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. ;)

	Saturday, April 30 Autostrada A1 #Posted by Dreams on 17:24 Arrivals, please take the left lane... Rented a cute little car: a Citroen C2. It's got airco, though. Be damned if I can find a decent radio station in Italy, though. :( Trying to find our way around, Petra's driving, and avoid the damn Italian cars. Psych! 24 Celius, BTW.
	Thunderbirds are go! #Posted by Dreams on 13:58 All gates ready for take-off! Roger, roger. Over, over. What's our vector, Victor? LOL
	Vacation #Posted by Dreams on 13:14 Here we are at gate C11. Plane is nowhere in sight so we might be here for a little while longer. Anyway, Tuscany here we come!
	Friday, April 29 Dutch plans for iPod tax could kill MP3 industry #Posted by Dreams on 14:02 There is money in everything. The Dutch once again prove this. In a final attempt to kill mp3 trading and P2P networks, my government wants to add taxes to mp3 players. If you can't beat them, tax them! Each 1 GB of storage in mp3 players will cost €3.28. So an average 40GB player like an iPod will cost an extra €130 just for the storage. But how are they going to cope with 500 GB PC harddisks? Or the Petabyte disk expected on the market in 2007? We'll see... sigh :puke:
	Abbaye de Villiers #Posted by Dreams on 13:49 During our stay in Waterloo, we visited an ancient, huge and sadly ruined Abbeye in the village of Villiers-La-Ville, Belgium. This huge complex is impressive, even with all of its splendor long gone. The entire domain of the abbeye used to be more than 10,000 hectares and stretched from Antwerp to Namen. At its peak it housed 400 monks as well guests. You have to see it to believe it!
	Show me the money #Posted by Dreams on 10:40 Computable is carrying a story of SURFdiensten and RealOpen IT... so now that the word is out: show me the money!
	Wednesday, April 27 Photos TINE Convention 2005 #Posted by Dreams on 17:47 My boss, Paul, took some pictures during the TINE Convention 2005. I put them online. Enjoy! ;)
	Debian -- The Universal Operating System #Posted by Dreams on 09:44 OK, it took me 2 months but I knew the day would come sooner or later. I now have dumped SuSE at work for everything except desktops and test & play servers (inside VMware) and I'm running Debian -- The Universal Operating System on my barebone, basic, stable, mission-critical server! B) Finally. Now why wouldn't they listen to me sooner... sigh Apache, Postfix, DNS... rock solid!
	Monday, April 25 Bastard Tetris: Tetris Hates You #Posted by Dreams on 14:07 (From Slashdot) Listen up all you puzzle-loving folks: this one's for you. Some sadist out there has put together a Linux version of Tetris that uses a special algorithm to decide just which tetrad piece you need the least and then sends it in: Tetris Hates You
	What a great weekend #Posted by Dreams on 11:34 Well, Petra's birthday weekend went fine. The cocktail party on Friday was great! About 30 people came over and I prepared Strawberry Marguarita's for everybody. Hmmm, fresh strawberries too! Food and drinks enough and 8 people stayed over night. Saturday morning, breakfast for everyone. My sister, Rob and Elise came over too. Isa is about due to deliver her second child, so she opted for the after-party instead of the cocktails. Wise choice! After breakfast, Petra and I set out to go to Waterloo to the Grand Hotel Waterloo. She had no clue where we were going. I had booked a surprise get-away through Weekend Desk. Good site, nice deals and good hotels and so on. We left at 2pm, drove to Waterloo, got there by 5pm, had a bath, took a nap, got dressed and enjoyed an outstanding dinner in the restaurant. The hotel is an old, restored sugarfactory and it is beautifully restored! Really well done! The restaurant, la Sucrerie, was booked too and that is a good sign. Had a perfect meal, good wine and went to bed exhausted, still from Friday's party. Slept in on Sunday morning, got to the breakfast buffet just in time and checked out around 11am. Before heading home we decided to stop by an ancient Abbey ruine in Villet Sur Ville. Huuuge ruines! It hosted 400 monks in the height of its day on 10,000 hectares land! Petra made pictures there for her next assignments, so hopefully they turn out. It was a nice sunny day too. We enjoyed strolling around the grounds, stopping here and there, etc. No fuss, no muss, no stress. Very relaxing! Around 2pm we stopped for lunch and went on our way back to Rotterdam. There we picked up Arjen en Isabelle, got changed and drove to Zaandam for an S.O.S. Sunday in the Hemkade. DJ Jochen, DJ Cor Fijneman and others. :bounce: Great night! Great party! Great way to end the weekend! At 10pm, back home; dropped Arjen and Isa off in Rotterdam and by 11:30pm we were in bed too!
