Cogs can think.

Yeah, the United States really is the pinnacle of the free world…Bwahahaha.

The Top2000 has already begun. The countdown of the ultimate music list, compiled byt the votes from 1 million Dutchmen and women, has grappled my nation. Why?

After six years, there’s a new number one. Instead of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, we now have a Dutch singer at the top spot– it was already predicted last year. Here is the new top ten (mine can be found here):

1. “Avond” - Boudewijn de Groot
2. “Bohemian Rhapsody” - Queen
3. “Hotel California” - Eagles [my best song of all time]
4. “Child In Time” - Deep Purple
5. “Stairway To Heaven” - Led Zeppelin
6. “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” - Meat Loaf
7. “Clocks” - Coldplay
8. “The House Of The Rising Sun” - Animals
9. “Old And Wise” - Alan Parsons Project
10. “November Rain” - Guns ‘n’ Roses

Now playing: “Walk On” - U2 - Top2000 #1319
Now playing: “Wooden Heart” - Elvis Presley - Top2000 #1317

I’m happy I hadn’t been drinking all that much tonight. Else, two people, and maybe three if you’d include me, would’ve ended up in the hospital.

Some waste of human meat felt the urge to start a barfight tonight. Me and Marcel were walking back to our group, after having a walk around or something, but some guy didn’t want to move his hand, which rested between his body and a table, out of the way so we could pass. So, I looked at him with one of my more arrogant faces, and asked him to move his hand. He refused to. Some girls on the other side of the table also shouted “move your hand!” He still didn’t. I kept looking at him. However, the guy’s attention was drawn towards Marcel.

Marcel got annoyed, and also asked him to remove his hand. A rather unfriendly exchange of words followed. I was getting really issed off, which isn’t a very good state to be in, if you’re next to me. I’m small, but when I’m pissed off, I can take on anyone. But, I hadn’t been drinking all that much, so I kept my cool, and swallowed my rather big pride.

The next thing I know, he pushed Marcel. Immediately, one of the not-moving-arm-guy’s fat, ugly friends grabbed Macel by the throat. And at that point I was getting ready to fight.

You see, Marcel is from the Royal Militairy Acadamy. You don’t fcuk with guys from that Acadamy. So, my next thought was, Marcel’s gonna break that guy into three pieces and wrap him around a table

Luckily, Marcel also kept his cool, for some unknown reason. I also regained my senses, and instead of taking on that fat guy (which I would’ve lost anyway), I tried to pull them apart, and kind of succeeded. I tried to calm Marcel down, succeeded, and we took a minor detour.

Marcel was furious. If we wouldn’t've drawn him towards the exit of the bar, he would’ve surely broken those guys’ necks, there is no doubt in my mind about that. If I had been drinking in my usual way, I wouldn’t've kept my cool at all.

So, those guys got lucky. If only one of them would’ve layed a finger on me, Marcel, a long-time friend, would’ve sent them to the hospital.

I’ve never had an experience like this before :/. What the fcuk happened to the Chrsitmas spirit, for Christ’s sake?

You keep going your way
I’ll keep going my way
River stay away from my door

I just got a cabin
You don’t need my cabin
River stay away from my door

Don’t come up any higher
I’m so all alone
Leave my bed and my fire
That’s all I own

I ain’t breaking your heart
Don’t go breaking my heart
River stay away from my door

Oh lord ain’t been faithful
And worked damn hard in the sweat and sun
Oh lord didn’t I pray for you and thanked you for all you’ve done
Oh lord you made the river
But won’t you try to remember that you made me too
Oh lord hear me pray to you and
Make the river hear my plea

I’ll keep breaking your heart
Don’t go breaking my heart
Oh river stay away from my door
River stay away from my door

You have these people, with whom you just *connect*. It’s a connection that’s not easily explained, certainly not with nothing but text.

I have a few of those people. I met up with one of them yesterday. She’s a girl with whom I basically spent my entire first year of Psychology. We basically did every assignment together, commuted together, spent the time in class together, you name it. We were really good friends, and I still deeply appreciate how she came to pick me up and bring me home after a certain not-to-be-explained event at the MacGuire in big city Alkmaar.

