Christmas is coming near, and ATV had the ‘Christmas Daddies’ commercial up, accompanied by the tunes of the lullaby ‘Suo Gan’.
I wonder what this song has to do with Christmas. The last time I heard that song was last week when the History channel showed ‘The Empire of the Sun’. Hearthrendering version in that movie. Spielberg style.
“Ni cha dim amharu’th gyntun,
Ni wna undyn â thi gam;
Huna’n dawel, anwyl blentyn,
Huna’n fwyn ar fron dy fam.”
It could have been a Chinese song too.
This month it’s knuckle month. Make fists out of your hands, put them together so that eight knuckles are lining up. Knuckles are months with 31 days. The valleys between the knuckles are the months with 30 days.
Apparantly this trick has been taught to me when I was young. I can’t recall who taught the trick: it could have been my dad. It could have been a teacher. The guy who invented it must have been a genius. And a comedian. Everytime I show it, people laugh their heads off. Knuckleheads and knucklemonths. Life is good.
I was compiling an example conduit for the Palm PDAs, which apparently worked out OK. Well: partially. For some kind of reason it just synchronizes the Addressbook instead of basically fetching the data and saving it to a textfile.
Not bad for an hour of work. Maybe I forgot to set something correctly on Pose (the Palm emulator). It wasn’t hard to figure out how to get the Palm connected to the PC: Set network, LanSync, Network address. Tap the HotSynch and off you go?
Not really: I forgot about the Palm Desktop. Luckily I already had it installed, but without the HotSynch manager. (‘Ah!). Then the pieces of the puzzle fell together and I was playing games that came with the ‘Desktop’. And that conduit was doing something it wasn’t supposed to be doing. Tomorrow.
Last night this got coverage from local ATV: a couple was killed last Sunday night. A Cape Breton woman (Port Morien) and her Dutch internet friend were shot to death by the woman’s estranged husband. Weird: it’s not mentioned in Dutch media (or maybe I just oversaw it?), but it’s a sad story for sure. The accused had been receiving councelling the past couple of months. Says a neighbour:
“It’s a darn shame. I feel so sorry for those little kids. . . . It’s shocking for both families.”
Not only a shame for both families: apparantly they forget that there is also a grieving Dutch family. Add: North American media normally release the names of victims whereas Dutch media normally withold those names.
Update: Link fixed
As a programmer I ask questions. That’s part of the job and eventually, it’s part of the nature. You ask questions because there’s a need for an answer: after all, it’s part of trying to find the solution for a problem. It’s not my nature to ‘second-guess’ about a solution, and as such, I do expect the same behaviour and attitude from other programmers. We’re here for the solution, after all.
Which brings me to today, Dave Winer’s item over at respectable Scripting News. Winer notices that his blogging tool isn’t mentioned in Google’s directory of Weblog tools. Instead of asking questions, he ends up in an obnoxious rhetorical rant: the typical rant of a person who is obviously personally and emotionally too involved. I find this behaviour rather unsettling.
Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a discussion about and between ‘bilingual’ speakers on the topic of being bilangual (Earlier here). Now via EurekaNews, researchers conclude that the our cognitive control system that takes care of ‘code switching’ is basically doing a superior job.
Working together with Dutch researchers, American psychologists and linguists fired a couple of tests to bilingual speakers, ranging from showing objects that needed to be identified in either language to firing tones to force them to speak in one language.
“A bilingual learns to attend to a set of cues that allows them to suppress the stream of language, to modulate processing so that the second language is what is spoken, but the first language is still there and active.”
Initially it was thought that an ‘environment of total immersion in a language’ would provide exposure to the second language and supression of the native tongue.
Which reminds me that I find it startling that I (for example) still count in Dutch. It’s apparantly something that will never go away. I can have normal conversations in English (accented though, but not as bad as the newly elected governer of Kah-lig-forgnia) but when someone on the spot asks me to count the number of whatever comes to mind, I would still do it in Dutch.
Let a bunch of kids (preferably ‘Playstation’ generation) play the good old games from the Eighties and magic things happen. Space Invaders:
EGM: This game was so popular in Japan that—
John: They made it into a TV show?
EGM: Well, no. It was so popular that they ran out—
John: Oh, did they make collectible trading cards for it?
EGM: Um, no. It was so popular that there was a shortage of the coins used to play it.
John: But you can get this game on a cell phone. Why would you want to pay for it in an arcade?
Andrew: I’ve seen a game like this in the arcade, but it’s tons faster.
Kids lack imagination nowadays.
The guy that owns the (self-proclaimed) best page in the Universe 
comes with the perfect solution to balance a two-wheeled scooter without a gyroscope and other expensive hard and software: just add an extra third wheel.
“Amazing! In fact, the only thing this revolutionary new model requires from the old Segway are the motors, gear box, wheels and batteries. Throw the rest of that shit away. What’s the point of all this technology if it costs a fortune? ”
The BBC dives into the latest Outlook version and notices that it comes with a new ‘leak-proof’ feature. The new version will allow users to make e-mails ‘self-destruct’, restrict other users to read mail or prevent the forwarding of e-mails.
Above features are part of Outlook’s Information Rights Management, and will probably benefit the not-so advanced users among us. Not to mention that those new features sound completely obnoxious to me for the reason that they try to make responsible people out of packrats. Note also that the page about security isn’t available for non-Office users.
As a sidenote: I find BBC’s “‘related links’ feature” highly commendable: I wish others (media) did the same to.
Yuck. It took me an hour to scp a hundred plus of pictures to Alf’s computer. Some of them needed to be resized, then copied and then copied and once again scp-ed.
I couldn’t have done it without the cat, dog, mirror image and my right brain. Make that a left brain. Thanks. You’re the best.
Alfons has a pretty picture of an ugly (new type of) frog, recently found in China. The new frog is a chubby, blob-like animal: scientists describe the find as a help to find out more about evolution of frogs.
For some kind of reason, the picture keeps reminding me of steroid-stuffed bodybuilders. You know, the ones that make it to the top of the world by showcasing their brilliantly tendered biceps or triceps.
The poor toad.
I have been pretty busy lately. Just yesterday, I told my wife that today it was going to be a crucial day where the peddling against the stream should end up into a forward motion.
Peddling it was for sure, but upon arriving home today, I can only conclude that we’ve made a couple of giant leaps forward. Maybe it’s a good thing to be thrown in the middle of a mess and stress. Afterall under those circumstances, the end result can only be good.
Tomorrow, I’ll be meddling with the Postgress server, to find new ways to get that back-up going, reorganize the code tree, set up a versioning system, collect the latest documentation of the latest changes and then jump in other big stuff. Next week.
I was checking today’s recommended fixes by Microsoft: a total of 5 fixes. Four of them are defined as ‘critical’. And guess what?
Two of the issues have to do with ActiveX. It would be rather mean to say that this is (once again) a proof that ActiveX is totally out of ..um.. touch with today’s Internet world. Come to think of it, it actually is. Here’s a quote that pitted Java against ActiveX:
“Java applets are sandboxed. To give one example, they cannot open an image file from a site other than the one where the applet came from.”
I’m not even a fan of Java, but for some kind of reason the argument above sounds like utter nonsense if you think of all the recent fixes to Explorer and Windows.
