I have no words to say, on this slow and useless day

Texel Volleyball Tournament

bje@dds.nl — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:05:41 GMT

Team Photo
Originally uploaded by Breyten Ernsting.

I had a lot of fun this weekend participating in a volleyball tournament. Unfortunately we only won one volleyball match, but we compensated that with winning the competition for best outfit! As you can see, we spent some time thinking about it, so I think we fully deserved to win.

1,000th Flickr Photo

bje@dds.nl — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:36:32 GMT

Earlier tonight I posted my 1,000th photo to my Flickr account (all in less than four years), which is quite a milestone. Especially if you consider that I didn't used to take photos at all. Most of the photos that are on my Flickr account have been uploaded directly from my mobile phone. There's something to be said for such direct uploading of photos. It removes a complete step in the process of putting your photos online. Also, since you are pretty much unable to edit the stream of photos as it all happens real time, it gives a very honest view of what you are doing in your life (It is kind of implied that your photos don't always need to be perfect).

Anyway, on to the next 1,000 photos. Or something

Front pocket wallets

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:45:20 GMT

In my old wallet, I carried my bank pass, my chip card, my credit card, my insurance card, my gym pass, a couple of business cards, some banknotes and a lot of change. It was bulky and I stopped actively using it about two months ago, at which point I decided to only take the most important cards and the banknotes with me and put them in my front pocket. This was of course, a great improvement, but the free roaming of cards and banknotes inside my pocket still left something to be desired. Since yesterday I own a Slimmy, a minimalist front pocket wallet that solves these problems, without the added bulkiness.

Full Time Working

bje@dds.nl — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:04:32 GMT

Long time, no post, I know. Life is a bit slow, although I'm doing fun things in between.

Anyway, I'm quite happy to tell that starting tomorrow, I'll be working a full-time gig at my current employer (as opposed to the half-time gig I've been doing up until now).

It's strange, the first time in over two years that I'll be working full time again. But, I'm looking forward to it.

Update round #45687

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:21:27 GMT

Let's bring you up to speed in a round of updates:
- I saw the movie Juno with logpoes a few weeks ago. Good movie, quite amusing.
- I saw Persepolis with bakenius. Was a great movie. Loved the animation style.
- I bough an Airport Express today, to be stream music to my stereo. Works like a charm.

More later..

Happy Pi Day!

bje@dds.nl — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:37:27 GMT

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

Pi Pie
uws reminded me that it's Pi Day again. So, happy Pi Day!

Songs as Charts

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:25:56 GMT

The image that I reposted yesterday was also part of a larger Flickr group "Song Chart", where many more song lyrics have been turned into charts or formulas, one way or the other. It's a great effort. Some of my favorites are this, this and this one (pic below).

Boys and Milkshake

bje@dds.nl — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:18:42 GMT

ORIGINAL
Originally uploaded by boyshapedbox.

Heh.

(via Kottke)

Improved Password Security with SuperGenPass

bje@dds.nl — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:37:39 GMT

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

I've begun using SuperGenPass to improve the quality of my passwords across the (many) different sites where I have accounts. Basically, SuperGenPass uses a master password and the domain name to generate a password that is specific for the domain. This approach, combined with a handy bookmarklet makes sure that the increase in security does not come with a high cost in efficiency. The bookmarklet simply takes the existing password in a password field and uses that password as the master password, so the login procedure for a site is extended by just a simple mouse click.

LHC

bje@dds.nl — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:16:17 GMT

There's a realy nice image from APOD of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with accompanying text. The LHC is the largest particle accelator around, and will be finished in May. Parts of the LHC are produced by the Nikhef institute, which is right down from the hall where I work. They even have a countdown clock hanging in the main hallway to countdown to the moment when the first experiments are executed. It's been in place since I work at my current job. And it's nice to slowly see LHC news everywhere.

