After having gone back to my workstation vendor for the 4th time in so many months today with a broken graphics card and after having had to replace the now scarce SMP motherboard, I’ve learned two very valuable lessons:

1. When you buy a workstation for Real Work(tm), get at least a three year on-site guarantee. You might think that you can’t afford the extra EUR150 (or roundabout), but after you tally up all the time you might have to spend fixing your own workstation during its lifetime, you’ll realise that you’re wrong.
2. When given the credit card at the beginning of a four year project to buy the machine of your dreams, DON’T splurge. Buy a somewhat more modest machine, but make the arrangement that you’ll have the right to purchase a brand new computer half way through the project. Remember how fast computing equipment ages.

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But let’s start a tad smaller: Go add your name to this petition against software patents in Europe.

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My Meyers Briggs personality type is ENTJ. I don’t know whether one should pay any attention to these kinds of things. Personally, I believe it’s mostly bullshit. :)

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Download this short movie clip, watch it and wait for the gentleman with the orange top (almost like a carrot, which is orange, with a green TOP).

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This is brilliant. Microsoft Visual C++ violates the ISO C++ standard (at least as far as my 1998 document is concerned) with regards to this very fundamental and simple scoping behaviour, but they do not admit that this is a violation as such. Instead they claim that one can work around this “problem” by using a special compiler switch that disables “language extensions”. However, depending on your configuration, making use of this switch will break compilation of certain Visual C++ headers (ntheader.h IIRC). You have to love this.

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I’ve finally released post XFree86 4.2.99 merge DRI suspend/resume capable Radeon driver snapshots and the adapted patch. Get them fresh here.

Our somewhat new real-time volume renderer, lovingly called the ShellSplatter, is more or less done. Look at the pretty pictures that it makes:

Semi-transparent rendering of human head arteries, with an aneurism! Rendering of a CT-scan of an engine block, whoooo!

That will be all. Thank you Jeeves.

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Another one of my favourite online radio stations shuts down thanks to CARP. Evil Dildo, RIP.

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I’m back from an incredible holiday in good old ZA. Now I just have to survive my article deadline on Friday and then everything will be just dandy. Fortunately there’s RantRadio to keep my industrial ears happy.

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This is brilliant: “I helped blow up a Bali nightclub — by driving my SUV to work every day!” Thanks for the link, Rudolph.

Read the whole article here. Keep in mind that the USA is responsible for a quarter (25%) of the world’s TOTAL oil usage. This and other interesting tidbits such as the fact that the USA also burns 25% of the world’s TOTAL coal are available here.

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Damn it, when will these idiots learn that patents are evil?! This article (which might be Slashdotted at the moment) reports how a certain genetic test for breast cancer can not be performed by a British Columbia hospital anymore because the morons of Myriad Genetics have patented the two genes that can signal whether a woman may develop hereditary breast cancer and have legally threatened the hospital.

How the F*CK can one patent a gene? Nevermind the very apparent stupidity and lack of reason behind this (the gene was already there, the company merely discovered it – there’s NO creative innovation here!): just practically speaking, this is screwing the populace over. This test now costs three times as much, just because Myriad went to the trouble of taking out the patent at the even more idiotic patent office.

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