Category: Personal

Sauna!

Yesterday we went to a public sauna where it doesn’t matter too much if they’d throw me out (I don’t often go there).

We decided to pick that one because we wanted to tryout our mint crystals!

“Just put them on the stones” I hear all the Finnish sauna people think. Right, indeed! But at most of the Belgian public saunas you are not allowed to bring your own smells.

In Belgium not everybody has his own sauna. And those who do own one usually have a infrared sauna (because those are often smaller in size). I mean, come on, infrared saunas are not real saunas. You can’t put mint crystals on stones, there are no stones involved! I think it’s much more common for Belgian sauna fans to go to a public one instead.

Although not allowed, it’s not uncommon that somebody brings smells. Usually there’s a guy putting smells incognito on stones. After some time all the real sauna fans recognize him of course. Often it’s the same people, so you get to know who’s into that. Usually I’m just an innocent observer who joins the saunas where custom smells are being thrown on the stones. In fact I’m inexperienced with bringing my own smells.

So we waited until there was nobody left in the sauna we picked, it was Sunday evening and stormy, so not a lot of people. Then we emptied a glass, filled it up with some water, put the mint crystals in it, entered the sauna, we threw the glass over the stones, enjoyed, hoped that they wouldn’t throw us out. We didn’t get caught!

Now, don’t get me wrong. At most of the public saunas in Belgium the owner of the place periodically puts a bunch of smells on the stones for an entire half hour. It’s like some sort of a three-hourly event. When that happens a lot of people join that specific sauna of course. They usually give you some oranges and cubes of ice after ten minutes. They circle with a towel to distribute the air. Etc. It’s not that because you are not allowed to bring your own smells, that it sucks. I guess they don’t want you to ruin their saunas with experimental piece of shit smells that some people would bring.

Anyway. The Turkish mint crystals were awesome. After the second time I was so thirsty that I drank a half liter cola and a half liter fresh orange. It was amazingly cold on my body yet I was sweating like mad.

Refreshing!

Don’t forget

I am not asking your newspaper to support an administration.. But I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people..

For I have complete confidence in the response and the dedication of our citizens when they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy from your readers I welcome it. This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, “an error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it”.

We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors and we expect you to point them out when we miss them. Without debate without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed. And no republic can survive.

That is why the Athenian law decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the first amendment, the only business in America specifically protected by the constitution, not primarily to amuse or entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and sentimental, not to simply give the public what it wants, but to inform, to arouse, and to reflect to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mould, and educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

ps. This is an extract from a speech by JFK

Upskirt!

This blog item was done for the sole reason of pissing off some people.

Consequences of SMASHED

An innocent developer will now not only be addicted to girly drinks, like Malibu, he and his girlfriend will also become addicted to drinking the same Whisky as one of the SMASHED members brought to GUADEC this year.

Mint crystals in Istanbul

I finally found what I was looking for at the Istanbul Spice Bazaar (Misir Çarsisi): mint crystals.

For the Nokians and other Finnish sauna freaks reading this, this is the stuff that you want to mix with a little bit of water (else your sauna is way to dry, of course) and then put the mixture on the hot stones. Crystalised mint is a very pure form of mint. Mint in a sauna gives a very cold and cool feeling on your body. Meanwhile your sauna is obviously very hot. You basically think that it’s cold, yet it’s very hot.

Well, with crystlized mint you maximize this. Eucalyptus is nothing compared to mint crystals. Chinese mint comes close, though. But not quite.

The aftermath is that you probably don’t want to jump in ice water after your sauna anymore. Not before adapting to normal temperatures for ten minutes. You wouldn’t be the first who passes out. I mean, your body is in a very confused state: it behaves as if it’s cold, but it sweats as if it’s very hot. The one thing you don’t want to do is to make it very cold suddenly. Unless you are a big dangerous looking Finnish dude, maybe.

I mean, I’m not underestimating the Finnish sauna people. I’ve been to a public one in Helsinki. Woah.

