Dreams Unlimited©

Diary

archives

A list of recent thoughts, things I saw or things I spotted on the Net, things that excite me (Uuh, baby!) or upset me, stuff I hate or love or in any other way find worth the trouble of blogging right here for your entertainment or interest and my archive. ;)

	Wednesday, May 28 US Robotics: WLAN (aka WiFi) at 100 Mb/s #Posted by Dreams on 15:08 Heise News-Ticker: WLAN Summit: Funknetz mit Tempo 100 (Article in German) US Robotics is announcing WLAN aka WiFi at 100 Mbit per second! Now we're talking wireless! Until then, I'll stick to good ol' calbing. Besides, making your own cables gives you a kind of satisfaction that's hard to have to miss! B)
	Friday, May 23 Palm Downloads - Phone Drivers #Posted by Dreams on 11:17 I have been looking so long for this download... Finally found it by accident (of course, what else did you expect?). Palm has a nice (new?) page with organised downloads for all Palms neatly arranged for your convenience...
	Digitally Imported #Posted by Dreams on 08:39 Digitally Imported is a really REALLY good streaming radio broadcast station on the Net. It's mainly dance, house, trance and so on, but there are a few other music "stations" too... If you are in the mood for some music and sick and tired of the same mp3 on your server or local PC, tune into this excellent music service! Recommended!
	Tuesday, May 20 Ultimate Frisbee #Posted by Dreams on 22:53 Tonight I went with some people from the EPO to the TU Delft. They have a frisbee team, Force Elektro, that also plays Ultimate Frisbee and they organised a walk-in tournament for anyone interested. It was a lot of fun even though the weather played foul play with us. But fortunately it was dry during all the matches. But playing on wet grass without special shoes reeeaaally sucks... :) Let's get that straight. Despite our best efforts, we made 2nd place, but were very happy with it. :) We had a great time and learned a lot. It's always fun play with or against people you don't know because you don't know what to expect or whom to watch out for! ;) After 4 matches and a break, the regular guys played a little showdown game. That gave me a chance to take pictures...
	.:: A S T A ::. Grand Opening #Posted by Dreams on 12:35 ASTA, the great and formerly well-known club in Den Haag on het Spui, is once again opening its doors on May 28th with a special grand opening night! Seb Fontaine is playing, so it's garanteed to be a smash evening!!!
	Dictionary: recovery #Posted by Dreams on 08:40 Well, I'm all better. I guess my body just forced me to take a time-out by sleeping 30 hrs in two days! That felt better, then during the weekend, the final stage of my recovery did their work and I had a calm weekend to help it out as much as I could. ;)
	Friday, May 16 DooM III trailer!!! #Posted by Dreams on 12:06 Slashdot \| Doom III Trailer Debuts At E3 Yeah! I was waiting for this one!!! Woohoo! Download this 30MB trailer to see eye candy from the new shoot-m-up game...
	Slashdot \| E3 - Hands On Impressions - Capcom #Posted by Dreams on 12:01 Slashdot \| E3 - Hands On Impressions - Capcom Slashdot reports from E3, the biggest computer gaming conference in the world... :(
	Thursday, May 15 New virus around...! #Posted by Dreams on 12:01 Symantec has word on a new virus, or better, worm out there. It uses mIRC and possibly Kazaa to spread it self. If you use any of these, better check out the W32.HLLW.Fizzer@mm
	*There is* a god!... or is there?** #Posted by Dreams on 11:56 Ever had one of those moments where you're looking at something or something happened, and you are sure that there has to be a god because these wonderful things just couldn't happen purely by chance? Yeah, me too, but think again... At Brown University, they had an experiment where they started with the famous primordial soup (water, CO2, CH4 and NH3), applied heat and lightning and voila...! After only 1 week running, they were able to identify up to 8 amino acids necessary for life. This experiment is known as the 8c30.10 Miller-Urey Experiment. Go figure...
	Wednesday, May 14 Sick... it's sucks... #Posted by Dreams on 15:53 Everything hurts, all my ligaments are in pain, my skin feels burny and my joint are doig terrible. Is there a slight but local gravity increasethat I wasn't informed of? Or did I gain 50 kg overnight? Hope not! Nope, clothes still fit... Oh man, I feel terrible. I'm at work but I think I'll go home early today and just roll into bed, close everything up, unplug all non-essential appliances and take an aspirin... Anything that gets rid of this moaning, miserable feeling that I have. I have to blood, I have sirup; that's how I feel... Blah...
	Monday, May 12 Heise News-Ticker: LED flash for mobile phones with (MMS) cameras #Posted by Dreams on 14:21 Haha, this was waiting to happen... Osram Opto Semiconductors has developed LEDs that can be used as flash for small cameras. They have extremely fast charge times and are almost instantly ready for use and have low power usage. However, they will only light up up to 2 meters, maximum. But that should be fine for all the MMS cameras out there...
