So that’s not good at all… not ideal anyway. So yesterday I took the plunge and updated my MythTV machine [which was running Slackware 13.0 at the time] to 13.1 using the ‘slackpkg’ tool. I read that some people were succesful using that tool, so that was enough for me. (I did have to edit the /etc/slackpkg/mirrors list a couple of time to force it to point to the new 13.1 repository though, and I had some other ‘minor’ issues [device files for hard-drives not created upon boot among other things].)

Anyhoo, when finally up and running I decided to boot up Firefox, I noticed it DID NOT CRASH.

It was a problem with, I guess, the X server all along, or some other library being included.

Me = happy now. I don’t have to browse Wikipedia or Google with my mobile anymore if I want to look up something while in the living-room…

And all other so-called “laws” that ought to protect “intellectual property”.

To prevent other people from stealing it and putting it on the market with cheaper labour.

So that’s saying: we want to protect intellectual property. Because we are so smart and innovative.

But you must pay the full price that we put to that crap we produce. Can’t have any fair competition giving everybody the change to market it….

(Ironically, USA wouldn’t have been there if all that criminal scum didn’t leave Europe, so factually, all your base belongs to us *anyway*.)

Obama: you’s the white man’s new bitch. The biggest one ever. Oh my god how many people you must put to shame with your “white” behaviour. Bitch is worse than the KKK….

Haha, damn criminals, each and every one of those politicians.

Oh fuck, it’s not even funny.

I feel really sorry for the people that thought the world was seriously going to change for the better when that clown took that post.

But hey, you /could’ve/ seen this shit coming.

Quite annoying, I do not want that process to die (nor the “jackd” process).

After having stumbled upon this page about the OOM killer, I wrote this little script, which I run just after jackd and linuxsampler have set-up (as root of course).

It’ll write the value -17 (OOM_DISABLE) to /proc/<pid>/oom_adj for selected process-names and this ought to prevent the OOM killer from ever targeting that process.

Haven’t seen it crashing on me since — but of course, your mileage may very…

Next time somebody believes your usage of the dollar sign when typing “MS” is childish, re-direct those people to that article….

‘Nuff said…

If he is prevented from committing suicide, and if he’s technically any good, he is most probably going to end up working for the US army.

Either way, good bye Gary, and do whatever you got to do…

<rant>
I know your story shall not be forgotten. In fact, this is surely going to cause more agression towards the USA — which, of course, is exactly the plan: the more people upset with the US, the more people organise — which means that more groups of people can be targeted as “sleeper cells” and end-up as so-called non-combatants in some foreign prison getting humiliated…

The more we look at this and get used to it, the easier this excuse can be used to take out any voices of freedom. (Freedom != democracy — you could be called a non-thinking idiot to think otherwise.) From terrorists to the non-violent political groups — people arrested and never to be heard of again. This “movement” has been happening for almost a decade now — it started since that 9/11-facade and has been speeding up ever since.

Speeding items shall definitely run into a wall at some point, but I sincerely hope it won’t do too much damage to the not-so-guilty. (We’re all responsible for baking this global shitcake, actually…)
</rant>

As a young kid I bought almost all the Art Of Noise’s music. Likewise, Rakim (of Eric B and Rakim fame) has been an inspiration as well…

And I only just now discovered they once did a collaboration together… Sweet!

This wasn’t as easy as it seemed as for some reason, blacklisting the ‘agpgart’ module did not seem to have any effect.

Why is it still loading the agpgart driver?
Running “modprobe -nv nvidia” it showed that it kept depending on the ‘agpgart’ module somehow.

A quick Google only showed other people having the problem, but alas, no solution.

Further poking around, I noticed when doing a “depmod -v” — which outputs module dependencies to standard out — that the nvidia module indeed depended on it.

Aha!
Hmmm… So I dove into the NVIDIA driver source (which I had to modify for a real-time kernel anyways, so the unpacked nvidia installer package was still on my system), and noticed the culprit.

The nv-linux.h file contains the following lines:
#if defined (CONFIG_AGP) || defined (CONFIG_AGP_MODULE)
#define AGPGART
#include <linux/agp_backend.h>
#include <linux/agpgart.h>
#endif
The CONFIG_AGP and CONFIG_AGP_MODULE it gets from your kernel configuration and presumably, this is what compiles in stuff that makes it depend on the ‘agpgart’ module. I put those lines in as /* comments */ and tried loading the module.