(via Jeremy Zawodny)

Yahoo opens up search platform

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:04:40 GMT

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

I like the idea of opening up the search results, like Yahoo is doing. It opens up a ton of new possibilities, like including the complete first paragraph of Wikipedia pages, etc. And of course, this will be an amazing opportunity to make intelligent use of microformats. Will definitely be playing with it once it is available for the masses.

Update

bje@dds.nl — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:46:22 GMT

So it's been a busy few days. First there was the official graduation ceremony (photos here), which was last Thursday, and was fun, and a nice way to end my career as a student.

On Saturday, I saw the movie No Country For Old Men, which was awesome. I always like the films of the Coen brothers, and this was no exception. Fully deserved the four Oscars, which it got last night. (Bourne's Ultimatum got three which also pleases me).

And yesterday I saw the geekfest people again. It was good catching up again. Photos are here.

Yahoo! Pipes: Create own modules

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:32:49 GMT

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

I just created my first pipe using Yahoo! Pipes, which is a great product. Easy enough to use, and dragging the links around to form connection is very smart.

There's only one thing missing though: When can we create and use our own modules? Such a feature would instantly turn it into an even better killer app.

Topper: An Interesting Take on a Search Engine

bje@dds.nl — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:04:16 GMT

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

Topper is a kind of an interesting take on a search engine. Their frontpage has a blurb that is filled with all the right marketing words, but that doesn't really describe the service right. The basic idea of Topper is that it will use user input (as relevance statements) to "learn" to re-rank the results. In itself, that is an idea worth investigating. We can see on Topper however, that the problem of this approach is not in the limited amount of user input, which they seem to handle quite well. This is probably based on some boosting method.

The real problem for Topper is how to present such an approach visually. Topper shows relevance scores, which change as you provide more input. However, the result list itself is never changed, which leads to strange results that will confuse most people. It took me a while to get it.

Nevertheless, this will be a good learning experience for the team responsible for developing Topper. I'm curious to see if they can get the interface right in the future.

The Guild

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:59:22 GMT

The Guild is a nice online show about a group of people who are in a World on Warcraft Guild. Funny as hell, and good acting.

Thriller, 25th Anniversary Edition

bje@dds.nl — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:33:15 GMT

Today marks the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller, the 25th anniversary edition. Now, Thriller, the record itself, is one of the first records I remember listening to (or at least the singles -- But then again, almost every song was a single anyway). Besides the new collaborations, the record also contains the original versions of the songs. Seems like a good way to compare the new with the old.

The Girl Is Mine (2008)
This track features Will.i.Am, from The Black Eyed Peas. Now, I find the Black Eyed Peas mostly annoying, so I'm not sure if this is good news. The new R&B beats are actually quite decent, and in spirit of the original track. All the other things are plain dissapointing. Much, if not almost all of the power of the original song is in the dialogue between Paul (McCartney) and Micheal. The reworked version however, is completely stripped of Paul's contributions, replaced by Will.i.am's vocals which are just off track.

P.Y.T. (2008)
Again Will.i.am on this track, and I can repeat much of the same things of the last track, except that I don't like the beats. But the original is not super either.

Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (2008)
This time it's not Will.i.am, but Akon instead. While the AutoTune corrections in this song are a bit too much, I think this version is actually decent. Good beats, and the instrumentation is well done.

Beat It (2008)
I already said that I find the Black Eyed Peas annoying, and this includes Fergie, which is on this track. However, Fergie's singing quite fits this song. Otherwise, the changes to this song are quite minimal, except that the guitar riffs are much more diminished. Which is a big shame.

Billie Jean (2008)
I think this is a very dangerous track to touch, given that it's such a popular track, and that it's still a floorfiller. This remix is done by Kanye West, and this version ain't bad at all. Of all the reworked tracks, this is the one I like best, even if it hasn't got the beats of the original.

