2010
2010 is already going pretty quickly (hell, its almost time for 2011). I was reminded by the fact that an arbitrary number advanced by one by the yearly e-mail telling me I need to renew this domain name (which is done by the way – damnleet.com is mine and stays mine!). Not that counting years means anything to me. The earth made (approximately) one revolution around the sun from completely arbitrary and meaningless starting point. And at a completely random moment in history (or well, not entirely random – mankind made a couple of other really stupid decisions at the time, most of them involving a carpenter and a few pieces of wood) we decided to start counting those revolutions. But guess what, the earth’s gonna keep doing that for a couple billion years to come. Big deal. Looking at it like that, it’s kinda like celebrating every time you’ve taken a step on a 50 km hike. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not significant in any way, and yet, we celebrate it.
That can only lead me back to the conclusion that lots of things lead me back to: people are weird.
But I can understand that they need to celebrate something. There is so much going on that isn’t worth celebrating, that we try to make the most out of the things we can be more or less happy about. On the grand scale of the universe it’s as significant as a single drop of water is on a planet filled with nothing but oceans, but for a creature as proud of himself as a human, one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of perspective.
On a smaller scale of things, I’m (temporarily!!) taking a few things offline (specifically some of the more space-consuming parts of the photo album). I really need to upgrade the disk space I have on this server (a few minutes ago there were 7 megabytes of it available), and getting a few GB’s freed up will help to keep everything going until there is more space available. Don’t worry – everything will be back online as soon as possible!
exFAT
Why does Microsoft have to be stupid again?
Microsoft recently announced the licensing model for their new exFAT filesystem (article in Dutch). exFAT is a filesystem that supposedly is especially suitable for flash-based storage media, such as flash cards, MP3 players, USB sticks, smartphones, and so on – stuff that you carry around, basically.
Of course there was the immediate need to raise the file size limit to 256 terabytes, because that is what they did. (For comparision, that’s over 300 times the amount of space on an average home PC.) Granted, FAT32 – which is in use by most devices today – is kind of limiting with 4 gigabytes (a decent HD movie can’t be stored in a FAT32 filesystem), but 256 TB?!
Anyway, since they want to make exFAT the new standard for portable devices, obviously they need it to be supported widely by both operating systems and storage devices. So, the obvious choice to Microsoft is to introduce a paid licensing model, which is really restrictive and requires you to sign non-disclosure agreements. This way, there is very little chance that open source initiatives are going to support exFAT (think Linux, for starters). But lets also look at it from a device manufacturer’s point of view: you’d have to pay for a license (not to mention the cost of implementation) of a new filesystem, which in the end, doesn’t really add that much. Sure, we can have bigger files now, but I’m making an MP3 player with maybe a few gigs of space, where the average file size is about 5 megabytes – who cares about large files? Plus, my MP3 player will only work on Windows operating systems (while I’ve just gone through all the trouble of letting it talk on USB as a mass-storage device, so any platform/OS can use it). And there is a perfectly good, widely supported alternative (FAT32), to which specifications can easily be found anywhere in the Interwebz, and which I’ve probably already used on older devices so I can just copy that code over and be done with it.
Gee. Difficult choice.
“Unconventional”
In my life, I have seen many bad websites. I have seen many terrible websites. I have even seen websites that, were they publicly known, could likely become the cause of WW3.
But rarely I have seen pages that are so fucking terrible that there are not even words for it (except perhaps ‘oh my god, fifteen minutes and the page still isn’t done loading’, which actually sums up many of the shortcomings of this particular website).
I has it!
Now on to reading.
Forty-two
I just came up with one of the better quesions that I’ve came up with in a while.
“What is the maximum IQ of any person who posts comments on YouTube-videos?”
“42.”
Which I’d like to use as a reminder – “And Another Thing…”, the sixth (and presumably final) part of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, written by Eoin Colfer, is out since today! I definately plan on getting it soon, I’m very curious to see what he’s made of it 
Newfound powers
Oh, hai!
As I have probably mentioned at some point, some of the bands I like include Behemoth and Belphegor. Both came with new albums recently. Behemoth’s new album ‘Evangelion’ is definately different from ‘The Apostasy’, but it definately kicks at least as much ass (which is quite a lot!). Since ‘Walpurgis Rites – Hexenwahn’ from Belphegor is far more recent, I havn’t really listened to it enough to form an opinion, but there are definately things that I like here 
Also, a few weeks ago someone mentioned something math-related. As you may know, x0 (x being any number except 0) is 1. I was told once why that was, though I couldn’t remember it and it bugged me for weeks. But I found it again (and it seems that very few people know this), so if you’re interested:
Basic rules when working with powers include that xa · xb can also be written as xa+b. For division, a similar rule exists which says that xa / by xb equals xa-b. Now if we take the second rule, and assume that a and b are equal, we find that xa / xa = xa-a, which is the same as 1 = x0 (which is valid as long as x does not equal zero, in which case it is undefined).
Yay!
Common sense
Just an hour ago I noticed a commercial on TV, which was done to encourage people who immigrate to the Netherlands to learn Dutch, since after all being able to make yourself understandable is pretty important if you live somewhere (semi)permanently.
But… why are they trying to explain to non-Dutch-speaking people that they should learn Dutch by airing a commercial in which the actual message is spoken only in Dutch?
I wonder where the common sense of these people went to. Probably enjoying a nice long holiday (albeit not terribly well-deserved).
Loud
Yesterday was the second day of Neurotic Deathfest, a 2-day death metal festival in 013 here in Tilburg. I visited yesterday (didn’t go the first day though).
