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scroll no-repeat bottom right}.node>.body>h1{font-size:larger;font-weight:normal;margin:20px 10px 10px 10px}.node>.body>div{margin:10px;}.node>.body img{padding:4px;margin:4px;border:1px solid #000} Not worth Knowing Posted by fnh on 2009/4/13 21:09 I went to see Knowing last night, and it probably is one of the worst films I've ever seen. Coming from someone who's seen Starship Troopers 2 and Ghosts of Mars, that's saying something. In fact it's so bad I want to warn the world about it. At first I thought it would suffice to (re)twitter a few bad reviews, but upon reading them I found that even the worst reviews were too forgiving. The following review contains spoilers, but don't worry, you don't want to see the movie anyway. The first three minutes of the movie were enjoyable however. The opening credits zoomed in from orbit all the way down to the backyard of astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage). Any movie that opens with extremely large, digitally projected, high definition pictures of the earth from orbit is off to a good start in my book. The blinking lights they added to make everything a bit less static were unrealisticly bright, but hey we're not going to nitpick. When the next scene referenced the Drake equation, I though I might actually enjoy this movie. The first time I felt uneasy was when astrophysicist John Koestler tried to explain and contrast determinism and chaos theory during a lecture at MIT. The character claims that determinism means that everything happens for a reason. Nothing wrong with that statement per se, but it was clear from his attempt to compare this with chaos theory that he didn't mean reason or cause as in the producer of an effect, but rather as in purpose, goal. Not only did the portrayal of determinism and chaos theory as competing theories make me wince (they are compatible after all). Not only did the bad explanation of determinism grate like fingers on a blackboard, the explanation of chaos theory - shit happens - and its application to everything - you, me - totally glanced over evolution, further discrediting the character as a scientist. I wonder if the elementary grade lecture about the sun and earth followed by such a bad representation of determinism and chaos theory could be a reason for MIT to sue for defamation. Johns scientist friend Phil Beckman (Ben Mendelsohn) doesn't do any better. He gets to play the part of the incredulous scientist that doesn't believe in the predictions made by the numbers. His own credibility however takes a nonrecoverable blow when he dismisses John's analysis of the numbers simply as being something that he wants to see. One assumes that someone with a science degree knows enough about statistics to see or even just intuitively feel the difference between finding your birthdate in the digits of pi and finding a chronological sequence of the dates and deaths of disasters that happended in the past 50 years. Even if the unexplained numbers wouldn't have been so regularly interspersed with the data that would've been a rather strong indication that these aren't just random numbers. Had the film ended right then and there, I might've forgiven Hollywood for getting the science wrong and cutting a few corners here and there to further the plot. After all, even if the acting was rather bad and the plot a bit of a jumble, the special effects were impressive. Unfortunately it didn't end just yet. Worse, instead of simply finishing up a bad science fiction/armageddon movie with a happy ending, they decided to end it with a religious happy ending. The second part of the movie is nothing more than a silly attempt at rehabilitating Christianity by explaining angels and god as aliens and the devastation of earth by a solar flare as the end time. In the end both John's son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) and Diana Wayland's (Rose Byrne) daughter Abby (Lara Robinson) are saved by the aliens to be deposited in a new Eden alongside two white rabbits. One simply has to assume that instead of introducing myxomatosis a few years down the line, the aliens introduce talking snakes to keep the rabbit population under control after which Abby eats from an apple and an inbred idiot human race struggles for a few thousand years dying of scary dental diseases before once more inventing digital watches. