Just listened to the promo and I can say just one thing about this album: wow
Yes, that's all I will say about this album. Download the promo somewhere, enjoy it, skip the jewel case release (soon to be released) and go for the digi version, in January. This album must be in your metal collection, period!
Label: Regain Records
I've seen the site (and other contests) before, but I definitely have to check in more often, for Worth1000 now had a Reality Manga contest. Take pictures of real people and make them look Manga.
It's amazing what people can do with Photoshop/the GIMP (?)...
Definitely have to check in there more often!
Before I have blogged about my bad feelings on Google and today, I feel the need to stress the point again. Google is Evil!
Of course I could just list all the complaints http://www.google-watch.org/ lists, but let's look what Google has done up till now in a bigger frame. It is however good to read about the infamous Google cookie.
Google started nice. A website without bells and whistles and a heck of a good search engine. Wonderful. Nerds all over the world loved it and not too long after, the non-geeky people followed. Google grew to become a "verb".
So far so good. Then Google slowly started taking over tricks of yet another evil: Microsoft. The started to take over companies and care about shareholders. But, even worse, they started collecting. And what they couldn't collect anymore they bought.
Where are we now? Google knows:
Google News, yet another invention. By collecting news from various sources, you can quickly scan all the news you'd like to see. They even allow you to add alerts so you can get an email when breaking news comes in, matching your keywords.
Where are we now? Google knows:
In 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs and became the home for Blogger. Like other Google services, they didn't really invent some complete new concept, they just offered a lot of megabytes for doing a something a lot of people already did: blogging. Most blogs are about personal events in people's life so:
Where are we now? Google knows:
In this year, Google also came up with the personalized search. A great way to know who even more about your personal preferences.
Gmail followed not long after. The motto was (and still is) "Don't throw anything away". It fits the Google collecting spirit perfectly.
Where are we now? Google knows:
Picasa, Inc was the next victim of Google's need to expand. Picasa would make it easier to share pictures (through hello.com).
Where are we now? Google knows:
What other means do people use to communicate? Phones! And before you knew it Google SMS was launched.
Where are we now? Google knows:
To know even more about your web-surfing behavior, Google offers Google Web Accelerator. It's mainly just a proxy.
Where are we now? Google knows:
But, what about the other popular method of communication, instant messaging? Sure: Google Talk. Many IM services exist already (Jabber, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Y!M), yet we seem to need just-another-Jabber-client.
Where are we now? Google knows:
The latest plans as of yet are to provide the city of San Francisco with Wi-Fi. The whole city will have to become on big Google hotspot.
Where are we now? Google knows:
There are other dubious Google services out there. Think about the Google Toolbar, the Google Deskbar, Froogle, Google Desktop Search, Google Ride Finder, and many, many more. It's just too much to comment on all of them, and you'll get the basic idea. They most likely all collect data.
Why would Google want to capture everything the can about you? This world knows very few to no people who do things just out of being nice, so what is going on exactly? Who could benefit from all this information?
I am absolutely not saying this is true, but what comes to my mind is: governments, and spammers. Yes, very conspiracy theory'ish, but until I have seen a better explanation, I'll stick with this.
Regardless of who will benefit from all the information, do you really want anyone to know all of this about you?
Time to drop Google and look for alternatives. Clusty seems as a nice search engine alternative. Email shouldn't be a problem for anyone nowadays, but if it is, have a look at hushmail.com for free webmail with PGP encryption. Instead of Google Talk, you can just use any Jabber server out there. Need a blog? Try livejournal or install some software on your own webspace (most ISPs give you some for free).
The only thing we all are stuck with is groups.google.com. If Google was really about sharing information, they'd open up the old DejaNews archives for anyone to download. Until then, we have to get used to the new, crappy interface.
'Google is Evil' -rw-rw-rw- 1 satan demons 0 Jun 06 06:06 google
Before I have blogged about my bad feelings on Google and today, I feel the need to stress the point again. Google is Evil!
Of course I could just list all the complaints http://www.google-watch.org/ lists, but let's look what Google has done up till now in a bigger frame. It is however good to read about the infamous Google cookie.
Google started nice. A website without bells and whistles and a heck of a good search engine. Wonderful. Nerds all over the world loved it and not too long after, the non-geeky people followed. Google grew to become a "verb".
So far so good. Then Google slowly started taking over tricks of yet another evil: Microsoft. The started to take over companies and care about shareholders. But, even worse, they started collecting. And what they couldn't collect anymore they bought.
Where are we now? Google knows:
Google News, yet another invention. By collecting news from various sources, you can quickly scan all the news you'd like to see. They even allow you to add alerts so you can get an email when breaking news comes in, matching your keywords.
