of years ago.
It calls for systems to be self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting, and it explains why systems should have these properties, and talks about why autonomic computing is needed. I completely agree on every point in the paper.
It is interesting that my master's thesis project, which I didn't really think would involve this kind of stuff, has brought me to a point where I can combine my interests, put a name on the amalgamation, and actually get to work with them.
All in all, very cool stuff.
This post sounded much better in my head before writing it down, but feh, it's out there anyway, and it is time for me to leave the office.

Another absolutely amazing thing that my research has brought me is this. It's a short story by Cory Doctorow (author and co-editor of Boing Boing)about hacking the human body with technology. I remember reading it a couple of years back and absolutely loving it. Unfortunately, I lost the link to it some how, and I've been searching for it ever since, but with no results. Until today.
If you like sci-fi and technology, this is a must read. It is awesome!

Digital Content Delivery

2008-02-12T08:24:00.000+01:00

What if I believe in digital online content delivery?
What if I think that it's the best idea I've heard in a long time?
What if I'm psyched that there's finally an acceptable payment model for music?
What if I want to buy a bunch of songs, just to find that the online stores don't have any of the music I want, what then?
What if I was to tell you that, while digital content delivery is an excellent idea, it won't work until you can purchase the right to have something digital, regardless of the source.

I want to be able to pay some record company for, say, 100 of their songs, and they are to not care how I got them. Maybe I copied them from friends, maybe I downloaded them (illegally), maybe I found them on a USB stick at school. It wouldn't matter, because I still have this license to own so many of their songs. This would work, because then I could get the kind of music that I want in digital format and not have to have these horrible CDs that take up so much space.
Of course, DRM would be out of the question, but it seems that DRM is going the way of the dodo anyway, so that would be less of a problem.
iTunes and its ilk works great for mainstream music, but as soon as you want music from a record label that isn't one of the enormous ones, you're shit out of luck.

(What if I think that, for once, the blogger spell checker would work? Would that be too much to ask?)

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

2008-02-04T19:05:00.000+01:00

I just saw this over at wired, and I saw the future of killing. You may wonder why I say killing, and not combat, but when one side is using this weapon, there will never be a battle of equals.
This is absolutely, without a doubt, bat-shit fucking crazy.
It's a fully automatic shotgun, recoilless, that can fire 300 rounds per minute.
And as if that wasn't enough, it can also deliver grenade payloads up to 175m at 120 rounds per second.
I can't possibly imagine any (non-WWII) FPS in the coming years that will not feature this weapon.
Some crazy stuff.

Pornostar

2008-01-23T15:55:00.000+01:00

While it's possible for me to write several posts with that delicious title, I'm giving it to this one (so far my titles are unique, I think).
I was listening to c.o.p project - pornostar and I decided I wanted the lyrics, for a quote or two, so I went to google.
Lyrics are normally a breeze to find, and they are generally correct. This time only the former was true. Google gives me about 3200 hits, but it's apparently been the parade of retards on the lyrics scene, or it's just been automatically transcribed by some bad voice recognition software.
After about 5 hits, it's painfully apparent that all the lyrics sites on the internet just blatantly copy each other, because the errors are exactly the same ones, and there are errors aplenty.
I know that lyrics don't always follow the grammatical norms, but this is ridiculus.
Listening to the lyrics it is painfully clear that the voice coming out of my speakers is not saying the same things that this epileptic monkey has scribbed on the webpage (nothing against epileptics, they fight a tough fight, but this looks like transcription in mid-seizure).
Whomever it was who said that an infinite amount of monkeys on typewriters would produce the complete works of Shakespere was only partially right. What they seem to have produces is the content on the internet.

Van Eck Phreaking

2008-01-23T10:51:00.000+01:00

Van Eck phreaking (or TEMPEST technologies, denepding on where you read it first) is about reading information from electro-magnetic radiation. What it will allow someone to do, for example, is read your monitor from a distance, based solely on the electro-magnetic radiation that comes off of it.
I first read about van Eck phreaking in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It is used a couple of times, and I was instantly intrigued. Since then it's made it around the net a couple of times, and today I picked it up again from a post on hacksine. They even had a link to the paper by Wim van Eck from 1985 (in astonishing quality, compared to most old papers that I come across).
I was even more excited when I found a little blurb about the author, and it turns out that he's an alumn from my university, Twente University. Sadly the discovery seems to have come some years later when he was working at some other company, but still.

Crunch time

2008-01-21T11:53:00.001+01:00

As you may have suspected from my lack of updates, it's been crunchtime these last couple of weeks.
Not only have I released version 1.0 of cuftpd, but I have also, today, written what could very well be my last exam ever. I don't have that "it's all completed"-feeling quite yet, as I won't have the results for another couple of weeks, so there is still a lot of anticipation, but atleast I know that it is out of my hands now.
It didn't feel like a 10 (nothing ever does), but it didn't feel like a fail either.
Currently, all I want is a passing grade. I'm happy if I get more, of course, but I really don't want to have to redo the exam.
Luckily I only had one exam this period. It would have been hell if I had had more.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw a gameplay video of Mythos yesterday (when I should have been studying). Being as big a fan of diablo as I am, I believe that I will play Mythos until my eyes bleed when it comes out. I signed up for the beta, just in case.

The Spice Must Flow

2008-01-06T21:32:00.001+01:00

The price of crude oil recently reached $100 per barrel.
The oil that powers society today is much like the spice in the Dune universe.
In the Dune universe, the spice not only extends life, but allows for instantaneous space travel.
Much like the spice allows for unlimited travel, oil powers the entire transportation machinery of our planet.

Interesting things happens when spice production is halted. Read the book or watch the movie and you will see.
I wonder what will happen when oil production stops. Not because someone chose to stop pumping oil, but rather because there was no oil to pump.

The spice must flow.

For now. In the near future, however, we need to wean ourselves off our dependency.
If we don't do it now, while there is still time, the withdrawal will be much more severe.

