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A short summary:
- trip there: uneventful with stopovers in Houffalize and Altstad in .ch.
- caravan: Monday morning model with non-functional power system, unclosable door, panels that were falling off and a front wheel that keeps dropping down when driving rendering the whole system dangerously unstable.
- camping: (jesolo international) great!
- weather: okish, a bit of rain now and again but hot enough to enjoy the sea and pool
- health: nearly broken tow from playing too much in aqualandia, some insect bites
- plans: visit Venice again, make more pictures.
Future plans:
- don't rent from http://www.caravans-deblock.be/ again
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ok I cheated and did this at work... sue me.
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So yesterday I had to 'sit' at the elections. In the end I was the 'second guy' who double checks if you are on the voters lists, marks you and gives you the voting card.
In our district we vote electronically. We have a bunch of ancient PC's with light-pens and you insert the card, select the person you want to vote, confirm and then you get the card back. Then you leave the booth and insert the card into the urn.
Which then checks if you indeed voted (voting is compulsory, if you don't want to you have to select 'blanco') and that the card is readable.
Most of of other people were more or less willing to do the job so we had fun and interesting discussions. At one point the head mentioned that the paper trail (voting list, double entry of presence, stamping of cards etc) would be better done electronically. I obviously protested and was joined by a guy who does safety coordinator at the railroads. We both agreed that a copious amount of paper is the only good way forward unless you have serious equipment (multiple WORM installations, the whole HIPA/FDI dance).
The most popular votes was the owner of the local ice cream saloon who brought ice for everyone, thanks 'Glacé Joseph'!
All in all a nice time, and later on I was very happy to learn that most of the ~ 800 people I gave to cards did not vote for the censored VB anymore.Current Mood:  content |
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In the last few weeks I needed to write a short utility at $WORK. I decided to use my trusted Common Lisp. Turned out that my old utility still would be ok, but 'upstream' had changed from CSV files to 'json' files.
A short google query, downloading the two libraries that exists to parse these files and within a few minutes I could read and parse the new fileformat.
Don't tell me CL doesn't have libraries...
ObDebian: yes I still need to update cl-irc and package said jason library... it's somewhere in my long todo list.
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( Read more... )
Todo: unpack and cleanup all the stuff still.
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| » Star Trek rebooted (no spoilers) |
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Yesterday I went to see Star Trek and I must say I really enjoyed it. It was funny, exciting and very much in the spirit of TOS, minus the 60's atmosphere. One of the best movies I've seen so far.
May. 20th, 2009 @ 05:27 am
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| » a nice surpise |
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We were looking at Disney Land Paris for a day trip. However as our son has severe food allergies we were shocked to find that you cannot bring food into DLP.
Until ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zoutke by good fortune found food allergy information for Disney Land Paris (Dutch only I fear).
In short they do cater for allergic people, so instead of going a day we'll probably go for 2 days and stay in a hotel. The opportunity to actually eat in a restaurant with $CHILD is too attractive...
May. 15th, 2009 @ 07:42 am
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| » Physics Joke |
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From a friend who is now a professor:
A student has to give a talk about the general relativity theory. (In English)
He starts the talk with "I'm going to discuss Genital Relativity", instant reaction from the smart girlfriend in the audience: "yeah honey, blame it on Lorentz contraction".
Strangely enough none of my non-physics friends seem to get the joke, from nwhyte I expect he also gets it :-)
Apr. 23rd, 2009 @ 05:37 am
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| » another first |
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Yesterday I was reading The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotom when I started to feel a bit nauseous. So I turned to watch a little of the TV that was on to distract me.
The next thing I remember was feeling very nauseous and zoutke asking what happened. In short I fainted. You can see when you SO studied first aid when she starts asking questions like "is blood coming out of your ears" or "were you sitting on the chair or standing on it".
Oh well, the bad influence of the internet again...
[edited to fix markup]
Apr. 5th, 2009 @ 02:32 pm
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| » @ fosdem but also not really |
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This year I managed to go to fosdem every day, even at the beer event. Not that I attended many talks: I was quite busy getting the network to work. We got wireless in almost all locations in the end. Setting up and fixing the problems took most of Saturday. On Sunday we added the final 'experimental' room via a wireless bridge link across the square, with the beam over the heads of the people in the queue for Belgian fries.
In the end it all worked and we had only a few configuration and many cable problems. I must say it was more for to 'work' at fosdem then to just be there. May thanks to Jerome Paquay who actually arranged to lend the equipment from our employer (Cisco) and to configure it. Thanks for AY for ... well being AY.
Next year n-mode? serious uplinks?
Feb. 8th, 2009 @ 03:05 pm
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| » KDE 4.2 Xserver 7.4~5 and I'm feeling good |
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I installed the 4.2 KDE from experimental and ... wow. Nicer. Faster. Less display corruption. All in all good.
shame about the crash when I unplug my external display
I can't wait for the 'testing' release :-)
Congratualtions to the KDE and debian-KDE people!
Jan. 27th, 2009 @ 10:11 pm
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| » Weekend redux |
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Last weekend was mainly shopping on Saturday and on Sunday 'Fietsen op rollen', cycling on rollers which wikipedia tells me is called goldsprint in English. The event was fun but chaotic.
