JRRZZ blog

I’m very sorry but I’ve been too busy to update my blog. So this is going to be a very large post containing all the stuff I wanted to blog about in the past two months.

Chapter one. Life.
I’ve been so busy doing the stuff I’m supposed to do that I haven’t really had the time to have fun or relax. Luckily I’ve been able to meet up with my friends and talk about almost everything while enjoying the richness of flavory junk food once in a while. If for some reason those meetings couldn’t be I wouldn’t even have seen my friends for two months in a friendly non-professional way. People say I should get out more. Meet new people and see stuff. Just be a non-geek for a while and stop fearing sunlight. They are probably right and I really, really try to get out more. But I’ve got two major problems. First, I don’t like, ehh, can’t stand popular music and dance halls. We’ve got this place all the students go in Eindhoven called Stratums Eind. It’s filled with bars and dance halls all playing this horrible static noise making it impossible to have a decent conversation. Don’t get me wrong, I like getting pissed among friends and people I know and have fun. But I don’t know or even don’t want to know the majority of the people that visit these bars. It’s usually the ignorant, plain type of people that’s attracted to mindless static noise and tasteless booze. But hey, there are plenty of other places to go to. I really like visiting concerts and seeing metal bands perform. I haven’t been able to visit alot of those because I usually can’t find anyone I know who’s visiting or wanting to visit one of these concerts. It’s just not that much fun on your own, really. I’ve bought tickets to some concerts and only visited half of them. Just like Six Feet Under. They have played on the Xmas Metal Fest and I had tickets but I didn’t go. Quite a shame actually since I’m quite a big fan of their music. I just buy tickets and hope for finding someone I know who also wants to see that band. The thing is almost no one I know likes those bands so it’s pretty hard to find someone. Luckily my brother has got some more freedom since his transfer so I guess I’ll just invite him to join me and maybe some of his friends. He’s got the privilege of having people in his direct social environment, and even friends, with a decent music taste. Second, Murphy doesn’t like me. There’s always something that has to come in between. If it isn’t Fontys’s worthless planning it’s one of my employers that has urgent matters to have attended. But this whole concert thing won’t satisfy all the people saying I should get out more. What they mean is that they never see me in one of those bars of theirs, that’s the only “out” they know. I’ve visited three stand up comedians last theatre season and even attended a classical concert. Now that’s something they’ve never heard of. So, I really don’t think it’ll ever be my initiative but when friends invite me to have a beer or two and nothing comes in between I’ll be there. There’s another big development going on right now. Since my younger brother has moved into his own semi-official apartment and I still don’t have a place of my own I’m carefully making progress in finding one. I’d really like a place in Nuenen, a village in between where I live right now and Eindhoven. Geek heaven. 100mbit/s to the home, close to Rock City and five super markets all over town. I still don’t know if I’m able to afford it all but if I can there’s nothing holding me back from moving there. To conclude this chapter I’d like to note I’m not feeling like writing atheistic texts all the time anymore. I’ve been following several atheists on youtube and found it very inspiring but this all just doesn’t give me any more info to write about. Last.fm ditto.