Californication

2007-12-29T16:36:00.000+01:00

I just watched the end of the tv show Californication. For those of you who don't know, it's a comedy starring David Duchovny, among others. It's an absolutely brilliant piece of small screen entertainment. It's got witty dialog, lots of great tits and nudity (more so in the beginning than the end), and a wonderful story.
There have been 12 episodes recorded and released so far, and I recommend that you watch them, because they are wonderful.
There is, however, a problem.
The first season had 12 episodes. Each of which was roughly a half hour. This makes a mini-series in 6 pieces, should one be so inclined. This is only of of the problems, and I'll get to why in a bit.
The second problem is that it seems to have been written like a movie. This first season has all the stages of a good movie clearly defined, but with some extra padding added on to make it into a tv show. Now, it would have made a terrible 2 hour love comedy, but as a 6 hour tv show it's great. It needs those extra hours to really put the content in there.

We have two problems, which might not seem like problems by themselves, but when taken together it spells death for the show. The fact that it was so short, and that it had a proper movie-style ending, indicates to me that, while new shows generally have a short first season for various reasons, they normally don't have such a definitive first season close as californication did. I won't disclose the ending, for those of you who haven't seen it, but I doubt that the second season will ever reach production. According to wikipedia, the shooting is scheduled to start in April of 2008. While this is only 5 months away, it takes place in southern california, and shooting could have begun much quicker if the producers and the publishers actually thought there was something worth putting more money and effort into. The fact that it had a proper ending, and that shooting for the next season is pushed so relatively far back, makes me believe that there won't be a second season.
It also makes sense because it's hard to see where the show would progress from here. It would be easy to just make it a static show about Hank Moody and the trials and tribulations of his life, but that just doesn't fit in with how the first season played out.

I really honestly hope that they can swing several more seasons, and with the same kind of writing that the first season had, but I just don't see it.
Kudos on an extremely well made first season, but I just don't think the storyline has any more tread left on it, I'm sorry...

I'd be able to further elaborate on this, but not without spoiling much of the ending. A little hint is that you are going to love the ending.

So ends an era

2007-12-29T01:05:00.000+01:00

I have the gravest news. AOL announcer earlier that they are discontinuing the Netscape browser.
This is sad for many reasons. One reason is that the browser poised to take the crown from Netscape, the spin-off Firefox truely and utterly sucks (at least in its current 2.0 state). The primary reason that this is sad, however, is that it ends an internet era for me. I have been using Netscape since 1994, version 1.0 (with the throbbing N, you might have seen it in the first Mission Impossible movie). I remember sitting on some crappy modem and using, which was at the time, virtually the only browser around.
Recently (since 2004) I've been using version 7.2 of Netscape's browser. The last version to truely be the Netscape that some of us know and love. Netscape 8 was a joke, and Netscape 9 is basically firefox with a theme.
I tried using Opera, but slow startup times and no added value keeps leading me back to my beloved Netscape 7.2. I believe that I will keep on using Netscape 7.2 for as long as it will run. I realize that HTML5 is in the works, but I think it's a bad idea. XHTML is the way of the future.

If Netscape stops working due to funky web design, I really have no clue where I will turn. Hopefully, by then, there will be something around that is actually usable.

For those of you who are interested, my User-Agent string is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

Edited to add: apparently I was wrong on the year. This article points out that netscape was founded in 1994, not 1993. I wonder what I was using before that then...

Edumacation

2007-12-17T09:37:00.001+01:00

I ran in to this quote today by Albert Einsten:

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Albert Einstein

It ties in really well with something I wrote down in one of my books as I was studying it last week:

The smarter I become
The dumber I feel

There's nothing better for letting you know how infinitely little you know about everything than learning about other things. The more you learn about one thing, the more you realize that there is so much more information out there about which you don't have a fucking clue.

Now, the reason why I think these two quotes tie in well together (which might not have otherwise been obvious), is that going to grad school really makes your knowledge seem insignificant, because you are exposed to so much other knowledge that you know you can't possibly learn it all. What grad school also does is expose you to a lot of useless knowledge, which in turn keeps you from learning about things that you are really interested in.

The Dangers of Open Source Software

2007-12-15T17:08:00.002+01:00

It is as sinister as the title suggests, but not in the direction you would think. I came across this today. It's a blog post from the guy who writes Paint.NET.
Just like all of the software I write, it is Open Source. For those of you know don't know what this means, it means that you give away the source code that makes up the software for free for everyone to see. The advantages of this are many. It fosters an atmosphere of honesty, since you can't sneak nasty stuff into your software if anybody can look at what you did. It also helps other developers learn new things, by looking at how you solved a particular problem.
There are many open source projects out there. Linux is one, Apache is another, and the different BSD distributions are open source as well.
Now, the disadvantage, as Rick Brewster points out, is that people can just take your code and do whatever they want with it. In his case, this means that someone basically just stole all his code, and some code from contributers to Paint.NET and rebranded it as their own. Taking code isn't a problem, but stealing the whole application and removing the credits, copyright and license (which is illegal in almost all countries I know), is just plain wrong.
Rick could sue the person, but I doubt it would do any good. The FSF could take on the case and rally some publicity for it, but the only thing that might come of that is that this particular instance of code stealing gets punished.
The problem, of course, is that there is no way to prevent people from doing this, short of taking them all to court, which just isn't practical. The open source business model will always suffer from this. People are basically immoral and will do anything to help themselves. If this is at the expense of others, so be it.
We can hope that the world will become a better place all we want, but that won't make it so.
When I see my code reused, I'm just happy someone liked what I did, but then I don't write the kind of software that Rick does.

Rick's software might be big enough to reach a critical mass of complaint where someone will do something about it, but most people who write open source software will not have that luxury. If people would do this to Linux, heads would (and do) roll, since it's such a big thing, but most open source authors will just have to bend over and take it up the ass when things like this happens. Our only hope is that the thieves step far enough over the line so that they commit a punishable offense.

Marriage

2007-12-06T10:00:00.000+01:00

I know why people get married.
I figured it out in the shower today.
It's vendor lock in. Think about it. It's another hurdle that you must overcome to switch providers.
Marriage provides everything a normal relationship does, except that it is harder to switch out of. If you're on a normal relationship and you find some reason to leave, you can just break up.
If you are married, however, breaking up becomes a process.

