GoneWacko’s Blog

20th birthday and new hair

I’ve finally got some pictures to show people, so it’s about time I blog about my 20th birthday and my new hair style.

Unpacking presents
Click for a bigger version.

On the 20th of June, I turned 20 years old. Because of various reasons, we celebrated my birthday on the evening of the 19th. Sander and Roel tricked me into coming along to the local Irish pub, Molly’s, to watch the football match (Portugal - Germany).
All my friends from Salo were in the pub with me. Then at 12:00 AM “Happy Birthday” was sung and I was presented with some presents.

Not much later we all headed on home, and whilst sitting in the living room of one of the apartments (the replacement Common Room ever since the janitor locked our actual common room due to ‘mischief’), it turned out that Aida had baked pie!

All in all a very good birthday, especially considering the fact that I did not expect any celebrations whatsoever.

Then, on Monday, I went to the hairdresser. Forced by my friends here in Finland, I let said hairdresser cut off a considerable amount of hair.
Unlike last time, I did get the chance to take ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures.

Before and after pictures. Click to enlarge.

reCAPTCHA

Akismet is a lovely plugin that blocks a lot of comment spam.
For some reason, however, I’m lately getting increased amounts of comments that slip through; Either to the level where I at least have to review them myself, or to the level where they just appear on the website without any kind of moderation.

So today I decided that it was time to add another line of defence. Yes, I’ve added CAPTCHAs to the website.

I know that many people find these annoying. Especially the ones on such websites as RapidShare are thoroughly annoying and sometimes in fact impossible.
This one, however, is not so bad. For starters, the images are actually quite readable. This may make it easier for bots to automatically solve them as well, but in that case I still have Akismet to catch them in the act.

What really makes the CAPTCHAs I use better than most, however, is that I’ve gone for reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a captcha system (by the original inventor of CAPTCHAs) where the users actually help with digitizing books.

At school, I once attended a presentation by the inventor of CAPTCHAs, and he spoke of the various plans he had for ‘Human Computation’. One of these what is now known as reCAPTCHA, but another one of these was what is now known as the Google Image Labeler - a game which is addictive to play and provides google with labels to images for their image search at the same time.

So I hope these CAPTCHAs won’t annoy anyone. It’s not like there are that many people posting comments on here anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

Early birthday present

Recently we were talking about teddy bears in #tycoon. It turned out quite many people in the channel actually still had teddy bears. I said I had never had one (which is true; Although I did have various plushies as a child) and that I didn’t understand why so many still had them as (relatively) adult people.

Spencer Bear.
Click for a bigger version.

I may also have said something about setting one on fire if I did still have a teddy bear…

As you may or may not know, I’m turning 20 years old on Friday the 20th of June.
Today someone rang the doorbell, and when I opened it it turned out to be the mail man with a package.

After opening it I found the object you see to the right (unless you’re reading this on planet.tt-forums.net in which case it’s somewhere above this text; Screw you!), together with the note you see below:

The card that came with it. Nice HTML escaping!

Thank you Tenebrae for your gift! And after noticing how incredibly soft it is, I promise not to set it on fire

New TV

Whilst I sit here in my 12 m² room in Finland, my parents went and bought a new TV with virtually the same dimensions…

A 46″ Sony Bravia is now making the living room in the Netherlands so much more aesthetically pleasing…

The box the TV came in. Humongous! Click for a bigger version.

And here it is in the living room! Click for a bigger version.

The furniture under it is of course a temporary piece.

Oops.

The French guys that live down the street like to pull pranks on the other students here and they are morally capable of doing anything. This is why, when they went on a trip to Talinn last week, the entire street went ahead and got revenge.

One of the guys living in the same house called the janitor and acted like he lived in the room of one of the French guys and that he had forgotten his key and was as such locked out. The janitor here has no idea who lives where, so he opened the door without asking… Quite a large security issue, but that’s not really relevant now.

In a team effort, we moved everything out of his room. Laptops, TV, Wii, Desk, Bed, Couch… Everything. Some of the people then continued to inflate some condoms and hang them around the room. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they did that latter, but whatever.

