I’ve been running Linux since 1993 (kernel 0.99-pl13 if I remember correctly) on most of my workstations and servers. I’ve had my idiot-zealot phase (“nothing but Linux is good enough”), but fortunately have left that far behind me. Now I like teasing idiot-zealots with comments about that shareware Loonix thing.

So for the past few laptops, I’ve been running Windows XP, mostly because this Just Works(tm) on modern laptop hardware. Linux really didn’t cut it when compared to XP: yes, you could install it without too much trouble, but getting 100% out of your laptop (suspend/resume, good power management, full support for modern GPUs, etc) is a different story.

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On Friday, Eric and I went to Rotterdam for some easter-Friday shopping. Somehow, I ended up purchasing this beautiful machine:

It eats coffee beans and produces the most beautiful espressos, all at the press of a button. The cappuccinos are also nothing to sneeze it… in fact, that little silver ball thingy on the right mixes steam and milk (that it sucks up through its flexible tube) to create perfect foam with user-adjustable consistency.

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My good friend, mentor and fellow alternative universe explorer (teehee) Dave bought me some of this whilst visiting two weeks ago:

This is beautiful stuff. Unfortunately, it’s very addictive, and I’ve almost exhausted my supply.

We had a truly smashing time by the way… we should definitely do more of those.

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Kids.

You’re at work having a productive day, and you’re just about to start with a meeting that you really need to take part in. At that point you get a phone call that your cute-as-a-button daughter has regurgitated three days worth of lunch at the day-care and that you have to come pick her up pronto. What do you do?

You flip that huge red Infinite-Patience(tm) switch, smile, and go pick her up. After changing the N-th diarrhoea nappy (diarrhea diaper to the more American-inclined readers) that has been filled to bursting with nose-destroying evilness but has fortunately only started leaking, and having to catch yet more regurgitated dinner in your hands, you’re still smiling. When this happens again in a few weeks time, you just reach for that big red switch again.

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My webhoster secretly disabled catch-all email addresses for email. Coincidentally, this is how I was forwarding everything to my gmail account, which means that all mail to my domain bounced for at least a few days. If you left a comment on this blog, or somehow have the feeling that I’m ignoring you, please resend your mail.

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I just discovered that videos can now be uploaded to a Picasa2 web album and are shown in a flash-plugin, a la YouTube and Google Video. I’m probably the last kid on the block to know this, but maybe there are blocks where the kids are even more retarded, hence this post.

See you around.

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Because I could, I went and exported all posts and comments from my old Livejournal blog (it was still alive!) with ljarchive and imported everything into this here shiny new weblog. If you’re into that type of thing, you can now go back as far as May 2001, or read this post about the BRAND SPANKING NEW Mozilla 0.9.9 release (by a very naive idealist open source standards zealot), or even this gem lamenting the supernatural amounts of rain in NL!

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vtkFlRenderWindowInteractor is a VTK class (actually FLTK too, but it helps to think of it as VTK) that enables VTK to render to and interact with your FLTK application. It is based on code by David Pont (the code was then called FlvtkInteractorWindow) which in its turn was partly based on the wxVTK code by David D. Marshall and Brian Todd. I reworked the code extensively to be simpler, more robust and bug-free(tm). It should always be available from http://cpbotha.net/vtkFlRenderWindowInteractor.html .

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See this Boing Boing post.

This is too primitive for words. Get a grip people. Religion is passé, getting all up in arms about your particular backwater religious flavour or icon is just barbaric.

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Four days ahead of time, the ADSL has been activated at my new house. I’ve been migrated to a different network operator (I used to be on the Tiscali network, now on BBNed) and the line has been “opened”. Distance to the exchange seems to have quite an effect, I’m connected at 5472 kbps downstream and 928 kbps upstream. According to http://pcdb.bbned.nl/, I’m 1.6km from the exchange. A rough calculation on my downstream attenuation of 46db, yields an estimated distance of 3.3km. I’ll sort this out later to make sure that it’s just the distance working me over, and not some misconfiguration somewhere.

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