It's a Ball…It's a Flower…It's Supertea!

It looks good, it tastes fine, it lasts very long and it's fun!

I am truly in love with flower tea...

Ricky Gervais, obviously!

You cannot have missed this man, the maker of The Office, Extra's, etcetera. However you might not have heard of his old XFM radio shows yet. From 2001 to 2005 Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington created many many hours of pure pleasure. You can download all the files through pilkipedia.co.uk.
Enjoy!

TeX, UML, OS X (going slightly mad...)

This post is only relevant to the lucky few who want to use UML diagrams in a TeX environment on OS X. This is the third time I solved this issue so this post is mainly to prevent me from having to figure it out once more.

First of all you need a TeX distribution, TeXShop is currently the best option. Next you need an UML package that works with that. I found MetaUML (a set op .mp files) that can be interpreted by MetaPost which (fortunately) is part of the TeXShop package.

To install MetaUML it seems sufficient to have the set of .mp files somewhere on your desktop. Documentation of the package tells you to move the files somewhere where other .mp files are but I have no other .mp files on my system so I'm very happy it just seems to work this way as well.

A UML diagram can now be made by using the code of the MetaUML package in an .mp file and type-setting it by choosing 'MetaPost' next to the typeset button. You can either create a stand-alone pdf-file or a postscript file (with extension '.1' for some reason...) that can later be included in a normal .tex file. To switch between these type-setting modes go to Preferences -> Misc and choose either mptopdf or mpost.

Make sure the .mp file has no spaces in its name because it will not work if it does (it took me ages to figure this out...).

Happy Unified Modeling!

Watch an online movie to avoid the springsnow

No need to leave the house and make your way through the extremely unspringlike weather in Amsterdam this easter weekend to go see a movie. Most new features can be watched online (for free) through the following websites:

• Red Curtain Movies
• 66Stage
• SneakFlix
• JooX
• Video Stored
• Canderel.Ucoz.Com
  
• ...
  

* Sites open and close continuously so please inform me of any dead links or omissions.

Under the Stars

A boyscout meets his doom, animated.



Found this very cute animation on Itunes as a video podcast of il Luster Productions. It is a videoclip for the song Under the Stars by the band Ghost Trucker.

Cached site for UN transcripts

Podcast 'bm241 Making Better Use of the United Nations' of Citizenreporter.org explains why pages of the United Nations website never show up in Google or other search engines. If you do want to find out what your nation and others have been speaking about and voting for in this international forum check out: http://www.undemocracy.com/.