A colleague reminded me of the forthcoming ‘The A-Team’ movie. Yes, you’ve heard that alright. The plot outline sounds so familiar too:
Four veterans, framed for a crime they didn’t commit, help people in trouble while on the run from the military.
That A-Team, yes: I can’t wait for ‘Knight Rider the Movie’. Not.
Over at the Postgres-General mailinglist (no real link to the thread because at this moment the thread hasn’t been completely archived) the question why there couldn’t be a scheduler built into Postgres.
The question is completely logical: many operating systems have many different cron-like solutions. All of them uncompatible. However, building such a thing into Postgres? A database server? I tend to agree with one of the comments made:
Sure, and there’s an advantage to traveling the speed of light, but you’ve got to set your priorities.
Why would there be a need for a multi-platform built-in scheduler for Postgres?
Earlier this week I had to pick up my (recently) renewed passport. I noticed something that day: while it was nice and reasonably cold in Truro, it was cold in Halifax. Windy, too, but then, it always seems to windy there. I managed to get some Christmas shopping done at the Scotia Mall, which between these lines, I find one of the most boring malls around.
Then that day after, I witnessed an accident while we (colleague and me) were driving on the One-O-Two in the direction of Brookfield. We only saw something grey flashing from the other lane into our lane. My colleague naturally stopped at the scene of the accident, and the next moment both of us (and other witnesses) ran down the ditch to see what could be done.
The other day I noticed a couple things when playing the XBOX version of Jedi Academy: first, the game is based on the Unreal-Engine. Secondly, the gameplay is pretty linear. Linear.
For example at a certain stage in the game I thought I was stuck. It only took me a second to find the solution to get me (or rather the character) out of the predicament: I couldn’t go left, right, forward or backward, so I had to go up.
The other thing is anti-spyware software. I’m not going to name names, but there’s a program out there that does not want to close down using normal means. So much for calling itself ‘anti-spyware’ software. It’s crap.
This morning when walking the dog, I personally experienced what the guys of Big Dog (for the oldies, back in the days they called that Truro radiostation ‘100.9/The Mix’) where laughing and joking about: -10 degrees. Celsius. If you think those temperatures are normal over here, you must be crazy.
Talking about that Truro radiostation: I always hated that name ‘Big Dog’. It has never been explained why they renamed it into ‘Big Dog’. I’m not really into the music though: it has always been the default station for the radio/alarm clock.
I saw 
‘Hero’ (mentioned before) and was impressed. It’s not as much a martial arts feature special, but mostly a visual spectacle. And an amazing use of colours in the scenes and scenery. Stunning.
The movie was nominated for an Oscar (‘Foreign Feature filn’) in 2002, which (alas) went to a German movie. Back in Europe, I remember seeing a couple of other Yimou movies, (notably ‘Raise the Red Lantarn’) in small movie theatres. It’s a nice surprise to see a movie of him making it to a DVD aisle in a local Sobeys store.
A Roman myth tells about
the god of the gates, past and present, two-headed, Janus. So I was a kind of amused to see this perfect photo made by Canadian Press photographer, Tom Hanson.
As for the President’s visit to Halifax, it wasn’t really the talk of the town since there were other important things to think of, like the rain or generally speaking, the weather.
Just the other day, it came to me that I’ve been around this Intarnet for 10 years.
Yes, you’ve heard that right, but don’t bother sending me congratulations. I will return those right away, including the spam you send along with them. Those 10 years: It’s a long story too. I can’t exactly recall which day I decided to ‘subscribe’ to the Internet, but it must have been in between September and December of 1994. It was a rather cold day and my first ISP had a wide choice of plans: long distance for 5 Guilders an hour.
That was a pretty expensive offer, which I then considered a steal. I remember people asking me ‘what this Intarnet was all about. ‘You can travel the WORLD behind your computer’, was my enthusiastic answer. Sure.
Does light behave as waves or particles?
Both. Earlier this afternoon, I was reminded of light’s dualism in physics when I was mindlessly discussing the properties of light, when returning to colourful Truro at night. Both.
When I first learned about this amazing fact I was astonished. I remember we were shown the double-slit experiment (or rather something that looks like it). I also remember hearing countless explanations what was going on when light encounters objects. Alfons gave the best explanation, I’ve ever heard: wave or particle, it depends in what aspect (or context) you’re experimenting with [but then, Alfons has a real knack for quantum physics].
Going back to those years, I remember doing an experiment together with the bro, shooting light through different coloured filters. The worst part is I can’t remember what we were hunting or looking for. It was spectacular though: I’d never thought putting a simple red (or other) coloured glass would change my ideas about light. The teacher gave us straight A-s too, which was nice naturally too.
Earlier this weekend I was making jokes about the snowstorm which was supposedly dumping 5 – 10 cm snow overhere. I had the suspicion that it would blow over, since the temperature was still dangling around the 5 – 10 degrees Celsius.
We were hammered and to top it off, we lost power too. It can be pretty cold in the house when it’s windy, snowing and around the freezing point.
People who are familiar with the famous WinAmp-website title-jokes can’t have missed the latest one:
“Let the great Canadian exodus begin.”
Brilliant programmers.
Did anybody forget to tell me that the domain name example.com (and its .net and .org variants) is not available because an RFC says so? See RFC 2606 (Section 3)…
” The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) also currently has the following second level domain names reserved which can be used as examples
example.com
example.net
example.org”
No, serious
A couple of weeks ago, me and my wife managed to fly over to the old continent, specifically The Netherlands (some of you Northern Americans still say Holland, but it’s really Netherlands). The last thing I expected was that the country, the most tolerant and liberal country on the Northern Hemisphere (and so clean, according to my wife), actually made the headlines for intolerance.
First was the killing of a prominent but controversial director, Theo van Gogh, (who was seen as a prominent proponent of free speech) by a radical moslim. And then it’s all violence, where it now looks like a ‘We [fill out your religion] burn [fill out your religion] churches’ – contest. And that all in a country that has accepted refugees and immigrants since its founding.
Now, let me give some advice. Don’t believe one-sided losers like Instapundit who come out with one-liners like ‘Indeed’ or ‘Told you so, Islamo-fascists’. I’m sure he prefers to live in a one-sided world where one forgets that extremist people who kill others because of opposing views and people who burn churches, mosques and schools, should be all put on the ‘return-to-sender-please’-pile.
