MrBlog » current affairs

Bitcoin, lure or cure?

mrb — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:40:00 +0000

Many people got attracted to bitcoin the last couple of months. This explosion of interest probably caused the monetary value of bitcoins to show the same shape as the google trend-line chart pictured below.

In this article I will ignore the exponential increase in monetary value since its inception and focus on some intrinsic properties of bitcoin and why those are valuable as such.

The sudden interest in bitcoin is not coincidental in my opinion. The bitcoin ecosystem tries to solve a number of problems with the current systems of trade, currencies and the economical structures in general we have in place for them, like our national banks, the currency and stock exchanges and the IMF. The last couple of years we have been confronted, sometimes in very painful ways, with the shortcomings of those systems and, not in the last place, the shortcomings of the people involved; all of us.

The financial crisis is obviously a complex issue and no single cause can be determined. Whatever these causes are however, they have provided a trigger for many to look for alternatives to create wealth or, more important, create ways to hang on to wealth, especially if there is not a lot of it to hang on to.

For the rest of this article I’m going to assume you know how bitcoins work. You will not have to be an expert in economics, cryptography or computer programming, but a basic understanding of the workings of bitcoin will be necessary. The websites http://bitcoin.org en http://weusecoins.com are good starting points. Some of the points below won’t make sense if you do not have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the system operates.

The trust issue

Most people will worry (a lot) if they have money issues. This alone dictates that you absolutely want to trust all parties involved with handling your money.

These parties include the people you receive money from, like your employer, the local banks you trust to keep your money safe for you, the government which monitors the usage of it, but also the ‘coins’ that represent the money. All of these need your continued trust, and that is a lot to ask. Especially if things do go wrong at times.

Employers need your trust that they possess enough of the ‘stuff’to be able pay you for work, local banks need your trust so you let them keep your savings, governments and central banks need your trust that they won’t screw up (by printing too much money for example) and the coins also need your trust that they are the real deal. All of the examples in some way betrayed our trust in the past. That has an effect on people. It may not be visible for a while, but broken trust sticks.

Bitcoin tries to address some of the trust issues people have; I think it was one of the main motivations for creating a system like bitcoin. It does this, amongst other things, by shifting a few of the trust items from people/institutions to verifiable technology.

For example, instead of trusting a bank to verify transactions to be valid, because they are the only party who can oversee all transactions, trust is placed in hashing techniques to demonstrate that, for example, double spending is very, very unlikely. These techniques are easier verified and proven to be right than the bank which is now responsible for it, if only because we don’t have access to these verifications. The major goal of both verifications is to prevent the same coin to be spent multiple times. (fraud)

Another trust shift is the ‘keep-save’mechanism. If you keep your savings on your savings-account at your bank, the combination of the banks trustworthiness and, should that fail, the (limited) guarantee the government gives on your savings makes that you can feel comfortable on parking your money there. With bitcoin, your trust will be in cryptographic tools and the network so you keep all your savings in a computer file. The mechanism you could use to keep it safe is to encrypt that file and spread it all over the network to many places to minimise the chances of losing all copies of it. There is no-one to trust but yourself, but there’s also no-one which can protect you in case you screw up yourself.

Distance is not important, value is

Another property of the bitcoin system, not unique to it but especially well implemented I think, is the way it makes the distance to receivers irrelevant and allows value to be put to use effectively. I’ll give an example below.

Say I want to transfer 2 euros to someone which is in a country far away from mine. The amount of time and money it takes to get this modest amount into the hands of that someone distant is ridiculous in the current financial system. My bank does provide a service but it will cost me at least 10 euros, double that amount if I want to get it done ‘fast’. Fast, in this case meaning within 24 hours! For larger sums, the cost may be acceptable, but for small amounts both time and cost are ridiculous.

There are many services which try to solve at least part of the problem outlined above. Services like paypal with on-line accounts to make things go faster, or proxy companies which gather up all the small amounts and transfer to the real supplier when things have piled up. Up until bitcoin I did not encounter a service which chose the simplest concept for this problem: “Set up a secure, verifiable, immediate non-refundable transaction between the involved parties.”

I do not believe the technology to do this has not been available to banks and/or credit card companies, so that can’t be the reason they have not implemented a cheaper and more efficient system. It’s not very hard to imagine what their reason is though. Distance used to be a major hurdle, it is not anymore.

