Archive for March, 2007

Switch!

Monday, March 26th, 2007

It looks more and more like I am making the switch to Ubuntu. There are still some annoyances, but the bigger ones I have managed to take care of. Have to admit though, every time I start a program I haven’t used until then, a surprise awaits me. Sometimes (GAIM), a pleasant surprise, sometimes (Skype) a not so pleasant one… but in that case, the problem surfaced in Windows as well, so I resolved it there (much simpler, more power to me there), and then bravely switched back and solved it in Ubuntu as well.

Yep, kind of happy about that… still, two things that bug me right now (your input on it more than welcome):

  • Screen resolution
    Somehow, on my desktop, the first X greeter that starts has a completely wrong resolution. ctrl-alt-backspace resolves this, and then another greeter is started. This one works, but the screen is shifted to the left. To fix it, I set the monitor to shift the image to the right (so rightshift on the monitor increases from 50 (centered) to 82).
    Not a big issue if I don’t switch, but stupid and unnecessary I think
  • Fonts — especially in Firefox, for example when browsing to nu.nl.
    You ever noticed the difference between the look of nu.nl in FF on windows and on Ubuntu / linux? Somehow the first block of items is completely ugly bold in ubuntu, and the fonts look… well, “off”.

Any assistance more than appreciated — and should I find more gripes, I’ll put them somewhere on the blog as well!
Last games played: Wario Ware, Inc; Wario Ware: Touched

Surprise visit!

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Imagine this: you wake up in the morning (slowly), rouse yourself (without coffee! Ha!), get your laundry going, change into your sportsgear and just before heading out, your best friend calls. “Hi, you doing anything this afternoon?”
– “Not really, no”
“Okay, then we’re dropping by!”

How’s that for a cool start to your day??

Of course, I start running into phone trouble the moment I am relying on the damned thing :( — i.e. when expecting visitors. Apparently the damn sim-placeholder isn’t tight enough, and thus the sims can shift around a bit. What is worse, is that they do (shift around that is) — something the phone does not appreciate. Right now I am testing patch 0.01-beta (in normal words: a piece of paper stuck behind the simcard in order to fill up the holes). Since I am not 100% convinced this is the origin of the problem, and definitely less than 100% convinced that the current patch is sufficient remedy should this suspected leeway indeed be the origins of the crashes, expect me to be hard to reach phone-wise for the coming time.

That rant sort of interfered with me explaining how cool it is to have visitors. Well, trust me on this, it is :)
Last game played: Wario Ware: MicroGame$

Gotta share this one

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Good thing Sasa didn’t join today — although I think he might’ve appreciated today’s meal, maybe even as much as I did :)

Anyway, apple-cinnamon-couscous-cashew nuts turns out nicely :) Next experiment will repeat yesterday’s meal in a slightly different fashion (of course different), but I am already looking forward to whatever Jen & me will be cooking on Wednesday next week!

Now gaming: WarioWare, Polarium, Phoenix Wright

Mostly about dining

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

But first one other thing: I finally managed to set up Ubuntu (more precisely: grub) such, that it defaults to Windows. Yihaa, I no longer get accidentally confronted by a broken desktop anymore!

Yes, we can start a nice flamewar on linux vs windows. Thing is: the moment I get into Ubuntu, it A) starts annoying me (with things being not how they should be) and B) distracts me from work (because I try to address these annoyances, and this is never fixed in a few minutes — even though the problem looks like it should be).

Anyway: dining! Saturday the SaToSS gang met up at the Auchan for some shopping. Somewhere along the line, the idea for a dinner on Sunday popped up, so suddenly we were shopping for a dinner together. Back at the office yes, still Saturday we ran into Sjouke still Saturday and invited him to dinner too. Then it sort of became non-earlish, but finally me and Sasa went back home again.

Incidentally, Sasa had borrowed my bike, which is hilarious, trust me! :) Well anyway, since it was late and we both could use something like food, we ended up having pasta (Italian style) at Sasa’s. Kind of funny, since the dinner of Sunday would be there as well.

For that one, planned without Sjouke’s advice, we had thought of doing something with couscous and some veggies. Since we all contributed some ideas, our ingredients were a mixed mesh without any real direction. And that’s why you invite the Big Boss to dinner ;-) Sjouke’s supervision proved superior, and with some extra items available in Sasa’s kitchen, we constructed a delicious couscous stew. For dessert we had yoghurt with some strawberries (strawberries are affordable, so we have an abundance of them ;-).

