...

bad memory is now a federal offense

2012-02-07T02:30:00.000-08:00

"A Colorado woman that was ordered by a federal judge to decrypt her laptop hard-drive for police last month, appears to have forgotten her password. If she does not remember the password by month's end, as ordered, she could be held in contempt and jailed until she complies. It appears that bad memory is now a federal offense."

Read more on SlashDot

MIA: Bad Girls

2012-02-05T03:23:00.000-08:00

Internet censorship in the Netherlands

2012-01-31T15:28:00.000-08:00

A court in the Hague has ruled that ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo must block access to thepiratebay.org for their customers. This court doesn't seem to understand how the internet works. Will they order phone companies to block phone lines for criminals planning a bank robbery?

This is what customers get instead.

UN Chief Urges Africa to Respect Gay Rights

2012-01-29T13:56:00.000-08:00

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on African leaders to respect gay rights, and to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Islington girls forced into marriage at the age of nine

2012-01-29T13:52:00.001-08:00

AN alarming number of under-age girls – some as young as nine – are being forced into marriage in Islington, according to a leading campaign group.

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) claim that at least 30 girls in the borough were forced into marriage in 2010.
Islington Tribune, more...

How to get around Twitter resctictions

2012-01-27T02:42:00.001-08:00

Does Twitter censor tweets in your country? Here's how to uncensor them: NextWeb

it gets better

2012-01-26T04:32:00.000-08:00

End piracy, not liberty

2012-01-23T04:54:00.002-08:00

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Man faces five years for ‘God does not exist’ Facebook post

2012-01-23T01:38:00.000-08:00

Atheism is a violation of Indonesian law under the founding principles of the country. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, recognises the right to practice six religions in total: Islam, Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhism and Confucianism. Atheism is, however, illegal.
ZDNet

I thought Indonesia was the one Muslim country that's not barbaric and primitive. I was proved wrong.

Occams razor (in Dutch)

2012-01-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

Sync.nl

Why politicians should never make laws about technology

2012-01-04T03:49:00.000-08:00

As the world gets more and more technical, we can't let Luddites decide the fate of dangerous legislation like SOPA. (InfoWorld)

The Art of Flight

2011-12-30T09:09:00.001-08:00

Hanged, not stoned

2011-12-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

Sakineh Ashtiani will be hanged, not stoned to death, according to an Iranian source. For adultery. A government that punishes people for adultery is absurd and ridiculous. A government that kills its citizens for adultery is barbaric, inhumane, criminal, stupid, ignorant, and should not exist.

Flappie

2011-12-25T04:44:00.000-08:00

Reason's Greetings

2011-12-22T00:28:00.001-08:00

print my new kidney

2011-12-20T13:31:00.000-08:00

What if there's an afterlife, but only for atheists?

2011-11-26T05:19:00.000-08:00

2011-11-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

Multicopter

2011-11-01T10:36:00.001-07:00

The innovators dilemma

2011-10-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs liked The Innovators Dilemma by prof. Clayton Christensen.

Malcolm McDowell

2011-10-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Clockwork Orange is the best movie ever made, Malcolm McDowell played Alex. Here's an interview with Malcolm.

Internet banking security in 2005

2011-10-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

Google robot car

2011-10-11T07:08:00.001-07:00

2011-10-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

2011-10-08T17:35:00.001-07:00

The future of kissing

2011-10-08T06:36:00.000-07:00

2011-10-07T04:44:00.001-07:00

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

10 ways Steve Jobs changed the world

Marlene Dietrich

2011-06-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

Before WW2, Marlene Dietrich stayed in Amsterdam for some time before leaving for the US. She stayed in the hotel of the van Venetie family near the concert hall. The painter Eduard de Froe, a friend of the Van Venetie family, regularly made portraits of hotel guests. He also painted Marlene Dietrich. The painting is part of a De Froe collection that as far as I know, contains a substantial part of De Froes work.

