Latest blog posts

Forgive me, I was bored. At least I found out what the <marquee> tag is good for. It was created for George Lucas.

The 1980s and first half of the 1990s were probably the golden age of the adventure game. Heavyweights Sierra and LucasArts created many inventory-based graphic adventures such as King's Quest, Space Quest, Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, to name but a few. As the 21st century approached, interest in these games waned while production costs skyrocketed. Sierra eventually closed down entirely (though there are signs of it starting back up again, it remains to be seen in what form that might be) and LucasArts focused on their Star Wars franchise.

Today is a day of national mourning in The Netherlands. The remains of the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) will start arriving at Eindhoven airport today. It will take weeks to take care of the entire mess that this situation has brought, but I trust my country will do everything it can to ensure that it is handled respectfully and all 298 victims' remains will be brought home. My thoughts and prayers are with the people who are left behind by the victims. I cannot imagine what they have endured over the past week.

Here's a little problem that bit me after an OS upgrade to a webserver. Whenever session_start was called, PHP would throw a warning message and not actually start the session:

By now, everybody and their grandmother seems to know about Bitcoin and the trouble at Mt. Gox (seriously, is there anybody who does not pronounce that "Mount Gox"?), even if they have no idea what a cryptocurrency is. Then there's other exchanges that have similar problems, Bitcoin's wildly fluctuating value and its association with criminal activity like on Silkroad. But still, cryptocurrency is an interesting concept. There are several alternatives to Bitcoin, sometimes collectively called Altcoins and one of those in particular, Dogecoin, caught my eye.