Ralesk Ne’vennoyx yxach Ychtaxtyrrich

This post was brought to you by a rather crazy old lady I’ve seen a few times on the bus. She’d pretty much chase people away from a particular seat, and stand in there. And then argue with the driver that he should turn off this “gas chamber”. So yes, she’s nuts. And evil.

Now, that made me think of things like… how odd it is, when someone has an issue with his or her brain, chances are they won’t even notice it themselves. It’s likely they’ll perceive the world as fine and peachy, while outsiders will be very aware of them being nuts.

It reminded me of the simulation hypothesis a bit — the simulants are unaware of being in a simulation. In other words, us being in a reality only we perceive and in one that really is the reality — no difference, can’t prove it either way, it’s just way more feasible and probable that the real reality’s case is the case.

So, the two things combined: if you experience something “extraordinary”, how do you know it was real? There’s no way to know. You’ve turned into an anthropomorphic dragon one night? Could happen! Or you could be nucking futs. Managed to kamehameha a fireball? Maybe you really scorched the next lamp post, maybe it’s only in your head. No use asking anyone — if they tell you you’ve indeed done those things, even then you can’t be sure, because maybe it’s just your perceived reality that they’re telling you this, or that you have a tail, or that you see the scorched lamp post for the next few weeks (or years as it would be in Budapest). Seen God manifest in front of you? Could happen. Or maybe it’s just your perceived reality.

Also, nun, ja.  Ich habe schon seit cca. 2006 nicht ganz viel auf Deutsch geschrieben und auch nicht zu viel auf der Sprache gesprochen, also es ist doch keine Überraschung, daß dies hier sich ganz un-Deutsch lesen lässt (bläh?) und mir Stunden dauert.

Dieses Jahr kann ich wieder nach Eurofurence gehen, und wie immer, diesmal mach’ ich wieder ein Bißchen Tourismus da in Deutschland.  Wenn alles gut geht, komme ich in Dresden am 22. August an, und bleibe da bis den 25.  Leider weiß ich noch nicht was ich besichtigen sollte, und ob jemand mich in diesen Tagen sehen will :P  Also sagt mir bitte was da zu sehen ist :)  Ich mag Kirchen zu fotografieren.

Zwischen 25. und 30. August bin ich am EF, aber nach EF bleiben wir in Suhl für andere drei Tage oder so.  Ich möchte gerne Jena und Erfurt oder Weimar sehen (und natürlich Suhl selbst).  Wenn ihr was wisst für zwei Leute, das die Reise billig macht, sagt es mir :)  Noch kenne ich nur die 10 € Wochenticket in Suhl, und ob ich Tickets früh genug und hin-und-zurück kaufe, DB gibt mir Rabatt, aber das ist alles.

With registration number 658, and 723 people accepted, I’m still supposed to go to the overflow hotel unless I find someone with a free third place in their room. This is especially displeasing as the overflow hotel costs thirty Euros more than the Ringberg (rip. fucking. off.), and the Euro rate is skyrocketing against my currency (you Westerners have *no* idea how lucky you are not to live in a fucking pothole of a country).

So it seems Karma does not want me to go to Eurofurence afterall.

If anyone has free space in their room and I know them from earlier (or I know them by other means), please speak up. If there are two places (even in separate groups), even better; as I’d like my friend Bird to be able to come too, with his #856 reg nr.

The Euro is now over nine thousaaaand 308 HUF. Normally it would be little over 250. This makes my EF registration (due the next few weeks) about 20% more expensive than it should be.

You lucky Westerners.

Mi van ebben az országban?!

Python 3 is out.

Keeping in mind that Python 3 and the Python 2 series are not compatible, they named the interpreter’s binary /usr/bin/python, just as in the past.  Guys, stop reminding me of KDE4.

Could someone please explain to me, that if there’s a financial crisis all over the place, but it started in the USA and they still aren’t feeling well according to the stock markets and all kinds of news bits I hear…

How the heck is it possible that the USD is strengthening against pretty much every other currency?

So much, that though they were on par with CAD a little while ago, it’s about 1.25–1.30 CAD to one USD now.

And of course I have to live in one of the, what, three countries that get trampled over in this. USD from 140 to 210 HUF a piece, EUR from 240 to 280 HUF a piece, GBP from 300 to 350 HUF a piece. Nice, isn’t it?