	Friday, April 22 happy birthday! #Posted by Dreams on 15:10 Today, my sweetie celebrates her birthday! Happy Birthday, sweetie! She's entering ther realm of Flirty Thirty today, but I can't tell you her real age, of course. You do the math! :)
	Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana #Posted by Dreams on 15:02 Finally it has been proven: Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana. There is no drug worse for you than E-mail and the Internet. These two combined will break down your brain quicker and more severe than any other chemical drug available (so far - our technicians are working at this defeat frantically!). Read the story for details... :)
	Thursday, April 21 Convention... #Posted by Dreams on 08:12 Yawn! Three days at a convention will kill you. Tired? Sure, but after two days of talking it seems i'm running out of words. I've said it all. Even jokes and punch lines get repeated! I've seen all the booth babes already, twice. But the good news is that it's the last day. Two more presentations on open source, linux and novell. One day of luring, pleading and tempting them with old technology in a new package. LOL wonder if they noticed...
	Monday, April 18 WebMail Extention for Thunderbird #Posted by Dreams on 14:17 We all have webmail accounts, like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Usually these can't be POPed using your favorite mail reader, so you need to login constantly to heck your mail or configure forwards istead. If that is too cumbersome or costly, you can install free tools like YahooPOPs or FreePOPs. They create little programs that parse the webmail's HTML pages and store them in a POP server on your local machine. You configure your mail reader to retrieve from localhost (127.0.0.1) instead of a noral POP server. However, you can also install webmail extension for Thunderbird. It does the same as YahooPOPs and FreePOPs but from within Thunderbird! Cool! Excellent! B)
	Linux and Open Source Screenshots #Posted by Dreams on 14:04 If you are wondering how geeky Linux desktops look these days and why on earth anyone would still use a terminal when you can also use Windows... ;) check out Linux and Open Source Screenshots, where users are posting complete installation screenshots, screenshots of their desktops and more Linux distos than you can imagine. This way, you can check out what your favorite Linux disto will look liek before installing it or downloading the LiveCD. :) Coool! B) Fact: Linux desktop look very professional and completely usable
	Adobe buys Macromedia #Posted by Dreams on 10:31 Just in... Adobe to acquire Macromedia... $3.4 billion in stock. Wonder what will happen with Flash and Dreamweaver and PDF and so on...
	Friday, April 15 Take the Acid2 test #Posted by Dreams on 14:26 You like your current browser? You think it's safe? You believe it to be standard-compliant, or know that it's not? Want to be sure or have proof? Take the Acid2 test designed by WaSP to help in testing the most important and critical W3C standards to ensure that all browsers yield the same picture of the same content... Scary to know that this currently not the case.
	Hollywood Looks to BitTorrent for Distribution #Posted by Dreams on 12:25 Hollywood might themselves start seeding BitTorrent servers with movie releases, according to Slashdot. Vinton Cerf, who wrote the original TCP/IP protocol and is currently chairman of ICANN, said this week he had recently discussed BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers.
	Thursday, April 14 MIT invents computer that runs away #Posted by Dreams on 14:51 And now for something completely different: the computer that runs away from you. ROFL Clocky is a robotic alarm clock. "If you hit the snooze button, "Clocky" rolls away and hides. To make life doubly difficult, it will try and hide in a new place every day."
	Wednesday, April 13 Evolution Groupware for Windows #Posted by Dreams on 23:38 Evolution, the great open source Outlook killer, will soon be running in Windows too. And with native support for Novell Groupwise, MS Exchange and possibly OpenExchange, it'll be hard to miss! W00t! Talk about mix-'n-match!
	Nerd humor #Posted by Dreams on 14:13 (If you don't get this, don't worry) Why did the tachyon cross the road? Because it used to be on the other side! LOL
	PHP iCalendar #Posted by Dreams on 14:06 PHP iCal file parser for displaying iCal on a web server. PHP iCalendar is a php-based iCal file parser. Its based on v2.0 of the IETF spec. It displays iCal files in a nice logical, clean manner with day, week, month, and year navigation, printer view, RSS-enabled, and searchable. It supports 14 languages, is fully theme-able, and has complete timezone support.
	Thousands flee Sumatra volcano #Posted by Dreams on 12:34 Earthquake, tsunamis, hunger, devastation, looting and plain powerlessness to human nature are just a list of the things Indonesia is having to deal with... But wait! There's more: a Sumatra volcano Mount Talang is rumbling now. 25,000 people have already fled the island. Smoke has only gotten upto 1000 meters in the air, so it's nothing major yet. But vulcanologists are at defcon5!
