Evilcoder.org

Today I had a useful and productive day! I committed several older drivers that I still had pending MFC, I requested MFC allowance for several manual page updates and some typo fixes, in addition I wrote some (very trivial and simple) code myself in the C language. Mark Linimon reported a patch for if_vr(4) recently and I tried a different approach to keep the code clean (I simply added the identity tag to the .h file of if_vr and logically OR’ed it within the code. That sounds very trivial but it’s more C code then I worked with recently myself (mostly I review patches on the bugs lists and process them if they are OK in my believing, but I mostly dont have to write things myself).

Reason that I wrote the part myself is that the patch from Mark didn’t apply very well, I think the markup got whacked on the lists somehow, so this might be the best idea. I actually have to admit that I had great fun in doing the trivial thing and rebuilding to see that it didn’t break anything

Mark had been asked to test this so lets wait for his reply now

Now heading to my buddy to help with his new house!

written by Remko

As mentioned earlier, I expected to have a lot of problems with the time change, and guess what happened. I have a lot of problems with the time change. From the time I went to bed, till the time I was brutally woken up by my alarm, the world was good and nice. The moment my alarm went, I felt really miserable. For my feeling I went to bed later then normally but the clock only showed it’s regular time (strange, it was an hour later just a day before!) and the time I woke up was a-normal.

So far so good, after waking up a bit, eating breakfast, saying hello to my dad and driving to work everything was just like every other day, except that it was already light when I arrived at work, this wasn’t the case the week before!

The time my coworkers got in and we went for a coffee, some itchy feeling crossed me, this was not normal, we were drinking coffee too late! My head felt heavy for a moment, till the caffeine kicked in (if you always drink a cup of coffee in the morning you know the feeling), again after that the world just continued and I seemed to adapt a bit better.

TILL lunch time was arriving, an hour before I normally eat, I felt a push to open my bag and take out my lunch bag and eat the contents, because it was lunchtime.. EHH!! Not yet. I needed to wait for an hour till I could eat my bread.

The moment I could go home, I filled my bag and grabbed my stuff and walked outside. It was already getting dark (IEK not normal!) and it felt like that I worked an hour longer then normal; again so untrue!

I got home safely and within normal timeframes (1 hour and 15 minutes driving from work till home) I decided to wait with my dad (my mother has a party tonight so she’s out) till my brother came home so that we could eat with the three of us. We ate at 18.30 or something, which felt like 19.30…

Now, the time is showing 19:57, but it feels like almost nine o’clock already!

And this goes on for another week till I am entirely adapted to the new time zone we live in.

For some people a very normal change, for others like me, a difficult and challenging change!

written by Remko

Ow yeah, it’s blog day today as one can see :-).

A couple of days ago the latest DVD from Queen had been released! Given that I have them all, I already pre-ordered this copy of their work. It’s called “Queen, Rock Montreal & Live Aid”. Within the package there are 2 dvd’s, a dual layer and a single layer one. Together they contain 25 rock solid songs from Queen, populating 96 minutes of your time with fantastic Rock music :-). Also on the DVD’s are fresh interview’s with Bryan May (guitarist, if you slept under a rock your entire life) and Roger Taylor (The drummer).

I am really enthusiastic about these DVD’s and I will give them careful attention tonight to see the glory moments of the best band ever! Queen.

written by Remko

Tommorrow (Monday) rik will recieve the keys to his very own house! I will be helping him on thuesday to make sure his house ready to go soon (with the two left hands that I have :-)) and make sure his computer stuff is ready for the movement and proven to work

I am very excited for Rik regarding this; finally moving away from his student-room to his own house.. yay!

written by Remko

It feels like timetraveling (for me); the change between summertime (CEST) and wintertime (CET). I really have problems with that, already for ages. For me it feels like a quarter to twelve, while the clock says: a quarter to eleven. Though this change is less problematic for me then the otherway around (From wintertime to summertime), so lets see how good we manage to handle this ; this time :-).

written by Remko

Since a little my entire blog is running on wordpress. I still need to convert loads of entries between the old Joomla installation and this new Wordpress installation. Reason for this is that the markup got wacked up with the migration tool I have used. Sadly that’s the pain part for most (cms!) software around, you cannot normally migrate the stuff between eachother, understandable because everything is opensource and developed in spare time of people, but ofcourse it would be very neat to have

Another thing is that my RSS Subscribers should know and see; my rss feeds changed, so if you actively followed my RSS feeds, please resubscribe using the new RSS feeds, for every category you can acces it’s own RSS Feed, or you can use the global one which follows everything (as far as I know).