There go my plans of getting a laptop. Soon enough you can’t get rubbish for 200k if this keeps on going.

Holy crap… Don LaFontaine… the voice… passed away today.

Yes, I haven’t written a damn thing in a million years now.  As usual.  Anyway, let’s see what’s been up.

I’ve been working at UHU Systems for quite a while now, coding in Perl (mainly plain scripts, some Gtk2 stuff and some web stuff),  Also packaged a few programs, some needed, some just for my own pleasure.  It’s mostly fun, we get along well, and that’s really all that matters.  Decent pay is decent, too.

Renovation of the house still hasn’t begun, whoever was to be doing it found himself in financial trouble, because one of his other projects (a huge one) refused to pay him.  Here’s for hoping that some other guy can pick it up.

Had a mostly awesome summer.  Only one week of vacation, but that went really really well.  Got some well-needed colour on my skin too, saw a really nice night sky (because the bunch of us were in the middle of nowhere), and so on.

School starts in a week, hopefully for the last time.

I’m sneezing like no tomorrow, the entire world can go fuck itself, I hate my allergies.

And as a conclusion of the summer, I had the shittiest weekend in a long while, so the entire world can go fuck itself once again.  I so should have remembered to call my ex-classmate and head with him to the Balaton.  Why do I only now remember that?

Today I finally got around to tidying up and cleaning my room — not that there was much disorder in it to begin with, but dust and unused junk needed to go.

So, last night (interesting time for that, yes), I cleaned my drawers, the action resulting in quite a lot of things thrown out. And today, after getting up, it was time for some more serious business: taking books and stuff from the shelves, cleaning said shelves, putting said stuff back up, hoovering, taking my computer apart and dragging all that stuff over to another room… and taking some Vanish® to the carpet and attack it with a big brush.

Who needs fitness centres? — housework does you good :P

I haven’t used ljKlient in a million years :(  And I haven’t updated my LiveJournal in about as long, either.  Both of these are rather sad, but that’s life.  I’ll get back into it eventually, hopefully.

So my last entry was about me getting a new monitor.  I have to tell you, the thing’s been in my possession for a little over two months and I’m very glad I bought it.  Thank you LG, decent TFT screen is decent.

I’ve been busy with school.  Doing the specialisation stuff, mostly, and some extra classes I need to do.  We have to make a few credits (heck, altogether an entire semester’s worth — 31 credits) of extra, “common knowledge” classes, of which there are two kinds, and I was missing six credits of one type.  So I did two classes this semester, both two credits worth.  One was called something like “The Issues of Internet Media” or something like that — basically it was a fairly interactive and interesting class where a guy was talking about the new media (It’s the way to go, kill the radio!), virtual communities, Creative Commons, and the likes.  And we talked back when asked.  And stuff.  He’s a cool dude, but for some reason I always felt kinda shy, dunno.

The other extra was — grab your seats! — “English communication skills 1.”.  Alright, I don’t think it counts as boasting if I say that my communication skills in English don’t really need practice.  If anything, having an American teacher and being surrounded by many Hungarians just sent my pronunciation to hell.  Still, since it’s an easy class, I thought I’d try it and rake in some easy credits.  Since I still have to do at least one — have yet to count my classes and such, will do that as soon as possible —, I’m going to take the second one next semester.

The specialisation classes went okayish.  The lab was often like pissing blood (here you go, a Hungarianism).  One of the teachers was kinda like a kindergarten teacher… talks a lot, knows everything (or at least believes so), and you’re never right.  And we were told a few times how said teacher dislikes Linux, yet all those labs were done in linux (network security related stuff).  The other three teachers were fine.  In the end, got a five on this whole anyway.

The two “proper classes” weren’t as good as those from last semester.  This is probably the reason why I only managed to get a 2 on one of them — I could try to fix that grade on the 23rd, but… I don’t think I’m capable of concentrating on anything anymore.  I could probably pull a 3 out of it if I really try.  Not my kind of topic, though.  Got a 5 in the other one.

Research went okay.  We kept being ridiculously senile — it’s now a running gag that once we pass through the door, everything will be forgotten.  Next semester I’m definitely recording our talks.  Good going, I only came up with this idea on the before-last meet for this semester.  The whole thing is progressing quite well — I took the server side of the things in my hand (that way I can avoid Windows and especially development on Windows (which wouldn’t be so bad, but I have not the slightest idea how to properly do it)), and I need to catch up and get some basic things running.  This means things like shoveling together some CGI script to serve requests to the devices, and looking into the Google Maps API — the latter of which is going to be a total pain in the butt.  Google’s help pages are anything but helpful.

