Weather, wise

Posted on December 3, 2006 by Arthur

While talking to my overseas relatives, I briefly brought up the impression that (as we grew older) the weather in The Netherlands got milder too. Yes, I remember driving on the bike through -20 degrees temperatures. Or through snow. I sound like an old retard now: after all, every generation claims to have gone through the worst of the worst. If you put all these claims together, would the result match the graphs?

I was reading the comments back to back, and noticed that I missed out on a link in one of Alfons’ comments. ‘Yellow River’? Maybe he actually meant this band? That said, I do recognize the song but can not place it. Maybe it was part of my mom’s vinyl collection. I was too young then.

Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on Weather, wise

Supply and Java

Posted on December 2, 2006 by Arthur

I read that the WSJ invited two bloggers to discuss and debate the state of uh-Microsoft. Who did they invite? Dave Winer and Robert Scoble. The best pals in the world. That never works, and it shows too. Debate? That’s not a debate.

At the end of the debate, Scoble points out an example where (according to him) Microsoft does innovate: an article at Gizmodo that “points” out that Microsoft’s search services work better on mobile devices than Google. Says Scoble:

One last thing. Can Microsoft hit the innovation bet? Just today Gizmodo ran a shootout of mobile search services that Google and Microsoft provided. Gizmodo said, “So which is better? Without a doubt, Microsoft’s was the winner.”

That’s half of the story what I read: I read that Gizmodo did a comparison how the two company’s mobile search applications fared on Microsoft PocketPC 2003. One application is a native PocketPC app. The other is Java-based. Can you guess which company made the ‘crappy’ application?

Maybe it’s about time Sun open-sourced Java and the whole damn stuff.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Supply and Java

Not even tech

Posted on November 29, 2006 by Arthur

A couple of notes: The first link that I ran into this morning was a bookmark at Digg with the title ‘This is what happens when you let developers create UI’ (actual blogpost). I have a problem with the ‘insinuation that developers suck at design’. That sir, is indeed a bad example of overkill by a beginning and aspiring programmer (using Visual Basic in this case). The original developer acknowledges this on his webpage. As for wget, it’s the last application in the world that needs a user-interface: it’s too powerful to even contain in a simple dialog. A good and experienced developer would have left wget alone.

Bethesda is about to release ‘Star Trek: Legacy’, a game that promises ‘an epic game of Starfleet combat spanning the entire Star Trek universe’. Hey, isn’t that the same wording that was used on the box of ‘Star Wars: Empire at War’?

A subsidiary of Logitech has made a new type of mouse in association with Google. From the imagery I can only tell that it’s perfect for use in 3D environments. In three years, Logitech will come up with a mouse in the shape of a beer bottle.

Earlier I was going to make the call and predict the winner in one of the categories of the CBA 2006 competition: In the Photo category, it looked like ‘Walk This Way’ was going to be the winner. This morning however, the odds seem to have changed as sudden as a cold spell that arrives in Nova Scotia. The Photo category currently is the only category where the number 1, 2 and 3 all have chance to win the race. Good luck to the ones competing in that category. We still have a day to go.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Not even tech

Left, or right?

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Arthur

For no A typical Leopard tank photoparticular reason, I was looking for images of Leopard tanks, when I noticed that the majority of the photos show the tanks moving from right to left (or rather, the picture taken from the left side). This appears to be consistent, if you look for pictures of regular cars (Mercedes, Opel and BMW, for example).

I wonder if there’s a logical explanation for this, or if this is just coincidence.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Left, or right?

Sidenotes

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Arthur

Rumour has it that I plan to move this blog to its own separate domain to offload the traffic on this domain.

Heavy traffic (unrelated to above) also came from fark today, because someone thought it was nice to include a picture of James “What does god need a spaceship for” Kirk with his comment.

The 2nd voting round in the CBA is still ongoing. Vote strategically! Vote xsamplex: a vote for this site means a vote for a strong use of the <strong> HTML tag. A vote for me, means sending a <strong> HTML message to the ‘blink’ CSS apologists.1.

