Fire!

Recently I have resigned from my former student-society-computer-foundation. Together with 4 friends, we kept the network running with given-away-for-free-thrash computers (except the DEC-alpha kick ass server).
Lots of fun, lots of beer, but life goes on.

A couple of years ago we had a fire in our mission-control room, and we made some pictures. The final thing i’ve done 5 minutes ago with my root-account was scp-ing the fire pictures to gargleblaster.org.

So long and thanks for all the fish…

The pictures…subtitles are in Dutch.
The real amazing thing is that all those computers are still up and running.

Babynamewizard.com

This is an amazing java-applet.
Especially because it is unbelievable fast. And it’s always fun to look up your own name…Apperently mine dropped from the top 100 during the 70’s.
What surprised me was the popularity of my name during the 1930’s.

Other fun names are: Bessie (name your daughter as a cow) and Xander (the Buffy effect).
The url to the java-applet: http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

shit.

I have a dead pixel in my 19″ LCD screen.

Fuck.
I see it every time. Everywhere I look there is that dead pixel staring at me.
Does anyone know how to fix a dead pixel? I really hope it’s only stuck for while. A pixel on strike. Be nice to it, and it might go back at work again…

It’s my first…(knock knock) and if I had the money, I would buy a new screen for it.
hmm, for the ones wondering, it’s a Philips 190B. (Yeah, I know, should have bought an 30″ Cinema Display. It wouldn’t have happened.)

Update
I think thinkgeek has Killed/murdered/slaughtered my pixel, just to plug their new T-shirt:

Podcasting

Having an update iPod since a couple of weeks, finally got me on the podcasting train. Not as a producer of podcasts (don’t worry, I don’t plan to do it either) but as a consumer. A short time before I got my iPod, iTunes 4.9 was released with podcast-support (…all over the place really).

I’m subscribed to three podcasts now. The drawback is that iTunes still isn’t built for multiple computers. Somehow your iPod is only able to stay in sync with 1 computer. @work, I’m subscribed in iTunes to 3 podcasts and those are syncing up nicely with my iPod (which is named “ieniemienie” by the way). But when I’m at home, and hook up my iPod to my iBook, I’m not able to get the latest podcasts in my podcast”playlist” on my iPod. That sucks. I have to drop those podcasts in my ordinary library on my iPod. I really hope it will be made possible in future iTunes releases.
Another feature (not bug!, feature:) of iTunes, and it’s in a way related to the problem described above, is that itunes keeps track to which podcasts you have listened in the last few days.

As you can understand…this isn’t very reliable if you listen to podcasts downloaded through different computers.
But where I started with, I like podcasts. At, least…I like listen to the daily source code of Adam Curry. Adam Curry is known in Holland from “CountDown” an 80’s television music show. When he stopped doing that show, he returned to the States and got very rich. A couple of years ago, he was in the news because he flew in with his own helicopter to his radioshow (keep in mind that holland is 400 km from north to south, he had to fly about 200 km).
But…I really really like his dialy source code. They are fascinating and he is very Apple-minded (which is always a big plus for me). This morning while commuting to work I listened to an episode where he did a “soundscape”, which is a nice word for walking on the street with a running microphone.
And it really was fascinating listening to all those San Francisco street-sounds whilst driving in a bus through Friesland.

Windows Vista

The first screenshots of Windows Vista are popping up on the internet. The remark of Steve Jobs (Redmond, start your photocopiers) has been proven right. Several features of Longh—, eh, Vista seems to be copied from Tiger.

But…A microsoft developer has the best excuse ever:

“If you are slow (or lazy) in your development, you never can be called a copycat”
Or, like he puts it:

Naturally, some Macintosh users will claim that this is like “Dashboard”. And indeed there are similarities here. But Microsoft has been working on Avalon a lot longer than Apple was working on Dashboard. And Avalon Express applications are designed to be very secure from day 1.

The quote above was taken from this website