So today (or technically yesterday) ‘the French’ returned, so we got ready outside the window of his room in order to watch (and record) his response.
Whilst standing there waiting, I put my hands in my pockets, because it was cold. When doing so I felt two small bits of plastic. Not knowing what they were, I took them out:

Sorry for the poor quality, it was dark and I was too lazy to switch on the lights.

The timing was perfect, too, because tomorrow I’m going on a trip to Riga, Latvia, for three days. Great! Luckily I still have my credit card, but that’ll cost me more money. Furthermore it’ll take some time to get a replacement - especially when factoring in the Finland issue.

Anyway, since I was ordering a new one, I went and designed my own card in the process. It was only ~2 euros more to make my card totally awesome and unique! Behold:

Look familiar?

If you’ve got 7 minutes to spend

A friend (one of my colleagues here in Finland) pointed me to this rather impressive video:
MUTO a wall-painted animation.

Watch it if you’ve got 7-or-so minutes of time to spend.

That is all.

Of Vappu Festivities and Lost Wallets

So, as promised, a bit more about my attendance of the Vappu festivities in Turku.

On Wednesday, March 31, the pagan/satanic (and Roman Catholic, but this is Finland, damn it!) holiday of Vappu, or ‘Walpurgis Night‘ is celebrated in various countries; mostly in northern Europe.

Unfortunately I do not currently have any pictures of the events, because I don’t have a proper camera myself, and I haven’t leeched any pictures from my friends yet.

In my particular case, the day started with going to work while enduring very nice temperatures (some 22 °C) and sun. During lunch time, my boss came around to see what we were up to, and told us we had to leave early that day so that we could go to Turku and get drunk (although not with those words).
My boss is a nice man.

Some of the other residents of Hakastaronkatu 15, or Hakis as we affectionately call it, had made plans which included staying in a hotel in down town Turku. Three minutes of enquiry later, it was decreed that I would join them in Turku for the traditional consumption of alcohol and the picnic in the park, the day after.

That afternoon we took the train to Turku, dropped off our stuff at the hotel, and went to the Turku marketplace, where something like 30,000+ people had gathered (I’m not sure what the exact numbers were; There may have been many more people around) for a variety of traditions.

After some time of standing around, 98% of the people present suddenly got out some white student caps and put them on after frantically waving them in the air. One of the Spanish students I was travelling with told me what they were - basically, the idea is that you get them when you graduate from senior high school. You are only allowed to wear them during Vappu, and you are not allowed to wash them - ever. Some people clearly lived by the latter rule, because some of them were so dirty that it could only have gotten that way by enduring something like a stream of puke landing on it…

Anyway, all the people started moving to the river side for another Vappu tradition: the washing of statues. Don’t ask me why they do it, but they do it. In this particular case, it was being washed by some dentistry students, so they used a gigantic toothbrush.

After these events, we went to have some food at a Grilli, which is a bit like a mix between a snack bar and a hot dog stand. Here we met some other people from the loverly town of Salo, as well as some Dutch people we had met some weeks before then. Small world.

Later that night we went clubbing. First we tried to get into a place called Onnela; Where the age limit was 20. I could not get in with my measly 19 years-and-10-months of time spent as a living being, so we tried another place. Åbo Diskotek (Åbo is Swedish for Turku) had an age limit of 22. Standing in line hand-in-hand with one of the girls of our little entourage, I got in without anyone asking me for identification…

Anyway, since I was pretty tired (mostly due to a drinking game which went on until 2:50 the night before), I didn’t really have that much of a good time there, but it was fun none the less. Later that night we went to the hotel to sleep.

The next day, we had a picnic, which is a tradition on May Day, the national holiday on the first of May. The weather was nice, so there, again, were many thousands of people present in the park.
Some horribly emo band played for an hour, and then a bit later some weird retro-electro-funk-pop ensamble played a few songs, just before we decided to head on home.