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again I guess. Don't go see it. A total waste of time and money. XForms in Firefox Posted by FnH on 2008/8/7 23:28 As you probably don't know because I haven't gotten to actually implementing a comment or public account system yet, I use XForms for filling out forms on this site. Because this is meant to be a pushing the envelope, take no prisoners, no compromises, boo pragmatism kind of blog (probably to balance too much of that stuff at work), I include XForms directly into XHTML, just like the W3C meant XForms to be used. No proxies translating XForms to old web forms, no including of javascript libraries. This means that every time I want to submit a blog entry, I have to fill out an XForm using a client with support for XHTML and XForms. For this I used Firefox 2 with the XForms plugin. Which worked great. Until firefox 3 came out. Insiders told me the project is being pursued less actively than before, and a port to firefox 3 might be a while coming. If it ever arrived. Because I refuse to change my XHTML code to please a client (The policy is clear: I do not negotiate with terrorists), I investigated injecting a javascript library using greasemonkey. Which didn't work. I could patch the main javascript loader which loaded other javascript files by writeln-ing extra script tags (which obviously doesn't work if you'r injected after the document is built), and I could handle changing my XHTML tree to move the XForms model from the head of the page to the body (a strange request from the library), but all this only resulted in a half-initialized form. Luckily, by that time someone picked up on the old XForms plugin, and as you can see, it is working great! Not that you can expect regular updates now. You might want to check out my incoherent ramblings on twitter, or bookmark the images folder if you want to stay updated. Pixels Posted by FnH on 2008/6/16 23:51 Dit weekeinde een nieuwe monitor gekocht. Een Samsung SyncMaster 245B om precies te zijn. 1920x1200. 24 inch groot. Veel pixels. Heel veel pixels. Groot. Heel groot. Het is wel eventjes wennen, die gigantische resolutie. Ik kan nu al zeggen dat al die ruimte heel welkom is tijdens het bewerken van foto's en ook het spelen van 3d shoot 'm ups is opeens een heel stuk realistischer, al heeft de videokaart nu meer werk om alle pixels gerenderd te krijgen. Grappig is ook dat een standaard Worms Armageddon level nu volledig op mijn scherm past en dat er dus niet meer gescrolld hoeft te worden. Andere applicaties en veel websites echter weten dikwijls niet goed wat te doen met al die extra ruimte. Sommige proberen ze volledig op te vullen, met veel te lange tekstlijnen tot gevolg. Andere plakken alles tegen de linkerzijde wat de leesbaarheid bevordert, maar een grote lege ruimte rechts achterlaat. Nog andere centreren alles netjes in het midden wat tot nu toe het meest werkbare idee lijkt te zijn. Wat je ook kan doen met een 1920x1200 scherm is full HD content bekijken. Full HD is immers 1920x1080 en past juist. Alleen was ook dat een beetje wennen. Tijdens close-ups lijk je soms oncomfortabel dicht bij de acteurs te zitten, en de extra details zijn bovendien niet altijd even flatterend voor de acteurs. Achteraf gezien had ik misschien beter geen scene met Laurence Fishburne uit The Matrix als test gebruikt. Twee miljoen driehonderdvierduizend pixels lijkt momenteel nog een beetje overkill, maar ik durf te wedden dat ik er binnen een week al heel erg aan gewend ga zijn ... Bricked and back again Posted by FnH on 2008/5/18 17:52 Recently, Freyja wanted a laptop to replace her aging desktop PC. Given that it didn't have to do a whole lot more than reading mail, surfing the web and viewing the occasional DVD we settled for a slightly upgraded Dell Vostro 1000. Problem: now that we had a laptop in our home we needed a wireless access point. One of our neighbours has an open access point - which we used to test the wireless by downloading some essentials - but that didn't seem to be a very good long-term solution. Having some earlier experience flashing routers (I monkeyed around with a Netgear WGT634U once, soldering my own serial interface and all) I decided to go for the best supported flashable router out there: the Linksys WRT54GL. The WRT54GL doesn't have pins for a serial interface like the WGT634U, but it does have a boot_wait parameter you can set making it pause for new firmware to flash when booting, which comes in handy when you've done something that broke it. This makes it almost fool-proof and means you don't need a special serial interface to play around with it. I suspect this explains most of its popularity. With Ezri constantly needing attention (eat, play, bath, bed) it was near midnight when I flashed and configured the router with a 2.6 kernel xwrt firmware. Unfortunately, the proprietary Broadcom drivers for the wireless card don't work with a 2.6 kernel and the open source drivers aren't fully functional yet, so I had to restart using an older 2.4 kernel. After midnight, sleepy and confident with how well everything was going, I grabbed a 2.4 kernel and flashed the router again. That killed it. I flashed it with the firmware for a WRT54GS instead of a WRT54GL and it didn't like that. Realizing I forgot to set the boot_wait parameter I feared there was no way I could flash the device back to