SideQuest

What is with the anger?

A question that I find I'm asking myself more and more. Everybody seems to have an opinion and everyone seems to have to ventilate this opinion as agressively and widely possible. I know that by writing this I myself ventilate my opinion, but judging fromt the amount of pageviews I could just as easily be talking to a wall and usually I pretend I am.
The most explicit example of this aggresive opinioniating is the murder on Theo van Gogh of course. Actual violence. But though it does draw a lot of media attention, it's actually not that interesting. There have always been violent idiots and they will always be there in the future. No, I'm talking politics here, friends, public discussion forums. People are outraged about the management of their country. Even the management is outraged about the management. Everybody seems to have the answer as to what should be done and how we should achieve this. What surprises me is that we all seem to listen to these people. Apparently we have grown so accustomed to a culture of discussion and negotiation that we think it's normal. Let me tell you. It's not. As recently mentioned in the satiric Dutch TV program Kopspijker: "We live in a democracy. And the definition of a democracy is not that everyone is allowed to make discissions. It is that everyone is allowed to elect the people who should represent You to make the best decission for you".

Politics and leading a country is not a simple task. It's not meant to be simple. It's not always as fun for the people as the people would like it to be. Sometimes the world economy sucks and you need to make decissions that will help the country and not directly the people living in it. Politics is something that should be thinked about in the terms of decades, not in single day one-liners. That's why a random referendum is such a dangerious form of making important decisions. If a referendum is a frequently occuring thing than its fine since people who don't know a thing about it, will often refrain from voting at all. But if it's only once every 4 years or something, then people will use it (their power) to ventilate their opinion about everything regardless of what the actual voting subject is.

Unfortunately the European Constitution (which isn't a real constitution but rather a specific set of treaties that we have already got largely in place) will be decided upon in such a random referendum.
And a lot of people voting are the people opposing the European Union as a whole. People are scared. Scared about the Euro. Scared about the progress that is being made. Scared about the rules that are supposedly laid upon them with them not having influence upon those. And almost none of these people understand what they are saying.
The EU constitution will actually bring more direct power to the people whom reside in it. The balance between the different participating countries will be more equal then it is now. The environment will be more protected etc etc etc. Besides the constitution is much more flexible then our own constitution. It's not like these laws are set in stone. They will be a work in progress and without doubt be changed many a times in this century. Why do people work together on Free Software, Open encyclopedias and the Internet in general, yet don't understand that all those recently very popular concepts are very much based on unification, cooperation and the adventurous spirit that Europe as a whole has always had?

Basically there is only one argument against the EU and that is being opposed to unification. Being opposed to globalism. What people don't see is that this will come regardless. It's either unification or anarchy, and both still won't last forever. Personally I prefer Unification. You see a continuing trend at the moment where people seek the safety of the fifties and the early sixties of the previous century. People are afraid of the next BIG thing. For the first time in a hundred years we don't really know what is coming next. It explains the growing interest in religion and religious movies, TV, books etc. It's a longing for a safety zone, something that you have seen and that you cherish. However, that is gone. It will never return in that exact same form. The future is always in flux. Fashions come and go and hopefully the fashion of voicing your opinion on every chance you get will too.

I still believe in the striving towards Utopia. You may call me naive and that is fine by me. I know that we will never get there, but perhaps, just maybe, the road towards Utopia is even a higher and more admirable concept than Utopia itself. Star Trek, Free Software and a Free society here I come, anyone who wants to can follow us, if not well then that is your Freedom of choice just as much (you see i still win :D ). Just don't bother me with that opinion everytime.

Current work

Well for now I have given up on integrating the mozilla plugin in a clean way into our contrib system on OSX. M-audio have sent me a Sonica Theather USB device. I have been rewriting the OS X Coreaudio plugin we have now, to work better with the large number of devices out there in the world. I'm using an Audio Output Unit for HAL devices for analog output now, which will hopefully improve VLCs functionality.
There are some other great things coming to VLC very soon (such as sounds and images, OSD menu, Screenshots, PictureInPicture ), but hopefully we will finally think about a new release, cause it really has been to long.

Will be going to my parents this weekend. Show my parents the ibook. Hopefully i'll get a bit more work done, cause the list is long (hell I have a laptop now, should be easier :D )

I book

Wednesday the 2nd of march I finally received my iBook. I'm posting this from it right now. It took me a long time, but I finally ported all my required data from the old G4/400. The old machine is now disconnected and removed from my room. I have to say the experience has been great so far. The ibook is just an amazing machine. I do really need to get that extra memory though. Switching apps or windows can sometimes take a lot of time. I'm guessing the extra memory will give it quite a speed improvement (i saw what it did to my older G4/400 and I suspect similar results with the ibook).

