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

‘Nuff said…

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!

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…

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.)

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.

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.

Apparently, after stating that ‘this was his way of life’, the municipal office didn’t see no problem with it, and issued a passport an ID-card.

This is funny as fuck, because they thought of these new rules when you want a passport an ID card, one of the idiot rules is ‘you may not smile and your face has to be visible completely’ and some stupid shit like that. All because the white christian facist assholes in the government wanted the burqa banned…

As I said many times, it’s one thing to think of a new law… but if it’s impossible to enforce it why fucking bother. It would save us all so much money, time and useless effort.

Kudos to this guy for trying this… and succeeding!

Cool graph…

This ‘treatment’ consists of 7 online chat-sessions with a professional.

Now, I can’t get this image out of my head:

i have a drinking problem
Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.
i drink too much
I’m not sure I understand you fully.
i am an alcoholic
Did you come to me because you are an alcoholic?
yes
I understand.
help me
OK… “i are an alcoholic”. Tell me more.

Well — you get the picture.

(BTW the above dialogue was created using this Eliza implementation in Javascript which, as it implies, works from your browser.)

People always noted my sitting position: I was either hanging backwards in my chair (hey the monitor is at eye-height then, too), or I’m sitting behind a desk at a slight angle (i.e. my face and body is facing the laptop or screen, but the rest of my body is at a 45 degree angle).

When criticising, they would always say things like `that position will haunt you in the future, you’ll have back problems‘. I always responded that this is my most comfortable sitting position and that everyone really ought to sit in a comfortable position. (Which of course, is a different position for each of us.)

Anyway, this morning I was rather amused when I caught this article here about some research into the ‘best’ sitting position.

Apparently, sitting up-right is the position that puts most strain on your spine. It’s always nice to see something confirmed — I’m one of those guys that actually loves to say “I told you so” after being told they’re ‘wrong’…

So there!

Rats, fucking rats, I tell ya.

Korea? Al-Qaida? Oh wait, I could better call on people that really got nukes out there… Please use them!

It surely seems like nature’s only chance of survival — is with mankind removed from the equation because we’re all merely interested in filling our pockets.

Because it doesn’t matter how much you love the environment — the moment you got kids or shit like that — you think you need to be a part of the money-hungry-nature-raping society because it seemingly leaves people chanceless, that don’t.

Really wanna give your kids an honest chance? Do you really want a ‘better’ world?

Then we should stop supporting the viral capitalist machine, but we’re all too much of a hypocrite to actually do something against it because that would mean that we’d have to sacrifice something.

And in this gotta-have-all society I guess that’s just something that we don’t do.

I’ve always defended the position of the smoker, and have always doubted research into this field because, hell, cancer could just as well come from another source, not specifically second-hand smoke (it could be farts, or fuck, this is one of my latest gems: cancer could be caused by (second-hand) ‘religion’ — so I will refrain from making religious remarks in this post because I know what it does, man).

Anyway, everybody ‘defending’ the anti-smoking lobby keep hammering me on the fact that ‘these guys are experts they know their shit’. (Oh, and smoking is ‘dirty’.)

Well, lo’ and behold…… It is possible for ‘experts’ to be wrong for decades, after all:

For decades, efforts to cure the disease may have targeted the wrong cells.’ If true, the discoveries of Canadian and Italian research groups may give us a new path to selectively attack cancer.”

But don’t get your hopes up — knowing ‘man’ we all know there’s bound to be a new thing causing disease all over the planet.

The content of the site really is sickening and vile. Of course, such a site should be taken down, but denial of service attacks are childish. And, everybody has a right to express themselves, even a white supremacist.

But… this isn’t expression… To go to that an extent to tell everybody how good the ‘white man’ is and, for instance, what things the black man did not invent?! These assholes probably don’t even realise that inventions are always invented in different places by different people: our brains all function the same thus we can do exactly the same.

Although I do think these white fucks have a serious mentality problem, it is almost that sad that it makes you feel sorry for them…

But hey, what idiots are we expecting morality from a bunch of idiots that like to dress up like women and give eachother names?