In the train, I had to show the conductor my student card which gets me a discount for the public transport system. When we got out of the train, I walked for some 100 meters before realizing that the pocket that normally contains my wallet, felt surprisingly devoid of any contents. My heart rate suddenly shot up, because my wallet contains my driver’s license, credit card, bank card, insurance card, student cards, etcetera.

Realizing that I had left my wallet in the train, I went back to the station. There, the woman behind the desk managed to contact the train. Luckily you buy tickets for specific wagons/seats when you get a ticket before entering the train, meaning that I could pretty specifically tell the conductor in the train where to look for my wallet.
Three minutes later, he called back to tell me that he found the wallet. The train he was on would be going through Salo on it’s return journey again at 9:30 PM, so if I could be at the station at that time, I could get my wallet back.

Obviously, this quickly made me a very relieved person. Later that evening I did return to the station, met the conductor (he actually recognized me immediately), and got my wallet back, contents very much present and intact. I’m 100% sure that, in the Netherlands, I would never have gotten back my wallet. Not only would it not have been possible to contact the train again - because there’s a train every 10 minutes or so - but it would also be impossible to tell the conductor in the train exactly where I was sitting.
Not to mention not-so-honest people getting their hands of the thing first.

I have internets!

After 2,5 months in Finland, I have finally been connected to the world wide web.

It was actually enabled yesterday, but because I went to celebrate Vappu in Turku with friends from my street, I did not actually get to use it until today.

More on the said festivities in a later post.

Twitter

Sander (one of the Dutch guys I’m working with here in Finland) has lately been responsible for getting me to use all sorts of Web 2.0 things that I really shouldn’t be using.

He is not actively telling me to, but in a horrible case of I-want-what-my-peers-have marketing, I find myself signing up to such things as LinkedIn and Twitter.

In the case of the latter service, it has so far not really proven too useful for me, because the only person I follow/following me is Sander. Who I sit next to every day. For 8 hours. And live next door to.

So if anyone is using the aforementioned services, feel free to add me as a buddy or start following me or whatever the action of subscribing to my person is called.

In other news, I STILL don’t have internet at home, even though the two weeks that would be needed to get me connected ended on Tuesday.

Slow day at the office

So yeah, I’ve not actually blogged from the Scandinavian country of Finland; I know. However, currently it’s all a bit slow at the office. The only work we’ve got at the moment is putting some finishing touches on the documentation, and preparing for a presentation which will be taking place next week. Oh how I long for the time when we get to start writing awesome code.

I have two reasons for not blogging about my work placement:

• I (still) don’t have internet in my apartment, which is horrible but also an experience on it’s own; It’s training my skills of solving problems without Google.
• I’m making a special blog about Finland; I’m writing this in Django so that I have something to do when I do not have internet. And for this reason, I’ve been meaning to keep all the interesting stories and anecdotes for that special blog

The blog in question will ’soon’ be found at an as of yet undisclosed location (to prevent it from being indexed or visited by people who will only be disappointed).

I’d just like to point out that I’m well; The work is fun, the boss is awesome, and the other international students in my street are all very nice people.

Getting my hair cut

Before

After

One of the tasks on my to-do list for my trip to Finland was getting my hair cut. My hair was getting rather long, which was exactly what I wanted. It just needed to be cut in a few places so that I might not look like a toilet brush with hairs going in every direction.

I almost literally said the following to the woman in charge of killing my hair cells (for as far as they weren’t dead already): “I want to keep it as long as possible, it just needs to be cut into shape”… So she made it the shortest length I’ve had in years.

Here’s a bigger image so that you may compare my hair before and after the procedure:

Click to Enlarge

As you can see I’m quite the photogenic type, and I do not have any issues with laughing in photographs.

Firefox Live Bookmarks

Although it’s most probably a well known issue with Firefox 2, I felt like writing about something, and I chose this.

As most readers of this blog are no doubt aware, Planet TT-Forums is a so called feed aggregator, which collects the RSS/Atom feeds of a number of members of TT-Forums.

Click to Enlarge

I’ve subscribed to Planet TT-Forums’ own RSS feed through Firefox Live Bookmarks. This works pretty well and most RSS feeds are not an issue. However, there are a few that do cause problems.

