Through pidgin's developers mailing list, I found this insightful comment by Eric Lippert on software users: It's not that users are morons or that they "forget" to think. Its that users are trained to not think. Users very quickly learn from experience that: dialog boxes are modal. But users do …

This morning I was sitting in my car driving towards work. I had some nice music on the stereo and the sun was starting to warm the land. These are conditions in which I naturally start to hum along with the music, even singing along. This Wednesday was even better …

Let's just say I converted some of my savings into a much needed hardware upgrade of my workstation. *rubs hands in glee*

Sooo, my hackerkey is: v4p-3.62/-4.15sw6CHJPRUYhw5ln5pr6OPSck4ma8u7FLSw0m5l7Di2e6t4MTWXb8AGHMOSen6a26s7IMr9g3CGOTZ or plain text: v4p-3.62/-4.15sw6CHJPRUYhw5ln5pr6OPSck4ma8u7FLSw0m5l7Di2e6t4MTWXb8AGHMOSen6a26s7IMr9g3CGOTZ hackerkey.com This weird string tells you more about me than you'd think if you take a little time to learn what it all means.

My girlfriend and I have been blessed with all our grandparents alive when we got to know each other. Because of this, we each got to know two extra couples of great people. Thankfully they are relatively young and only suffer the occassional illnesses and annoyances everyone eventually encounters when …

Yesterday our provider [Speedlinq, or Telfort Internet or GreenISP or whatever they want to call themselves nowadays] switched to another VoIP platform for ADSL connections. They sent a letter with a cd-rom for changing the settings in VoIP-enabled ADSL modems, but we have a VoIP phone, with SIP routed through …

An old man dieing Two doves on a bare spring branch Finding peace at last

April Fool's day went by quite un-eventful. I even missed the normally tradional pink Ponies layout on Slashdot. Some other sites (like Engadget) had some pink accents, but still. Of course, my whole day was spent writing on a paper and presentation for a course Literature Study (hence the weird …

Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.

LaTeX Beamer: making slideshows slightly less painful 'nuff said

I've had it. I'm done with being a student and following courses, doing practicals and projects. Maybe it's because it's all a mess in my head and I don't get any rest, being it in the evening or in weekends. I just want my 9-5 job and free weekends :) So …

Hm, what is with me starting weblog postings and taking a while to finish them? You might find some more posts after this one which I started this weekend/last week. Sooo, the construction company that was going to [finally] impregnate one of the outher walls of our house against …

Now for a geeky post. Since a while, apt installs recommended packages by default too alongside the dependencies, like aptitude does. However, you might pull in quite a lot of packages you don't really need that way. Here's how to stop it: apt-get install -o APT::Install-Recommends=false [packagename you …

When it's finally some good weather again [even nice and sunny] and you're driving to your work over that obnoxious 80km/h road and a guy in front of the queue of cars drives in turns 50 and 80km/h, making for a nice 65km/h average and you having …

*grin*, how coherent was that? :) I guess that intartubes thingee is melting my brain or something. For those remotely interested in what I meant yesterday: I had been adding functionality to my weblog software [simplog] a year or so ago to be able to save drafts and such, but didn't …

Heh, just noticed I posted the 666th rant in this weblog [well, the system did, after I fixed the automatic posting of webmarks]. Fixing some long-standing issues with my weblog software can make things a lot easier for me :) [FYI: I have to edit some minor things in the database …

The day this spring began, also was the beginning of a new chapter in my online life: a server in a real datacenter. No more 1MBit connection, which also was a tad flaky because of my ADSL connection's signal being quite weak at 3600+m from the exchange, but 100MBit …

Tuesday I migrated most of the web services hosted on aquariusoft.org to my new server, which is colocated and therefor has a far faster and reliable connection than my home-hosted box. Some things will not return, like the forum [was never really used], other things might still be somewhat …

Today Arthur C. Clarke passed away. He's the well-known author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and lots of other great sci-fi material. May he rest between the stars he pointed us to.

Last Saturday we went for a hot-stone massage. This is a massage technique which besides normal massage oil uses heated stones to soak your muscles with warmth and let you relax even more. It surely helped relax my poor back and shoulders :) Quite a nice way to relax, if you …