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Journal Journal: Wow!

I don't know what to think... unbelieveble?

  • Wesley Willis Google search results for Wesley Willis, a 350 pound, chronically schizophrenic streetcorner Rock&Roll artist from Chicago...
  • The Brick Testament This must have taken a lot of time and a lot of LEGO(tm) bricks! - and a bible of course. Although I'm an atheist, I like this site.
Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: Slashdot's performance

Man, I take it back. A few days ago I said I experienced no problems accessing slashdot. Yesterday it performed like a Slammer Worm Infected Microsoft Toy. What is going on?

Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: Underrated has become Troll

Except from very strange mathematics the moderation system seems to suffer from something else:

Moderations: 50% Funny, 20% Overrated, 20% Underrated
Moderations: 20% Troll, 60% Funny, 10% Overrated

Both are the moderation totals for one and the same message! About an hour elapsed in between.

Announcements

Journal Journal: Recipes

As I promised sometime ago... Here are a few pasta recipes. The first one is fairly easy, the second one is a little harder, but if you trust your skills, really worth trying. Both for two persons. I guess. Beware, I (re)invented them myself.

p a s t a . a g l i o l i

Preparation time: 10-20 minutes.
Skills needed: rookie

  • Oil, olive or sunflower - preferable both
  • Spaghetti or tagliatelli - 200 to 300 gr (whatever taste or kind you like)
  • Garlic - 3 or 4 toes
  • Red Hot Chilli Pepper - one will do
  • Basilicum, dried - about a half spoon
  • Salt
  • Parmezan cheese, grated - optional

Important after you've finished the cutting part, be carefull not to stick your fingers in your nose or to touch other sensitive body parts. It hurts.

Peel the garlic and cut it into rough pieces. The easiest way to peel garlic is the cut af the ends and then hit it with the side of a big knife; this will cause the skin to burst and to come loose from the body. Cut the pepper lengthwise and then into pieces (you might remove the seeds if you don't like it hot).
Put the garlic and the pepper in a big cup and drop a little bit of salt on it to enrich the flavour. Add the basilicum and mash the contents of the cup a little. Add oil, to some this may seem a lot, but I want the cup atleast half full. I prefer to use 1/3 olive and 2/3 sunflower to temper the taste of the olive oil a little. You might want to stir or mash it some more to get all flavours in the oil.
Tip: prepare the oil yesterday, it's flavour will be richer.

Cook the pasta. Lots of water, a little oil and a little salt. To see if the pasta is ready - in the genuine Italian way - throw a little of it against the wall and see if it sticks there for a few seconds. I don't throw the pasta against the wall, but that's because I have a better, secret way to find out if it ready. I taste it to see if it's 'al dente'. Oops. Well don't tell any further. If your pasta is ready, remove the water. It's a hell of a job - I know - but they have very usefull devices to assist you, however I don't know how they are called in English (in Dutch it called a 'vergiet').

Pour the oil onto the pasta. Ready. You might want to add a little bit of grated Parmezan Cheese. Oh and you might want to serve some salad or vegetables too, just to get a more balanced and healthy dish (I don't really care if my food is healthy).

l a s a g n a . c a p r e s e

Preparation time: 1 hour or so
Skills needed: veteran

Oil, sunflower and olive

Lasagna sheets

Spinach, frozen - 400/500 gr

Garlic - 3 or 4 toes

Tomatoes - 2 or 3

Mozerella - 125 gr

Basilicum, preferable fresh

Mushrooms - 200 gr

Pinue nuts

Black pepper

Salt

Butter

Milk

Flour

Parmezan or other grated cheese

Note if your spinach comes at temperature early do not let it cool down. I was told this is extremely unhealthy, seriously. I forgot why. But you should know why anyway, you're a veteran when it comes down to cooking.

This lasagne consists of three different types of filling, spinach, tomatoes and mushrooms. You can prepare these at the same time.

Cook, heat or nuke the spinach, instructions can be found on the product itself and mix fine chopped or squished garlic through it. Add some salt as you like it.

While the spinach is defreezing proceed with the tomato stuff. Cut the tomatoes and the mozerella into fine slices. Add basilicum to it. If you have fresh basilicum, tear the leaves into little parts by hand. Add a good drizzle of sunflower oil to it. (basically we now have a simple Caprese salad, and we are going to put it into te lasagne).

When finished with the tomatoes fry the mushrooms and the pinue nuts with some black pepper using a little butter and some olive oil.

