Cogs can think.

Filled with joy I started making my supper today, as the Housing Corporation have finally agreed to perform their duty (returning my garden to a clean slate) after 18 months of sending letters, making phone calls, and so on. Anyway, with my supper on my plate, I sat down, turned on the TV - only to learn that Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema has passed away.

Suddenly, my supper didn’t taste all that good anymore.

The personification, almost, of the Dutch Resistance during the Second World War. This man, known as the ‘Soldier of Orange’ (after my Royal Family, of which he was a very dear friend), fought for everything we as The Netherlands stood for. Of course the Resistance was made up of so many people who were just as great as he was, just as important, just as heartwarming, but that does not make his achievements any less impressive or less important.

And as disrespectful as it may seem, his passing could not have come at a better time. I am happy for him, that he will not live to see our modern Dutch society wither and die. Everything that he as a Dutch freedom fighter held in high regard - freedom, tolerance, respect, understanding - is being threatened in this day and age, by right-wing anti-Muslim extremists like Geert Wilders. It must have made the Soldier of Orange so sad that the very forces he was combating over 60 years ago, are now gaining ground again in new forms, with fairly large support among the “Dutch” populace. Between quotation marks, as any one voting and supporting Wilders is not a true Dutchman at all. I am ashamed that this anti-Dutch movement, who defecate on our Constitution, gained 9 seats in parliament.

It’s goddamn treason.

The Soldier of Orange, immortalised due to the film Paul Verhoeven based on his life, lived to see the respectable age of 90. He passed away peacefully in his sleep, in Hawaii.

Look what I ordered from t3h 1nterw3b today…

Pong was my very first contact with the world of computers. We had a small orange Pong machine at home - a Binatone Mk. 6. It was a Mk. IV, actually.

Why is that whenever I clean my toilet - about the only item I do not enjoy cleaning - I almost always have to take a huge dump immediately afterwards? It’s like some cosmic constant, something I can guarantee will actually happen.

So basically, you get that bottle of toilet cleaner. It’s amazing in itself that the bottle does not actually disintegrate due to its content - which is something really close to pure chloride acid. Before you take the cap off the bottle, you better take a deep breath, as that’s all the air you’re going to get during the cleaning process. The bottle has a specially shaped neck, so you can squirt the cleaner right underneath the toilet rim. It needs the time to work its magic, so you run out of the bathroom and close the door - outside, you see the birds chocking on the chloride smell.

A few minutes later, you dive back into the bathroom again, toilet brush in hand, ready to brush the toilet clean. You flush the thing, drop the brush back into its container, dash out of the bathroom again, and close the door behind you.

And then, you need to take a huge dump. Right. Now. And there you are, with your apparatus dangling in a cloud of chloride acid.

And somehow, that just don’t feel right.

I just bought the new aluminium Apple keyboard - wired, of course. Nice piece of machinery. I always preferred laptop keyboards over traditional ones, as they feel more natural. Let’s hope it doesn’t get restricted to 867Mhz+ machines when Leopard comes out.

And it has that new-Apple-gear-smell. I love that smell.

And so Apple decided to turn up the heat under satisfied PowerPC owners by (most likely) dropping support for 800Mhz and lower PowerPC G4 Macs from Leopard. For me, this sucks major balls.

I have a PowerMac G4 Cube, with a 450Mhz PowerPC G4 with 1Mb L2 cache, 768MB of pc133 SDRAM, and an nVIDIA GeForce 2MX with 32MB of video RAM. It has a nice 128GB hard drive, AirPort Extreme, and of course a DVD drive. It’s a completely silent machine, and serves me extremely well as my main machine. It runs the latest OSX just fine (except for Flash). I can do a lot of stuff simultaneously, and therefore, am perfectly happy with the system’s performance.

And, lest we forget, it’s the best-looking computer man has ever conceived, and is a great fit for my living room.

Apple’s reasons for this decision are clear: financial gains. By cutting off a whole bunch of G4 owners, they will force them to upgrade to Intel Macs if they wish to continue to run the latest and greatest. On top of that, this cut off is completely arbitrary - I have received many reports from Leopard testers that Leopard ran just fine on machines similar to mine, including the new fancy effects. So, it’s obvious Apple wants to please their stockholders - which is fine by me, but that doesn’t make it nicer to its customers. Once again Apple is showing that it is not a single bit better than every other company out there - Apple is just like Microsoft. Make no mistake about it.