	Tiësto Solo in Arnhem #Posted by Dreams on 11:35 This weekend I went to the world's first ever solo live performance of a DJ in a football stadium! DJ Tiësto, currently without a doubt the best and most popular DJ in the world, gave a concert in the Gelredome in Arnhem, the Netherlands. 25000 fans packed in a stadium enjoyed wonderful performances of guests, artists, dancers and the DJ himself, of course. :bounce: It was amazing and my best party so far!!! :respect: Although you weren't allowed to take pictures, I manage to take some without a flash. My gallery has some wide-angle images of the party. ID&T has official party pics (of course) :(
	Saturday, May 10 Re-establish faith in mankind #Posted by Dreams on 14:17 Every once in a while, someone does something that just puts your faith back in mankind. Not everyone is a complete moron! The B.C. Cancer institute has filed a defensive patent application to ensure the information remains in the public domain. The lead scientist asked specifically for his name to NOT be on the application, as he feels that he made a discovery, not an invention!
	Most brilliant car ad EVER! #Posted by Dreams on 14:10 I'm sure you have heard of this one or see it, but just in case: Honda made an amazing and wonderful ad for their new Honda Accord station wagon. LOL :respect:
	SAT tests done different #Posted by Dreams on 13:33 Slashdot mentioned a guy who decided it was time to see how bad he could do on an SAT test. LOL Very long and detailed, but hilarious read!!!
	Friday, May 9 The Digital Life Lab at Caltech #Posted by Dreams on 14:30 Caltech has taken the original Life idea one step further... "Avida is an auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Digital or Artificial Life research. In lay terms, Avida is a digital world in which simple computer programs mutate and evolve. Avida allows us to study questions and perform experiments in evolutionalry dynamics and theoretical biology that are intractable in real biological system." Great reading and sooo interesting to see what shows in a few hunderd "millenia" when let to chance...
	John Conway's Game of Life (in Java) #Posted by Dreams on 14:27 I never grow tired of this one... Used to have a screensaver for Windows with this, which ate pixels depending on the nutrition value of RGB values of it. :) Watched it for hours, tweaking every color to get a good decent feeding pattern on my old 386DX25. W00t! John Conway's Game of Life (in Java)
	Wednesday, May 7 Palm OS 6... ETA 6 months... #Posted by Dreams on 15:20 Palm OS 6 will be ready this year... They say it's written from the ground up (always a good idea) and pays special attention to security and wireless access methods. I guess they mean Bluetooth and W-LAN aka WaveLAN aka WiFi. Makes sense! :) But the developers don't expect to see the first hardware implementations until early summer 2004.
	Blade PCs #Posted by Dreams on 14:25 This is one of those why-didnt-I-think-of-this first things! HP wants to change desktops into blades. A blade PC (BC anyone?) is a full PC on a small card that you stick into a special slot in a rack or cage especially adapted to Blade PCs. It's just like your nVidia video card, for instance, except it has a CPU, GPU, harddisk, network card, and so on, all on board. It's a full PC in a compact form. In an office for 50 people, the IT dept has a cage which houses the 50 Blade PCs (BCs) for all the users and all the users see is a connectivity station on/under/near their desks into which they plug their monitors, keyboards and mouses. USB would do fine here. The advantages are users still have their own PC but can't touch it nor mess with its hardware. The system administrators get centralized management, easy upgrade and replacement and relocating someone PCs becomes a matter of patching data cables slightly differently. :) It's a great concept and I'd love to have 2 or 3 of these at home too? Not just in the office... ClearCube already makes these BCs and now HP, Dell and the like are also thinking of making them...
	Tuesday, May 6 Now where did I put that bag of black holes...? #Posted by Dreams on 17:29 (From Slashdot) In England, scientists are looking for the missing parts of our universe...The search for the missing universe: `"about 90 per cent of the universe is missing. Analyse the movements of stars and you can work out how much matter is making them swirl around in galactic islands and how much makes galaxies cluster together as they do - in other words, you can work out how much mass makes the universe look the way it does. But measurements suggest that the universe is not what it appears."` "Honey? Have you seen my blue Quasar...?"
	nslookup www.moon.planet #Posted by Dreams on 17:17 Just when you thought you knew about most things that mean anything, someone leaves you cold in the dust, wondering where you have been this past week? NASA appearantly is building (or wants to) an Interplanetary Internet. Planets, moons, satelites, bases and so on will be able to get IP addresses and be a part of the Internet... Doh! Worldcom is in on it, it seems. Hmm, wonder what the ping of Mars would be? Maybe the aliens wanna play Quake or Unreal with me?! :)
	TouchGraph #Posted by Dreams on 14:04 Visual interface to search results in Google http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html (Req. Java 1.3 or higher)
	Sauna Soesterberg #Posted by Dreams on 00:09 Just got back from a cool, relaxed and just-hang-out-and-do-nothing day at the Sauna Soesterberg. Not so cool, actually, sauna is pretty hot. :) Yesterday was nice, warm and sunny. Today was grey and not so warm. So where better to go than the sauna? After looking over all kinds of saunas close by, I had to go to one in Soesterberg, because all the one's close had a special women-lony day on Mondays. Pff, go figure... Anyway. Soesterberg is very nice, huge and definitely recommened, if you are in the neighborhood. :)
	Monday, May 5 #Posted by Dreams on 00:18 Guess you already figured out that I didn't make it to the Keukenhof today. :( I went out with friends yesterday and went clubbing in Amsterdam. XL theme night re-opened in the iT, one of Amsterdam coolest and hippest clubs. I was pretty excited about it and it was a stayer! Ferry Corsten and Spider were... :bounce: Didn't get back until 3 am. And today was a beaauuuuuuutiful day over here. 70-75 degrees F (23 Celsius) and gorgeous skies. So instead I woke up late, put on Norah Jones DVD, had breakfast in the sun and read aaall the newspapers I could find. Didn't bring books or anything, just a magazine. That wouldn't do, so I brushed up on foreign affairs, local politics, science (as if I need to!) and culture (I did need that). Got a slight sunburn on my shoulder but nothing that won't be gone tomorrow. Felt good to just sit outside, read, eat, enjoy the sun and work some small things in my parents' garden...
