Present Perfect

Yesterday we got a visit from Daniel Fischer who works on Warsaw Pakt. He showed us some of what it can do, along with a cool video of a performance being done with it where a person dancing is being traced in real time, and a generated image gets projected on a big screen behind her. At some point it was generating an outline for the shadow that acted like a contracting shell. So she would extend her arms, causing the outline to grow organically, and then shrink back around her later on. Hard to explain, and I'd link to the video which is supposed to be on the site but I can't find it.

Anyways, afterwards we met for dinner at our favourite tapas place again. There Johan informed us that he 'disliked birthdays'. Apparently I wasn't the first to be informed of his dislike and I had the same 'huh ?' question as everyone before me. The observing reader will have realized by now that it was, in fact, Johan's birthday.

So we sang a song and then Johan got to decide what to do that evening. So we ended up drinking a cocktail in the city, then a cocktail by the beach (which is where 'they' got an Orgy, which you can only order if there's at least four people ordering it), and then that got rounded off with a nightly swimming session by Johan, Wim and Ismael. I was happy enough just watching their clothes for them since some guy was taking pictures and circling around us.

So, happy birthday to a not-quite-so-young-anymore turnip.

Yesterday we got a visit from Daniel Fischer who works on Warsaw Pakt. He showed us some of what it can do, along with a cool video of a performance...

Here I come baby !

I am going to an old friend's wedding. I'll be in Boston between the 16th and the 19th of September. Tickets were 426 euro, could have been worse. If you have waited to interview me for a job, now is a good time to speak up. And if I know you in some capacity unrelated to job interviews, let's do lunch. I'll have my people contact yours.

Here I come baby ! I am going to an old friend's wedding. I'll be in Boston between the 16th and the 19th of September. Tickets were 426 euro, could...

Day 3 at the Pukkelpop festival. A short dead moment, only crap bands on right now, so took some time to sit down with the laptop and check our Fluendo stream of the KDE devel conference. Seems to be going very well. Since Wim optimized the Theora codec for MMX they could make the video size a bit larger, and it looks good. About 50 people on.

Saw lots of friends and acquaintances here, which was unexpected. Peter and Tinneke decided to come as well for three days, which is great ! Jeroen and Annelies dropped by yesterday, and I ran into lots more. Sad though that our favourite rock chick Willeke was sick yesterday, but she did manage to get their in time for our favourite singer, Greg Dulli. She's back home now though, recovering.

Anyway, more later, time to check some more bands.

Day 3 at the Pukkelpop festival. A short dead moment, only crap bands on right now, so took some time to sit down with the laptop and check our Fluendo...

Two weeks ago, when planning to go to the movies, I saw that the big movie theatre here that has original versions was showing Secretary. Now, I had wanted to see this movie ever since I missed it in Belgium when it first came out, boring DVD rental store owners to death with my question "Is that movie in yet ?". Spain really is behind on some movie release schedules, but this one takes the crown.

Anyway, I'm not complaining ! Went to see it, and while it might not have lived up to two years of built up expectations, it's still easily about the best movie I've seen this year. Dark, romantic, funny and edgy.

This weekend we went to the movies with a bunch of us, so we had to settle for a "ok-for-everyone" type of movie. Two of us went to see Spiderman 2, but Kristien managed to drag me to "El Rey Arturo" with her on the promise that we'd see Spiderman 2 together if I could arrange for her to see the first one somehow. Women :)

The movie itself was quite a letdown. As far as I could follow the story, there seemed to be some huge plotholes in it. Keira looks quite dashing dressed in so little, but doesn't get a lot of screen time. The scene on the frozen lake was pretty spectacular though. Other than that, some heavy over-the-top acting. Arthur himself looked eerily like Alan Rickman, and I also couldn't put away the feeling that I had seen this guy before in something else. IMDB comes to the rescue - apparently he played the main character in Privateer 2 ! I should break out that game and try it again, I remember not playing it completely to the end. Wonder if WINE would manage it...

Two weeks ago, when planning to go to the movies, I saw that the big movie theatre here that has original versions was showing Secretary. Now, I had wanted to...

So, on saturday I decided to spend some time to figure out my network trouble at home. I finally figured out that the real symptom was my ADSL router rebooting. At some points the lights lock up, it keeps at it for about a minute, and then it reboots itself. No clue why, but at least I finally have something I can measure to see how my network is doing: the uptime of my router.

Armed with that piece of information, I unplugged everything from the network. I only used my laptop over wireless. Sure enough, ADSL router works fine for over an hour. I add one hub and one machine. Things keep working for more than an hour. And so I go on until I connect the small QBIC box that since a short time acts like the home server. And things fall apart.

To cut a long story short, this machine has an on-board network adapter that doesn't work, and with two different PCI NIC's it messes up the network badly enough to make the router crash.

I should also say that my appartment isn't grounded anywhere - which is typical in Spain. I had started thinking about adding a ground cable myself.

I was considering giving up, and move the home server back to the crappy AMD that overheats as soon as it runs 100% busy for a minute and starts beeping like crazy, and can only take 32 GB disks. I even got so far as tracking down and installing the latest (unstable beta) BIOS for it, which made it not halt on big drives, but it just reboots as soon as it loads the kernel.

Luckily at that point I remembered I still have some USB network adapters lying around. I hoped the USB adapter given the lower signals it works with would not cause problems on the network wrt. ground issues. And yes, using that my routers is a lot more stable. It still reboots sometimes, but it's more in the six hour range than the ten minutes. Enough to be bearable until I either add grounding myself or get someone to do it.

Only one drawback left in the meantime - even though the network adapter claims it can do 100Mbit, I cannot get it above 5 mbit of actual throughput...

Now let's hope I'm clear of network/harddisk/server issues for some time...

So, on saturday I decided to spend some time to figure out my network trouble at home. I finally figured out that the real symptom was my ADSL router rebooting....