random thoughts

The Belgian prime minister was involved in a car accident today. While driving over the R4, his car hit the safety rail, and turned upside-down. He's in hospital now, right when the federal government is involved in a major crisis. One would almost think this was done on purpose, so that he could extend the dead line (which he had already missed by that time, BTW). Oh well...

I've decided on the laptop question. Being stubborn as I am, I'll go for the apple box none the less, despite it's shortcomings (no serial port, no decent wlan, no IrDA); there are other solutions to each and everyone of those. For the serial, there's of course USB serial dongles – those should work pretty well. For wlan, I can use an atmel USB device; these are reported to work, and work well, even on big-endian PowerPC. For the IrDA, I can of course just use the Bluetooth in the powerbook. That's not always true; but I was using the IrDA only in combination with my mobile phone—a Nokia 6310i, which supports bluetooth as well. Since doing PPP over bluetooth is reportedly possible, I'll use that—and will probably like it even more, since bluetooth doesn't require line-of-sight as IrDA does.

Since I'm talking about the phone anyway, I'm looking for a Java application that I can run on the thing, and that would allow me to track expenses. For bonus points, it'd be nice if I could get the information to somewhere else using bluetooth and import it into GnuCash directly, somehow (say, OFX or so).

And then, there's also this little thing...

traceroute to gateway.nixsys.be (195.144.77.33), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  folk (192.168.119.1)  1.087 ms  0.902 ms  0.717 ms
 2  D5E02C01.kabel.telenet.be (213.224.44.1)  21.770 ms  12.463 ms  12.654 ms
 3  D5E0FA41.kabel.telenet.be (213.224.250.65)  17.860 ms  12.038 ms  10.097 ms
 4  213.224.126.234 (213.224.126.234)  7.091 ms  11.543 ms  8.087 ms
 5  kpnbelgium.bnix.net (194.53.172.75)  8.264 ms  11.840 ms  7.452 ms
 6  gig-1-0-0-mpl-be-inx-pe01.KPNbelgium.be (194.119.224.53)  13.900 ms  10.839 ms  13.134 ms
 7  * * *
 8  Fe0-0-1.brussel3.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.186)  19.275 ms  13.763 ms  10.031 ms
 9  Fe0-0-2.brussel1.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.185)  16.205 ms  13.928 ms  13.357 ms
10  Fe0-0-1.brussel3.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.186)  14.413 ms  11.751 ms  10.108 ms
11  Fe0-0-2.brussel1.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.185)  10.160 ms  10.628 ms  10.611 ms
[...]

Why?