Well, the next day I realised that since we hadn’t executed the original plan for dessert on Sunday (fruit salad), Sasa had some ingredients which I could use. To thank Sasa for keeping the cottage cheese in the fridge, I made him a dinner — filled paprika, vegetarian style. Thanks to Sasa bringing cheese (quite essential ingredient, and planned), the dish turned out wonderful. Definitely worth having again.

Well, to top it off, after Saturday’s post-shop-closing-time invitation to Sjouke to join the Sunday dinner, Sjouke felt it would be nice to also invite us over once. In discussing what this would be, we finally settled for showcasing famous Dutch cuisine: hutspot!! :) Of course, Sjouke style dining and allowing me some free reign means appetizers (mozzerella, tomato and mint) and dessert (flensjes with icecream, whipped cream, strawberries told you we had plenty of ‘m and chocolate sauce). The hutspot was ok, of course, despite some improvising (no meshing kitchen tool). The unavoidable sausage turned out wonderful, and the appetizer was delicious. The dessert topped it all off — as if we weren’t full, having icecream, whipped cream (shaken, not from a can), pancakes and strawberries to ensure lack of hunger. For the next week probably ;-)

Anyway, it might seem to be all about dinner, but in reality it’s about having lots of nice evenings with my colleagues. The talks are much harder to capture in the blog, and some of it should be moderated, but we’re having much fun together :)

Now gaming: Wario Ware, Phoenix Wright

M3 works, part 2!

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

So, I finally got around to a bit of gaming again. The M3 works wonders, and I’ve got the most recent photo’s on it — unfortunately, the ordering of directories still sucks :S. There’s a different shell on the DS, which does work. Unfortunately, the integrated Moonshell does not like the JPG’s from my digicam (update: Moonshell v1.71 does, but the photos have a too high resolution :( So you can see, at max zoom-out, a tenth of the picture…). I can fire up the DS with the SD card from my cam in there, but the pics will not be displayed correctly :S

On the other hand: I upgraded the firmware, and the functionality of the M3 increased with leaps and bounds! Stuff that never worked before, is now working smoothly. Nice. Stijn told me about the M3 simply, but I think that given the operational nature of my current gadgetry, I can skip it for now :)

Now GBA’ing: Zelda Minish Cap, Wario Ware. Now DS’ing: just playing around with M3 :). Not cubing atm

Sleep is overrated!

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Trust me, sleep is overrated. Who needs more than 5 hours of sleep anyway? See, the thing is, the holiday sort of hit sleeping time a bit. Going to lux has done little to improve this — we have the SaToSS compositionality workshop here, with all sorts of cool people to meet. Hence: long days, longer evenings. Well, luckily I found one area where I could save time. You guessed it!

Well, to be honest, I don’t get a chance that often to see Cas nowadays, so sleeping is the lesser alternative then anyway. It was very nice to see him (he attended the comp. workshop) and hear about Zurich, Yen Ha and their impending happiness (i.e. how Yen’s pregnancy is going). Glad to hear that things are going more smoothly!

Anyway, as you can see from the timestamp on this post, it’s time to go to sleep and work some more tomorrow. I should actually make my fruity salady lunch, then again, there are more things I should actually do :)

Now: sleeping!

NS sucks

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Would you believe this? Monday I traveled from Barca to Eindhoven, flying from Girona airport. Yesterday (Tuesday), I traveled from Eindhoven to Amsterdam (CWI), and then to my Sis’s birthday in Nijmegen. Guess which one took longer…

It’s incredible, but the NS really manages to take more time transporting me from Ehv to A’dam than RyanAir takes to transport me from Girona Airport to Ehv Airport. Heck, I could even include the bustime to get home and be there faster. How’s that for sad?? And, to top it all off, of course I ran into more delays on the way to Nijmegen.