2011-05-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

This is how Israel and the Arab state were defined by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. It's not what happened: Israel immediately took 60% of the area that the UN resolution had given to the Palestinians (the "Arab State").
(picture from wikimedia)

Women are better programmers

2011-05-07T14:07:00.000-07:00

TechCrunch: "1Yes, I am being deliberately sexist here, because in my experience those women who write code are consistently good at it."

Ubuntu 11.04: how to move back to gnome desktop

2011-05-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

I upgraded my MSI Wind to Ubuntu 11.04 today. Within five minutes I decided I want Gnome back: the colorful icons at the left side of the screen are way too distracting, and it's too hard to find the programs and options in the confusing new menus. I hate the fact that you now have to use the windows key of your laptop to use Linux.
This link shows how to move back to Gnome.

little Thor

2011-04-24T13:29:00.001-07:00

Eagles Nest

2011-04-18T17:42:00.001-07:00

Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV

2011-04-16T15:01:00.001-07:00

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

the tiniest camera - and it's disposable

2011-04-12T04:33:00.000-07:00

Had ALS, still fixed bugs

2011-04-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

Adrian Hands had ALS. He couldn't use his hands any more, but using his feet and a clever contraption, he could still code, and he contributed this bug fix to gnome just days before he passed away. His son, in a comment to the bug fix, says he has the coolest dad in the world.

Strangers in the mirror

2011-03-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

The art of flight

2011-02-20T06:01:00.001-08:00

Religion in a box

2011-02-20T04:46:00.001-08:00

like tell sell religion: Religion in a Box

How to film earth from space

2011-02-02T15:17:00.001-08:00

Prinses Maxima

2011-02-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

Oh, I never mentioned, last December I attended a reception at her Royal Highness Princess Maxima's place. Even got to see the little princesses. What I learned is that Princess Maxima is smart, and knowledgeable about SME financing. She'll make an awesome queen. There's an official picture here

Iran executes Dutch citizen

2011-01-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

Iran has executed Dutch national Zahra Bahrami. Bahrami was visiting relatives in Teheran. In 2009 she was arrested after attending demonstrations against the Iranian government. Later, she was accused and convicted of possession of drugs.

AP CNN iReport

Anthony Hopkins

2011-01-29T06:53:00.000-08:00

Nice interview with Anthony Hopkins about The Rite.

database acces from android apps

2011-01-26T10:20:00.000-08:00

There's a great blog post from Kevin Galligan about database access in android apps. He found out that you really should have one database-helper instance. If you have multiple helpers, you'll get errors, and what's worse, you won't know.

clue

2011-01-20T04:50:00.001-08:00

The total amount of clue on the Internet is a fixed constant (Bill
Cheswick, ca. 1994).
The Internet has grown a lot since then (Wietse Venema, 2011).

Fuel, from sunlight

2011-01-19T14:25:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Caltech have created a machine with which they can create fuel from sunlight, or as I call it, "synthetic gasoline". I strongly believe that the future of cars is not oil, is not batteries, not fuel cells, but rather this fuel from sunlight.

The history of gaming

2011-01-19T08:58:00.001-08:00

History of Gaming from Florian Smolka on Vimeo.

Bufferbloat

2011-01-07T06:44:00.000-08:00

Will bufferbloat stop the net?

top quoting in email

2011-01-06T03:45:00.001-08:00

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

how to avoid rush hour traffic

2011-01-02T04:27:00.001-08:00

youtube

guitar robot

2010-12-31T05:30:00.001-08:00

more...

The Woz says Android will dominate

2010-11-18T13:00:00.001-08:00

Steve Wozniak: Android will be the dominant smartphone platform. (Engadget)

Allan Sandage dies

2010-11-17T05:58:00.000-08:00

Allan Sandage died at 84. For decades, Sandage maintained a controversy with Gerard De Vaucouleurs about the size of the universe. Sandage put the Hubble constant at about 55 (km/s/Mpc), De Vaucouleurs put it at 90. In 1979, a group with Marc Aaronson published new data from their satellite radio measurements. Everybody thought this would resolve the controversy, but Aaronson c.s. found 75, which at the time was within the limits of everybody else's data. Sandage did not have to adjust his value of the Hubble constant.
Today, the Hubble constant is supposed to be around 72 (km/s/Mpc).

