Olympics II

Posted on February 24, 2006 by Arthur

I decided Dutch bobsled teamto watch the Olympics at CBC and ended up watching the 4-men bobsled heats. The report only focussed on the Canadian sleds and the leading teams. In this sport that’s generally either Switzerland, Germany or Russia. The final heats are Sunday.

I briefly watched Canada’sBrueghel, Pieter gold game curling: to be honest, I’ve got no idea what this sport is all about. For that matter, cricket is one of those sports that I don’t understand either. Curling reminds of the Dutch boardgame ‘sjoelen’ (Dutch) and even ‘klootschieten’. It surprised me to find out that there’s a “Dutch link” to the sports: the first painting showing ‘curlers’ was painted by Flemish painter Brueghel. Somebody should make a ‘curling’ videogame1.

1 Somebody already did that. A Canadian too.

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Google Pages, RSS, Sets

Posted on February 23, 2006 by Arthur

Everybody and the other was talking about ‘Google Pages’ today. Might just as well point you to the discussions at Metafilter, Slashdot and Digg. I’m not impressed with what it has to offer, but the technology behind it is pretty neat. Frontpage is out, hail Google Pages.

Did you think the ‘RSS wars’ were over? You’re wrong. It’s all going to be old business again. So many links and not enough popcorn! (I admit, last link is best).

Via one of the links above, I rediscovered ‘Google Sets’, a tool that predicts sets of items based on examples provided by the user. Weird stuff. Addictive.

And last but not least: has anyone ever noticed that Roland appears to have gone out of the SoundCanvas business? Or maybe I’m missing something1?

1 I guess Edirol is taking care of that portion.

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Super-cave™

Posted on February 23, 2006 by Arthur

Apparently the world still hasCave with two choppersnot been fully explored: In Venezuela, researchers found a cave that huge that two helicopters could fly safely in it and land. Yes, on that picture there, those little specks are helicopters.

Looking at the picture, I’m wondering what the rest of the photoset looks like.

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milkman (or milkwoman)

Posted on February 22, 2006 by Arthur

milkman, milkwoman
n 1. A person who is frequently wandering around the office (‘door by door’/’cubicle by cubicle’) and fills in time by making conversation with anybody who is willing to listen and discuss today’s headlines.
ex – Duncan is proving to be quite a milkman today.

Origin:Dutch: Back in the 70s a ‘mobile store’ was generally operated by the local dairy store (or producers), delivering fresh produce and dairy products right in front of the door. These drivers (‘milkmen’, Dutch: ‘melkboer’) and their stores became popular meeting points for people discussing the latest rumours in the neighbourhood.

1. Earlier at xsamplex

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Licenses and other stuff.

Posted on February 21, 2006 by Arthur

A discussion over at Cosmic Variance (‘Apple or PC laptop’) reminds me that a lot of people actually think that Apple runs on ‘Linux’. Nope, it doesn’t: it runs a ‘Unix’ flavour. If you want more points, GNUyou say either ‘Mach’ or ‘BSD’ (Mach is a kind of a hard to pronounce in English). As for which laptop: if I had the choice, I’d be going for a Toshiba again. My 2 year old one is still outrunning the one I got for work-related stuff (which happens to be an HP). And it’s a lot more ‘solid’ looking. Laptops need to be ‘solid’.

More confusion about Open Source: I hear a lot of people suggest to use open source software because ‘it’s free (as in beer)’. This is false. The point of open source software is that the ‘sources are open, so you’re free to look and tinker with it’ (free as in speech). Open source programmers are allowed to charge for their software. Heck, they’re even allowed to become millionaires (hey, it worked for ID Software).

Continue reading →

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Strike. Past.

