dammIT

A rantbox

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Comments reenabled

OK, I reenabled the comments again. If a posting gets spammed, I can now simply close comments for that posting only. Still need to find a way to block spamming in general, but it's likely there's a human behind it, so that will get difficult. BTW, yeah, I'm still alive …

Miracles still exist

Yay. Just yay. Got an email a few moments ago from my universities administration, stating I have a 6 out of 10 for my Calculus exam, while I got the impression I had done quite badly when I reviewed it with some friends. Right freaking awesome, so to speak :D …

Comment spam

OK... I get quite a lot of comment spam on a single posting I did more than a month ago; until I figure out how to stop it [I want to implement "Comments closed for this posting", but I'm looking for a way of preventing it], comments are disabled :( If …

Having fun with cross-server image linking

I know lots of people don't have some webspace of their own. However, if they start posting on forums etc, they tend to want a nice picture with it. So they do a quick Google image search on it, paste the uri of the picture in their profile, and done …

Sick bed

(Hushed voices) 'Hi, I just heared from his condition. How is he?' 'He's sleeping now, but it's not good...' (Sad stares) 'Sounds like he's waking up,' 'Doesn't sound good at all, does it?' 'Indeed, occasionally the sounds he makes gives me the creeps. His functions slowly start to fail; I …

aquamorph v0.3: almost there :)

I know I've said it before, but the new version of my livecd is almost done. I'm now playing with the package configuration to keep the size down a bit; it turned out to be an .iso of about 420MiB, which I thought was a tad large. I left out …

overload and IM conversations

And when on the topic of morphing the overload feedreader into an information center, why not give it capabilities of storing your Instant Messaging [IM] conversations too? I'll go looking into writing a Python plugin for Gaim that in real time updates the logs in overload. Maybe auto-tagging on base …

Ideas and projects

Currently testing a new version of my aquamorph livecd, which is close to being done. In my last post of yesterday I forgot to tell I had been working on it that day too, so it wasn't a completely wasted Thursday ;) Besides the idea bmsleight has for our Open Source …


Blocking your mind by having to do certain tasks

OK, the title may sound weird, but picture the following: you have a certain task which involves doing things you don't really like [say, booting windows, messing around with a Visual Basic script]; it is for your work, it has to be done etc etc. But because you don't quite …

Michael Crichton on Human Nature

What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told -- and become upset if they are exposed to any different …

Programming fun

Finally learning to write decent C with Posix threads, processes, pipes, inter-process communication etc. And some Java with threads too. Quite interesting I have to say, but that may be the influence of the large glass of whisky I consumed this evening; I really love late night hacking/irc'ing/music …

A Rebel Geek and His Ideas for an Open Company

After capitalizing the title right [I hope], I wanted to share a little anecdote with you. A guy of the same year of my Computer Science study has a traineeship where he's profiling a large information system. He could choose between writing his application in Java or .NET with C …



Public transport in Amsterdam: their computer systems

Gotta love public transport running windows... The contact-less system for checking in/out of the trams and subways. Out of order, as you can read. In French... The electronical ticket machine, for charging your chip based public transport pass: Same machine, close up [gotta love their internationalization]: Same machine, some …

Workstation upgrade: casing recommendations?

As I'm upgrading my pc from a 750MHz AMD Duron with 448MiB of RAM to 2x AMD Athlon MP2000+ with 4GiB of memory, I kinda need a new computer casing. After getting a nice little cardreader in a stand, which is colored black/silver, and having a black/silver laptop …

First public release of the Qik site framework

As some may have noticed, the aquariusoft.org site has been overhauled in the last weeks. It's now based on the Qik site framework I wrote from scratch. Today, I released a first snapshot to the public. There's a small HOWTO included, but the project page itself already contains a …

Michiel v24

And that was my 24th year of making my way on this wicked piece of molten lava floating through vacuum. Of course the only "space" I'm really confident with is cyberspace, but that's where we have starship Earth for. On to the quarter of a century!