Where are we now? Google knows:
In 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs and became the home for Blogger. Like other Google services, they didn't really invent some complete new concept, they just offered a lot of megabytes for doing a something a lot of people already did: blogging. Most blogs are about personal events in people's life so:
Where are we now? Google knows:
In this year, Google also came up with the personalized search. A great way to know who even more about your personal preferences.
Gmail followed not long after. The motto was (and still is) "Don't throw anything away". It fits the Google collecting spirit perfectly.
Where are we now? Google knows:
Picasa, Inc was the next victim of Google's need to expand. Picasa would make it easier to share pictures (through hello.com).
Where are we now? Google knows:
What other means do people use to communicate? Phones! And before you knew it Google SMS was launched.
Where are we now? Google knows:
To know even more about your web-surfing behavior, Google offers Google Web Accelerator. It's mainly just a proxy.
Where are we now? Google knows:
But, what about the other popular method of communication, instant messaging? Sure: Google Talk. Many IM services exist already (Jabber, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Y!M), yet we seem to need just-another-Jabber-client.
Where are we now? Google knows:
The latest plans as of yet are to provide the city of San Francisco with Wi-Fi. The whole city will have to become on big Google hotspot.
Where are we now? Google knows:
There are other dubious Google services out there. Think about the Google Toolbar, the Google Deskbar, Froogle, Google Desktop Search, Google Ride Finder, and many, many more. It's just too much to comment on all of them, and you'll get the basic idea. They most likely all collect data.
Why would Google want to capture everything the can about you? This world knows very few to no people who do things just out of being nice, so what is going on exactly? Who could benefit from all this information?
I am absolutely not saying this is true, but what comes to my mind is: governments, and spammers. Yes, very conspiracy theory'ish, but until I have seen a better explanation, I'll stick with this.
Regardless of who will benefit from all the information, do you really want anyone to know all of this about you?
Time to drop Google and look for alternatives. Clusty seems as a nice search engine alternative. Email shouldn't be a problem for anyone nowadays, but if it is, have a look at hushmail.com for free webmail with PGP encryption. Instead of Google Talk, you can just use any Jabber server out there. Need a blog? Try livejournal or install some software on your own webspace (most ISPs give you some for free).
The only thing we all are stuck with is groups.google.com. If Google was really about sharing information, they'd open up the old DejaNews archives for anyone to download. Until then, we have to get used to the new, crappy interface.
'Google is Evil' -rw-rw-rw- 1 satan demons 0 Jun 06 06:06 google
http://nu.nl/ is a great news source for us Dutch people, but for some reason, bloglines had problems parsing the URLs on the feed, preventing you from 'clicking on the link' to read the full story.
A lot of times I wanted to read the full story, but found it too time consuming to browse the entire website in search for the article in question. So, I went on a little quest to make this work.
The problem seemed to be the & in the URLs. The feed feeds us this:
http://www.nu.nl/news.jsp?n=596320&c=22&rss
yet bloglines shows us:
http://www.nu.nl/news.jsp?n=596320&=22&ss
Quite annoying, yet also rather simple to fix with Greasemonkey. And so it happened, my first greasemonkey script: bloglinesNU.user.js
http://nu.nl/ is a great news source for us Dutch people, but for some reason, bloglines had problems parsing the URLs on the feed, preventing you from 'clicking on the link' to read the full story.
A lot of times I wanted to read the full story, but found it too time consuming to browse the entire website in search for the article in question. So, I went on a little quest to make this work.
The problem seemed to be the & in the URLs. The feed feeds us this:
http://www.nu.nl/news.jsp?n=596320&c=22&rss
yet bloglines shows us:
http://www.nu.nl/news.jsp?n=596320&=22&ss
Quite annoying, yet also rather simple to fix with Greasemonkey. And so it happened, my first greasemonkey script: bloglinesNU.user.js
Although graphical user interfaces can be horrible, sometimes it's really handy. Recently Joffie brought zenity to my attention.
Zenity is an easy way of including GTK+ widgets in your shell scripts. It looks very promising and I definitely have to read more about it.
Zenity is a tool that allows you to display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts. It is similar to gdialog, but is intended to be saner. It comes from the same family as dialog, Xdialog, and cdialog, but it surpasses those projects by having a cooler name.
A cooler name is all it takes ;-)
Although graphical user interfaces can be horrible, sometimes it's really handy. Recently Joffie brought zenity to my attention.
Zenity is an easy way of including GTK+ widgets in your shell scripts. It looks very promising and I definitely have to read more about it.
Zenity is a tool that allows you to display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts. It is similar to gdialog, but is intended to be saner. It comes from the same family as dialog, Xdialog, and cdialog, but it surpasses those projects by having a cooler name.
A cooler name is all it takes ;-)
After many thoughts on actually going out on a wardrive, yesterday the decision was made: the wardrive must happen!
