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. ;)

	Thursday, September 30 Siemens achieves 360 Mbps on mobile data transfer #Posted by Dreams on 14:01 "On a test system, videos and music as well as a Microsoft NetMeeting conference were transmitted in wireless mode at data rates of up to 360 megabits per second (Mbps). This speed is around one hundred times faster than the fastest DSL connection available today. To also achieve these peak data rates for larger coverage areas, Siemens is the first company in the world to test a combination of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and the so-called multi-hop technology, a new infrastructure concept. The system was already tested successfully in a field trial in the center of Munich."
	Griffin Technology: RadioSHARK #Posted by Dreams on 12:50 RadioSHARK is a USB device you connect to your to record live radio on demand. Like a tape recorder we all once had, but better. This goes to your hard drive as an AIFF music file. (Supported by dbPowerAmp, of course!) "The RadioSHARK can record any AM or FM radio broadcast in real time. You can also program it to record a scheduled show, or to ?pause? live radio so you can return right where you left off moments or even hours before."
	IBM Blue Gene/L tops super computer list #Posted by Dreams on 12:34 My first PC, a Gateway 386DX, achieved - after heavy BIOS tweaking - a MegaFLOP: one million Floating Point Operations per Second. Today's Pentium 4s and Athlon 64s easily get a GigaFLOP. But super computers or computer cluster go way beyond that! Recently, IBM Blue Gene/L super computer has broken the world record but a small margin and achieves just over 36000 GigaFLOPS! :shock: Current record holder, the Earth Simulator in Japan, got to 35860 GigaFLOPS... But the best part is that the Blue Gene is only partly completed, uses more processors but... consumes only 1/20 of the space that the Earth Simulator does. So space and power savings are a big plus!
	Wired News: SpaceShipOne Rolls Toward Victory #Posted by Dreams on 11:44 It's almost done... the first privately owned and built spaceship that makes a trip to a height of 100 km and repeats it within 2 weeks, wins the X-prize. Looks like SpaceShipOne will be the first! Damn! I love it when a plan comes together! ;)
	Wednesday, September 29 London #Posted by Dreams on 10:46 Petra and I spent the weekend in London. We visited my friend Jelte and his girlfriend Linda. It had been years since I saw him. We had a great weekend and even went kiting with him in Blackheath, on this huuge grass field that is located there. Awesome!
	Liam Kemp - This Wonderful Life #Posted by Dreams on 00:00 There is an animated short story: Liam Kemp - This Wonderful Life and it kinda continues where Final Fantasy left off. It features real life humans (AVI clip) that are completely 3D animated and created from the ground up. The animation tries to be a real as possible. And boy is she real! :shock: :drool: sigh Boys will be boys I guess!
	Tuesday, September 28 PADI Skydiver #Posted by Dreams on 23:55 PADI Skydiver is another great time waster, although not as good as Hit the Penguin or so... ;)
	Thursday, September 23 buzzzzzzzzzzzin' fly & Neighborhood #Posted by Dreams on 18:04 Going to London this weekend with Petra. I'm visiting my old friend Jelte there. He's been living out there for years now and it's been way too long since we met. While there, I can finally check out Ben Watt's club Neighborhood. He and Tracy used to form the band "Everything But the Girl". When they broke up, Ben started a record label buzzzin' fly, producing music and entered in the club scene. I'm kinda psyched coz I have all EBTG albums and am really curious about his club Neighborhood. :)
	Wednesday, September 22 SpamAssassin v3.0 released #Posted by Dreams on 16:36 SpamAssassin has released v3.0! This free, open source, enterprise-strength, anti-spam solution is even better now! SpamAssassin can be easily integrated with many mail systems out there. Commercial implementations also exist, if you'd rather buy something.
	Tuesday, September 21 palmOne's plans to release the Tungsten T5 and the Treo 650 #Posted by Dreams on 23:57 Palm will release two new handhelds this fall: the Tungsten T5 and the Treo 650. By accident, a GPS card for both appeared on a site but the models are still undisclosed... LOL
	Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, wireless: Digital Photography Review #Posted by Dreams on 17:18 A day not spent dreaming a little, is a day lost... Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, wireless: Digital Photography Review. Nuf said... :drool:
	Zombie networks #Posted by Dreams on 12:39 Read the story of Arjen's PC? Remember that he had a dialer trojan horse? Well, these dialers together with other dialers form what are called "Zombie networks". And they're dangerous because all the PCs in a particular network can be controlled at the push of a button to do anything the hacker wants. On one day, 75,000 PCs were "recruited" into Zombie Networks... "BBC NEWS: "Once created the networks of zombie PCs are used as anonymous relays for spam, to launch denial of service attacks on websites or simply to steal confidential information about a PC's owner."
