well , those of you who visit this blog through www.knightwise.com : Welcome 🙂 As you can see the contents of the blog are now 'parsed' onto the main website. Unfortunately the pictures are not working yet 🙁 Some bizarre reason is the source of this. Sometimes it works other times it does not.. )…
Yesterday afternoon proved to be a fun episode in the week. Driving from work to school i stopped at a local Car wash not far from Geel. I had seen these dudes before , 4 or 5 whacky guyz that wash your car for 15 euro's (inside and outside ! ! ) As you know…
Haunted by the shadows of sleep I crouch down amidst the sleeping dwarfs and wish for slumber to whisk me away. There.. that about sums up how I felt this morning. After having my third migraine attack in a row yesterday evening I popped over to see the doc. who kindly told me to start…
Hmm Haven't gotten a time to post these last days. It has been busy too 🙁 Went out on Friday and I had to get up real early on Saturday to help out in the shop so my brother could sleep in ( erm… yess). One does it out of the kindness of ones heart…
Just a quick one today, because time is short. Started work a hour later today but decided not to sleep in. Had a nice time just sitting behind my Ibook , cappuchino in hand and the on-line moment of peace when there is absolutely no one on line to bug you 🙂 Nyana thought there…
First of all : No pic today cause i'm mobile , Bloging at 'De geletterde mens' in Hasselt . Damn , My schedule at work changed today so I'm gonna have to start out later and finish an hour later allmost every day. The days I CAN start on time i'm gonna be driving straight…
Watch out ! Porn ! Not that I am on the verge of dressing in a white gown, putting flowers in my hair and dancing around barefooted through the grass.. BUT : I can feel the spring is coming !. Yesterday was one of these days when you can SMELL the winter going away. Temperatures…
Monday comes and goes again. Spent some time in the car catching up on my podcasts and spacing out with the vibes casted by http://spacemusic.libsyn.com/ (loooove that). Got home and had about an hour of free time (yes ! Free time) to squander. Wasted half of that on messing around with my sound equipment to…
And the weekend has come and gone again. Like marching soldiers the hours have slipped trough my fingers and I find myself once again on the other side of that lovely break from work-and-no-play. Saturday morning was nice : I had about an hour to sit down and have a big ass cappuccino while trying…
Yep : Today we stop the presses and say HAPPY BIRTHDAY to our lovely friend Karien. She’s been Nyana’s buddy for over nine years now ( They used to work together in Bokrijk) and I have had the privilege and honor to call her my friend as well. Sometimes its funny how you can get…
A few months ago I started out with my ‘new years resolution’ for 2005 : Using as much open-source cross-platform software as I possibly could. And so far that’s working out fine. With Openoffice, Mozilla, Fire, NVU, Deepburner, Freepdf, Firstclass and of course Mandrake Linux I’ve managed to stay afloat and do the things I…
The pope is apparently returning from Hospital this week. We have found a sneak preview on the new modes of transportation. (Thanx Jakke !) Related PostsNo Related Posts
Looking back : an old repost from November 6th I found this article on tiestoworld.nl and thought I would 'bring it to mommy' I wrote it the day after the Tiesto Concert in Hasselt and is was on the old Knighsite website (and mirrored on Tiestoworld.) So for those of you who want to know…
When they do remakes.. it often sucks. When they try to re-enact a classic series , it often sucks. When they go 'bigger better faster' it always sucks. Well, not always. I watched part of the pilot episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series yesterday. And it did not suck. As a matter of fact…
The letters of life. Wonderful day today. Sometimes you need to take a day of and just let stuff be stuff. Well I'm not THAT relaxed cause i have a lot to do today. But still , its a welcome break from daily affairs. With all the 'march-ial law' that is in effect these day's…
Snow falls down, gentle white feathers of frozen dreams. My thoughts grow wings and dance trough them on warm and gentle wings. I look over the frozen world and my mind grabs hold of the deafening silence. I can sit here for hours and let my soul grasp the peace of the white curtain of…
I'm seriously considering declaring Martial Law in my agenda starting March first. I've been to school yesterday and all the stuff we have to learn and get in our heads before the end of June is starting to freak me out. If I keep this pace up (letting the freebies take over the agenda) I’m…
Just a quicky on my Ibook, cause its been much to long since i had a chance to update. Life is a hectic non-stop string of events these days and I find myself frustrated and angry most of the time while rushing from one appointment to another. Its a mixture of anger at myself cause…
My love. Time flows like a silent river. The babbling brooks of days gone by flow into its gently swinging curves. Like lightning strikes the dark but ever present horizon. I sail with you through the oceans of time and over the waves of life. You are the sea that keeps me afloat, you are…
hmm. time for another update, trying to find the balance between techno babble and Babylon-doom-style posts. Not easy though. Start of with the practical stuff i guess. Yesterday i decided to skip class because i was just to damn tired. Almost ran a red light in the morning and felt all fuzzy all day long.…
Been a while since my last post. I have decided to let all the bad stuff flow away in this post. Don't feel like getting all wrapped up in it all over again. Yes , Babylon is still burning but I’m getting a bit used to the heat of the fire right now. The biggest…
What are the lines below ? The lyrics of an anthem.. the words of a song that has unlocked the secrets of the third decennium to me… Is it poetry in the modern world or a psalm of fundamental truth in a haze of chaos. I don't know but what i do know is that…
Its not realy my day. Allthough I had half a day off from work i've been running around like crazy trying to get everything sorted out that needs to be done. And there is shit flying everywhere. To top it all off my Ibook has arrived, but with the wrong keyboard. I'm sitting prepped up…
I wanted to update last Friday but i was too shaken to make any sense of the words that blurted out. I don't know just how much information i am allowed to disclose about what is going on.. but its family related stuff and its pretty serious. When I drove to work I had…
I have just about had it. I won't go out on an all PC rant (again) but i must say i have just about had it. Every six months or so i go for a total redesign of my 'small' home network. I've just made up a little list what i still have to do…
Ok , Its been a while and i must say its been a hectic week. But enough of that blah-blah : Blog is back. Hmm.. what have i been up to ? Enjoyed nice weekend with Nyana of course (non-computer related trips to the city combined with mega-server-stress cause I’m setting up a new server…
We all think we'll live forever. we all think it will never change. We all think everything is nice and good and that happiness is granted to us by default. We all think bad things happen to other people and never to us. We are all wrong. Today I stood by and watched somebody's world…
The big switch : A different view at teaching Linux.