The key differences bitcoin provides here are:

the receiver and sender communicate directly, trust is a lot easier to maintain if there are less parties involved. “No middle man needed, nor wanted”
the ‘act’of payment is almost immediate, the receiver can check almost immediately that a transaction has been made. (Verification for validity by the network can take a while though) In relation to the 24 hours described in the first paragraph this can certainly be considered very fast, near real-time
a transaction fee is optional. If you specify one, you make it more attractive for others in the network to check your transaction and have a go at collecting that fee. If swift transaction handling is not important, but transferring, say 0.05 euro, to a certain person is important, bitcoin is about the only way I know to do that effectively.

Remember, the amount of 0.05 euro may not be much to you and me, but there are parts in the world where it can buy you a meal or a bottle of water. The fact alone that bitcoin makes these kinds of transactions possible is enough reason to give it more than a casual look.

Bitcoin increases the value of my € 0.05 by allowing effective use.

No unreasonable control

It’s probably true that bitcoin, or systems like it, scares financial companies and governments and therefore will have a rough time ahead. This scare is in part caused by a fear of decreasing control over the system compared to the classic system. Almost all economic commentators or government representatives will argue that ‘some form of control’is needed to correct and stabilise the system. I’m not very convinced of that being effective or wanted anymore.

Recently, the unreasonable control over money flow in the wikileaks dry-out attempt confirmed this once again for me. It doesn’t really matter if companies like mastercard and paypal decide not to handle transactions for wikileaks themselves or that they have been put under pressure to do so. The fact that it happens shows they have control over where I spent my money. I don’t want that. Bitcoin offers a system where this type of control is impossible by means of the system itself; personal threats will be effective I’m afraid with any system.

Next to the self-control over spending purposes, anonymity is also important for some people. The example often used, mostly in critical pieces on bitcoin, are criminals. Bitcoin makes it possible, when used in certain ways, to bring money from A to B without exposing identities to each-other and to third parties. This is obviously attractive for criminals, including people who want to evade taxes. This is a valid concern and should be addressed properly, but I don’t think it has anything to do with bitcoin as such. With regard to this aspect, bitcoin has no other properties than cash, it’s just more effective and easier to use than exchanging bits of paper money. The real use-case here is the non-criminal people who want to perform semi-anonymous transactions for valid reasons.

So, what’s the verdict?

Bitcoin is a good idea, generally speaking. From a technological viewpoint it’s excellent. It’s trivial that libertarians and anarchists will be attracted by bitcoins, we don’t need to argue the case for them. The challenge is to present the extra-, not the replacement-, values of bitcoin for all the other people out there. I have touched on three of the most important ones to me. There are more properties which make it very attractive as an alternate choice for exchanging value.

Many ‘digital cash’systems have been presented before bitcoin, but for all of them I could point out critical weaknesses within a very short time. For many of them this was not even a technical weakness, but an organisational (like a paranoid initiator, looking for patent protection) or an economical issue (creating a metal backed currency in the hands of a private company). With bitcoin there are certainly weaknesses in the system, but I have not been able to find a critical one upfront.

The goal of bitcoin is not necessarily to take over existing currencies or existing financial systems, although I would love to see that play out. I would like it to augment the current systems with new ways to trade, more effective ways to put wealth to use, more transparent ways to work together. It needs to put banks and governments on the edge of their seats and keep them a lot more aware of their obligation to reasonably deal with their control over over money.

Having a transparent, technologically sound system for exchanging value is in the interest of many. I’m sure bitcoin has many things that can be improved. Its its complexity of use and the rather clumsy exposure of meaningless addresses come to mind, but the foundation is solid and the issues I found are by no means critical or unsolvable. The fact that bitcoin, the program, is open source does help to understand and validate the system and thus gain my trust. This contrasts on many levels with the services offered to me through financial companies.

When was the last time you validated your bank’s software?

Buying apple hardware just to run linux?

mrb — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:10:00 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post, I moved back to using Linux as my desktop operating system, coming from OSX. I have a couple of notes on the why and some observations about it which may be of interest.

My main machine has been a macbook pro 17 inch (or powerbook when they still had a ppc in them) for a couple of years now and I was pretty much a happy camper using OSX. OSX has represented an ideal mix for my long unix based experience and the need for screen candy and proper support of drivers which make usage of the hardware flawless.

