Dvorak
This night I took all off my keyboard for a good cleaning. While I was at it, I re-arranged the keys to the Dvorak layout (which did require me to cut a few small pieces of plastic, but hey, it all fits and works now). And if I end up not using it too much, it’s okay since I can type in QWERTY blind (and really fast).
So, right now I’m typing REALLY slowly… But I’ll get used to it. My speed (and average amount of time spent searching for each letter) has already decreased significantly while I wrote this post – I can already find some letters blind (especially the ‘A’) – or at least, without spending half an hour searching for it
No, my experience in typing with Dvorak does not extend very far beyond this post… But practice makes porfect, and I am already noticing that the letters are arranged in a more logical way 
Politics
Politicians really remind me of little school children sometimes. Or well, actually, they do that most of the time.
We had the elections a few weeks ago. From the election came certain results about which party gets how many seats. Can we please just have those people sit down in their expensive blue chairs and let them talk about stuff and vote against eachother to make whatever decisions it is the government needs to make? As far as I recall that is the entire idea of our democratic system, so let that be what they do. Not this childish bullshit they’re wasting time on now.
We had elections, we have results – take those, accept them, live with it, and just do your freakin’ jobs.
“But mommy, I don’t want to play with that kid! He’s mean!”
Politicians, stop whining and grow up already.
Seriously.
Spam
Yay for social networks!
I just sent someone 24 messages in a row, detailing my adventures in eating two slices of bread 
Pulse of the Beast
I just had to share this…
I am now ranked 666th of the world on WhatPulse!
For those of you who are not familiar with it, WhatPulse counts mouseclicks, keystrokes, and tracks the distance you move your mouse. This data is then sent to a central server, where statistics and ranking lists are created. Is it useful? No, not really. But is it fun? Hell yes!
And you don’t even need to do anything extra for it (which is why I’ve been running it for a few years now). It is impressive that the Netherlands as a country is ranked second of the world, even though our country is tiny!
Anyway, if you aren’t using WhatPulse yet, get it now!
Towels
To all the froods who really know where their towel is…
I wish you a very happy Towel Day!
May DNA never fade from our memories, and let us never forget the importance of towels, a greatly under-appreciated not-quite-household object.
A Story
Once upon a time, in a land that doesn’t actually exist but for the purposes of this story we will imagine that it does, there lived, a boy. This boy, was not a special boy in pretty much any imaginable way. He had the average size, weight, and appearance for a boy of his age, and was not particularly smart (or stupid). His name was Vroomp, and like most boys of his age, he served in the King’s army, as boys of his age were required to do.
The reason that the King had chosen to enlist even young boys into the army, was the raging war with a neighbouring country. The war had been going on for so long that nobody really remembered what the war was about, or even what the name of the country was – most of the time they were referred to simply as ‘the neighbours’ or ‘the enemy’. This has not in any way anything at all to do with the author of this story being too lazy to come up with any sort of decent-sounding name.
The King had a problem. His armies were vastly superior to the Neighbour’s army in many ways. They had a superior number of limbs that were capable of wielding weapons, superior training, superior numbers, pretty much everything about them was better. Except, their strategies.
Somewhere in the beginning of the war, an advisor to the King had invented Science. This granted him a lot of useful knowledge, a very well-paying job at the local college, a lot of respect from his friends and families, and generally a lot of other good things. The King naturally saw the potential advantage in using his knowledge in the war, so he asked his advisor to devise a new strategy to use against their hated enemy.
The good man went to work, and came up with a plan. The plan went something like this:
“As all of you know, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says, in simple terms, that you can never be really sure where something is,” he explained.
“And since when you don’t know where something is in the first place, the best idea is to either go searching for it (which is futile, since you’ll never find out where it is anyway), or consider whatever it is you were looking for to be lost and hope to find it again at a later point in time.”
That wasn’t the brilliant part just yet.
“Everybody knows that, when you have lost something, it tends to come back to you at the time you least expect it.”
Now, let’s apply that knowledge to the neighbour’s army and defenses.