Overall, the new versions aren't that noteworthy. The good thing of the record though, is that all original versions are also present. So hopefully (young) people that will buy this record, will buy it for the originals (even if maybe the new versions got them interested in the first place).

And the best thing of this record? Thriller isn't reworked.

Update

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:14:33 GMT

It's been a while.

First: I've succesfully defended my thesis, which means that I'm done with everything study-wise. Now all that's left is the graduation.

The past days have been active, volleybalw-wise. I played a tournament on Saturday, trained on Monday, played a game yesterday and tomorrow I'll train again. The next weeks will be a bit more quiet :)

Done

bje@dds.nl — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:49:15 GMT

On Monday I submitted my thesis work as a paper for a conference. Yesterday I extended that paper with two more pages, and now it's done.

I'm defending my thesis coming Friday. If you wanna be there, just leave a message :).

Project Kill Day Redux

bje@dds.nl — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:00:15 GMT

Project Kill Day went well today, but I put in 9 hours of work today, and now I'm quite tired. Good thing that the last item clearly says: Take some rest -- So I'll hit the sack not too late to be fresh again tomorrow.

I did some things differently though. For example, waking up as early as suggested isn't really my thing. Instead, I just woke up an half hour early, rushed through my morning ritual and ended up at work at 9AM, which is about an hour earlier than usual. Also an hour early before (most of) my colleagues, which gave me the time start working well. Other than that, the walking quickly worked well, and also having to decline helping other people (which I usually like to do -- This was pretty hard), simply because I was too busy. Other than that, I tried to minimize social interaction, but it's hard when your (work)roommate is having his birthday ;).

Now the question is: did it work -- after all, such a day is meant to move things forward n a big way. I'm happy with what I did today. I didn't got it moving as far as I initially wanted, but that's okay, since I ran into something unexpected (This feedparser bug, spent almost 2 hours writing proper Media RSS support for it -- Not of enough quality to roll a patch though.), but in the end I managed to fix that, and also managed to get the state of the project in such a way that I can lay it to rest for the coming 2-2.5 weeks.

Project Kill Day

bje@dds.nl — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:52:50 GMT

Tomorrow will be a project kill day at work. The intention is to push my project forward, and in such a state that I can leave it to rest for the coming 14 days, so I can get into full time thesis mode. I haven't done such a day before, so I have no idea if it'll work out for me. I'll let you know.

Thesis work is progressing well, btw. Final experiments should be finished somewhere by Friday. Then I have still 10 days to finish writing.

Productivity tip of the day

bje@dds.nl — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:28:50 GMT

I use the Smultron text editor (on OS X) for writing my thesis in LaTeX. One nice feature which I discovered today brings the active buffer into full screen mode, which hides the menu bar and the dock and all pretty much everything else, to turn the editor in basically nothing more than a simple text field. Since you can't see other apps, you less quickly distracted.

You can activate the full screen mode from the View menu, and get back into regular mode with the Esc key.

Happy New Year!

bje@dds.nl — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:07:02 GMT

I'm fashionably late, but happy new year everybody!

Let's take a moment to step back and look at what happened in 2007. 2007 was a very successful year for me. I finally got my Bachelor degree (This is undoubtedly the best achievement of the year), I started pursuing a Master degree, I took up playing volleybal again, and I went on a vacation trip all by myself (well, for almost a full week anyway ;). And these are only the "big" things that happened.

Now, 2008 will also be an important year. Why? Well, I'll just predict what will hapen this year:

I will get my Master degree (and hence, graduate and not be a student anymore)

I will get a new job

I will blog more often

I will also be blogging somewhere else

I will finally have some time to do fun mash-up projects

I will become active again in the Drupal project

I will become active again in the Roomware project

Heh. Well, let's look back in a year and see how much of this will be true.