And finally; if you have ideas or suggestions about the blog, please do not hesitate to comment on the entry(/ies) where needed so that I can really make a good blog again

written by Remko

OK Ken Smith already made it public in the CVS entries already, but FreeBSD 7.0 BETA-1 is available (my own machine: FreeBSD guardian.elvandar.org 7.0-BETA1 FreeBSD 7.0-BETA1 #9: Tue Oct 23 14:10:01 CEST 2007 root@guardian.elvandar.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GUARDIAN amd64) and you should really test this the soon you can.. the sooner the better, we count on you all to get a very good major release again. A lot of shiny new features as well as much improved stability had been added to the system which you really want to test

In the mean time 6.3 preparations are also started which is a much improved version of 6.2-RELEASE (ofcourse), but the cool things are in 7.0mmkay?

update: 27/10: You can find the ISO files required for testing here

written by Remko

Today I went to my home-cafe “The Breakaway” in Rotterdam to meet with old collegue’s. Reason for this is that Ivo (my old-teamcoordinator, someone I learned a lot from, and visa versa as far as he told me ;-)) is leaving the ING real soon now to restart a former career. Ofcourse I wish him all the luck and best he can use to restart it and continue it afterwards. Personally I think it is the right choice for him :-).

BUT beyond that I also met a lot of old co-workers, people I didn’t speak for ages because “E_NOTIME” things etc. We all spoke a bit and exchanged contact-cards etc. which was a nice thing to do because we can now keep in touch again.

Ivo I know you read this at some point, thanks for the invitation, it was a really nice evening which I enjoyed a lot (more then I thought before arriving).

So another successive night

written by Remko

After crossing a couple of ” invisible ” bikers in the last few days, I decided to blog about it. The reason I am doing is, is that it hopefully make more people aware of their problem (the biker’s problem that is imo) and perhaps resolve it.

What happened? Well, I almost drove over a few bikers in the last few days. Monday I drove an alternative route towards home, crossing some narrow ways, only suited for two bikerlanes and one driveway (small road). Normally this is just fine and when bikers have their lights enabled they are visible and nothing happends. Now in one of the last corners near the “Schaapherdersweg” the car in front of me suddenly went a bit more the left then usual and I instantly pulled the big light handle.

What I saw was rather amazing. There were two bikers driving there, next to eachother, wearing black clothes and stuff, not driving with the lights enabled etc. They were just invisible and not to be seen on this road (no additional lighting from poles, there were none there!), it’s luckily that I saw them otherwise bad things might have happened. Ofcourse I need to pay attention all the time and I never ever hit a bike (and I dont intend to do this); but please you bikers out there, enable some more lights! I am sure that every car driver does not want to smash into a bike where visibility can be easily prevented / corrected. Also it’s against the law to drive without lights in the dark, and it’s against common sense.

BIKERS: Enable lights in the dark; wear reflective clothes!
DRIVERS: Please keep paying attention to these bikers, we dont want to harm them!

written by Remko

Where I did this last year in may (just before I went to Greece with Luca’s mother and Luca himself), now it was my brothers turn to crash into the car infront of him.

He couldn’t help it, someone way in front of him was acting strange in his car, causing a major breakage by the other cars in the row. My brother braked too late and hit the car in front of him. The car behind him (driven by the parents of his friend whom participated in our holiday) barely missed him, given that he really couldn’t help it. Luckily the guy that got hit wasn’t angry and both fully understood the reason of this.

This all happened 5 minutes before our departure to the airport. Not a very good thing to start with, but well, OK nobody got injured other then the car. The damage is rather big financially seen, so we are looking into the best option for Martijn to replace the car or get it fixed.

I also made some pictures from the car today (on depot) and with Martijn’s permission I will include them later (or remove this line if I am not allowed :-))

The crashed car..

written by Remko