For example, Jonty Sewell’s Blog seems to be resulting in RSS feeds that get parsed incorrectly by Firefox’s Live Bookmarks:
<title>Jonty: iPod accessories? Yay!</title>
<guid>http://www.jontysewell.co.uk/42 at http://www.jontysewell.co.uk</guid>
<link>http://www.jontysewell.co.uk/blog/ipod-accessories%3F-yay%21</link>

For some inexplicable reason, the URL used when clicking on the live bookmark entry, is between the <guid> tags instead of the <link> tags.
I’ve experienced other-but-similar quirks with Richard Eldred’s Blog’s blog.

It’s as if the Live Bookmarks feature doesn’t actually parse the XML, it just takes whatever line seems to contain a URL and uses that.

Interestingly, the ‘Feed preview’ page - for lack of a better name - does parse things correctly. Why they would use different feed parsing code for different parts of the same application is beyond me.

I’m going to see if the Atom feed for Planet TT-Forums performs better…

Update: Indeed, the Atom feed works just fine, at least with the entry for Jonty’s blog. In the case of the Atom feed, the actual link comes before any other entry that has a URL in it. That might be why, or perhaps the Atom parser is just not as mentally retarded.

The Calm Before The Storm

Last Friday I had my assessment of the current semester, and the outcome was that I needed to fix a few minor items in my portfolio in order to pass, which I shall be doing over the next few days.
Apart from that, I’m pretty much free of any obligations such as school work for the next three weeks, meaning that I’ve got plenty of time to make the necessary arrangements for my work placement in Finland. This time of leisure will be short lived because when I arrive in Finland I will be working full time for the first time in my life D:

Things that need doing include:

• Looking at insurance options
• Looking at how I can prove that I’m able to finance my stay in Finland
• Buying new shoes
• Having a drink with the people I’ll be going with

I also still need to put the finishing touches on my school project (which I don’t count a school work because it’s not that much work and it’s fun to do).
In the end I’m not overly proud of the product we’re delivering, but I did learn a lot about how not to do stuff (which surprisingly enough does not include ‘using JSP’ as a bad practice).

I don’t know why I’m even writing this blog entry, I guess I figured I had something interesting to say when I started writing but now (after spending about an hour rating movies on Flixter, through Facebook) I can’t quite remember what it was.

Semester’s end

Yesterday was what everyone in my school calls Portfolio Day or Oh-God-Not-This-Shit-Again Day. It’s the day on which everybody has their deadlines for proving that they are competent on whatever they’re studying during that semester.
This semester I’ve been learning about Object Oriented Programming and Design, as well as writing Distributed Applications.
After learning about these subjects for 3 months I’ve now spent about 3 months (9 weeks + christmas holiday) applying these topics in a web-based application for a real company.

So traditionally the night before the day on which we have to submit our portfolios is subject to half the school pulling all-nighters to get their work done. This semester it was no different, and I was up for a good 38 hours. ‘Tis times like these where a mild form of ADHD and a condition where I don’t produce enough Melatonin, the hormone which causes drowsiness, really help. I’m able to stay up for 40 hours or more without too much of a problem.

Unfortunately I’m not feeling very secure about how my portfolio will hold up under the scrutiny of my assessors, but I should get plenty of chances to fix what’s wrong with it, luckily. At least the fact that the portfolio’s have been handed in means there’s less stress. Normally this also means that I now have a few days off, but no such luck: I still have another week in which to deploy the product we’ve produced and fix the last couple of issues we may stumble upon.

After next week however, I should have about 3 weeks of free time before I travel north-east to Finland! Exciting times are ahead and I’ll have tonnes of stuff to take care of. I have to buy a ticket, new shoes and perhaps somewhat warm clothes (although so far the temperatures in Salo, Finland are pretty much comparable to the temperatures in the Netherlands). I also need to figure out if Finland has different wall sockets from us and such.
Yesterday I’ve received word that they’ve made housing arrangements for us, very close to the university campus, in a residence where all the university’s international students are placed. So I think it’s going to be quite good, with people from all over the world in very similar situations as us. Should be a lot of fun!

