A nice sunny morning

Ah... A lightblue sky, a bleak winter sun, and some birds flying over.
I don't often take the time to look outside, but I decided to take just that little rest. I realised yesterday night while tossing and turning in my bed, that I needed some slack time after the last stressful days. Even though I have a notebook in which I write down the things I need to remember (such as "buy X" or "take Y along from home"), my usual gears-in-overdrive state of mind is fully active almost continuously. Combine that with discovering more ickiness in the house every once in a while and my poor little head goes poof.
For example, coming to the conclusion that the previous owners can't have cleaned in the 7 years they lived in the house. Or the sloppy state in which some walls or corners were left finished (or rather, unfinished). Or the hole in the bathroom floor that was covered with a hardboard plate. Silly me thought that the plate was just lying around there and had not thought of the possibility that someone would leave a 20x50 cm hole in the floor of his bathroom.
So, at this place my special thanks go to my girlfriend for being able to calm me down over and over again. Purrrrr...

Once again I'm grateful

... to those who help with all things that need to be done in our new home.
For example, today, while we were shopping for floor covering and curtains, the remaining wallpaper in the bedroom was stripped. Hurray for mothers, hurray for study friends.

T + 2 days

Two days of DIY'ing later, I'm very glad to have people around me who will gladly help out with the work. Amongst us, we've:

• almost stripped the wallpaper off of one room


• cleaned the kitchen (boy was it filthy and greasy)


• removed the unnecessary wall-mounted stuff in the bathroom


• and chiseled off a layer of tiles only to find one more underneath

Tomorrow: the final chiseling and stripping of wallpaper. Next week: shopping.

The keys!

The contracts have been signed, hands have been shaken, and the keys are now mine. As of today I'm the proud owner of my new apartment in The Hague. The rest of this year will be spent packing my stuff, cleaning, buying furniture and whatever else we need, and redecorating the new home... *bounce* :)

Panic promotes once again

Yesterday, Panic 1 played four games with a very tough defense and some nice offensive actions as well. The result? Three wins, one draw, and promotion to the third division based on score difference. I'll post a link to the longer match report when it's available and when I remember to ;)

Devoxx: not only hardcore developing

So, last Wednesday to Friday I've been in Antwerp for the Devoxx Java developers conference. Although I am a developer, my side interests in project and information structuring have grown over the years, and so I was quite happy to see some interesting talks on that subject on the programme.

The first talk I went to apart from the keynote, was one about software estimation. The speaker discussed how you can make proper estimates about the amount of time a certain task will take, and how to take various environmental variables into account. He stressed that estimates cannot be argued about, because when you do that, you are in fact debating the premises for the estimates.

The subject of the next interesting talk was so-called behaviour driven development, a way to make sure you write tests for your program that actually test the intended behaviour instead of the actual implementation. For example, assuring that the increase function does indeed add 1 to its input is very nice, but when the behaviour of the program should be to decrease instead, that outcome says nothing.

On Thursday, I visited a talk titled "Be smart!". The very enthousiastic speaker (Ivar Jacobson, who was a key designer for various of the currently used business engineering and modelling processes) described how you can avoid the common pitfalls with agile development by simply... being smart. That is to say, recognising a problem when you see one.

Next to these three talks, I've been to various more technical topics (some brought very well, others were extremely boring), had my fair share of alcohol, and of course great fun. Over the next few weeks I will try to combine all those experiences together with those from the book I just finished reading (Spring Into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists) in some form. At the very least I should be able to make a nice set of notes.

Off to Devoxx

(yawn) Time to leave for Antwerp already...

One last week

Ahh... A full weekend off. Almost ashamed of sleeping late and only getting up at 11, but this is a rare opportunity and I'm taking full advantage of it. So, nothing much has happened the past days, apart from confirming plans and making a few new ones. Furthermore I've picked up playing WoW again with some new characters. Oh, and of course I have been counting days :)

Next week is going to be busy again though. Me and a bunch of colleagues will be in Antwerp for Devoxx, a developers conference. For me that means that I'll be at work for my last two days of this year there, then give practice on Tuesday evening, leave early Wednesday morning to be in Antwerp before 9, and arrive back home on Friday just in time for another packed weekend.

Sinterklaasje kom maar binnen met je knecht...