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani mock execution

2010-11-10T05:40:00.000-08:00

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian mother of two who has been convicted to death by stoning by a court in Iran, was subjected to a mock execution. Iranian authorities so far haven't killed her because of international pressure. To me, this shows that the current government of Iran are barbarians.

In the mean time, Carla Bruni, the wife of French president Sarkozy, has become an Al Quaeda target. France has made burqas illegal in public. Also, Bruni has stepped up for Ashtiani.

Zen and the art of snowboarding

2010-11-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

"Extreme snowboarders don’t want to die. They take protective measures not to, but in certain circumstances, a Giro ski helmet is useless. The only thing that is going to save a snowboarder’s life in a truly ‘extreme’ moment is their ability to act on instinct."

read here

Encryption market set to grow, distributor says

2010-11-04T04:23:00.001-07:00

from Silicon Republic

Cat in kitchen sink

2010-11-03T08:40:00.001-07:00

My cat Pengo sleeps in the kitchen sink.

Report: Iranian authorities give go-ahead to execute woman

2010-11-02T12:26:00.001-07:00

CNN: Authorities in Tehran, Iran, have given the go-ahead to execute a woman who initially was sentenced to death by stoning, according to an activist working on her behalf.

More on CNN

2010-10-31T05:53:00.001-07:00

from c-span

A lego lego printer

2010-10-20T12:34:00.001-07:00

home made space craft

2010-10-04T02:46:00.001-07:00

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Venus

2010-09-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

brilliant video about Venus, and the importance of Galileos discovery that Venus has phases, like the moon.

bus

2010-09-21T03:27:00.000-07:00

The day my kids were late for school...

Herding cats

2010-09-21T03:19:00.001-07:00

100 cats in Ikea

super bus

2010-09-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

From sync.nl

Islam?

2010-09-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

Salman Rushdie about 9/11

Fire in San Bruno

2010-09-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

Friends of mine live three blocks away from the big fire in San Bruno. They have been evacuated, they are in a hotel now. I hope for them their house will not burn. Most or all homes in that area are made of wood.

gravity switched off

2010-09-09T09:23:00.001-07:00

Djigzo partnering with Comodo

2010-08-23T05:26:00.001-07:00

see press release

Rubiks cube

2010-08-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

Did you know that in a Rubiks cube, you cannot rotate the corner cubes arbitrarily? Starting with a solved puzzle, you can rotate a corner piece by one third or by two thirds (put differently, you an rotate it one third clockwise or one third anti-clockwise). But if you rotate it one third clockwise then either another piece has rotated one third anti-clockwise, or twho other pieces have rotated clockwise by one third. This means that the total amount of rotation for a corner piece is always an integral number: the law of integral rotation.

Similarly, you can flip the edge pieces only in an even number. The total amount of "flip" needs to be one, the law of integral flip.

This means that you can assemble the cube in six different ways. First, you can take it apart and reassemble it with one edge piece flipped. Now the cube cannot be solved, you will always end up with one piece flipped.
Also, you can reassemble it with one corner piece rotated clockwise, or anti-clockwise. This gives three different cubes, one that can be solved and two that can't. The total number of different cubes you can assemble is six.

software patents: oracle vs google

2010-08-20T02:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting blog entry on Infoworld.com on the Oracle vs Google patent case.

Did sea life arise twice?

2010-08-18T13:45:00.001-07:00

Slashdot points to an article in the Daily Mail about geologist Dr Adam Maloof who found fossils of sea life of 650 million years old, predating what until now were believed to be fossils of the first sea life, i.e. the first life on earth. If life has arisen twice on earth, it may as well have arisen a dozen times even before 650 million years ago. But even if it's only twice, then this is another proof of Darwins law of evolution. Evolution can fail easily, and just start again. But what about a god who fails, kills his newly created life, waits 100 million years and tries again?

2010-08-18T03:30:00.000-07:00

Open source F1 simulator

2010-08-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

This is cool: a look inside a formula 1 simulator. The name of the F1 team using this simulator is not revealed. The company that built the simulator is Dutch: Cruden and it uses open source software.