Introduction.
The first time I saw Linux was about five years ago, I believe it was a version 6.1 of Suse Linux. I remember being curious about the computer that was running it, and chatting up a colleague of mine (known as one of the company's uber-geeks) about what Linux was and how it worked and stuff. The story he told me dazzled me and for a while i really thought he was pulling my leg. He told me about a safe, secure and speedy operating system, that could run on machines varying from a “386” to a bigg-ass server. When I asked him what it could do , I knew he was kidding me, because he basically answered one word : EVERYTHING. My disbelief in an operating system that could be used for that enormous kind of diversity in purpose, gave him reason to explain to me just exactly how Linux was built, what the concept behind it was and how it was used. I sat down with him every lunch break for the next few days listening to his experiences with Linux and the things one could to with a “tux under the hood”. When the GNU license was explained to me, pointing out that the whole damn thing was free, I was ready to call the loony bin and have my friend planted in the funny farm. To those of you who come from a Win-world where Gates ( now Balmer ) is king and the only blue you see are the BSOD's on your computer, Linux DOES sound like an impossible utopia. And quite frankly , IT IS. There is one big big catch ! In order to protect its nest from predators, some birds make their nests high up in the trees. Natural predators do not have the ability to climb up so high without having to 1) Evolve some serious climbing skills 2) Overcome their fear of heights. And to those who are ready to make the switch to Linux , or are so fed up with the alternative there are some bounds to be broken. The big ass catch in switching from a “house of windows”' to “Torvalds Utopia” is having to drop the mouse. This trusty sidekick I have been using in my Windows based life for over ten years now (and that should be considered part of the human anatomy as an extension of the right hand) has been my palm-rest for almost half my life (i had an Amiga once, that one had a mouse too) To control an entire operating system via keyboard alone is too much to bare for some. They soon become 'ghosts in the shell'. And that shell is the other biggest scare of windows users. I started out with windows 95 where Dos was becoming a rapidly fading black-and-white-character-based memory. When i needed something i would just point and click. So when my Linux-geek-friend told me that i would have to unlearn everything i learned in a GUI enviroment, that i would have to drop my mouse and step into the dark void of bash.. I thought : I can do this ! Two weeks later, after hopelessly trying to understand the complex unix commands, getting trapped in VI once an hour and having to call for help to get me out, and basically getting NOWHERE.. I gave up. All the promises my friend had made, about what you could do with Linux , how fast it was , the great software you had etc etc seemed to reside on another planet. No way I could ever learn THAT. So I gave up and walked down the path of shame to my Windows workstation. Since then I have repeatedly tried to pick up Linux again. From downloading various versions to see which one i liked best, to actually BUYING three versions of Suse Linux, a lot of Linux books and taking classes about Linux in my local educational center.
And no matter where you go, or what you do : There are some things that are the same everywhere. Things you encounter when trying to work with Linux, and ways Linux is taught to students. I will some them up for they are the underlying fundamentals for this 'different approach' to Linux.
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To start of today : A little bit of internet history. …"Linus Benedict Torvalds Oct 5 1991, 8:53 am show optionsI'm also interested in hearing from anybody who has written any of the utilities/library functions for minix. If your efforts are freely distributable (under copyright or even public domain), I'd like to hear from you,…
Just a Tidbit of techtalk today, Cause basically its been all techno-blabb all week long. As said in yesterdays podcast : The Minimac is out. I've found this hilarious review http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/mac-mini.ars/1 with some excellent quotes : " A 1.25 or 1.42 GHz G4 (pathetic 167 MHz FSB included), and, sure it would have been nice…