In short, my hardware broke down. That is, it broke down a bit. Every once in a while I’d get coloured stripes on my screen or a yellowish glow or fonts of which the letter ‘m’would not display correctly (go figure). Annoying, but fixable with a reboot and I could live with that, at least for a short period of time. When the machine started rebooting spontaneously and I started losing work because of it, replacement seemed the only option left.

As the problem was intermittent and seemed a bit related to how hard I was hitting the cpu with my compiler whip, I decided, before scrapping the machine, to install ubuntu linux on it, just to see how it would deal with the same hardware error and to have a look at the new ubuntu (at that time Lucid) release.

The hardware problem was still present under Linux, but I was able to control it. A major help was to be able to control the fanspeed and thus the temperature of the machine. This was something that I never succeeded in doing under OSX. Perhaps I didn’t look hard enough, or was not experienced enough in OSX details or whatever. Fact remains, I got to control the fans in Linux within the hour and with that a large portion of the problem.

By carefully configuring display settings and upgrading to newer customized kernels I am now in the situation that my machine is basically back to a state where “scrapping it” sounds ridiculous and it’s good to go for a while.

The above process took about 3 to 4 weeks. After that I realized that the level of control I had over my machine felt really good.

Having worked on a daily basis under Linux a notable observation was that I didn’t really miss anything from OSX, apart from a dedicated blogging application (MarsEdit) and possibly iTunes. Apart from those, most of the applications I used a lot are also available on Linux. Emacs and Claws mail actually run a lot better on Linux than they do on OSX. I do have a solution for the blogging (org2blog with emacs), but replacing iTunes is still a problem;

So, now I have apple hardware all over and not using OSX on any of it. At first, that does not sound like a smart thing to do. From a financial point of view for one, most people argue that apple hardware may be expensive, but a lot of quality software comes included. Throwing the sofware away, which is effectively what you do when you go running linux on that hardware, does not make much sense then, does it?

What I found however, is that it is quite a challenge to match the macbook pro specs, build quality and features like the magsafe connector for the same price. Add to that an ability to drive the 30″ screen and it’s pretty darn difficult to find a machine other than the macbook pro series from apple. (I was charmed by the Sony Vaio Z series, but it can’t drive the 30″-screen and it’s a bit more expensive than an MBP too) Viewed from this (admittedly biased) angle it makes sense, even if you don’t plan on running OSX to buy a macbook pro again.

On top of all what is above, there is another issue which has been bothering me, and apparently I’m not alone in this, is the general direction Apple is taking. While I love their attention to detail and precise execution of production of their hardware, I loathe the way they treat (iPhone) developers and their strategy of control and censorship. The latest preview of OSX Lion only confirmed my concerns. Notably the appstore developments and the limitation of freedom to run sofware is bothering me. I guess the balance was held in some way with their sort-of-open contributions to several pieces of sofware (darwin, calendarserver, launchd etc.) but lately the scale tipped over for me.

I fully realize this is all subjective and food for rants and all, but hey, it’s my blog. :-)

Revisiting Emacs on OSX

mrb — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:00:20 +0000

Before I used an Apple machine with OSX, XEmacs was my editor of choice. Recently I saw Emacs 23 being released with native OSX support in the main repository (well, NextStep support formally, but with Cocoa bindings, which makes it OSX native I guess).

That alone was enough to revisit the old friend. With caution, because I still feel the pain somewhat of switching to TextMate from Xemacs. Another reason is that I sort of lost patience lately with proprietary applications. (TextMate in this case). I’m finding it less doable to have to wait for another developer to be able to find the time to fix issues or provide upgrades within reasonable intervals.

I’ve had a similar experience with Ecto not that long ago. You’d think I’d have learned by now…

Using Emacs again instead of TextMate was actually quite easy. My fingers still ‘remembered’the keys to press apparently. However, the learning curve to use the editor effectively is still steep. It’s still, and now more than it was with the native build, a joy to work with though.

What keeps (re-)surprising me about Emacs is that there’s apparently a mode or package for anything you want to do to get you 80% of the way and, thanks to the strong customization, the other 20% is around the corner.

I switched last week and since then I’ve discovered a mode that lets me view PDF-files (docview), a mode that connects to my microblog (identica-mode), spent quite a few hours in org-mode organizing my notes and task-lists (including syncing them to my iPhone), editting XML files in nxml-mode and blogging right now with the weblogger package.

