Kids.

You’re at work having a productive day, and you’re just about to start with a meeting that you really need to take part in. At that point you get a phone call that your cute-as-a-button daughter has regurgitated three days worth of lunch at the day-care and that you have to come pick her up pronto. What do you do?

You flip that huge red Infinite-Patience(tm) switch, smile, and go pick her up. After changing the N-th diarrhoea nappy (diarrhea diaper to the more American-inclined readers) that has been filled to bursting with nose-destroying evilness but has fortunately only started leaking, and having to catch yet more regurgitated dinner in your hands, you’re still smiling. When this happens again in a few weeks time, you just reach for that big red switch again.

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My webhoster secretly disabled catch-all email addresses for email. Coincidentally, this is how I was forwarding everything to my gmail account, which means that all mail to my domain bounced for at least a few days. If you left a comment on this blog, or somehow have the feeling that I’m ignoring you, please resend your mail.

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I just discovered that videos can now be uploaded to a Picasa2 web album and are shown in a flash-plugin, a la YouTube and Google Video. I’m probably the last kid on the block to know this, but maybe there are blocks where the kids are even more retarded, hence this post.

See you around.

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Because I could, I went and exported all posts and comments from my old Livejournal blog (it was still alive!) with ljarchive and imported everything into this here shiny new weblog. If you’re into that type of thing, you can now go back as far as May 2001, or read this post about the BRAND SPANKING NEW Mozilla 0.9.9 release (by a very naive idealist open source standards zealot), or even this gem lamenting the supernatural amounts of rain in NL!

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vtkFlRenderWindowInteractor is a VTK class (actually FLTK too, but it helps to think of it as VTK) that enables VTK to render to and interact with your FLTK application. It is based on code by David Pont (the code was then called FlvtkInteractorWindow) which in its turn was partly based on the wxVTK code by David D. Marshall and Brian Todd. I reworked the code extensively to be simpler, more robust and bug-free(tm). It should always be available from http://cpbotha.net/vtkFlRenderWindowInteractor.html .

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See this Boing Boing post.

This is too primitive for words. Get a grip people. Religion is passé, getting all up in arms about your particular backwater religious flavour or icon is just barbaric.

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Four days ahead of time, the ADSL has been activated at my new house. I’ve been migrated to a different network operator (I used to be on the Tiscali network, now on BBNed) and the line has been “opened”. Distance to the exchange seems to have quite an effect, I’m connected at 5472 kbps downstream and 928 kbps upstream. According to http://pcdb.bbned.nl/, I’m 1.6km from the exchange. A rough calculation on my downstream attenuation of 46db, yields an estimated distance of 3.3km. I’ll sort this out later to make sure that it’s just the distance working me over, and not some misconfiguration somewhere.

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NOTE: All the linux machines that I work with are still running Debian Stable (aka Woody aka Linux 1958) and im2avi happily works on these machines. Some users have reported getting it to run on newer machines, some users have reported not being able to. At some stage, I’ll spend some time on a newer Linux distribution and update everything to run out of the box on such machines. Until then, you are primarily on your own.

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envedit is a Windows Environment Editor. Use it to edit / set all your user and system environment variables, such as the PATH. I made this tool as the built-in Windows editor (Start | Control Panel | System | Advanced | Environment Variables) is definitely one of the worst user interface examples ever created.

envedit is different from other environment editor tools in that it offers two free-form edit windows. Changes to the complete text will be parsed and applied to the Windows environment keys in the registry. See the screenshot below:

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One of the complications of moving is that one’s internet connection can take its sweet time to catch up with one’s new location. For the past two weeks, I’ve been living off 64kbit/s capped UMTS (i.e. shit-slow mobile internet) at the new place. It looks like I might be rescued in another week or so by my old and generous link!

Marvel at the glory of my ADSL order status:

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