Work’s been going well, I have made a metric ton of Perl scripts, we’ve migrated from file-oriented design to a database-oriented one, now that we know what we’re doing, and I’m currently breaking apart (in the good sense) some of the web-based tools I made.  Will have to factor out the common parts in the other scripts and modularise things… and throw the deprecated shit out in the rubbish.

The other day I made a CSS syntax highlighter for midnight commander.  Gonna publicise it eventually, stay tuned.  Personal projects are totally on hold though… I never have enough energy when I get home, to mess with them.  Wish ljKlient 0.3 would finally start taking shape…

Recently, there have been a bunch of posts on my friend list that automatically started playing and more importantly, MAKING NOISE.

Fuck you all, I have now turned on the placeholders. Which of course will make me miss out on Youtube embeds.

Hell yeah :3  I mean, I bought a new one finally.  It’s an LG L206 WTQ, a 20″ wide LCD screen, capable of 1680×1050 and equipped with DVI.  It’s quite nice so far :3

My old monitor was slowly dying — when I turned it on (or rather, some minutes later) it would get blurry (and I mean really really defocused!) and then eventually sharp again… and then somewhat blurry after a while.  In any case, it was getting really uncomfortable to look at, so I gave in and blew a significant chunk of my savings on this thing here.

At 00:36 CET today, a spam network decided it would use my e-mail address (ralesk § muszaki … info) as a fake from addess and SMTP failure notifications have started flooding in at a rate of around 20–25 a minute.

Fuck you, spammers.

Landslide doesn’t even begin to describe it.  But that’s not the reason I’m mentioning it.

The voting information website www.valasztas.hu came out with a really decent (albeit not particularly accessible — it’s Flash) map for the results and the site in general works in every single browser.  Even in Konqueror.  That’s how the web should be.

PS: I bought a new mouse, finally.  The bastard has a wheel that emits bright blue light — purple if the red tracking light on the bottom activates.  Other than that, it’s working fine so far, unlike my previous one :P

College started like all heck.  Both of the compulsory classes are ridiculously boring so far, but on the other hand, I’ve been enjoying the two extra classes I’m taking.

AIM and ICQ don’t let me connect tonight; I can ping the server, and it also doesn’t depend on my DNS settings (ISP vs. OpenDNS) or the client being used (Kopete, Pidgin, Miranda IM) — other people report that they can connect just fine, even with Pidgin.

Amikor frissítettem a Windows XP-met, láttam egy ilyet: „Microsoft .NET-keretrendszer”.  Na most lehet, hogy én nem értek ehhez, de ha kötőjellel írjuk, akkor valami olyasmit jelent, hogy „a .NET keretrendszere” vagy „keretrendszer a .NET-hez” – márpedig a .NET maga a keretrendszer (ebben az értelemben pedig szerintem nem kötőjeles).

I recently developed a liking for System of a Down.  Those who know me for a long time may get quite surprised by that.  A coworker listens to them quite a lot, and this made me realise just how good they are (when they aren’t just screaming their lungs out) — not to mention, I really like the message in their songs.  On another note, Serj Tankian looks a lot better now than in SOAD, imho — the long hair just totally doesn’t fit him.

DCF77 and the public time servers appear to have a vast 6 minutes difference.  This should not be possible, but it has been going on for quite a while.

All three radio signal driven clocks I’ve met recently run around 6 minutes behind any synchronised computer (which includes those at work and mine here at home) I’ve seen recently, and if I adjust my watch mobile phone to the NTP-given time, I’m going to run early for the bus.  Imagine my surprise when I saw an 58 come in about three minutes after I arrived to the bus stop, feeling disappointed that somehow I managed to come late and miss the one at 20:43 — my phone said :46, and I was preparing myself for waiting 20 minutes for the next bus, when it arrived and its clock showed :43 when we started off.  The buses’ (public) clocks aren’t synchronised to anything, they’re manually set (which means they tend to be off), but the line 58 tends to have properly running clocks for some obscure reason — and it fits the 6 minute gap well too.

Any idea what could be going on?  Again, since both services are set to atomic clocks, 6 minute difference shouldn’t be possible.