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Help the People of Burma — Post this Meme on Your Blog!
2007-10-02 07:55:00
Note: This is a new kind of online protest that uses blogs to spread a petition globally. To participate, just add your blog by following the instructions in this blog post. This not an issue of partisan politics, this is an issue of basic human rights and democracy. Please help to prevent a human tragedy in Burma by adding your blog and asking others to do the same. By passing this meme on through the blogosphere hopefully we can generate more awareness and avert a serious tragedy. As concerned world-citizens this something we bloggers can do to help. How to participate: 1. Copy this entire post to your blog, including this special number: 1081081081234 2. After a few days, you can search Google for the number 1081081081234 to find all blogs that are participating in this protest and petition. Note: Google indexes blogs at different rates, so it could take longer for your blog to show up in the results. 3. If you know how to add tags to your blog posts, add the Technorati tag 10810...
More About: Meme , People , Post , Blog

Ethics
2007-09-30 18:19:00
It seems that googling for images on ethics mostly turns up caricatures, pictures of ethics workshops, and book covers about the ethics of one business field or another. Oddly enough, religious images hardly ever turn up. But this post isn’t to wonder about that, it’s to do with something else — as such, the image I’m including doesn’t really have much to do with the post contents, but it’s the best summary of search results that I’ve found. This post is in reaction to someone somewhere else asking the age-old question, why purportedly intelligent people behave stupidly. The context in which the question was asked this time is irrelevant, but it’s usually asked when people do something that can’t easily be logically or ethically explained. (more…)
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Canon EOS 400D
2007-09-27 07:57:00
Since yesterday, I’m a proud owner of a Canon EOS 400D digital SLR. Ever since my mother sold her AE-1 just about a decade ago, I’ve noticed how much I took a decent SLR for granted, and shortly thereafter set my sight on a digital SLR. Problem was, they were way too expensive for a long time, and only nowadays have prices dropped to an acceptable range. Anyway, I’ve only just got my new toy, and can’t really say much about it yet, except that the first couple of test shots I made came out way better than expected. You really don’t need to know much about photography to make pretty good photos with this baby. Now I’m hoping to reanimate and strengthen my somewhat atrophied photography skills. We’ll see what happens. After the jump, two pictures for your previewing pleasure. (more…)
More About: Anon

Metroid Prime
2007-09-26 08:31:00
A while ago, I bought a copy of Metroid Prim e for the GameCube, figuring that it’s cheap, and it’s a great excuse to buy Metal Gear Solid and the necessary GameCube controller to play both games on my Wii. Part of the decision making process involved the thought that the newly released third part in the Metroid Prime series is more expensive than a used copy of the first part plus the controller, and I’ve never found the latest and greatest graphics that important. By trying the first part, I could figure out whether part 2 and 3 would be worth getting. Metroid Prime got great reviews across the board, so I thought that the chance of sore disappointment would be fairly small. Well, I guess sometimes Murphy is watching after all… (more…)
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Ritalin, ADHD/ADD
2007-09-25 10:33:00
I can’t be entirely sure that the “facts” presented in this video are indeed facts, but going by personal experience with the medical profession, I wouldn’t be all too surprised.
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Johnny Got His Gun
2007-09-22 09:42:00
Yesterday I finally got around to watching the movie on which Metallica’s One is based1. I knew it to be a moderately well-known anti-war movie, but I hadn’t expected it to be this impressive. (more…) There’s a longer version of One to be found here, but I’m afraid the sound quality is worse. [↩]
More About: Johnny

