Dit is mijn eerste en waarschijnlijk laatste podcast. In ieder geval de laatste die alleen maar muziek bevat, misschien worden latere posts vanuit IJsland ook in podcast-vorm uitgebracht, maar dat moet ik dan nog maar zien.

Ik heb een kleine selectie uit mijn IJslandse muziek gemaakt om een idee te geven hoe anders ‘anders’ nou is waar iedereen het over heeft als ze het over de muziek hebben. Ik vind het zelf wel meevallen, het is alleen behoorlijk vrolijk, ja, punk is er wat later aangekomen en heeft meer invloed gehad op de muziek die later zou komen.

1. Sigur Rós – Rafmagnið Búið
2. Sigur Rós – Ný Batterí
3. Björk – Bachelorette
4. Trabant – Bahama Banana
5. GusGus – Ladyshave
6. Sykurmolarnir – Eat The Menu (IJslandstalige versie)
7. Apparat Organ Quartet – Romantica
8. Ég – Evrópukeppnin
9. Efterklang – Prey And Predator (even smokkelen, Efterklang is namelijk een Deense groep)
10. Ég – Santana kl. 9 um morguninn
11. Sigur Rós – #8, a.k.a. Popplagið

Directe download: hier

Alright, so I got this Medieval Award the other day. Medieval? Award? Doesn’t really ring a bell right… Okay, so Medieval is a MOO, which can be seen as an online community avant-la-lettre; it’s really lo-tech in today’s Internet technology. So far, so good.

I created this together with the other ‘Guardians’ quite a while ago in 1999. We were friends from Breda and The Hague and we wanted to create an online world set in the Middle Ages, using our and other’s fantasy as guideline. Our world grew and grew and at some point caught the attention of a whole slew of Pijnacker-persons. Now, the community strangely enough is grown quite close to eachother, despite the fact that most users wouldn’t be compatible at all in “real life” (I put it between quotes because it seems to turn out the way we feel ‘what real life is’ is changing).

Medieval Award 2005

I got the award already begin April, on Medieval’s birthday meeting, but I couldn’t/wouldn’t come no matter how much they pushed (well, now I know why they did :)). Anyway, this award I received in the mail today was for the many years of administration of the server and database. I really appreciate this gesture since the system administrator is often forgotten. It encourages me to continue what I’m doing. Ah, and I should mention the fact that Peeg and DarkShadow also received the award for their work to keep Medieval up and running.

Wim de Bie, een van de weinige mensen die van niets werkelijk iets kunnen maken (en daarmee sluit ik nu dus Hart van Nederland en kopiëen uit, want die kunnen van niets niet werkelijk iets maken).

Goed, in ieder geval, op 23 november 2004 postte hij een berichtje op z’n Bieslog dat hij een link van iemand kreeg toegestuurd waarop het beeld van een webcam te zien was wat de uitgang van een tunneltje in Noorwegen te zien was. Dat is dan ook verder het enige, er is inderdaad een tunneltje te zien, beetje gras en natuurlijk de weg die eruit komt.

Wat krijgt De Bie vervolgens voor mekaar? Dat er een stel Nederlanders intens naar ‘hun’ cameraatje beginnen te kijken. Opeens heeft een oninteressant tunneltje in het Noorse achterland een schare trouwe fans en zodra er ook maar iets ernstigs gebeurd met de camera slaan ze alarm (zo is de camera al een paar keer van URL veranderd en ook meerdere dagen uitgevallen)!

Interessant kijkvoer voor de maandagavond die nu langzaam dinsdagnacht begint te worden.

Sometimes you just don’t get the movie industry… Now Universal has announced that among the first titles to be released on HD-DVD will be Serenity!

Hmmmmm, nothing’s better (for a drink I mean) than a nice cold Altbier, especially when it is from Düsseldorf.