life. Getting in bed I had to inform Freyja I probably bricked our brand new router. Normally the router would've been dead unless I started soldering and created a serial interface, which would've been more effort than I wanted to spend on it this time around. Luckily google turned up some advice. With a bit of brain-surgery the router could be trapped into the low level CFE and accept new firmwares just as if boot_wait had been set. Figuring I had very little to lose I opened the router and booted it with a few pins of the flash module short-circuited. This did the trick and a few moments later it was back alive. Now that I have a fully capable embedded linux device sitting in the store room I need to figure out what to do with it, except providing WPA2 secured wireless internet for Freyja's laptop, that is. I could make a bandwidth restricted public access point, but it seems my neighbour has that market segment covered already. I could use it to have some fun, or to break the 3 WEP encrypted access points that are hanging around, but I think I'll just leave it be and use it as a reliable access point ... Imaginary property Posted by FnH on 2008/5/13 0:28 Last Saturday someone posted a thought-provoking video on slashdot. While the video itself annoyed me - mostly because the audience seemed to be high on something and laughed way too hard - the ideas put forward by the speaker were interesting. Basically, he argued that the result of labor isn't something you own. He argues that this is already the case for the standard, menial type of work where labor simply transforms resources and doesn't imply extra owner rights. If I hire someone to create a nice deck from a pile of wood in my garden, then he doesn't have the slightest property claim on my newly constructed deck. Why should it be different for intellectual work like inventing something or composing a song? Economics never really was a favorite subject of mine. Even though the field ends on -nomics, I barely consider it a science. Not being able to tell whether patents foster or harm innovation after a few hundred years doesn't really help your credibility as a science either. This was a refreshing exercise though. It takes something everybody takes more or less for granted "If you create something, it's yours" and throws it out the window, not unlike what Non-Euclidean geometry does with the parallel postulate. Just as with Non-Euclidean geometry it is interesting to explore where this new set of axioms leads us. Would there still be pop stars? Would new drugs still be developed? Somehow I think there would be and they would. The way they get paid would obviously be very different though. The video suggests people might simply give what they consider is fair, and even though there are examples of this today (userfriendly, Radiohead), I don't believe this would be a stable model. What I can see happening is pop stars keeping a new album hostage until a predefined amount of money is transferred to their account, after which they release it. Another interesting realization is that there are lots of people (like me) who don't really own the result of their intellectual labor anyway because they sign the copyright over to their employer. Similarly, pharmaceutical agencies might be contracted by the United Nations or smaller groups like Aids organizations to research and develop new drugs. The upshot of all this being that, once created, the album or drugs would be manufactured and distributed near cost prices. Interestingly, copying music from your favorite p2p network would no longer be stealing, and this might make some sort of sense. After all, stealing usually implies depriving someone of a resource, and copying a song or other information doesn't really take something away from the person you're copying from. Finally, it is interesting to wonder whether this is just a fun Gedankenexperiment, or whether this might someday be reality. While the enormity of the change argues against this ever happening, you could also argue that it already happened, and that the music industry is the first business facing the immense consequences. Time will tell. Als ik ooit eens 5 minuten tijd heb Posted by fnh on 2008/3/1 1:01 Dan kan je er zeker van op aan. Dat ik op een keer, maar wie weet wanneer. Mogelijk eens aan het bloggen zal gaan. Ik weet het, het is alweer een tijdje geleden dat hier iets nieuws verscheen. Niet dat er niet genoeg onderwerpen waren om iets over te schrijven ... Ik had graag een reactie gescreven op de blog entry van professor Torfs (Zou hij het ook ongepast vinden als een onderwijsinstelling geld gaf aan een leerkracht aardrijkskunde mocht 20% van de Belgen overtuigd zijn dat de aarde plat was?) Ik had graag uitgelegd waarom ik het oneens ben met de argumenten die Pieter Hintjens aandroeg op FOSDEM tegen softwarepatenten, terwijl ik net zoals hij denk dat we beter af zouden