Anyway. The store can send the crystals to your home with DHL, the owner told me.

If any of the Nokians or other Finnish sauna pussies want to know what a real sauna experience is, you can mail them at ucuzcular@gmail.com, and try it.

Privacy in Europe

Obviously, European Youtube users didn’t ask for their youtube usage to be handed over to Viacom Inc.. Who knows what Viacom will do with this highly private data (which contains highly detailed information about people’s interests such as the videos they watch, the various topics they are interested in, and so on)?

I only hope that enough Europeans will formally protest at their country’s privacy agencies and/or at the European institutions. Although, I fear it won’t matter anymore as privacy nowadays has become far less important than Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.

Anyway, please find the contact details for Belgium here.

Every once in a while somebody whines about replacing the x11 clipboard

I just realized that the promise of ipv6 will create a demand for good clipboard integration in console applications! Imagine the very long ipv6 addresses that many Unix/Linux admins will have to move from spreadsheets into configuration text files!

Therefore I propose that we start thinking about a libclipboard library. As a pragmatic bridging solution we could easily make a small DBus service that not converts but bridges the target requests to the x11 clipboard owner. This service would just play as a proxy rather than something that collects and harvests x11 clipboard targets (the x11 clipboard supports requesting the owner to convert to a desired format, getting a list of available formats, etc – called targets -).

Meanwhile we could let console applications finally enjoy a decent clipboard that can actually make it possible for a console application to request multiple formats. Sounds better than xterm hacks to me.

Before continuing with reading, do this in your mind:

If you are a religious vim user:

export EDITOR=vim

If you are a religious Emacs user:

export EDITOR="killall -9 vim; emacs"

Examples:

  • Select text in Firefox, paste as HTML source in $EDITOR
  • Select two columns and twenty rows in a spreadsheet application, and paste as a comma separated list in $EDITOR

Maybe even have an easy to configure filter application that on-the-fly converts just a copy source into a format that the admin wants in his configuration text file. You know how management always delivers things like IP addresses in spreadsheet format (it’s just a silly example, really).

We could also let such a library solve the problem of two applications running on the same computer being displayed on a remote X11 server having to transfer large clipboards over the X11 protocol (over the wire).

I still think PRIMARY and SECONDARY are broken concepts by design. But I also agree that this is subjective (but really, let’s be honest about it, it’s broken. Seriously).

Of course I realize that whether or not I’m right about such a solution only depends on somebody (like me) doing it rather than just blogging about it. I have always been tempted to try to start something. Who knows someday I will?

On the act of subverting the British nation

A few days ago I made a completely correct analysis of how the Schuko standard for power sockets and plugs, used on the continent of Europe, is superior to the British BS1363 standard.

Today I noticed the fruits of our hard work of trying to convert the British people to the fine uses and traditions of the people who live on the European continent. I saw a carton “Gezeefde Tomaten / Purée de Tomates” at a supermarket in Durham UK.

Just like how politics in Belgium work we have started applying the principle of divide and conqueror: instead of using their native language English, we are now sending them products with dual language branding and descriptions. Just like in our own country. This introduces doubt about their English identity. To divide you first need to generate fear and doubt (Am I really English? I’m not Welsh either? Maybe I’m Dutch? Maybe French!! Wouh!). Then you conqueror them by telling them, with a soft voice:

No no, you are Europe.

Works great! Just make them believe those Belgian “Purée de Tomates or Gezeefde Tomaten” are good. Once they grasped that, tell them: “but the tomatoes and the brand itself (Valfrutta) actually comes from Italy”. That’ll completely confuse them! Then relax them by softly putting your hand on their forehead and say: you are European, don’t be afraid child.

ps. Dear people who don’t live in Europe: this post is sarcasm, irony, a joke.

God save the Queen

People living somewhere on the British Islands.

