OK, a while back I said we where going to Cirque du Soleil's show Alegria in Amsterdam. Well, we did the 2nd of August, and thoroughly enjoyed the show. They have a huge shiny white tent, which is cool to watch when approaching their site. Of course, they have …

Am I cursed? I have the very annoying "habit" to have projects and unfinished courses haunting me. Cleaning my slate hasn't succeeded as yet. Maybe I should be a bit less overzealous on the project side and actually wrap up some of the exiting projects I embarked on and finishing …

Some ideas for a modularised set of gadgets that work together in a personal network [e.g., "on the body"]: PDA [provides touch sensitive screen, other input possibilities, wifi, some storage] Music player [provides hdd storage, has small screen and controls for standalone functioning] Cellphone [provides gsm/3G uplink, possibly …

After finding my wallet in time, finding my old bike mysteriously locked and needing to put some air in the tires of my better bike, but still being in time for my train, I got booted out of it two stations down the track needing to buy a ticket because …

We just got back from Corfu, and I just got online again after a refreshing period of offlineness. The statistics: Number of digital photographs copied to my laptop from the image tank we had with us on vacation: about 2000 Number of megabytes these take: 6582 Number of pictures I …

We are currently sitting in a waiting area on Schiphol Airport with our plane leaving in about 2.5h. On to Corfu! Yay at a completely offline vacation on a great green island :) See you all in about eleven days!

The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? [ Source ]

OK, this is a real geek speaking, but the upcoming days present a nice numeric sequence other geeks will appreciate [except when you're not a fan of this platform ;)]: 2/8/6 today, 3/8/6, 4/8/6, 5/8/6 and 6/8/6 the following days, representing …

While installing Gaim for my sister at her pc at my parents' place, I noticed she is running WinXP. And with that I mean: pure WinXP. Not a sole servicepack in sight. There was some Watchdog thingee running [my dad's work I guess], and of course she's running Kerio firewall …

OK, so you're already using the nice ALSA sound system on your Linux install, but when you're playing music etc you can't hear the sound of those YouTube movies? Edit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and add/edit the FIREFOX_DSP setting to read "FIREFOX_DSP="aoss". Of course, you will need ALSA's OSS …

The fan of my server/mediabox/goddamnimportantfilesholder stopped spinning without my knowing and, it being the sole fan in the system as it's a small form factor machine with neat heatpipe and such, the whole machine turned into a lightbulb wannabe. Newsflash: that's not good for your parts [hdd!], stupid …

... in my newsfeed reader. I guess I should start using it again ;) Frankly, I want to start building that new Django-based version, so I can implement smart filters based on tags. The current way is just too messy. Anybody has some more smart ideas? The cause of me still …

As everybody and his dog can program in PHP nowadays, and -- worse ;) -- does without the proper programmer training in input validation and such things, here are some tips about hardened PHP, modsecurity, putting Apache in a chroot jail etc: Use security on multiple levels. Code your stuff so it's invulnerable …

Who would vote for a new top-level domain .w00t [if they're trying to introduce .xxx and .mobile and already having introduced .tv and .bizz, I have some more ideas for useless top-level domains :)].

Show: Alegria. Location: Amsterdam. Tickets: VIP places. Wallet: empty. My state: happy. :)

My girl just landed her first real job! As pharmaceutist, no less. Congrats sweetie! Now I can safely enjoy my student-dom a bit longer ;)

Our teammate is going to put a hardcopy of the documentation [all 22 pages of it] in the teachers "pigeon hole" [teacher's own words] in about 5 hours from now. Now I hope it doesn't contain too much sleep-induced weirdness ;) Signing off...ZzzzzZzz

So, what do you do after working for a week on a project for the university, writing the documentation in the weekend, testing the implementation with rules, drinking some wine on a birthday party and merging some more changes into the doc which needs to be handed in as hardcopy …

Yesterday me and my girl went on a shopping spree. The damage is considerable [hm, somewhat more than €0.5K for a total of five pairs of shoes and a lot of nice summer clothing for us both :P], but it was big fun! Our dinner was free, as we …