Impossible

Jesus fucking Christ, I started playing Guitar Hero 3 on Hard difficulty today and things went okay-ish until I reached Aerosmith - Same Old Song and Dance and Dead Kennedys - Holiday in Cambodja. Not only am I not a particularly big fan of these songs, but they’re also fucking impossible to play. I’ve attempted to play the former song over 40 times now and I still can’t get past even 1/3rd of the song. It’s starting to get so frustration I felt a growing urge to smash the guitar into a wall, but I managed to refrain myself from doing so. There just isn’t anything as annoying as having to play a song you don’t like over and over and over again. It’s so bad that I’m even having trouble typing this because my fingers are so fucked up at the moment.

All of a sudden I see what Yahtzee meant with the steep learning curve. All was fine until I reached these songs after which things suddenly became impossible… Heck the game even gave me a 5G achievement for failing a certain number of times in a row

Expenses

December is of course very well known for being a month in which one spends quite a bit of money, be it for Christmas, Sinterklaas or new year’s eve (i.e. fireworks, drinks and food).

I don’t celebrate Christmas with presents, and I don’t tend to be the one who’s paying for the food. Fireworks look nice but I think they’re a bit of a waste of money, I usually just watch other people’s money shoot up into the air.

None the less, December’s been a bit of an expensive month for me. My new laptop was bought for me by my father because I mainly need it for my studies, but even so I spent quite a bit of ‘dosh’:

And today I decided to go buy Guitar Hero III because I had been playing it with a normal xbox 360 controller but some of the songs were already impossible at Medium difficulty, so I wasn’t really going to try hard without a Guitar Controller. Add another 85 euros to the total expenses.

I think I may need to draw on some of my savings for just a little while so I don’t enter 2008 with my bank balance in the red.

New laptop and Finland

Last week, my laptop mysteriously died on me. It seems to be under the impression that it’s powered on, even though it’s not (the LED is burning). It’s also acting as if it’s drawing power from a wall socket, even though it’s not (the LED is burning).

So after looking for a nice laptop to replace it with, my dad and I ordered it last Saturday and it arrived today. It’s an HP Pavilion dv9595ed (although these version numbers seem to vary in meaning per country). For info on what’s inside, check the specifications page (In Dutch, but you should be able to make sense of it anyway). You can also check out the product demo flash animation.

Apart from the 2 GHz Centrino Duo and the GeForce 8600M GS (shared memory ) I also quite like the

• Support for 802.11n, which is good because that’s what we’ve got at my home
• 320 GBs worth of hard drive space (5400 rpm)
• Integrated fingerprint reader

Yesterday I received confirmation from my school that I should be going to Finland for my work placement. Woo! There is no concrete assignment yet, but that’s being worked on. I’ll probably go to Finland somewhere around the 18th of February, for about 20 weeks. Exciting stuff!

Work Placement in Finland

Fooled you! Completely disregarding what I may or may not have written the other day, I’ve decided to write about something not-entirely-technical anyway. I probably will until I figure out what I want and how I want it.

Anyway, I’ve been planning on going abroad for my work placement for quite some time. A good friend of mine went to Finland about 2 years ago I think it was, and he came home with such good stories that I’ve always wanted to go to Finland ever since. I’ve somehow always thought that Finland was a pretty cool country. The land of Metal, cold weather, and incomprehensible languages.

Anyhow, I recently started to do the things needed to get there for my work placement which will be from February until June. At the moment the plan is to go to a company called doRego (or some other variation of the capitalization of that word) which is a company in Salo, some 2 hours west-north-west of Helsinki. The aforementioned friend went there, too. The plan is also to go with a classmate and good friend (Roel).

Recently yet another friend of mine (Jan-Jaap) bought an XBOX 360 and we (Roel, Jan-Jaap and yours truly) have been enjoying a great many games like Assassin’s Creed, Halo 3, etc. So now I’m saving money to buy an XBOX 360 myself, which I think may come in handy in Finland if we ever get bored (which should not happen because there should be a lot of international students there to socialize with).