In a relationship, there's generally one person who has more to loose from breaking up than the other. This could be because of many things. For instance, he or she has a harder time getting dates. They might be affraid of being alone. They can't cook. The list can be long.
We will call this person the weaker person. In the pecking order of the real world, this person would be eaten first of the two, if we followed the laws of the animal kingdom.
Because this person has the most to loose, this person will probably be the one who proposes. The roles might change over time, but I believe that the person who wants it to end the least does the most he or she can to get it to last. One convenient thing to make it last longer, that the parents will like too, is to get married.

I think that couples who survive without marriage, without kids, and quite possibly without anything else material holding them together, are the strongest couples. If they don't need ways of tying the other person down into the relationship, they have a pretty good relationship to start with.

If you have different values, I challenge you to prove me wrong!

Waterboarding IS Torture

2007-11-30T10:45:00.001+01:00

I was reading today about waterboarding. I don't know what triggered it, but an hour of fascinated wikipedia clicking later, and I knew enough to categorically declare waterboarding torture.
I also read that there are some reported and admitted cases of the US using waterboarding to interrogate prisoners in morden times (the last 5-10 years). I'm sure there are also a bunch of false reports, but the fact that there is even one substantiated and confirmed report makes me sick to my stomach.
While the concept of torture is an interesting one, from a scientific point of view, subjecting humans to anythin remotely close to what I have read about today is nothing short insane.
Victims will say anything to escape the torture. Sometimes interrogators are lucky and they go after someone who actually has something of value to disclose, but if it was me on that board, I'd admit to the whole holocaust if it meant that I didn't have to be tortured.
Some might call me wek minded, but torture is an attrocity, and anyone performing it should receive the harshest possibly punishment.
Totrure shoudl not be performed. In any way shape or form. There can be no exception here whatsoever. Even the Geneva Convention backs me up on this one.

The worst part is that there is no oversight. There is noone to monitor the monitors. Supposedly the police are to be the monitors. If you do anything wrong, they punish you. (police / legal system). This isn't the case though, because the military can do things the police can't, and they don't have to tell you about it. What's worse is that the intelligence agencies do even worse things, and it's not that they don't have to tell you about it, but peopel never find out.
Even if countries have strong willed leaders who are against these sort of things, intelligence organizations, such as the CIA for instance, do whatever they damn well please, and noone is the wiser.

The torture has to stop. Humans need to be treated like humans. Not even when they are proven guilty should human treatment be abandoned. There is never a reason for torture.
And even if there was, what if you've got the wrong guy? What if your assumptions are wrong? What if he doesn't know anything? There are so many "what if"s that any argument for torture can be swiftly dealt with by the massive amount of uncertainty surrounding the authorization of torture.

Governments publicly declare that they are against torture (most of them anyway), but when pressed on specific issues (like waterboarding), they squirm and shed responsibility by claiming that a specific interrogation technique isn't classified as torture.
Anything that more than basically a heated conversation with possibly some screaming should be considered torture. Inflicting pain or the threat of pain, both mental or physical, is torture. There are no two ways about it.

Some of you, undoubtably, would say that there are exceptions. Much like how banning certain forms of expression and thought might seem convenient, who determines where to draw the line?
A lot of people would love to ban nazi symbols and racist speech. Make it a punishable offense. This might seem, by most, as an aceptable thing to do, but who's to say that the next "bad" thing isn't being republican. Or muslim.
If we let governments get away with this sort of thing there is no going back. There is no revoking the privilege. History shows that privileges given to governments are never given back.

The problem, as with most things human, is that there is no easy solution to the problem of government. Humans are inherently power-hungry, and they will do all they can in a position of power to make it last longer, or get elevated into a position of more power. One could argue for direct democracy, that everyone votes on all the issues, but that's not feasible. Besides, most people don't care about most decisions anyway, nor are they informed enough to make a proper decision.

I realize that we are moving away from the central issue here, which is that torture is bad, but this issue arises due to the fact that there is very little the population can do about the behavior of the government. Fear is an excellent way of controlling a population, and most governments have mastered it and made it an art.

Don't believe everything you hear. Question everything. Make sure that you know the facts.
You should even question what I wrote here. Don't take my word for it, investigate!

Racing Rocks

2007-11-27T22:57:00.000+01:00

I just found a link to a pretty cool phenomenon. Apparently there's this place out in the desert where huge heavy rocks move around and create snail trails with no apparent application of force.
People have never seen the rocks move, but they do move, and when they move, they leave big trails after them, indicating that they have been sliding around.
It all looks pretty cool, and the pictures look really nice.
Take a look here.

Skype Crypto Unbreakable by German Police

2007-11-23T12:06:00.000+01:00

Slashdot is running this article today. It's about how the German police is having difficulty breaking the cryptography used by the popular voice communication software Skype.

Germany's top police officer, Joerg Ziercke, said. "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted."

My first reaction to this was "so, any and all other forms of encryption are easily breakable to you then?". This is, hopefully, not true, but it was phrased in such a way.
There was an especially good comment, with a really good finisher, and it was this one by hanssprudel:

This is a good thing. Having to install monitoring at the source or destination means an operation that requires effort and, hopefully, a court order. This means that their is judicial oversight, and that to catch criminals police have to do, you know, police work rather than just sitting around spying on us.

Ubiquitous encryption does not make law enforcement impossible. It just makes indiscriminate law enforcement impossible.

The bold face is mine. (If hanssprudel doesn't like me reprinting this, he's welcome to talk to me about it, and I'll fix it).
I think it's a good thing that the police should have to earn their keep. Sure, the beat cops are out there getting shot at, and they earn their paycheck, but in the age of digital surveillance, it has become to easy for organizations (governmental or otherwise) with clandestine agendas to spy on what other people do.
Granted, it has become easier to hide what we do as well (we as in normal people, not clandestine organizations), but that doesn't mean that the intelligence community should get carte blanche for spying on us.
Regardless of what technology you use, there should be checks and balances in place to make sure that the rights of the individual are not being violated. We should not regulate technology. That is useless, because it changes faster than the laws do. We need to regulate what can be done to people rather than how.

