Cogs can think.

• My dad and I have decided to buy a digital SLR camera together - I want to take good pictures damn it. We both want one, but in order to make it affordable for me, we decided to buy one together. After consulting the interweb and Eugenia and her husband, we decided on getting the Nikon D40 (we’ll buy it somewhere in the coming weeks). It has gotten raving reviews, is easy to use, and is relatively affordable at ~500 EUR. As for a lens, we’ll be settling on the kit lens (18-55mm) for the time being, seeing that has also been getting very good reviews (despite it being a kit lens). We can always buy a better, more professional lens later on. They don’t come cheap at all, you see. Great stuff.
• For the first time ever, Debian has let me down. A dist-upgrade on my laptop went tits up, and manual fixage got me quite far, but not far enough. I’m quite pissed off right now about this one. Ten pounds of suck, that’s what it is.

Seeing I’ve already spent four years at university, as well as six years at Latin/Greek school, I’ve certainly had my share of academic articles, in many different fields, ranging from hardcore neuropsychology to conversation analysis. And as the weeks, months, and years of my academic career pass me by, I’ve come to thoroughly hate the writing style employed by many academic writers and scientists. There are two things that annoy me more than anything.

For the time being, it is useful to think of moves as discriminative elements of generic structure and strategies as nondiscriminative options within the allowable contributions available to an author for creative or innovative genre construction.

1. Cramming as many difficult words into a sentence as possible does not make you smart. In fact, it only makes it apparent you need to compensate for something.
2. If a sentence is so draconian that fairly educated folk such as yours truly (I never said I was humble, did I?), and one with a thing for language at that, needs to read them 244345 times before the actual structure (so not its meaning!) becomes apparent, it probably means you have written down a very bad sentence.

All these articles that I’ve read over the years have shown me one thing: academics are lousy, lousy writers. The fact that these articles are supposed to be read by peers is not an excuse to abuse language in the way so many academics tend to do.

It hurts.

My Inspiron 6000 was getting very hot lately - say, the past four months. Where the fan barely kicked in during the early days of the laptop, it spun almost continuously these days. This got me worried, and today, I took the entire laptop apart. Only to discover carpet had actually grown inside the laptop - right between the entrance to the fan cavity and the heatpipe.

Why hello there, Mr Carpet!.

I took Mr Carpet out of the fan cavity, and looked at him for a while. Then came big Mr Grumpy Vacuum Cleaner, and up, up and away Mr Carpet went. I imagined a faint ‘heeeeeeeeeelp’.

My Inspiron’s now back to cool and quiet service.

I do not like sects and cults like scientology (lower-case ’s’). In fact, I hate them, and I expect my government to do whatever it takes to ban and combat dangerous cults like scientology. This may sound weird seeing my strong belief in ‘live and let live’, but let me explain.

I’m all for religion. Everybody should believe whatever they damn well please. That is one of the most important pillars of a modern society, and I’m proud that my country was one of the first countries in the world to implement a rudimentary form of religious freedom; even though Calvinism was the state religion, the government was tolerant towards non-Calvinists.

Should we therefore be tolerant towards dangerous sects like scientology? No. A line must be drawn between a true religion and a money scam: you don’t have to go to church to be a Catholic, you don’t have to pay lots and lots of money to the Mosque to be a Muslim, and you don’t have to commit fraud to uphold the Jewish faith. This is where you can severe the money scam from the proper religion: Scientology and its members have to do all those things (and more) in order to be part of the church mob of scientology. It’s the biggest Nigerian Scam ever.

I hope my government will, just like the Belgian government, act strongly and justly with scientology. I hope they burn it down to the ground, and wash its ashes away, just like it ought to do with any other money scam that feeds off the hopes and fears of innocent people. I hope for a coordinated justice assault by the EU and the US government, to wipe the earth clean of the criminal organisation that is scientology.

I can dream.