I wish Apple would go about this the same way as Microsoft: set minimum specifications, but let customers decide *shock gasp horror* for themselves if they are willing to run the OS slightly slower than His Steveness intends. Give us customers the freedom to do whatever the fcuk we deem acceptable. I have run Vista on machines way below the minimum specifications, and I could get acceptable performance out of them, simply because Microsoft allows me, as a customer, to have the freedom to actually try it.

Anyway, as OSNews’ managing editor, I find that I ought to always run the latest and greatest (software-wise), in order to make informed decisions as to what news items to publish, and to have good knowledge on what’s available on the market - knowledge I need for writing informed editorials and reviews. Apple is making that impossible for me.

You see, despite claims to the contrary, OSNews ain’t making any of us money. All our ad money goes to hosting, and whatever’s left goes to David to give us the odd present here and there. Oh, and of course, the company DB9 we all drive. So, in other words, I ain’t rich. I simply cannot afford to spend a 1099 1199 EUR on a new iMac (no, I don’t want a Mini, I don’t like it, it’s ugly, and it’s a toy, and in The Netherlands, way overpriced), just because His Steveness wants me to.

I’m genuinely pissed off about this one.

I just want to express my support for the uprising against the vicious military junta in Myanmar. Let us hope the massive protests by the monks, who are now joined by civilians too, leads to changes in Myanmar, in a peaceful way, beneficial to the people of Myanmar, who have suffered long enough under the junta. Every people, country, and culture has the right to express themselves, the right to belong, and the right to independence.

The junta has not yet intervened, because the monks leading the protest are held in high regard by the very religious populace. Intervening, like they did in 1988 (3000 people got killed), would cause a massive public uprising. In addition, China is exerting pressure on the junta not to intervene, because China cannot use a bloody massacre in a neighbouring country during the running up to the Olympic Games.

Anyway, as Aung San Suu Kyi said back in 1990:

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

That is so utterly brilliant there’s little to add.

This is Amarok 1.4.x, the current tree.

On OSNews, for the past few days, some discussions have centered around Amarok being ‘the best music player hands down’. I beg to differ, and based on this main window’s screenshot alone, I can point to various major flaws in this application that will prevent me from ever using it. Please note that these are just my personal concerns (that’s why they call it a personal weblog, boys and girls), and they do not reflect the opinions of my employer.

In the top left corner of the window, you see the Music/Lyrics/Artist tabs. This indicates that this row (yes, even modern graphical user interfaces can be divided up into textual rows) is a tab bar. Great, but, then, why are there file/navigation buttons on the same row, only a few pixels east?

The reason for this is clear: the Amarok developers are trying to cram so much information into the main window, they were forced to split the window up in two sections: a contextual section (left) and the actual section that matters to this kind of application, the playlist/buttons (right). You could argue that the play/pause/stop/etc. buttons in the right section ought to be on top (seeing they are the most vital buttons for a music player) but alas, I’ll let that one pass.

Let’s focus on the left section. The Amarok developers were so hell bent on cramming as much information as possible into this limited space, that they were not only forced to add a vertical scrollbar (and sometimes, a horizontal one too), but also not one, not two, but three (!) tabs.

The above leads to this ridiculous situation where you have two completely different types of sections crammed into one window, where rows switch their function (tab to button), simply because they wanted to cram way too much (pointless, in my book) information into a single window. The end result is that the actual part that matters (playlist, play/pause/stop/etc. buttons) is now demoted to that side of a window that receives the least focus (the right side). On top of that, as said (can’t let it pass by, I’m sorry), the most important buttons (play/pause/stop/etc.) are now rendered somewhere at the bottom right, far away from the focal area of a window (which is the top-left).

The ever-growing hunger for more functionality and information forced the Amarok developers to take even more drastic measures. The left section of the main window needed to function not only as a three-tabbed contextual tab (read that aloud five times if the ridiculousness doesn’t sink in immediately), but also as a devices tab. And a Magnatune tab. And a collection tab. And a files tab. And a playlists tab.