Friendship
2007-09-05 07:38:00
Recent events have forced me to think a lot about what friendship means to me. That last sentence can be interpreted in at least two ways: I have thought about what it means to me to be friends with someone. I have thought about what the value of friendship is to me. To be honest, I’ve thought a lot about both interpretations, and in the course of my thoughts, have discussed various aspects of friendship with some of my best friends. Rather unsurprisingly, I seem to share a lot of my values with the very people that I apply these values to. (more…)
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Zelda: Twilight Princess
2007-09-03 08:01:00
I finished playing The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess yesterday evening. After some 63 hours of game play, I can certainly say that it was worth the money. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played, though I don’t think it’s without it’s share of flaws. The most notable of those can probably be explained by the fact that the game was developed for the gamecube, and delayed and refined just to be released for the Wii — it was not, however, meant as a Wii release originally, as far as the rumour goes. The following isn’t meant as a review, but there are some things I noticed along the time I played, that I want to share. (more…)
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Abusive Criticism
2007-09-02 13:24:00
Another blogger’s recent blog post links to an article about criticism in FOSS projects. It’s an quick and interesting read, and mentions the sort of criticism Linus Torvalds finds hard to deal with. Much of the culture of harshly criticizing what’s wrong in the Linux project is cultivated by Linus, a guy who admits he likes to argue or to flame as he puts it. Flaming involves insults and provocation, according to the jargon file. Let’s just say insults have never been a clever approach to team building. I find that discussion culture to be the greatest failure of the Linux community1. (more…) And one that propagates to many other FOSS projects. [↩]
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Communication Barrier
2007-08-31 08:48:00
Has it ever happened to you that you talked to someone, and what you quite calmly said made them froth at the mouth? That happened to me the other day. True, the content of my words wasn’t necessarily the nicest, but it wasn’t rude or insulting either. It was stating a point of view that the other person did not share1. If my words happened to be the truth, then I can see that that sat uncomfortably with my conversation partner. If my words happened to be completely off the mark, then I can see that they feel upset by my misjudgment. Either way, the only constructive way to move forward is for them to consider why I might have chosen those words, and discuss the reasons for that. What I don’t expect is a lengthy diatribe detailing an alternative point of view as the only acceptable explanation of reality2, delivered spitting with venom and spite. I’ve been in that sort of situation before. Let’s, for the sake of the argument, assume that I can infuri...
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British Telecom Fuckup
2007-08-22 13:35:00
From handheld devices that enable flexible working to global networking and outsourcing solutions, our products and services can satisfy your organisation’s needs completely.– from bt.com website, today No, you can’t. For the second time in just about as many weeks, BT have manged to cut off Germany (and god knows what other countries) from my employer’s site in Luxembourg. Maybe all of Luxembourg, I don’t know. It’s not like there are severed cables or anything like that involved, it’s just that the routing loops around and around and around… Great job, BT!
More About: British , Telecom , British Telecom

A Higher Standard
2007-08-13 08:03:00
I came across an interview with Jonathan Blow just now, designer of the upcoming game Braid. Because I’m still caught up in things that have little to do with this blog, I decided to mention this article as a signal to my dear readers that I’m still alive. Let me give a quick quote from the interview that I find highly interesting: Saying “games are about escapism” is a nearly content-free statement; it just provides some kind of pat answer so that you don’t have to look any further into the subject. But it’s obviously, at its core, woefully incomplete, and I think people who really understand games know this implicitly. (…) They can give you at least a taste of experiences that you wouldn’t have any other way. (…) Games can provide this kind of mental, emotional and spiritual expansion, and they can push it in a different direction than movies, or books, or music, or whatever. (…) There’s a certain feel to what it’s like driving a ca...
More About: Standard , Higher , Stand

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!111oneoneleven
2007-07-30 08:24:00
So, last saturday my Wii arrived. That, and a cold I’ve been fighting for a few days are the reasons I’m updating rather sporadically at the moment. We’ll get back to a proper schedule at some point, I’m sure… So, the Wii — great fun! I apologize for the weird picture, by the way… You can see for yourself that I was going insane, but you may not know why — due to some weird scheduling, the Wii Classic Controller arrived before the rest of the console… so there I was, holding a controller with nothing to plug it into. I’m sure you understand that that was more than my fragile little mind could bear. (more…)