Relieve

bje@dds.nl — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:05:44 GMT

In the pask week I have been working on implementing the final models for my thesis, which was quite difficult. Why? Well, if you're working with a document collection that is big, like I am working with now, you run into all kinds of memory and speed issues. And I've had those problems in the past week, where a machine with 2Gb of internal memory wouldn't even load half of the model I'm supposed to work with. When I moved to a machine with more internal memory, suddenly I was looking at running times for a single experiment that would last for about 40 days. A few days and a couple of nasty hacks later, I'm looking at running times of under an hour. On top of that, using the models I am able to duplicate the results of an earlier experiment which I did. Which kind of proves that the idea is working. Nice to know that the assumption under which I was working on the past month holds. And relieving ;).

Still much to do, but this is motivating.

Edit : Heh, caught a stupid bug in my tools that produce results for my experiments. Fixing that bug makes for an increase of 20% on one of the types of experiments that I'm doing. Don't mind me too much -- Just happy that the experiments are going well.

Top 10 Songs of 2007

bje@dds.nl — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:18:34 GMT

I've narrowed down the list of 50 albums to 10, and just like last year, I took one song per album and concatenated them into a single file for your listening pleasure.

You can get if from here. Enjoy!

1. Beirut - Nantes
2. Yael Naim - New Soul
3. Charlie Dee - Love My Life
4. Stevie Ann - Get Away
5.Marte Wulff - Safety Pins
6. Tegan and Sara - Back In Your Head
7. Siouxsie Sioux - Here Comes That Day
8. Wir Sind Helden - The Geek
9. Eisley - I Could Be There For You
10. Kate Nash - Foundations

Top 50 Albums of 2007

bje@dds.nl — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:36:48 GMT

It's the time of the year again, where I reflect on the music I heared in the past twelve months. This year, I didn't hear that much, bust was still able to compile a list of the 50 best albums of 2007, in no particular order. Ehr, no actually in alphabetical order. Somewhat. Watch out for the top 10 at the end of the year :).

1. Tone Damli Aaberge - Sweet Fever
2. Air - Pocket Symphony
3. Stevie Ann - Closer To The Heart
4. Anouk - Who’s Your Momma
5. Aqualung - Memory Man
6. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
7. Tori Amos - American Doll Posse
8. Au Revoir Simone - The Bird Of Music
9. Beirut - The Flying Club Cup
10. Margaret Berger - Pretty Sacry Silver Fairy
11. Bjork - Volta
12. Bloc Party - A Weekend In The City
13. James Blunt - All The Lost Souls
14. Kelly Clarkson - My December
15. Coco Rosie? - The Adventures of …
16. Charlie Dee - Love Your Life
17. Eisley - Combinations
18. Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Trip The Light Fantastic
19. Feist - The Reminder
20. Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control
21. Justice - Cross
22. Krezip - Plug It In
23. KT Tunstall - Drastic Fantastic
24. Avril Lavinge - The Best Damn Thing
25. Amy MacDonald - This Is The Life
26. M.I.A. - Kala
27. Manic Street Preachers - Send Away The Tigers
28. Maria Taylor - Lynn Teeter Flower
29. Maximo Park - Our Earthly Pleasures
30. Mika - Life in Cartoon Motion
31. Missy Higgins - On A Clear Night
32. Abra Moore - On The Way
33. Kate Nash - Made Of Bricks
34. PJ Harvey - White Chalk
35. Po’ Girl - Home To You
36. Polyphonic Spree - The Fragile Army
37. Joss Stone - Introducing
38. Rilo Kiley - Under The Blacklight
39. Siouxsie Sioux - MantaRay
40. Tegan and Sara - The Con
41. Anna Ternheim - Lovers Dream and More Music for Psychotic Lovers
42. The Blow - Poor Aim: Love Songs
43. The Chemical Brothers - We Are The Night
44. The Shins - Wincing The Night Away
45. The Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist
46. The White Stripes - Icky Thumb
47. Tracey Thorn - Out of the Wood
48. Wir Sind Helden - Soundso
49. Marte Wulff - Safety Pins
50. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Is Is