dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

posts Articles


27th of July: sysadmin appreciation day

Check the System Administrator Appreciation Day site, and go to the nearest server room/basement/closet-with-pale-guy-at-a-noisy-computer and show them you appreciate it they don't ruin your day by disconnecting everyone from the network except them and their buddies to play their favourite game without lag. Well, at least they didn't …


Thunderbird Tango icon theme

I'm using Icedove 2.0 for a while now [the Debian GNU/Linux version of Mozilla Thunderbird], and as I'm using the excellent Tango icons for everything on my system, I also had a Tango theme for my mail program. However, it was a tad buggy, so I went out …

Restless

After reading Bloempje's posting about her restlessness, I was inspired to write about my own. I'm currently working on some assignments in Minix 3, and trying to get my bachelor thesis in shape. Also, I'm advancing with talks about an internship for my Masters research project. The company I'm talking …


Happy fair use day!

From today on Boing Boing: Happy fair use day! Go quote something! Fair use is the smallest part of the public's side of copyright. Sure, we have the right to quote, time-shift, format-shift, transform and so on. But the big piece is all the stuff that copyright shouldn't/doesn't touch …

Dr. Who

I have a craving. A television channel here in the Netherlands aired the first season of the new Dr. Who episodes a good two years back, but I've not seen any new ones after that. As my girlfriend prefers not having to concentrate on English after a day hard work …

Music at night

People turning on their music at 7:20AM [when you finally have a slower day] should die. If they do so at 3:30AM, they should die horribly... Fun, having neighbours above you...

Failure in design

This week, a "Do Not Disturb" sign was hang on every door knob in our street. It was an advertisement for anti-burglary protection. However, this campaign could have very well a negative impact, as for example, a house across our street had it hanging there for two days straight - meaning …

Observations in public transport

The other day, I was sitting in a metro racing in the general direction of my university. The girl sitting opposite me was chewing bubble gum. In itself, that's far from special, but do people realise they really don't look intelligent when chewing that material loudly with an open mouth …


Update on Life and Such

I've not been posting much lately, but I've been quite busy. No real excuse, I know, but it's the best I have ;) I'm still preparing a largish post on our recent move to a newer, bigger, better home. I need to fix some images for it, and wrap it all …

Forum spam

*sigh* I just deleted several hundreds of spam accounts, and dozens of spam topics on the aquariusoft.org forum. Tightened the authentication a bit too. Let's hope it'll be ok this way :) Spam sucks; I get an average of 80 spam emails per day, which are filtered conveniently in my …

Dreaming in Hex

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt that the world became a bit better, and a bit more fun to live in; that gave me a fuzzy feeling of course, but when I tried communicating with people on my computer, all messages where "09 F9 11 02 9D …




gaim is dead, long live gaim^H^H^H^Hpidgin

Today, I read a posting on the Gaim weblog that's big news in the project's history. It basically means Gaim doesn't exist anymore. But don't grieve, they've renamed it to Pidgin. This all because of legal struggles with the nice company known as AOL. They also renamed their libgaim to …


When the birds awake

It was 6:10AM when my alarm clock gently started humming a tune from the radio. It was still dark [thanks, DST...], but I heard some birds already singing their morning songs. Groggily I stuffed some sandwiches in my mouth while getting some suitable day-clothes on, hoping they would match …