1 Did I mention about the aliens?

Posted in Hyperlinks | 1 Comment

A camera strikes

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Arthur

Back in my teenage years, I apparently was able to buy not one but two SLR cameras. My very first one, was an East-German made ‘Praktica’. I bought extra lenses for that one, and as a matter of fact, became the ‘official’ family photographer. That was until I found out that making photos of clouds was more interesting than asking people to pose (or not to pose). Around that time, I decided to treat myself on a new camera, which was a Pentax, I believe.

I mention this while I browse the images shot by Alfons: his FlickR set shows he has an excellent eye for subject and arrangement1, things I thought I mastered when I was a teenager. Additionally, I can’t remember if Alfons ever touched either of my older analog SLRs. Why was that? Maybe I was playing the ‘evil twin’ role back in those days.

That said, I have been asked if I’d pick up photography anytime soon. No, not really: what is more boring than two people who look, talk and laugh alike, take up the same hobby? And that said, I think my twin does an excellent job already.

1 I’m not saying this because he’s my twin brother. Twins hate each other. Really: it’s all about competition, rah, rah, rah.

Posted in Those-wonder-years | 3 Comments

String theory

Posted on November 25, 2006 by Arthur

Yesterday, CBC’s ‘The Current’ had a section about the discord in the theoretical physicist community regarding String Theory. There’s an excellent recording of that section right here (Scroll down for recording, or try this link [RealAudio!])

While not going too deep in the Theory itself, the program includes audiobits with opponents of the theory, Lee Smolin and Peter Woit. Smolin has a more conciliatory tone but he criticizes the group mentality of String Theory followers who according to his latest book, carry too much power over other theoretical physicists. Woit, on the other hand, has problems with the theory: he states that all scientific theories are supported by evidence and predictions that can be tested, something that (even after two decades of research) still doesn’t apply to String Theory (Woit sound fragment at 8m:55s). String theorists say, that while they haven’t been able to test their theory, evidence may come as soon as the construction of the Large Hadron Collider has finished.

In the mean time, there are some who question what happens when String Theory proves to be not so right, as Lawrence Krause says (at 22:20):

I do think we’ve lost some really good young minds that could have been trained to physics but probably never will, but I suspect that on the other hand, there are a lot of bright young string theorists, who, the minute something else comes on, will be able to jump on to it.

1.String theory (wikipedia), The String Theory website and the art behind the science of String theory.
2. What do you mean, they just did a power-up test?

Posted in Scientifically | Comments Off on String theory

Up Round

Posted on November 25, 2006 by Arthur

This week the Dutch went to the polls and to much surprise, the Christian Democrats kept most of their seats in the Lower House. The other surprise was that the Socialist Party was officially named winner of this year’s election by winning an extra 17 seats (making it the third largest party), presumably indicative of the mood of the Dutch: while they seem to agree that the country is ‘fairly good off’, most Dutch seem to want to see a more social face to the current government. Interestingly, it appears that either left/right political parties will have a hard time to create a coalition because of the lack of the right amount of seats. 76 is the magic number and as it looks like now, I won’t be surprised if the Christian Democrats are going to (have to) govern with Labour and Socialist parties.

There’s is a discussion going on in Canada about Quebec (there’s always a discussion about Quebec’s special status): this time the Conservative Party will table a motion to give Quebec the status of a nation within Canada. I’m not sure what that means but it sounds more or less like ‘more of the same’. Strictly political.1

Robert Altman died at age 81. I remember a couple of his movies: some of them good, some of them worse. ‘Pret-A-Porter’ is one of them I can’t really place: while I appreciated his effort to shake up the fashion world with a morality play, the movie itself is not overly exciting. If I think of Altman, that last sentence probably explains his whole oeuvre.

1 Excellent commentary courtesy of The Current.

Posted in We-reflect-news | Comments Off on Up Round

Empire at War

Posted on November 24, 2006 by Arthur

ThisOH MY GOD! LEIA?? is going to hurt so much, so I might just as well throw it out: LucasArt’s “Empire at Wars” rots. I got the game a couple of months ago and was too embarrassed to mention it earlier. Don’t buy this game. Buy something else, Civ 4 or even, a boardgame like ‘Trivial Pursuit’.

