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CapsLock away!

Friday, January 11th, 2008

I have been forced to work once more under Windows. The experience is less than pleasant — most noticably the low resolution coupled with the lack of virtual desktops leading to desktop real estate being at an all-time high.

Anyway, under my trusty old Ubuntu I had configured CapsLock to double as a control key. It’s quite easy there. In Windows it is not so easy, but doable. There’s plenty of tips on the web (e.g. anticapslock.com). After a bit of Googling and browsing the following made the magic happen:

fire up regedit
open the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout”
Right-click and add a new binary value named “Scancode Map”
Give it following binary value:

00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00
02 00 00 00
1D 00 3A 00
00 00 00 00

Explanation: the numbers are in little endian, so swap every block of two. 00 02 is the number of changes; 001D is the (left) ctrl key, and 003A is the CapsLock key. The rest is header and footer stuff.

It works, I am a happy camper now! Now onwards, to copy&paste more stuff from LaTeX to Word :S
Edit: Do reboot your machine afterwards for the settings to take effect. This is, after all, windows :)

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The prequel (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

“One word sums up the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is `to be prepared'”

After waking early on monday morning, I quickly got myself to working. Not my favourite thing in the morning, of course, but there was this presentation hanging over my head, and there was not sufficient material yet in the presentation. One of the first things is of course checking mail… hey look, a mail from the symposium organisers. Turns out that I do have enough material already! Woohoo! :) Okay, time to hop in the train to Enschede, meet the people there and finish the slides there.

Getting to work in Enschede took some time (even though it is handled neatly, explaining my laptop that it is handled neatly was step 2… eventually, I get connected, work on the slides, meet the people (it’s nice to see them all again), work a bit more and then it’s time to visit Ileana & Stefan’s new apartment. It has changed incredibly since the last time, Stefan & Ileana worked quite hard to get this far it seems. Ayse comes over for dinner too, and we have a nice, traditional Romanian dinner (cabbage+sour cream stuff). Good, I like to be prepared for the wedding :) And, if these tastes are anything to go by, Romanian food will be OK!

Next morning, some more work on the slides, and then they feel finished. Of course they aren’t, but that’s okay, the seminar doesn’t start until two o’clock, so let it settle a bit, have lunch, go through it once more and then: done! There’s actually some new stuff in there compared to the WISSec presentation. All of that is fairly new, so I am not feeling too confident yet. Luckily, there’s enough time to prepare…

And then surprise, surprise, turns out the seminar starts at one instead of two. UH-OH!!! A hurried lunch and a couple of quick glances at the slides later, it’s almost time! Most of the audience are familiar to me, so that’s a relief… waiting to be dissolved by the last-minute entrance of a couple of new folks. :) Good thing I thrive on this sort of thing, I guess. At least, perhaps if I think that I’ll fall for that.

Talk went okay-ish. Somehow felt it could/should have been better, but it wasn’t a substantial miss apparently either. Aah well, something to think about for a next time. Later that evening, I help Ayse out cooking a nice dinner for Stefan & Ileana. We have some fun, and too soon it’s time to go get a train. In the train, I find that I am exhausted. So instead of going to Eindhoven, I get off in Nijmegen and meet up with my sister for a change. It had been a long time, so this is actually really nice.

The next morning I quickly go to work in Eindhoven, to prepare the final things for the trip (doublecheck the Romanian cheat sheet with Simona to see if there are some other words that might come in handy). Home: pack, early to bed, and prepare to get going!

Posted in cooking, friends, work | Comments Off on The prequel (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)

woohoo(rk)!!

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

Working on a journal publication, the camera-ready version for an LNCS paper, a presentation in Twente, a book chapter and since today a presentation in Passau. Life is cool! W

Ow yeah, I have to work, no time for blogging. Le oops! ;-)

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Away from the ‘Bourg

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

So, at WISSec I met a couple of old friends and made some new ones. I was invited to visit Twente and perhaps give a talk there. That prospect sounded quite nice, since there are quite a number of people living in Enschede that I hadn’t seen in ages. However, first things first: I was off to Zurich for the weekend, meeting up with some friends (and having a much-needed conversation in the train with a friend).

So, as if me going to Zurich and planning to go to Twente wasn’t enough, Mihai and Raluca stopped by on their way moving back from Zurich to Twente :) We had a nice weekend here, talked quite a bit about stuff (well, WISSec was still fresh in memory) and then they were already leaving. Since they were going to shop at the Auchan first, I offered to show them the way. Well, I do know where the Auchan is… but getting there by car is slightly less easy than I thought. We first missed the parking garage entry — well, not really a problem. We then came close to the roundabout. Okay, so turn around and redo from start. Since we were turning around, we took the leftmost lane… which put us below the roundabout, on the highway to Trier. Le oops!

Well, after a fun drive through Luxembourg, we arrived back at the Auchan, and this time we did manage to enter the parking garage :)

After that, I started preparing for VOTE-ID — joechei, a paper got accepted somewhere! On Thursday, I’d be presenting the paper in Bochum (Germany), and right now it was Monday and the presentation was far from ready…

Fastforward, VOTE-ID was very nice, and meeting the familiar and not-yet-familiar faces was once again the highlight of the event (for me at least). Berry Schoenmakers gave a keynote address on “the evoting crisis” (inspired by “the software crisis”); there were interesting talks and more interesting people (as said). I’ve been back in Luxembourg now for 3 days and still need to digest most of what happened.