I’ve also been thinking of taking my PC along. Doing some quick calculations (two screens of 5 kg each, plus a case which I’ve estimated at around 15 (may have been a gross overestimation) would amount to a total shipping cost of 270 euros, with UPS). Although that does seem to be some sort of express delivery where it gets delivered the next day, so maybe it’s cheaper if I tell them to take as long as they want.

How do I make money for buying xboxes and paying shipping costs, you ask?
I’ve been working as a (Visual Basic 6.0) programmer, which is great fun and lucrative! I’ve just finished writing a printing system (which took ages to write because I tried 3 different methods and found out they all Failed Badly™) and now I’ve started to work on a way for the application I’m working on (Dutch website: Voetbaltrainingsuite.nl) to be internationalized. It’s a bit of a makeshift solution at the moment though.

I shall no doubt be posting more about (and possibly from) Finland in the coming months, because I’m quite excited about going there

Gallery Deleted

I deleted the gallery from my website, for two very good reasons:

• I wasn’t updating it because I don’t take a lot of pictures
• Lately my website’s been terribly slow. After complaining to orudge a bunch of times, it seemed that spambots spamming on my gallery were stressing MySQL too much. Oops!

It was also a terribly outdated version of the software, so that might’ve been a reason for it, too.

I don’t think it will be missed too much

A new direction

I’ve lately been thinking of going in a different direction with this blog.

Writing about what happens in my life is not really for me. Not necessarily because nothing ever happens, but just because I don’t really realize at the time that it makes for blogging material.
Instead, I think I’ll just blog about anything technology/computer related that I engage in, stumble upon, am excited about or feel like telling people about

While I realize that there’s bound to be a smaller audience for that than for the more generic topic that is my life, I’ve decided not to care for one very good reason:
Nobody actually reads my blog posts NOW, so I don’t have to worry about losing any readers ;). So if I’m going to write for no one but me, why not write about stuff that interests me?

Attempting to program

Warning: geeky entry coming up which is probably not even interesting to people who are going to know what the heck I’m talking about.

Boy do I hate it when this happens.

I’ve recently been in a mood where I wanted to do programming. This is remarkable, because there are plenty of games I still have to play, including Settlers 6 (which didn’t work before due to a bug in the SPTD drivers when used in combination with my on-board RAID controller (ICH7)) which I’m playing at the moment, The Witcher (good reviews) and Gears of War. Not to mention that the copy of Crysis which I pre-ordered some 3 months ago should arrive in a few days, and there’s also the new SimCity which is due this week, which many people predict will be a disappointment, but I’m not going to have an opinion on until I’ve played it.

Anyhow, I think this urge to write code comes from doing my current semester, which is called DDOA or “Develop a Distributed Object Oriented Application”. As the name suggests, it’s all about designing and writing applications that are written in object oriented languages (in this case Java) and which are distributed, meaning that they run on multiple machines at once, be it in a grid, cluster or even just multi-threaded applications.

I’ve really enjoyed this semester up to now, because it’s finally a semester on software design/architecture (which is one of the main reasons why I really wanted to study computer science: to learn how to write good programs) and it’s also a semester which finally covers some serious programming, the kind of programming which I’ve so far only done in my free time, as a hobby.

Now, I’ve been trying to write numerous applications in the last couple of days, such as a Wishlist application in which I can keep track of things I still want to buy. This program seemed like a fun exercise in C# as well as ADO.NET (more specifically, the MySQL wrapper for ADO.NET). Unfortunately, the class that was going to handle most of the database work didn’t work the way I wanted and I quickly gave up (or at least I decided to try again some other time).

I’m the owner of a G15 Gaming Keyboard which features a small 160×43 Monochrome LCD screen which can display a variety of applets, such as a Media Player applet which shows information about a variety of popular media players, a Clock applet which shows the current time (really!), a POP3 mail checker, etc. It’s a bit gimmicky, but I like it because it does certainly give me access to stuff like the current time or my media player without leaving my game. Logitech advertises the keyboard with promises that many games support the screen to show information such as ammo/health/energy, but really I only know of 5 popular games that support it. I did recently experience that TimeShift shows Health and Energy information on the screen, but since I don’t tend to look down at my keyboard when I’m playing a first person shooter, it wasn’t all that useful.