Empire at War promises a mix of ‘Spaceward Ho’ (remember that game, kids?), ‘Battle Ships’, ‘Command & Conquer’ style action, naturally all in a Star Wars-like flavour. While this initially looks promising, during my first games (all wins!) I found out that the space and planet-surface battles (the C&C-like gameplay) were actually too repetitive for my taste. The good thing is that you can ignore these battles and let the computer decide who eventually won them. Which leaves you with a ‘Spaceward Ho’-style game with only one AI enemy (either the Rebels or the Empire, right?). The only way to win the game is to build a gigantic fleet and go at it. Meh. Yawn. Boring.

There’s one amazing element to the game: Computer moves happen in real-time. If you’ve played ‘turn-based’ 4X games, you know how annoying it can be to wait for your turn just when you’re ready to strike the decisive blow to the computer. In ‘Empire at War’, some of the computer’s moves may come as a surprise if you don’t follow or monitor battles closely. If only Civilization 4…

To summarize: if you’re a hardcore Star Wars fan, this game is probably better than a slice of bread cut by a light saber. If not, you may want to ignore this game. If not for the silly gameplay then for the Wing Commander 1-like cut-scenes. I mean, this is 2006, no?

Posted in Video Games | Comments Off on Empire at War

Ball-points

Posted on November 24, 2006 by Arthur

Earlier, BICI read about the ball-point pen at BBC. Revolutionary? Probably not, but definitely groundbreaking: how many generations have used the ball-point pen since it’s invention in 1938 by the Biro brothers? How many of your pens have been stolen (or borrowed) by your colleagues, brothers, sisters or schoolmates? How many pens have you gone through (including all Parkers, Sheaffers and Watermans you owned)?

Probably way too many.

1. A history of ball-points wars.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Ball-points

There

Posted on November 23, 2006 by Arthur

As you may CBA 2006 Round 1 have found out: xsamplex made it to the second round of the CBA 2006 awards. Congrats to the others who made it through. For the ones that didn’t make it: that was quite a narrow margin. The next round of voting starts next Saturday and continues until Friday next week.

Posted in Hyperlinks | 6 Comments

You asked: CreatMapFile & Pascal

Posted on November 20, 2006 by Arthur

From the logfile, a Polish person looking for CreateFileMapping, most likely using Delphi. The WIN32 API function is generally used in conjunction with ‘MapViewOfFile’. You’d generally use memory mapped files when you run into a TStringList limitation. At this stage, you’d probably cursing the Delphi implementors.

Your first step is to create the filemap like this: 

// fileMapHandle = THandle, filehandler = integer. Choose your mapping
// protection appropriately (in this case I used page_readonly
fileMapHandle := CreateFileMapping(filehandler, nil, 
  page_readonly, 0, 0, nil)

Verify if a handle was returned (you probably also want to use GetLastError). Your next step is to actually map the file to an address using MapViewOfFile. It is probably handy to learn about PChars at this stage (note this is an example that comes from Fandro: in this case the ‘magic search’ happens in a function called ‘SetData’): 

  // size == integer.
  if fileMapHandle <> 0 then
    SetData(MapViewOfFile(fileMapHandle,
      file_map_read,0,0,0),size)

When done processing, don’t forget to close (any) open handles: 

  CloseHandle(fileMapHandle);

And that’s it!

Posted in Programming, You-Asked | 1 Comment

Made in Whereverland

Posted on November 19, 2006 by Arthur

Back in the early Eighties, Made in Chinawe used to make jokes about every single electronic product, which always appeared to come with a label ‘Made In Japan’. In the early 90s, production of electronical goods apparantly shifted to Taiwan and Singapore (‘The Asian Tigers’). Nowadays, it looks like everything is made in China: from advanced electronics to delicious butter tarts.

Earlier this year, I looked up the manuals of a laptop and discovered that the accompanying Microsoft Windows XP manual (or rather booklet) was actually printed in China. At that time, this made no sense: what’s the point of ordering booklets to be printed in China and have them flown (shipped) into North America. Wouldn’t that be expensive?

On the other hand, since most laptops are made in China, it probably doesn’t make sense to ship them with booklets made in the US.

Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on Made in Whereverland