Schumacher Alt

The drinking of Altbier is during carnaval often accompanied by the singing of the Altbier song: “…Ja, sind wir im Wald hier? Wo bleibt unser Altbier? Wir habben in Düsseldorf die längste Theke der Welt…”

A new trimester, new plans… With some quite familiar courses ;-)

• Semantiek (exam)
• Neurale Netwerken (exam)
• Software Testing (exam)
• Inleiding Formele Methoden (exam)
• Geometric Algorithms (assignments + research paper)
• Real-Time Architectures (exam)

And… there they are once again:

• History of Computing. Yes, the assignment still needs a subject.
• The Linux Operating System assignment is finished within the next few weeks!
• Hypermedia Systems assignment will be started after having read all the course hypertext.

I need to pass Semantiek and one of the two courses Neurale Netwerken or Inleiding Formele Methoden and finish History of Computing and Hypermedia for my Bachelor “degree” (papiertje). I’ll focus on those first and of the Master courses I will do Geometric Algorithms seriously and I’ll probably drop the other courses for now.

This probably is the most pointless entry in this journal to date.

Drinking Rivella from a Swiss souvenir glass

Hmmm, nice ;-) Actually, Rivella is nice. It is mainly made of components of milk. Rivella calls this colourless liquid “milk serum” and is the residue of milk when proteins and fats are removed. It contains no sugar (no sugar as in saccharose, it does contain lactose) and it tasts just great (when you’re accustomed to it).

Well Rico, there you have it: An interactive fly for your toilet.

(Dutch only)

Rijd je hier door de stad, zie je overal posters van simyo hangen, met daarover stickers met teksten “Red de prepaid beller” en “Stop simyo”… Een bezoekje aan de website suggereert dat het hier gaat om een stichting die begaan is met het lot van de verdwijnende prepaidbeller. Robert Long (kent u hem nog?) spoort de bezoeker aan om zijn boodschap door te sturen naar anderen. Op de hele site geen referentie aan het moederbedrijf van de ‘stichting’ én van Simyo: KPN Mobile. Leve whois!

Dus zó moet je reclame maken, door anti-reclame van jezelf eroverheen te plakken en je klanten te belazeren!

I opened a new blog today, which sole purpose will be to log the events from now until I’m back from Iceland. The language will be Dutch, since it will also be the communication channel for me to my family and friends while I’m away.

And as an extra service: A direct link to the RSS feed.

Great concert, little short maybe, but well… Making it longer won’t make it long enough :)

The setlist was something like this (taken from a gig in Danmark, changed where I knew the differences):

• KGB
• Delikatessen
• Knekker deg til sist
• Hevnervals
• Container
• Señor Flamingos Adieu
• Blitzregn Baby
• Bøn Fra Helvete
• Mann Mot Mann
• Kontroll På Kontinentet
• Christiania (yes, the self-governed community in Denmark, but also the former name of Oslo)
• På Ditt Skift
• Die Polizei (request from audience)
• Di Grind
• Dieter Meyers Institution
• Evig Pint
• Ompa til Du dør
• Maestro

Reprise:

• Mr. Kaizer…
• Bak et Halleluja
• Resistansen

Thanks to Lotte, Sjoerd, and Bram for joining me. Ah, and Lowlands is a no go, since I’ll be in Iceland by then after all (I thought Lowlands was in July).

And I found some English translations to the lyrics!

Ooooh, my first visualization application!

For the course Visualization I write a fluids flow visualization. Based on some sample code and a simulation, this little beast already miaows a bit. We had smoke and hedgehogs, two fairly standard techniques in visualization. It shows you the density and direction of the flow of a fluid (or gas if you like) when you inject some fluid in it (using your mouse in this simulation).

By the way, the whole thing is animated of course.

The two standard visualizations

Now I added streamlines, another technique. Currently it uses Euler’s numerical integration, which is fairly inaccurate for this application. I think I’ll have to change it before I hand it in.

The newly added visualization

There is this little problem with streamlines; you don’t know in advance where they will end up. Thus you’ll never know whether you cover an area well enough to be able to say something about it. Maybe there are some clever algorithms that can, but we should probably look into something else.

Combining all three techniques is pretty, but completely useless!

Coming up: Isolines. You know, the things you see on the weather map indicating areas with the same air pressure, well here it will be matter density, but the idea remains the same of course. They are much easier to evenly distribute them over the whole image, but are a bit harder to construct.

Update: People wanted to play with it already, so I made a fluids-0.0.0 release.