WoW Design Improvements: Player Skills
2007-07-25 08:53:00
This article is part 8 of 8 in the series, WoW Design Improvements. Yesterday I mentioned an article on game design, which tries, among other things, to give some pointers towards “fun” game design. Having recently finished a series on the design of World of Warcraft, I felt reminded of that game and it’s particular flaws. I suppose I should explain first why this particular post you’re reading is also part of the above series. To be honest, I felt the series was ended with it’s seventh entry. This post however exemplifies that such a large topic is never really finished — consider this (and possibly following posts) to be appendices to the original seven part series. This particular post deals with player skills vs. character skills. (more…)
More About: Player , Skills , Rove , Layer

Game Design Chemistry
2007-07-24 19:13:00
Following a link from Raph Koster’s blog, I came across an article on Gamasutra, titled “The Chemist ry of Game Design ” — it’s a good read, go on and read it. The author proposes (components of) a language for game design, and a way of analyzing “fun”, with the aim of generating it. What I find interesting how closely this model of gaming corresponds to how I described how we generate models of reality. (more…)
More About: Game Design

Quick Update
2007-07-21 13:47:00
I haven’t been writing any posts for the last week because I spent most of that week at a conference centre in the Netherlands. The wireless connection wasn’t terribly reliable, and I was rather busy. One of the things that struck me as noteworthy about the event was that what was discussed pretty much mirrors my series on how the design of World of Warcraft could be vastly improved. I feel vindicated by the fact that a bunch of people who’ve been involved with software design & online communities seem to think exactly the same way I do. And when I came home, my copy of Earthlings arrived. You can help the project and order your copy here.
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Programming Interfaces: Introduction
2007-07-15 08:27:00
This article is part 1 of 1 in the series, Programming Interfaces . A few years ago, I was in charge of enhancing and maintaining a collection of code libraries in a company that, given that it was involved in “internetsy” stuff, actually had a fairly large development department of about 120 programmers or so. The code I was working on formed the basis for several other libraries, which formed the basis for other libraries, which were eventually used by the web developers. This sort of dependency chain is not uncommon in larger companies, but if not managed very carefully, can prove to be very fragile, as small errors in the most basic of components can propagate to most software packages at the end of the chain1. It came as something of a surprise to me, therefore, that the company had instituted policies regarding such changes only around the time I started working there — and that most programmers I’ve met at this or other companies had only a vague idea o...
More About: Introduction , Intro , Ming

Album: Alice in Chains - Dirt
2007-07-14 08:37:00
If you were in your mid-teens in the early nineties, there will be a couple of albums you’re likely never to forget. At this point, most people will probably think of Nirvana’s Nevermind — but I never cared all that much for it. Grunge in general has always been too much influenced by Punk for me to really like it, so at the time I was drawn more towards records that focussed on warmer, more sludgy sounds and songwriting closer to Metal. In 1992, one such band released an album that has it’s hooks in my brain to this day. To be perfectly honest, “Dirt ” is also one of Alice in Chai n s‘ records that I own and even know. At the time, my economic means were not such that I’d buy more of the same band, until I had listened closely to what I was about to buy — and a few years later, my interest in the band had waned. Nevertheless, “Dirt” stands as one of a number of releases that define the early nineties for me. (more&hel...
More About: Alice In Chains , Album

I’ve Got Nothing To Hide
2007-07-13 09:03:00
A few days ago, I was ranting about the fact that our Chancellor supported plans to search the computers of German citizens without their knowledge, in an attempt to help fight terrorism. That article used a few fairly loaded words, partly because I felt frustrated with the lack of competence these ideas show, but also because I’ve cultivated a strong sensitivity to privacy concerns of various kinds. It’s something of a coincidence that a few days later, an essay linked on /. explores the term “privacy”, it’s meaning, and an argument as to why it’s supposedly not as important as people might feel. That essay is fairly long-winded, though, and in my view doesn’t adequately argue why we should care about our privacy. (more…)
More About: Thing , Hide

