http://blog.crowdway.com Snippets of madness with a dash of salt Sun, 25 May 2008 21:22:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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. ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/05/25/good-luck-phoenix/ 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 ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/05/25/130192108e94k/ 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 ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/05/23/make-your-pc-wake-you-up/ 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 ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/04/08/talk-on-broadband-and-distributed-software/ 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 ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/04/07/wanted-in-ear-headphone-buds/ Getting up early has its advantages. http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/04/07/sunrise/ 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 ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/04/04/argument-list-too-long/ 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 ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/04/03/devaluation-of-my-pc/ As seen on reddit (submitted). http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/04/02/sarcasm/ 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 ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/04/02/awesomeugentbe/