This is a device that produces static electricity

You plug a power plug in a power socket

I have marked on this image of the power plug where the static electricity gets delivered into the power socket

Let me clarify my point:

  • Washing machines produce static electricity
  • Walls and sockets don’t produce static electricity

Let me add another point that I’m trying to make here

  • The dangerous looking pin in European sockets is not dangerous at all

Also note that the Germans and the Dutch use sockets that don’t have the dangerous looking pin. Both types of sockets and both types of plugs are compatible with each other. European continental standardisation is very useful sometimes.

Let’s take a look at the European plug and the location where it delivers the static electricity to the wall socket.

Let’s now compare that with an actual photo of a British Island’s (Irish guys use it too) plug.

My adult male finger (I have very thick fingers compared to Tinne’s skinny fingers and Tinne has thick fingers compared to a small child’s fingers) fitted in the space. It was possible for me to fully touch the static electricity pin. The device was powered on so the two pins for delivering the actual electricity where completely connected.

Now let’s see some actual photos of the European plug in action. Decide for yourself.



The solution is to convert those crazy English, Irish, Northern Irish, Scotts and Welshman (boy, I do hope I didn’t forget anybody) to the European system :-)

Dear English-only speaking audience

We receive messages like this quite frequently:

Please only post in English on planet gnome or at least make non-english posts contain english translations.

If you don’t wish that posts like this are syndicated, please have the planet gnome administrator (jdub) pull a certain tag from your blog.

Thanks for understanding.

Note that Jeff Waugh (maintainer of planet-gnome) has indicated several times that he wants planet-gnome to be a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors (top-right of the site). That includes “lives”, not just “work”, and for that reason planet-gnome does not filter based on tags like “GNOME”.

This however means that you get to read the personal blogs of the people who are syndicated. Very often they asked specifically about the use of non-English languages and about the fact that content is not always going to be related to GNOME at all. Very often it has been pointed out that is precisely the very idea of planet-gnome.

This means that planet-gnome is meant to have posts in different languages, is meant to have posts that are not about GNOME at all. If that’s not comfortable for you, then please either read another website or install filters.

I’m not planning to change my personal blog because planet-gnome doesn’t use my categories. Although I agree with and like its policies, I didn’t decide them. Please don’t complain to the non-English speaking blog writers who are syndicated on planet-gnome.

Durham, a beautiful city

Since last week I’m staying in Durham together with Tinne for the next two months.

Tinne went to Durham last month because she’s doing her work placement. University college students in Belgium have to do three months of work placement in order to graduate. Tinne studies languages, so it was especially interesting to do her work placement in another country.

For me it doesn’t matter where I do my job, so I decided to join her in Durham city. We made some pictures to make you guys jealous.

Cathedral, taken from Framwellgate Bridge

I kinda wonder why we organized Guadec 2007 in Birmingham, given that Durham is such a beautiful city.

Wed 2008/Mar/12

  • I’m surrounded by beautiful hackers these days.








Hmm, yeah, nice try. Maybe I’m idd nonetheless a little bit jealous on Federico.

All your privacy are belong to me!

I’ve been using Google analytics for Tinymail.org for a few months now.

I was mostly interested in results per city. As expected is Helsinki scoring high. Since a lot of Modest’s developers live in Spain there are a few cities with a lot of visits in Spain too. Now I know where you guys live!

Nothing surprising. Except maybe the visitors from the Indian cities Hyderabad and Bangalore. I wonder what Indian company is working on a mobile E-mail client? The visitors from South America are interesting too! Are you guys working on one for OLPC?

I also have a lot of Brooklyn and Tempe visitors. That’s Red Hat, right?

What Nokia division can we find in Oulu by the way? And Sydney, is that jdub visiting?

Cute and I guess typical are all European cities. All major cities in Europe had a lot of visitors. Just never really a lot, unless they are located in Finland and are called either Helsinki or Oulu.

With one single exception for Europe: a city in my own country, Heist-Op-Den-Berg. So, who’s that Tinymail fan in Heist-Op-Den-Berg? Let’s get a drink somewhere? What about FOSDEM this year? It was not me, my own home city scored like all other European cities.

Disappointing is Russia. The visits for all of Russia compares to one European city, all Russian visitors came from either Moscow, Tula or Lisichansk. In Russia E-mail libraries code you?

