Marco’s blog

Last week I started working on my graduation project. It’s a full-time job and at the moment my top priority. During the weekend I try not to spend too much time using the computer. For example, next weekend I will go to a concert of Sonata Arctica :-). Last weekend I have been keeping up with the emails on grub-devel so GRUB 2 will remain to be maintained.

Besides that, I am reading Operating Systems Design and Implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum. Although I know quite a lot on this subject already, I am reading it to refresh my memory on this subject and to prepare myself to read more papers on microkernel design. I have the silly idea to waste my precious time on writing my own microkernel some day. More importantly, I like reading and I do not want to spent too much time working on the computer. I am considering buying the book Modern Operating Systems, also by Andrew Tanenbaum. Can someone tell me if this is a good book and if it doesn’t have too much overlap with the book I am currently reading?

So I do not have much time at the moment. Still, I intend to finish the ATA driver and networking support for GRUB 2 somewhere in 2007. Also, I want to get the Dirac code for FFmpeg in shape so it can be committed soon. I am not sure if doing all this in 2007 is realistic though…

Everyone remembers the day on which the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by massive amounts of Iraqis. It seemed lots of people in Iraq were happy. They were the ones that pulled down the statue, it was their choice and they were able to do this and gain their freedom. The USA just gave them the chance to do this, nothing more.

Right…? Wrong! Although this is (more or less) what I thought what was going on. Of course I expected it wouldn’t be exactly like it was shown to us by the media, but it was almost the opposite of this! Perhaps I am an idiot for falling for this, or perhaps I should have payed more attention. Yesterday, in the TV broadcast of Een Vandaag, the photographer Geert van Kesteren said this was all fake. When you zoomed out from the square you would see that there were only about a hundred Iraqis or so. This was just a nice media show organized by the united states goverment.

Of course I did some searching on the Internet as well and I found a website that covers this event and the lies surrounding it. Something that shows how untrustworthy Bush is, is this quote from a CNN transcript “BUSH: I don’t think I’ll ever forget, sure a lot of other people will never forget, the statue of Saddam Hussein falling. Baghdad, and then seeing the jubilation on the faces of ordinary Iraqis.”. He sets up the lies (just like when his friend Colin Powell discovered some interesting use of photoshop) and uses it as evidence. Although it scares me more when you hear how many people still believe the lies about the evidence that there were “Weapons Of Mass Destruction”.

Last Friday I went to a cafe to eat. On their menu I noticed the weirdest thing on their menu that I have ever seen on a menu: deep fried Snickers.

You can see the entire menu on the website of Cafe Crash. The food I had was good and really cheap. After searching with Google I noticed that deep fried Snickers are being sold at other places too, I even found a recipe!

For a few days I have not been writing about the progress on my Summer of Code project. This is actually good news because I was really busy working on it! The last days were spent working on optimizations. I have been able to speed up my code and will write about that soon when the final optimizations are finished.

Yesterday I went to the cinema to see the movie Transformers. It was sort of what I expected of it. Lots of action and simple entertainment. Usually this is not exactly my kind of movie, but I had fun :-). Compared to other movies like this which I have seen (Spiderman 2, X-Men 3), this movie was way better in my opinion.

But usually I prefer other kinds of movies, like The Butterfly Effect, Twelve Monkeys, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc. While I was thinking of good movies, I wondered if there was actually a system like last.fm. This website, to which I am subscribed has a list of the music you listen to (sent to the website by my music player) and has the same information for other users. It uses this information to build a list of similar music, this way you can get recommendations of other music you might like.

Information about movies you watch is a bit harder to collect, but not impossible. You will need a plugin for your movie player instead of for your music player. I already have the IMDB numbers of all my movies in MythTv, so information is quite reliable for me. Although some of my movies/series are not (yet) in IMDB.

The next question is: which domainname should they choose? Usually .tv is used for television related websites. I tried last.tv and it actually exists! Their favicon.ico is the same as that of last.fm, so it might even become used. I typed in this address in google and found lasttv. It uses your last.fm account to fetch youtube videos related to your musical taste. I don’t have flashplayer so I can’t and won’t test it, but it is interesting nevertheless. I wonder if anyone reading this have tried this.

Sometimes you do not realize how important something is, until it is not available. This happened to me. Last weekend I visited my parents. When I came back Monday and decided to wash my dishes, I noticed there was no warm water. The weird thing about this problem was that my neighbors had warm water.

The next morning I called to the company responsible for this (Essent). That’s when it all started. They asked me for my address and tried to look it up. The strange thing was, that I was not in their database. This surprised me, I do pay my bills to essent!. The person who I had on the phone forwarded me to one of their daughter companies, which also offer the same service. I called them: Same problem, I was not in their database. So I called essent again. At the end they agreed to send someone to me to see what is going on and to fix my problem.

In the afternoo, still no phonecall from the plumber to make an appointment for a visit. So I called again. They told me they had forwarded my problem to a plumber and I would be called. They would try to contact them again. Of course nothing happened…

Wednesday (3th day without warm water). I called to essent… again. Something went wrong and they would call the plumber again. In the afternoon I STILL didn’t get a phone call from the plumber. In the afternoon I called them again. They told me that more people from my apartment (also from the same level) had called and someone is underway to fix the problem. In the evening I should get warm water again. I checked with my neighbors and they all had warm water so they haven’t called. And still no warm water…

Thursday… still no warm water (day 4). I called and finally someone actually apologized and promised me it would be fixed today. Finally someone actually made a hard promise! About two hours later I was called by the plumber, they told me someone would come here to fix my problem later that day. And finally the plumber came here and fixed the problem. The actual problem was not in my house. The problem was that the pressure difference for the entire neighborhood was too low. The plumber called, they changed the pressure difference and I had warm water again!

The plumber told me he heard about my phone call when he was driving back to his house Wednesday late in the afternoon. I can’t blame him, but I surely can blame the bureaucrats of essent. Too bad I am stuck with them. And the nice thing is that I am still not in their system, just like most of my neighbors. I wonder if they will notice if I stop paying them ;-).

This is the first blog entry I wrote. I am not exactly sure what I will write on this blog and what I will add to this website. So you will have to see what happens!

The main topic of this blog during the summer will be my Summer of Code project. My project is adding a dirac decoder/encoder to ffmpeg. Development didn’t go as fast as I hoped before, but now I have all the time to work on this :-).

I will also use this blog to write about other projects I work on. For example GRUB 2, for which I am a maintainer. I also have some small pet projects I work on, I will also write about those

And of course I will write about myself, things I do, my opinion about certain things, etc