The tickets were not that cheap (~ 35 euros, not counting food and drinks), but considering the number of bands (16) and the duration of the whole thing (I was at 013 for about 8 hours, probably more) it’s good value for money. Even the merchanise – there was lots of that being sold – and the food were reasonably priced.
I mostly stayed near the main stage most of the time, where 6 bands played: Severe Torture, Aborted, Illdisposed, Brutal Truth, Entombed, and finally: Behemoth!
Except for Behemoth, I barely knew any of the bands that played so it was kind of a gamble for me there – but it turned out really well. I didn’t find Brutal Truth that great (their drummer was funny though, he sat there in his underwear and made really weird faces), other than that the stuff I didn’t know was at the very least enjoyable
But then came Behemoth – a band which I’ve been wanting to see live for a long time – and it fucking kicked ass.
The songs they played included Slaves Shall Serve, At the Left Hand ov God, Prometheon, Demigod, From the Pagan Vastlands, Chant for E schaton 2000, Christians to the Lions, Antichristian Phenomenon, Decade of Therion, Slaying the Prophets ov Isa, and probably some others I forgot to mention. In other words, it REALLY kicked ass
What’s more, in the end I was in reasonably good shape considering the circumstances: I could still hear pretty much normal, my head was still attached to my neck, and my voice was still where it’s supposed to be. Pretty good evening
I’ll see if I can get my hands on some pictures, and assuming I do, I’ll post the link here.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there’ll be a whole lot of stuff worth going to in 013 for a while… but two things I am considering to go to would be October 27th in Zwolle (Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus, Evocation, Obscura) and November 3rd in Enschede (Behemoth, Devildriver, Scar Symmetry, Arsis). But we shall see
French
This tweakers.net article tells about the French government having passed a law allowing them to cut people who download copyrighted content off from the Internet. This just proves again that the French are just plain weird.
Especially the clause stating that even when cut off those people will still have to pay their monthly fees to the internet provider is just ridiculous. As is the idea that the person who pays for the connection is responsible for what is done over it. Very few connections are used by only one person nowadays, and many of them are on insecure wireless networks.
And no, I do not think that not doing anything about the problem can be justified (and neither can the ridiculous salaries some people from music labels (etcetera) receive). People worked hard to create something, they expect to be paid for that, and they should be. But a ridiculous approach like this is not the way to go 
(For instance, just try making stuff less expensive… I have no objection against buying software and I regularly buy software if I think it is worth buying, but only so long as the price of the software is justified. Cost of development is no excuse, a lower price will lead to more sales and therefore provide at least as much income.)
A democratic government should represent the people. If it does, any decision the government makes can logically never be a controversial one, since the political ideas of the government and the people are the same. But that is clearly not what’s happening here. Apparantly the French government is no longer representing the people, and should step down right away because of that.
A similar issue I read about recently was a proposal to censor child porn websites. While in principle I have nothing against removing child porn from the Internet, it’s the censor – based on a non-disclosed list of blocked websites – that I don’t like. It is merely the first step towards blocking other content as well. The Internet is a free, open source of information and should always remain so
(And of course, the Chinese government could learn a lot from that… they say it’s to protect their citizens, but if everything on the internet is so damn bad for the Chinese, why don’t we just cut off all Internet connections with China? Then they no longer have any bad content to worry about, and the rest of the world won’t miss it either as most Chinese domains contain viruses/malware, or are written in a language that nobody outside China understands.)
Playing (part 3)
Wheee! Things are starting to take shape on my little PIC project here 
The code to control a character LCD is progressing nicely… it can now automatically align text on the screen and stuff like that. It’s also handling custom characters quite well. The nice thing with these screens is that you can display most ASCII characters on them, but also a number of customized characters (which are displayed by using the ASCII values that are normally non-printable characters, eg 0×00, 0×01, 0×02, etcetera).
Obviously, since I’m working in C the 0×00 one can be a bit of a problem at times, because in C it’s also the string termination character (but I can still send a 0×00 manually to the screen… so no big deal).
Also, in addition to powering the LCD, I also have a flashing LED once again! Only this time, it’s flashing at a pretty accurate 1 second interval, and is doing so using timers and interrupts. Once every 50 000 microseconds, an interrupt tells a variable to go up by one; once it reaches 25, we know that a second has passed
(If you’re wondering what the hell an interrupt is: when certain events happen, such as a timer reaching its maximum value or the state of a pin changing, that may generate an interrupt, at which point the processor jumps to a certain location in the program to handle it. Basically it’s calling the processor’s attention away from whatever it’s doing to handle something that is urgent and which probably should be handled right now. Afterwards it’ll get back to what it was doing before the interrupt happened. It’s like you’re walking in the grocery store and your phone rings: you stop to pick it up, and when you’re done you continue shopping. It’s the same principle really (you’re the processor, and your phone just generated an interrupt to get your attention to the fact that someone’s calling you). Your PC also does this, but you don’t notice it normally.)
That may seem a bit elaborate, and well, erm, it is elaborate, really. It takes a good amount of code, as well as a bunch of calculations to make sure that the timer runs properly. But I’m learning the PIC to tell what time it is, and I’m just using the flashing LED to make it indicate to me that a second has passed. For some reason that remains unexplained sprintf() doesn’t seem to be working (and it’s a bigass function too… you’ll probably never notice it on a PC, but on a PIC the size of it is significant), so it’s going to be difficult making it actually show the time. But I’ll find a way