As the designated translator Dutch-English-Dutch, I noticed something the other day: it breaks me-own English.
For example, the other day, when walking into Subways, I had a terrible hard time to get a sandwich ordered. I talked (and thought) in a mix of Dutch and English language to order my favourite sub.
This is not good.
Since we
all need a bit of humour so once in a while, here’s something I discovered and liked to share with you.
Canadian weather does follow a pattern. I’m not kidding you. I sampled 2 years of data and ended up with two graphs: one showing the general trend for Summer and one showing the Winter trend. Notice the trend lines in the two graphs: During Summer there’s a linear relationship between 
good and bad weather spread over 7 days (which is basically a week!). The interesting part is that the same is not true for Winter: the weather trends during that period is remarkably similar to hyperbole! (this will not surprise fellow Nova Scotians)
I always loved math.
L
ooking for more information on today’s find in my old home town, a genuine +800 BC late Roman melting oven (Dutch only), I decided to take a look at the Deventer Dagblad, nowadays called ‘De Stentor’. (I have no idea what that Dutch word means, but I’ll found out. I think it has to do with the movable type press machine)
As all newspapers do nowadays, I was redirected to a login page or, rather, a page where I could create a new account… where (as shown above) every field in that form appears to be a mandatory field. The only field that’s missing is the one with the obligatory question what kind of colours my shorts have.
No way I’m filling that one out.
Hey there’s a security release out for WordPress. It. Uh. What it says is:
but an important security issue was brought to our attention which required an update for our users. The problem is not yet public but you should update your blog as soon as possible to 1.5.1.3.
Oh. And there’s one extra line more. Oops. We almost forgot:
If you are unable to do upgrade in the short-term you may protect yourself by deleting the xmlrpc.php file from your WordPress directory.
Well, darn. Wasn’t that the file I just deleted a couple of days ago when I saw it was accessed a couple of times? Why not make the security release public? Or are there more open problems?
Update (07/04): Serious PHP troubles I see.
We watched Joel Schumacher’s “Phantom of the Opera” last night, a movie heavily inspired by the popular ‘Phantom of the Opera’ stage musical from the hand of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
It includes all the songs that were part of that musical too which keeps me thinking that this movie was made to satisfy the needs of all those Phantom of The Opera (the musical) fans. I mean, what’s the point of making these kind of these movies if you’d be able to watch them in your local theatre on stage?
While it was enjoyable, at certain scenes it became ad nauseam because the music appears to be so repeative. There was only one section of music that woke me up and which I instantly recognized: the music of the Phantom’s own ‘Don Juan’ (20+ sec. fragment). Utterly brilliant, because it is atonal. Hey! More of this stuff please!
A 
yearly commemoration of the dismantling of slavery in the Netherlands was marked by heckling (and noisemaking) during a speech of the Dutch minister of Integration and Immigration (ms. Rita Verdonk). She was eventually whisked away by security personnel.
I
haven’t been following the current Dutch political culture, so I have to rely on sources like nu.nl and the National Broadcasting Corporation: apparently not everybody is happy with the policies of the (current) center-right government. It’s interesting to see and watch (for example) online footage of a discussion between cabinet ministers and the (ever) critical journalists of broadcasters like the NPS. Earlier this month I was watching a heated discussion between the (above mentioned) minister and a journalist on transition houses, female immigrants and emancipation. Lots of plans, but nothing concrete.
Maybe that’s the best description of the current Dutch cabinet: Lots of plans, but nothing concrete. I hear the Dutch Labour party is rising slowly (Dutch!) in the polls: if there were elections, they could actually start a coalition with like-minded parties, instead of (always) relying on center-right partners. Which would make life in Holland a bit more interesting.
Doing a file search on files I saw one of the counters of My Homemade File Finder (that isn’t here yet) display negative values. After it hit the 2047 MB mark (or around that). Consistently.
This is logical: when accumulating the size of a file (bytes in integers), I passed that value to a function that converts it into a readable amount of MB. Stupid mistake: the maximum value of an integer (in Delphi and even VB) is 2,147,483,647. So the maximum value that particular variable could store is an amount of 2 GB. What are you laughing at?
That would have worked in the DOS ages, when everybody thought that 2 GB for storing e-mails would be enough. We know better these days. And hey, I have gazillions of stories too about how expensive 100 MB harddrives were those days.
Think about it for a second when you write a File manager that needs to accumulate file sizes: how are you going to display that particular value and how are you going to store it.
Update: No I have not considered using Int64s. Int64s are taboos.