Anyway, I noticed the link in question is still on the first page of Google’s search results…. and because I don’t have to time and resources to quickly create a spoof ‘whitesupremacists.org’ website spreading misinformation about them, including some well-shot videos detailing on their buttfuck-fests, well, here goes:

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

Then again — I’d hate to see their page go away; perusing the page on rap lyrics, I noticed some songs I really gotta pick up…

Damned whidiots.

It started with what we thought was a very obvious statement. We claimed on our website that
the Nedap was just another computer, and that as such it could just as easily be programmed to play
chess or to lie about the election results. We didn’t think more of it until Jan Groenendaal, placed a
document 9 on the Nedap/Groenendaal website to talk about our website “Wij vertrouwen
stemcomputers niet”. In it, he says: “[...] And with regard to the claim that our machine can play
chess: I’d like to see that demonstrated”.

So, obviously, these guys did it:

So obviously, one of our first goals now that we had access to the device was to make it play chess. Apart from proving our point, programming it to do this would also confirm that we knew everything we needed to know about the hardware before getting into the election fraud business. After having learned roughly how the hardware worked we used a gcc 68000 crosscompiler to create a Nedap IO-library containing functions to initialize the system, write data to the display, read the keyboard, and write debug messages to the UART. Together with newlib, a small clib implementation, we then managed to compile and run Tom Kerrigan’s Simple Chess Program (TSCP) 10. This was non-trivial only because we had to squeeze out quite a few tables to make it run using only the available 16 kBytes of RAM. Getting the chess pieces to magnetically attach (the keyboard is mounted at an angle) was also not that easy since the foil switches are stuck to a plastic base. We ended up using using 2 and 5 Eurocent coins underneath the paper, taped such that we could press the underlying foil switches with the edge of the coin.

Hahahaha, never tempt a technician…

BTW the whole report itself is quite an interesting read if you’re interested in that shit.

Voting Machines, Gaming Consoles

I didn’t know the creator of the first ‘lie detector’ and Wonder Woman were one and the same guy. And that, in 1938, William Moulton Marston once did some tests with his creation for Gillette, and deceivingly claimed these tests proved that people found Gillette to be the best razor. They really proved the opposite, though….

Who says that websites aren’t already recording your movements?

I mean — earlier in this century I was thinking that, when you are a big corporation, and you have some ‘comments, complaints & suggestions‘ section on the website where people can, well, comment, complain and make suggestions, it is pretty damn valueable to know what people typed into that TEXTAREA but did not submit the information.

Never gave that any thought, until today, reading the above and thinking and — yeh, with all that ‘asynchronous javascript’ — that’s even more easier to implement today. I know Gmail does this — it’s one of the most important ‘features’: Google knows about every email you did not sent.. Every complaint, rant or love-letter you did not send is still in their ‘entropy’ to compressing the whole world into a single system… although you, at the last moment, decided not to send it…

Which makes me wonder… Are there any other web-based forms that actually already do this?

And more importantly — if this happens, is this illegal — or is it possible because of some loop-hole in the system (i.e. can one prevent prosecution with a well-written click-through end-user license-agreement, disclaimers, et cetera?).

I mean — they are my frigging movements — they should be protected by copyright and nobody can steal them just as it is illegal for me to download copyrighted music, right?

Why can’t I copy a CD (or do they use poor techniques in a feeble attempt to prevent me from doing so), while other types of corporations can frigging record my intellectual property? And not only websites — what about biometric systems depending on a record of your physical information. I don’t know, but being reduced to an insignificant set of parameters kind-a feels like rape. It’s disrespectfull and it introduces more problems than they solve.

There must be a way to sue the companies that do this, for just as an excessive amount of damage done, like the MPAA and RIAA are inflating the numbers of piracy. Just like them, I should be able to be a rich man too, without actually doing any real work or producing anything.

(On that note — I just love this whole ‘Try Before You Buy‘ concept that we have on the Internet these days. You can download whatever crap you might want to buy before actually wasting your hard-earned money on a piece of shit film or whatever. There are plenty of things that I wouldn’t have bought if I didn’t first got it from somewhere else. There’s nothing wrong with that. The media only too well realises that 99% of their output is plain and utter crap and don’t frigging want you to try — and have to resort to cheap marketing ploys because you’d never even be remotely interested in it.

