jepla.com

I'm happy to announce that, since yesterday evening, I'm officially a bachelor in Elektronics-ICT option ICT. I graduated (unexpectedly) with great honor and I'm starting a new chapter in my life.

Although lots of fellow-students will still go to school for a year or two, I'm planning to go to work. After four years of college I've had it with being a full-time student. This doesn't mean I'll stop learning. In my opinion, one should never stop learning more, especially in ICT. At the moment I'm already studying to become a ZCE, although there's no hurry in taking the exam. First it's time to take some vacation to celebrate the result.

There's been a discussing on IRC about travelling back in time. I know Einstein's theory says you have to move faster than light in order to return to an earlier date. And I do realize my own theory probably has a mistake in it, must be. Einstein was a pretty smart guy, I'm not going to argue with him.

Anyway, enough blabber, let's get to my theory.

The earth is approx. 6378,137 km. Say a plane flies at an altitude of 400m. A plane would then have to fly 40077,52 km to fly around the earth once (2 * PI * 6378,137). To facilitate, I'll take 40100 km.

Now, if that play would be able to cover this 40100 km in 24 hours and it flies in the opposite direction of the earth's rotation. The plane would then go backwards from timezone to timezone. The time directly below the plane would always be the same. The speed of the plane in that case would have to be 1671 km/h.

So, in this theory, if we could fly 1672 km/h or more, we would fly faster than the timezones could follow, and we would travel back in time. That or my theory has some serious gaps. I expect the last.

Electronics don't need electricity, they need smoke. And when the smoke escapes, the electronics stop working. That was what happened with my pc. The power supply started smoking and apparently caused even my motherboard to fail. Since the pc could use an upgrade (a single core AMD 3000+ with 1 GB of RAM), I started looking for some new parts.

Main function of the pc will be office works and programming. I will be playing a game occasionally, but I'm not in need for a superb image quality in games. As long as the gameplay is OK, that's fine by me. What I do need is the possibility to run some virtual machines. I will be using the machine to test websites in different browsers and OS'es, so enough memory is necessary.

A basic system with enough RAM. Here's is the list of what I ordered:

• AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition - A popular triple core CPU already working on the new AMD AM3-platform. Actually this is a quad-core CPU, but with one core disabled, either because the core is malfunctioning of because the demand for triple-cores is to big. In the latter case, the forth core can apparently be activated with the correct motherboard.
• ASRock A780GXH/128M - A decent priced motherboard with everything I want. People on the internet have been able to easily activate the forth core of an X3 with this motherboard. Furthermore it has a D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI output controlled by a AMD Radeon HD3200 graphics processor, so I don't have to buy an extra graphics card.
  6 SATA-connectors are available for hard disks and optical drives so I can upgrade the system without problems. The backplate has 4 USB-ports for perpherials and the motherboard is ready to add another 6 USB-ports if necessary.
• OCZ Titanium Dual Channel Kit (2 x 2GB) - Four gigabytes of memory should be enough for the moment. The timings seem great and the price was very decent.
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro PWM - The CPU is delivered with the standard CPU-cooler of AMD. This fan does the job better, keeping the temperature lower and making less noise. It's PWM-ready, so the rounds per minute drop if the CPU is at a 'cool' temperature.
• Samsung SH-S233-B - Not much to say about it, it was the cheapest DVD-writer I could find.
• WD Caviar Blue 500 GB - I recovered the hard disks from my previous computer. Nevertheless, you can never have enough space. Prices of hard drives are low, and this particular model has gotten some good reviews. 500 GB is enough for now. For data I still have my server and external hard drives available.
• MS-Tech LC-182 - A midtower model computercase. My previous case is not at all broken, but it has no front USB-connectors. This one has and it's cheap. Good enough for me.
• Labtec Pulse 285 - 2.1 speaker system to replace my two standard pc-speakers which start making cracking noises. Because programming with music is so much more fun ;-)

One problem still remains, the screen. My previous screen was a 15 inch CRT screen with a maximum resolution of 1024x768. Not exactly productive nor nice to work with. Needless to say I've been using this computer only when absolutely necessary. Luckily there was a promotion this week in a store nearby. A Samsung SyncMaster 2243SN. 22 inch large, widescreen and a resolution of 1920x1080 (Full HD) costing only €129. Not so positive was the fact it only had a D-Sub-connector, not a DVI-connector. Nevertheless, for this price, I couldn't resist and got the screen.

There are only three things missing in the list above. A mouse, a keyboard and a power supply. That's because these are already lying around here. I can still use the mouse and keyboard from the previous pc (for now) and I've just bought a new power supply to replace the one which let it's smoke escape (too bad it didn't help).

Anyway, in a few days I'll be having a brand new pc for under €500. I'm already counting down the days until it arrives.

I've just added a little bit of javascript to this website. This piece of code is part of a larger statisticsscript I'm writing. To being able to develop this further, I'm in need of some data.

Instead of refreshing pages, clearing sessions and installing different browsers myself, I've embedded the script in this site. From now on, every visitor contributes to the script, which hopefully results in a fully working, lightweight statisticsscript. When there is a public version available for testing, I'll be sure to post it here.

Note: these are just some thoughts about the Flemisch and European elections in Belgium yesterday. This text does not necessarily represent my policital preference.

Belgium (and Europe) has voted yesterday. Who lives in Belgium knows that politics in this country is a bit more complicated than in other countries. I'm not gonna dig into this deeper. It would be a large blogpost of it's own. Just know we have a gouvernment for Belgium, one for each region (that is Flanders, Wallonia, the German-speaking region and Brussels) and of course for each city. Yesterday's elections were to elect ministers for the regional gouvernment and the European gouvernment.

Winners of these elections were no doubt the christian democrats (CD&V) and the new-flemish alliance (N-VA). Two parties longing for more autonomous regions. Biggest losers were the Flemish liberal party (Open VLD) and extremistic right (Vlaams Belang), with a loss of almost 5 and 9 percent.

Personally, I didn't think the N-VA would win this much. Last elections they grouped together with the CD&V in order to have enough votes, yesterday they managed to get 13% of the votes without any help of another party.

The loss of the liberal party was a bit expected, altough noone thought it would be so much. A new liberal party, LDD, entered the competition and took away a lot of votes. Also the fight between these two parties the last weeks didn't help according to me.

What I didn't expected was the loss of the green party in Flanders. In a world where green enery and global warming are hot topic, it's strange that the party which encourages this the most is losing votes.

Extreme right never seems to be dissappointed. Losing almost 9% and still claiming some victory in their final speech. Please, stop living on a cloud and admit you have lost for once.

Another thing that struck me was the difference between Flanders and Wallonia. In the latter, the green party multiplied their power by five. Also the social party could hold their voters. In Flanders, the social parties don't go above 20%. In Walonia the social and green party managed to get almost 50% of the votes.

Biggest challenge now will be forming a gouvernment. It is possible to keep the same parties in the gouvernment than before the elections, but in that case they would ignore the biggest winner of all Flemish parties and work together with a party how yesterday admit they lost bigger than expected.

Other problem is de coöperation with Wallonia and the federal gouvernment. Although the Flemish gouvernment works independantly, they cannot ignore the fact there are still other regions in this country. In Flanders the central-right side won, in Wallonia the central-left side has won, dividing the country even more. This movement could affect the federal gouvernment also, but only time will tell. Belgium has cast their vote, now let the politicians do their work.