Indeed, it now does not depend on ‘agpgart’ anymore and shall use ‘nvagp’ now. And the time spent on it was worth it: I even got about 200 frames per second increase with glxgears.

Interesting times ahead for my pet project NG-BASIC!

After long deliberation I have decided to transfer the ownership; transfer the ownership to a new owner that is going to breathe fresh life into the project.

It shall be actively developed on — something which I can’t do anymore as I seem to be wasting more and more spare time on work.

I must say it feels weird to let go of it… I guess it’s similar to what an artist feels when he sells a painting (well I like to think so anyway).

When I initially wrote it I never expected anyone to be interested at all. Perhaps one or two like-minded people — I did not expect more for a “toy” programming language.

The emails I got and the amount of downloads over the years show differently: there’s still quite an interest in BASIC, be it because of the geekiness of it running in a browser; to quickly get some calculations done; to explain somebody the basics of a programming concept; or — for people born in the 70s and 80s — just out of pure nostalgia.

So, that’s all very cool and I’m glad that people enjoyed it and hope they will do so in the future.

I believe it will be in good hands at its new home. In a different context (read: not on my personal weblog with, for perhaps some people some non-subtle opinions) it can even reach a broader audience…

It will surely be interesting to see how it’ll develop, literally.

Farewell — may it be in for a nice ride!

Until, a few of months ago, my stomach started acting up on me after drinking my WTF-mug filled with coffee. Seriously thinking it was the coffee, I started to cut down on my coffee-intake from that day on.

I usually drank about 10 to 12 of those mugs and the days after that was severily reduced to about 2 or 3 mugs: one or two in the morning (to wake up), and one in the evening after dinner.

Having built up a fair dependancy on caffeine; the headaches of course started to get worse.

Somehow, the brain still longs for caffeine — or the extra water-intake that comes with it — and your body lets you know it by giving you a headache to cope with.

Now, I used to have these types of headaches a lot, especially in the weekends in which I did not drink as much coffee as I have done during the week. These headaches weren’t anything “new” to me, I have had these long enough to think that it was coffee / caffeine related: if I had them in the evening (which I used to have regularly, somewhere between 19 and 20 o’clock, I had always fingered caffeine as the one responsible.

If you have drank liters of coffee a day and suddenly reduce that to barely 1 liter of coffee, your body starts to complain, or has a change to get used to. Well, at least mine did. The first couple of weeks were relatively easy, after 2/3 weeks, I started to really feel those ‘caffeine-dependancy-headaches’ as I’ve grown to call those.

The amount and intensity of these slowly reduced, even convincing me I was on the right track cutting down on coffee because the headaches went away.

Cluster Headaches
Now, a buddy of mine has been suffering from a condition called “cluster headaches” (Wikipedia page here) for quite a while now.

Honestly, the first time I heard of this, I think must be 2 years ago by now, I did think it was similar to what I was having — but I was still too busy blaming caffeine at that point and didn’t pay it no more mind.

Recently however, the intensity of my headache now increases again: “attacks” that last for about an hour, usually a bit less but sometimes even a whole hour longer.

I also noticed a slight difference that I had not felt before: the normal “caffeine-headache” I used to have concentrated mostly in the temple — but these headaches I was also having felt like being stung by something sharp in my eyes from behind at the same time: a subtle difference that I probably haven’t noticed earlier.

So there I was, earlier this week, lying on the couch, waiting for the pain to pass, when this friend suffering from the condition coincidentally came by our house. I told him about my headache-episode I was having at that time and how it felt. He immediately recognized it — especially the stingy pain behind the eye which sometimes can be really, really painful, making you want to roll on the floor in pain…

So, it wasn’t the caffeine after all and I may have been suffering from this quite some time now. The funny thing is, I have only really starting to get bothered by it the last couple of months, where before I thought it was caffeine related, the pain didn’t seem to take me out like it does now. It seems like its intensity is increasing over time…

Oh well, I’ll see how this pans out…

Updates
13:30: I discovered www.clusterheadaches.com and the “quiz” there. If I may have been in doubt, I’m most surely not anymore…

Last month my employer went bankrupt and me and some colleagues haven’t been payed for a couple of months.

