Hi all,

This weblog was pretty much abandoned, due to lack of time and, even more so, omnipresence of Facebook and Twitter.

I took a bit of time and redesigned my homepage (www.sid3windr.be now redirecting to tom.laermans.net), linked a bunch of stuff from there, and started a new blog (tech.sid3windr.be) to post mostly ICT-related tech tips/solutions/howtos.

The social part of the updates will be on Facebook and Twitter, as they have been for the last 2 years anyway – you can find links to all my profiles on the new home page.

Thanks for watching, and hope to see you on the new blog as well!

A belated new year to everyone reading this 😉

Ordered 2 albums of Thermostatic on thursday, got them in the mail yesterday – took ‘m in the car and enjoying sid-style pop music. Granted, the vocals could sometimes use a bit of protools-y fixups, but all in all it’s pretty enjoyable. Check their site, I’m sure you can find some stuff to listen to, I got my CD’s from MAZ’s Sound Studio site.

I was also a bit surprised when looking at my car radio’s display – this is I think the second (and third) not self-burnt CD which has CD-text information on it! (disc/track title, artist). Woah, I thought everyone had forgotten about that already (and had no clue my head unit supported it).

Last weekend I got Guitar Hero: Aerosmith from my wife, as a present for our first anniversary. Cool game, and I’m having lots of fun with it although a lot of cool Aerosmith songs seem to be missing (e.g. Crying) – one minor niggle in the star power mode: most people in your audience should be lucky they’re not living in the middle ages, as they would be burned as witches. No other person can clap so much out of sync with the music, you should try it! It really is impossible, and especially it completely gets you out of rhythm 🙁 I’m avoiding star power as much as possible because of it 🙁 (no clapping in the original GH3, as far as I know). The Guitar Hero series rocks 😉

I forgot to mail my original GH3 DVD to Nintendo, so I’ll do that on monday; why, you ask?  Because the original Wii release has a bug in that it only produces mono sound. You can recognize the fixed version by the guitar on the disc print (in Europe, or a star on the US version). Disc swaps are free until August 31, so hurry up if you didn’t do it yet!

As the previous post already mentioned, a minor setback on the way back… while doing 180 on the autobahn suddenly no more power from the engine and a large amount of smoke coming from the exhaust. Well, you couldn’t actually see through the smoke, so large amount may be understated. Pulled over, and very happy with the subscription to VAB with international support. Got home with a replacement car (Seat Leon) with about 5 hours of delay… but got home!

Thanks to the Alfa Romeo 156 club the car is well on its way to get repaired for a reasonable price, though "repaired" includes a new engine block, as the current one is pretty much toast – one of the 4 cylinders is badly damaged and beyond repair. I’ll be without it (her?) for a few more weeks I fear, but big thanks to my sis for letting me use her Volvo while I’m waiting!!

By popular demand (seriously!) I’m now going to post a few blog posts describing new developments 😉

Oh, and here’s an entertaining picture …

Needing cable management is one thing… but motherboard management??

Since just before 12 or so, power problems occured at the NIKHEF datacenter in Amsterdam. Funny enough, they’re still not resolved. In the meanwhile, many internet providers using AMS-IX for traffic offload and peering are getting into trouble, as the NIKHEF part of AMS-IX is also down, so about 60Gbit of traffic has to go over other IX’es and transit, and it’s getting tight. Funny what one power outage can do 😉

(In related news, my Phyxia connection between bebru1 and nlams1 went dead because it passed through equipment located at NIKHEF 🙁 )

*rant* 

Most of the time when I see someone asking how to kill a process on *nix I see someone responding "kill -9 <pid>".

Alas, this is NOT the way you kill a process … the process gets killed alright, and a little too hard. So for everyone not understanding, here’s a small explanation. Everyone who knows, just skip to the next post 😛

Normally when you (or something) kill a process, it gets a SIGTERM. When a program receives SIGTERM, it knows it should shut down and saves all its open files (or prompts the user), closes its file handles, etc etc. When you use -9, you send a SIGKILL which causes the OS to clean up the process without further ado (e.g. when it doesn’t respond to SIGTERM anymore), and shut it down. This also kills the process indeed, but doesn’t always have the intended effect when looking at data loss… Remember it 😉

*end of rant*