Chapter two. School.
School’s going pretty well. This time I had to do some work and put some time into my study but at the and it seems to pay off. I’ve just had my last tests and I think I don’t have to redo any one of them. The project we have been working on has been so great. It’s about signal filtering and handling with embedded or desktop software. I’ve been able to build an app within 8 weeks together with another student comparable with single track Audacity. It has it’s own portable (BSD Licensed) filtering API using ANSI-C(++). This API has it’s own layer to support SDL playback and codec control. We’ve also got a Win32 interface (we had to) that can draw nice graphs and controls the API functions. I hope the teachers will be able to understand the software and the whole idea behind it’s stucture. I’m really worried because the only teacher who’s supposed to teach us programming skills is a lousy coder himself. All the code he produces that should be ANSI-C just aren’t and are virtually unreadable by lack of structured indentation and syntax. He doesn’t seem to notice that other systems unlike x86 could be big endian. Even in the test we made he included a question about some compression algorithm that just couldn’t be written in a portable way without using the OS itself. But hey, he’s still learning from us and I have to say I’ve learned quite alot from the guy. There are also some really negative things going on at school right now. As an Open Source zealot I don’t like to be forced to work with closed “standards” and other bullcrap like that. Fontys has become more like Microsoft School 2007. We are now forced to use Outlook Web Access and their Exchange mail servers to mail teachers. They don’t even let us connect through POP or IMAP. They have introduced Sharepoint (half IE-only) and publish all of the information we need on this. In Microsoft Office formats of course. All the software we make has to be able to run on Windows. I’m a Linux and sometimes even BSD user. I can’t open 3.2M PowerPoint files without waiting 15 minutes for OO.o conversion. I can’t run IE. I can’t run your weird software packages like Borland C++ and Keil. I won’t allow untrusted closed source blobs on my machines. I’m still forced to used Microsoft products while it’s the official national policy to encourage the use of Open Standards. I’ve already written that Fontys is being paid by Microsoft to keep the Open Source Evilness away from all the potential customers, ehh, students. I still don’t know what I can do about this but I think it has to stop. This isn’t what education is meant to do. This is pure indoctrination. I can keep ranting about this for ages but something has to be done. Count on that.

Chapter three. Work.
I’ll keep this short because lots of the things I’m working on right now are pretty top-secret. I can tell you, and this is officially the first publication about this, that I and Bjorn, a good friend of mine, are going to start our own company called Expleo. We are the holy grail many companies are looking for in IT. We know what we can do and we know no one can but us. Expect some really nifty shit with Expleo printed on it. Another really nice thing about this is that all our employers will become our customers. I’m not really into financials myself but it should be cost effective. I’ve been working alot for one of these customers, ViaViela. It’s been really fun working in an environment like that. Some major changes have been made lately that I’m not really looking forward to. We used to have a sysadmin whom I liked, it was my idea to get him involved. I knew the guy from Interlink, the Libre computer geek club within Fontys, and I knew he could play a key role in our migration to GNU/Linux on both the servers and workstations. It’s not that we can’t handle that for ourselves but he’s a real pro with things like that. I still read a man page or two. Because we were still using a Microsoft solution he had to admin that crap for a while. He said he could but it turned out he wasn’t that much of a Microsoft admin. He also had a real Fontys way of doing things. Too much planning and paperwork with minimal results. We had to let him go. It’s a shame really, I still believe he should have got that key role in the migration process. We’ve go a new guy now. I don’t like him. He’s a real Microsoft puncher and even his shoulder smells like Microsoft poo, he’s in that deep. He doesn’t understand jack shit about anything that doesn’t say Microsoft(tm)(r)(c). I’m so happy we can finally start migrating to GNU/Linux. We have to because NTFS and Win2k3SBS have already failed us too many times. The first step in the migration will be to set up an new high end server to run GNU/Linux. I’m going to use the new KVM freature of the 2.6.20 Linux kernel to run Win2k3SBS. That way Windows can’t destroy hardware. The only thing Windows is going to do on our next setup is Exchange (people seem to still want to use it) and some other software package that makes the thing use 8GB of memory. The GNU/Linux server is just going to run Win2k3SBS as a process and host all our local files on safe journalling Linux file systems. I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to our Microsoft puncher but I’ll manage. Eventually we can introduce Ubuntu to the desktops and we’ll be rid of the pest and hopefully that Microsoft puncher. Oh, puncher, if you happen to read this please don’t be upset. You can still download any GNU/Linux or *BSD distro as ISO and format your drive. Really, it’s that simple. I won’t be mad at you anymore when you’ve done this.

Well, I guess that sums it up. Time to get some sleep.

Tags: Stuff //