It sucks…. There’s the issue of some back-pay that I still have to get back which comes with some paperwork and requires me to go through those old-cardboard boxes I call “my past”.. Hopefully I get most of it: 3 months not getting payed kinda drains your bank-account….

So that’s what’s been up lately, I just updated my CV here and thought I’d leave this little note. Hopefully things will settle soon though, so I can finally *really* laugh about this shit.

I was just reading Bruce Schneier’s CRYPTO-GRAM and he linked to this suprisingly good track (direct link to MP3) by MC Frontalot, called Secrets From The Future (direct link to the lyrics).

To quote the chorus:

You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.

I dig it — I really, really dig it.

See, my girlfriend found the new site set up by Everlast (to spread the word about his new album, Love War and The Ghost of Whitey Ford, I assume) called “Martyr Inc.“. (A pretty nice design job it is, I must say.)

I just love page 3 in the Book of Life, which I can relate to as we still had obligatory military service here in the Netherlands and that P.E. song was an inspiration to me to ‘rebel’ at that time.

Anyways I thought I’d spread the link here as well, as I know some of the few readers I have are into the same music.

(Oh yeah, and a happy new year and all that.)

It was only after the machine really crashed, and one of the two encoder cards didn’t want to initialise resulting in only static coming from the card. That sucked, so I tried to reboot to no avail, the damn thing didn’t even boot. Only after removing the card the machine wanted to boot so obviously the card died.

The card was quickly removed and a replacement ordered when I noticed there was a 24-month warranty on the dead card, so this was the first time in my life I actually sent a product back to make use of such a thing.

I got word today that, indeed, the product is broken and a replacement will soon be sent to me. Woohoo!

Yeah, even though there is hardly a damn interesting thing on TV, it does occasionally occur that 3 interesting programmes are airing at the same time and we don’t have to watch those programmes live again, either.

It so effing rules to be able to skip through those annoying ads and other irritating crap — or at least to be able to not miss anything remotely important by pausing while taking a leak.

You know, if you had biology in school, there are 2 tiny little holes on the floor of your mouth, about where your tongue attaches, where your saliva comes into your mouth.

Basically, what happens is that sometimes — and this is usually when I am eating — one duct that brings the saliva into my mouth is blocked by some white stuff. No problem, you’d say, you still got another saliva duct so enough saliva will still get into your mouth to be able to eat.

Yes, there is enough saliva in my mouth, but here is the problem: my salivary gland does not know that it is blocked so it keeps on producing saliva. This in turn causes my glands to swell up immensely: you can see a big bulge forming below my jaw.

And it also expands internally — causing pressure against my throat, making it extremely painful, thus hard, to swallow. This pain is pretty hard to describe… it’s like … when you throw up after having too much to drink and ate to much food whole and unchewed. You can imagine, or remember, that food hurts on it’s way back up through you throat. Well, it’s like that feeling, the main difference being I’m trying to swallow chewed food.

The first time this happened to me was when I was eating tomato-soup in 2001. Having had cat-scratch-disease I thought this was just my old swelling acting up and didn’t pay it any more mind as it went away after a few hours.

At a later time, I believe I was eating something with peanuts in it and it happened again. This time, more painful, and as I was home I went to the bathroom to check things out. That’s when I first noticed that there was something actually blocking my saliva duct! I did then realise possible consequences of the salivary gland keeping on producting while the stuff can’t get out — I freaked thinking about the gland ‘exploding’ in my neck.

So what does a man do? Of course, he tries to solve things by himself.

With a pair of cotton-tip applicators I was able to massage and force the white thing outward. Painful, yeah, because the floor of your mouth is pretty sensitive. After couple of minutes I was able to pop a little white thingy out and I felt and heard the saliva being released from my gland, going through the duct like a *woooosh* in my head. That really, really felt great.

So in total, I have been experiencing those painful episodes, 5 or 6 times now, over the last 6 years, messing up a couple of dinners. I thought it was some weird allergy, really. I didn’t touch tomato-soup since!

Only since about 2 or 3 years, thanks to some smart googling by my girlfriend have figured out it is salivary duct calculus that is causing these episodes. She only found a couple of Dutch sites though and at that time, I did not seem to find find anything relevant in English, because I really didn’t know any English term.