	VIA makes Linux graphics core drivers open source code #Posted by Dreams on 10:40 The Register said that VIA made its Linux video drivers open source. It's probably an effort to encourage the use of Linux with its EPIA embedded x86 platform, but who cares. Good Linux drivers are hard to write and therefore hard to come by. VIA opened up drivers for its S3 Graphics UniChrome family (kernel 2.6), the S3 ProSavage DDR graphics controllers (kernel 2.4 and 2.6), as well as the Ethernet (network) controllers built into VT6107, VT8231, VT8233/A/C, VT8235 and VT8237 South Bridge chips (kernel 2.4 and 2.6). ATi has also released new Linux drivers and nVidia has been doing it for some time now.
	Tuesday, April 12 USB Disco Dance Floor #Posted by Dreams on 16:01 Some people deserve sheer genius status merely by the ideas they have, not to mention putting their money where their mouth is. MIT students have built a USB controlled LED operated Disco Dance Floor. Martin, fancy a little project for this years New Years Eve party?!? LOL ;) It features 1536 LEDs, almost 12 m², 4096 colors, 30 frames/sec and 20,000 soldering connections... :respect:
	Whasssup! #Posted by Dreams on 10:24 So what is up, anyway? What's everyone talking about? What's new? What's old? Check buzztracker and find out. They have tracked Google News for a year and charted where in the world something is up and what we are all talking about. For instance, the pope or New Years Eve. So it is an image of what news sources all over the world (and tracked by Google News) are talking about... Cool, huh?! I wonder who' tracking BuzzTracker...
	Digital Blasphemy #Posted by Dreams on 10:19 If you are tired of the damn green fields of Windows :yawn: and want something different then your kids or wife or friends on your desktop... check out Digital Blasphemy. This guy is amazing in creating artificial but gorgeous images well suited for desktops.
	Indonesia can't get a break #Posted by Dreams on 10:10 It seems like mother nature has it in for Indonsia or something, because Earthquakes just keep happening there. There is a constant rumble going through the tectonic plates there. Also, probably as a reaction to all these shifts, Eastwards of this plate, near Hawaii, vulcanos are countering all the shifts of the plates.
	Monday, April 11 must have: DownThemAll (dTa) #Posted by Dreams on 12:45 Don't you hate Firefox built-in download manager? It sucks... it can't resume and other things. It's just barebone, that's all. Enter downthemall... Download manager heaven... 'nuf said!
	300 Free Truetype Fonts You Should Have #Posted by Dreams on 12:43 I found this great collection of 300 tested and tried Essential Fonts For Designers. Really cool and great looking under Windows and Linux alike...
	Adobe Photoshop CS2 #Posted by Dreams on 11:48 And speaking of Photoshop, Adobe has released Photoshop CS2 and DPreview has the news... "one-click red-eye reduction", that sounds like it is at least 5 years overdue... ;)
	Canon EOS 350D in-depth review #Posted by Dreams on 11:46 DPReview also has the in-depth review of the Canon EOS 350D. Cool camera! 8Mpx, better CMOS, better DIGIC II DSP image processor, E-TTL II for better flash pictures, faster start-up speed, lighter (wussies!), But I'd prefer the 20D, of course... duuh!
	Google Founders Cut Salaries to $1 #Posted by Dreams on 11:16 Working at Google will surely make you millions, right? Wrong, the Google Founders Cut Salaries to $1. Hehe. Of course, there will be a mix of tax reasons and philantropic measures... but who cares. I still think it's kinda cool if you can financially live on a sallary of $1... :D (y)
	The GIMPshop #Posted by Dreams on 10:11 Read over at Moosy that there is an extension that makes the GIMP look just like Photoshop! So now there is no more excuse not to try the GIMP instead of Photosoup... The creator of GimpShop even uses a Mac..., so even hardcore Macaholic designers know a good when they see it. ;)
	Sunday, April 10 USB Drivers for DOS #Posted by Dreams on 19:48 You may never need it, but if you need it, you need it B A D! DOS USB Drivers... I just had a msg from a friend who wanted to get her USB printer connected from DOS, because she uses really old and arcane bookkeeping software from Grote Beer... I'll ge over there soon to try and get it too work. If anyone has pointers, please...
	Matis #Posted by Dreams on 19:36 My good friend Madou and his wife Tijen have become parents of a cute baby boy Matis. At almost the same time, my old-time friend BJ and his wife Freeke have also become proud parents of Marinus.
	Gorgeous girlfriend #Posted by Dreams on 16:42 Petra had to improve on her self-portrait for her photography master class. In the proces of doing so, she ended up making a gorgeous photo of herself instead. :) And the beauty of it is that I pushed the button for this one and told her how to position herself for best effect... hmmm, I like the result I must say!