... and other Sinterklaas songs were on the program yesterday as we celebrated this Dutch festive evening with Panic. First, everyone got a turn at Sinterklaas's lap and was spoken to by the bishop and his servant. Those of us who were known for a small vice (for example, often being late) got a stern remark, others were just thanked for something they did for Panic.
For the second part of the evening, everybody had had to bring three presents for about 5 euros in total, which were then distributed among the group in a game. What exactly had to be done (swap presents, rotate all clockwise, ...) was determined by dice rolls. Of course, when all presents were unwrapped, everyone went swapping once again to get those presents he/she liked best, with strange mercantile deals being made.
I came back with - amongst others - a 3D variety of noughts and crosses called Trimula, published in the 90s, although the picture on the box makes it look like it's at least two decades older.

Plots, plans, and other ideas

My mind is running in top gear again. I'm thinking of some last minute ideas for my role at the Call of Heroes roleplaying weekend that starts this evening. Sunday afternoon we will have the first Maerquin plot and storyline discussion with the new team.
While I usually have the Monday off, I've switched that for the Fridays in these last weeks before moving house, so there's no sleeping late and relaxing on Monday this time. And if working the day right after an intensive weekend was not enough, silly me also proposed having a first chat about the possibilities of founding our own consultancy-like-small-business-thingy with Martijn, one of my colleagues. I wouldn't be me if I wouldn't already have some mind gears dedicatedly spinning for that subject...
On the good side, only two weeks on full throttle left, and then the easy and relaxing part of making our new house ready for living in starts. Cough.

T minus three weeks

Today my broker called me with a confirmation. Three weeks to go, then a new period in my life will start ... we'll finally have our new home. There will be a lot to do, and most things will fall together in the last two weeks of December. I'm getting more and more anxious. It's a large and stressful step, but one I'm really looking forward to.

Night of the Proms 2008

Last night my girlfriend and I went to the Night of the Proms in Ahoy' (Rotterdam). I can only say that it was definitely worth it, with mixtures of classical music, golden pop songs and some hilarious acts. Seeing fireworks seer by right in front of us during the Ouverture 1812 was especially impressive and actually brought tears to my eyes. Looking forward to next year's edition :)

The good type of lead

Back home from my first Maerquin roleplay weekend as a gamemaster. Early last week I heard that one of our crew members had broken her leg. Hence, neither she as one of the plot writers or her husband as one of the gamemasters, could be at the event. So I was asked if I could help out instead of being "just" an NPC...
So... Friday. Early train, shopping, gathering props, driving to the terrain, and before you know the afternoon is over and the first players arrive. I think I've been sitting down for about 2 or 3 hours between Friday 8 PM and Sunday 2 PM. The rest was walking or standing. Add about 12 hours of sleep over three days, and the result is that my legs still feel as lead.
But it's a good type of lead. I've seen brilliant plays, overheard many interesting discussions, and had great fun with the rest of the crew. It goes too far to write down a "short" summary of what happened, but basically, the players' task was to reinstate the balance between the gods and bring them back in the pantheon after the tenth god appeared and cleared the pantheon from all but one other. And for some gods, that went significantly better than for others...
Nevertheless, there is a new balance now, and only time can tell what happens next. I'm already excited and nervous about twisting time in my favour though :)

Inspiration

<Pink> Zoals lucumo ooit zei: 02:17:13 <lucumo> Ik snap het echt niet. Ik heb 5 minuten gecode. Maar 5 minuten geleden was het 2345h!

(A quote on IRC, as registered by Pink, the channel bot: "As lucumo once said: 02:17:13 <lucumo> I really don't get it. I've coded for 5 minutes. But 5 minutes ago it was 2345h!")

At a slightly smaller scale, I had the same today, and I'm not too unhappy about it. Not while coding, but while writing other stuff. I got an idea this evening and after about half an hour of twisting and turning, suddenly the lock clicked and my mind started to unravel. Fifteen minutes later, two hours had passed. And the start of a new D&D campaign is the result. Now only to convert the ideas into actual adventures, and find players and time to play... Guess that the former will be easier than the latter. Or will it?