I seriously think you can take a bare iron machine, install a minimal linux kernel on it, configure Emacs as the ‘sole interactive application’on it and still end up with a useful machine, not missing out on any task you’d want to perform.

Reasoning my way into new toys

mrb — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:32:35 +0000

Last Monday was my 40th birthday. I’m kind of used to having a quiet birthday; most of the people are always on holidays during this time of year. My girlfriend had organised a two day trip, she usually does something like that for my birthday, to an unknown destination to do something unknown. We were leaving on Sunday and returning on Monday evening.

Sunday we went to an outdoor activity centre where we goofed around in a Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB), got very muddy on a quad and very wet on some jet-skis. Very good fun and indeed a perfect way to spent a day for my birthday. A good diner-out and sleep-over in a hotel completed the day. I thought it was perfect and I thought it was over…

However, the next day the GPS steered me towards the town centre of Utrecht where she got me an hour to play with one of these:

For those of you who do not recognise it; it’s the Segway i2 Personal Transporter. A self-balancing two-wheel transportation device. It’s positioned somewhere in the gap between a bicycle and a pedestrian.

I’ve been mumbling about these things for a while now, but they cost a small fortune (for a toy, which it would be, for me). On top of that, their added value maximises in the city, and we live nowhere near a city! So, I can not defend a good reason to want one, other than that this is the most natural way to control a motorised vehicle I have ever driven. (or glide, what seems to be the segway term for driving).

Renting one of these things does not help to cure this curiosity, au contraire! Now I want one even more!

So, as of Monday I find myself thinking about formulating a consistent argument for buying one. A new one costs around € 5000,= so that is serious money. I have actually done calculations how many kilometres I would have to glide, replacing short trips in my car and saving gas, to earn back the investment. (Quite a few, it turns out)

Would I travel by train more if I had one? The nearest train station is like 10 kilometres from here, which is more or less doable; the range of the segway is advertised as around 40 km on one battery charge. I visit most of my clients by car (most of them are big and are in industrial areas, not in cities), but I guess one out of four trips could be replaced by the segway/train combination.

Would I take it with me if going to town by car? Most definitely. Would we be going on city trips more? I guess, but we would then have to buy 2 of them.

Would I be running the errands in our village with it? I think so. What shops we have here are mostly at 4 to 5 km distance from our home, so that is well within the Segway range.

The above sort of reasoning goes on for a while and at a certain point I have convinced myself it is ‘reasonable’to purchase it. At the very least, there is a feeling of: ‘Hey, I have worked hard to earn this money, I have deserved this!’The reasoning has never failed, assuming the enthusiasm of a product of service did not fade. (If they do, they usually fade quickly for me).

It’s not that I have regrets over previous toy purchases, but the question remains: “Is there still a way to prevent me purchasing one”?

For the moment, I think I am going to construct a symbolic big saving jar with the word ‘SEGWAY’written on it.

Switching to another blog client

mrb — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:38:13 +0000

After quite a long period of using ecto, I have switched to using Marsedit. Ecto got sold beginning last year by Adriaan to Illuminix. There has been no update of ecto since and I’m seeing no signs of improvement either. Does this mean ecto as a product is bad? No. I still love the idea and implementation of it. It is still a rough product though, has a number of annoying bugs and generally needs polishing; in other words: maintenance. After filing a couple of bugs and generally getting minimal or no response to them, time has probably come to expand my options.

With the set-up I have (wordpress-µ self hosted, off-line editing, flickr for images) switching between ecto and MarsEdit is hardly any work at all. Key in the account details in the new client and you’re basically good to go.

The only drawback I saw upfront was that MarsEdit does not have a wysiwyg like editor as ecto has. I’m not so much looking for the wysiwyg part, but avoiding the html editing process. I worked around this by installing a server side MarkDown plugin which enables me to edit posts in MarkDown. MarsEdit has a Preview Text Filter which supports MarkDown, so I actually feel the situation has improved.

I find MarsEdit a bit more intuitive in terms of navigation and menu entries and quite a bit faster to work with. The most important thing however is that the product is properly maintained by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Software. In the last year he has updated the application 4 or 5 times with healthy changelogs and (judging by the forums) Daniel is very much on top of things. That looks a lot better than the current ecto situation.

