Alla. Ik ga de stad eens in. Kijken naar de GSMs met camera’s, en dan gedegouteerd weer terugkeren omdat ze allemaal te duur zijn.

Ik word zó oud…

11:16   The More Things Change…
oenderd procent mee akkoord

Ik herinner mij dat allemaal als de dag van gisteren. Ik gebruikte al WordPerfect (op een stapel 5 1/4-inch disketten op een PC met 256 K geheugen en geen harddisk) toen WordPerfect nog Satellite Software International was. Mijn serienummer was WP032100248, en ik ken het nog altijd van buiten omdat de support toen gratis was en ik om de haverklap aan de lijn hing met de expert macro’s-maken.

De highlight van de kerstvakantie van 1986 was dat mijn vader een XT van het werk (een Tandy 1000 EX) meegenomen had naar huis én dat WordPerfect Library uitgekomen was en dat ik ùren (dàgen) aan een stuk The Beast kon spelen. Zou iemand behalve mij dat spel nog kennen? Hoeveel mensen zouden er de cursortoetsen mee leren gebruiken hebben?

Ha, de system requirements van deze versie van WordPerfect: 2MHz XT with 384kb free memory, one floppy drive, and any PC video display. Tch…

Teletekst op holland 1 weet mij te zeggen dat ene Koos R. is aangehouden in Amsterdam. Hij was de rechterhand van De Hakkelaar, die de leider was van de Octopus-bende.

Ligt dat aan mij, of klinkt dat net een beetje teveel gelijk een kruising tussen Merlina en Bassie & Adriaan om waar te zijn? Ik heb het hele bericht nagelezen en geen verwijzing gevonden naar Sardonis, dus misschien is het tóch echt.

Jazeker. Ons CMS en de URLs ervan doen hun werk. Allemaal op 1 bij Google:

Filips van Artevelde
Hoorenbaut
Dirk Boncquet
Goudstraat

Why Macs Suck.

Spooky: IP Address Locator

Ik maak eigenlijk heel erg graag foto’s. En als ik op straat loop, kom ik vreselijk veel aardige zaken tegen.

Maar om heel de tijd met de digitale camera op stap te zijn, ’t is ook niet alles. Ik ga morgen (straks) eens kijken wat voor telefoons er zijn die foto’s pakken. Dan kan ik allemaal kleine fotootjes naar mijn weblog posten, haha!

heh heh

Apple’s fans continue to rewrite history
So now that Apple has added audio and video chatting to iChat (AV), Business 2.0 has apparently come to the conclusion that Apple was the first company to get this technology deployed to users. I first used video chat with NetMeeting on Windows several years ago, and I’ve tested various Web cams on Windows ever since, using a Logitech add-on for Windows Messenger and the new MSN Messenger 6 most recently. But hey, now that Apple’s finally caught on to the possibilities, the ~7 million people using OS X are going to do what the ~700 million people using Windows could never do: put the phone companies out of business. Yawn. Think, people.
posted 11:03 AM

Apple benchmark lies
The Apple fanatics just can’t stand it, but those G5 benchmarks are as bogus as a three dollar bill. As always, CNET’s Michael Kanellos does get it, noting in a recent article the ways in which Apple’s supposed “fastest personal computer in the world” is anything but. First, the scores Apple posted for the Intel competition are bogus. According to the Apple-sponsored tests, Dell Computer’s Dimension 8300 with a single 3 GHz Pentium 4 scored 693 in the SPEC floating point test, below Apple’s score of 840 (for a dual processor G5). However, previous (non-Apple) tests show the Intel 3 GHz Pentium 4 scoring 1213 on the floating-point test, while the 3.2GHz version hit 1252; both of these scores are roughly 50 percent faster than Apple’s best dual processor score, and the Intel systems are both using a single processor, no less. Furthermore, floating point is supposedly the area in which PowerPC processors outdo the Intel competition. Heh. On the integer tests, the figures are even further off. Apple’s tests show the dual-processor G5 machine scoring 800, while Dell’s scored only “slightly higher” with 889; too bad Intel actually racked up scores of 1164 and 1221, respectively, for the 3 GHz and 3.2 GHz systems. Game over. Second, Apple did things to illegally tilt the test in the G5’s favor. For example, the G5 was outfitted with faster Serial ATA technology, compared to the standard ATA hard drives used on the Dell. And then there’s the infamous choice of a GCC compiler that Apple uses to develop Mac OS X; meanwhile, no one actually uses this compiler outside of Linux on PCs. Third, there is Apple’s legacy: The company has been lying to its customers ever since Jobs took the company back. A few of the more infamous examples: The (400 MHz) G4 Cube was a “supercomputer” (it wasn’t), the G4 was faster than any PC (remember the “Pentium toasting” commercials?), and virtually ever single promise about release dates ever uttered from Jobs’ mouth proved to be false (the PowerBook 17 was coming in February 2003, remember? It was available in limited quantities in March, but in volume in April, in one recent example). In fact, Apple’s bogus claims are so bald-faced, the company’s been sued several times by shareholders. The stupid part of all this is that the G5 is cool. It really is. Hell, I want one. But Apple gets more bad publicity from the BS than the good feelings from the already converted can possibly overcome. Will the company ever learn?
posted 10:33 PM

en nog!

