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* 

As Diana is going back to college (at least when the KULeuven permits her ), she stops working at T-Systems. This means we have to give back the super cool Alfa Romeo leasing car we’re currently driving around in.

As we kind of need a car or at least got so accustomed to having one, we set off on a course to find the right car for us. Which isn’t that easy, considering the length of my legs which disqualify a lot of the cheaper and smaller cars available on the market… after a few weeks of search we found a nice Alfa Romeo (yes, we fell in love with those) 156 1.8i Twinspark. Hopefully it passes the Touring car-test (only then we’ll buy it) which is scheduled for friday. I’ll post some pics when we got it !