When sed and awk come together

I prefer the filenames of my MP3 collection to be a bit useful, and consistent at that. Hence, instead of Track 01.mp3 I would much rather see 01 - Title of the Song.mp3, and the same holds for 01_title_of_the_song.mp3. Please give me a nice title-cased name, it's so much friendlier to my eyes.
For the latter, replacing the underscores by spaces is trivial with sed, but uppercasing the first letter proved to be a bit harder. Using sed's y command is not an option, since it transforms all characters in its input. Would there have been the option to only transform the first occurrence, I would have been happy. But alas, no such luck.
At first I thought I had found the solution here, but unfortunately, using the proposed \U and \E turned out to be a no-op. But the solution was nearby, and so my command line became
for a in *.mp3; do mv "$a" "`echo $a | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | awk '{print toupper(substr($0,1,3)substr($0,4,1))substr($0,5)}'`"; done
Now I only need to capitalise a few additional letters. Much better!

Edit: It turned out that I was fooled by my own "knowledge" of regular expressions. Using \d does not really work in sed. It's now for a in *.mp3; do mv "$a" "`echo $a | sed -e 's/_/ /g' -e 's/\([a-z]\)/- \U\1\E/'`"; done :)

Wine rocks

When reinstalling my desktop, I left my Windows setup alone so that I could still play some games. Yet, rebooting only to play a game is not really ideal. I knew that Wine supported a number of Windows games quite well already, but I did not expect so much change since the last time I checked. So, when hearing that even World of Warcraft is quite nicely supported in Wine version 1.1.7, I could not resist checking if that was really the case.
And indeed it is. It took me some time to get it all running, but that was mainly due to one hurdle, being my graphics card. Eventually I found out that I had to compile a new kernel module for it (yay, NVidia) in order to get proper OpenGL support. On the other hand, it now runs just as if it were under native Windows: smooth enough as long as you don't enter Shattrath ;)
On the left screen: WoW... On the right screen: Nothing, but just enough to show that it runs :)

Look ye, Another Wall

I'll let the image speak for itself.

Sign here, please

Oh, and there, and there, and there ...
Last week I had the pleasure to sign both my mortage request (and all the added insurances that apply) and the buying contract. The former comprised much more documents, but the latter one had to be signed on each page.
But the good news is that we are one step closer to moving. Yay!

Gulls scream and gods arise

Last weekend the Nijmegen frisbee team BFrisBee2's organised the "Schreeuw van de Meeuw", an indoor ultimate tournament. PANIC got themselves a spot on the teams list and I went along for the first day.
Having to catch a train at 6:45 is not my favourite start of a tournament, but the games were well worth it. Even though we lost all but one game the first day, we played really well at times and we gained some valuable indoor experience again. Then came a good meal followed by a party with three important ingredients: good music (partly live), beer, and wacky people on the dance floor.

After having downgraded my hangover to a slight headache the next morning, I left my team mates to play the second day of the tournament while I went to the plot and roles discussion day for the next Maerquin roleplay weekend. As usual, it was a great afternoon with lots of strange humour and weird cooked up ideas. The upcoming event (November 14-16) is the last weekend organised by the current team, and for starters, the official title that was revealed last week ("A dark and hungry god arises") does not prove much good. Having inside information about what is going to happen, I'm curious what the players will do and what situation I will be handed on my plate as member of the new writing team...

Qt and Phonon, or how to compile a pre-written application with the use of Google

I've been using XMMS for a long while now. When it comes to playing music, it does about everything I want, but its looks aren't the greatest. JuK and/or amaroK on the other hand, have a reasonably nice, but clogged UI, and I don't need them storing all information about my music if I have that myself anyway.
Hence, I thought about writing a simple Qt-based media player myself which would contain nothing more or less than what I wanted. A secondary and not less important goal being to get some experience with Qt.
For starters, the Qt 4 documentation contains a working media player that uses Phonon as a backend. So why not compile that, see how it works, and tweak some things, gradually learning?

So, let's start by grabbing the sources... by copying the text out of the manual, since I can't find the source files themselves, and apparently the qt4-examples package has been missing in action since quite a while in Debian.
Next step: put those files in a folder and compile. Of course, compiling simply by running g++ does not work. Should have known, but my hacking skills are a bit rusty. Instead, I have to run qmake, errm, I mean qmake-qt4.
Then run make, having made sure that all Phonon include files can be found.

Finally! It runs! But no music yet... I have to install the Phonon backend first. Silly me for thinking that installing the Phonon libraries and development packages would install the backend, which is required to be actually able to do anything with your newly compiled application, as well.
So now it should work, right? Oh, wait. It is not yet available at the expected location. And after that... Hurray!