I had three visits from Honolulu!

What is strange is that Google analytic’s analysis of amount of visitors doesn’t really match my actual Apache logs if I manually count them. Something like 60% less unique visits on Google analytics. I wonder at what point will Google analytics start grouping the hits of a user as an actual visit?

Open-source-facts

In follow-up to what Luis wrote, i just took a look at open-source-facts and liked it a lot.

More space for hacking

I cleaned up my desk once more:

More space for hacking, less for bugs.

Absinthe

I, Philip, do hereby pledge to practice absinth-tinence by remaining absinth-tinent from Absinthe …

Since absinthe incidents in many instances induce incipient synesthetic inspiration and sinister synthetic insistence on sin, I sincerely insist I will be absent from instances of Absinthe ingestion, this instant.

Just thoughts

My little Tinymail is becoming like a small fire that I just need to keep burning. Various people are contributing both large parts and small improvements to it. We’re releasing pre-releases and those are working increasingly well. I received less requests for improvements based on the pre-releases as expected. It seems most people are still using ‘trunk’ to learn about Tinymail. At GUADEC a lot of people told me that if there would be just a release, they would start using it. Well, now there are releases (although, pre-releases), yet I’m seeing no significant differences here. The ‘release often, release quickly’ mantra is not always true, it seems. I rather think that if a project is useful, it’ll be used. If not, it wont. Full stop.

To increase users of Tinymail I think that in stead of rushing to make a clean release I rather have to focus on supporting it on SymbianOS and WinCE, showing that you can build a client with it (which is what Modest is doing, and more likewise clients will follow soon), support higher programming languages and models and having good documentation. In other words: adding value. In the end is “a release” just a wrapper for that value in my opinion. Although I believe that for packagers and distributions “a release” by itself add a lot of value.

I already know what I have to do to create more site visitors: making fancy looking video demos, being part of GMAE and its press releases, getting my blog aggregated on the planets, being mentioned by Lortie (+4000 unique visitors that day!), providing easily browsable sourcecode (you’d be surprised to know how many people seems to be just reading Tinymail’s code via the trac source code browser daily) and again having good documentation (increases the hits coming from search engines). Just a lot of visitors is not really what I’m seeking for as the project maintainer. Rather people who’ll either contribute, learn from the code (the browsable-code visitors) or people who’ll want to use it for their own projects.

To get more contributors I try to get as much companies involved as possible. The major contributors to Tinymail (other than me, of course) so far have been Codethink, Nokia, Openismus and Igalia. Let’s try to get some more such organizations interested. I would love to see more individuals like contractors, students and hobbyists getting involved. I just have no idea how to get them to be interested. I think the problem is that creating an E-mail client is usually a project for a small or medium sized team of people. Although with Tinymail’s API available in higher programming languages will this be doable as a one person activity. Or, that’s the idea.

RE: Evo Morales on the Daily Show

Online version of the Interview that Miguel recently referred to.

Mindstorm … s

You buy a bunch of Lego Mindstorms bricks and you start building a robot to remotely control your mobile devices.

Well, that’s the official explanation.

The actual explanation is that this is what happens when you are 26 years of age, your girlfriend tells you you are almost 30 and that when you are 30 it’s the end of your youth (although, people of that age usually tell me this ain’t true), you are a nerd of the type software developer (and quite addicted to this too), you have your own business and therefore your accountant asks to make some expenses (like .. buying a Mindstorms robot! No?).

I acknowledge it’s probably just an early midlife crisis. Boys want to make things, fiddle with stuff, put things together. Whereas girls, girls just wanna have fun. I’m totally guilty of being a boy. I know. (although, I’m sure a lot of girls enjoy making things too — before I get killed by a group of feminists –).

Now that the model itself is finished, I clearly see what I am becoming: an old lonely dude who plays with trains, electricity stuff and mostly breaks things just to put them back together. I’ll probably die getting electrocuted while trying to take apart a by that time old holographic 3D gesture recognizing display, as I’m trying to figure out whether some evil corporation is spying on its customers by using such electronic devices.