Album: Alan Parsons Project - Tales of Mystery and Imagination
2007-07-12 08:10:00
For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it. (…) There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language. (…) [These fancies] arise in the soul (alas, how rarely!) only at its epochs of most intense tranquility — when the bodily and mental health are in perfection — and at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with (…) the world of dreams. [And so I captured this fancy, where] all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. – Edgar Allan Poe, adapted from “Marginalia - Part V” and the poem “A Dream Within A Dream”. The “Tales of Mystery and Imagination ”, Alan Parsons Project ’s first album for me captures the essence on their creative career1, and weaves ...
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Monotonous Messups
2007-07-11 09:04:00
Apparently, there are still software developers out there, who don’t know what version or revision control systems can do for them. Just think of it as backups of your thought processes. Nowadays, though, that breed of programmer is (thankfully!) becoming relatively rare1. Version control has been around for ages2, so I’m not going to explain them. A more recent, but still not exactly new development, are distributed version control systems, which basically substitute the central repository for a more peer-to-peer approach. Each client has it’s own repository, and repositories of different clients can be synchronized. For private stuff, I’m using one such system called monotone. Not only does it have a drawing of a rat3 as it’s mascot/logo, it also uses a programming language and a collection of libraries that I’m very familiar with, meaning I can modify it to my needs. (more…) Though I could tell you stories about former employers…...
More About: Mess

Monotonous Mess-ups
2007-07-11 09:04:00
Apparently, there are still software developers out there, who don’t know what version or revision control systems can do for them. Just think of it as backups of your thought processes. Nowadays, though, that breed of programmer is (thankfully!) becoming relatively rare1. Version control has been around for ages2, so I’m not going to explain them. A more recent, but still not exactly new development, are distributed version control systems, which basically substitute the central repository for a more peer-to-peer approach. Each client has it’s own repository, and repositories of different clients can be synchronized. For private stuff, I’m using one such system called monotone. Not only does it have a drawing of a rat3 as it’s mascot/logo, it also uses a programming language and a collection of libraries that I’m very familiar with, meaning I can modify it to my needs. (more…) Though I could tell you stories about former employers…...
More About: Mess

Album: Abscess - Tormented
2007-07-10 08:43:00
It’s sad when members of particularly interesting or groundbreaking bands form a new project, and then only produce mediocre outputs. Abscess contains people who played in Death and Autopsy, so you would expect a fair amount from them. Tormented is played precisely, and it’s recorded and produced very well, with a nice, gritty Death Metal sound. And that’s just about all the good things I have to say about it. Don’t get me wrong, the songs are enjoyable enough. The songwriting is reasonable, but rather uninspired. But ultimately, the songs on this record are utterly unmemorable, and not easily distinguished from each other. Ah, well. That makes yet another record I can sort out.
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Terrorized By The Government
2007-07-09 19:35:00
Stealing a line from a friend of mine, “I don’t know why people talk about a war against terror, when the terrorists clearly have won”. Apparently, in his war against terror, our easily-terrified Minister Schäuble has convinced even our Chancellor, that secret online searches of your computer by the government should become a legal tool for our police to use. So how does this work? Somehow, you’re supposed to install a trojan horse on your computer. That’s right, one of those types of malicious software, usually lumped together with other types of malicious software under the term “computer virus”1. Yep, provided by our own government. (more…) Though technically, trojans are not viruses, but no less malicious. [↩]
More About: Government , The Go , The G