Buidling time! Grab a dish that's large enough or has a convient lasagne shape (depends on the size and form of the sheets you've choosen). Use butter or oil to get the dish fat so the lasagne won't burn to it. Now make layers. I'd say start and finish with a layer of spinach, the middle layers, use your own creativity. One type of filling per layer. And don't forget to put the lasagne sheets in between, or else it won;t become lasagne. At the end pour over some extra oil.

Now it's time to finish the lasagne by creating a Bechamelsauce. Melt a little butter in a frying pan. Stir flour into it until it looks 'dry'. While stirring add milk to it, a little at a time. This should become a thick white sauce. Add a little salt. Take care too much milk and your souce will become to thin and you can start over again.

Pour the sauce over the lasagne. You might want to Put some grated cheese or black pepper on top too. Time to put it into the oven, must be reasonable hot, for about 25 - 45 minutes?

Enjoy!

Hardware

Journal Journal: Hardware I own and what I'd like to do with it...

I decided it might be interesting - for some - to give a list of hardware I own, not a very long list though... I ordered the items by age, specs given are a little lousy (just what came to my mind).

  • DEC PDP 11/23 2Mhz CPU, 256k RAM, 2x 5.25" Floppy internal, 2x 5.25" Floppy external, 20Mb Winchester HD external, DEC VT100 Terminal, OS: RT-11
  • Olivetti M21 8Mhz CPU, 640k RAM, 2x 5.25" Floppy internal, internal 8"? Amber CGA monitor (320x200x2bpp/640x400x1bpp/25x80/25x40), this one is "Portable", OS: MS-DOS 3.x
  • AMD K2-400 based system 400Mhz CPU, 96Mb RAM, 3.5" diskette internal, 6Gb HD internal, 512Mb HD internal, 52x CD rom internal, 100Mb Zip external at LPT, SB-Pro, 1024x768x32bpp. OS: Windows 98
  • Asus A1000 Notebook 800Mhz Celeron, 128Mb RAM, 3.5" diskette internal, DVD, 1024x768x32bpp, TV-out, 2 USB, OS: WindowsXP / SuSE8.0
  • Openbrick 300Mhz, see openbrick.org (soon) OS: FreeBSD

What do I keep these for?

The PDP dates from the late 70's or the early 80's! Maybe even a collector's item. On this type of machines K&R created C and unix. For that reason I want to put an ancient version of unix on it.
It has some features which took about 15 years to be implemented on the Intel 80x3++ processors, such as virtual memory and memory protection (3 levels). The PDP's CPU is able to perform quite complicated instructions such as: upon assignment you can defer and autoin/decrement registers. C constructs as while(*s++ = *d++) ; seem to be based directly on the possibilities of this processor.

The Olivetti M21 just looks extremely cool. Back in the late 80's and early 90's I wrote a drumcomputer emulator which was able to sample at a rate of 22kHz on a D/A device attached to the LPT (According to my calculations this is the fastest output rate possible when mixing 8 channels on such a CPU). To do so the program used selfmodifying code.
I modded the keyboard of the Olivetti in such a way dual footswitch of a dictaphone (generated ESC and ENTER signals) could be plugged to it allowing me to start and stop the drumsounds while playing keyboards or guitar.

The K2-400 is currently used by my exgirlfriend to write documents and check her bank account. In the future I hope to assign it the noble task of MP3 server, it should be able to store about 1500 MP3's (my entire CD collection, which is not too big aprox. 100). I look forward to put the (call that vintage already?) SB-Pro to good use...

The Asus, because it looks sexy, with it's curved body and it's semi transparent keys. What can I say, this is my second home. Use it for work, hobby and fun - anytime & everywhere.
At the moment I'm working on a Rebirth like application for Linux. I have a coded a test version emulation a 606, two 303 like synthesizers (wavetype, cut/res modultation), bandpass filters and reverb effects, but this is merely a begin. A lot of work on modularity and the user interface (graphics using console in FB mode) still needs to be done. I'll let you know when I publish it one freshmeat or sourceforge...

The OpenBrick. Should become either a router/firewall or a synthesizer module to be attached to my Yamaha P-80 (electric piano, stage model)

Hmmm. Lot's of plans, little spare time. Will take a while I'm afraid. Feel free to post good advice for other or better usage...

United States

Journal Journal: Poor Bush

A quote I found Journal of grrliegeek (592264)

Another Bush-ism Monday January 06, @12:01PM #20628

There are some rediculously funny things that the current President of the US has to say. Unintentional humor brings me much joy. I'm glad there's something to balance out the sorrow at the intellectual capacity of my country's president.
...
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush "
...