“Since it is impossible to know where their armies are and they can therefore be considered lost, and because in the middle of a direct assault on their territory is pretty much exactly when you would find some sort of resistance, it is, in accordance with my theory, perfectly safe to charge in at any moment. We don’t even need to bring weapons. We’ll just march in and there won’t be anyone there to defend against us. The only time when you would actually run into them is when you really wouldn’t expect it to happen, say, when you’re sitting against a tree thinking trying to figure out what the baby from a nineteen-legged squirrel and a shopping basket would look like.”
Amazed by the brilliance, the King dispatched his armies straight away.
Needless to say, the result of the battle was less than impressive. In a few hours, very little remained of the once mighty army, and shortly after that, a little bit less remained of the connection between the Scientist’s head and the rest of his body.
Centuries later, however, the war was still raging on. The only reason that the aggressors of the great slaughtering all those many years ago had not been defeated yet, was that the Enemy was a species that was generally very calm and peaceful and felt very bad about having to wipe out an army of such nice young lads.
At this point you have probably forgotten entirely about Vroomp. Though, admittedly, there is nothing really special about him, as has been said before. In an attack during one of the later years of the war (the new strategy involved bringing weapons to the battle), Vroomp and the rest of his squad charged into an enemy encampment. Being the young inexperienced boy he was, Vroomp drew his sword, grabbed an arrow, and spent a few seconds trying to figure out how to combine the two items into something useful, or at least, something edible. Then, in a rather painful fashion, he discovered that swords are meant to by themselves, by the simple fact that one was dividing his favorite vital organ into a few more pieces than what was generally accepted as being a good number of pieces to have your vital organs in.
A few years later, the King’s armies finally perished, and the King was forced to surrender what little he had left. He spent his remaining years hiding himself in places so distant and strange that even he himself started to believe that his entire kingdom and everything that had gone down was nothing more than a vague dream from a distant past.
The Neighbours (which is not really a proper term anymore since they were now the sole country that existed, but ‘Enemy’ is probably an even worse term since that obviously does not apply anymore) lived in peace and prosperity.
Until a lonely man somewhere in the Neighbour’s country had invented Science again.
The rest, as they say, is history. What has passed since then I will leave up to your own imagination (but feel free to share any very creative suggestions with me ).
Will Possibly Be Continued…
Surfing
A while (probably a few years ago) I came accross a fun little game called Audiosurf. About a week ago I was bored and decided to play it again for a bit.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, Audiosurf is a music-based game. The idea is that you can select any song from your hard drive (or audio CD), and the level you play through is generated based on the music. You control a sort of flying-car-thingy that you can move left and right accross a thing that resembles a highway with 3 or 4 lanes, and the object of the game is to pick up colored blocks that appear on said highway. When you get clusters of at least 3 blocks of the same color, the blocks magically vanish, and your score magically goes up. There are of course a few things to worry about, but if you can think quickly and anticipate what’s coming, it’s not too difficult.
Again, the level is based on the music, so if you have really calm music it’ll be slow and mellow and there won’t be a whole lot of blocks to worry about, but pick some intense music and there will be tons of blocks, the track will quite possibly be twisting and turning, and you have to think REALLY fast to pick up what you want and avoid what you don’t want.
It sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it is pretty simple, but it’s also really addictive, and the just-one-more factor for this game is incredibly high.
Then came, The Idea.
This game bases the tracks on music, and since it keeps online high scores, there cannot be a random element as to how it generates the tracks (because that could create unfair advantages for some players). This means it just picks the audio file apart and works with that, basing its decisions on things like when beats occur, the tempo of the song, the presence (or absence) of certain frequency ranges, the shifts in frequencies throughout the song, and so on.
What if you can figure out exactly how the game’s algorithm works, and use the knowledge to create a sort of ‘level editor’ for the game, which in turn generates .mp3 files that, when played in Audiosurf, recreate exactly whatever level you had in mind? There are a few restrictions of course (for instance, the game never places two blocks directly adjacent, because then it’d be impossible to pick them both up, or it could create a ‘wall’ of blocks that you cannot pass through without picking up at least one of them). And sure, it’s going to sound horrible, with lots of bleeps and noises, possibly much like what happens when you listen to the signal from a 56k modem using a phone, but it’d be pretty neat.
