Belgian Griffins - Lille Vikings: 30-0

Soccer fans will see the above score as immense, but this isn't soccer; it's American Football.

Yesterday, the Belgian National American Football team played a practice match against the Lille Vikings, and won by four touchdowns and a field goal. Unfortunately they missed one of their conversions, hence 30 points rather than 31. They actually even scored a safety in the final seconds of the match, but the officials did not count it.

Still, that's a good score, so congratulations go out to all Griffins.

The game took place on the new field of the city of Andenne, in Namur—in fact, it was part of the official opening ceremony—and will be the home field of the Andenne Bears team that plays in the LFFAB, the french-languaged American Football league of Belgium. This field is now probably the best field of its type in all of Belgium, and I imagine we will be seeing it more often from now on.

Anyway, the main reason I was there was bifold. The first was called Joris Verhelst:

Number 85, my brother. The second was my D50. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to get a good action shot of my brother. He's a Tight End, and did get his share of the game; but when he did, either I was too far away, or someone else was in the picture, or—as happened all too often yesterday, since the lighting was rather dim—the picture was too blurry to make out anything interesting.

All in all, it was a nice day, and the ending was really great:

See you next time, Griffins!

Oldest bug ever

I've had my share of old bugs, but #234448 holds the distinct record of being the oldest bug that I ever found a fix for. It's so old, I don't even know how old exactly.

Don't be betrayed by the number 234448. While the Debian bug was filed in 2004, the bug itself is older than that. Take a look at this FreeBSD commit, for example; the original import of the 4.4BSDLite code of the 'trek' program already has the bug. And that was over 14 years ago. The first NetBSD commit is even older: 15 years, 7 months ago.

BSD itself, of course, is much older than that, and so is trek. The copyright header contains 'Copyright(c) 1980, 1993', which suggests that this bug might be as much as 28 years old. That's almost as old as I am...

Like I said, a record.

Music is Math

Gintautas Miliauskas blogs about a computer program that can generate something which reportedly really sounds like composer-written music; apparently it has passed a 'turing test' where people listened to music generated by this thing, and music written by a human composer.

I'm afraid, however, I'll have to disappoint him a bit, really. If we ignore the effect that music can have on the emotional state of a living being for a moment, then it's a plain and simple fact that music is pure math:

• 'An octave' is the musician's term for 'a doubling in frequency'. As many people know, a center A on a piano is tuned at 440Hz; it follows that an A one octave higher is tuned at 880Hz, and that the one which is one octave lower will be 220Hz.
• 'Chords' are based around that, too. A regular C chord, for example, contains the C, E, and G notes; and usually, a C at one octave above the first C is included, too. The frequency of a G is exactly halfway between the two C notes, and the E is about halfway between those. Most chords are built in such a manner; the sound waves of those notes will build an interference pattern that is perceived as a chord.
• A melody usually starts with the base note of the key in which the piece is written, and almost always (except during a short time in the early baroque) ends with that same base note. Note that the 'base' note is not the same thing as the "bass" note (although the base is often used in the bass).

There are many other things in music that can be expressed as mathematical rules; learning to how to compose music involves learning those rules, which is a long and tedious process.

Now I'm not saying that following those rules will necessarily lead you to an interesting piece of music; the fact that it's possible to create something ugly while still using chords etc. But since so much of it already is math, I can imagine it not being extremely hard to figure out what the other rules are (the ones a composer figures out by imself as opposed to being taught them), transferring them into a computer program, and using that to generate music.

That's not to say that such a thing is easy to do, and I'm sure it's still an impressive feat to create a computer program which can create "nice" sounding music; but I don't think this would qualify as 'artificial intelligence'. At least not any more than Deep Blue

Rails? Stay the f* away from my system.

I knew for a long time that rails is somewhat fun to work with. The first time I read something about it, I went to check it out, and kindof liked the idea. Web development really isn't my cup of tea, so I didn't do anything with rails; but really, the idea made somewhat sense to me.

It's unfortunate that the implementation is such a piece of crap. Luckily I don't have to deal with it firsthand, but the stories I hear and read everywhere speak for themselves. I won't enumerate them all; but in case you're not familiar with them, the Debian Ruby team has a pretty clear explanation on their website. In addition to complaints by packagers, I also hear that many ruby developers recommend that you install gems inside the project you're running (or that you ship your software in such a way that it includes those libraries as part of your source). Oh, the horror.

Now, however, they've really topped it. Via Koen's blog, I found some other page that contains this:

Now, in theory, to update to the latest version of RubyGems, you just need to run

sudo gem update --system

But - depending on what version of RubyGems you have installed, running that command may lie and tell you that you have nothing to update. If you’re currently on RubyGems 1.1 or 1.2, you need to run a different set of commands to update RubyGems:

sudo gem install rubygems-update
sudo update_rubygems

Seriously. This is why we have distributions, packagers, and, really, people spending a whole shitload of time making sure everything works together nicely. This is why there is Debian, RedHat, CentOS, Mandrake, SuSE, and whatever.

Me touching rails? Not with a 10-foot pole. Not if you pay me a million, in any currency. Stay away from my system!

New hackergochi

... again. This must be my third, in about as many years. The picture from which I made it was taken by Andrew, with my camera. I kindof like it; and I think the hackergochi came out well, too.

No, I'm not planning on changing my hackergochi every year, even though it's turning out to be the case. Oh well.

(Speaking of hackergochi: If people on Planet Grep have a hackergochi or something similar that they'd like to get associated with their posts, please send it to me. Now, preferably

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Great game, that. I used to play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory a few years ago, but this venture into the Quake2/Quake4 saga I could not miss.

When I saw a poll on on the ET community site about which client people were using, I must say I was surprised. Not by the fact that most people use Windows; not by the fact that more people use the Xbox 360 version than the MacOS version, either. What I was surprised about, was the number of people using the Linux version of Enemy Territory

Linux: 20%

One out of five people in one particular niche prefers to use a free operating system, given half a chance. That doesn't mean one out of five people actually does use Linux, but it does mean they would rather be known as such. Provided the poll isn't forged, that is, but then I don't see what would be gained by that.

Interesting. We're doing better at total world domination than I thought.