Happiness
2007-07-09 07:23:00
Fist of all, let me apologize for the animation here. I usually dislike animated GIFs, as they tend to distract from what I’d really like to focus on - but this one is just too cute, and fits the subject somewhat. I wanted to write a short follow-up to my previous post on learning, lies and trust, with an observation about happiness. Given that this previous post was already growing pretty long, I decided a new post was in order - let’s hope this one will be shorter1. (more…) No, at this point of writing I don’t usually know how long posts grow. I do reread post before publishing them, but don’t actually follow any structure rigidly laid out in advance. I like to surprise myself, I suppose. [↩]
More About: Happiness

Album: Aborted - The Purity of Perversion
2007-07-08 20:53:00
Hmm, yes. An album to which the question of whether it’s any good is a resounding “maybe”. I don’t know if I’m just put off by the over-the-top gory cover art or if there’s a good reason, but I can’t quite make my mind up about this one. Aborted have definitely produced a very solid recording here. Select sound snippets from various horror movies manage to set the mood here and there. The riffing ranges from pretty good to excellent. The song structures offer a few surprises, the songs on this recording definitely offer more than a straight line from intro the the ending notes. On the negative side, the drumming is less than imaginative (I’ve heard worse, though), and a large part of each song is made up of semi-random “melodic” parts that work for Morbid Angel, but somehow don’t take off here. Overall I get the impression that the band knows very well the elements that make up a good Death Metal song, and even have a...
More About: Album , Version , Purity

Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics
2007-07-07 21:17:00
A few days ago, I declared truth to be nothing but a model of reality that we can use to predict observable results. Today I wanted to point out some examples of situations where such models have gone wrong, or clashed with the models of other people, but I realized that just about every article I wrote on philosophy before is one such example. Still, now that I’ve started this post, I need to finish it somehow, so let’s consider the nature of learning. (more…)
More About: Statistics , Damn , Stat , Lies

Album: Abigor - In Memory
2007-07-06 08:27:00
This is the first in a series of blog posts I’ll likely produce on a weekly basis or so. It’s part of an attempt to consciously analyze and classify my music collection, in the hopes that I’ll form a clear picture of what parts of it I can safely sell. A side-effect of this is that the Music section of this website should grow to contain more useful information, that is, my reviews and ratings. Starting with Abigor’s “In Memo ry ”, I realized, not for the first time, but never in this clarity, what I dislike about Black Metal. The main reason is really very simple, and does the music itself little credit: the type of distortion used in this form of music produces strong high frequency sounds, which simply hurt my ears. I need to literally force myself to shut out that noise, before I can hear the music. And it’s really the frequency, as other types of music I listen to employ similar amounts of distortion, but are fine for me to take in. So, ...
More About: Album , In Memory

PyLicious
2007-07-05 23:58:00
Following the initial announcement of my music collection, I polished up the script I hacked to generate the HTML in the first place. It’s now using the Cheetah template engine for a lot of it’s work, enabling the user to create just about every output that you can with Cheetah. This script isn’t the prettiest, nor is it the best documented - but anyone with a smattering of Python should be able to modify it to their needs. If you don’t know Python, go learn it. The software is published under the GPLv3 license - which probably makes it one of the first pieces of software to be expressly published in this way. I’m quite happy about that coincidence. PyLicious comes as a simple command line tool - you need Python and Cheetah installed, and little else. The code should also be usable as a module, as most of the functionality is split into a class. I’ve forgone packaging the script up in any sort of way, that’s just too much of a hassle right n...

Truth
2007-07-05 09:51:00
Following a recent discussion somewhere else, I feel compelled to write down my perception of truth. The discussion was centered around how much or how little humans impact the world climate. There is, of course, Al Gore’s side of the story - which he didn’t come up with by himself, but of which he is the most vocal and/or popular proponent. There is also the other side, which more or less claims that the temperature shifts we experience are caused by a natural phenomenon, outside of our sphere of activity. The debate goes back and forth. What strikes me is that the second side is quite often abused by lazy people1, who use it as an argument to validate using their petrol-guzzling SUVs. (more…) I think we’re all lazy in this respect: changing one’s life-style is a scary prospect that nobody likes. [↩]
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