	Sunday, May 4 X2 #Posted by Dreams on 23:57 Saw part two of X-men... this time it said that Marvel Comics had gotten involved in production. Well that seems to have been a great move, because this movie was awesome!!! Excellent! Really cool fx and a decent story line this time. It was also much longer, good 2 hrs. But I wasn't bored or anything. Kinda easy ending of course, but that was to be expected. SO X2 is a definite Recommened from me, especially if you like comics and/or great special fx. :)
	Saturday, May 3 Keukenhof #Posted by Dreams on 15:48 The Keukenhof is a huge Dutch flower park that shows hunderds of thousands (no kidding) blubs and other Spring flowers. It's gorgeous and I've never been there. :( This weekend, they say it'll be 70-75 degress (20 Celsius) and I don't have any particular plans. So I think I'll go and check it out. :) I am going home tomorrow anyway and it's kinda on my way. I like gardening, flowers, sunshine and gardens and this would be amazing to see...
	Getting a child... #Posted by Dreams on 15:25 My friend tena took some pictures of the newly born baby girl of a friend of hers. She managed to capture the essence of what it means to have a child of your own... Take a look, and see if you agree.
	Mister House #Posted by Dreams on 13:31 Ever wanted to automate things on your house but didn't know how...? Check out MisterHouse, an open-source home automation program. Written in Perl, it can fire events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 9x/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. It can talk, it can check your messages, control the lights, program your VCR, and what is best - it understands spoken commands. LOL!
	Libranet - Debian done right? #Posted by Dreams on 13:27 Slashdot writes: "Libranet is our implementation of Debian to which we have added our installer, up-to-date software e.g. KDE, Gnome, kernel, etc., and generally packaged GNU/Linux into a super smart fast and stable system. The installer has sophisticated hardware detection and setup with flexable installation of software packages. We keep hearing that the Linux Desktop is on the horizon and while the horizon never gets any closer Libranet is steadily making its way in that direction." Hmmm, think I'll try this because the normal stable releases are genenrally really old and conservative. That results in my (2 year old) GeForce2 not being recognized. Doh! Hate it when I can't get a desktop...
	Unreal 2 demo is out! #Posted by Dreams on 13:20 Just heard this... Unreal 2, the demo is out! Woohoo! Looks good, judging from the screenshots. I'll have to get the 153MB big demo soon, and test it. Although I don't think my humble Athlon@1300 and GF2 can really make it spin...
	Pffew #Posted by Dreams on 13:06 Well, I survived the Kaos party. PF's VIP tix were very cool. You feel kinda special walking by everyone else in line and just walk up to this 7 foot squared bouncer and humbly say: "Uhm, I'm sorry to bother you, but I think I'm on the guest list..." And then he steps aside! LOL Soo cool! :D Petra and I got in OK, she even was able to sell the regular tix we'd bought (just in case). Martin and Sjoerd had to stand in the regular line, sorry guys... :( But Petra had been able to borrow the Canon EOS D30 from a colleague! Woohoo! So I took her in with me. Felt really good to walk around there with a real DSLR. But... It's really hard to take good pics with that right away. And no... I'm not stupid and I know how to take pics. I learnt it all on a totally manual Ricoh KR5 Super, years ago. But the cameras nowadays think for you and that is fine under normal circumstances. But in a crowded, warm and humid, loud club, with tons of lights, flashes and worst of all: smoke... Forget using the camera's auto focus. It simply can't... it's terribly confused by flashes, can't see properly because of the dark and the lens gets fogged up once in a while. :( So I was having a rough time making good pictures. I quickly switched off the auto focus but that solves only part of the problem. Now you have to find the focus yourself. And manual lenses have these special parts inside the lens that let you see if it's in focus or not. Auto focus lenses do not have to luxury. :( Boohoo So I was back in the dark ages, literally, and down to trial and error, hoping that experience would teach me sooner rather than later... It did, but only after many, many trials. I'll get to the pics tomorrow because I left them at home. Anyway... what have we learned from this? First, get a good DSLR that can focus well in low-light conditions. Preferably get the (expensive) lenses that use ultrasound for focusing rather than infrared light. If that's too expensive, get lenses that show focus distances on the lens. And make sure you can focus the lens manually in low light conditions, i.e. the lenses should have a focus indicator built-in.