Then we went to an indoor playing area which was also chaotic and fun.
Little or no hacking recently :-(.
Jan. 26th, 2009 @ 08:44 am
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| » 23042 |
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for the non technies, that's my CCIE number. 3 weeks of working and now it's over!. let the partying begin!
Dec. 18th, 2008 @ 08:04 pm
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| » a truely remarcable thing |
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this happened a few days ago in Belgium. At a certain moment I was thinking that I'm in the USA, but that would be too offensive to my American friends, because not even their media are that stupid.
A well known pharmaceutical company (Omega Pharma) released a "GSM radiation protection chip" that is classical snake-oil: it works as by magic with QM, you just need to stick it on the GSM and ,amazingly for a pharma company, there are no serious studies to prove that it actually works. There is as with all pseudo science products a lot of nice looking pictures, a lot of complex words and a VIP (for small values of V and of I) that is promoting it.
The difference between this and the other voodoo stuff is that it is sold by the pharmacists!
What should we take away from this? Three things: don't trust medicines made by omega pharma and if you have stock in that company then sell, sell, sell! Now!. Oh and that even 'serious' journalists will just repeat whatever junk is being said to them.
More info in English here and on several facebook 'that stuff is snake-oil' groups...
Dec. 11th, 2008 @ 01:03 pm
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| » deleting a contact |
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Today I had to delete a contact from my addressbook and the program asks "Are you certain that you want to delete this contact?".
Now I am pretty certain: I've seen the urn, the grief stricken husband, the mourning friends and family and the small children she leaves behind. However I most certainly do not want to do this.
Dec. 9th, 2008 @ 07:24 am
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| » an essential extension for firefox for 'real men' |
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http://kuix.de/sslhazard/sslhazard.php
Yes, I browse to billions of self-signed https sites every day so I needed this...
Oct. 28th, 2008 @ 04:56 pm
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| » Whoos Whoos |
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For the last few months I've been running the latest git versions of xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd on my $WORK laptop with a Mobility Radeon X1300.
And actually I like them more then fglrx: they crash less and I actually have xrandr support so giving presentations and using the second screen no longer involves reloads of X.
A remaining problem was that they would sig11 when I enable DRI. Yesterday I went investigating and found out that the ati driver was crashing in the line:
Bool RADEONDRIGetVersion(ScrnInfoPtr pScrn)
{
...
/* Low level DRM open */
fd = drmOpen(RADEON_DRIVER_NAME, busId);
After giving some message that it cannot open /dev/dri/card0. Some research showed that this was because I forgot to load the kernel module. /me hits table.
modprobe radeon and DRI works. Obviously it doesn't do 3D because the mesa library is too old. Installing mesa 7.2 from experimental and I see:
$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
And all the whoos effects... well ... whoos.
Now off to Ana's blog to find out how I can get KDE 4.1 in unstable....
Oct. 19th, 2008 @ 06:57 pm
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| » Vista assymmetical speed problems |
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My wife has a laptop running Vista because she wanted to try out the operating system before having to decide on using it at work.
I called her various names because of it, but that didn't help :-).
So we have this setup with an SMC wireless router/AP talking to a Cisco 837 router that does the internet part. Upstairs we have a 'server' that is connected via Powerline IP-over-power, downstairs we have the Dreambox that is connected via a normal Cat5 connection.
In the last few days my wife complained that it was very slow to download media from Frost. Working at TAC having a network problem at home is almost a personal offence :-) so I decide to take a look and I find using iperf the following speeds:
frost (debian) --cat5--> sharrow (debian): 35 Mbit/sec
frost (debian) ---WL-cat5-> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---WL-cat5-> frost (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) --cat5---> frost (debian): 35 Mbit/sec
frost (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 0.2 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 12 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---cat5-SMC-WL--> martha-jones (vista): 6 Mbit/sec
martha-jones (vista) --WL-cat5-> frost (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
martha-jones (vista) --WL--> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
martha-jones (vista) --WL-cat5-> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
This made no sense at all. The speed halved going from a WL->WL to a WL->cat5 connection but only in one direction!
So having isolated the problem to the Vista machine I started looking round and I found a note saying that running netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled in an 'Administrator' cmd window will fix the problem.
Now I'm very weary of changing the TCP/IP options of the operating system. In most cases the 'tips' you see flying round the internet have no meaning at all and sometimes make the situation worse rather then better.
However I did find this on a Microsoft Technet site.... Hmm
So in the end I try it and modify the setting, disconnect and reconnect to the wireless and:
frost (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---cat5-SMC-WL--> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec
Aah, finally I could tune Vista so that it has the same speed as an untuned Debian machine. I only took me 2 evenings worth of work...
Oct. 15th, 2008 @ 05:24 am
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| » almost too real |
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Yesterday I saw this ad and was ... confused for a second...
Let's see if objects work:
Oct. 8th, 2008 @ 07:21 am
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| » BBC will do 'state of the art' |
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According to the stage. Cool, scifi to put on my ipod!
Oct. 3rd, 2008 @ 09:09 am
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