(via SlashDot)

god's number is 20

2010-08-09T12:28:00.001-07:00

Solving Rubik's cube in just 20 moves: cube20.org

Net Neutrality

2010-08-08T10:43:00.001-07:00

watch on youtube

new game: cow clicker

2010-07-22T05:18:00.000-07:00

Futex_wait in Eclipse on Linux

2010-07-13T02:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, my Eclipse hangs indefinitely. For those of you who don't know, Eclipse is an editor that programmers use to create code. "Hangs" in this case means that the Eclipse window gets gray and not responsive.
In the system monitor, I see that Java, in which Eclipse runs, is stalled in something called "futex_wait". Futex is something that allows multiple threads/processes to control access to shared resource. There seems to be no way to resolve the problem. Rebooting my computer - I run Ubuntu linux 10.04 - doesn't solve the problem. What does solve the problem every time it occurs here, is the following.

I have a second Eclipse installation on my computer. I start this Eclipse, with a different workspace. Then I open the original workspace, the one I use for my projects, and save it. I exit Eclipse, start the original Eclipse, open the workspace, and presto! it works. If it doesn't, you may have to play with different workspaces in both Eclipses, but eventually, you should be able to solve the futex_wait problem, which apparently is a combination of errors in the workspace and in the Eclipse installation.

The reason I have two Eclipses is that I used to install Eclipse from eclipse.org, but currently, Ubuntu has the same version of Eclipse in their distribution, which is easier to install and upgrade. The drawback is that moving your tools - the update sites - to a new instance of Eclipse is cumbersome and not always straightforward.

Anyway, I can go back to work now :-)

how to debug server apps in Eclipse

2010-06-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

I was debugging a jboss app from eclipse and I wanted to explain to a coworker how to attach the right source files to the app. I knew I did that before, but I forgot, and even Googling didn't find me the info. Finally, after typing exactly the right search terms. I found it. It's on this page. The part I missed is that you have to double click the server name to get to the run time options. I tried alt-clicking the server, which does give you options, but not the one I was looking for. Kind of confusing.

Women dropping out of IT

2010-06-26T12:55:00.001-07:00

Women are dropping out of IT jobs, according to an article in We.News. Quotes: "..women are discouraged and leave for a wide range of blatant and subtle reasons" and "Women's pay, after 15 years, is 11 percent less than men with comparable experience."
Via SlashDot.

Tech cults

2010-06-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

6 tech cults in an article in Infoworld. Nr one is my favorite web site, Slashdot, but I can relate to cult nr two also, or six for that matter.

Maxima: support SME's in developing countries

2010-06-03T02:29:00.001-07:00

Family and friends tech support

2010-06-01T02:08:00.000-07:00

Muhammad

2010-05-31T15:23:00.000-07:00

One of the pictures in the "everybody draw muhammad day" contest: "Burning Mo".

Gamers have control over their dreams

2010-05-27T03:05:00.000-07:00

A story in Slashdot says gamers have control over their dreams. I have control over my dreams more often than not, does that mean I'm a gamer? I don't play video games that often, not recently that is. The concept is cool. Maybe you can teach people to have better control over their dreams based on research on how gamers do it, so you can cure people of nasty nightmares.

Plato 50

2010-05-26T03:43:00.000-07:00

My first experience with social media was Plato. I used it at University of Amsterdam when I was an undergraduate student in AstroPhysics. It was cool, and we used it for chatting and gaming, not for the education program that the University had bought the system for. It was the first time I saw people who were addicted to using a computer for games and social networking. Now, Plato celebrates 50th birthday. It's not really used any more, but people keep it going as a monument, as a starting point for the history of online social media. You can download a terminal client to connect to the Plato server at cyber1.org
(via SlashDot)

How to park your car

2010-05-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

This is how a robot parks its car.

(from slashdot)

One of Jupiter's belts just dissappeared....