	DJ Dazzle #Posted by Dreams on 12:29 A while ago I was in the XL for a great party. I heard DJ Dazzle there and loved it. Nice trancy, kinda hardtrance but in a pleasant mix. So I was excited to find these livesets by DJ Dazzle. Give it a try. They're 80 MB and up, so be gentle with bandwidth and download only one at a time...
	S.M.A.R.T. Failure Predicted #Posted by Dreams on 11:55 Last weekend, I tried to fix my friend Arjen's PC... again! He's been having terrible bad luck with viruses, trojan horses, dialers, etc. If a hacker has made it, he's had it! This latest one was the downloader.JH dialer. It made his PC barely usable and seemed to trick the (Panda) anti-virus software, but that is just a hunch. Anyway, not only did he have the virus, he couldn't remove it. And, to make matters worse, his E: drive with tons of mp3 and movies, played dead the whole time. Lots of timeouts and non-deterministic behavior. And I hate it when that happens... So I finally got XP reinstalled on the Windows partition (thank god I did that when I installed his PC!) but the E: drive was still flaky. Upon boot it notified us with the warning: "SMART failure predicted on hard drive WD1600###. Warning! Immediately back up drive! Failure imminent". So I called it a night and took his PC home with me to fix. Today, I searched the net for S.M.A.R.T. and found that these warning must be taken very seriously! If you get this warning, do not reboot! Makes backups immediately! They're not kidding! Read the Seagate article on the technology. But you should avoid rebooting if at all possible! Make backups first, better quick and dirty than nothing at all! When the data is safe, expect the drive to be lost. Run the diagnostics tool that belongs to your drive. Get the serial number from your drive and search Google for it. You'll end up on the manufacturer's website and then try to find a diagnostics tool. Download it. Run it. Turns out, Arjen's WD1600JB is toast! It failed the quick test after only 10 seconds... So now I'm backing up his documents on a DVD and bringing the PC to the store for a replacement drive... We'll see. Lessons learned: if the PC warns you to backup your data, do so immediately!
	Monday, September 20 Wired News: Microsoft Shares More Source Code #Posted by Dreams on 11:53 Wired reports that Microsoft Shares More Source Code. Starting Monday, 60 organizations (mainly government and international) will have the option of checking the lastest source code "of its ubiquitous Office software, including the Outlook e-mail program, Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheet application." The move makes perfect sense as an increasing number of governments and companies are looking at switching to "open source" alternatives such as Linux or OpenOffice.
	Poort van Leyden #Posted by Dreams on 10:20 On a gorgeous, sunny and warm, late summer afternoon, Petra and I leisurely strolled through Leiden while looking for objects for her lastest photography assignment, when we bumped into de Poort van Leyden brasserie. A trendy food and drinks place near the old city gate to Leiden. I desparately needed some coffee, so we sat down and enjoyed the scenery. Very nice place! Highly recommended for quiet, cozy dinners for two on the waterside, cool parties and celebrations and an occasional Friday night funky party! :) Go check it out!
	Sunday, September 19 A visual history of spam (and virus) email #Posted by Dreams on 14:10 Some guy at Microsoft collected all the spam and viruses he received on his work account since the day he started. That makes for interesting analyses, funny patterns and useful training sets for your home grown Bayesian spam filter. :) Cool! B)
	gaim hits v1.0! #Posted by Dreams on 13:59 Gaim, a popular, open source, multi-protocol Instant Messaging (IM) client hits v1.0 after years of development! That means that like Trillian and Miranda, you don't need to install Y!, AIM and MSN alongside each other to talk to all your friends. With a multi-protocol IM client, you use your accounts on each platform to connect to each system. It saves lots of desktop space, tons of RAM and you don't need to remember different keys, commands, etc. for each IM client. One client does all. "Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks."