Then again, that is also partially due to the overload of other things happening. I found out that Bochum was really close to Enschede (closer than either Eindhoven or Luxembourg), so I went to visit Enschede. That weekend was wonderful, so no time to let VOTE-ID sink in slowly. And then, back here in Bourg, the intermediate report for my BFR grant was due, so that was the primary focus until now. Having finished those things, I just need to update my Bochum paper & slides, start preparing this talk I will be giving in Twente (I promised, so now I have to go there again (;-)), wrap up some WISSec stuff, and then I can actually get back to checking what happened there!

Pfffft, hope that’ll happen around next week.
Recent noteworthiness: Happy Birthday Aleksander!

Posted in friends, luxembourg, travelling, work | Comments Off on Away from the ‘Bourg

WISSec 2007

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

WISSec 2007 was a resounding succes! I spent some time organising this workshop, but all in all it went of very nicely. We had over 40 participants, many nice talks, perfect weather, food was good, company better, all in all: perfect!

Thursday we started off relatively late. Some people came from far-off Netherlands, and thus were a bit late. Lunch was in a local Italian restaurant (we tried booking the University, but they were too busy). Talks were okay, and in the evening, before dinner, there were nice tours — the organised one by Deike and the personal one by me, where I got to chat with some friends who visited. Woohoo!

Dinner was nice, and after dinner I said goodbye for the night and enjoyed a final cup of tea with Jing in “Hotel Hugo” — her hotel reservation didn’t happen, but there was a communication problem so Jing didn’t know about it.

Friday was even more fun, just a bit of apprehension about my talk and about leaving quickly after the things to get to Zurich that day. Well, managed all of it, with style but not much more than that. It was a very nice workshop, it was good to meet all the people and I am looking forward to next year’s meeting!

Posted in luxembourg, work | Comments Off on WISSec 2007

Weeking work

Friday, September 7th, 2007

So, what’s been happening here:

I reconfirmed my status as “The Hooded Man” (shot twice again all in yellow)
Sasa hit all yellow once, thus bringing me only a short 3 lots away from the elusive prize!!
The WISSec workshop is gaining momentum and seems to be going swell
The absurd style of Tim Burton strengthens the absurd story of Roald Dahl (yes, I watched Charly and the Chocolate Factory once again)
I’ve been using the blender to make soups. All the kitchen stuff the Hoopje people got me for my 28th birthday is finally being used — and thanks again! It’s all excellent equipment (I love the knives! They hate me, but I love them despite their semi-lethal attempts at injuring me)
And you can easily vary endlessly with soups :) Tomato soup works brilliantly with ginger, but also with red wine (caution: not both at the same time! :)
Running twice a week might actually work out. So far so good at least.
Got a paper (provisionally) accepted, so that seems nice.

Greetz from ‘Bourg!

Posted in cooking, luxembourg, work | Comments Off on Weeking work

Uni.lu events

Monday, May 7th, 2007

A lot of stuff has happened since my last update. In this post, a focus on the official side of things — the rest is pending pictures :)

As you may know, the UniversitÃƒÂ© du Luxembourg is a very young university. As happens with young and dynamic universities, stuff gets done, and then the results are celebrated. First up was the opening of my apartment building (which gives me a good reason to show off once again what a nice building it is!). The Minister of Education dropped by (to put it nicely, he and his secretary of statecame to my house just to shake my hand ;-). There were some talks in Luxembourgian. Turns out that I can follow Luxembourgian only if I sort of know what they are saying — so I understood all the pleasantries, but all the extrapolations for future projects went by. Then we had a tour of the building, and it had quite a bit of surprises for me! We even have an altar hidden in there, and a lecture hall. And of course a nice place for a drink, where they had the drinks.

The next uni.lu event was the first doctorate defense within the CSC research unit (roughly speaking: the CS subgroup of the department of technical sciences here). It was the second or third defense of the university, so there is no set way of how to arrange this. Of course, I am used to those defenses I have seen in the Netherlands, which are quite formal. So you can imagine that a much more informal approach was already quite strange to me. That coupled with the attempt to find a form for such an event really ment that my previous expectations of how a defense is conducted, and what happened here, are quite far apart :) Still, good to see how these things are evolving here.

Third uni.lu event was the opening of our office building, here on an old picture. There was some planning in advance, since a lot of journalists would be invited and this was the ideal chance for CSC to showcase itself to the Luxembourgian world. So, the various subparts of the CSC all prepared nice presentations and what-have-you-not. We participated, I patched up an old poster and took it from .nl with me to hang up. The event was kicked off by official talks by the dean of the department, who was followed by the rector. The rector had quite a long speech in French, talking about short-term work contracts and how it is better for academics to move on. He then wanted to recapture that in English, but somehow missed the mark at times. There were some funny remarks made, but the overall message was quite clear: fixed-term contracts will not be extended — if it is up to the rector. And it seems to be. This has of course been playing a bit longer, and there are varying views on the subject.
After the speeches, there was a round of drinks and a sighting of the building, after which we got back to work. The poster presentation was planned as the final part of the program, and of course the invitees were by then overflowing with information and looking to get home, so that part was skipped.

The final event was the first inaugural speech within CSC, by Leon van der Torre. He gave a nice overview of his planned research. The form was once again different from what I was used to, but by now I was slowly adjusting and expecting differences :)

Enough for now, more updates later!

Recent gaming: acquired a GBA Micro2Micro connection cable, trying it out with Sasa! Mario Kart Advance is the winner until now.
Recent cooking: couscous variants :)

Posted in luxembourg, work | Comments Off on Uni.lu events

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

Posted in software, work | Comments Off on Switch!

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

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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!

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Hugo Jonker