Stopping and Moving Light

2007-11-23T09:13:00.000+01:00

I'm no physicist, but I'm enough of a scientist to think this is pretty cool.
A Harvard physicist named Lene Vestergaard Hau has been experimenting with Bose-Enstein Condensates (BECs for short), and found that when you hit them with lasers, you can get them to do pretty nifty things:

Her first trick was slowing a pulse of light to a crawl — 15 mph as it traveled through the BEC. Since then, Hau has completely frozen a pulse and then released it. And recently she shot a pulse into one BEC and stopped it — turning the BEC into a hologram, a sort of matter version of the pulse. Then she transferred that matter waveform into an entirely different BEC nearby — which emitted the original light pulse.

How cool is that!

Browser Wars

2007-11-19T16:24:00.000+01:00

Another casualty.
I use Netscape 7.2 as my browser. It's great, it's fast, it's got a wonderful email client, and it uses an old gecko rendering engine (the same that was in firefox circa 2004) that does virtually anything you ask of it.
I say virtually, because one application (that I don't particularly like) has fallen off the wagon and now prohibits me from clicking buttons.
This application is facebook.com.
Whenever I go to respond to a message or accepting a friend request anything that involves any kind of submission, it just does not play ball. It doesn't give me an error message either, so I can't know it has actually failed. It just sits there as if the action I just took was lost somewhere between my mouse and my browser.
It used to work well up until a couple of weeks ago. Did my rendering engine deteriorate all of a sudden, or are the writers of facebook total asshats that will change a working solution to a non-working one without adding any other benefits?
I would have been more willing to accept it if they had some explanation like "as part of an upgrade, clicking a button will not dispense candy from your cd-rom drive, but as a result clicking buttons in Netscape 7.2 will not work".
I would have even settled for something less extravagant, but they have given me nothing, and yet taken a core feature away from me.
Now, I really hate to have an account on that glorified address book, but since "everybody is doing it", I figure I have to throw mine in with the rest.
At least until now.

From now on, please, those of you who read this. Don't contact me on facebook. I don't want to have to fire up another browser just to answer some message that could be sent to me via a plethora of other services (email being one).
People who don't have any other means of contacting me than via facebook, fine, you do that, but the rest of you. Please choose another proven means of communication where I don't have to suffer needlessly.
I would change browsers, if it wasn't for the fact that they all suck. I guess Opera is ok, but it still can't stand up to the awesome performance my Netscape 7.2.

Also, for hitherto unknown reasons, I get a "500 internal Server Error" when I try to use the blogger spell check.

Welcome to civilization

2007-11-18T20:33:00.000+01:00

I just came across this little piece of news from Saudi Arabia.
According to CNN, some woman met with a guy, and as a result of her being at this meeting, 7 met converged on her and the guy and gang-raped them.
Why Saudi men would rape another man is unknown, but apparently, that's what happened.
Anyway, the gay rape is not what is at issue here. What we are talking about is the atrocious treatment this woman received from the government.
Her rapist got sentenced to between 10 months and 5 years in prison. I don't know how that stacks up to other international rape convictions, so I will not pass judgement.
The woman, however, the rape victim got, get this, 90 lashes as punishment for meeting with an unrelated male. Not only did she get raped by 7 dudes, but she's getting raped by the Saudi government as well.
As could be expected, she and her lawyer appealed both her sentence (and presumably ruling) and the sentences of the rapists.
The court increased the sentence to the rapists to 2 - 9 years.
What the court also did, and this is where I start getting nervous twitches, is that they sentenced the raped woman to 6 months in prison and 200 lashes!
What the fuck?!
Not only that, but they disbarred her lawyer in the process, so now she has no legal representation.
The reason for her increased sentence was apparently:

The judges more than doubled the punishment for the victim because of "her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media," according to a source quoted by Arab News, an English-language Middle Eastern daily newspaper.

So, not only do we do horrible things to women in general, but we stifle any and all forms of public outcry.
I've blogged about weird religious laws and getting lashes previously, but this is just ridiculous.
How the hell do they expect to be accepted as equals (and not just oil suppliers) in modern society when they pull shit like this in a regular basis?
It's supposed to be the cradle of civilization, but apparently someone got dropped on the head several times by some evil proverbial stepmother, and we end up with this.
Seriously people, it's time to get your shit together. It's stuff like this that makes me think that the atrocities that the US commits against both its citizens and the rest of the civilized world on a daily basis is nothing to be worried about.
I would never live in the US, but I would sure as hell never live in a country with laws like this.
This is one of the few cases where I can honestly say "go team America - world police!".
I don't care what you say about equality, but sentencing anyone, especially a 19 year old rape victim to 6 months in prison and 200 lashes warrants a serious carpet bombing.

Frank Lloyd Wright

2007-11-18T16:30:00.001+01:00

It should come as no surprised to the people I've spoken to about architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright is my favorite architect, hands down. The man is an absolute genius, and all his designs are masterpieces second to none.
Unfortunately, the man is dead. Died some 50 years ago (the man lived to be 91 years old. remarkable). This unfortunately means that I can't get him on the horn to design my house, but that hasn't stopped Joe Massaro. Massaro has revived some sketches that Fran Lloyd Wright did for a house on Petra island on Lake Mahopac. Joe purchased the island, where the previous owner had chosen to not go on with the building, and decided to put up the house anyway.
Apparently, the only thing available for the project was some pencil sketches that Wright had done for the house.
The result is an absolute beauty, much like all the other of Wright's works. You can clearly see the heritage in the square lines and how thing extend into the air with no support other than the one inherent in the structure. The house also incorporates features of the island it is built on, like pieces of rock coming out of the walls and the floor (picture 4 from the article).
Absolutely magnificent. Even though I am but an architecture dilettante, I know what I like, and I know that I like Frank Lloyd Wright.

Also, as you can see, I just found a wonderful new blog that I will be evaluating. Hopefully it will keep up what I've seen so far.