But, isn’t that cute? No? I mean, Tinne, seriously, now I must be ‘like’ a younger dude, no? I have been playing with toys for kids aged 11 to 16 (that’s what the Lego box’s age indicator says, so it must be true). Anyway, the only way that it can get worse now, is if I’ll start writing software for this Lego model. I’ll have a camera view on my screen where I can mouse-over so that the robot will follow my mouse pointer. With a library like GStreamer I can let that camera image go efficiently over a distance. Sending some commands over a socket ain’t very hard.

About the bot itself: it has three axis. One (the X one) uses normal wheels, two others (Y and Z) are built on top of the chassis. All axis are controlled by Mindstorms motors. The Mindstorms computer thing is integrated in the model, there’s a touch sensor on one of the axis (the Z one). I don’t yet have this software, that’s the next thing I’ll (try to) finish. I’ve spend ~ 450 euros on this thing (the normal Mindstorms package didn’t have enough bricks, but the programmable thing, the sensors and the motors are ~ 300 euros).

But hey, 450 euros for something that you could give to a little fellow as soon as you are done playing with it? That’s not much for multi functional and multi age toys! I mean, if I get bored of this thing, I can make another robot with it. If you have a son (or a technical minded daughter), you can let him (or her) play with the Lego bricks while watching his (her) brains grow! You can’t convince me that today’s computer games are better for training a kid’s brain than Lego.

After the kid is finished building the bot, you can make the software for it. Hah! Perfect father – son (or daughter) relationship. You actually help him make his toys, and you enjoy doing that! And … he’ll get interested in software development, join one of the many free software communities, he’ll find a job in IT as programmer, etc etc.

Lego rocks!

Belgium for sale on EBay, for one euro!

Regretfully, they removed the EBay article, so I can’t link to it. This was the original text:

Kingdom in several (3) parts, can be bought as a whole ( not recommended), can be bought in parts.

I. Flanders

highly traficated and very heterogeneous architecture (as well art nouveau as spanish hacienda style) , hard working people understanding American english ( due to an overdose of episodes of Dallas), catholic but not fanatic. Be aware some Flemish ( not to confond with Amish) are ‘ practiserende Vlamingen’ and you recognise them easily by their Lion Flags (hand model or life size flag). As a whole easy to govern provided that you dont cut mobile phone traffic or television broadcasting. If you do so you will see what. Oh yes, in possesion of a seaside (50 kilometres) and flashpilars ( ‘flitspalen’). What to say, when you meet them: it is the one and the other ( ‘t is t’ een en t’ander) in case of emergency, Say it is not true ( Zeg dat het niet waar is) in all other circumstances.

II. Brussels

Lively village with nineteen lord mayors and a government on top. The real Babylon with several coexisting minorities.Nice realestate taken by National, Regional and European institutions.Still opportunities in the Bois de la Cambre for de luxe flats. Possibility to establish farming facilities both on Grand Place, De Brouckère, Place Rogier and on the Boulevards ( contact mr. Pascal Smet). What to say when meeting with a Brussels subject: Hello good morning (Zeg, draag ik soms iets van U. Quoi tu veut ma photo!)

III. Wallonia

First become member of Parti Socialiste which makes it easier in many ways to establish your situation. Has plenty of water ( sometimes sparkling), tons of old iron, acres of woods, several homebrews, ingenious shipptraffic ( The Pending Slope of Roncquiers), The Shape head quarters (tax fee cigarettes!) and German speaking backyard. In general the Wallons are more philosophical and relaxed guys then the Flemish. Plenty of opportunities but find out yourself. What to say if you bump into a Wallon: Hide the Flemish are there!

So you see there is plenty of choice. Beware there is a 300 billion of National Debt which has still to be divided under the three, but that wil be fixed soon after the Duchess Valley Talks ( het beraad van Hertoginnendal).

Free premium: the king and his court ( costs not included)