No, this is not something I’m actually going to do (I’m not that bored, or at least, not at the moment), but it’s a fun thought experiment.
Comic
As some of you may know I regularly check on several webcomics – in particular, Cyanide & Happiness, Ctrl+Alt+Del, and of course, xkcd. Last night another one got added to the list: The System uses a simplistic drawing style utilizing figures and icons you could find on signs, and some of the best jokes I’ve seen in a while (I was hooked at comic #3, which is still one of my favorites). I can highly recommend it
To clarify on the story in the previous post; yes, it is in Na’vi. If you’re interested in what it means, the original can be found here.
Seven
So, I decided to finally take the plunge and install Windows 7 (64-bit) on my laptop (I have hestitated to do that for a reason I will come to shortly). So far it’s working well, it’s running pretty smoothly (especially considering I got the Ultimate edition). Installing Win7 is really easy (much more so than the XP setup process, which can be quite intimidating to novice users) and despite the fact that this is a laptop, I had no driver issues whatsoever (thanks to Acer).
I like having 64-bit now. Computer hardware has been capable of 64-bit for a long time now, yet it is heavily underused (mostly because people are afraid of it and the extremely crappy 64-bit drivers that XP had). But it definately has it’s advantages, and so far I havn’t come accross a single 32-bit application that didn’t work in a 64-bit OS environment.
Doing all the configuration and re-installing applications is the bit I hate though. Yes, I could have just used the ‘upgrade’ function, but I had a lot of software installed that I don’t really use anymore anyway, and a lot of stuff that needed to be updated, so then you can just as well start from scratch. I finally moved to Office 2007 (instead of 2003), reinstalled/fixed SolidWorks (running 2010 Premium SP2 now, even though I despise the extremely lengthy and complicated setup process big time), and updated a ton of other applications. Still, it’s a long process and not altogether a lot of fun. A lot is back up again, but not everything…
One thing I did have issues with were the drivers for various USB -> RS232 adapters. I frequently use serial ports, and since my laptop has none of its own, I’m stuck with using the (often crappy) USB adapters. And of course, it seems that there is no such thing as a Windows 7 driver (let alone a 64-bit Windows 7 driver) for any of them.
I like Win7 so far, but am not installing it on my desktop PC just yet. Two reasons for that: first, I hate having to re-install everything (particularly SolidWorks, which I have just re-installed anyhow). Second, I hope to be doing some hardware upgrades soon, which would require me to re-install the OS anyway, and I’m not exactly feeling like repeating the previous step several times over if it’s not absolutely necessary.
Anyway, on an entirely different note, I thought I’d post a little story (not mine, but I like it):
Trro lamu krr a terìran Nantang.
Terìran mì na’rìng.
Ultxarolun pol Yerikit. Poehu lu prrnen.
Nantang plltxe san Kaltxì, ma tsmuke.
Mì tal ngeyä prrnenä a sanhì lor nìtxan lu nang!
Nìrangal lirvu oeyä frrnenur lora sanhì sìk.
Yerik plltxe san sanhì tsun livu frrnenur ngeyä.
Pìsyeng oel ngar.
Kem si fìfya.
Frrnen hì’i lu nìtxan a krr, apxa txepit txula oel.
Tepvil sanhìti ngop.
Tsakem sivi nga tsun fpi frrnen ngeyä.
Tsakrr lora sanhì layu kop for sìk.
‘Efu Nantang nitram.
Zene sivi a kemit olomum.
New livu lora sanhì frrnenur peyä.
Ayvulit zamolunge ‘awsiteng.
Txepit apxa txolula.
Evengit nìwotx yem nemfa txep.
Tepvi tswayon.
San lìyu for lora sanhì sìk plltxe.
Po pxaw txep srew.
Krromaw plltxe Yerikur san.
Krr a fol txepit tok lu txan nìtam srak?
Lu set for lora sanhì srak? sìk.
Srane sìk plltxe Poe.
Tolul neto tengkrr herangham.
Evengit ta txep molunge Nantangìl.
Lu fo nawnekx. Lu kerusey.
Po steri. Yerikit folewi.
Nantangìl vay set ferewi Yerikit, slä ke stä’nì kawkrr.
First person who can (correctly) tell me what it is about gets a cookie.
