Guus Bosman

Tonight I was looking up something on the website of my university, and I noticed it was extremely slow. I didn't pay a lot of attention to it; I thought there was perhaps a problem with their internet connection.

But the real cause is very likely this article on Slashdot that I accidentily came across a few minutes later. The article about an ex-professor of mine, Mr. Tanenbaum, is making so many people go to the VU website that the webservers there are having a hard time staying 'alive'.

This is called the Slashdot effect: a link on the frontpage of that hugely popular website would cause Guus Bosman.nl to immediately go up in smoke and it would definitely upset my ISP.

A young Ukrainian woman has created title="PRIPYAT ghost town (1970-1986)" target="_blank" href="http://vincent.vanscherpenseel.nl/chernobyl/">a photo journal of her motorcycle rides through Chernobyl and the area surrounding it.

Surreal pictures of desolated cities, houses and roads. Very impressive.

I ima tezi stranitsi na Bulgarski.

I am the happy owner of a digital camera, a HP Photosmart 735. It was a present of my grandmother Groen and my parents for my graduation and it's very nice to have it here in Bulgaria.

I've been able to connect the camera to various computers: at Joana, at Svetla and Radoslav, and even in some internet cafe's. The nice thing is that Windows XP has the drivers for this camera pre-installed, so it's really a matter of plug-and-play.

Before I left to Bulgaria I bought a card with extra memory for the camera. Now I can take over 120 high-quality pictures. I thought I would be able to just make pictures and bring everything home on the camera, but the other day I had a problem. The camera's batteries were empty, and the camera shut down too fast. The result: an unusable memory card, with about 25 pictures that I haven't been able to recover.

Unfortunate, but at least it didn't happen after 100 pictures.

I took the lesson, and I copy the pictures I made till now to various computers in Holland as soon as I can.

I've been looking at a graphical tool lately, and it's a lot of fun. I enjoy playing with the features the program has: photo retouching, drawing, special website things... Perhaps I can use some of my new 'skills' for Guus Bosman.nl one day.

I had dinner with Jelly, she's staying here for a while, which is nice. Had two pleasant phone-calls tonight.

Since a little while I am the happy owner of a webcam. I bought the cheapest one I could find; I just wanted to use it for some experiments. I found one for only 15 euro, and it works great!

It's very easy to set up, and gives a pretty good picture. I often use it with MSN Messenger, and it's a wonderful addition to chatting over the keyboard. Bianca pointed me out to the fun of a webcam, and she was definitely right.

I don't usually give warning against virusses, but now I'd like to make an exception. Last October a friend received "BugBear", a then-famous virus. Well, now there's a new virus that's called "BugBear B", and it's a really nasty one.

Luckily enough we have good system adminstrators here at Chess. At home my virus-scanner gets updated every few hours as well, so I feel reasonably secure.

But this is a particulary tricky virus: it disables virusscanners, some firewalls, and it spreads itself quickly by e-mail. It knows how to spread itself to Eudora, Outlook and other mail clients. If an Outlook user receives a file with the virus, the attachment will be started automatically. The user doesn't even have to click on it...

My advice: update your virusscanner today. CNN has a story about the virus.

Today a good friend called. His laptop behaved weird and a lot of files on the 2nd hard disk were mangled and unreadable.

Luckily enough he made a backup 2 months ago, so the damage was manageable. But it reminded me of something –- how long ago has it been since my last backup? And how long ago has it been for you, dear reader, since your last backup? What would happen if your hard disk would stop functioning all of a sudden?

My website itself is reasonably well covered; a few weeks ago I restored the whole system from the backup, which is always a good indication of the backup’s quality. But I know there are things on the desktop computer at home that are quite valuable to me, but my last backup is a couple of years old. Something to work on.

This Friday there's an interesting theme of the photo-manipulating contest at Retecool.com: genetically engineered animals.

As always, Mr. Ratelband is a popular target; just like Mr. Balkenende and Mr. Bos.


The ideas of "Poolifant" and "Jamai de Bij" are nice too, have a look.

Many computer programmers are interested in the way Google works. They use very sophisticated mathematical algorithms to deal with the huge amount of data on the internet.

I found a quite readable explanation of the more fundamental stuff.

Anybody remember

HGCIBM /E

?

We used to have a Brother 8088 with a Hercules graphical card. Unfortunately, almost all games only supported CGA mode. So we couldn't play most of the games, only the text-mode ones.

It was Mieke who --after a long time experimenting-- found out how to use the graphical games on our PC.

One of the very first computer games I've played was Alley Cat. I haven't played for about 10 years, but the other day in a nostalgic mood I went looking for it... download it here!