Personal

It's that time of the year to be merry and to put up Christmas decorations.

Yesterday we happily dug out our Christmas tree and decorations and put them up in the living room.

Soon after we unboxed the tree, we not so merrily realized that it was way too small for our new apartment. It was dwarfed by the space around it and it looked more like weed sprouting out from the carpet than like a tall fir tree!

Just returned from a life changing, perspective shifting trip to the Indian subcontinent.

You can find a detailed account of what happened here.

I just added a feature and fixed a bug in soothsayer. Nothing special about that, one would think.

What makes this bug significant is that it affected the simulator component. soothsayer comes with a simulator program that takes a file and reads each character from the input file and sends it to the soothsayer prediction engine. The simulator counts the number of key presses required to enter the desired text using the soothsayer prediction engine and the number of key presses required to enter the same text with no prediction enabled.

It's not something I usually do. It is actually something I have never done. So please indulge me for a few bytes of text.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is now time for a shameless plug.

Soothsayer 0.4 has been released. You can head over to the recently redesigned soothsayer project website to learn more about the latest release and try it out for yourself.

I recently redesigned the look of the soothsayer project website. The redesign was very much needed. The previous choice of colours was very bad. What was I thinking when I decided on orange, pink and red?

The site looks sleek and neat as it is, but I would like to add some icons. I think stylized icons would enhance the site's appeal. I am leaning towards reusing the same colour of the logo for the icons...

Well, time for some inkscape experimenting.

It is official. The AIX operating system has taken that special place in my heart that was once reserved to Windows.

That's right! AIX is now the operating system that I have most hatred and contempt for.

What kind of operating system is not capable of performing the most basic function of killing a process?

You would hope that the answer to that question would be 'None'

Take a look at the following `topas' output:

Topas Monitor for host:    henk3                EVENTS/QUEUES    FILE/TTY
Mon Jul 16 15:28:48 2007   Interval:  2         Cswitch    5099  Readch      988

What is it with rocket science that fascinates people? Surely, most people nowadays appreciate that there are many other disciplines that are just as hard as rocket science. But the expression 'It's not rocket science, after all' has stuck around.

One field of scientific endevour that is surely as hard as rocket science (if not much much harder) is robotics. Robotics combines tough hardware and software problems. Typical robotics problem are hard when taken individually. In fact, they are usually NP-hard, when talking about software problems.

Listening to Part of the Process, Morcheeba. Used to listen to this song a lot, a few years back. It's funny how simple, little things can take you back to your past. No matter how far it was, both in time and space, some detail triggers your memory and it takes you back to that very moment.

I treasure these flashbacks, no matter whether the awaken memory is of joyful or painful events. Reliving those emotions, rediscovering those remembrances, is a bit like getting to know oneself better, and being refreshingly honest with oneself.

Who would have thought that some day I would be sitting in a rather fancy pub in the centre of Dublin, sipping (or should I say taking generous gulps?) on a quality pint of Guinness draught, waiting for my very significant other to join me?

No one could have possibly predicted that ten years. No one could have ever predicted that not even five years ago. Or two years ago, for that matter.

If you paid any notice to the title, I am sure you guessed that it is a metaphor. I would hardly write a blog entry about an actual storm or the quiet that ensued after it.

This is about no atmospheric event, even though the significance of what happened in the last few days is as important as the world itself and it shook my world even more than a seismic event could do.

Wala and I bought a house and moved in last weekend.

Mmmh, I made it sound like everything happened in a day... it actually took a bit longer than that. Much longer than that, in fact!

It all started five months ago, when the realization that our current apartment was getting a bit to small downed on us. We immediately discarded the idea of looking for another place to rent.