2010-05-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

This is weird. You look at the pics of Jupiter one of last year, one of May 9th, and you see that the south belt has gone. This happened after the superior conjuction that recently happend - Jupiter passed behind the sun, as seen from Earth. The article doesn't say what happened with the big red spot, that was part of the south belt as you can see in the left picture.
From TG Daily via Slashdot.

Spring

2010-04-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, by us.

We cannot know what bees know . If I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, I'm throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.

Not all things are possible, but these things are:

You can eat bread, .... more..

spamassassin "date grossly in the future"

2010-04-03T05:05:00.001-07:00

I use spamassassin with my mail server. For a couple of months now, I have seen an excess number of false positives. The reason Spamassassin considers those messages as spam is "date is grossly in the future". I use ntp, so the date is correct. I do have the threshold for marking a message as spam rather low, viz. 3.0, where 5.0 is the default. So far, 3.0 has worked well for me.

After some googling I found that the Spamassassin rule that checks if the date is in the future, uses the regex 20[0-9][0-9]. This sets any date in 2010 as a date "grossly in the future". Now, the release of Spamassassin that I have, has 20[2-9][0-9], which is correct. So why does my Spamassassin use the old rule? I set the threshold to 5.0, but the messages still said "3.0". I restarted Spamassassin a few times, I even restarted Postfix, to no avail. Until I realized that I use Spampd as a daemon to run Spamassassin, and maybe Spamassassin only reloads its local.cf at a Spampd restart. Which turned out to be the case: restarting Spampd solved the issue. I'll set the threshold back to 3.0 and I won't have false positives any more because of "date grossly in the future".

The problem with running your own mail and web server on linux is that it requires so little maintenance. By the time it requires attention, it's been a year or so that you've made the last change, so you don't remember the details. I have to document everything I do because I know that next time I look into it, I won't remember.

Encrypting the disk of your laptop with Ubuntu

2010-04-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

I found it's kind of complicated to have your laptop have a fully encrypted disk. The instructions in the Ubuntu installer are not very intuitive. I found useful guidelines here.

In short:

You need the alternate installer cd for 32 or 64 bits. You need to select "expert install". Then, when you get to the disk partitioner:

- select "manual install"
- create a new partition table on your disk
- create a new partition of about 200Mb that you configure as ext4 file system, mount point is /boot, bootable flag on
- create a new partition of the remainder of your disk, use as "physical volume for encryption".

Now the complicated part.
Use the logical volume manager to create a logical volume group on your encrypted disk partition. In the logical volume group, create two logical volumes: a swap partition of a few Gb - you create a swap partition by creating a partition and selecting swap space - and an ext4 file system for the remainder of the disk. This ext4 file system should have / as the mount point.

Done!

shocking news about Google.

2010-04-01T07:06:00.001-07:00

... or is it?

Software will no longer be patentable in New Zealand

2010-03-31T05:07:00.000-07:00

(via /.) A New Zealand Parliamentary select committee has released a draft bill that explicitly declares that software will no longer be patentable in New Zealand. This is very good news because patenting software is a silly concept in the first place.

cyborg contact lenses

2010-03-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

I'd have these cyborg contact lenses, if only my eyes weren't unsuitable for contacts.

Boris van der Ham

2010-02-27T10:29:00.001-08:00

The internet in 2020

2010-01-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

To borrow from John Lennon: Imagine there's no latency, no spam or phishing, a community of trust. Imagine all the people, able to get online.
Network world

IT failures cost us 6.2 trillion per year.

2009-12-28T05:21:00.000-08:00

ZDnet writes that IT failures globally cost us 6.2 trillion annually. Wow. Somebody clearly is incompetent. The question is, is it all IT people or just the IT managers? Personally, I think it's the bosses of the IT managers who are responsible.

from SlashDot

Battery to power your home?

2009-12-24T16:25:00.001-08:00

Panasonic plans a battery pack that can power your home for a week. It will be available to the general public in 2011. Imagine that you can just store the electricity from your solar panel or wind mill and store it for up to a week. This is a break-through.
From /.

The economics of a free Google phone

2009-12-19T14:06:00.001-08:00

From Gizmodo: The economics of a free Google phone.