People Killing People

2007-11-15T16:15:00.000+01:00

It's interesting to note that googling for "people killing people for a reason" (without the quotes) only gives me hits with a little "no" inserted, as in "people killing people for no reason".
If I search for "people killing people for a reason" (with the quotes), however, the only hits I get are from a song by Infected Mushroom called "change the formality".
I don't know why this is, but I can only assume that it has something to do with the fact that there is no real reason to actually kill someone else...

Jeans

2007-11-06T17:29:00.000+01:00

I have a couple of jeans that I like. These jeans look great. I think so, others think so.
The fashionistas of the world have decided that in fall you wear darker colors and in spring you wear lighter colors. This makes sense from a cleaning things perspective, but what doesn't make sense is that they just up and stop selling all the other stuff just because the seasons change.
I like pale washed jeans. In fact I like all the colors I wear to be pale, but especially so with jeans.
Since no brick-and-mortar store sells my jeans anymore, I decided to go online and find them.
Shouldn't be too hard I though, and said and done, I found a handful of sites selling them.
After a good 30 minutes of trying to figure out what color was which, I had finally come to some unsure conclusion about which color best matched the ones I am currently wearing.
I go to the checkout stage, and on ALL the sites, the field where you're supposed to fill in "country" is either non-existent, or it is preset to "United Kingdom", and is unchangeable.

Wasn't one of the big things with the European Union that there was supposed to be free movement of goods and money? Why won't these ass-goblins sell me my precious jeans, just because I'm in a different country from them? Even play.com sells me stuff anywhere in Europe with free shipping, but not these fuckers.

I am truly and utterly disappointed. I believe I don't even want to visit a site with a .co.uk TLD.
To quote Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore: "I will not hurt or harm you. Just give me back the board, Lance. It was a good board - and I like it. You know how hard it is to find a board you like."

Apparently good boards aren't the only things that are hard to find...

Spam Spam Sausage and Spam

2007-11-03T14:25:00.000+01:00

In an average week, I probably get something like 4-5 spam messages. Sometimes more, often less.
Today, however, I log on to my webmail system and find, get this, 21 pages full of spam.
One page contains something like 30 messages, so that would make something like 600 spam messages. Delivered to me tonight.
This almost never happens, so I can only assume that something is going on. The thing is that it's 'delivery failure' messages, so my name isn't in the target list, but it seems to be in the list of senders. Granted, none of the emails actually use my email, they just use my domain.
I can, without a doubt, say that I've never received this much spam at any single moment in time before. It'll be interesting to read the news today and see if other people are experiencing something similar.

Äntligen!

2007-11-02T11:23:00.000+01:00

Toshiba has finally created a TFT worthy of praise from me.
Previously the only somewhat acceptable fixed-resolution display was the Apple 30" cinema display (or the dell equivalent) with a whopping 2560 x 1600 resolution.
Now, since I'm sitting pretty on 2048x1536 on a lovely CRT, I would be stupid to spend €2000 on a cinema display, no matter how good it is. TFT just can't keep up with CRT when it comes to picture quality. The fact that they don't have variable resolution is another horrible thing that most likely will keep me from ever buying a TFT.
The display that Toshiba has created blows everything else out of the water. At an astonishing 3840x2400 pixels on a 22" screen, it is the display to beat.
Apple needs 30" to cram half of that amount of pixels onto the screen. Laughable!
Granted, the Toshiba is brand new. So new, in fact, that none of the news outlets have a picture of it yet. Not only that, but it'll set you back a hefty $17.500 (according to Engadget, $1800 according to Wired).
This is a 9 megapixel screen, for you photo nuts out there, so the days of scaling to fit stuff in are gone.
All in all an incredible machine. This is development going in the right direction for me. Maybe some day we will have affordable screens at this resolution. Until then, I'm sticking with my CRT.

Call the cops on your neighbor, get a cookie

2007-11-01T15:03:00.000+01:00

Try as I might, I can't keep myself from posting delicious nuggets from Bruce Schneier's blog. If your not reading it every day you should be ashamed of yourselves.
This current one is about the war on the unexpected. How citizens are encouraged to report everything that they see that doesn't seem right to them.
In this day and age, that basically means everything.
You really need to read this article. It is very insightful, and it gives further proof that society as we know it is going to hell. The terrorists have won. Shit, they don't even need to kill another person ever. We are already terrorized by our petty fear. Terrorists don't need to blow up planes to shut down airports. Just call in an anonymous tip, and you'll terrorize the travellers and authorities for hours or even days.
This has got to stop!
People, refuse to be terrorized! Refuse to believe that everything outside your own kitchen is out to hurt you. The world isn't as bad a place as people make it out to be.
Sure, people are assholes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are out to destroy civilization as we know it.
A bright example of this fear mongering (that was also linked from Bruce's article) is this campaign that you're supposed to call the cops whenever you see a parent holding a child's hand. Does holding your child's hand automatically mean that you're sexually abusing it? I'm going to go for "no" on that question, but if the societal tendencies today are to be believed, the answer to that question is "yes".
I used to think that people's stupidity was what would bring about the downfall of society, but I was wrong. It's people's unfounded fear that will ultimately cause the world to collapse.

Maybe if people weren't so dumb, they wouldn't believe in all this crap that the media machine churns out.

Fo Shizzle!

2007-10-29T16:18:00.001+01:00

This is a surefire sign that language is going to hell, and quite possibly culture with it.
In tha ghetto, bitches!

Multi-touch interfaces

2007-10-28T21:22:00.000+01:00

A friend just sent me this video of an awesome demonstration of a wall-based direct graphic multi-touch interface. I'm not entirely sure what it would be used for other than working with images and possibly some modelling (I preferr a real tactile keyboard when typing), but I do know that this is a sign that the future is now.
Cool things are happening, and slowly but surely they are being brought out in the lime light.
I even heard someone has flying cars available for preorder.
Anyway, check this cool demonstration out. It will blow your socks off!