Click to Enlarge

However, it is of course possible to write your own applets for this LCD screen, using a(n) (somewhat poorly documented) SDK written in C++. Yesterday I felt like messing about with it a little bit, and the end result is shown to the right. Unfortunately, displaying an image is as simple as converting it to an XPM-like file (I actually made an XPM file and converted it to the desired format manually) and telling the API to display it, while deciding what to draw at runtime (i.e. text, progressbars, etc) is considerably harder (with the lowest level API available anyway).
I decided I wanted to write two things:

• A DLL for mIRC which allows me to display and/or say my currently playing song
• A DLL for mIRC that shows the latest couple of lines from the channel in the LCD screen

To add to (what would in the end appear to be) pain, I wanted to write these DLLs in C#. Writing an application for the LCD screen I knew was possible, because EveMon, a tool which keeps track of your Eve Online character even when you’re not logged in, also displays this information on the LCD screen.
I decided to do things the quick and dirty way by just ripping the LCD screen code from EveMon and using it myself. Now all I needed to do was write a DLL that would work with mIRC. Of course I quickly figured out that writing a DLL in .NET would not make the DLL compatible with mIRC, which expects it to be written in C++, C, or some other non-.NET language. A quick search on Google told me that I could still write a plugin for mIRC by using the /com (for COM) command instead of the /dll (you guessed what for) command.
Writing the DLL itself ended up being pretty easy. After about 30 minutes of fiddling around in mIRC, I also got the COM connection to open and some simple hello world message to return from the DLL. My LCD screen however stayed awkwardly devoid of any (testing) chat lines. Furthermore, unloading the DLL kept the DLL loaded anyway, and closing mIRC resulted in it crashing.

Today I decided to move all the LCD code into a standalone application, which gave me a better shot at debugging the LCD code. Turns out it’s complaining that the LCD SDK .NET wrapper DLL (which works fine in EveMon) is a ‘bad image’ which probably has not been compiled for .NET.
The genious that I am when it comes to the internals of a compiled program, I gave up and decided to do something else, because I usually come up with some new angles to look at the problem over the span of 2 or 3 days after a problem arises.

As for the currently-playing-displaying-dll-for-mIRC: This should be a lot easier to make, although I do have to figure out how to get the relevant data from Windows Media Player. Live Messenger uses a WMP plugin, but the applet for my keyboard does not use such a plugin and THAT works, so there’s bound to be some other way using API calls or some sort of exported file.

I wish I would just decide to program something and actually just do it without running into silly issues like these. Maybe I should just stick to writing Hello World, at least that never fails for me.

Oh bugger

I recently received my salary for the very first time in my life, so I decided to treat myself to something nice.

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What I went with is a new mobile telephone. Not just any mobile telephone, but a 620 euro mobile telephone: An HTC TyTN II.
I read some good reviews about it so I had been wanting to buy it for some time now.

Of course, I don’t make 620 euros a month (It’s just a part-time job; I’m a full time student), but when combined with a 2-year 22,50 euros/month Vodaphone contract, together with a 9,50 euros/month Unlimited Internet BloX subscription, the phone was ‘only’ 270 euros. (Of course I’m also going to have to spend 32 euros a month for the next two years now :x)

So yeah, I’ll be enjoying my internet whilst on the road from now on, but I’ll also be enjoying the embedded GPS receiver and all the regular PDA-ness such as having a diary and being able to write e-mails.

Unfortunately I am known to be able to screw stuff up quite quickly. I bought the phone yesterday. Yesterday evening was when it went wrong: I ran the pre-installed Windows Live Messenger, and accidentally enabled the option where it syncs the phone’s contact list with the live account’s contact list.

