Remember when you spit in my mouth when I was sleeping? Well, I was awake.


eBay user andy46477 has a funny way to leave feedback to eBay sellers, in a way which reminds of the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy.

Man, the weather out here really sucks : nothing but rain since a month. And one can't really do large works in the outdoors without a rain shower. Luckily, Buienradar.nl shows a radar image of the rainfall, so you know if you have time to mown the lawn without getting wet.

What are the games you played when you started out with computers ? On my XT not much fancy games were available, but once the 386 machines were there, most games were astounding. The first ones, I guess, where Wolfenstein and Prince of Persia, quickly followed by Doom. Of course there was Moria, Omega and Nethack, but these couldn't compete with the first person shooter games out there.


Duke Nukem is my all-time favourite : heavily bashed in the DukeNukem vs Quake popularity battles, it still holds the trophy for most addictive and thrilling game I ever played. I quickly changed the sound effects in the game by 'Aliens' samples, which made the creepy atmosphere complete.


But all these were 2D sprite based games. Quake was there to change all of that. I never found the game as compelling as Duke, and the first game was overall critisized over its too dark environment, but the game set a standard for its extendibility : the number of add-ons were impressive. New areas, new skins, and especially : new gamebots. Playing a gamebot is like playing another person, that is if you had a bot with some decent AI, and definitively beat shooting grunts. Other things were complete revamps of the game, like Future vs Fantasy Quake, which transformed Quake into a role playing game with new races and new weapons.


I recently installed Quake onto my desktop, for nostalgic sake. GLQuake runs quite good, if you count that the game is about 10 years old. Unfortunately, the game doesn't provide sound. GLQuake is compiled with OSS support only, whereas modern Linuxes have ALSA on board. The FAQ mentions the OSS emulation module snd-pcm-oss, but loading this one doesn't help much. Has someone else tackled this already ?

How do you know when your subway map is too dense ? When you're able to draw figures on the subway map, animals actually, as in London. Nice way to keep yourself busy on those long voyages.

Can you make something out of this image ? It is part of a BBC World advertisement campaign. Don't worry if you can't make out anything of it; it took me five minutes to see what was going on.


This link might explain alot, and contains pictures that are more easily to spot, but don't click too soon on the last link (might feel like a spoiler). Great advertisement.

Dusso.com has some great high resolution images of the Naboo and Coruscant planets.

Another uptime record :
[root #/ ] w
9:23am up 1396 days, 17:21, 15 users, load average: 1.36, 1.07, 0.94

This uptime beats by far the previous record. This machine runs an old copy of HP/UX 10.20 and is still fairly used, too. To be fair, I don't like machines with such big uptimes : they're old, have a non-standard setup and configuration and go mostly unpatched through life.

How do you get to sleep at night, when your brain is still working in overdrive, digesting the stress from the previous work day ? Some people use ambient music, composed from samples and recordings of naturally occurring sounds, like wind, water or birds, or music like new age.


I like dark ambient. It's the darker, creepier opponent of the 'regular' ambient music. The king of dark ambient is Lustmord, and the album 'The Place Where the Black Stars Hang' has been my favourite for years. I recently searched for some other dark ambient recordings, and this is what I found :


* 'Celestial Geometries' from Oophoi & Tau Ceti, an enigmatic and deep album of slow dynamics, ceremonial intensity and methodical pacing. Synth pads grow, thicken and gentley shift, a creature calls from the distance through a mist of reverb and echo, harmonics alternately become dense then fall away to a shiny smooth ribbon of sound. This album does not lead, but stays right with us as we navigate a way through whatever scenario the composition brings out: exploring the surface of some distant dead planet, or as the title implies, traversing some great distance in the vacum of space.


* 'The Magnificent Void' by Steve Roach is truely deep space music : a sonic journey to the true depths of inner space and beyond that flows through you,making you not a passive listener but part of the music.


* 'Nostromo' by Sleep Research Facility : by far the best album, ultra deep ambience, based on the first 8 minutes of the movie `ALIEN` which depicts the deep space haulage vessel slowly moving through the void. The disc takes you through a slow trip into the ship via tracks DECK A through E, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the `NOSTROMO`. Colossal dark ambience from the abyss, with beautiful artwork that evokes the sinister atmosphere of the ship.

This site has listed everyone's PIN code number. It even contains the pincodes of my mobile, and my bank card. Shocking ;)

If you use the 'Search' option on your browser to look for articles on Neural Networks or "Connectionism" (which is another name for the same subject), you will find a great many sites explaining what they are and how they work. Unfortunately, they all seem to be written by mathematicians, all of whom speak Double Dutch. This is fine, providing you speak fluent higher mathematics, but when I wanted to find out how they worked, I looked from a programmer's point of view. What if I really wanted to find program source code, would I find any? Here, the idiots guide to neural networks comes to aid.