Obviously, I thought I was a freak. Nobody I knew ever heard about it, and that isn’t strange because I hadn’t before, either.

A week ago I was happily eating my girlfriends’ home-made tomato-soup and nothing happened I could enjoy it all. We even talked about that it was ages ago that it last happened.

Of course, a few days later (last weekend), it happened again. This time it was pretty painful again and I ran upstairs to the bathroom for the usual poke-and-massage-it-out routine. Looking inside my mouth, the two spit-holes seemed OK so I thought it’s OK, let’s continue eating. I went downstairs again, took another bite, and I really hurt when I tried to swallow it. So I went upstairs again, because this really felt the same as before. Again, I couldn’t see nothing… I really wanted to because I could force it out and go on eating my dinner!

After a couple of minutes of swinging back and forth between uh-oh-let’s-go-upstairs-and-check-it-out and hmm-really-nothing-let’s-continue-dinner I finally noticed the usual white spot behind one spithole.

I must’ve used about 20 cotton-tips to try to force it out, it was really a pain (as I write this 2 days after, the bottom of my mouth is still sore). I got a bit of white stuff out, but it was definitaly not all so I kept on massaging and forcing it. This even caused a small internal bleeding in my duct. The skin of the bottom of my tongue being fairly thin and transparent I could see a red spot between the spit-hole and the white stuff. I kept on forcing it out and I see the red spot popping, the blood from it merging with the out-flowing saliva and the rest of the white stuff coming out with a *woooosh* of saliva entering my mouth and my swollen saliva gland finally reducing.

Curious about possible causes and remedies I starting searching the web again. That is when I discovered this UK site about the condition, with a link to a forum with user experiences.

I was amazed at the amount of people suffering from this same, freaky and rare condition. Some people have even worse and more painful episodes so I guess I can consider myself “lucky” not having stones the size of an almond which have to surgically removed with possible nerve-damage.

I have read some pretty freaky stuff, about nerves growing the wrong way back causing one fellow his face’s sweat-glands to activate while chewing — or people without feeling in parts of their face after the surgery. I’ve always been pretty hesitant about surgery; and if I read that in some cases it didn’t really solve anything — or only temporary — it doesn’t really seem like a viable option.

So.. as far as I now understand, nobody really knows what exactly causes it, only that it statistically happens more to males than females. It is theorised that it may be caused by periods of reduced saliva production and that a steady flow of saliva may reduce changes of blockage by accumulating calculi, so for this I need to find some herbs or simply some sour candies to induce saliva production.

I love to recycle. I got a ‘new’ server from a buddy of mine, which performs better than the older one. So the web- and database- stuff have just been migrated to the other machine and things seem to work OK.

You may noticed if you have been here before that the page loads about, well … at least 5 times faster.

So that’s pretty cool! (edit) And it didn’t cost me a buck!

I still cannot make out whether it is a sample from the actual Transformers-series, or if he is saying something else…

That was Tuesday last week … but the image of the camera kept haunting me with this little voice telling me to “Kill all white p.. — err — “You want this camera”.

See, our current Kodak camera, a cheap-ass CX4310, with its mere 2.0 megapixel doesn’t really cut it in this day and age — especially if you want to take pictures of some small objects (like animals) at a distance… Birds in your garden end up as pixelated blurs, and well, pixelated blurs are so 20th century.

Anyways, we went into town again last Saturday to find the store that sells said product at the lowest price (hey, I’m Dutch) and bought it for no less than 189 EUR. That really was a bargain if you take into account all the other shops are selling it at a steady 249 EUR price.

The new camera sports an impressive 7.1 megapixel which results in pretty sharp images; the drawback of course being that it takes ages before you’ve transfered all the images to a PC…

So we have been playing with that thing the whole weekend and as you can guess, the battery is almost dead — a universal AC/DV adapter for indoor-usage would really save on batteries, so that’s what I’m gonna get later today.

Here are some of the images I shot last weekend:

Of course, my rabbit.	Zoomed-in on a clover-flower.
A bee on a flower.	This duck is a regular visitor to our garden, searching and begging for food.
As a ‘bonus’ — the sudden “Black Screen Of Death” I got while browsing the Kodak site with my MacBook Pro.