	The Whole-House Machine #Posted by Dreams on 15:00 Coool, computers and robots building houses... People have been trying to make a robot that builds houses because it has been the same procedure for over 20,000 years and mroe than 400,000 builders get injured each year in the US alone. NASA is also interested in the machine... it may one day help build humandwellings on the Moon!
	Sjoerdski #Posted by Dreams on 13:41 Finally, my good friend Sjoerdski has also gotten himself a blog. I'm anxious to see what he'll blog about. He usually contemplates things that never occur to me and then start to fascinate me too. :) So, Sjoerdkie (aka Hugbear), I'm looking forward to your blogging! (y)
	Friday, April 8 Luminocity - GNOME Live! #Posted by Dreams on 10:20 If you want to get Luminocity working on your desktop, check the Luminocity - GNOME wiki. It's based on the MetaCity Window Manager.
	Wobbly Windows #Posted by Dreams on 10:17 Speaking of nerd stuff... Using the Luminosity, an openGL-based Window Manager, you can add physical behavior to your windows, buttons, dialog boxes and other desktop resources. LOL! Check the videos! Of course, it works only under Linux and under GNOME and... you need to rebuild the xserver... Cooool! B) :nerd:
	Galactic Competitions #Posted by Dreams on 10:04 What do you for fun when you're working at NASA on long-lived satelite and solar probe missions? You come up with hilarious and utterly useless, yet mathematically and intellectually challenging and rewarding competition on predicting orbits of pieces of debris. LOL The team responsible for Temple-1, a mission where they slam a 370kg object into an astroid at 10km/s and see what happens ;), has created just such a competition... read on, it's nerd humor at its best! "Why do we do this? Because we can!" ROFL :D
	Blogging anonymously from/about work #Posted by Dreams on 09:01 EFF has a guide online about blogging. More and more people blog. Companies are also discovering blogging and using it seriously. But how do you blog about anything yet stay anonymous at the same time? As you blog about your life, you're bound to say things about work, colleagues, bosses, clients or worse...
	Wednesday, April 6 WEP can be cracked in 3 minutes #Posted by Dreams on 09:51 TomNetworking reports that at a recent ISSA meeting, FBI agents cracked a 128 bit WEP key in 3 minutes. So now is the time to switch to WPA or even WPA2! WEP and WPA are means to make wireless communication secure and are based on public/private encryption keys. Almost all WiFi routers support WEP, even though most have off by default. That's why most WiFi networks are public and unsecure. WEP only adds a small hurdle. WPA is much better, WPA even more so. However, people, families and sysops have to do more to get it working smoothly for everybody in the house or office. Also WPA2 is brand new and not widely supported. However, they're thinking of making it required to receive WiFi-compliancy stickers... ;)
	Tuesday, April 5 TrusttheDJ - Holland Clubbing! #Posted by Dreams on 09:15 TrusttheDJ has a nice little article about clubbing in Rotterdam. It names the scene in Rotterdam, great DJs and cool clubs to go to... pretty good!
	Great Canon cash-back promotion #Posted by Dreams on 09:11 Canon is having a huge cash-back promotion sale until the end of the year. Everyone how buys an EOS 20D or 350D receives vouchers and coupons with cash-back between £50-100 for accessories. Cool! Also valid in the Netherlands!
	Monday, April 4 Data soon stored in 3D array on your harddisk #Posted by Dreams on 14:45 Hitachi announced that data will soon be stored in a 3D fashion on your harddisk, as opposed to the current 2D way. Bits are just put onto your harddisk's surface platter one after the other, going around in circles, until they reach the outside of the physical disk. This may soon change. The resulting increase in storage space is huge. An iPod mini may easily hold 20GB and your ordinary 3.5" drive will contain a terabyte quite comfortably! Coool! B)
	Friday, April 1 Sony wants an 'iTunes for movies' #Posted by Dreams on 11:27 Just when I had given up all hope, it seems someone might just getting it after all... BBC reports that Sony wants an 'iTunes for movies'. Following the succes of iTunes in the realm of legal music downloads, Sony will puts it top 500 movies digitally online. We'll see.
	Novell's Race Against Time #Posted by Dreams on 10:29 Slashdot has a article about Novell's Race Against Time. It has placed its bets on Linux is scrambling to reorganize itself and move on after its historical bad decisions (WordPerfect) and bad management. I know it can make it, but it'll need a lot of help from good people. And with all the sheit that has been going on at Novell lately, I'm afraid that all the good ones have already left...