After the first year, she stopped Psychology. I really felt sad about that. But, it was definitely for the best– she is now doing something that fits her much, much better.

The really bad thing about her leaving was that we didn’t keep in touch very well. Especially in the 2nd half of the following schoolyear, the contact watered down. I was far too busy with everything surrounding me mum and of course with the hard decision on my end to also stop Psychology (promoted by me to ‘best decision of the century’).

You can imagine how happy I was when she IMd me Tuesday, asking if we could meet up at my university in Amsterdam to do what we did best in our year of Psychology– hang out at the DE Café in the Medicine Faculty.

But to get back to that mushy connecting stuff– you can now understand why I came to my first paragraph of this post. There was none of that awkwardness that you usually have with people to whom you haven’t spoken in a while. We got talking without hesitation, as if nothing’d ever happened.

And Sascha, I like that :).

I’ve had this idea for quite a while but only the last few weeks it has materialized enough to put it into readable text.

Now, we all know Linux on the desktop and Linux in the embedded world didn’t take off as well as many would’ve hoped for. In the server world, Linux has put its feet firmly into the ground, but outside of that, Linux means fairly little. The desktop market is ruled by Windows (OS X doesn’t mean all that much at this point), and the embedded world (phones, PDAs) is pretty much ruled by Symbian, Windows and PalmOS (the last being on its way out though).

I have a very simple reason as to why Linux ain’t getting there. And it’s the monolithic nature of the kernel. The vanilla Linux kernel tries to be a jack-of-all-trades, it tries to accommodate every possible user scenario, whether it be supercomputers or mobile phones, and that simply ain’t working.

So, what do I advice Linus Torvalds to do? Well, besides learning some manners, and besides stopping breaking driver compatibility each point release, and besides stopping treating 2.6 as a dev. branch, I advice him to split the main branch up into three separate branches: kernel-2.6-embedded, kernel-2.6-server, and kernel 2.6-desktop. Then, optimize the fcuk out of each of those branches.

For the desktop branch, work closely with the GNOME/KDE/Xfce/etc guys, let those teams have more say in what goes in the -desktop branch and what doesn’t. This way, the desktop environments’ lives get easier, and thus the overall desktop experience will improve.

Do the same for the other branches (ie. work together with RedHat on the -server branch), and it will mean a huge leap forward for the Linux world.

—

Another solution would be to turn the Linux kernel into a proper microkernel– the advantages of a microkernel (ie. stability) far outweigh the disadvantages (overhead). 15 years ago, when computing power was limited, it made sense to make a monolithic kernel. But in this day and age, with all the computing power going to waste, the overhead is neglicable.

You can’t serisouly expect a kernel with 6 million lines of code to work flawlessly.

Today, my mum had her first check-up after her chemo and radiation therapies which ended a few months ago.

The doctors found nothing.

I am so happy :).

—

The iMac G5 really rocks. MacSupport did not have a 20″ in stock, so I settled for the 17″ instead. It has a 1.9Ghz G5, 1GB of RAM and an Ati Radeon X600 128MB RAM PCIe. I’ll have to return it by the end of January, which is too bad :(.

I have commited a serious crime. I have done something so horrible, so unforgivable, I have no words for it. It is… Unbelievable. They should put me away forever, I should never be allowed to see the light of day again or eat anything else than dry bread and dead water. Really.

You won’t believe what you’re about to hear. I’ll… I’ll just tell you: I used the new FreeBSD logo atop a DragonFly BSD story.

Yes. Can you believe it? Can you now believe I’m planning my own crucifiction? I really didn’t know what came over me the moment I chose to put a story about a FreeBSD fork in our “FreeBSD and other BSDs” category. Really, what was I thinking? Me and Eugenia had to create a whole new category just to fix this.

—

Seriously now, if you ever wanted proof that the software and computing world is fcuked up beyond recognition, this is it. I even got emails from a FreeBSD teammember! Can you believe it?

No fcuking wonder no one takes the free software world seriously. First Linus, now this. Well, I’m off picking up my completely proprietary and utterly non-free 20″ iMac G5 with a 2.1Ghz G5 processor. I am going to indulge myself in the non-free software world. And fcuk, how I like it.

Who said GNOME is ugly?