dammIT

A rantbox

#rant Articles


Things I'm going to do in 2009

Things I want^H^H^H^Ham going to do this year: Read more books. Ever since I'm travelling by car to work (the railway connection is aweful), I'm reading a lot less. At home I spend a lot of time reading electronic stuff, but that's mostly news, not fiction …

ScheduleWorld just works

For years I've been wanting to synchronise my Sony Ericsson m600i smartphone with pc software. This would both provide a backup and a comfortable way of editing my agenda, contacts, todo's and whatmore, just like I did before with my Palm devices. I already had tried the Funambol SyncML software …

Happy and healthy 2009

I want to wish everyone a happy, healthy and in respects interesting 2009. You can fill in freely what that means for you personally, as it seems very strict resolutions might be contra-productive (goals not met resulting in a bad self-esteem and such). For me it's going to be an …


Youth and fireworks

Is it just me or do those kids have too much to spend on fireworks? Of course they're free to spend their money on whatever they want, but to have more noise and light shows two days before it's actually the end of the year is a bit overdone in …

More statistics: spam of the past two years

So a few weeks ago I made a graph of the nightly spam-learning events of spamassassin on my Spam folder. I updated it today: Of course the graph is clickable for a large version again. It also contains a trend line. You can see the noticeable drop in spam levels …

Obligatory end-of-year statistics

I did some digging in the logs of this weblog and dumped some page view listings per day. With some gnuplot magic, that's easily turned into a simple graph. So here is the development of the number of page views over the years of dammIT: The weird line from 2006-04-28 …

Same old weblog, different feel

Fear not, this is still the dammIT you know, except that it looks a bit... new. I felt bored a bit and next thing I knew I had restyled it all ;) Kudos go to Bas for providing really useful feedback on colours, layouts and such and even designing the new …

Quiet music listening

When playing a newly-bought audio cd (bought directly from the artist, Jennifer Grassman - movieclip of one of her beautiful songs), I was annoyed at the amount of noise my DVD-drive made. Turned out the solution was easy: eject -x N /dev/cdrom where N should be replaced with a speed …

On `irony'

A snippet from #xfce-debian on freenode: Zhenech | HE: you missed the irony, I meant it as "it is great - you can vote FD" :) aquatix | s/irony/sarcasm Zhenech | ok :) aquatix | lot of people use the word `irony' incorrectly ;) Zhenech | actually my sister (13) asked me some days ago whats the …

VoIP magically works again

Well, not quite magically as I updated our router to the latest snapshot of DD-WRT, but apparently a lot has been fixed since version 24 SP1. If you have issues with your router running DD-WRT, try the latest snapshot too. More info in this forum thread. Now... on to some …

Christmas eve

It's about to be the evening before that over-hyped Christmas thing. It might be way commercial nowadays, but it's still a fun time to slow down, enjoy your loved ones and contemplate the upcoming dinner and Life in general. (Like that girl you had a crush on years back, wondered …

And life is better

Today I've been thinkering around with the code and layout of this weblog, and eliminated some elements that cause the content to jump around quite a bit. The text should look a lot better aligned this way, easier on the eye and such. Now to actually get text in here …

Happy birthday dammIT

Today is the day that I started dumping my thoughts online by means of a weblog five years ago, which means the first lustrum party of this kind of web presence of mine. Yes, there are two older posts, but they are both from before the actual first implementation of …


Working in the mountains

This morning while driving to work I went from being snowed upon with sleeth to interestingly clouded skies (picture pink/purple/orange coloured feathered clouds in an almost sunny morning sky; a nice break from the gray). While nearing the city a work in, I noticed a dark gray mass …

(Embedded) Video Madness

I just spent an evening debugging the girlfriend's laptop as it somehow flat-out rejected to play video in Totem (ever since upgrading her xubuntu install from 8.04 to 8.10). Totem has a convenient browser plugin for Firefox, so this is kind of a problem if I don't want …

Meme #214: a London one

Apparently it started out as a London Meme, but as it got passed on by bmsleight to me, and it's fun anyway, I'll post my answer here. Top three non-work websites: Google Reader (rss/atom feed reader, contains most of my news and recreational sources) Wikipedia Slashdot Three favourite cocktails …

RIP home server

I just bought a nice new, quiet Zalman 15mm thin cooling for her, cleaned her from dust, even cleaned the partitions of her hdd before powering down, but suddenly luna, my trusty home server/media box doesn't want to boot anymore. Worse, she doesn't even POST anymore. No VGA signal …

Next generation audio setup

So, as my current stereo is kinda dead, my mediabox (home server) still is located in my home office upstairs, headphones are bothersome and laptop speakers decidedly are not on-par with hifi stereo, I started thinking about how to get some decent sound back into our living room. So when …