I must admit Bush never really impressed me by his intellect, but this beats everything... Personally I think Bush confuses opinions with feelings and agreement with understanding (a very common disorder). He must have meant to say this:

"I have feelings of my own, strong feelings, but I don't always understand them."

and that is something that takes some courage to admit, makes sense for someone in his position and it might explain his behaviour. Well let's hope he won't bypass the VN again and spend your billions on a useless war against Saddam. Personally I still have a very strong and bad opinion about this...

User Journal

Journal Journal: Did it again... 1

just click a few times on the parent

Sometimes jokes make me feel so tired - I admit - I overreact. But consider this: if Microsoft is the standard, so do blondes driving SUV's, who watch soap series or stupid shows. Whatever... What is a joke? What's humour? So that's funny? Don't make me laugh...

They should disallow blonde people from moderating Troll. - I'm blond, I really am.

Apple

Journal Journal: Apple release Safari, a browser based on Konqueror 2

A few minutes ago I submitted this article to /., but it was rejected - too bad, I don't know why. Perhaps someone else did submit something covering the same topic... Well, for those who are interested, here it is:

Apple releases a new internet browser for MacOS X, named Safari. It's based on an improved version of the engine of KDE's Konqueror and it's specs look very good. Apple seems to plan on releasing Safari in the future as an opensource product. An interesting question might be whether or not this will force Microsoft to release the source of Internet Exporer. More articles can be found at macworld.com and ZDNet zdnet.co.uk and zdnet.com.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Happy new year! 1

Oops, I nearly forgot:

Happy New Year to all /. readers!

I hope for a lot of interesting, informative and insightfull discussions and - not to forget - funny, silly and sarcastic jokes.
'There is nothing wrong forming an opinion based on a balanced amount of prejudice.' - giel

And, ehm, well English is not my native language, so forgive me for expressing myself unintentionally bad or - *sigh* I don't know the word, something like broken or incomplete - or funny sometimes...

User Journal

Journal Journal: (Troll -1) 1

Imagine a beowolf cluster...

In Soviet Russia...

Sometimes my messages are moderated Troll, but I never intend to post replies to troll around. So if you mod me Troll I would like to hear why or find you in my freak list. But I guess that's inherently not the nature of modding Troll...

Privacy

Journal Journal: Copy(right) laws!? 2

Today I found this (Skylarov like) story about some Dan Jackson who published a binary to decode the .lit format on Slashdot. It seems to me laws on copying software are a hot topic to most of the readers of Slashdot and the people in general.

Anyway since I assume most people do see copying as a legal act or feel that they should be able to copy software and electronic content, I do not really understand there exist laws that prohibit copying. Most of us live in democratic countries, don't we?

I cannot see anything wrong in copying or decoding your own content and there is nothing wrong with software which allows you to do so. Moreover I see it as natural behaviour of computers that they copy stuff. From internet to memory to harddisk to memory to printer to etc, etc. I hope that this idea and the fact that I own some computers does not make me a criminal.

Yes, yes, offcourse I know: authors and credit for their work and blahblah, but my guess is dumping some laws would mostly affect the media industry and not the authors of content. I mean if someone wants me to write a piece of code or a report, he will have to to pay me. If the code is good and used all around the world I'm only happy and more people will ask me.

Don't get me wrong, I would not appreciate anyone publishing work with parts of it which are copies of other work and not telling so. People should get the credits for their work.

User Journal

Journal Journal: no s*x: no pr0n...

Wow, incredible! What's up with this spelling-etiquette?
I seem to have offended some people by spelling sex like s*x, moreover they suggested I would probably have a problem with content filters at my school! see...

Or I would not even have the age... Well, I guess some of the younger readers of /. suffer some severe form of projection, perhaps they should consider consulting professional help.
C'mon read the bio, it isn't there for fun or fake...

In reply to one the comments: OK, perhaps 'sex' is not very offensive, but then what is? Is porn erh... I mean pr0n? I am sorry, but I do not see the problem. I mean why is pr0n offensive? It is because of s*x. So what is offensive? Very subjective matter in my opinion.

So: Hey offend me! And... No way. I don't care. I don't give a damn.
I'm 31. I don't attend school. I have a (good, IT, developer) job. I have broadband. I have a car, a notebook and lots of technic lego - perhaps I am a bit twisted. And yes, sorry, my girlfriend DOES scream during orgasms. I hope you don't live next door.

Sorry. I really needed to get rid of a little frustration. No need to post any comments on this entry.

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