Full On Ferry Fiasco

2007-10-28T16:07:00.000+01:00

Last night me and my girlfriend (as well as a couple of thousand other souls) went to the Full On Ferry Masquerade in Rotterdam. I had had some bad feelings about the whole thing for a couple of days, but I chalked it up to my s.a.d.
Anyway, we got on the train from Enschede at 21.57 to go to Rotterdam. A 2½ hour train trip and a subway ride later, we were showing the people at the gate our tickets.
Once we got inside, we started moving to the dance floor. The place featured only once large-ish dance floor, and a staging area where one could buy hotdogs (the only food available), and some trinkets and other knick-knacks.
We went to the dance floor to get a feel for the music. 30 minutes later, I was convinced that the DJ had not changed the record. Not because of mad DJing skills making for seamless transitions, but rather because it sounded exactly the same. Similar is ok, it's in the same genre, but the same?
Not only was the music incredibly repetitive, but it was also horrible. Labeled as a trance event, this was the housiest trance I have ever heard. And it wasn't the good kind of housy trance (there are a few tunes), but rather trance laid on top of a lazily crafted house loop. Absolutely nothing going on but the rhythm. The music was incredibly boring.
We left around 3 am.
The problem was that last night was the switch day for daylight savings time, which gave us a wonderful extra hour. Now, had this been at a great party, I would have liked it, but the fact that we were stuck in the cold Rotterdam night with no way of getting back to any kind of civilization made this extra hour seem like hell.
Our first train was scheduled to leave at 7.32, a lovely 4½ hours later. As this was clearly unacceptable, we embarked on a long winded train trek over what seemed like all of Holland, just to be indoors on a train instead of waiting out in the cold.
The train trip that normally takes just over 2½ hours took us somewhere around 4.
For those of you who don't know, Holland seems completely devoid of indoor waiting areas. This is fine in July, but it is unacceptable in October.

I've been let down by Ferry Corsten and his ilk before, but this was the last time.
From now on I will refuse to spend 39 EURO parties that I know will never ever be worth the money. If I also have to travel to another part of the country just to attend, I'll be even less likely to go.
I've known for a long time that spending anything over 10 euro on a party is too much, compared to the value I get for it, but silly little me, I keep on going anyway.
Well I say no more. The stupidity ends now!
No more crappy mainstream trance events. From now on I choose my parties with care. Even though it means going to fewer parties, I am totally fine with that.
Seeing as how I am a poor student, I can't afford to blow 100 EUROS for a party night anyway.

I hate seeing stupidity in other people, it's painful, but seeing stupidity in my self is the worst.
Hopefully I can remember this vow next time a big party comes up...

Fuck you Ferry, Fuck you very much!

Half-life 2 - Episode Two

2007-10-23T11:25:00.000+02:00

I recently finished playing Half-life 2 - Episode two. When I first played the original Half-life 2, I was blown away not so much by the graphics engine, but by the graphics themselves. Sure, the marvelous physics engine was incredible, but the way they painted the landscape and the dysotopian future is what made me come back to the game and play it over again three times.
The colors they used, especially in the outdoor scenes, and the way things looked real was what really hit home.
I generally play FPSs for the story, and not to weave some skill. If FPS skill was what it was all about, I'd be doing de_dust day in and day out, but that's just not fun. (Ok, it's awesome, but for short periods of time).
The story that the team at Valve have spun, stretching over four installments of the Half-life 2 game (3 of which are currently available) is just incredible. The characters are all well made, incredibly well scripted and voices, and most of all, they are real. The only game where I have felt such reality was in Myst and Riven.
The first Half-life 2 game took me some 15-20 hours to play through. At the time I thought this was an acceptable amount of entertainment for the price of the game. The promise of episodic content to be released on a short schedule made my mouth water. The problem, as we all know, is that they failed to deliver. The first game came out in 2004, after having been postponed in 2003. The next episode came out in 2006. The whole point of having episodic content is that you run with the technology you have, and just create more content. This was supposed to lead to shorter inter-release times, but that apparently did not happen. They did a better job on episode 2, which was released just one year after episode one.

Now, as great as both episode one and episode two were to play, they lacked something fundamental, and that was time. They were both incredibly short. I finished episode two in 2/3 or the time that I finished episode one (6 and 9 hours, respectively).
Of course, people could say "play on a harder difficulty", but that's not the point. Sure that would make the battles themselves last longer, but in a game that is mostly about story, and very much about puzzle solving, this would not add as much time as it would add frustration and get in the way of the story.
Other than the time spent, I only have one gripe, and that's that Gordon's gloves looked like they were chromed. I can expect this kind of gloss from things like Need For Speed - Underground, but I expected a flatter and dryer look in Half-life 2. Also, the detail on some of the weapons was terrible, but these things could just have been texture glitches.

All in all I am very happy with what they've done with the game. My only hope is that episode three, the conclusion (which hopefully will ship around this time next year) will finish off with a bang, and take around 20 hours to complete. That way the start and the end would be balances, and episodes one and two could be seen as mere interludes.

Another wonderful feature is the directors commentary. I would have loved to have that in the original Half-life 2.
I also ran through portal in a couple of hours. It was a fun game, but I'm not as excited about is as the general gaming press seems to be. I did like GLaDOS though. All the cake references added another layer of sweetness (frosting?) to the game.

Frost

2007-10-22T08:33:00.000+02:00

Frost on the rooftops this morning.
There's a serene and peaceful quality about frost.
Or maybe it's just the beautiful sunrise.
Winter is coming.

The Winter is Coming

2007-10-18T16:56:00.000+02:00

I look outside my window today and it looks like an absolutely gorgeous day. Nary a cloud, and the sky is blue.
Looks can be deceiving, however, because I know that it's fucking freezing outside. I got the brunt of the mummy's wrath when biking home from my girlfriend's house earlier today.
I snipped this from the BBC online weather service (if you're from the BBC and you don't like this, just tell me).
As you can see in the "Summary" column, we're in for some nice weather. What's deceptive about this is the ghastly nighttime temperatures. As you can see, circled at the bottom right, is the -3 degrees C we will have on Monday night.
Last winter I experienced a grand total of 2 or 3 days with temperatures below 0 here in Enschede, and none of them were in the middle of October. I've got a bad feeling about this. The dutch say that this summer has sucked, so I can only assume that means that we're in for a shitty winter too.
Why ohh why can't I just live in a beach hut somewhere?...