zijn zonder (Zelfs in kapitalistisch Amerika zou ik niet meer durven aankomen met een stelling zo ongenuanceerd als "patenten zijn een protectionistische maatregel - te vergelijken met het communisme in Rusland en China - en zijn daarom een heel slecht idee"). Ik had ook iets luchtigers willen schrijven over hoe ik dankzij de groentepapjes van onze dochter eigenaardige nieuwe groenten leer kennen (Iedereen die al lang weet hoe een knolselder er uitziet en niet vindt dat het - van bovenaf bekeken - lijkt op iets uit HalfLife zou dit wellicht grappig gevonden hebben). Genoeg onderwerpen dus. Nu alleen nog 5 minuten tijd ... eth0, eth1, eth2, come out, come out, wherever you are Posted by FnH on 2008/1/9 22:55 Upgrading a headless systems is always a bit exciting. After recompiling the kernel and issuing the reboot command, there are those few scary seconds before it comes up again accepting ssh connections. It's the minute following the reboot command that will either make you really proud of yourself, or will have you scurrying under the desk for cables connecting keyboard and monitor, angrily muttering "I'm really getting too old for this ..." under your breath. In the course of the years you learn a few tricks relevant to upgrading the kernel of a headless system. First, after a few crawls under the desk just to have the latest and greatest linux kernel, you start to appreciate the saying "If it ain't broken, don't fix it". Seriously. If there is nothing to be gained, don't take the risk. Second, if you really do have to change a kernel, start by copying over your old .config. After a few struggles with cables because you forgot to compile in the file system used by your root partition (or network driver, or ...) you learn this lesson as well. Third, configure grub to use the new kernel only once before reverting to the old one, just in case something else goes wrong, like forgetting to run modules_install which might end up in critical hardware not functioning. When I wanted to upgrade the network card from a lousy 100Mb/s to a super fast 1Gb/s one, I took all these precautions, compiled in the extra network driver, swapped the network cards and rebooted the system. And waited. And waited some more. And cursed a little under my breath. Turns out that recent linux distributions figured out a way to track devices. Which is great, really, for your hot-pluggable harddisks and thumbdrives, giving them stable names which makes managing and automounting them a lot easier. Because distributions use the same logic for naming network devices - claiming that they have to do so to support faster, parallel loading device drivers - changing your network card will result in a new name for the device. In my case I ended up with a brand new eth1 and a missing eth0. Needless to say that this brand new network device wasn't configured properly and decided not to work. Anyway. Lesson learned. Next time I'll be more cautious when replacing hardware, and check /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules before rebooting (or applicable equivalent, depending on the hardware being replaced.) Once properly configured though, the D-Link DGE-528T is working splendidly and making backups goes markedly faster now. Geactiveerd Posted by FnH on 2007/12/25 21:28 Gisteren heb ik weer iets nieuws gehoord. Kinderen doen tegenwoordig geen kennis meer op. Nee, tegenwoordig worden kinderen geactiveerd. Voorkennis wordt niet meer aangesproken maar geactiveerd. Kinderen wordt niets meer aangeleerd, ze worden geactiveerd om leerervaringen op te doen. Ze worden niet meer aangezet om zelf oplossingen te zoeken, ze worden geactiveerd in het vinden van oplossingen. Ik vraag mij af wat er mis was met de woorden prikkelen, aanspreken, aanleren of aanzetten, dat ze Alles kan beter gewijs vervangen dienden te worden door activeren. Het heeft een extra lettergreep en klinkt daarom wellicht duurder en geleerder, maar verbetert het vervangen van al deze verschillende werkwoorden door één enkel werkwoord het onderlinge begrip? Dubbelplus ongoed volgens mij. Omdat activeren bij mij nog steeds geassocieerd wordt met elektrische apparaten en bommen riep het gebruik ervan in educatieve context meteen het beeld op van een school vol kleine zelfmoordcommandootjes die eerst geactiveerd dienden te worden alvorens ze deel konden nemen aan de strijd. Waarschijnlijk is het vechten tegen de bierkaai en gaat het met activeren dezelfde weg op als met noemen, het komische naar de toekomst toe en andere creatieve martelingen van onze taal, maar ik moet het toch proberen. Laten we het alstublieft duidelijk en eenvoudig houden en voortaan enkel dingen activeren (à la limite mogen slapende spionnen ook nog). Tot slot kan ik nog meegeven dat Ezri sinds kerstmis de trotse eigenares is van zoveel speeltjes dat ze binnen de korste keren ongetwijfeld als volledig geactiveerd beschouwd kan worden.