As a dynamic IP user I ran into several problems though. For instance WLAN simply disconnects sometime and of course the machine goes to sleep sooner than i was used to. This makes my ssh connection fall out regurly. Since my server contains my screen sessions with the shells to all my servers that i have accesss to, and also contains my irssi session, this can be quite annoying.
I installed SSHKeyChain to prevent me from having to reenter my ssh key everytime when i log back into the server. This was getting quite annoying as you might imagine. When you set SSHKeyChain to only show a menubaritem and launch it at boot, it's quite unobtrusive. I have come to enjoy it.

Another issue is that I host all my mp3's, movies and series on my linux server (I can't afford more than 1 mac :) ) On my old static ip workstation, I used to connect to my server trough NFS. It was more reliable than AFS, SMB or FTP and the speed was fenominal. Now with the dynamic IP, I have a problem with applying access restrictions to the NFS share... I haven't quite decided yet how I will solve this.

The next issue is mail relay. My server has exim, and I had allowed my server machine relaying for the static ip's of my workstations. Off course this isn't a good solution now. I guess I will have to build exim with authentication support, but that might have to wait a tad at the moment.

I also installed gentoo on the iBook. Immediatly I know again why ppl think installing linux can be hell. But it will be good to test VLC on ppc linux once in a while. Perhaps I will not keep the linux install, but at the moment I have room plenty on the machine, so when I run out of that, I might delete it of course.

Last thing that his me thinking is all the cables I need to hook it up to my home setup. I have a 19" CRT monitor, and it really is much nicer to use that one if it's there anyways. Audio on my stereo is also nice, and 100Mbps as well if you are watching a movie. So I have a total of 5 cables that can be hooked up to my ibook and they all hang on the backside of my desk. I need something to keep them from falling down when they aren't connected :)

Why is it so difficult to write?

Oh my god. Has it really been so long since I wrote on this site of mine? I haven't even been THAT busy. Why do i find it so difficult to write I ask myself.....

]]> It's not like I cannot write, don't like to write, don't have time to write or just don't care to write. It has very much to do with my piece of mind I think. The times I can write and actually produce good writing at the same time are rare. I have to have this certain state of mind, a calmness, over myself that I don't often enough allow myself to find. Laziness usually kicks in before that moment. After school, sports, coding or work I much rather prefer to just hang on the couch and watch TV.

So currently I'm at my parents, just relaxing a bit and enjoying pure piece and quiet. Other times that I feel like writing are often during travelling. In the train for instance. Unfortunatly I don't own a laptop and I hate writing on paper. Still I miss it often. So I SHOULD force myself to do it more often. I'm trying to find ways to make this happen but it's just so hard....

Anyone got an idea????

A month?

Has it been almost a month since my last posting? My god. I knew it was a long time ago, but the past month seems to have vanished into thin air. What happened to that promise that I would write something once every three days? Luckily my DIOK stuff is back to 'normal' now. I've been working almost 24/7 on that. But is was my own fault. I let that slip from me in the months ahead.
For the past week I've also been busy a lot with VideoLAN again for the first time in about 4 weeks in think. The new test2 release is out, and people seem to like it. Off course it's not nearly finished. I'm surprised how many bugs are still there. I guess we all have been really busy. Fenrir's computer broke down, so he hasn't been able to do much. Dnumgis, titer, bigben and me we have all been working on other stuff. Gibalou really kept everything afloat I think.

So what are the plan?
1: finish my treasurer transfer
2: fix the bugs in 0.8.0-test2 so we can make a proper VLC release (at last!)
3: pick up the SNT project IPTV for transferring TV over the network
4: start posting again on my site :)

#brand and #utwente

So to preserve some history for prosperity...
As most people reading this probably know, on 20th of november in 2002 the Networks Operation Center of the University Twente burned down. In the wake of this event, the entire internet connection and LAN network was disabled. Students set to work immediatly to bring their beloved network back online, taking over services as DHCP, WWW, and most importantly IRC, to bring back some form of communication again.
Of course our old #snt channel was working up untill then, but with so much work needing to be done, we couldn't be bothered by non-snt members who weren't really working on any network systems..

At that time (hours after the fire started) #brand (#fire in english) was born and loads of not regulars started joining this channel on IRC to exchange information etc etc.
The channel became really popular and wasn't gonna die. It went on as a new 'general' university channel named #utwente.
Today I suddenly wondered how this channel got started exactly and my friend 'ascent' sent me his #brand irclogs which I had lost myself. Some excerpts will follow

Time of Conception of #utwente: 22-11-2002 13:50
* HCl vindt nog steeds dat een globaal c'net irc kanaal best een goed id is
< dj|term> is goed, als alles weer een beetje goed is doen we wel #utwente op IRCnet goed?
< HCl> dj|term: bijvoorbeeld
< FizzGig> indeed

