Archives for 2009
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Let’s give away some more civil rights
December 30, 2009
We give up irresponsible amounts or our civil rights into the hands of those we put in charge of our safety, because they deem it necessary, and when they screw up, the solution is to give up more privacy?
310 words.
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2012: Predictable, mostly boring and just plain stupid
December 14, 2009
I find it odd how Roland Emmerich can produce exactly the same movie over and over again, but still manages to make each one worse than the last one.
461 words.
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Samurai cow
December 11, 2009
A cow has been born with some shape resembling a cross on its forehead. To its Christian owners, the cross has obvious religious meaning.
271 words.
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Asimov, Forward to Foundation
November 26, 2009
It is an odd book, mainly because its just not a very good story. In fact, it is several stories in a row, each with the psychohistory development as their background thread.
278 words.
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Asimov, Prelude to Foundation (1988)
November 14, 2009
An an Asimov-story, this book contains logical discussions and unexpected plot-twists. However, they are too late, too little, and too predictable.
391 words.
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Kubuntu Karmic installation
November 07, 2009
I upgraded my desktop box from Ubuntu Jaunty to Kubuntu Karmic today as well, since I find the latter’s advantages over the former outweighing its disadvantages.
316 words.
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Kubuntu 9.10: Slightly more impressed
November 03, 2009
Kubuntu 9.10 seems to have the same problems waking up from sleep/suspend on my Vaio, but at least it has the decent sense to tell me its the compositing manager that’s in trouble, and then shuts it down, so I can go on working.
191 words.
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Karmic Koala: not impressed
November 02, 2009
This weekend Canonical released their new OS, Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”, and I upgraded my Sony Vaio laptop. So far, I’m sorry to say, I’m not impressed.
264 words.
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DEception
September 27, 2009
For the first decade of this century and the better part of the last, once or twice a week, three generations of my family have been going through an utterly pointless ritual.
333 words.
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Apartheid state Israel persists in making occupation a fait accompli
September 18, 2009
Someone once told me that Israel is more civilised (he actually said “a way better country”, but I suppose that’s what he meant) than its neighbouring Arab states, simply because Israel is a democracy, and its neighbours are not.
144 words.
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Static IP with Ubuntu Server
September 10, 2009
My home router’s DHCP server has the bad habit of ignoring MAC addresses when handing out IPs.
466 words.
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I’ll be speaking at the 5th NCeSS
June 19, 2009
The fifth International Conference of e-Social Science has accepted a paper I lead-authored. I will be presenting it next Friday
134 words.
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Tomtom Home won’t install (+solution)
June 17, 2009
I was offended by the inaptness of an employee of the Dutch Tomtom support desk today. Not only couldn’t he help me, he didn’t even try, nor did he seem to know what questions to ask me.
370 words.
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Terminator Salvation: sufficiently entertaining
June 12, 2009
Terminator Salvation, though fairly badly acted, is sufficiently entertaining and humorous.
301 words.
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Discontinued port maintenance
June 02, 2009
My Armada finally gave out, so there is no way for me to test my ports anymore.
58 words.
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Epic fail
May 20, 2009
Dutch PM Balkenende, a conservative Christian right wing man, apparently still clings to Milton Friedman, but without understanding one bit of it.
71 words.
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Server outage
May 16, 2009
I have replaced the offending hardware. Things should be better from now onwards.
36 words.
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Kubuntu 9.04 and pulse audio
May 03, 2009
At this moment, Rhythmbox on my laptop is using the audio card in my desktop box to play an MP3 song which is streamed by a DAAP server on my home server.
357 words.
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QT4 look and feel for Swing
April 29, 2009
I write my desktop applications for personal use in Swing. I hate the default Metal look and feel, so I’m happy to report that I have found out how to give Swing applications a QT4 look.
265 words.
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Jaunty Jackalope
April 24, 2009
I just upgraded my desktop box to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). The new notification system seems to be working. I had only one hickup: no network.
141 words.
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Server migration: taking a shortcut
April 17, 2009
Yesterday evening, I migrated this server (the one you’re reading this blog on) to a new machine. I had only a few seconds down time, and it took me less than three hours.
877 words.
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Fractal map creation
April 10, 2009
For a small msx adventure game I’m creating, I needed a map with three islands.
598 words.
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Politicians focused too much on market, says politician
April 08, 2009
Mr. Tjeenk Willink, chairman of the Dutch government’s primary advisory board, the Raad van State, says that politicians have been focusing too much on market mechanisms in the past.
143 words.
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50 Dutch quacks spread nonsense (surprise!)
April 07, 2009
Yesterday, many Dutch news sources reported that a group of fifty physicians recommended further study into the harmful effects of radiation from cell phones and other wireless devices and a moderation in the usage of such devices.
174 words.
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Il Tramonto
April 06, 2009
On the fifth of March, Marijn van Dijk, sang, accompanied by me and three friends, Il Tramonto by Ottorino Respighi.
129 words.
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Koelsch
April 05, 2009
I went to Germany this weekend, spending Saturday in down-town Köln.
141 words.
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Blogging@work
April 03, 2009
Just a quick post to see f I can blog mobilly using Opera on my Palm TX.
17 words.
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Why I hate my Sony Ericsson C902
April 03, 2009
Since a few months now I am the owner of a C902. My previous phone, a W810i was stolen. On paper, my new phone is better. In practice, things are less clear.
662 words.
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Slumdog Millionaire
April 03, 2009
I wasn’t expecting too much. I wasn’t disappointed.
108 words.
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Hello world!
April 02, 2009
If I had a blog, I’d blog about this.
54 words.