Posted on February 20, 2006 by Arthur

Over the weekend I was reminded of an incident that happened during German classes when I was (way) younger. I was called upon to write my homework on the blackboard and I refused to do so. I had done my homework and that: I just didn’t feel like writing stuff in front of the classroom. I think the teacher exploded (and the class fell out in miffled laughter) when I muttered the reason (‘I always do my homework. Here’s the proof. I just don’t feel like standing in front of the classroom.’). I do recall the faces of students and teacher. I also remember Alfons’ face, who appeared to be literally stunned by the situation. No offense meant, no rebellion, or ‘oops I didn’t do my homework’-excuses. I just didn’t feel like it. Only after threats to send me to the principal, I decided to give in. I’m not sure if I was punished afterwards: I don’t think so. I may have apologized or maybe not. German classes went on happily after that. I don’t remember being called in front of the class regularly after that. And as always, I did my homework.

Also earlier, I was looking for sequencers (as in MIDI) and happened to find nothing. Hey: for Linux there’s a couple of brilliant ones. But for Windows: nada. For a moment, I pondered about creating one (hard work). I decided to check out a couple of trial versions of renown sequencers like the ‘Cakewalk’ and ‘Voyetra’. I have good memories of Voyetra: back in the days we (Alfons and I) were introduced to the world of ‘sequencing’ by a lady who happened to be pretty good at it. It was also around that time we decided to buy up a genuine SCC-1. Good stuff. Good memories.

As for testing sequencers: only Voyetra comes close to what I had imagined. It’s solid (but bare) and feels a lot more stable than the others I tried before. It’s not expensive either: In the early days of PC-MIDI, DOS based sequencers were beyond the reach of students. Things have changed.

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Bow wow wow

Posted on February 19, 2006 by Arthur

While preparing snapshots of music from Sonic Youth, for a new addition to the ‘Past-The-Bridge’ collection, I decided to turn the clock back a bit more (once again , I see): right to the Eighties. I’ve discussed Bow Wow Wow before here.

Back to the Eighties: from what I know from memory, the band Bow Wow Wow was (literally) raked together by British musical ‘enfant-terrible’, Malcolm McLaren, who apparently, was the first manager to ask a front singer (a teenager) to pose naked on an album cover. I have no memories to the public outcry around that time: I do remember the band promoting their latest (catchy) tune ‘Do you want to hold me’ on the Dutch version of ‘Top of the Pops’. I also recall the mohawks, a hairdo that became synonymous with rebellion in the age of punk and ska.

At that time, younger and interested in other kinds of music, I didn’t care about Bow wow wow. 22 or 23 years later, I remember flying over CD covers, picking out the bands’ sampler and dragging it along to several ‘Eighties’ party. Not because it is good music, but it’s surely catchy and is (once again) a living proof of McLaren’s genius.

Update: YouTube has the original video online. Look for the scary Reagan picture! (note: YouTube seems to be awful slow today)

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The Island (2005)

Posted on February 19, 2006 by Arthur

EarlierFemme Assise this weekend we watched ‘The Island’, a movie with so many (amazing) stunts and effects that it makes your head whirl. Quite an action movie: not flawless, but that’s why it’s called an action movie.

Interesting to see a movie featuring a painting of Picasso, in this case it’s the ‘Femme Assise Jacqueline’: it’s shown a couple of times and it’s not until almost at the end that Sean Bean reveals it’s a Picasso. How many Picassos are shown in movies, I wonder.

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Konvoi! Absinken!

Posted on February 19, 2006 by Arthur

For Das_boo_t.jpgno apparent reason, I’ve been humming one of the themes of the movie ‘Das Boot’: the one that (apparently) is titled ‘Konvoi’.

The History channel is to blame this time: I think they showed that movie 3 or 4 weeks ago on a late Sunday evening, meaning that I missed most of it. Except for that scene where (after all this bad luck) the crew is chasing a convoy. And the music that accompanies that scene.

If you mind me, I’m going to reboot my brains for a minute.

