WHOOHOO! My Ph.D. thesis has been officially approved by my advisor and by my promotor. Now it just has to get through the 5 external examiners and then, if everything goes according to plan, I will be standing in that scary little room across the road in a few months trying not to get verbally ripped apart by the opposition. I really must remember to acquire a set of asbestos underwear for the occasion…
Secret bandwith increase
Oh joy! My internet provider has secretly doubled my bandwidth, leaving me with a healthy 4Mbit/s down and 1Mbit/s up. I couldn’t help noticing the 440 Kbyte/s as I was apt-get installing j2re on my little CentOS server.
New A64 server
I finally caved in and upgraded my sweet little Celeron 300A Linux server. Yesterday, after a brief planning phase, Paul and I jumped into his souped up Toyota Corolla and tore, Ronin-style, through the streets of Delft on our way to Informatique in Bergschenhoek. Wallets considerably lighter, we returned with several items of brand new hardware. My little Celeron server has now been upgraded into a somewhat less timid Athlon 64 2800+ Newcastle core (130nm) on an Asus K8V-X motherboard with 512 MB PC3200 DDR ram.
Lush, OCaml and more, part deux
In a previous blog entry, I did some extremely informal benchmarking with Lush, OCaml, Python and C. I’ve now added two new Python tests: one with Psyco, a JIT-like solution that takes almost no effort to add to existing code, and one with Pyrex, where one can code extension modules in a language that looks just like Python but has types. These modules are then translated to C and compiled into Python usable extension libaries.
Hitchhiker`s Guide to The Galaxy
Whatever you do today, make sure that at some stage it involves watching the third trailer of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy movie by going here. It truly does rock. I hope that the movie follows suit.
Ubuntu 5.04 preview on Stoeptegel-1
I needed a machine to install Oracle 10g on and although my 300MHz Celeron Ubuntu 4.10 server (with 192M of RAM) is just perfect as fileserver and mini linux playground, those specs just don’t cut it when a real man decides to slap Oracle around for a bit. Well, stoeptegel-1, my previous 3.7kg weighing 2GHz P4 Northwood (768M RAM) laptop seemed just perfect for the job. I cleared out a 12G partition and installed the brand spanking new Ubuntu 5.
Hyperlinked AVIs and PowerPoint 2003
In my new life as PowerPoint 2003 flunky, I experience many and exciting adventures! My latest adventure involved hyperlinking AVI movies (encoded with the MS-MPEG4 codec) to images in a PowerPoint presentation. Clicking on the hyperlinks would result in a “Media Player” dialog box popping up with the helpful message “There is no driver installed on your system”. After clicking OK, the movie would play perfectly in spite of the awful implications of having no driver installed on my system.
Blagg and WordPress
My infamous weblog aggregator relies on Bloxsom Blagg to do the grunt work. The WordPress blogs of some of my friends were generating feeds with a CDATA tag in the description field. Blagg let this tag get through into the aggregator post, resulting in these posts not showing any description body. Oh, the tragedy! The small change needed to fix this can be found here. Astute readers will see, in the lines of this patch, that Perl really does suck.
The Commonly Confused Words Test
I saw this on MJ’s blog, so I had to take the test. Without consulting any external resources whatsoever, my results were: “Advanced You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 72% Expert!” What’s even more flattering, is the following: “Compared to users who took the test and are and in your age group: 100% had lower Beginner scores. 100% had lower Intermediate scores. 100% had lower Advanced scores.
My GMAIL experiment comes to an end
Since August of last year, when I received a GMail invitation from Rudolph, I’ve been running all my mail through GMail. In other words, GMail was my primary interface to any and all email. It went swimmingly! This is a fantastic product: to my mind, it’s not so much the 1G storage, as it is the fact that you can search for and find emails in the blink of an eye and, quite importantly, the idea of dumping all processed emails into a great big container, called “All Mail” by GMail.