Base jumping

2007-10-17T17:31:00.000+02:00

A friend just sent me a link to this video, it's just about the coolest thing I've ever seen a human do.
Granted, it's dangerous, but it's not stupid.
I believe that if I wasn't so keen on keeping my head squarely on my shoulders, this is the kind of stuff I would absolutely love to do.
And in the alps too, what a fucking rush this must have been.
Regular skydiving is for pansies, that's all I have to say...

The things these people get out of life, I am pretty sure cannot be canned or put in a pill and sold. This, to me, looks pretty close to the ultimate rush!
Doing summersaults while sniffing 50cm out from the cliff wall... There are no words to describe this!

Jeff Dunham

2007-10-15T16:02:00.000+02:00

I found something today that is absolutely hilarious! Jeff Dunham is an extremely talented ventriloquist with 5 loquacious companions; Ahmed the dead terrorist, peanut, Melvin, Walter and Jose jalapeno on a stick. Coincidentally, in order of funniness.
Ahmed is by far the funniest. Peanut is ok, but after that it trails down.
Anyway, for your enjoyment, here they are:

Ahmed the dead terrorist - http://youtube.com/watch?v=1uwOL4rB-go
Peanut part 1 - http://youtube.com/watch?v=oQm_8vX3sYU
Peanut part 2 - http://youtube.com/watch?v=f9KK3FlVC2w
Peanut part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrr4rV4AaOU&NR=1
Melvin part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeRDgAkK-zs
Melvin part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d70SLc6BfA0
Walter part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf81dE4DS20
Walter part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-MmzCQSuFw

They were recorded for comedy central, and they are well worth watching.

Burning the candle

2007-10-14T17:42:00.000+02:00

You know what's really good about living in a foreign country?
Birthdays! I absolutely hate birthdays. Mine as well as others, but mostly mine.
When you live in a different country, you not only rid your family members of the terrible task of buying you some nonsense thing that you don't need, but you also get rid of that task yourself.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love giving things to the people I like, it's not that, it's just the eternal problem of what do you give to the man who has everything?
I'm not saying that I do, but I know that if there's anything out there that I want (and that is reasonably priced), I buy it. I know that the rest of my family and my friends are the exact same way. Things that fall outside my range of reasonably priced wouldn't fit in that range for your family members anyway, so it comes down to trying to find something that is both acceptably expensive and that will also be liked by the recipient.
When I was 7 years old, this posed absolutely no problem what so ever. Now that I'm 28 going on 29 (I shiver at the very thought), this has become an insurmountably complex problem. It's even worse when it comes to parents.
Also, when your family members aren't around, you can conveniently forget your birthday. That way you don't have to acknowledge the fact that you're not getting any younger, and the years only get shorter and shorter.
All in all it's a win-win situation for everybody.

I'll make you all a deal right here. If you promise to conveniently forget about my birthday, I'll promise to forget about yours, and we'll all live happily ever after in blissful ignorance...

The Nobel Peace Prize 2007

2007-10-12T15:07:00.000+02:00

The laureates for the Nobel Peace Prize were announced today. It goes to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, each getting half of the price.

"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"

It is well deserved I think. Global warming is a serious issue that we need to look at.

Bruce Schneier Talks at Defcon 15

2007-10-12T13:37:00.000+02:00

From Bruce's blog we get a link to the talk he gave at Defcon 15. It's actually just a Q&A session, but it's quite insightful and interesting. Besides, Bruce is an awesome speaker, he's funny, he's charismatic, and he has a great voice. If this man was selling volcano insurance, I'd buy it in a second.
He takes some questions about the flying withing an ID, and the TSA, and why they have one of the shittiest jobs in the world. He goes on to talk about crypto and hash functions and how NIST is going to do for hash functions what they did for the AES, namely have a competition to get the next successor to SHA-1.
He also gets a question about privacy which he answers brilliantly and at length. This, for me, was the highlight of the show.
He then talks about side channel attacks on crypto and electronic voting and some more crypto.
All in all a very good way to spend 49 minutes and 20 seconds. It's available from google video here.

Now the UK is also off-limits for me.

2007-10-12T10:40:00.000+02:00

For the longest time (basically since the introduction of the PATRIOT act) the US has been off-limits for me. Not because I've committed any crime punishable under it, but rather because it gives law enforcement the legal right to do whatever the fuck the want to people without having to prove anything.
Now, after a long line of similar atrocities, the UK is also on my no-fly list. Almost once a week I read about new legal development in the UK (usually on Slashdot and on Bruce Schneier's Blog) that gives the police similar freedoms there. You'd think that people in an EU country would be more resilient to big brother-ness like this, but apparently law makers don't listen to the people anymore (when have they ever, right...).
One could argue that the big grey mass of people would like to give up liberty to gain security, which doesn't actually work, but the reality is that the big grey mass of people probably don't vote anyway, should something like this actually be voted on via referendum.
The US and UK are now right up there with North Korea and China on the list of countries that don't give a flying fuck about the liberties of their citizens, and will do anything to bring about a police state much in the same way that Germany worked back in the day (can someone say Gestapo?). Bush seems intent on finding a final solution to the liberty problem, but other than the problem statement, there are a lot of similarities between him and some other guys in history I can think of.

I find my education lacking

2007-10-12T00:03:00.000+02:00

A big problem that software developers face today, with the advent of multi-core cpus and grid computing is parallel programming. Ask any computer scientist and he (most often he, sometimes she) will tell you that one of the 'big' problems that computer scientists face is problems of concurrency and parallelism.
Despite this well known and difficult to tackle problem, I have yet to see a single university course that deals with this in depth. Sure, some basic programming courses mention that this IS a problem, but doesn't arm you with any tool to solve these problems, or explain the problems in detail.
Granted, most toy examples that are used in schools never require any parallelism, but that's why I think there should be an entire course dedicated to it. A course where you wouldn't address some random problem and hope to solve it in a parallel manner, but you would specifically craft problems that would only be solved in this way.
Research into this area has gotten so far that most known issues in parallel programming even have names and scenarios drawn up for them to explain them properly, but this is never seen on a university level.
Looking over the various education paths available to a computer science student, I'd need to complete 4-5 masters programs to learn all the stuff I'm interested in from a teacher.
Sure, most people who are genuinely interested in their profession will take it upon themselves to read about this on their own time, but some of it might still need explanation, and people might need guidance. Also, getting a different view on a problem you're struggling to solve can be invaluable.

