This
is weird: all day we’ve been waiting for the snow to come, but it’s still not there. We hope it will pass by. Note that image above (rather right) has a UTC timestamp, instead of our regular AST one (-4 hours that’ll be then).
It’s going to be (half-homemade) pizza-and-a-movie night.
Ed: Looks like we have a flurry touchdown
There’s much abuzz about Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U been gone’ song. Apparently it makes tops over at iTunes (goes to XML link).
For Europeans abroad, ms. Clarkson was one of the winners of American Idol, you know the show with the premisses that the one with the most votes goes popstar. It doesn’t require to have talent to become a popstar: the only talent you apparently need is to sing along and hold on the last vowel of the song. The longer, the more votes!
But back to the song: there’s one reason why this is song will not stand the test of time and that’s because of the word ‘cool’. When is the last time you heard anyone say the words ‘Far out’ (movies not included). In ten years, we will not know what ‘being cool’ was all about and the word itself will either end up in the bin of ‘anachronisms’ or show up in terrible movies starring Brendan Fraser.
So close and yet so far: You think Spring is on its way back, then you get slammed with another weather warning.
“A low pressure system approaching from the west will lie in the gulf of Maine by Saturday morning. It will intensify as it tracks northeastward during the day pushing snow at times heavy and strong easterly winds gusting to 80 km/h over the regions in the afternoon and evening. Snowfall amounts of 15 centimetres for the southwest and 20 to 30 centimetres for the northeastern regions are predicted”
We stocked up on movies, in case we still have power and if we get too bored watching the snow accumulate in our backyard.
No matter 
what people say of Google, the company itself is pushing its tech in a consistent way: Take for example Google News: Since this week users can change the layout of the frontpage according to personal wishes (via Asa’s
It’s literally drag and drop sections to different places. It’s not only cool, it’s so particularly consistent with other parts in their ‘product range’ that that alone makes it cool.
On a sidenote: trying out Google maps the other day, I noticed that that feature isn’t really meant for our Dial-Up cousins. It’s too slow (too many pictures) to make effective use out of it.
I noticed the Privateer Remake on both Slashdot (thread) and MetaFilter (thread). I’m not going to play or even try it for the reason that, although playing the original game was extremely fun (and frustating at times), I cannot see myself playing that game once again.
First of all it’s based on Vega Strike. It’s a game that doesn’t want to run on my computer. Secondly, sure Privateer was revolutionary that time, but so was Elite. Replaying these old games for the sake of sentimental reasons seems not to work for me. There’s one final reason why I don’t like playing the game: the main storyline is too linear. If I was one of the Privateer Remake developers I would look for a professional story writer.
Ed: I wonder how much of this remake will infringe the original WC/Origin copyrights
Looking for information on older processors, I ended up comparing Intel’s and AMD’s roadmap for this year.
AMD is focussing on dual core processors (as the graph seems to indicate) to be released at the end of the year. Intel then? No word about dual-processors, only about more + more speed. 3.8 GHz. No problem!
Where’s IBM’s roadmap I wonder. Their PowerPC pages don’t seem to reveal anything.
Earlier this weekend we managed to watch three movies: ‘Paycheck’, ‘Sky Captain’ and ‘The Forgotten’. All three of them were (equally) appreciated but a couple things sprang out:
‘Paycheck’ was directed by Johnny Woo and it shows. I’m not a great fan of Affleck, who’s the leading actor in the movie, but when watching the movie I noticed a slight resemblance with how Hitchcock directed. Woo (in the extra feature section of the DVD) admitted he tried to imitate Hitchcock’s style. Hint: look for Affleck haircut. Also, look for the abrupt camera work.
‘The Forgotten’ reminded of typical Alien vs. Humans movies. However, despite a couple of ‘overacting’ moments, particularly the ‘side crash’ scene was impressive.
And then ‘Sky Captain’: it’s the only movie in my collection that seems to be allowed to be watched by kids (No joke). The movie is impressive, only after you watch the Extra Features section when you learn that everything was done using CGI and the of blue screens. The actors did not have a clue what the end result would be. Impressive work of art done by the animators, colourizers and others. Watch for the traditional animators easter eggs in the movie.
