Crowdway

Good Luck Phoenix!

David — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:22:13 +0000

2 hours and 30 minutes before humanity’s newest mars lander will touchdown - hopefully unharmed. One of the highlights of the mission is the search for past lifeforms in the polar ice. Some nice links if you’re interested:

Phoenix (wikipedia)
Phoenix (NASA)
Live stream (NASA)

Let’s hope Phoenix will fare better than his predecessor. Sleep tight tonight, because we just might awake to a whole new world.

1.30192108E+94K

David — Sun, 25 May 2008 09:00:29 +0000

A year ago, while drunk, a friend and I were discussing temperature scales. Turns out Fahrenheit used his body temperature to define 100°F, which is totally ridiculous from a scientific point of view. Fahrenheit was actually having a little fever when he developed his scale, which is why 100°F is slightly higher than the normal human body temperature of 98.2°F.

One could say Celsius was more sane, using the boiling-point of water to define 100°C. If you think about it, though, this isn’t optimal either. Water boils at differint temperatures depending on the atmospheric pressure. Seen through the alien eye it really doesn’t make any sense at all: why H²O? Why bound by the conditions of one planet (Earth)?

Mind you, we were drunk.

So off we went and created a new temperature-scale. We figured Kelvin was spot on with defining 0K as the absolute zero, so we used that in our scale. Furthermore, using probably bogus science, we calculated the highest temperature possible in our universe, which turned out to be 1.30192108E+94K, and used that to define 100°.

Out came Astix, including basic HTML-page explaining the calculations done and Kelvin-To-Astix converter. Enjoy our crazy brainfart.

Make your PC wake you up

David — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:38:57 +0000

It’s a little known feature of a BIOS: You can set it to start the PC at a specified time and date, practically like an alarm clock. Even lesser known is the fact that you can set this same setting in Linux by writing a date and time to this special file (as root):

$ echo "+00-00-00 00:05:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm

Now shutdown your PC. It should boot up again 5 minutes after you executed that line.

Let’s harness this awesome power and turn it into a poor man’s complex alarm clock:

sudo sh -c ‘echo “2008-05-24 06:59:00″ > /proc/acpi/alarm’
Start a media-player and make it play a song
Quickly put your PC in hibernate

Now when your PC is booting in the morrow, it’ll return from hibernate and continue playing the song, waking you up in the process. Yay.

Talk on Broadband and Distributed Software

David — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:06:15 +0000

Zeus organises another talk, this time by Piet Demeester. He’ll give us some details on the how’s and why’s of broadband and distributed software. We’ll also be able to visit the IBBT, which is chock full of gadgets and consoles, for “testing purposes”.

For more info, and an abstract, visit the Zeus site.

Although I don’t like this poster as much as I like my previous ones, I love the photo used as the backdrop. Link to original. Truly amazing the quality of some of the free photos you can find on sxc.hu.

Wanted: Earphone buds

David — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:01:58 +0000

I lost one of the rubber buds used on my in-ear earphones, and now I need to use a size that’s a bit too big for my ear-canal. It’s annoying because they keep popping out, unless I sit perfectly still. As luck would have it, you can’t get the buds seperately, and at a cost of €30 I’m in no mood to buy new earphones.

If anyone of you have the Creative EP-630 or Sennheiser CX300 (they’re basically the same), and doesn’t use the medium buds, I propose a swap. I still have both small and large buds. This way I don’t need to buy new earphones, and you have some spare in case you lose your buds.

Sunrise

David — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:34:43 +0000

Getting up early has its advantages.

Argument list too long

David — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:30:29 +0000

While moving Seenly to a new server with more capacity, I had to upload a huge amount of tiny files. Trying to do ncftpput * in a directory that contains 27000 files each with a filename of 35 characters makes Bash cry, and spit out “Argument list too long”.

Xargs to the rescue:

echo * | xargs ncftpput

Amazingly, this works: Instead of trying to ncftpput everything at once, xargs executes ncftpput repeatedly with a group of files, until all files have been sent. Echo doesn’t throw an Argument list too long error because it’s a shell built-in. This basically works for every command you need to execute on a large number of files.

Watch out though, because the command isn’t interactive anymore. So if you get this error:

Error: gl_getline(): not interactive, use stdio.

It means it’s trying to get interactive, e.g. asking you for a password, while it’s not allowed. So make sure you set all required options using switches:

ncftpput -u user -p password hostname remote/path

The Devaluation of my PC

David — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:30:02 +0000

Everyone knows PC components devalue at a very fast rate. Here’s a calculation based on my latest purchase.

I ordered the components for my new PC on February 21. Total price: €945,5. Today, about 40 days later, the price of all those components together has dropped by €54.5, a decrease of 6%. Especially the RAM (15% drop) and processor (15% drop) have devalued significantly.

That’s 54 beers, gone!

Sarcasm

David — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:42:39 +0000

As seen on reddit (submitted).

Awesome.ugent.be

David — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:00:31 +0000

Having a job at the University of Ghent comes with certain perks. One of them allows me to have a dedicated hostname and IP for my laptop on the network of UGent.

It didn’t took long for me to come up with something original, and I’m now the proud owner of awesome.ugent.be.

Awesome.