Sometimes you run into something on the web…

mrb — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:48:29 +0000

While looking for a solution to a LaTeX path search problem i ran into this:

As you may know, when you change the power setting on most microwaves, it doesn’t change the power output of the magnetron. It changes the duty cycle, i.e. when the magnetron is on and when it is off.

From: Microwave Duty Cycle | The Fugue

He’s a brave soul, I did this years ago too, but was afraid to admit (let alone publish it). (Oh and I also found the solution to my LaTeX search problem there)

5 years of blogging?

mrb — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:47:37 +0000

I just migrated the posts from this site from Xaraya to a WordPress install, just like I did with My Cobra Blog. Apparently I have been playing for about 5 years with it since my first post. The blog started out as a subdomain of hsdev.com, using an install of Moveable Type (I forgot the version).

I don’t think I used MT for a long time. At the time I was maintaining/rewriting all the xmlrpc/blogging modules for Xaraya and it made sense to use my own blog as a testenvironment for it. This weekend I installed WordPress on our servers. Both the “normal” version and the WordPress-µ (Multi-User) were installed. (I had already started with the 2.7 beta, but along the way I sort of realised that the multi user variety is a better choice for me).

So, all new software again for the measly 10 posts I do a year.

The plan is to have mrblog.nl be a ‘top-level’kinda thing, perhaps multi-domain to allow quick creation of blogs and use subdomains for specific purposes (like the cobra blog and I want to experiment with a photo-blog at some point too).

We’ll see.

A year has passed

mrb — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:03:14 +0000

More than a year even, time i come back here again. Most of my publishing has been done at http://cobra.mrblog.nl lately.

Emerce – Technologie nieuws: Mention of NLTivo

mrb — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 10:05:45 +0000

Emerce – Technologie nieuws: TiVo maakt downloaden naar iPod mogelijk:

De Tivo-dienst is officieel alleen beschikbaar in de Verenigde Staten en het Verenigd Koninkrijk. In Nederland bestaan ook TiVo-gebruikers. Wie het apparaat hier wil gebruiken moet wel flink sleutelen aan het oorspronkelijke apparaat. De Nederlandse TiVo-gemeenschap assisteert hierbij

Translation: “The TiVo-service is officially only available in the United States an the the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands there are also TiVo-users. Who wants to use the device here, has to perform quite a bit of tinkering with the original device. The Dutch TiVo community has some useful info.”

This community site was started by Dennis and myself. Lately Dennis has done some great work making it easy to create a fully working TiVo in the Netherlands. The critical point is having high quality guide data. Dennis runs a Guide Data server for the community. Several others, including me, run their own emulators for further development.

While it would be great to have an official TiVo service in the Netherlands, it would also destroy the community as it exists today, because the moment an official TiVo subscription can be had, our efforts become illegal, not only by the way TiVo license it hard- and software, but also by the licenses imposed by the several TiVo groups themselves. Most of the open tools developed have an explicit mention you can only use them if there is no official TiVo service available in your area”

Way to go holland univs!

mrb — Thu, 12 May 2005 08:58:16 +0000

Dutch academics declare research free-for-all | The Register

It has been there for a while, but now it’s official. I’m linking to the english summary on the register, the actual site where the stuff is accessible is in Dutch.

Only pragmatic arguments for Open source?

mrb — Thu, 12 May 2005 08:00:41 +0000

Computer Economics: research on strategic and financial management of information systems has results on a survey they held on why organisations choose an Open Source solution.

“Computer Economics recently conducted a survey of visitors to its website regarding the perceived advantages in the use of open source software. Although not a scientific sample, the results are nevertheless startling”

From those results I largely miss 2 things:

If “less dependence on vendor” is the main factor, i would like to see some cases where that really mattered, not by showing people who can’t switch from MS (we know there is a lock-in there), but by showing the ease of switching OSS providers.

Apparently only the economical arguments count here. Which might make sense considering the focus area of Computer Economics, but what i would like to know if the argument of “freedom” or “right thing to do” was asked, or mentioned at all.

Also, why these results are startling is beyond me.

Linus on kernel management style

mrb — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 18:14:00 +0000

Linus on kernel management style

“While it turns out that most people are idiots, the corollary to that is sadly that you are one too, and that while we can all bask in the secure knowledge that we’re better than the average person (let’s face it, nobody ever believes that they’re average or below-average), we should also admit that we’re not the sharpest knife around, and there will be other people that are less of an idiot that you are.”