And so, Joffie and I went out on a little trip. Not knowing too much about Wi-Fi networks, we found out how shockingly easy it was to actually get online through somebody else's router/access point.
Just driving around showed us many, many, many points of interest and after parking the car somewhere, it usually took us less than a minute to completely take over a router (or more than one). We could just randomly park the car in the city, and get online in matter of seconds.
Why don't people enable WEP, disable DHCP, allow only certain MAC addresses to connect or at least change the default login/password combination of their routers? With a little help of Yahoo you can find lists containing routers' default passwords. Very handy, yet going for 'admin/admin' usually works out quite well too.
All in all, I found the journey quite interesting from a network point of view (learned a lot), yet also very scary. People really don't care about security, or so it seems. This must change... Then again, if -for some reason- my own internet connection fails, I have ample backups ;-)
After many thoughts on actually going out on a wardrive, yesterday the decision was made: the wardrive must happen!
And so, Joffie and I went out on a little trip. Not knowing too much about Wi-Fi networks, we found out how shockingly easy it was to actually get online through somebody else's router/access point.
Just driving around showed us many, many, many points of interest and after parking the car somewhere, it usually took us less than a minute to completely take over a router (or more than one). We could just randomly park the car in the city, and get online in matter of seconds.
Why don't people enable WEP, disable DHCP, allow only certain MAC addresses to connect or at least change the default login/password combination of their routers? With a little help of Yahoo you can find lists containing routers' default passwords. Very handy, yet going for 'admin/admin' usually works out quite well too.
All in all, I found the journey quite interesting from a network point of view (learned a lot), yet also very scary. People really don't care about security, or so it seems. This must change... Then again, if -for some reason- my own internet connection fails, I have ample backups ;-)
Last night I went to see the great Opeth once again. This time they performed in 013 in Tilburg.
I have mixed feelings about that venue, for sometimes the sound is great, but I've also had terrible noise there. Luckily, the Opeth sound was just awesome. Not too loud, crispy clear and full. Didn't even need earplugs (!).
The band played a mixture of new and older songs, and they even banged their heads now and then (big improvement from the previous show I saw of them ;-)
Now I have to rethink my whole 'best gig ever' list. This Opeth show ranks high, but can it beat the Duran Duran gig? Not sure yet... Nevertheless, this show was just simply awesome.
Last night I went to see the great Opeth once again. This time they performed in 013 in Tilburg.
I have mixed feelings about that venue, for sometimes the sound is great, but I've also had terrible noise there. Luckily, the Opeth sound was just awesome. Not too loud, crispy clear and full. Didn't even need earplugs (!).
The band played a mixture of new and older songs, and they even banged their heads now and then (big improvement from the previous show I saw of them ;-)
Now I have to rethink my whole 'best gig ever' list. This Opeth show ranks high, but can it beat the Duran Duran gig? Not sure yet... Nevertheless, this show was just simply awesome.
For years, my good old Nokia 3210 has served me well. I'm not a big cellphone enthusiast, but sometimes it can be handy (more often, a mobile phone is just annoying). The poor thing has been dropped so many times, yet it never failed me, until lately. The power supply fails now and then and it's just doing weird things then and now.
Time for a new one! I don't call a lot (and to be frank, hate cellphones) so I didn't want to spend too much money on one. Now I have a Sony Ericsson J200i.
It's already and "old" type, yet top notch, shiny new, and high-tech to me. I never had a phone that could do more than ... make phone calls, yet modern phones must include a camera for starters, or so it seems. Luckily I am not that far yet, for the J200i is camera-less, can't play mp3's, has no voice recording and cannot drive my car for me.
Phones that are anything like the good 3210 are hard to find. I don't care about most features my new phone has, like a calendar or profiles for home, car, office. They expect me to navigate through the phone four times a day to get different sounds and stuff on the right place? I don't care if the phone rings the same at home and at work.
Another thing is that the buttons are terribly small on every phone out there now. The J200i isn't as bad as others, yet if you're plagued with rather thick fingers, you're doomed.
There are of course also nice things to it. I like the color screen and polyphonic (yes, already old fashioned) ringtones. I couldn't even resist to get me the theme of my childhood heroes ;-) And the best thing, that my old phone lacked, the vibration alert (for the lonely nights ;-).
So to conclude: I am horribly old fashion, and have a total lack of interest in cellphones and anything that has to do with them. I like old phones where buttons are big, phones that don't have 300 pages bound into a manual, and phones that can just stay focused on what they have to do: place and receive phone calls. The J200i isn't that bad, for it doesn't have many features (still too many), isn't too hard to understand, can vibrate and can keep me amused with my ringtone (which means I never pick up the phone, for that would stop the song again, oh no!).
