C Hees . info

Ha, my vacation in Poland with Ania was great. It was kinda tricky to get there with the rental car without a decent/working navigation system but it was all worth it. Also, the rental car reminded me that I suck with a stick shift :P

I tried some Polish food like Gofry (waffle with a Lot of whipped cream and fruit on top) and some sort of potato pancake with goulash on top and of course more Pierogi (it’s Goood).

It’s actually been only the second week(ish) that I’ve seen Ania irl but she’s coming to nl in 15 days! /me bounces around.

Oh and I finally got a Picasa account so I don’t have to mess around with making my own galleries anymore. Picasa is actually pretty nice =) Anyway, here are ze pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/christiaanhees/PoddabieWithAnia

I’m off to Poland again :) My train to Berlin leaves in about 2 hours and there I’ll rent a car to drive the last part to Poland. I hope everything will go well since I’ve never rented a car before and never driven in Poland and the last part will be in the dark with small roads, so wish me luck =) I’m looking forward to it though cause I’m gonna see Ania again!

/ania/

De foto’s en de video van het afscheid van Jan Hees.

Jan Hees

* 25-3-1947      † 8-6-2008

I found this talk on ted.com and I’ve been meaning to post something about, so here it is:

In the video at 3:50 he talks about Impact Bias:
“Winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have.”
I think that’s pretty interesting. I think that once you realize this it can help to put things into perspective when you feel really bad about something. And perhaps the “it’s all gonna be alright”-argument isn’t so lame after all.

Another thing he said around 17:25 about the students who can either change or not change their picture:
“People who have no choice and can never change their mind, like it a lot.”
I’m no psychologist so I might be completely wrong here, but I’m wondering if that’s why people are divorcing now more than they used to. Because they know they have a choice and then they’ll start doubting and will become unhappy. Maybe it also works the other way around: if you tell yourself that you had no choice in a certain situation then you’ll be happy with it, whatever it was.
Now I wouldn’t be a computer scientist if I wouldn’t consider the boundaries of this: So, what if you make all your decisions by throwing dice? Whatever the random outcome would be, you’d have to stick with it and you can’t change it. Now would this make you permanently happy about all your decisions?
Probably not, but either way, it’s an interesting talk =)

Today I went to the university library cause for some reason I thought that I could get some information there. What was I thinking?

This enormous building with 90 km of books has a computer science section. The computer science section is highlighted in red:

Yes, that’s a whopping 2 bookcases. And most of the books are about things like Algol60 (a programming language dating from 1960), Fortran and cutting edge computer graphics… from 1991. Completely useless. There were hardly any books on recent topics, let alone books that were really up to date. I guess it’s hard for a library to keep up with new techniques, but this is ridiculous. At least I know I won’t ever have to go back there again.

I’ve been sick for more than a week but it’s finally almost over. Before I got sick I was working my way through the The Java EE 5 Tutorial which is actually really terrible. It’s supposed to be the official tutorial for Java Enterprise Edition but it’s full of weird jumps and assumptions and useless information. I’ll probably read a couple more chapters and then find some decent docs. Since a couple of weeks I have another big project in mind which might be cool to make with JavaEE. It will also involve Hibernate so even if it won’t be any good it will still be helpful for my colloquium talk (which will be about Hibernate).

I just noticed something weird with SSH and Firefox. I was running Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox) on a remote computer over SSH with X forwarding. Then when I started Firefox on my local machine, instead of starting my own Firefox it started a new instance of Iceweasel for some reason. Even explicitly starting /usr/bin/firefox on my local machine gave me Iceweasel (which isn’t even installed on my local machine). Only after I closed all instances of Iceweasel could I run my own Firefox again. I’m not sure if this behavior was intended but apparently the browser shares state even with remote and different versions.

Yesterday when I got home the power was out in my room. When I tried turning it back on again the fuse died. By unplugging all power eating machines and plugging them in again one by one I ended up with my tv. The moment I plugged it in it more or less exploded. It gave a loud bang, sparked and… started to smell. I’m glad I decided to hook up all my stuff to a surge protecter a while ago so luckily nothing else seems to be broken.
After I got online I heard that I’m given an admin position at a webgame I play called Nowhere Else and Beyond. Now that I can’t use my tv anymore to play with my Wii I’ll have more time to do some coding work there =)
Oh and I found somebody who makes Music Mashups: DJ Earworm. He doesn’t just mix one song’s end to the beginning of the next, but actually makes new songs by completely combining them. It’s really cool so go listen to his stuff and let me know if you find some really good songs.

I heard that a number of companies make you do some sort of IQ test when you come for a job interview so I figured it can’t hurt to train a little. I ran into this logical puzzle game. I’m not sure if it really helps if I do a lot of these games but at least it’s fun =)