dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#rant Articles



Dealing with annoying passengers

If you are sitting next to someone who irritates you on a plane or train follow these instructions: Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case Remove your laptop Start up Make sure the guy who is annoying you, can see the screen Close your eyes and tilt your head …


FOSDEM, or how to get me to a university at 10AM

Currently, there's a talk about Suspend to RAM and disk going on. It's quite interesting, but it's not yet helping me getting it to work on my Debian sid laptop :) In a few minutes, a talk on OpenSync is going to start, which is always interesting, considering the amount of …

Geeking out on FOSDEM

I'm currently sitting in the bar, having finished my Curry Chicken sandwich [well, baguette], and my dose of sugared caffeine [also known as Coca Cola]. The event is turning out really interesting, with too many talks I want to attend. Until I find a way of cloning myself to attend …

Linux and FOSDEM

I'm leaving in a few hours to the nice city of Brussels [just south of Amsterdam, but in the country Belgium ;)], to attend FOSDEM 2007 with some other geeks. Looks like it's going to be quite some fun, completely geeking out, sharing ideas and listening to talks on our favourite …

Minimal xorg.conf with composition

I really like Xfce 4.4's compositor [giving me nice shadows, transparent windows et al], and I wanted to clean up, so I requested Mephisto's really minimal xorg.conf [which he uses with X.org 7.2 and an nvidia 9746 driver]. I added some modules that wheren't automatically loaded …

Pink

Sooo... what's up with guys having a pink iPod [Nano, maybe only its rubber cover] or a pink cellphone? Having a pink shirt seems to become normal already [the vogue of yesteryear], but hellish pink gadgets? I mean, where is your manlyhood?

Submit

There, just hit the Send button of my mailer. Time for some sleep, after which I'll have to face some household tasks and studying for a Math re-examination which is scheduled Tuesday evening. Life is wonderful!

Pulling an all-nighter

Deadlines are fun. I love the sound they make when they fly past me. However, I'm currently wrapping up a Parallel Programming project I would have loved to finish in time. I'm not done with the Java RMI part though, so I'm polishing the measurement results and documents about the …

/me v25.0

So today is my 25th birthday. Some stats of this version: I've been online for over ten years now, and running this weblog a year or three. I've had a website for over 8 years, and still have that pre-Microsoft-Hotmail address [yes, Hotmail wasn't from Microsoft back in the days …

Me? Superman?

Your results: You are Superman Superman 85% Green Lantern 85% Robin 72% Spider-Man 70% Supergirl 64% The Flash 55% Wonder Woman 54% Catwoman 50% Batman 45% Iron Man 40% Hulk 25% You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others. Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz …


Making your files safer

When sharing a machine with users you gave an account, you'd better take some precautions for your precious files in general dirs [like /storage or whatever]. To do so, do: Recursively setting files to 644 and dirs to 755: chmod -R 644 * find . -type d -exec chmod 755 '{}' ';' ... for example …

File extension meme

OK, what the hell ;) Which File Extension are You? Funny thing is, last time I was .ogg. Does this mean I'm no longer as weird as I'd like to be?

A very good [belated] new year!

I wanted to start the year with a post with some resolutions and thoughts, but I kinda slipped... Starting out well, it looks like ;) Here are some resolutions for my new year: 1600x1200, 1400x1050, 480x320 and 176x220. [That other post will appear here soonish]

Christmas 2006: a new year already almost over again

... and time flies. While enjoying the company of close ones and the food and drinks they serve, I can't help but contemplating a bit about another year gone by. Did I accomplish the things I wanted to do? Did I live up to the expectations of the people around me …

Three years of rants: dammIT

Today is the third anniversary of this good ol' rantbox of mine. Putting online my frustrations, thoughts, ideas and pieces of life still is fun, so expect more annoyances coming from my way to you in the future ;) BTW, if you visit this site, please do a refresh so you …

Microsoft Exchange administrator: "Microsoft falling"

See Vermyndax' posting here. And I hear more voices saying the same thing. Will Vista be popular? Yes. It will be used by many people. Everyone will want "the latest and greatest" [forgetting that Apple has some really great software too], but at least a sub group will notice the …

Indoor trees

To comply with the weird tradition of putting an almost dead tree in your home, we brought in an Abies nordmanniana, also known as a Nordmann Fir [or "nice looking Christmas tree" for those who don't care]. More images in the gallery