dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#rant Articles


xfce4 v4.2 beta1 :)

Looking good as always, check the new and improved xfce4. There's a beta version of the compositor too; check the translucent panel at the bottom. Gotta get me x.org 6.8.x some day :/ Get it at xfce.org. I myself hope it hits Debian's repositories soonish.

Life's tricks

Life is fun. Even pessimists know life can be fun, if only for having a great girlfriend and being able to having good times with her. But life can play it's tricks upon us. Enter the younger brother of my gf and his own girlfriend. They are both 19 years …

How to add an hdd the cool way

Added a 120GiB hdd drive to my workstation Saturday. I had it lying around for a while, and when I came to build it into my trusty AMD Duron 750MHz workstation, I figured it wasn't going to fit. Well, not in the drive bracket that is. There are already 2 …

The tidbits of week 38

University and work really have me in a strong grip, so here are some tidbits I gathered last week. Our national technology proud - Philips - has a new slogan: "Sense and simplicity". Their previous one, "Let's make things better" lasted ten years, and now they where in for something new. They …

Party-induced comas considered healthy

Finished my breakfast at about 3PM today after about 12 hours of sleep. That twelve hours compensated for the about 2.5 hours of sleep I got the night before, at Alex' place, after a night of drinking beer, wandering around looking for a train [missing the last one home …

Not dead yet(tm)

For those wondering, the wonderful thing called University has opened it's gates again and is sucking up lots of my precious time. As I'm planning to actually get my bachelor this year [that's about two years late :/ ], I've dived headlong into it. So, I'm not dead, only a bit occupied …

US acting like China and paper documents suck

There have been quite a few protests against Bush in New York lately. The Axis of Eve Panty Flash Protest I like the best, but there are lots of others, like the bicycle rider protest. Lots of people where arrested, over 1500 as I heard. Now doesn't that seem a …


Bits of the last day of August

It still rains. Not continuously, but it's still wet outside. Damn, ye $WEATHERDEITY! Oh no, now the sun tries to shine. Heh, it just failed. August should have been the hottest month of the year. Instead it became the wettest August in 50 years [Dutch link]. And I am currently …

Good weather for hacking

Hacking as in merrily-programming-at-various-projects-while-not-minding-your-surroundings hacking. At the moment, rain is pouring from the skies and thunder and lightning make the scene even more enjoyable. The calendar says it's still August but Zeus doesn't give a damn.

How to make the perfect blog

OK, I know I'm flooding various aggregators and planet livecd, but I was wondering about various aspects of the design of my weblog site. I asked in my previous post if anyone used the feed in which I include the comments to posts I make alongside the posts themselves. I …

Random bits

First I want to ask the readers of my humble blog [yeah, you two] if anyone uses the feed with comments included. I'm asking, because noone gets a notification if someone posted a comment to a post or commented on a comment except for me. I know it's a tad …

About mages

As Alex pointed out, computer literates are not the most important mages. He's completely right, and I didn't intend to put it that way. I've far more respect for the modern day medical specialists and technical engineers. However, why only count a "real life" engineer a modern day mage? OK …

Modern day magic

Not so long ago I went fixing two computers. I generally don't want to fix other peoples windows computers anymore, but those where the pc's of the grandparents of my girlfriend, so I was glad to help them. While I was exploring the systems, installing things, updating stuff and nuking …

Caffeine, security and caffeine

Just finished my second espresso of this morning and pored myself a coke. Still not feeling even slighter awake. I hope I'm not growing resistant against caffeine, otherwise I'd be screwed :) Talking about screwed; I've a talk with my study advisor about my ongoing war with certain classes. Not only …

Gadgets and other freaky things

As you may know, I'm a gadget freak^Wlover. So, Engadget is one of the sites I've featured in my super1337 RSS aggregator. Todays harvest is a nice one; lets start with the first thing I would want to have for my [hypothetical] own house: a kitchen sink. Well, it's …

IBM battling back, me stuck with algebra

IBM files counterclaim against SCO, saying SCO "literally copied more than 783,000 lines of code from these sixteen packages of IBM's copyrighted material". Now, that code is licensed under the GPL and/or LGPL, but SCO has renounced, disclaimed, and breached the GPL and therefore the GPL does not …

Firefox security goodness

There are now a couple of security spoofs out there for Mozilla Firefox. Unlike IE there is an easy way to catch them that is not often mentioned. Simply type in about:config into the address bar, then search for and change these settings to true: recommended: dom.disable_window_open_feature.location …

Study, what's that again?

So, basically I'm busy studying for some re-examinations I've to do the next two weeks. But, you know, studying on the same desk as your internet connected pc just doesn't work. At least not for me. IRC is just too tempting, as is reading the backlog of mailings and the …

Going webbased

Lately I've seen myself following a trend of putting more and more work in online tools. I've had an online linkdump for ages now, but since Sitebar integrated in Firefox it's serious. Furthermore, I switched from various standalone RSS aggregators to Bloglines, a free online service. Besides these two key …