I have to admit, once it works, it works like a charm, and the code is actually quite legible even though I have little knowledge of Qt (and C++, for that matter). But the process to get it working was a bit too bumpy to my taste.

Desktop sharing under X

The idea behind buying two identical TFTs was, once, that I would have a dual screen setup. Currently however, one of those is in use by my server, which has functioned as my primary desktop machine for a pretty while now. So I've been playing with the idea to keep my server only as a machine for remote logins and give my freshly reanimated desktop machine back its second screen. That turned out to be harder than I thought.

And that all because I still wanted to be able to access my X session once I would disconnect the display. Had I stuck with e-mail in mutt and instant messaging in BitlBee, that would all not be necessary. But I've become quite used to my KDE environment and it is just a bit too much hassle to switch back to console-only applications. Hence, I've tried various ways of connecting to my existing X session.

For some reason, the built-in KDE desktop sharing application krfb does not work well (this seems to be a known bug, although I have no SMP machine), so that option was out. Then I looked at RealVNC's solution called x0vncserver. Granted, its documentation says that it is a bit inefficient, but at least it was worth a try. Alas, the only message I got while trying was "Aborted", so, back to the drawing board it was. My final try was to install the vnc.so module that is packed along with RealVNC. Lo and behold, it works, and I can use krdc jsut as fine with it, although it still feels a little sluggish over my local 100 Mbit connection.

Of course, a better idea might be to skip the remote desktop connection story altogether and just run KMail, Kopete, and friends locally on my desktop. Using my server purely for fileserving and routing purposes might just be better suited as well. Still, at least I now know that setting up such a remote connection is really possible, and for small tasks it might actually work quite well.

My room has a wall there?

All at once the far corner of my room is a very strange sight... Instead of seeing a packed bookcase, I can stare at a blank wall and a dozen boxes.

Boxen

Well, once you decide to move, things will have to start rolling. And one of those things is, that things have to be packed. So now I've got 50 boxen in my room...
And that causes a slight problem. Since most of the things I have are books or things closely related, completely filling up a box proves quite hard. After all, they measure about 55x50x30 cm, and you want to be able to lift them off the floor afterwards. A rough calculation shows me that I can fit in about 65 kilograms worth of normal copier paper in such a box. No thanks.
On the plus side, I finally have a real reason to search through all the stuff I've managed to cram in this room and throw away what I really don't need.

Careering an alter ego

Last weekend I attended the Moots (a live roleplaying event, for those not acquainted). I'm playing a slightly flammable mage who, unlike my daily life personality, is actively pursuing a career path, and I'm now a student of a more experienced mage who can hopefully teach me how to get the most out of myself. Perhaps in a while I can manage to turn people to ashes...
Even though very few people of our group were present, and though it was a bit colder than expected, the event was nice and brought its usual moments of stress. And with weekends like those, I'm ever so happy to have my Mondays off. Time for cleaning and laundry!

Call in three months time and I'll be fine, I know

Let's hope the next line of Evita's text won't hold...

Three months seems quite long now, but once they're over, I reckon it will feel like I wrote this only a month before. After searching for a while, my better half and I have finally found a house with enough space for all our piles of stuff. We first wanted something with a proper garden, but the few reasonably priced offers we found, just did not cut it. Deciding to be less picky and accepting a balcony as well turned out to be a very good choice: the first apartment that seemed really interesting to the both of us, will likely be ours in three months time. It's only all the paperwork that is in the way.

I've been quite nervous for the past month and I'll continue to be so until we're finally settled. Not really strange, considering that I'm soon going to own an apartment about four times as large as the flat I currently live in, and that at the same time my girlfriend is going to move in with me. Now for moving in the midst of winter...

Too much, really?

After my old blog died a quiet death more than 1.5 years ago, quite a lot happened, but I simply did not have, or did not take, the time to write about it. Yet, a part of me remained that wanted to share stuff. That part has now gotten a new place to play, to be excited, to cry, to ponder, and perhaps even to ramble again. Probably for the good. Or at least for my own. Since whatever you look at, be it my interests, my current projects, or simply my thoughts, there is always too much to mention...
Hence, I warn you, beings interested in the inner workings of my mind. Caveat lector.