What I had really wanted from my stay at university was to learn how to program. To learn it in detail, learn different programming paradigms, learn how to solve problems, and to become a damn fine hacker(not that kind of hacker, look it up). Instead we are bombarded with modelling courses and levels upon levels of abstraction. I'm not saying that these courses are bad, because they're not. I'm just saying that there should be a university education for people interested in computer science (who suck at math, like I do), but that don't want to gun for middle-management right out of some data entry job. For the people who want to build hammers instead of use hammers to build houses.

I could have learned twice as much in half the time had there been a program like this for me. I would gladly have ditched a large portion of the courses I have taken in favor of proper advanced programming courses.
Maybe that's just me though, maybe I'm of a different breed, more old school that other people, but the last thing I want to wear to work is a shirt and tie...

Infected Mushroom - Vicious Delicious

2007-10-09T14:32:00.000+02:00

I just got my hands on Intefected Mushroom's newest album Vicious Delicious.
I know it's been out for several months, but I never got around to actually listening to it until now.
I must say that it is a radical departure from what they have done in the past. While this is only partly the Infected Mushroom I know, I still like the album a lot.
The beginning has some flavor of rock and whatever the genre name for what Link Park plays is. I'm not saying that it sounds like it, but it has some elements of similar styles. This latest album is also somewhat slower than their previous albums. There are a lot of guitars on this album. The guitars are very goa, yet also not. Lots of lyrics, much of them coherent instead of just small clips of a sentence and a half.
It gets older and trancier towards the end. More back to the roots.

All in all, it's not hard to see why so many people like Infected Mushroom. Sure, not everything they make is good (B.P Empire and Converting Vegetarians come to mind), but I must say they have a higher average than most, and the music that is good is just that much better.

Choice Overload

2007-10-03T11:22:00.000+02:00

I found an interesting blog post over at Intel's research blog titled Parallel programming environments: less is more.
It talks about how offering users too many choices that individually have little or no benefit over the others might cause users to walk away instead of diving in to the sea och choice and working something out.

My comment to the article was as follows

I would say that this applies to more areas of programming than just parallel programming. I think that Sun made the correct decision when it delivered not only a programming language for java but an incredibly complete API to go with it.
If you compare to C/C++, which is similar in performance and use today (people will argue about that I guess, but there are many studies both confirming and denying what I just said, anyway...), you get a similar language with similar language constructs, but you have a horde or APIs to choose from for virtually anything you could possibly want to program. Everything from string handling to sockets to threads.
Much the same way with linux distributions and software in general.
Consolidate choices to make fewer and better products. (This only works to some exten[t] though, much like uniting countries in unions (us & eu, for instance))

This is a topic that often comes up in conversation for me. Not with regards to parallel programming, but rather in connection with the things I stated above, software in general and countries or organizations. I realize that someone may have a unique vision and decides to create a product based on it, and this is fine. The problem is when everybody does it, instead of picking one of the already existing products and helping to make it better.
I believe that choice is good, choice benefits the consumer if there is a surmountable amount of it. There is always a breaking point, where uniting too many things will reduce the entire effort to a rubble with too many creative minds wanting to go in different directions, but I firmly believe that, taking the world of linux distributions for an example, it would be possible to create something like 3-4 distributions with heaving intellectual and professional backing, rather than the around 350 virtually identical distributions we have today.
Much like Microsoft went overboard with (I think) 7 different versions of vista. Microsoft has succeeded so far for many reasons, but one of them have been by limiting the choice the users have. Getting everybody to rally behind one cause inevitably makes that cause better than having a single cause for every participant.

Diversity is good, but having too much of it hampers development.

(I realize that I've been using the Swedish spelling of parallell (with the double Ls at the end) all over the internet, including in the Intel blog comment. I'll try to keep the languages apart from now on.)

UPDATE: Apparently Intel is very selective about what comments it allows in its posts. I should have realized that I was not the first to comment on a 1-day old story that figured on slashdot, Intel just isn't showing any comments...

This could be the end of the world... of warcraft.

2007-09-30T17:40:00.000+02:00

Maybe I was just in a bad mood today (as per my previous post), but I logged on to WoW for about 45 minutes and it struck me how little I actually like playing the game. The penalty for virtually everything is time, and as an impatient man, that is unacceptable to me.
I checked the account management page, and the next time they were going to deduct my monthly fee was on October 2nd. Perfect, that's just a couple of days from now, it'll make my quitting much easier. Said and done, my subscription is cancelled.

I have a theory about quitting any online game. In the beginning, it's all nice, and you spend a lot of time in the world. After a while (6 months to a year) you begin to grow tired of the game, so you quit. This lasts for about 4 months, then you reactivate your account for various reasons. This time you play for a shorter period of time, say 4-5 months. After that you think that the game sucks again, and you quit. This time you wait even longer to start again, and when you do start again, you play for a shorter time. As time progresses the time between reactivating your account grows longer, and the time your account stays activated grows even shorter. After some time you reach a point where, after over a years absence, you think "hey, wouldn't it be fun to reactivate my account?". You reactivate your account, and within days or even hours, everything starts coming back to you, and the reasons you quit in the first place are as clear as day. You give it one more day to be sure, but after that deactivation, you will probably never ever play the game again.
I can't say I have this experience from that many games, but from the two online games that I have played and subsequently quit (Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft), the pattern has been identical. The fact that there's an expansion pack coming out for WoW doesn't bother me in the least. The game will still be the same, just more content. I might take a look, I might not, but I think that by that time, they will have launched Diablo 3 (on can only hope), and when that happens it'll be bye-bye all other games for a long time.