I speak and understand Dutch, English, and German (my German is not that good, by the way - I refuse to learn its conjugations). I can understand French if spoken slowly, and can read a bit of it too - I can barely speak it though. On top of that, I have a basic understanding of Latin and ancient Greek. I study English in university now, and it really shows; my English has made huge strides the past two years.

In addition to all this, I decided not too long ago that I wanted to learn an exotic language. Seeing my interest and love for the British isles, it only made sense to pick a language spoken there, and there is of course a variety of options to choose from.

Gaelic. More specifically, Scottish Gaelic - about 100 000 speakers, mostly in Scotland. Today, I made my first, very, very, small baby steps into the language.

It’s going to be an interesting learning process.

Some… Interesting responses to the big QNX news and interview today.

I have been called ‘unethical’ for saying “QNX is opening up its source code”. A reader on OSNews claims that with that, I am “redefining” the meaning of open source - and that’s what he calls unethical. Ridiculous, of course. The code is open. You can look at it. Compile it. Change it. Alter it. For personal use. You can keep those changes for yourself. You can share those changes with the QNX community. You just can’t sell those changes - you can’t exploit your work commercially. In order to do that, you need to pay royalties to QNX.

Which makes total sense.

Unlike other companies such as IBM and Sun, QSS is actually quite a small company. The only stream of revenue the company has is its operating system and the services it provides. Compare this to a big shot like Sun, who does not only sell a boatload of software and services, but also has an extremely important hardware business. Sun can afford to be ‘more’ open source than QNX simply because to Sun, Solaris is financially actually fairly irrelevant. It’s by far not their greatest source of income.

QSS (QNX Software Systems) has done the right thing by their hybrid software model. They allow everyone to look at the code, download it, compile it, change it, share it with their peers or keep it to themselves, heck, they can even make a distribution and put that online - they are just not allowed to sell it. Which is logical, because else the ‘altered’ QNX versions would directly compete with QSS, and seeing those altered versions would leech for 99% off QSS’s hard work, they would be infinitely cheaper (if not free).

On top of that, by choosing this model, they made sure that their biggest competitors (VxWorks, Microsoft, and commercial Linux ‘embedders’) are forced into a ‘Τάνταλος torture‘ - they can look at it all they want, but they cannot use it for their own good.

I’m sure a healthy community can be built around QNX. I sure hope it can, in any case.

There is only one book in this country that is prohibited - Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (’My Fight’). That prohibition is relative by the way, as it is only prohibited to sell copies of the book. It is freely available in libraries, and possession of it is not illegal either. This is of course a weird situation, but remember that the prohibition is largely symbolic in meaning.

Our Secretary of Eduction, Media, and Culture said in an interview that we, as a nation, ought to reconsider the prohibition, on the grounds of free speech, as well as that it is a part of our history, and therefore important. The problem is, however, that Mein Kampf itself sort-of violates the first article of our constitution - the prime pillar on which our nation is built. The Supreme Court, therefore, ruled that it must remain prohibited.

I’m not really sure where I stand on this one. On the one hand, we have our freedom of speech, and of course the fact that it is in fact part of not only our past, but also our present and future - you are supposed to learn from history. On the other hand, the book most certainly violates the first article of our constitution, and that’s a very, very important reason for me to support the Supreme Court on this one.

You can’t side on all matters.

The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met.

Thus speaketh Gen David Petraeus, US Commander in Iraq. While I agree with him that the American forces should not retreat from Iraq, this utterly idiotic quote reminded me of someone…

We besieged them and killed most of them, and I think we will finish them soon. […] They are nowhere near Baghdad. […] Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected.

Was signed, the coolest Iraqi ever, former Secretary Of Information of Iraq, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, when American tanks had already invaded all parts of Baghdad - in fact, you saw and heard the American troops in the background.

Darn, this is a nice laptop. Small, optional red colour, Core 2 Duo, Intel videochipset. Nice, nice, nice.