Nominees for the Losers of the Century

I’m trying to decide between these two nominees for the award of “Losers of the Century” (play dramatic Oscar theme here): On the one hand we have Mensa, a society for people with IQs in the top 2% of the population (*getting nauseous*) and on the other hand we have the International High IQ Society, in this case for people in the top 5% of the population. This society claims to foster “intellectual thinking”. Snigger.

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Vis2005 day 1

Whooohoooo! We’re1 here at the IEEE Visualization 2005 conference in the Minneapolis Hilton.

It being Sunday, we’re nursing our 7-hour jet lag and relaxing with a light tutorial, General Purpose Computing on GPUs. The team presenting this tutorial are some of the heavy-weights in the field and so far it’s quite interesting.

During the next few days, I’ll try and post an update or two. Rubbing shoulders with the Visualisation world’s Who’s Who obviously takes precedence over abusing the conference WLAN to blog like a nerd.

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SORBS sucks

I don’t have the time to explain to you how much SORBS sucks and how I wish that their servers and their whole organisation would just disappear from the face of the internet, so I’ll point you at some other reports:

One of the GMail MTAs (qmail.gmail.com) has been listed in the SORBS database (due to one jackass sending a mail to a SORBS spamtrap address) and now I haven’t been able to send mail to a number of my friends and family. Many GMail users will be terribly inconvenienced by this. If I want to have the IP delisted, I’m supposed to pay SORBS $50. That’s extortion!

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Getting the FRIKKING euro key working on a Dvorak keyboard layout in Ubuntu 5.04

I’ve lost at least 5 hours of my life to the frikking euro key on my Microsoft Natural (old-style) keyboard. It seems that Gnome 2.10 on Ubuntu 5.04, otherwise a great combination, enjoys torturing its Dvorak keyboard layout users with the euro-symbol on the “5” key. It simply doesn’t work, no matter what you try.

After sacrificing the prerequisite 5 hours to the Linux gods of Ultimate Non-Usability, I came up with the following solution. Make the following change to your /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/dvorak file:

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My make-over

So, as some of you might know I had a sort of make-over on monday morning, september 12, 2005. Here are some before and after photos: Before and after.

The first photo shows all the wonderful people that showed up to watch me defend my work and the esteemed gentlemen (in fancy garb) who opposed me. The second photo was taken right after I received that red thingy. The red thingy means that you may now call me Doctor Charl if that sort of thing takes your fancy.

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