Amen

Dutch nights

mrb — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 20:16:00 +0000

From the back yard. Pity it is too cold to sit there with a beer.

Too hot too handle

mrb — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 05:31:47 +0000

Ok, I surrender

mrb — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 07:14:59 +0000

I decided to disable comments alltogether on this blog. The amount of time required to manage the ip banning and deleting the spam comments is getting too much in comparison with the small scale blogging i do over here.

I just dont have the time to go to war on this and keep securing the blog, while giving others the opportunity to comment on the postings. My apologies to the serious commenters. Please use the trackback facility to be able to refer to the postings which you want to comment on.

Sigh

mrb — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 11:49:05 +0000

Microsoft granted patent on button click timing
Microsoft Corp. has been granted a patent relating to the use of buttons on hardware devices that form part of a user interface. U.S. patent 6,727,830, granted April 27, is described as a “time-based hardware button for application launch.” The patent abstract goes on to explain that the patent relates to how different functions can be invoked depending on whether a button is clicked once, clicked and held down for a period of time, or double-clicked within a short period of time. [MacCentral]

My brain is not a tree

mrb — Mon, 31 May 2004 16:50:50 +0000

Mind mapping seemed an attractive concept to bring some order into my chaotic thoughts, so i spend an afternoon looking for a program running on OSX to give it a spin.

The first thing I noticed all these programs assumed (with the exception of PersonalBrain which is not available on OS X) that my thoughts are organized in a tree like manner. At some point someone must have decided that a tree like organization for creative thinking is appropriate.

I am probably not a creative person

The leading mind mapping software on OS X does not even support quick linking between one part of a tree and another part. Yes, you can draw a line between two leaves, but that’s not exactly what i had in mind.

The PersonalBrain mentioned above comes quite close to what i was looking for, taking each idea as a possible starting point for organizing. So, i played with it for an hour, deleting it from my PC right after that. I managed to make a mess out of it immediately. Instead of stimulating navigation and organizing thoughts I found the program chaotic itself. It created links for me which i didnt want with no obvious feedback when I did that. (and i got dizzy from the UI too)

There must be something wrong with my brain.

If i understand all the involved techniques right, i need a very graphically oriented and very fast RDF editor with lots of attention to keyboard shortcuts and screen organization, which hides the horrendous details of RDF graphs and how they are specified. There are some RDF editors out there, mostly java based, but they are exactly that: RDF editors, nothing more, nothing less. Not very imaginative about making RDF being a storage format for semantical relationships and abstracting the interface around it.

I must have misunderstood the semantics.

Dutch treat?

mrb — Sat, 15 Nov 2003 18:15:06 +0000

Will the Ebay2RSS Feed help me to get the best prices on the expensive electronics i would like to buy?

I hate shopping for lowest prices. Once i decide what i want to buy, it must be available near me, with good service and i don’t want to wait.

Unfortunately my wishes do not correspond to the size of my wallet, so to make them fit you dig and dig the internet to get good bargains for stuff.

This used to take a lot of time. Being able to construct an RSS feed from online auctions (eBay in this example) It should be a matter of minutes to check whether there is an item in the search i want to bid on, or not

My hopes aren’t that high set, but i tried it out anyway. (Searching for a digital SLR camera body below a $1000,-)

Getting used to a new OS

mrb — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 06:42:51 +0000

Last week i got myself a 17″ Apple Powerbook. I’ve been wanting to check both hardware and OS X out for a long time. The combo of a Free BSD like core and the interface reputation of Apple seemed like an attractive combination.

Not sure if it is yet, but so far I haven’t been able to concentrate much on work ;-). Two things which stand out:

There is much more to play out there than is healthy for a person
I completely underestimated the way you set your machine to your hands to work efficiently, i feel completely disabled using the new machine.

Let’s see if that changes over the next few weeks.

It had to happen

mrb — Tue, 28 Jan 2003 05:38:08 +0000

Always hated blogs, weblogs or whatever those things are called. So I decided to install one ;-) . No deeper thought behind it, just wanted to try MT out, it might even help Xaraya become a better weblog tool. I was however looking for a diary kinda thing and this might help to get things organzed and published at the same time. We’ll see.