Meaningless
On several occassions, people who heard/read some theories of mine said that I could probably write a book like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, a book which you simply should have read, not entirely just because it’s probably the only five-part trilogy that was ever created. In this book, it is stated that the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is in fact 42, and that nobody knows what the actual question is. For those who know this, it is funny to see on how many occassions people have used this little fact in various things. For example, in the episode ‘Quarantaine’ (Stargate Atlantis, Season 4), the password of Rodney McKay consists of the birth years of two major scientific people, his own birth date, and the number 42. In an earlier episode, McKay asks Sheppard if he knows how many unexplored planets there are in the Ancient’s database, where Sheppard answers 42. However, back to the topic: according to the Hithhiker’s Guide, it is also impossible for the answer and the question to exist in a galaxy at the same time. I came to the conclusion that that is a true statement, and I will get back to that shortly. Before that, I will need to go into a little science. In this article, I will combine the science with the fiction, so to say.
For many of us, the Ultimate Question has something to do with the reason of life/why do we exist/etcetera etcetera blahdiblahdiblah. If you ask me why do we exist I can answer that question: there is no reason. Everything that happens, has happened and will ever happened is nothing but the combination of the laws of physics and a complicated playback of events that were recorded at the time of the Big Bang, or possibly even earlier. Now hold on: the science bit is coming up.
According to Newtonian physics, the future is predetermined. Every particle in the universe is at one particular location and is moving at some speed in a direction. If you know where it is and where it’s going, you can predict when and how that particule will interact with another, which may or may not cause something significant to happen. This is a very significant thing, since this means that everything that happens is the result of some action (and in any case the indirect result of the big bang), and every action causes something else to happen. And no, there is nothing you could ever do about it, since every thought we have is nothing but the product of a complex electrochemical device known to and possessed by many, but used by few, that is known as a brain.
In fact, that you are now reading this is the direct result of some electrical pulses in your brain that made you decide it was a good idea to go to www.damnleet.com and read this article. That you are still reading here, is the result of you reading it in the first place, since that caused more electrical pulses to make you decide it is interesting enough to keep reading.
I know that some people (including Samantha Carter in one particular Stargate SG-1 episode, but I’m too lazy to review all episodes to find which one it was, thank you) will now start whining about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. For those of you not familiar with it, quamtum physics has a funny little thing called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which basically states that the more certain you are about a particle’s location, the less certain you are about it’s speed, and vice versa. The point is, this only means that it would be impossible to create a device to predict the future, not that it isn’t predetermined. And it would be impossible either way since you would need to know the speed, direction and location of every particle that exists, because no matter how far away, they might accidently have a significant effect that completely throws your little time machine off course.
Okay, and now back to the science and fiction thing. As you may have noticed I just explained that everything is predetermined. I will now explain why the Ultimate Question and Ultimate Answer indeed can’t exist at the same time, knowing that the answer is 42.
Let’s say we know the Ultimate Question: what is the reason of our existence? It’s easy here: because there is no reason to existence, the question cannot be answered, and therefore given the question the answer can’t exist as well.
Let’s say we know the Ultimate Answer: 42. It is simply impossible to come up with a question that is important enough to be considered the ultimate question, and to which the answer is 42, thus confirming that the question and answer can’t exist at the same time.
And for those who are now complaining that ‘What is the reason of our existence? 42.’ is not logical: I would like to refer you to the scene where Arthur and Ford are stuck on prehistoric Earth, and Arthur utters the words “I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.”
And as final thing, for those of you who claim that the above is way too much philosophic to be science: consider this:
science + fiction = philosophy
Doesn’t seem at all that crazy, eh? 
For all eternity
Last week, a new version of Trackmania has been released. Or two, actually: a free upgrade for TM United and a new version of TM Nations, also known as Trackmania Nations Forever and Trackmania United Forever.
This is cool, because TMNF is a serious lot better than the previous version. You can use more different types of terrain and a lot more objects for tracks and the Forever versions of both Nations and United can play against eachother. Also the new build of the dedicated server software is a lot better, since the new build actually does work.
That is also why I am now running a server. [EMØ] Public Server is running on the same physical box as this website and currently contains most of the standard Nadeo tracks, however I am planning to launch a separate server with custom tracks.
If you are feeling bored (or not) I seriously recommend checking this game out. If you never played it you don’t have the right to exist.
On a technical note, tonight this site (and any others hosted on this server) may act funny for a while since I will be upgrading various things on the server, including MySQL (apparantly the new 5.1 release kicks a lot of ass).
Conclusion: Sucks
After using Vista for a while, I come to the conclusion that it sucks ass.
It’s not just the ridiculous resource usage or the extreme uglyness. It’s also the extremely poor performance.
May I expect to be able of browsing through my files without having to wait three minutes for Explorer to load the contents of a folder? Because I think I do. Several games run terrible on Vista, but run perfectly fine on XP. Explorer for some reason refuses to just show the proper icons on files. My SVN client doesn’t work properly with it. It takes forever to find settings that were straightforward in XP. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Looks like I have a copy of Windows Vista to uninstall.
First impressions
Almost needless to say, Vista is FUCKING UGLY. If it’s not the stupid aero theme that hurts my eyes, it’ll be the font. It took me a while finding the setting to turn of that smoothing of text because that is simply horrible. Naturally I set the classic Windows theme, however so many things are different that I kinda wonder why they still call this classic. Explorer looks completely different, icons changed, etc. etc. etc.
Oh, and the sounds. Horrible. I think I’ll just get the XP .wavs from my laptop and use those instead.