	Friday, September 17 Sony begins mass producing OLED displays #Posted by Dreams on 17:57 Sony begins mass producing OLED displays. They are brighter than regular LEDs, require less power and can be folded. Sony will use it in their PDA the Clié PEG-VZ90. Cool B) "Measuring 3.8 in. diagonally, the display provides a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels, and shows 262,144 colors. Brightness is 150 candelas per square meter, and viewing angle is 180 degrees."
	Skype - Free Internet telephony that just works #Posted by Dreams on 17:32 Skype has an OS X version out for Macs (aka Apple Computers) and also lifts the version number to 1.0.0.29... FYI
	PVRs: MythTV vs Microsoft Media Center #Posted by Dreams on 13:02 I've been thinking what to do with my 400+ CDs. I love the booklets, the colorful covers & lyrics and looking at some disks after a while brings back a whole slew of memories, sights, sounds and smells. Really. But... storing 400 CDs is a problem. You need a big bookcase and they're always ugly. I have 4 wall-mountable racks in beautiful aluminum brush, but they take up the whole wall. I could loose the booklets and store them in bag-like folders but you run into the problem that you forget in which folder a particular CD is. And it's always in the last one!!! So I've come to the conclusion that I need a barebone PC. In a roughly shoebox-sized PC with plenty of trimmings, I can store all my CDs as mp3 (Ogg Vorbis, for quality vs. size considerations) encoded files. CDDB will provide author names, track titles and more and a suitable player will let me search through the library in a jiffy. SP/DIF output from on-board AC'97 5.1 audio cards will feed directly into my Home Theater set-up for superior sights and sounds. Easy as pie! But while at it, why not use the barebone for it's computing power too?!? I could easily put in a TV receiver, add PVR and DVD playback software and watch any DVD, TV show or movie when I like, even if I forget to record my favorites... That's why AnandTech's review of MythTV vs Microsoft's Media Center is very very welcome!
	Peper IT - Scherpe Internetoplossingen en advies voor het MKB #Posted by Dreams on 12:44 I've updated my professional site, Peper IT again, slightly. Links back to main and better descriptions of my services and added value.
	Windows crashes 8% of the time #Posted by Dreams on 11:36 A French study reports that Windows, on average, crashes 8% of the sessions. Acadys and Microsoft collected data from 1.3 million workstations over a period of one month from 7 countries (France, Germany, Switserland, Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy). Employees sat, on average, 2 hrs and 15 minutes behind their PCs. More than 25% of the time behind these desks was spent on Internet or one form of messaging (Email, IM, etc.). 17% was spent on office applications, with wordprocessing being 15%. The weird thing was that 8% of all sessions of sitting behind their PC resulted in crashes (i.e. reboot was needed). But these figures vary among the versions of Windows being used: Windows 2000 has a failure rate of 4%, and NT4 is at 3%, whereas Windows XP is close to 12%... Go figure!
	MIT Leg Laboratory #Posted by Dreams on 11:26 Building robots is easy. The BBC has a whole series of shows with robots wreaking havoc on each other. Building humanoid robots is also a lot easier these days, as Honda has proven. But making robots that have legs is still tricky... Or so I thought! The MIT Leg Laboratory has dozens of working, walking, running, jumping and dancing ;) robots around. Jeeez, was I malinformed or what?!?!
	IOI - International Olympiad in Informatics #Posted by Dreams on 11:03 IOI - International Olympiad in Informatics 2004 are being held in Greece this year. The event has been going on since 1989! :shock: And, according to Slashdot "...the 304 programmers from 80 countries will be competing in 7 marathon programming sessions to determine the world's fastest coder."
	Wednesday, September 15 Azureus : Java BitTorrent Client #Posted by Dreams on 01:32 Azureus : Java BitTorrent Client with a kick! Java-based, auto-updating, very configurable, very usable, make your own torrent files and share them, auto-reget, auto-resume... it slices, it dices... The works! :respect:
	Tuesday, September 14 Grouper: P2P for friends networks #Posted by Dreams on 15:08 Grouper is the latest in P2P music sharing. Instead of sharing with everyone who's connected, you share only with your group of friends. For instance, your friends in Orkut or Friendster. And you stream them your music. Kinda cool and interesting. Of course, streams can be easily stored... ;)
	The lomographic Society International #Posted by Dreams on 13:21 The lomographic Society International has redesigned their website and webstore. It's still an extremely provoking website. I mean, it makes me want to get active, dive in there and make lomo's, scan, upload, post, do something. Anything! :) Weird, huh?! Just browse some of the LomoHomes and you'll see what I mean, maybe...