Date of Birth #utwente: 23-11-2002 00:17
00:15:56 <@tsd> er wordt gewerkt aan een nieuwe irc server, daarom zal deze tijdelijke irc server dalijk alleen nog bereikbaar zijn op 'cugel.student.utwente.nl', en niet meer 'irc.snt.utwente.nl'
00:16:28 < zielknijp> moet er niet gewerkt worden aan een nieuwe mailserver? :-)
00:16:47 <@tsd> dus als je op deze server/dit channel wilt blijven, even host 'cugel.student.utwente.nl' gebruiken :)
00:16:56 < Remco> tsd: komt er op snt dan ook weer een #brand? ;-)
00:17:04 < FizzGig> #utwente lijkt me
00:17:07 < oediv> is wel een hit he
00:17:07 < HCl> mmhmm
00:17:13 < HCl> #brand lijkt me een goed id
00:17:17 < Wh|teRuss> :)
00:17:18 < HCl> gewoon een globaal utwente kanaal
00:17:19 < Wh|teRuss> gewoon joine
00:17:24 < Wh|teRuss> :)
00:17:28 < Wh|teRuss> utwente kanaal rockt

....... .....

00:20:03 <@tsd> 'irc.snt.utwente.nl' gaat mogelijk weer linken met ircnet.. #brand op ircnet is op t moment door een viertal onbekenden in gebruik, dus als je op ircnet zelf verder wilt, moeten jullie even een ander kanaal uitkiezen.. :)
00:20:17 < Wh|teRuss> --> You are now talking on #utwente
00:20:17 < Wh|teRuss> --- Topic for #utwente is Fire in the datacenter of University of Twente in the Netherlands
00:20:21 < Wh|teRuss> :)

What is remarkable is that all the people participating in this chat are all still #utwente regulars. dj|term would be me of course.

P.S. Some unrelated chatter was removed.

Busy Busy Busy

So I haven't been around much. Many people noticed I guess, especially my IRC friends from #utwente, #videolan and #matroska. So I'll tell you what the critical point is at the moment. I'm gearing up towards handing over my treasurer duties to someone else and this is keeping me very busy. The important date is 22 september, and hopefully I'll have a lot more time then to catch up on lots of VideoLAN, SNT, SideQuest and school stuff. I leave you with this thought.

"...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do
not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out
about them."
Osama Bin Laden .

There aught to be limits to freedom!"
George Bush.

Which one scares you more?

Quickie

Been fairly busy, but i just love this one... http://mercola.com/test/only.htm
I had to share it..

Making introductions

Today the univeristy's introduction period for the first year students has started. A hot day with most of them looking around, browsing, exploring. This has always fascinated me since the first year that I wasn't participating myself. Everybody starts out a bit cautious. Intimidated you might even say, some even overwhelmed. They receive their goodie bag with the 2 week program and an insane amount of advertising. Some are completely alone, others in the company of a friend from high-school or something.
And it's high school all over again. A lot have a big mouth, trying to make a good first impression, making friends or they just seem to attract them naturally. Others hide in the furthest corner of the complex. Scared perhaps.

And then it starts. Everyone of them starts to make the rounds. The event area is covered with stands of sports, student and study clubs. Activities, music, food and beer. A small terras to sit down and read the insane amount of folders and flyers everyone keeps pushing in your hand. As an active member of two large clubs, me and my friends try to meet them and talk them into participating in a workshop or have them join up right away. For us this is just as important as for them. You need to make sure your club is interesting to them and at the very least have them remember you. This is the time to pick up those new members who are still looking around and haven't decided what they want to do with their time after college hours.

One by one they loosen up. The weather is definetly helping making the atmosphere very gemütlich. And all of a sudden everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. This is what it is all about. Starting over. Popularity, grades or skills it doesn't matter anymore. This is a fresh start and that is possible because you don't know anybody (well 3 people perhaps).

And that is just perfect. It's the way it should be. It allows you to be yourself and redefine yourself at the same time. You will make new friends, perhaps with people you had before never thought you would hang out with. That is what will make you ready to face the rest of the world. It is what makes you grow as an allround person. In my eyes it will teach you more than you will ever learn in the college benches.

Progress

Progress has definetly been made. The layout is largely done now. The left side contains some links to websites I visit a lot (daily). There are also some links to people I know. I would very much like to extend this list, but I have noticed that only very few of my friends have proper websites/blogs. I'm sure the list will grow though in the times ahead.

The right side contains the archives, recent artices and other shit that you just NEED on a blog, but that are of less importance.
The top has a menu, which the more exploring visitors among you have already noticed, doesn't work. This is a more longterm part of my project and I will make does additions at a later time.

In the meantime, i'm waiting for my Domain registration and account setup to be finished, at which time the site can be hosted on it's own domain. The old http://sidekick.student.utwente.nl/ root now has a simple overview of my Sidekick server (the stuff that was previously hosted at this location).

If you have suggestions for my site, please leave your comments.

Starting SideQuest

So everybody has been bugging me as to why I don't have my own domain and a proper website, with a blog and pictures and other shit. Well until now the DNS wasn't worth the money to me. I just used my machine http://sidekick.student.utwente.nl on the University Twente Campus.
Besides that I also didn't really have any content to publish i thought, so why would I need it.

Well finally people talked me into it, and my new domain will be sidequest.org, where I will regurly make postings about all kind of things that bug/haunt/entice me.