So McAfee just finished scanning: over 100,000 files, almost 2 hours and 2 restarts later. About these restarts later, but first its catch, because that’s what you’re all curious about: I mean, me, the guy who laughs about the panic virusses and trojans spread, because I can remove them all by hand because I know where to look for them. Well.
McAfee found 20 virusses. All of them duds. The first 17 were so-called Byte Verifier Java trojans. They affect the Microsoft VM and since I don’t use that VM and I’ve used Firefox (almost) from the start of using this computer, I can only imagine that they must have creeped in via whatever program that forced me to use IE. Or maybe they creeped into my system while I was downloading Firefox the very moment I turned on the computer for the first time.
There were two files tightly embedded in RFC 822 type e-mail messages. Since these need to be extracted first by a mailer that does support MIME decoding (and message parsing), these didn’t even hurt. I was aware of possible virusses matches too because, these were messages forwarded to me by Alfons so I could use them as examples for a live presentation.
The last one? It was presumably in a dll that comes with an nsis (the famous Open Source Installer) install. That DLL? Innocent, as McAfee acknowledged.. Hey, but thanks for removing it anyways! I like reinstalling stuff like that ad nauseum.
While I actually like the (bare-to-bones) install of McAfee [it’s just a plain virus scanner and it doesn’t feel like Symantec bloat], downloading updates requires a two-time computer restart: after finishing the download and after actually installing the new update. Not good, but not bad at all either: Instead of a 3 month Symantec-type-grace-period-and- then -pay-for-an-extra uh virus update, McAfee comes with a year out of the box.
It’s one of those days I can’t fall asleep and guess what: it’s Canada Day too. How appropriate.
Canada Day? There will be celebrations around town too, but we haven’t made up our mind yet about what to do: well, actually we do and it’s probably cleaning out and setting stuff up. Most of part we’re done around the spare room, but in doing so we basically moved -uh- mess around.
Canada Day reminds me also of the silly computerdesk I won: it was the first year I was here, the first time I celebrated that particular holiday and the first time I ever won anything. I won a ‘stuiterbal’ too, but mentioning that will grant me hours of homeric laughter of people who witnessed that particular event.
I guess, in the meantime, I should install the Virus scanner on this PC.
Woof 
bloody woof. I just finished the harder part of the File Matcher And Res Earch Finder. Whatever that means. It works too: it may need some brushing up so here and there (uh, memory wise), but it looks like it’s working perfectly for me-own needs.
As for the file/matcher
I resorted back to the way how I added conditions to a Mailer program I once helped develop: I’m not sure if that’s the most convenient way. However, having played with Windows XP’s search thing, I’m not sure if I like that either.
Other things needed (for myself): when pausing search actions, the next continue please take over any changed file conditions. Secondly, I need to see if I can stuff this into Explorer. And thirdly, saving searches (or even the set conditions) might be nice too.
Reasonably happy with the graphics but particularly happy with another area of expertise covered, that is search algorithms.
C
leaning up from aft to night, moving furniture around, I ended up crawling around on the floor because hubs, modem and routers needed to be rewired.
Guestroom needs lots of cleaning and I need to to test how far the wireless goes. Be right back.
Update: Check.
Looking for a background information on the BM algorithm, I discovered several neat sites explaining the procedure:
From one of the inventors, Moore, comes a plain HTML based (step-by-step) explanation of the algorithm. Make sure you click the links. Note the following quote from Moore and think about it when watching the example:
Our algorithm has the peculiar property that, roughly speaking, the longer the pattern is, the faster the algorithm goes.
A rather neat explanation is hosted on a German site with a (Java- based, so might take some time loading) animation of the algorithm.
Hey. 
I didn’t break it this time!
Earlier this year, I rambled about Windows XP not-so-good internal text search tool: It’s broken. No matter how you try to find files with specific portions of text, it will not return the right results. No matter if you turn that frigging dog off (‘Assistant, my *ss’), it will not return the files I’m looking for. I know they’re there. I wonder if this is the reason why other companies saw a hole in the market for an invention that was supposed to be there: the Desktop Search Tool! And Microsoft (as you’ve probably found out) has now also launched their own tool, appropriately called ‘Desktop Search’. Why did they break it in XP anyways? Can I sue them now? I mean, I just want to find my files.
Also, while looking around for other tools, I found that most of them were ‘light versions’ (Agent Ransack for example) or bluntly said, overpriced. And while Grep works on Windows (using the GNU tools for Windows), it doesn’t find me files with specific timestamps and creation dates.
