skoop.dev

A Dream Come True

February 6, 2006

music

A dream come true. Something I’ve said should be happening for years on end is finally going to happen.

Live will again be playing in Paradiso. I’ve seen them there once before, in 1997. Paradiso is the perfect place for a show by Live. And they’re doing it again!!!!!!

Fanclub members have a good chance of getting tickets. Boy, am I glad I’m a fanclub member.

update Live is doing another concert, in the worst venue of The Netherlands: Heineken Music Hall. Ah well, there’s a good chance we’ll still go.
Linux distributions

February 2, 2006

linux, technology

Slackware is a great linux distribution, but better for servers than for desktops in my humble opinion. At the moment, however, I’m running Slackware on my laptop. Though I like to tinker and play with config files etc. lately I’ve been wanting a slightly more solid, user friendly user experience on my laptop. For my server, I don’t care about that, I hardly ever work directly on my server. However, for my laptop I want a bit more.

I used to think Linspire was a good idea, until I recently installed that on a desktop machine with pretty similar specs to my laptop. It was slow as hell. Though it definitely looks very userfriendly, it’s just way to slow on slightly older machines.

So I’ve been looking around. My main demands for this new distribution are: good hardware support – I don’t want to have to fool around with drivers for my intel centrino wireless card anymoregood graphical interface for configuring the system – hardware settings, wireless/network settings, maybe even samba and printing setup using a nice GUI would be goodI prefer KDE over Gnome for some reasonObviously it should still care about saving resources. This is a laptop after all.Preferably, my own partition-system should stay in tact, so I can just move all the data that I want to save to a single partition and only re-install my root partition.

Now, I’ve been looking at two distributions: Vectorlinux and Kubuntu. Vectorlinux is nice because its Slackware-based, and I already know Slackware. Possible downside is that it’s so explicitly aimed on being small and fast that I’m afraid that makes it again less easy to configure (though their website actually claims it’s easy to configure). Unfortunately, they have no Live CD, so I can’t try before installing.

Kubuntu is more aimed at being a simple, graphical distribution. I know it’s slightly slower, at least from my previous experience with Ubuntu, but it is mainly aimed at userfriendliness.

Are there any distributions that I’m missing, that I should look at? Or any opinions on the above-mentioned distributions? I’m open to information here. 🙂
Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha

February 2, 2006

books

Something completely different from The Bourne Identity and American Psycho for me this time. Siddhartha is seen as a legendary book by many, and I can understand why. I literally finished it in a few days (where one day equals approx. an hour and a half during my travel from and to work). Of course, this was due to the fact that it’s only a 152-page book with relatively big letters, but it definitely also had to do with the actual story.

The story itself is definitely interesting. I guess I can read a lot of different stories that are alike, and they will all be interesting, because they offer a certain perspective on life. In this book, you basically follow Siddhartha through life, through his life journey in search of peace and perfection. Finding perfection is far from easy, and Siddhartha experiences this.

Already from an early point in the book one can easily figure out that the message this book is trying to get across is a very buddhist, zen -wisdom- knowledge (a very wise lesson I learned from this book: One can obtain knowledge from others, from teachers, but wisdom can only be obtained by experience).

I guess I had an extra interest in this book due to my (still quite young) interest in zen and buddhism, but I am sure that most people would highly enjoy this book.

Judging from the author biography at the end of the book, I might also enjoy more works by Hesse, so I might try to find some other Hesse books as well. For now, I’m going to continue with ‘Latter Days at Colditz‘, the sequel to ‘The Colditz Story’ that I read earlier.
Surrender

February 1, 2006

music, php

As you might or might not know, over the past 9 months or so I’ve worked on the intranet for the Miloco studios. As I quit my business, I also quit this work. Nick from Miloco told me he would send me a thank you gift. Today, I received this gift. A double platinum Surrender 🙂 🙂 🙂
Comment spam

January 28, 2006

comments, spam, textpattern, weblogging

Though Textpattern is still not a huge target for comment spammers, lately, this website seems to have been discovered by some comment spammers that target textpattern as well. And so began my quest for a blocking system. Before attempting to write one myself, I decided it might be easier to first check if someone already had something in place 🙂

Through this post on the textpattern forum, I came to this anti-comment spam measure. The only “downside” is that you have to maintain your own blacklist (are there any centralized blacklist services yet for spam words?) on your server (or leech of other people’s blacklists, but that’s not good and makes commenting slow). I’ve just implemented this system here and it seems to work quite well, at least with some small testing I’ve done.

Maybe I’ll port over the system to a database-managed blacklist, which might make it slightly easier to maintain.
Internet

January 25, 2006

internet, technology

Today, in the Amsterdam underground.

Approx. 25 year old guy to his travelpartner: “I don’t like the Internet”
Music to code to

January 23, 2006

development, music

zeroK had a nice idea. A top 5 of albums to code to. Here’s mine, in random order (because it depends on the mood):

Underworld – Everything, Everything
Evanescence – Fallen
Eminem – The Eminem Show
Boards of Canada – Music Has The Right To Children
U.N.K.L.E. – Psyence Fiction
Java training

January 21, 2006

java, php, training

Yesterday was the last of a three day Java introduction course. Or actually, one day of UML, and two days of Java. And I have the feeling that I’ve wasted a lot of time.

Luckily, my employer organized the training, so it hasn’t cost me any money. However, with a deadline quite near, it was a lot of wasted time. The UML training was nice, but I don’t expect to start using it any time soon. The first 1.5 days of the Java training were a disappointment. Most of it was OO basics, and though the Java syntax is slightly different, most of it was pretty much the same as PHP(5). Only in the last afternoon did we get some interesting information on what Java can do in terms of application serving, thin client work, and frameworks.

I partly understand why they’d want to move their back-end from PHP to Java (not fully, since PHP is quickly replacing Java as the industry standard for these kinds of things), and for this, I obviously need to gain new skills. I’d gladly learn Java, Java seems quite good and nice. But this course was… boring.
Logging in English

January 18, 2006

weblogging

I recently shut down my dutch web log in favor of this one. Though I’ve always had fun maintaining my dutch weblog, I feel that it’s useless to maintain both. English is my main language on the Internet anyway, and since just about everyone I have contact with that would be remotely interested in what I write on my weblog, I might as well just do it in english.

It does give me one dilemma: Should I write about these typical dutch topics that I’d normally put on my dutch weblog. I’m not sure yet. There’s a good chance that I won’t. That I’ll just leave those topics. Or, if they’re related to the region where I live, I might just write an article for Amersfoort Centraal.

Aside from that one little dilemma, I am happy about my decision. There really was no real need to maintain a seperate dutch weblog.
Becoming a father

January 16, 2006

meta, personal

On mcville I just published an article on becoming a father. I’m quite happy with the result of this article. There will be a second article, a sequel to the current article, just so you know 🙂

Read it here