Speaking of Barca: I will in another post :)

PS: Happy birthday Ileana!
Now GBAing: Wario Ware: Microgame$

Bye bye pc, hello laptop

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

BCF came to collect my old desktop pc today. I’ve spend a bit of time cleaning it (roughly, there’s still stuff on there but nothing (I hope) that I mind sharing) over the weekend and yesterday, but now it is really gone. Kind of weird, since I’ve been using that pc for my Master Thesis and then onwards. (yes, one does gather quite a bit of bits in such a lengthy period, so cleaning is non-trivial.)
On top of that, they took the nice, fancy screen I had (boohoo, was to be expected though), and I got myself a nice, clean keyboard. The layout of it is hilarious – a dutch keyboard layout?? :) I’m almost convinced that Dell is giving away this crap for free. Luckily enough I can type without looking at the keyboard, because otherwise this would be horrendously confusing. Well, one thing’s clear: if I need to program, I’m getting myself a different keyboard.

Facts on Luxembourg (city & grand duchy)

Sunday, March 4th, 2007

Since I keep running into this question myself, I’ve looked for some facts on the web on Luxembourg. I’ve used 2 sources: wiki pedia (nice, but how reliable / accurate is it?) and the cia (reliable – if they choose not to lie to you ;-). Well anyway, some details:

  • The duchy has about 475,000 inhabitans (2006, CIA), 465,000 in 2005 (wiki)
  • The city has a bit more than 75,000 residents (2005, Pedia); the metropolitan area (which includes Hesperange, Sandweiler, Strassen and Walferdange) is comprised of about 105,000 people (Pedia)
  • Male/female ration in the country is skewed, more males than females below 65 (CIA)
  • It is the 82nd smalles country in the world (CIA)
  • It is a rainy city (Pedia)

Bro’s visit

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

So, my brother accompanied me to Luxembourg last weekend. We went on Saturday (after his work) and could luckily enough tag along with Pieter – going by car is so much more pleasant :). Since we went after Rogier finished working, we still arrived quite late, so we had to bring something to eat. Well, after careful consideration that became bottles filled with pancake mix :) :)

It had been a long time since I had eaten pancakes, but after last week, I have definitely had my fill for the near future. Both Rogier and me brought a PET-bottle (i.e. 1.5 liter)… of course we didn’t finish that in one go, but still.

Rogier’s visit prompted me to check out Luxembourg a bit more, and guess what: there is actually life there! Saturday evening, after the pancakes, we biked to the area where Sasa, Baptiste, Pieter and me spotted people going out the previous time. As luck would have it, we found a nice place, ran into a couple of Flemish girls and had a nice evening. (Btw, later heard from Ann that her headache had lasted quite some time… poor girl).

Sunday, after breakfast with pancakes, we went to the Mudam museum. It is a museum for modern art, but the reason Rogier wanted to go there was to view the architecture – it was designed by the same architect as the glass pyramid at the Louvre, apparently. Well, the architecture was captivating – a lot more than the exposition, in my opinion.

In the evening we started to watch Pulp Fiction (note to Mark: it is the first movie I have watched on the DVD player since moving to Lux! :), when suddenly there was a knock on the door. Sjouke & family were there, so we stopped the movie and before you know it, we were bongoing all the way :) We’ve sort of bongoed every evening this week actually :) After Tessa & Daniel had to go to bed, Rogier & me finished Pulp Fiction. Weird movie, I had seen some scenes, but most was new to me.

Monday we slept late, then I went in for a quick 30 minutes of working (which became a slow 1 hr of working…) to finally finish the BFR. Well, we did! Woohoo! Another issue out of the way. On top of that I was also partly arranging the SaToSS kickoff event (which would be on Wednesday), so it wa a good thing to be in at work – for a short while at least. After that, we went to the Auchan and I spent a small fortune ;-) Well, there were some things that would be convenient in the house: speakers for my laptop, a quickloader for rechargeable batteries, table cloths, pillows, pillow covering, an extra set of wrenches, some hooks to be able to hang stuff, etc. This turned out magnificantly: That night, Rogier could actually use a pillow, we dined from a table with table cloths, and I now have a “coathanger” (some hooks in the wall, but it works wonders).

Tuesday Rogier was going to .nl again, so we got up a bit early, and walked to the city centre, checked stores there, walked onwards to the station and checked the stores there, got him his ticket, waved him off and then, on the way back, found a store which I think he would’ve appreciated (a combination of expo, blokker and xenos, with prices like in a dump store). Aah well, can’t win ’em all.