The new start menu is also horrible, the stupid search box doesn’t want to go it seems, and I absolutely hate the new shutdown buttons. And I want the old ctrl-alt-del dialog box back
Then, UAC. UAC is this security feature that asks for your permission when doing things that are considered sensitive. It would be a perfectly good security feature if it wasn’t so fucking annoying. Having to confirm a single action somewhere between 1 and 6 times is way too much, especially since pretty much anything requires permission. Even when disabled UAC is being a bitch: now I have a little notification thing in the taskbar warning about how fucking dangerous it is to not confirm everything you want to do in triplicate, but there’s probably a setting to turn that off, somewhere.
So far I also hate having to search for things. In XP, it’s easy to find a particular option. If you want to change any display property, there’s a nice dialog Display Properties, which lets you change the theme, background, screen resolution, and so on. Actually, it’s been that way for a looong time and has always worked perfectly fine. In Vista, for some reason they turned it into a load of different dialogs, which doesn’t really improve the experience of migrating to Vista. The did the same thing with lots of settings; I sometimes really need to search for something that was straightforward in previous versions of Windows.
I can keep going on like that for quite a while, but let’s also make some positive notes. First of all, installation was quite painless. It just asked a few questions in the beginning and installed everything from there on, no interaction needed. Unlike previous versions which, while taking fucking long to install, might need input any moment, which makes it impossible to go do something else while installing. It just seemed to have copied drivers from XP and except a small RAID driver issue that was fixed soon enough, I havn’t experienced any driver-related issues at all. Neither have I ran into any compatibility issues so far, but then again, I havn’t installed much applications yet.
I do need more time to make a decision (and make it less horrible), but there is a good chance that – given it’s possible to fix a load of annoying things – Vista gets to boot up by default. But I guess it’s too soon to draw a conclusion at this point
The vista thing
I decided that I would like to check out Vista, and I figured the 40gb spare unallocated space on one of my hard drives will do. Since I have no idea how much I will like/hate Vista, I’m just setting up dualboot for now. The reason for doing this also lies in the fact that my current XP installation has its issues, and it’s running on an old 20GB IDE drive (due to RAID driver issues during installation); 20GB isn’t a whole lot of space and moving a live Windows installation turned out to be sort of difficult.
So far installation has been relatively painless. I didn’t even use a DVD to install; I just mounted the image using Daemon Tools while running XP and initiated the setup. That also allowed me to pull some drivers from my laptop; my desktop lacks a DVD player for the time being. It just kinda annoys me that Vista seems to go with a one size fits all approach; just install everything according to defaults, and if you need something tweaked, go figure it out later on.
Also of course the installation software doesn’t get too technical. One point did make me laugh a bit, first I got a black screen with just white letters “Please wait while Windows sets up your computer”, followed by a graphic interface with a dialog box, “Please wait while Windows continues setting up your computer.” Anyway, it seems installation is complete now; I have some serious driver installation/aero-theme-busting to do (damn I hate that skin). I’ll post my findings later.
mv /easynet/* /databarn
Today I got home and found a letter on the doorstep, addressed to me, which appeared to come from my hosting provider. I already received the bill for this month’s colocation, and to my knowledge there’s nothing illegal on the server (or at least not that they would bother about), so I was wondering what it could possibly be. So the logical action to take is to open the envelope and read the letter.
So far this server has been doing it’s thing from the Easynet datacenter, and so far that’s been going pretty well. Okay, a day or so ago the AMS-IX went unstable (apparantly they were doing maintenance in one half of the redundant network but a failover triggered, switching links to the part of the network that was down for maintenance) causing packetloss and slow links for most of the world, but that affected about every Ducth datacenter and probably a major part of the world (as you may know, the AMS-IX is by far the largest internet exchange in the world). But that was pretty much the only issue in several months, we even seemed to escape from the wave of power outages in data centers that has been going on for the last couple of months. Many data centers suffered blackouts, including LCL in Diegem (Belgium), which – up to now – had a zero uptime reputation of which they were kinda proud.
The point is that, starting June 1st, the server won’t be doing it’s thing from Easynet anymore, but move to Databarn. The choice to move was made by the colocation provider. The lack of oil is affecting datacenters badly, because energy prices are rising. And if there’s one thing a data center needs lots of, it’s power. Easynet has apparantly raised the price for electricity by a whopping 87%, up to 72 euros per ampere, whereas other datacenters usually charge about half that. Of course this rise is considered ridiculous, and since the costs in having a cage in a DC isn’t about the space but the power usage, the decision has been made to move to Databarn.
Naturally that will mean downtime, however I’m going to see if I can combine moving equipemt with the already planned maintenance to reduce it as much as possible. More info to come.
Insurance
Last week or so the insurance company charged my bank account for the insurance I have with them. A few days later, they send me a € 50 bill for some medicine. This made me realize yet another time how stupid the whole concept ‘insurance’ is.
Basically you have to pay a company a lot of money each month, just in the hope that they will return your own damn money to you when you need it. And in most cases, they won’t return shit because of the own risk in your insurance policy, or because they are simply too lazy to make a bank transfer.
That does officialy make the insurance business one of the easiest ways of making money known to man. You just charge people for nothing it all (because they were stupid enough to sign a contract allowing you to do so) and if someone is begging you to get his own money back because he needed surgery, you could pretty much just as well roll a dice and give him the money if it lands on 6.
It would in most cases probably be cheaper to just save up like half the money you pay for your insurance every month, and use that if you need health care. Or get your car fixed. Or pay your funeral. Or whatever else people get insurance for nowadays. The whole problem is that the government (or at least mine) thinks it is a good idea to require people to have insurance on certain things.
However, no matter what people say, the simple fact that – at least most – insurance companies make (lots of) profit is definately proof that in the end, we are paying others just so that we can kindly ask them to give our own money back. Which is a fucking stupid thing.