Photography, Kodak Z710

You could just as well be asking:
“You screwed around in the sixties, now why can’t your kids?”
“You smoked as a teen, now why can’t your kids?”
“You shop-lifted, broke public property and sprayed graffiti on walls, now why can’t your kids?”
“You watched porn, now why can’t your kids watch MTV?”

Now I could go off making dumb conclusions a few paragraphs to say with a lot of words that, well, sex, smoking and shoplifting or braking public property isn’t what it used to be… But you know that is just a silly waste of electronic ink.

(Oh, if I only wrote columns for a paper — then I could get payed (per word) for my bullshit musings, too.)

This doesn’t have a single thing to do with the games — it has to do with the fact that people slowly realise that TV and media do have a bad influence…. Under the guise of ‘freedom of speech’ and shit like that, we get all kinds of soft-porn thrown at us — and surely girls get raped on the streets.

That is all OK because MTV can sell ads in between. But parents have to get the fingers pointed at and told “Hey you played games as a kid why can’t yours?.”.

So the media can sell more.

Curious as to what the ‘truth’ is, I started browsing around and read that, indeed, Christians converted the whole lot of them, through a ritual called “siqqitiq”:

(From wikipedia.org):
Siqqitiq (meaning transforming one’s life, more specifically adopting Christianity) is the ritual of converting Inuits with shamanist beliefs to Christianity. This is usually accompanied by ritualistic consumption of foods held taboo by shamanist belief (like caribou lung and heart), to underscore the fact that such taboos no longer apply.

Mkayy, well….. what can I see other than: “That’s bloody typical”. Kinda like force-feeding Islamic people pork — something they’d do if they could get away with it, I’m sure.

Incidentally, through this blog post I hit this story about someone that has been in that area and how Christianity is the default belief over there. It’s amazingly sad how, once again, Christianity wiped out a entire belief and assimilated yet another culture.

I think the term ‘punk ass religious fanatic bitches‘ applies to them just fine…

A couple of years ago I did once read that some/one of the founding members of Greenpeace at a certain point, got out of that organisation. I didn’t read why, nor who it was or what that guy did after that, though. Well, now I do: Paul Watson founded The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. I wouldn’t have had heard of it, and its campaigns, if I hadn’t been told, though.

There are quite a lot of videos on YouTube documenting some of their actions, you can see that their work is more direct and far more risky than those organisations that attempt to accomplish similar goals through diplomacy — other organisations that are more heavily funded and seem to only spend this on buying expensive advertisement-time on TV…

I think these guys are doing a hell of a good job enforcing the laws that countries don’t seem to care about enough to take real action — probably politics has a lot to do with it; the politics of economics.

Nope, it doesn’t seem enough anymore that somebody else even wants to try your software — no, people have to pay to get an un-crippled, functional application.

I don’t mind people making an honest buck, but the crippling of functionality seem like mob-extortion practices to me.

And it’s really starting to become an annoyance… again (hence this rant). It seems that money is more important than showing off what you can do. Back when I was a kid, it was fun to write software and share it with people I knew. The idea that somebody else was using my software or playing my game was cool — somebody else that would think ‘Wow this is a great, I’m glad he wrote this‘.

Now people are like, ‘I’m a l33t coder — gimme gimme gimme and you get this fine application without crippled functionality.‘, before you have actually started using the program. (And everything being released as a binary, it’s pretty hard to find out if they actually wrote it themselves and didn’t steal logic from known Open Source projects. Being I’m Dutch, I don’t think I would even want to pay up $20 to attempt to find out.)

Man, didn’t you write that utility or program because you wanted the functionality yourself? People downloaded and used your program and have possibly sent you bug-reports, feature requests and new ideas. And then, suddenly, your great free program turns into a cock-teasing prostitute that knows what the users want and you depend on the fact that a few people that have taken it for a lap-dance will pay up for the complete job — just showing enough to make the average guy horny.

No wonder there are guys (and girls) out there that crack that type of software. To continue the analogy in the previous paragraph, that isn’t rape, the software is asking for it.

No, today it seems that the crackers are the really smart guys out there. At least, they unconditionally release their tools — for their own egos or whatever. If the ego of any author of a cracked application was just as equally pleased he wouldn’t have had to lock-up his piece of software to begin with.

But relax, I wouldn’t use a cracked version of your program anyway — there’s no love, man — I’d only make love to a woman that actually wants to, for free.