Stories of an ex-erasmus student
I stumbled upon this great visualization that explains the credit crisis.
If you wonder how all of this could have happened, watch the video below. It might go a bit fast sometimes, but I found it really interesting and a nice summary.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
Best viewed in full screen in HD (on Vimeo).
If you ever find that some partitions are missing on your Windows PC, try using Active Partition Recovery. It saved my ass two times already.
Today I booted my bloody windows box and 3 partitions were missing, and I had a pretty bad Virus infection. Booting windows in safe mode i could remove the entries made to my system from the trojan and scan the systems folders for more trojans with ClamWin open source anti-virus software.
Problem 2 was a bit easier as I had already dealt with ‘deleted’ partitions before. Booting from the floppy and searching for the missing partitions was not too hard.
After two hours of misery, the machine is working again. I swear this is the last Windows box I’ll ever buy. I’ll probably replace it with a MacMini when the new version comes out.
Why projects fail to meet the deadline:
The Wikipedia entry explains why this “Student Syndrome” is a good thing 
:
The student syndrome is defended by a layman’s understanding of the functioning of the human memory, most notably the concept that a person’s short-term memory fades over time, and thus studying at the last possible moment leads to better results than studying early because more of the material will be remembered during the exam.
Wikipedia
I’ve been playing an online F1 manager game for a couple of weeks. F1Time is a manager simulation game with great depth and the right level of complexity. I like it.
I wrote a small tool to extract laptime data from the race reports so it can be easily analyzed in MS Excel. I wrote it as a Sinatra webapp. Sinatra is a Ruby DSL for writing small webapps with a minimum amount of code. This tool was written in 35 lines of code.
It’s open source, so you can view (or fork) the sourcecode on github.
F1Time managers: You can simply copy & paste the html code of your race report HERE, and it will generate a table that you can copy/paste into Excel. (to get the html code from the race report: right click and click “View page source”)
Today we had a job fair at our university. Many companies gave short presentations to introduce themselves and talked about what job offers they have and why we should apply for them. It’s a nice PR event where you get to know employees and the companies they work for. Some companies, like Accenture and Hudson, really impressed me. Accenture fosters innovation and creativity, and seems to invest a lot in developing the skills of it’s employees. Their focus towards technology sparked my interest. Hudson on the other hand seems to be an ideal place for people with international ambitions. They match job offers with resumes over the whole world.
But even Delhaize attracted quite a lot of interest from fellow students who are looking for more traditional management work. Apparently you can apply for the position of store manager after an internship of only 18 months. This job is way to narrow minded for me though.
I found it a bit disappointing that there were so many tax & auditing firms present, yet so little innovation & technology driven businesses. The companies I would love to work for would be Apple, IDEO, Intel and I guess Accenture too. If I haven’t founded my own start-up by then .
At any rate, I’ve put my resume online for anyone who is interested.
John Underkoffler, a technical advisor for Minority Report, worked on the 3D computersystem for the 2002 Spielberg movie. Today he is the head researcher for Oblong Industries, a company that develops a “spacial operating environment” named g-speak. Take a look for yourself:
(click on the full screen button on the lower right of the movie player)
If this is how future user interfaces will look like, i want one!
I recently had a hard drive crash on my home Linux NAS box. The important files were on a software raid 5 array, but the root filesystem (with the majority of the OS) were on a separate IDE hard drive.
Only the IDE drive crashed so my important files were safe, but I needed to remount the raid array. It took me quite a while before I got that right, so I’ll share my knowledge here for you. Here are the commands needed to reconstruct / remount a raid array with a Gentoo live cd:
Continue reading ‘Mounting a Linux software raid array with lvm’