This meant that I suddenly had all my Messenger contacts in my phone’s contact list, which was rather annoying because most of those contacts I don’t exactly call or e-mail (heck I rarely speak to most of them). So I tried disabling the option, only to find that the relevant checkbox was now grayed out (but checked). Silly as I am, I then started deleting all the useless contacts from my mobile phone’s contact list. Which of course meant that all those contacts also got deleted from my Live Messenger contacts.

This means that I now suddenly have some 60 contacts less than I used to. Luckily enough, all my old contacts are still in my ‘Allow to speak to me’ list, so I should be able to get most of them back.
Still, I wasn’t happy with Live Messenger digging itself into Windows Mobile like a friggin rootkit, so I did a hard reset and all was well.

A fun experiment

As any reader of this blog probably already knows: Yes, I’m still alive.
I’ve not blogged in a while because I just couldn’t be arsed, but today I come to you with a post about a little experiment I did.
The information below is rather geeky, perhaps, so if you’re not interested in geeky stuff, consider yourself warned and feel free not to read further

Since my last blog entry, I’ve been to Birmingham and Oxford, I’ve done more driving of cars, I’ve had LAN parties, I’ve been having a long holiday (which is unfortunately coming to an end sometime next week) and a bunch of other things. Today my parents left for Oxford to visit my sister. This means I’ve got the house to myself, which has opened up the opportunity (although really my parents wouldn’t have been in the way if I’d done it earlier).

Earlier today I was downstairs making a sandwich when, far off in the distance, I heard the sound my mIRC plays when someone says my name. This made me realize that it’d be nice if I could be notified of highlights even when I’m downstairs. Quickly a few ideas came up such as having a device which takes my PC’s sound output, broadcasts it wireless to a receiver, which then feeds the sound into the amplifier downstairs.

I don’t actually have such a device though, so I decided to try the next best thing. I looked if there were any loopback sound drivers for Windows that would allow me to take sound output and feed it back to the PC as sound input. After a bit of googling I stumbled across Virtual Audio Cable. This tool does what I want: it creates virtual sound devices which applications can send to and receive from.

Now all I needed to do was broadcast the input over the network to the PC downstairs, which is conveniently located 1 meter from the amplifier. This was easy, all I did was install Icecast and the Winamp Oddcast plugin, told Oddcast to read from the virtual input instead of Winamp’s output, and I was done.
I got the PC downstairs to connect to the Icecast server, hooked it up to the amp using a cable I happened to have in my possession already, and then I was able to enjoy sounds (and music) from my PC upstairs, downstairs!

Unfortunately the Virtual Audio Cable software does cause for a bit of lag (about one third of a second I gather), and of course Icecast streaming means the PC downstairs buffers the sound causing considerable lag.

So although it was a nice experiment, it’s not here to stay

Tomorrow I’m moving my PC downstairs to prepare for a LAN party later this week anyway, so then I can just connect my PC to the amplifier directly.

My first real drive

This Saturday we went to a party at a sort of ‘Party Farm’ outside the town of Hoevelaken. This seemed like a nice ‘Maiden Voyage’ to get the hang of our (automatic handling) car and such.

Here’s the trip I ended up driving. The destinations in between were places where I had to reverse in order to find the address I was looking for.

While driving northbound over the A30 it suddenly started raining so hard, the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. Not the type of weather you’d want to have when you’ve barely got the hang of the car you’re driving

And then after leaving the A30, as can be seen on the map, I drove on a road which had really annoying turns.
After that, when I was past Hoevelaken, I had to drive on very narrow roads. And I don’t know why but people in Hoevelaken seem to like big American cars or something, and they really don’t like making way for approaching cars…

So all in all it was a pretty tough drive, but I did okay.

In other news, I’m going to the UK this Friday to go to the TT-Forums meeting and to visit my sister in Oxford.
Exciting stuff.

The day on which I was born

Is today!
I have been annoying people for 19 years now.

Funnily enough I can go pick up my driver’s license today as well - some present!

And not so funnily enough I have to present the prototype I produced during the school project today, as well… Which is also the reason why this post is so short - I’m working on finishing the prototype