	Monday, September 13 Sony Cyber-shot DSC-M1 #Posted by Dreams on 22:41 DPReview reports on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-M1. Very cool but weird camera. 5 Mpx and 3x optical zoom, but MPEG-4 movie encoding! Cool B)
	Sunday, September 12 Melkweg, sailing in Loosdrecht & Robosail #Posted by Dreams on 20:43 This weekend was exhausting... On Friday evening, Petra and I had a day off we went to de Zaanse Schans near Zaandam. It's a classical area of the Netherlands with windmills, polders and cute little houses from that area (all replicas). Photos will follow... That evening, we went to visit Sjoerd in Amsterdam, had dinner together and us guys went to Earth in de Melkweg, an alternative club near the Leidseplein. Music was excellent and I had a chance to listen to Lemon8 live, of whom I'd just bought a CD. Cool! By chance, we also ran into Rob and Suzanne, as well as Martijn, Robert and friends. So it was a great evening... except that we were bushed. Called it a night early (3am). Saturday, I woke up at 8am, brought Petra her home keys (she'd forgotten her own) and went to Loosdrecht were I went sailing with ENIAC, my alumni club. After a day in and out of boats, we listened to a presention by Robosail. They try to use high-tech IT help to be better solo sailors... Very very cool!
	Saturday, September 11 64th Wedding Anniversary #Posted by Dreams on 13:46 Today is the 64th wedding anniversary of my grand parents... :shock: They were married on September 11th, 1940. However, they've known each even longer than that! Can you imagine that?! I can't... :respect: Happy anniversary opa en oma! (K) :hug:
	Friday, September 10 TV View - the Dutch online TV Guide #Posted by Dreams on 12:59 Finally! I was waiting for this: TV View, a Dutch TV Guide that lists all the channels, times and shows that are playing Dutch cable TV. Even Pay TV is included, so you now what hacking your smartcard will get you. ;) Now I can get started with a PVR and recording what I want, when I want. ;) Narmaraktuk, are you reading this?! :D
	Thursday, September 9 Gizmodo : Archos Gmini 400 (P)Reviewed #Posted by Dreams on 15:32 Martin pointed me at this one: Archos Gmini 400 (P)Reviewed and it seems to be a killer gadget indeed. :drool: wow But before you buy, you might want to wait for the 500 that coming out... Cool B)
	DJmag's Top 100 DJs #Posted by Dreams on 10:22 The time has come again to cast your votes for DJmag's Top 100 DJs: "Every year, dance music lovers from around the world choose which DJs they rate worthy of a ranking amongst the elite. Only 100 names from the thousands of jocks out there will make the grade, and the choice is entirely yours." This year, I'm putting DJ GT in there. He deserves it as I have all his mp3 mixes! As does Miss Nine, cute as hell and plays just as good. :)
	Tuesday, September 7 WatchMouse - free website monitoring #Posted by Dreams on 14:51 Ever wanted to have a service that would check your webserver periodically and let you know if bad things happen? Well, you can with WatchMouse website monitoring. There is a free version that works fine for small and simple sites, but also a heavy duty (paid) version that checks up to 10 servers or protocols every 5 minutes and let's you know by ICQ, SMS and/or Email if anything goes wrong. You can even get a whole escalation list, ending up at the senior system manager's beeper when all hell breaks loose! :) Super! B) And best of all, it's built and run by a friend and old colleague of mine! :respect:
	Feestagenda.com #Posted by Dreams on 12:05 I've long had the idea to run a simple site that just collects dates and venues of parties. Any parties. Anywhere (in the Netherlands). Don't know why I didn't do it, but now I'm glad to see there already is a site like that: Feestagenda.com! FeestAgenda lists dates, locations, admission fees and venues of parties in the Netherlands. B) Coool. Just what the doctor ordered. And you can also add any party that they're missing... :devil: let's see if I can find some...
