dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#rant Articles


Geeky meme

Currently, a command frequency meme seems to propagate through Planet Debian, and I thought I'd run that one-liner as well. Some interesting results yielded: At my laptop: 09:43:23 mbscholt@galadriel:~$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10 331 cd …

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Avast! Every September 19 people around the world celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It's been marked on all continents -- even Antarctica. Why? Because it's fun, it's anarchic. Its very whimsy -- trying to get everyone on the planet to talk like a stereotypical Caribbean buccaneer on the same day …

Hacking spam networks

During a quite boring class of ICT in a Social Context [mainly about the Information Revolution and Codes of Ethics], I stumbled upon the idea of hacking a spammer. More specifically, hacking his overlay network of spambots. You may know that some spammers [mostly the "normal" corporations] have their own …

Projects, university

So I finally released aquamorph v0.4 [which is available from sourceforge.net now, so feel free to download and try it!]. I reduced my projects to a minimum [I'm even using Liferea as my primary newsfeed reader now instead of overload :/], so I have time for classes and such …

aquamorph v0.4 - and there was much rejoice

You hear it well, Satan's gone scating: I finally released a new aquamorph! At this moment it's only hosted on this not-too-fast server, so if you can wait half a day, check back tomorrow when I've uploaded it to a faster server :) It even has a manual:


"More"

Oh shiny consumer society, with its broad streets lingered with deadly McFlurry cups, Britney Spears listening sheep with iPods and our fast-food consuming I'm-not-fat-I'm-big-boned fellow humans. Mrs Bsag has a piece about "More", triggered mainly by the advertisements marketing campaigns sling at us: excess masquerading as progress, and increase in …

*sigh* cars...

Yesterday we went to a very nice building of the University of Utrecht, located right at the sight of the Dom [nicer pics on the Dutch page]. Here, twenty-one students of my girlfriend's year -- including she herself -- where officially made pharmacists in a nice ceremony. Congratulations sweety! After a nice …

Corfu: A [not too] Lazy Tale

I finally came around to editing the notes I took while on vacation at Corfu, that nice green Greek island. I hope you'll enjoy this read ;) At least I can heartily recommend visiting this sweet little island. 20060805 - To Corfu! After my quick blurp a lot earlier today on a …

Rain

Hey, you damned $WEATHER_DEITY, it's the end of August, not October! Give us back our sunny free days!


Dictionary.com blurp

I kinda like the restyle they did, but the special chars in the pronounciation key of their "Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1)" source don't turn up right here [Firefox shows the unicode char-not-found character, which doesn't look that well in their nice clean site ;)].

Wrapping things up

OK, my two readers are getting a tad tired about this subject I guess, but today I'm making a list of all things, projects, courses etc I've laying around and prioritising them, hoping to mod quite a lot down the level of "todo this year". That's really necessary as I …


Broke

BTW, did I mention we actually, positively, really spent way too much money on clothing today? Oh well, us poor students need to get some decent clothes once a year too ;) And then to think we want to buy a car this weekend too. Thank the Light for savings accounts …

How to stop being haunted

As I posted earlier on, being haunted by unfinished projects and uninteresting courses at University isn't great fun exactly. Now this is general knowledge, but how does this lazy procrastinating programming and randomly surfing geek do something about it? Of course, "getting a grip" on the situation and myself is …

Alegria!

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 …

Haunted

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 …

Ideas for a personal network

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 …

Grumble

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 …