More over at Wikipedia (naturally)

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Half-Life 2, II

Posted on February 18, 2006 by Arthur

Earlier this month, I decided to replay Half-Life 2 (earlier and earlier): while the gameplay is excellent, I still think 50 dollars for a game with no extra features is a waste, particularly compared to what you get in the PC version. A level-by-level review:

  1. Point insertion: Introduction. Confusing.
  2. Red Letter Day: Part of Introduction.
  3. Route Canal: The fight starts! Finally.
  4. Water Hazard: Boat level. The boat part is sometimes fun and sometimes no fun. It’s fairly straight forward but there are a couple of hidden spots that are generally (easily) overlooked when playing the game the first time.
  5. Black Mesa East: Short. Cut scene.
  6. We don’t go to Ravenholm: Boring but full of unexpecting turns. Couldn’t challenge me really and I always end up with ‘no ammunition’. I blame the XBOX controller for that.
  7. Highway 17: Buggy/Car level. Fun. I think it’s more fun to ‘scoot’ around than to ‘float’ around.
  8. Sandtraps: Buggy/Car level. Fun. Except for past the Lighthouse. Jolly jumping around and that.
  9. Nova Prospekt: The jail level is fun at times. Most of part boring.
  10. Entanglement: Endless ‘turret’ fun. Boring, except for close quarters combat.
  11. Anti-citizen One: Fun.
  12. Follow Freeman: Urban warfare fun. Strider level.
  13. Our benefactors: Boring.
  14. Dark Energy: The conclusion. Not really hard to solve.

When doing the first ‘rail trip’ in the Citadel, I noticed that there’s no real reason given why the Combine are ‘collecting people’. Or maybe they aren’t but what’s the point of Freeman being inside the Citadel? So while I think the game was actually a good follow-up, the designers should have skipped the part of adding other Half-Life characters to the game. They don’t fit the storyline.

Posted in Ordinateurs | 6 Comments

Keyboard madness

Posted on February 16, 2006 by Arthur

During one of those longer coding sessions, my development environment started to act up and (at the end) gave up on me. There was no way to save the code because of some ‘modal madness’ occurring in the background. I took a deep breath, restarted the computer and (succesfully) re-programmed the portions of code that got lost. Naturally, I closely and (frequently) watched (and used) that ‘Save’ shortkey afterwards.

Retyping code out of memory is no fun. The good part of it is, that it does give a new meaning to the words ‘a fresh start’. I bet that, in a couple of years, someone will introduce ‘Extreme Reboot Programming’: two programmers sitting side by side writing code and ‘rebooting’ the computer every hour just to catch that ‘fresh start’ feeling.

I’m not kidding you.

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Algorithms Fun

Posted on February 14, 2006 by Arthur

Interesting detail: Yahoo has released its AJAX library under the BSD license. The archive shows some neat examples of JavaScript. There are other AJAX libraries around. Some of them good. Some of them not good enough. Yahoo’s dev. blog can be found right here.

DAWG (as mentioned on the WordFinders page) stands for Directed Acyclic Word Graphs and it’s a data structure that allows for extremely fast word searches. Better yet, the datastructure forms the foundation for many spellcheckers on the market. A good description (and perfect explanation) can be found at Wutkas. Good programmers master algorithms.

Talking about algorithms. Imagine this: get 48 million dollars to develop algorithms!

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Google and more Olympics

Posted on February 13, 2006 by Arthur

Returning from work, I noticed that my Gmail account includes the web-based GoogleTalk. I complained earlier about not being included. Thanks. I was also surprised to see the approval of Adsense coming through. In 20 years, I’ll be a millionaire! Wait until you see my masterplan! (Oh. Old news)

Talking about advertisements, going to Niels’ site, I noticed how appropriately Google was showing ads for Canadian companies. You can see it right here.

Canada? Earlier this day, I heard that the Canadian Women Hockey team decisively defeated the Italian team with 16 to 0. That wasn’t funny and figure this: not all Canadians were happy with those numbers. Defeating an opponent is one. Defeating the host with these kind of high numbers is just not right.

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