Who is General Protection and why is he reading my disks ?

This morning I got out of bed and was overall bored (not something that happens too often), thus decided to install an old adventure game and had some few hours of 'i can count the pixels' fun.

But to no avail, Windows XP simply refused to install the game, with the infamous "General Protection Fault", a message I hadn't see for almost a decade or so.

So, it's back to surfing for porn ;)

Computer networks ... now with practical use

The following story is loosely based on a at-the-job-situation.

During my last year as Computer Science-student, we had a course called "Datacommunications" and as every self-respected networking course, we used Andrew Tanenbaum's book, called Computer Networks, which in my opinion is still the best networking related book that money can buy. For the exam, we had to study the better part of the book and most students did flunk this course (btw I got a whopping 90%). Over the past 6 years, I've forgotten most things, but one of the examination questions stayed with me :

Imagine that you have trained your St. Bernard, Bernie, to carry a box of three 8mm tapes instead of a flask of brandy. (When your disk fills up, you consider that an emergency.) These tapes each contain 7 gigabytes. The dog can travel to your side, wherever you may be, at 18 km/hour. For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a transmission line whose data rate (excluding overhead) is 150 Mbps? (Thx to Georgi's blog for the exact phrasing).

Well, a week or so ago, one of our applications started to show some incoherent behaviour and the manufacturer asked us to upload a dump of the application's database by FTP. No problem there, except the most business firewalls block FTP as a protocol, thus we needed intervention of the firewall team, which costs money. In addition, uploading an entire database takes 1) bandwith and 2) time and 3) someone who supervises the upload for security reasons, and thus makes uploading of a database a very costly operation.

And then the question, that has laid dormant for 6 years in my memory, bubbled to the surface and suddenly I realized what the most cost-effective way was, to send the database to the manufacturer : a box of DVDs shipped with next-day delivery and it only costs 7,50 dollars.

Bottom line of the story : never ever underestimate the bandwith of a box of DVDs.

And the winner is .... not applicable

As many of you may know or not know or simple don’t care, I'm one of those fools, who believes he can improve himself, by depriving himself of the few free hours one has after work, and use them to obtain an additional degree. In my case, a Master in Commercial Sciences.

Why ? Well, there are a zillion reasons, but most all : I’m still pissed (at myself) for never finishing my Master in Computer Science 10 years ago. So, since obtaining a Master in Computer Science is quite stupid nowadays, because I have already a Bachelor in Computer Science and almost 6 years of working experience, I thought it was better to get a degree in an area everyone needs : Money.

(Please insert some really career-related reasons)

Last Thursday, me and my fellow students were invited by the teaching staff for a gruesome 3 hours lasting proclamation to conclude our second year of Commercial Sciences. I was not very inclined to waste 3 hours just to get my results, so I simply didn’t go (had a very urgent appoint with the barber) and called the headmaster the next day to get my results. Ok, I passed, no news there (ahum), but no one could tell me my exact degree. Did I simple pass, or did I pass with Cum Laude or even Major Cum Laude …. Who will tell ?

Well, the headmaster told me an envelope would tell my degree, since they were no longer allowed to give the exact results by phone or in person ?????

Finally, after one agonizing week of waiting, I finally received an envelope in the mailbox and impatiently tore it open to envisage my well-earned degree. My eyes scanned to document and found …. NOTHING. No degree, nothing, da nada, rien, noppes. And slowly a panic got hold of my heart, when I started to realized the impossible must happened … I just passed … no degree, no better than the rest, just passed.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO …..

So, got me a calculator, started counting and found my percentage was a mere 74%. Not really fantastic, since I lost some percentages on the final exam of the year, thus losing my chance at a Major Cum Laude, but nevertheless high enough to obtain a Cum Laude degree, but to the paper simply refused to reveal a degree.

Total disillusioned, I looked up the school charter and discovered that to obtain a degree one must :

a) Obtain more than 68% percent.
b) Do not flunk for a course
c) Must have followed a curriculum with more than 27 credits.

So, back to the drawing board, I mean, paper, and discovered my curriculum only consisted of 27 credits, because we were given the opportunity to be exempted from courses, by obtaining 75% on tests at the beginning of the year. And due to those exemptions, my curriculum diminished to 27 credits instead of 31 …

The road to success is closed down … due to small print.

Geek mutant powers

A couple of weeks ago, me and some friends went to see X-men 3 : The Last Stand. An awesome movie and a really must-see, if you're into comics.

But I wouldn't dare to call myself a geek, if I accepted everything they threw at me. Besides the incredible mutant powers, which in my opinion, can be proven in a scientific way, there was a minor detail that captured my attention during the film. In fact there are a lot of details that captured my attention, but this one was worthy of my geekness.

*** SPOILER AHEAD ****
At a certain moment during the film, Magneto and his gang are planning to attack Alcatraz Island and sees no other way to reach the island than by levitating the Golden Bridge from his pillars and relocating it to bridge the gap between Alcatraz and the main land. (If you ever have been to Alcatraz, you'll know there are a zillion ferries to make the trip from Pier 39 to Alcatraz, each with a boarding capacity of over 200 people. But then again, you can’t except one of the most powerful mutants alive to simple buy a boot ticket).

So, really impressive scenery, but during this scene, reality jumped back in and bit me in the arm : Is the Golden Gate bridge wide enough to bridge the gap ??

Well, let’s consult our by-all-loved Google maps, locate the aerial picture of the bay of San Francisco, open the picture in your favorite picture editing tool, select the Golden Gate bridge (the section between the 2 towers is around 0,9 miles) and move/tilt/rotate until you’ll come to the same conclusion : You can’t bridge the gap with the Golden Gate bridge.

Reminds me a bit of the movie Independence Day when they managed to run a virus developed on a Macintosh on an alien computer.