On July 17th 1980, the Netherlands ratified the "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women". Based on that convention, a Dutch christian political party (SGP) just lost a trial in which the Clara Wichmann fund claimed the Dutch government to stop providing this party a subsidy, for they were violating the mentioned convention. The subsidy was for €800,000 a year (now the government saves money, let's make gas cheaper! ;-) The party said to be surprised and sad (I bet).
The SGP is a strict religious party which bans women from any position in the party, based on the holy bible. That discrimination, according to the judge, was in violation with the UN convention.
The interesting part about this trial was to see what was more important: freedom of assembly and association, freedom of religion or this treaty. As it turned out, the judge ruled the women's treaty to be more important. The party itself can continue whatever they want to do, yet the subsidy will be over. For the law regarding the political subsidies provides means to retract the subsidy in case of discrimination (Wet subsidiëring politieke partijen).
I must say I have to agree with the judge. Tax money is (was) going to a political party that violates treaties and, in my humble opinion, is beyond old fashioned (women were able to vote in this country since 1917 (passive) and 1922 (active)). The SGP also wants to ban "extreme" porn on European scale. Would they support http://stopclownpornnow.org/ too? ;-)
Also I'm rather surprised to see this result for usually the freedom of religion rules in favor of anything else. Finally that's starting to shift.
I am one of many non-hardware nerds who believe hardware should just function straight out of the box. I don't fancy overclocking and usually hurt myself whenever I have to replace a certain piece of hardware from the case.
This disinterest in hardware usually is no problem for Win32 enthusiasts, but is killing if you -like me- like Linux. A few years back, I had a friend of mine put together a nice system. Awesome! Too bad he didn't know about the horrible Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard though... and that was the one I got.
From day one I have had difficulties with it. But in the end, everything functioned well under Debian Linux (except for the oh-so annoying New CPU Found! message whenever I had to reboot (luckily not that often ;-)) The 3Com onboard NIC (3C940) was probably the hardest part, until I found out about the sk98lin patch, that made my kernel work well with the network card.
Recently I've got really fed up with Debian though. Software packages not being maintained and my system was full of exotic and obscure tarball installations. So, time for a change! And Gentoo it was going to be.
After installing Gentoo (which takes too much manual work IMHO), I compiled a fresh kernel and found out the rotten 3Com NIC was playing tricks on me again. I've lost my pride in that thing and plugged in a tulip based NIC. Same problem: downloading big files (or emerge --sync for the matter) would hang and time out. So I shoved in a 8139too based NIC to find the same problems.
Three NICs cannot all be faulty, so it had to be something else. I've messed with hdparm, memtest86, kernel params/modules, and everything one can think off, but until now I don't see a final solution (although it doesn't seem to happen that often anymore, and at least Azureus works ok again ... crossing fingers). I have no clue what it can be that causes this strange behavior anymore, so I blame the Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard. Not because I'm sure it's really the problem, but because I've had it with that thing and its name looks too much like PHP, another thing I can't stand anymore ;-)
Conclusion: Asus P4P800 Deluxe, avoid like the plague if you like Linux!
I am one of many non-hardware nerds who believe hardware should just function straight out of the box. I don't fancy overclocking and usually hurt myself whenever I have to replace a certain piece of hardware from the case.
This disinterest in hardware usually is no problem for Win32 enthusiasts, but is killing if you -like me- like Linux. A few years back, I had a friend of mine put together a nice system. Awesome! Too bad he didn't know about the horrible Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard though... and that was the one I got.
From day one I have had difficulties with it. But in the end, everything functioned well under Debian Linux (except for the oh-so annoying New CPU Found! message whenever I had to reboot (luckily not that often ;-)) The 3Com onboard NIC (3C940) was probably the hardest part, until I found out about the sk98lin patch, that made my kernel work well with the network card.
Recently I've got really fed up with Debian though. Software packages not being maintained and my system was full of exotic and obscure tarball installations. So, time for a change! And Gentoo it was going to be.
After installing Gentoo (which takes too much manual work IMHO), I compiled a fresh kernel and found out the rotten 3Com NIC was playing tricks on me again. I've lost my pride in that thing and plugged in a tulip based NIC. Same problem: downloading big files (or emerge --sync for the matter) would hang and time out. So I shoved in a 8139too based NIC to find the same problems.
Three NICs cannot all be faulty, so it had to be something else. I've messed with hdparm, memtest86, kernel params/modules, and everything one can think off, but until now I don't see a final solution (although it doesn't seem to happen that often anymore, and at least Azureus works ok again ... crossing fingers). I have no clue what it can be that causes this strange behavior anymore, so I blame the Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard. Not because I'm sure it's really the problem, but because I've had it with that thing and its name looks too much like PHP, another thing I can't stand anymore ;-)
Conclusion: Asus P4P800 Deluxe, avoid like the plague if you like Linux!
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