Martin @ Blog

Yes, I’m still alive. I didn’t write much lately, mainly because I had some troubles with my life and the very hot weather. I hope I will be able to write some interesting stuff the coming weeks.
My girlfriend decided this week that she wanted to get some time for herself in order to determine if she still likes our relationship (at the moment she thinks she doesn’t). The reason for this, is that I was having some mental problems (maybe I was a little depressed the last few weeks?), but didn’t talk about it with her. Additionally, I didn’t work very hard on my final project for my Msc. grade, which caused some friction in our relationship as well.
Currently I’m staying at my parents house in order to get things sorted out. Life ain’t easy. I really hope we will be able to get our relation working again, because she definately is the girl of my dreams and I really don’t want to lose her. Time will tell.

On other news, I started programming on the OntoAIMS project, in order to finish my graduation project. I also started learning Perl, which is a very nice language for easy tasks. Especailly the regular expressions, which are also implemented in other languages, are very nice. While I already had some knowledge on Perl compatible regular expressions, I definately learned some new things and it is also nice to know how to use these things in the language for which they were originally developed.

Today I read about a patch for X-Chat-gnome by David Trowbridge. He is using the HSV-colorspace for improving the readability of IRC-text. I think this is a very smart idea and wonder why anybody else didn’t come with such an idea. I think it may also be useful to use this technique for gnome-terminal, were the readability is sometimes also not very good when performing an SSH-session to a remote host.

Red Hat has introduced a new social community site called ‘Mugshot’. It’s not entirely clear to me what the goal of this project is, but I have got the feeling that it could be useful. Currently, it contains a thing called ‘Music radar’, which enables people to publish information about songs on their weblog or website.. I’m not sure what is new about this. Another feature is called Link Swarn, which enables people to discuss about weblinks. This is quite interesting I think. During my exploration of Mugshot, I came across this. I hope that this will not be the process a user has to go through in the final version, because it will be a nightmare for helpdesks and system administrators, because not any non-technical user will understand this behaviour. On the other hand, if it will be the case, there is a clear oportunity for other OS’ses like Mac OS X and Linux because the usability will be so much better, that even stupid users will see it (I hope).

Some students at MIT have created an automated room. Very nice, especially the party mode is cool. When reading about it, you almost feel like to turn your own room into a fully automated environment.

• People who still are not convinced to use Firefox, this page gives some good reasons.
• Microsoft introduces a Pay-as-you-go computer, which means that you can only use your (own?) computer when you have bought enough credits in advance…
• According to a US Attorney, it is not allowed for journalist to publish about leaks.
• The US State Department is affraid that Lenovo uses their computers to spy the US governement. Since Lenovo bought the computer department of IBM, there is a discussion in the US about this fear. They think that Lenovo, because it is partly owned by a deparment of the Chines government, will install espionage devices in their computers. Ironically, the Lenovo systems which are sold to the US government are manufactured in the VS, while most other US computer manufacturers such as Apple, Dell and HP manufacture their systems in Taiwan or China…

Last weekend there was the FIRST LEGO League Open European Championship at the university in Eindhoven. I visited it both Saturday and Sunday where I took some pictures with my new Sigma 70-300 APO lens. I didn’t have the time yet to filter the pictures and put them on the internet, but I will do that soon. It was very nice to see how smart some children are. The idea is that the teams build a robot using Lego Mindstorm to solve some ‘problems’. The battles were intersting and it was nice to see something like this for a change.

I also finished the redesign of the website of ESBV Panache. The site is pretty simple, but has to be available in both English and Dutch.

I think electric cars are the solution to a lot of traffic problems we are currently suffering. This article gives us hope for the future. I think products which use sustainable energy are the products of the future and will generate a lot of profit. The car in that article is faster than any Ferarri and almost as fast as the fasted production car on petrol.

I did not updated this blog very often. I have the intention to change this, because there are some topics I want to write about.. Although nobody reads here, but well, that doesn’t really matter… I am playing nice and not disturbing anyone 🙂

Last week Sun’s co-founder and CEO Scott McNealy decided to drop its function as CEO. He will remain chairman of the board and keep working for Sun, but he will not be the CEO anymore. The new CEO of Sun is Jonathan Schwartz, who was already Chief Operating Officer (COO) at the company. Now the CEO has changed at Sun, people start speculating that the company will ‘open source’ Java. However, it seems that this is based on the press release in which the new function of Schwartz is announced.. and the statement about Java is relatively vague in my opinion, so one should not expect to much of it. However, it would be interesting when Sun decided to make Java free, mainly for the open source desktop and community. But I don’t think this will happen anytime soon.

The website I work for, Tweakers.net, has been bought by VNU Business Media. The news became public last monday. The founder of the site, Femme Taken, and the current director, Daniel Kegel, decided to sold Tweakers.net because they think VNU gives Tweakers.net the opportunity to grow further and improve some parts of the site.
While this news is still relatively hot, today there was a new announcenemt. VNU will probably be sold to a group of private investors. I’m not sure if this is very good news for Tweakers.net, but on the other hand, this announcement has been expected for a few weeks already. Among one of the private investor firms is the company Carlyle. People who have watched the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 should know this name, because this is the company which is involved with the defence industry in the US and has some US politicians on the payroll. The most famous one is the former US president George Bush sr. While a lot of people now maybe think this company is entirely evil (which is may be), it should be mentioned that the number of investments in defence companies is only one 1% and the focus of Carlyle is telecom, media and real estate. Before VNU is aquired by this group of companies, the current shareholders have to accept the offer of the companies and sell at least 95% of the shares (I guess).

Canon today introduced a large number of new products. The first is the Ixus 800 IS, which is the first Canon Ixus camera with build in image stabilization. The Ixus 60 and 65 are also new, with a large 2,5″ LCD-camera. Also the Powershot A-serie is extended with new models. The A700 and the A540 are the more expensive models, the A420, A430 and A530 are aimed at the budget market. For the prosumer market there is the new PowerShot S3 IS, which has an 12x optical zoomrange and build-in image stabilization. Finally there is a new dSLR from Canon which is the EOS 30D. This camera replaces the 20D which is positioned above the entry-level dSLR EOS 350D. The new features of the 30D are limited, but interesting enough to choose the newer 30D above the 20D. Canon also introduces two new lenses for the Canon EF-mount, a 85mm F/1.2 L-lens and a 17-55mm F/2.8 lens with image stabilization. This last lens is intersting, but unfortunately a little bit expensive with an introduction price of more than 1100 dollar.