LWN recently published an article called Five years of Mozilla, an interesting, if-overly positive look at the first half-decade of Mozilla’s life. I wish I could be equally positive, but I’ve watched Code Rush, I’ve read every book there is about Netscape, and I’ve been covering Netscape/Mozilla news at my day job for years, so I know the truth. So, the short story goes like this: Mark Andreessen did not invent Mosaic or even write most of it. When Marc joined up with Jim Clark, he was unable to come up with a compelling new business, so they eventually settled on re-doing Mosaic (this was about their 7th business plan as I recall), so they hired all the Mosaic developers and Netscape (eventually) was born (they tried to use the name Mosaic, but were sued). The code Netscape wrote was complete crap, so when they released the source code to Communicator as open source in 1998, excited developers at the recently established Mozilla.org quickly realized they’d have to restart the project from scratch, which they did in late 1998. A short four years later (ahem), they released the first version of their browser suite, Mozilla 1.0, a bloated but standards-friendly browser with an excellent rendering engine that quickly grabbed less than 0.1 percent of the market (cough). That brings us to the present. Less than a month ago, Mozilla.org realized it had to dramatically change course, decouple all the applications from the suite and, yes, start all over again. This move, while technically sound, should have come four years ago and will likely garner them another 0.1 percent of the market. Woo!

Ik had het nog niet eens door: eergisteren een mail gekregen via de website van onze wijk, van een dame die een huis aan het zoeken was, en wiens oog gevallen was op de Baudelostraat 41-43.

Mailde om te vragen of daar iemand woonde.

Neen, er woont daar al een tijdje niemand meer (sinds de onderpastoor van Sint-Jacobs er niet meer is), en de huizen worden afgebroken om plaats te maken voor vier appartementen voor mensen die het minder breed hebben.

Maar dat is het punt niet: daarnet viel mijn frank pas. Hoe was die dame op deze pagina geraakt? Blijkbaar zit de site sinds recent in Google! Ha!

Wel, verdomme, geïndexeerd toen “huizen” nog onder “geschiedenis” stond. Bah. Ik heb er voorlopig even

if (request.current.URL CONTAINS “geschiedenis/huizen”) request.current.URL=replace(request.current.url,”geschiedenis/”,”home/”,”all”);

bij gezet, ugh yuck bleah, I know.

Al die mensen die Me and Bobby McGee alleen kennen in de versie van Janis Joplin: shame on you! De versie door Kris Kristofferson is zo onnoemelijk veel schoner.

I should get back to programming my C# blogging client. Couldn’t be bothered these last few weeks.

In fact, I’m itching to get my grubby little paws on DirectX. My one regret in PCs is that I’ve never done any graphics programming past BASIC. It was always the next thing I was going to do when I did C++, and by the time Borland C++ 3.1 gave way to Borland C++ for Windows, it was all GDI and stuff and bother. And then came WordPerfect and then hypertext and then Photoshop and then the web and all that lark.

Now I’ve slightly had it with the web (who hasn’t? ha!) and I really want to make something graphical. Something artificial life-y. Yessir.

Note to self: als ik ooit nog eens een kaartje of zo maak: Kievit gebruiken van font.

When I insert an image in a weblog entry and specify it should have a popup windown onClick on the thumbnail, if the image is larger than my screen there’s not much I can do to see the complete image.

Perhaps include an “advanced mode” option to allow turning scrollbars & stuff on/off?

Naaah: I can just edit the javascript myself.

Morgen (straks) CD maken voor de kindjes. En voor ons eigen ook. Zeker erop zetten: Twnty Four Hours From Tulsa in de versie van Gene Pitney. En You Don’t Own Me in de versie van Klaus Nomi.

I’ve been away for some time (big presentation for work, a $1.8 million project, you don’t want to know).

Let’s see what’s different in TypePad land since last week.

Hmm. A new option to see the trouble tickets/cries for help/suggestions I’ve posted since the beta started. Turns out there’s 21 in total, and none of them even got past the stage of “Awaiting Staff Response”. I’m guessing that’s not because staff hasn’t looked at any of these items yet. Probably they’ve just put the system in place.

Nice: I’ve posted tickets 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 22, 26, 29, 30, 37, 40, 42, 61, 104, 165, 181, 190, 396 and just now, 489.

Everything up to 190 was posted on the 17th and the 18th of June, the last-but-one ticket is posted five days later, and the last one is posted a whopping twelve days later. That means there were about double the number of tickets the first two days of the beta as during the last twelve days. Groovy.