Thoughts
So, like everyone else I’ve seen the movie Avatar, in 3D of course. As everyone else I agree that the story could have been a bit better and less predictable at times. But the visual quality, effects, and the whole 3D things is simply amazing. Seriously. I’m not going to be able to watch any other movie the same way again. It’s that good. No, the 3D isn’t perfect, there are occasional flaws and there is still room for improvement in the technology… but as for perfection – it’s a damn big step in that direction. I truly feel that this is going to be the future of movies and games but later on television as a whole as well.
(For those who think that won’t happen or don’t see the advantages… remember that there were lots of you when the internet or computers or cell phones or cars or many other such things were first introduced!)
I’m really looking forward to an Avatar sequal (which is coming, by the way! Mr. Cameron has confirmed that already).
I’ve also tried the game. It’s a good way to kill a some time and for a movie tie-in it’s actually not that bad, but it could have been much better.
Let’s start with this: you can choose to play for either tha Na’vi or the RDA, this is decided somewhere after half an hour or so of gameplay. You have to arrest one guy who does ‘secretly’ work for the Na’vi but gets caught. He points in the distance and say ‘look what you’re doing’ and you have to decide right then and there, based on pretty much nothing, whether you’re going to betray your own species or exterminate another.
Anyway, I played through the game on the Na’vi side. The Na’vi in the game seem really eager to trust you (except for one guy, but he’s turned around later on) and saddle you up with various things that their own kind only goes through after many years. It also caught my attention how quite a lot of them just happen to speak English (and how often the subtitles are different from the actual speech). In fact, very few seem to ever speak their own language in the entire game, and when they do, it’s usually pretty poorly (more on that later). The storyline of the game is not particularly interesting (I dare use the word generic), and the ending is less than impressive. Near the end you get to fly the Toruk (I use that word because the ‘human’ name is way too long to remember), which seems awesome at first but after 200 meters or so you get off again and that’s it. A flight you could just as well have done on your own Ikran (which you receive fairly early in the game, after which you only get to fly it ‘manually’ a few times, which is fun even though the controls are terrible), and I really have the impression (as with a lot of things in the game) that they put it in just because you’ll probably recognize it from the movie and you’d be disappointed if it wasn’t in the game. But they could have done so much more with it.
Also the main character is as tactful as an untrained dog when faced with a yummy treat most of the time, and the game is pretty simple. The soldiers barely pose a challenge and if you just need to get past them to reach some place, you just jump on one of the horsy creatures, send it into a gallop, and you’ll run straight past anything and barely take any damage at all.
But all in all it’s not a bad way to spend your free afternoon (though I’d never spend the full € 50 on it. Seriously.)
The Na’vi language is actually really interesting and I’ve taken some time to learn more about it. It has some really nasty things in it though – word order within a sentence is pretty free for instance, but that’s mostly because a lot of information goes into the verbs, which use infixes (rather than pre- or suffices which are used by most languages). Infixes can turn a root verb into s omething that is barely recognizable. Except for the basic verb, it may contain things like how the speaker feels about it, when it’s happening (which can be the present, immediate future, distant future, immediate past, or distant past) and who it relates to (me, you, me and the other guys standing here but not including the guy being spoken to, and a whole lot of other variations). You can basically say ‘Im going hunting this afternoon, the guy over there is coming with me and I think it’s a pretty good idea’ in a single verb.
But what really bothered me in the game is that, even with my basic understanding, the Na’vi used in the game is done pretty poorly. Nearly every NPC you come accross has a different way of pronouncing things (especially the really characteristic sounds like the kx, tx and px) and if you compare all of the speech, it’s a miracle that these guys even understand each other at all. I understand that the voice actors for the game didn’t get the thorough training and exercise that the actors in the movie did, but still, they could have done so much better.
One awesome thing I’ve noticed is a fun reference in the (rather good) TV series Farscape. In I believe it was episode 7 of season 4, there’s an elevator (or rather, a guy on a screen in the elevator) talking about how boring it was to go up and down all the time and how he’d like to go sideways just once. That quote, plus the entire idea of a sentient elevator, is yet another awesome reference to an awesome trilogy that is currently made up of six books.