Guess the country...

Many sandwich shops around here import Coke from countries all around Europe, Asia or Africa. Usually, you can't read what's written on the can unless you chose Turkish or Albanian as a second language. Today, we had a little discussion about where a particular can came form. Since no one had the answer, each of us put 50p and had a guess: Portuguese, Albanian, Macedonian, Croatian, Afrikaans or Romanian. We googled for the text on the can to find out the language. Thanks to globalisation, Andy won his lunch money back with Albania ;)

Yet another social networking site

Ok, maybe a bit different from the rest. Link

Gold Ol' Mario Bros. Times

If you ever played Super Mario Bros. you know the feeling... :D

Modern Technology

It's unbelievable what's possible with modern technology...

It's the Latency, Stupid

is the name of an article by Stuart Cheshire that I found quite interesting.

Two Rooms, Glass and Twins

Take two identical bathrooms separated by a glass window plus two twins. What a cool idea! Thanks for the link, Andy.

Clean up your code before you leave for the weekend

Yes, very important. Otherwise, you return to work and find your program behaving in a really weird way, requiring you to spend some time to figure out why. Especially, when you just wanted to try something quickly on Friday and then on Monday forgot why and more important that you put

for (int i = 0; i < 1250; i++){
...
}

somewhere in your code. Took me about 20 minutes to find that loop and another 10 to remember why I put 1250... damn it ;)

Kubuntu Problem

I had a problem with Kubuntu Linux earlier this week and just wanted to share my experience, because it took me a couple of hours to figure it out.

Kubuntu was starting normally and showed me the login screen. When I typed in username and password, the check went well, the login screen disappeared and then for 1-2 seconds nothing happened. Then, suddenly, the login screen came back. Didn't matter how often I tried, even rebooting didn't help.

First, I thought I screwed up the settings when I logged out last time or that the update did something bad, but after reading lots of forum posts I found out that my disk might simply be full.

I stopped kdm with: /etc/init.d/kdm stop
and started KDE again: startkde

The messages appearing on the screen said that several files couldn't be generated. So I checked how much disk space was available: df
and found out that 0% free space was available. Great.

After removing some stuff, I finally could login to KDE again. Too bad, there's no warning message at the beginning, when you try to login.

If you think, your lunch was big today...

... you should check out this and this! I wonder, who has to do the dishes? ;)

The Hives - New Album

In case you like rock from Sweden, you might find it interesting that "The Hives" will release their new album The Black and White Album in a weeks time. Here's my favourite song (from an older album):



and here's the new single:

Fancy your own X-Wing Fighter?

A long time ago, in a garage in Santee, California, a group of slightly insane rocketeers decided to make a flying scale model of the X-Wing fighter from what is arguably the best movie ever made, Star Wars.

Read the story here.

What a punch...

Mike Tyson would have been proud...

This happened after Celtic Glasgow scored the winning goal against AC Milan (2:1):

I already hate this day...

Tried to login to my machine this morning and it wouldn't let me to. After installing some updates yesterday, I can't login to KDE anymore great! The cycle: "reboot - start windows - read tips in Kubuntu forums - reboot - start Kubuntu - try them out - reboot" is really annoying!

On my way to uni with the scooter, I suddenly heard a noise that sounded like a little machine gun. I looked around for the next 30 seconds in order to identify the source of the noise until I realised it's me. First, I thought it's something to do with the engine, but when the driveability changed as well, I stopped and found a big metal spike in my (flat) back tire. Fantastic! Should I mention that I replaced the back tire a couple of weeks ago?

So, what's gonna happen next?

Death Star Canteen

I don't understand...

... why healthy, young people take the lift for one floor? Even worse are the people that go from the 1st floor to the ground floor! Why?!?

The Ballmer Peak

What's the correlation between alcohol and programming skills? Check out the Ballmer Peak.