ralphje.net Blog

Last week, we’ve managed to put Inter-Actief on the map with the symposium ecomputing. With over 170 visitors, 23 lecturers and 16 sessions, the event was a great success and one of the biggest symposiums of the study association. In this context, ‘we’ is the symposium committee of Inter-Actief, namely Jarmo van Lenthe, Niek Tax, Rick van Galen and Renske Vermolen, presided by the undersigned.

The event went like clockwork and stress wasn’t required at all. Everything was fixed before the event, although we didn’t do much the days before either. There are some points for improvement, but overall it was great to organize something like this.

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It has been a long time since I wrote my last post at this weblog. Since my last post, much happened, as you might have noticed if you are following my Twitter account. If you want to know what happend in the last five months, just read my Twitter timeline !

I would like to mention though that I’m part of the candidate board of study association Inter-Actief. This means that I’ll be (most likely) part of the (full time) board as responsible for the education of our members. Until then, I’ll be busy with the symposium ecomputing. If you’re interested, please subscribe to our newsletter!

Furthermore, Antagonist was celebrating its fifth anniversary last week. What’s keeping us busy lately, is brainstorming about the future of the company. Do we want a new website? Should we launch new products? The main problem is not harming our current identity.

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Ten weeks ago, this quartile seemed to be very easy, at least easier then my first quartile this year. Just two exams and one project to complete. Only one of the three subjects was seemed hard, namely ADC (Algorithms, Data structures and Complexity). The others subjects were Operating Systems and Software Engineering Models. The latter didn’t have an exam, there was only a project.

As the quartile got on, this proportion seemed correct. Operating Systems did have hard lab work, but was, with the help of the teaching assistants, not impossible. ADC turned out to be hard, but not much time was required to keep up with the subject matter. SEM only had a lab in the first four weeks, so I had plenty of time to do…. well, nothing interesting.

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In my recent post, I pointed out why and how I wanted to get my right with KPN’s commercials at Dutch television stating that their DVB-T implementation in the form of Digitenne is an improvement of your signal quality. I also stated that KPN is, with thanks to me, not allowed to broadcast this claim anymore.

However, KPN doesn’t seem to agree with me and the decision of the Reclame Code Commissie and requested further appeal at the Board of Appeal of the RCC. As KPN points out, their claim of “Improved sound and picture” isn’t absolute. Claiming they have the ‘best’ quality, is an absolute claim. However, ‘improving’ isn’t absolute and only true in some specific context.
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Recently, I’ve bought a NetGear WNDR3300 router, which supports N-draft. Ffor a more convenient management of this router, I decided to put DD-WRT firmware on it. For some reason, however, my router doesn’t want to broadcast N-draft with this firmware. As information is limited, here’s how you can revert your installation of DD-WRT:

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This year’s October, my study assocation organized a symposium about Media and ICT. One of the readings was one of KPN, talking about the complexity of implementing the DVB-H specification into it’s network.

In fact, this was just some marketing speech for KPN and the speaker lost his face when he said “Nederland 2 isn’t broadcasted since the NPO doesn’t provide us the signal” and someone responded “I’m from the NPO and I know that KPN didn’t want us to provide that signal.”

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To continue on my previous post, the financial meltdown is hurting us all. As CNN made clear in their recent article. Placed in 1989, the sign at Wall Street shows the total national debt of the United States. Last week, it ran out of numbers: the national debt is now about $10.3 trillion, a fifty-year record. When the sign was placed, it only showed about 2 trillion.

During the regency of George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, the national debt increased. Bush II did this by doing the following things: he decreased the taxes on the rich, he invaded Iraq instead of winning in Afghan-Pakistan and loosened the controls on Wall Street.

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Well, as you know, currently there’s a financial meltdown going on. As you might know, I lack some luck at the financial sphere. In April this year, I’ve lost about 850 euros (at that time about 1350 dollars) as I bought a new television with paying in advance. However, the company I ‘invested’ in, went bankrupt, so I lost my money.

If a company goes bankrupt, the consumer is always left holding the baby. Either you’re money is gone or you are left unsure for quite a while. In this case, I’ve lost all my money and there’s no real chance to get it back.

To get to the point of this post: the last 2 weeks, the Fortis bank, was in a very painful situation. The government of The Netherlands acquired the bank and Fortis is quite safe now as the government can’t go bankrupt (we assume for now).

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Although I’m Dutch, I prefer to use my Operating System and software in English. This has several reasons, but the foremost reason is that I just don’t like some translations (Mac OS X, for example, translates ‘File’ as ‘Archief’ (’Archive’) instead of ‘Bestand’ (’File’)).

However, I like to see my date and time formatting in what’s default in my country, so I configured Windows to use Dutch formatting. Also, I’ve set Windows to use Dutch as my default character set for non-Unicode programs.

Unfortunately, some programs misinterpret this setting and feel like to show me dialogs in Dutch. Most programs allow you to choose English somewhere in the configuration, but nVidia likes to be a pain in the ass and won’t offer this option. Even if you download the English version of the software, nVidia shows localized messages.

To prevent nVidia from showing you non-English messages, just execute this batch file in Windows:

del %windir%\system32\nvwssr.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvvitvsr.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvrssv.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvmoblsr.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvmccssr.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvmccsrs.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvgamesr.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvdispsr.dll /f /q
del %windir%\system32\nvcpluir.dll /f /q

You can also go to the folder System32 in your Windows dir and remove (or rename) the files mentioned above.

When you now start the Control Panel, all messages and dialogs will be in English. Tadaa!

A common problem found by starting PHP programmers is the warning:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at index.php:1) in index.php on line 3

Before understanding this problem, you have to know how pages are transmitted using the HTTP-protocol.  Any page or image you receive looks like this:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:46:41 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix)
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=500
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

<html> ...

The upper half of the content are the page headers. These are used by the browser to identify the page, but are also used to set cookies. The other half is the content of the page. When you have sent any content to the browser, you can’t change the headers anymore.

This is exactly where the error comes from. If you want to change the headers of a file, there may not have been any output to the browser. Even a space or new line is output!

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