And in order to cram all that information and functionality into one single window, they did what makes Amarok, to this very day, the most ridiculous application ever written, UI wise: vertically text labeled tabs, with normal horizontally oriented icons. This is wrong on so many different levels, it’s just not funny any more. Whoever thought of that brilliant idea ought to never be allowed to “design” a graphical user interface, ever again.

Amarok is not the only audio player that suffers from functionality and information creep. Windows Media Player, iTunes, they all suck major balls because they all try to present their users with so much goddamn pointless information it almost makes my head spin. Every part of Amarok except for the parts that matter are just screaming “Look at me! Over here! I got boobs!”.

That’s why I refuse to take anyone seriously who says “Amarok is just about the cleanest as it gets UI wise”.

I just had one of the weirdest experiences ever.

Here I was, watching the evening news/discussion program, about the Dutch military effort in Afghanistan. At the same time, I’m browsing OSNews, reading/making comments. All of a sudden, my ears pick up some faint static - the static a radio produces when it is in AM mode. My ears are extremely keen, so even the faintest of noises make it to my brain.

Anyway, the static turned louder, and all of a sudden, I heard voices. I could clearly hear a German woman speaking about “Korea”. It was difficult to make out individual words, but from the woman’s intonation I could make out it was a news programme. I immediately muted my TV, and located the sound from the speakers of my Apple Cube (my main computer). My first response was to see if there were any audio ads in Safari - but I was browsing OSNews, and we don’t run audio ads (I’d go on strike if we did).

I grabbed the (non-cordless) remote control to my Creative iTrigue speaker set, and max’d out the volume. The static and the woman’s voice undulated, from loud, to faint, and back again, for a few times - until it disappeared. Flabbergasted, I sat there. In the back of my head, that Mythbusters episode about that woman receiving radio signals through her teeth popped up. I swiftly fired up Google, and it promptly gave me a reply.

Thank you Google, for reassuring me I’m not going crazy.

Yesterday at university, during an English course, I wanted to hand in a short assignment I was unable to hand in last week, together with this week’s assignment. I walked up to my professor (he’s from Texas, by the way), and said:

“Here’s last week’s assignment. I’ll hand it in now, apart form this week’s, so you don’t mix them up.”

Smiling, he replies:

“Erm, you wrote the week’s number on it. I’ve got a PhD, you know. I’ll figure it out.”

“Good point.”

My professor switches his attention to the beamer he’s setting up for class, and grumbles:

“Now, why won’t the damn picture show up!” Silence. “Oh wait. The cap’s still on…”

I couldn’t resist.

“A PhD, you say?”

I learnt something about myself today. I probably already knew it (I know my friends certainly did), but got it confirmed in a rather… Interesting way.

I will go to whatever lengths necessary to defend my own opinion. In a discussion, I will never admit it when I’m wrong. I redefine stubborn. The only way to get me to admit I am wrong is when I can gain something from it.

Today, a certain lady held a presentation in class. It was the first time since all the shite happened that I was sort-of forced to communicate with her - during a presentation, a presenter actually communicates with his or her listeners, mostly non-verbally. But I couldn’t do it. I still have a lot of… Weird feelings about this case, I’m just not sure what to do with all this. We were kind of really close. I’m certainly still extremely angry, but I consider myself to be above public displays of anger. I always opt for the ignore option. Control über alles. It’s better for everyone. There’s no need for me to act like an angry child.

So, I didn’t look at her, I ignored her. Sheer disapproval. The good thing about this option is that you really need to know what has happened between that lady and I to know I am actually ignoring her. And that’s good.

But to get back to that thing I learnt about myself - at one point, someone in the audience critiqued one of her statements. Yours truly, however, had to agree with the presenting lady. And so, my instinct to defend my own opinions overruled my anger with regards to the lady - I opened my mouth, defended the lady’s statements.

And it actually made me proud of myself. Not only does this mean I’m really willing to defend my opinions, it also means I can sever my personal emotions regarding people from the things they are saying.

And yeah, I’m proud of that.