If only the record- and movie industry had been a little more honest in the past — we could be looking at a grand world right now without the wasted cash on (flawed-by-design) DRM restrictions and, more importantly, we could’ve had quality productions. I mean — they are in the entertainment-business and I find those guys practices hardly entertaining. In that respect, the Internet really is serving society — it actually does help the people prevent them from wasting their precious cash on artificially over-priced garbage. But again, I digress….)

I just don’t like the idea of keeping tabs on where my cursor goes, the keys that I touch or what my eyes are balling, merely for creating more ‘efficient’ (read: deceiving) marketing ploys.

But damn, my browser does not support Flash (well not the latest version anyways) and I can’t see it — but I’ll bet there must be some way to get to that stream-URL the moment it goes live. (I’m not putting too much money on it, though..)

Well, at least they got a new album out as well, an acoustic one, `Bare Stripped Naked‘ — gotta check it out.

Bands, Dutch, Bettie Serveert

Based on your own music-profile, you can find similar music, or choose to listen to the internet radio of people with similar taste. And it’s pretty good quality radio, too.

Using the service for a couple of hours, I thought it’s pretty cool. And it actually was a breeze to set-up (the guys over at last.FM even supply a Linux-client).

I had already fixed the patch to MythTV to include internet stream support, so the only thing I needed to do was to set up the proxy.

This proxy, called lastfmproxy is a nice piece of code that can serve any old media player with an MP3 file, but can also be used to skip, love and ban tracks. The only thing the proxy program needs, is a username and password to use (and a working-directory, of course).

Another nice thing (and I’m refering to the remark this being the 21st equivalent of booming your car-stereo), is that you can include your personal charts on your website (just like in the header of this one’s).

So that’s cool..

Update Hey I just discovered this old patch which, after some manual intervention, embeds Audioscrobbler support into MythMusic, so tracks I play will be scrobbled to the profile.

MythTV, Linux PVR, Open Source, Internet Radio, Last.FM

Over the recent years I’m having this increasing interest in history and the evolution of human knowledge, so to speak. The ancient Greek philosophers of course and stuff like etymology for instance quite interest me. It’s funny to see how words have evolved in different languages, coming from the same stem.

I’m a computer-programmer and it has been said that C is the Latin of programming languages. Ever since I was a kid I was interested in artificial intelligence and wanted to code a program that seemed intelligent and could interpret and even converse. Later in life I discovered a thing like the Turing test as well and the topic has always kept my mind busy; thinking of ways to ‘classify’ words, so it could interpret, conclude and react. An amount of understanding language is quite significant. Latin being the mother of modern western languages, I decided I’d study it.

Also, some knowledge of Latin comes in handy if you’re into plants. See, when watching English documentaries, sometimes ‘native’ English terms are used which I’m not familiar with. The Latin name of plants is the same everywhere. Thing is, those Latin names are hard to remember if you haven’t got a clue as to what they mean.

I also have this belief that keeping the mind busy, i.e. like learning a new language, is beneficial and keeps all the gears oiled-up, if you know what I mean.

So yesterday, I started picking up Latin from the book Latin for Beginners by Benjamin D’Ooge, which is quite nicely broken up into separate ‘lessons’ and so far it’s a good read and I’m actually picking up stuff. It’s good to find out that my 31 years, 1 month and 2 day-old mind can still suck up data — and the regular ‘aha-erlebnis‘, for instance when seeing how etymologically some words in different languages are ‘tied’ to eachother, keeps me interested too.

We’re told that the suspects were planning to use TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, a high explosive that supposedly can be made from common household chemicals unlikely to be caught by airport screeners. A little hair dye, drain cleaner, and paint thinner – all easily concealed in drinks bottles – and the forces of evil have effectively smuggled a deadly bomb onboard your plane.

Or at least that’s what we’re hearing, and loudly, through the mainstream media and its legions of so-called “terrorism experts.” But what do these experts know about chemistry? Less than they know about lobbying for Homeland Security pork, which is what most of them do for a living. But they’ve seen the same movies that you and I have seen, and so the myth of binary liquid explosives dies hard.

War On Truth, Liquid Explosives, Terror, Propaganda, Fear