	Sunday, September 5 Oh, my, god! #Posted by Dreams on 01:27 This seems to become the greatest party ever!!! Woohoo! Amazing! The music is tantalizing and the women even more. The men are proud and strong but the weather is simply unbelievable. Still 20-some degrees, at least, and already past midnight. Wow! But best of it all, is my sweetie is here with me and we're having a ball! (K) (L)
	Saturday, September 4 Littlesins: Sins on a Beach #Posted by Dreams on 11:14 Tonight will a great one. Petra and I are going to another LittleSins party. This party is a home game, because it's in Kijkduin, only a 15 min bike ride from my house. :) What will make this a great party is that somehow the weather has turned!!! After days of rain storms, thunderstorms and high winds, it's now sundrenched, hot (>25 degrees), gorgeous, clear blue skies, almost no wind and it feels like a hot summer's day on Ibiza! So Petra and I will go to the beach early, chill a bit and then go party from 16:00 'til 04:00... Woohoo! So coool to be alive!
	Friday, September 3 Notary fees #Posted by Dreams on 14:00 Petra and I just bought a house! Woohoo! W00t! Unreal! :D We were even able to get a good deal on it. That's good because there is a lot of renovating to do! Ceilings have been glued over with Tempax tiles, water pipes are still partly lead (which is highly toxic!) and there's old wall2wall carpeting which will have to come out! It was built in the 20s or 30s, so there is a chance that we'll find a beautiful hardwooden floor underneath. If so, we'll probably sand it down and varnish it. Sooo cool it that works out. :) So now Petra'll arrange all details and I start to plan and arrange contracters.. Pfff, so much to do, so little time! ;) First we'll have to get a notary office to sign the deal.
	Generation Trance #Posted by Dreams on 12:50 Wow! Just checked DJ GT's website again and whatdayaknow!?!? He's had a redesign! Cool stuff. Pretty nice and simple (but still not XHTML). He's even got a forum for his fans... ;) Only sad thing is now all downloads are bittorrent links. That saves huge bandwidth but it's just slow. :( Oh well, good things come to those who wait! ;)
	Illustrations of all kinds of virusses and diseases #Posted by Dreams on 11:23 I was looking for a nice image of a computer virus, but instead I found the Russell Knightley Mead image library of medical and scientific stock pictures. Excellent stuff! Wow! They have illustrations of cancer cells, SARS and HIV virus, hepatitis, smallpox, anthrax, the infamous influenza but also ebola virusses as well as bacteria cells and some astronomy images of pulsars, quasars and the like. The images seem alsmost rendered and you can even buy a poster of one or all images! Sooo cool! B)
	Thursday, September 2 Legally Blonde (2001) #Posted by Dreams on 21:31 "Smell this! What's that? That's her resumé! ...Smells good!" ROFL Legally Blonde (2001) is a great movie. If you're having a bad day, nothign works out right no matter how hard you try and the weather sucks too, get this movie, make some tea or pour yourself a drink and sit and chill! Trust me! :)
	Windows Media Player 10 Released #Posted by Dreams on 19:20 "Windows Media Player 10 gives you more music and more choices, and for the first time makes it possible to sync high-quality music, video, and photos to the latest portable devices." Download it now! LOL Yeah right. Just use Media Player Classic together with K-lite Codec Pack
	Rio Carbon: 5GB iPod Mini Fighter #Posted by Dreams on 19:13 New iPod killer: Rio Carbon. Same price, 5GB, longer battery life... cool B) Read the full specs and judge for yourself.
	Wednesday, September 1 Buying your own home: The World Of Private Islands #Posted by Dreams on 13:58 Petra (and I) made a first offer on our new house in Den Haag today! Yesterday, she closed an oral agreement with Dirk, a friend of mine from the EPO, for him to buy Petra's current house in Leiden. Needless to say, we're pretty excited and franticly trying to decide which is the best house, kitchen, fireplace, bath, ceiling insulation, paint colors, floor covers and so on and so forth. Sigh You seem to go directly from solving one problem into another and the supply is endless... But the goal is ending up with a home of your own and a pretty picture to dream about. Speaking of dreaming, after we buy the house, our next goal is owning your own island in the Pacific! LOL :D They don't call me Dreams for nothing!!! ;)
	Treating the Common Cold: General Principles #Posted by Dreams on 13:45 sniff snotter cough I still have a cold, although it seems to come and go. So I'll take it easy for a few days. Easier, I mean. ;) Meanwhile, read this website on Treating the Common Cold to learn what you can (not) do about it. Excellent! Petra has been assimilated already, you're next! :devil: