Log

We started a new site where we can vent our rage on all things sucky about software:

Software Bashing: We hate software. With a passion:

Fact: All software sucks. We're here to show you exactly why, and just how much it truly sucks. We don't discriminate against vendor or development model; all software sucks. We are relentless. We show no mercy. If the software exists, we will find its suckage, no matter how much it leverages synergetic business potential. Be prepared.

Hopefully we can reach some software authors and make them see the light. If not, at least I was able significantly reduce my blood pressure through the site.

The most annoying thing about email…

When someone sends you an email, and not five minutes later proceeds to call you up or visit you to ask if you've already read their e-mail and what your response is gonna be. Then makes you explain your entire response and says "send me an email about that, will you".

I don't understand gift certificates. I mean, the idea is quite good: A piece of paper that represents a certain value, and which you can then trade for goods of some kind. Much better than dragging all that gold around all the time. So in that regard, gift certificates are an awesome idea. Except that we already have this thingy which is made of paper (most of the time) and that represents a certain value. It's called "money".

The best thing about money is that you can spend it on everything, everywhere. Whereas most gift certificates are only valid in certain stores. The only reason gift certificates make sense is if the giver wants you to spend it in a certain store. I guess that's the reason gift certificates exist: vendor lock-in. Another brilliant way of controlling how and where we spend our money. Capitalism, yay.

I prefer money.

I'll be on vacation from now till the 26th of July.

Since me and my housemate have been living in our house for nearly one and a half years now, we thought it was high time for a house warming party! But who to invite? "Well", we thought, "why not invite everybody"?

When?

Friday, 25th of Januari 2008
Party at our place!

The party starts at basically whatever time you'd like to show up. A general guideline would be around 8 o'clock in the evening, but you're more than welcome earlier. We haven't set an end time for the party, so we can keep going all night long if need be.

Who's invited?

Everybody's invited! You can bring your friends, coworkers, your significant others, your mom, whoever you want. We really don't mind. The more, the merrier, we always say.

Where

The party will be held at our house. The address is:

Lloyd Webberhof 56
3543 EH
Utrecht
The Netherlands

Directions

Here's the place on Google Maps.

If you're coming in by train, there's a train station (Utrecht Terwijde) quite near our house. Once you disembark from the train, go down the stairs and straight ahead over the old tracks and over the little bridge. Go left, past the bicycle stands, then right (yes, you can walk on that street, no worries). You'll pass a park on your left. Take the first street on the right and immediately go left, in between the houses and the tall ugly building. Take the first street on the right. This is the Lloyd Webberhof. Number 56 is all the way at the end, on the right – just follow the music ;-).

If you're coming in by car: From Amersfoort get on the A28 towards Utrecht. From the A28, get on the A27 towards Den Haag/Breda. Take the exit to the A2 towards Utrecht/Amsterdam. On the A2, take exit 7 'Oog in al'. Take the second street on the right, BEFORE crossing the bridge. You'll go all around and over the highway and will end up at a roundabout. Take a left at the roundabout, then take the first street on the right (passing through a tunnel underneath the railway). Out the tunnel, take a left. Take the fifth street on the right. Take the first left, and keep going until you're almost at the end of the road (which ends in a T-section). Before that T-section, you'll see parking spaces on your right, where you can park your car. On the other side of the house bordering the car park is the Lloyd Webberhof.

Tha booze and tha food

Since we have absolutely no idea how many people are going to show up, it would be a good idea to bring your own booze and food. Naturally we'll have some, but we honestly can't say if it'll be enough. So, rather safe than sorry, right?

Sleep

If you want to, you can sleep over at our place. There's plenty of room for people to sleep, but you'd be wise to bring your own sleeping gear (airbed, sleeping bag, pillow), since we don't have many spare beds. Also, you'll probably have to share a room with some other people. If this bothers you, bring a tent or something.

Contact

Wanna know more? Can't find the house on friday? You can send me email and find out my MSN/ICQ address by going to this page: Contact information. In case you need to call me (cause you can't find the house or whatever), my phone number is: +316********. (Update: Removed after the party for obvious reasons :-P)

Present?

No presents please! Unless it's booze for yourself.

The ANGRY Whopper, with ANGRY onions and ANGRY jalapenos!

Hey, BurgerKing?! Your ANGRY advertisement just caused you to loose an ANGRY customer. Angry onions? Spare me. There's no way this ad wasn't made up by an American advertisement company. Well, guess what? I don't like companies making me feel stupid when buying their products, so I'll never buy one of your products again.

Hi, I'm back from Dublin.

Here's a picture of what we did:

I'm off too Dublin for a couple of days. Be back on the 25th. Ahoy mateys!

For the last year and a half, I've been terrorized by mosquitos. At night they even had to queue up and draw a number before they got a chance to drain my blood. I've tried everything to get rid of them, all to no avail. I kept the windows closed, burnt essence, air-tightly closed off my room when I was sure there where no mosquitos in it, bought expensive electrical anti-bug devices and more. Nothing worked. On 'good' nights, I've killed more than twelve pesky buzzers in two hours.

But now I've found the ultimate solution, and I can't believe I didn't think of this before. I'm now sleeping in this:

_{No, this is not a joke.}

"This will be the year of Linux on the desktop!". This has been the topic of tech-predicting articles on the web since at least 2001. It's been repeated (and proved wrong) so many times, it's even become an Internet meme. But ladies and gentlemen, rejoice. For the year of Linux on the desktop has arrived! I have witnessed it with my own eyes. How do I know? Because my 60-year old mom is using Ubuntu on her new laptop!

The new machine

Let me tell you how this came about. My mom, who is 60 years old, used to run Microsoft Windows 2000. It was the only Windows version fast enough for her old 300Mhz machine. I sometimes thought about blowing new life into her machine by installing some version of GNU/Linux, but I was afraid it would be too incomprehensible for her. So I always kept her with Windows.

Now, about three weeks ago, my mom decided she wanted a new computer. She found a nice Packard Bell budget laptop for sale at the local electronics store, so she asked me if it was okay. I told her, "sure, looks like a nice machine". A 1.8 Ghz with 1 Gb of memory ought to be more than enough for her computing-habits: surf the internet, watch a couple of movies online, write a letter, chat on MSN, manage her photos, print a document, write an e-mail.

Windows Vista

The new laptop came pre-installed with Windows Vista, the latest 'hot' operating system from Microsoft. "Great", I thought, as Windows 2000 was becoming a bit of a nuisance. I once thought about installing Windows XP on my mom's old machine, but was afraid it might be too slow. Now she could have the latest Windows version with a clean install on her brand new laptop.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Vista wasn't such a good deal as we thought it was. Even though we're talking about a brand new 'Vista-ready' laptop, the horrors of The First Boot where mind-shattering. Mom's brand new, out-of-the-box laptop was slower than her old 300 Mhz machine! The cause? Windows Vista! Sure, it's a budget laptop, and it's not the fastest machine around, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't make a great gaming platform, but it sure should be enough to run a simple Operating System!

Another big problem was Vista's new 'security'. My mom is a paranoid lady. If she doesn't trust something, she'll back off. And when she doesn't understand something, she won't trust it. You'll never find my mom entering her address, personal or bank information anywhere on the Internet, for instance. This is probably the reason why she never gets spam, nor has she ever been conned. The problem with Windows Vista is that it alerts the user about everything and then makes them choose. A clever way to delegate the burden of responsibility of security to the user instead of the Operating System. After about half an hour of working with Vista, we must have seen at least fourteen security related pop-ups. I personally couldn't make heads nor tails of the 'possible security problems', let alone my mom. It's common knowledge that when you let the user choose each and every time anything happens, they'll quickly adopt the Don't-read-just-click-okay mindset. Hell, I'm a paranoid security freak and even I started to just click okay without reading any of the warnings.

I tried tweaking and configuring Vista so that it would run faster. I tried turning off the annoying security and placing restrictions on the default account the default user uses. I tried and tried and tried, but all that happened was a botched up Vista that was either still incredibly slow, annoying or wouldn't boot anymore. Enough was enough. Time to pop the big question: "Mom… what about Linux?".

Ubuntu installation

My mom agreed to me putting Ubuntu on her laptop. If it wasn't satisfactory, I'd get some illegal version of Windows XP from somewhere and install that instead. "Can I write email/chat on MSN/manage my digital photographs?". Sure! Everything my mom wanted to do on her computer was easy with Ubuntu, so no worries there.

I started my very first Ubuntu installation (I'm a Debian user) and started clicking 'Next'. Everything in the install worked pretty easy, with some notable exceptions:

• The 'Next' button on the next screen didn't work when I left the mouse cursor on it. I had to move the mouse of the button, then back on it, and then I could click it.
• I couldn't partition and format the harddrive. It kept complaining with some kind of error during the creation of the ext3 filesystem. Turns out I had to reboot the machine after creating the partitions, but that wasn't mentioned anywhere.
• When I brought the machine over to my mom's house, there was a particularly nasty problem where the machine would hang during or right after booting. It turned out there was a bad WiFi network around my mom's house somewhere which caused the machine to halt with a 'SOFT BUG ON CPU#0' bug. Removing all the propriety closed source drivers fixed the problem.

After installation, I tested all her hardware: the digital camera, the wireless mouse, etc. Everything worked like a charm. Watching video on the internet? No problem. Listening to internet radio stations? A breeze! Making sure her own software is up-to-date with the latest bug and security fixes? Easy as pushing a button.

The verdict

My mom's verdict: "This is just like Windows, except faster?! I thought I had to do stuff with a lot of white-on-black text, like I always see you do?! This is much easier than I thought, and I can even watch internet movies!". Don't worry mom. I wouldn't have put Ubuntu on your desktop if you'd had to learn how to use the terminal.

She's been working on it for a few days now. Of course, there's some stuff she still needs to learn, simply because the programs are different then what she's used too, but she's coming along just great. My mom already used Thunderbird and Firefox for her emailing and browsing. She's picking up the other new programs fairly quickly.

Would she have been able to do the installation herself? Well, probably yes, if it wasn't for the problems mentioned above. That's more than I can say for Windows, cause she's never been able to install that herself.

So there you have it! Linux on the desktop. 2007 was the year. Kudos to all who predicted it.