Years ago, when I was living on the Other Side of the ocean, we (brother and friends) used to go out to Amsterdam and have (literally) ‘dine and discuss’ days. All of us were programmers, well-paid in most cases, so topics ranged from programming to Linux to Internet. Those were good days, particularly knowing that we all were programmers alike.
It was on one of those night when one of us (I can’t remember who) argumented how the Internet and Linux would benefit the political movements. And how the Internet would literally empower hordes of generations using Open Source programming as their social weapons to fight the social unjust.
The argument was not well-received: after all, as most of us replied, we’re just programmers because we love it for the sake of programming. Politics and programming don’t go well together because it limits the programmer’s reasoning ability. In programming, reasoning and rationality isn’t about black or white, red or blue as seen in many political debates: it’s a well-thought, compromising, irregular path to the best solution.
Which brings me to the current blogging state, as Alan seems to carve out in a couple of well-reasoned postings.
No matter what people will tell you, blogging will not result in the downfall of existing media. That’s because these bloggers who claim this, pretend things are simply black and white, right or wrong. They hold the media accountable but not themselves.
Have you ever seen a blogger publicly retract a posting, a personal opinion? I have not: neither sides of the blogging sphere has ever issued a correction in cases when they overstated facts. I believe this is leading to an extreme form of Internet Balkanization, where only opinion, not accountability, counts.
As informed people, with the power to look up different opinions with the press of a button (instantly), we should take reading blogs lightly: blogging is like overhearing or participating in a private coffeetable discussion where everybody is entitled to have his own opinion.
Here is a tip for those aspiring web developers who think that they know it all after they have managed to create a ‘database-driven’ web application:
Always add a field to important tables that shows when specific items (or rows) were inserted or created. Call it date_created or something. At least it gives you a reference when something was created. Helps if you need to audit and verify data too.
To my surprise I saw that there’s no date/timestamp for WordPress’s *_links table. It has a ‘updated’ timestamp field, that gets updated each time you change the link. Which gets pretty unusable.
Maybe 
it’s just me, but I find some similarities between the Dutch weather
forecast and the current NS weather forecast. It’s cold for sure both here and overthere. Slight difference though: being used to the cold weather I find the current temperatures actually pleasant.
The Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute calls tonight ‘the coldest night since March night since 1900’: in a place called Marknesse, temperatures of -20.5 degrees were measured. That’s cold, yes.
Today, I was researching the file format of a legacy application that is not supported anymore. I don’t think the company that made the program exist anymore, probably suffering the same fate as anyother (legacy) database vendor: swallowed up by larger corporations.
I noticed something weird though, while counting bits, bytes and comparing high and lows: why would someone write or design a database file format where the number of records is stored in the file itself? This is particularly weird knowing the following: all the records have a fixed size, which makes it more or less like a regular random access file (minus the header data and field definitions). After all the number of records would be:
(length_of_the_file - (header_def - field_def))/ record_length) = number_records.
Related: In case you need a good Windows Hex editor. The graphing part reminds me of an old hexeditor I once wrote (it should be still around on my old laptop).
I noticed that the amount of snow seems to be accumulating in The Netherlands. Earlier this day, Alfons forwarded me pictures of kids (apparently) enjoying 4 to 5 centimeters of snow. It looks like heavy slushy snow, but still more than I’ve seen the last 5 to 7 years when I was living over there.
Looking at the the Dutch (news) reports, traffic was chaotic, which led to the following question here: do Dutch use snowplows when there’s this much snow falling?
I can’t remember. Back when I was younger and when snow was accumulating to the same amounts they have now, I remember throwing snowballs at salt trucks. But then, I know the answer already: when I was over there last year I remember seeing all those speedbumps and roundabouts. There’s so much traffic, those things are the only way to force drivers to slow down.
As for the snow… enjoy it for now. It’s almost Spring.
