dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#rant Articles


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!


overload: enclosure support

For those following and/or using the overload feedreader: the reader has enclosure support now! Enclosures are references to files in the feed itself. Mostly used by "podcasts" etc, so you can download the audio file straight from the reader. Also, the Rocketboom videolog uses it [right click, download .mov …

Pharmaceutics website: our own

Yesterday I created a website for my girlfriends group of students pharmaceutical sciences, which they gladly put online. Now she's learning HTML and even CSS fast and building her very own new pages. You can say I'm a bit proud :) Gotta love how you can whip up a nice website …

Thinking about buying a dual processor pc

Puff-n-Stuff aka SithAdmin in #morphix at freenode.net told me he had a dual athlon mp2000+ motherboard with dualhead matrox g550 video card, power supply and 4GiB ram for a nice price. I was interested from the point he named the price and the shipping fee :) Also, instead of the …

Playing with layouts

I've been playing with site aquariusoft.org site the last few days, and you may have noticed quite a few changes coming and going. Currently I'm quite pleased with how things are looking [having a more experienced graphical designer taking a look at it and swallowing his critics helped too …

Irritation #294

Why do girls insist on wearing their tight jeans *inside* their high boots? It looks dumb. And yeah, those fluffy dangling balls look even dumber.