I went to see the movie Ender's Game. I had hoped to see it at my birthday last year, but the
release of the movie was delayed in the Netherlands to just last week. This
was the second week and the movie is only sceduled at 16:20, giving the
impression that it is not a big success and will be out of the theater soon.
Besides me, there were only eight other in todays screening. I did enjoy
the movie and think it is quite a good story. I understand that the book,
which I never read, is even much better.
Around 14:08, a Aérospatiale Alouette III helicopter from the Dutch army, the
A-247, (which has been used by
Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands) landed just across the road from
our office building. Everybody walked to the window to see it land and take-off
around 14:24. Many pictures were taken. The conditions were not very good with
the sun behind the helicopter.
The books in the window of bookshop Polare
read "HOOP", the Dutch for hope. Last Tuesday, the filed for automatic stay,
and were granted this by the court. Although the laywer of Polare stated that
the shops could reopen soon, nothing has been heard since then. Recently, the
website went blank, only showing the logo. Bankruptcy seems imminent.
Tuesday, February 12, a judge granted the request for automatic stay for the twenty Polare bookshops in the Netherlands and
Belgium. In the past week the liquidator tried sell the shops as a whole
to new owners, which failed. Yesterday, he announced that now the shops
would be sold apart or in groups, and that for this it would be beter if
the shop would reopen. It was also announced that the stock of books in
the shop would not be resupplied and that it would also not be possible
to order books. The online webshop was already closed some days ago. this
morning, I went to have a look the local shop
this morning. They had brought all the new books (with still a fixed price)
to the low tables in the center of the shop. Those probably have the most
worth. They haven't started with a sale, but I guess that an important
purpose to reopen the shops is to sell the books in stock to pay the
creditors in case of liquidation. I did not buy any book, not being sure who
would benefit from it or whether it would have a possitive effect on the
continuation of the shop by a new owner.
Last Saturday, Leo Vroman
died at the age of 98. He is known for being a scientist, a poet and an
illustrator. Today, I discovered that he was wrote computer programs using
True BASIC. He continued
doing this until November 2012 according to the entries on
his blog, the latest
being 25 November 2012 chaos programa, which has the listing and the resulting
images. Far more examples of his computer drawings can be found at
image
library under "computer drawings". It surprises me that he continued
programming until such high age and using rather complicated mathematical
functions.
Since Saturday, I have been working on a program
for analyzing then files on the many backups that I made on CD's and external
drives. The CD's contain incremental backups also including old files that
were not backuped for a long time. The program is based on the program that
I used to create the selection of files to be put on a CD. Because the
original program was quite a mess, actually two programs in one file, and
primarily written in C, I basically rewrote it from scratch using C++ classes
and reusing parts whenever possible. In the past days I spend at least four
hour looking for a nasty bug. It appeared that the g++ compiler I am using
does not report an error when a method that should return a value does not
have a return statement. I only discovered the error, when I started printing
pointers of all involved structures. Some weeks ago, I already had copied
all of the CD's on a large external drive. There was only one CD (one of the
ones made the latest, and thus being the youngest) that contained a number
of files at the end that could not be read. The original progam used a
hashing algorithm for identifying files that had changed and the CD's
contained files with these hashes. The program can read these files and use
them to verify the contents of the backups that were restored on the external
drive. For this the hashes for all files had to be recalculated. No corrupted
files were found. I have some idea to put the collected files on
M-DISC's. These are special
DVD's that cost about € 4.00 per disc.
Last Monday, Polare was declared bankrupt. This was to be expected after
automatic stay decision. Now that the shops are declared bankrupt, the chances
of them being continued by new owner, have increased, because the new owner
does not have to deal with the dept of about one million Euro per shop. The
employees are now working for the liquidator, and they can so for the next
six weeks according to the Dutch law. At 9:35 this morning, I bought the
following books from the local bookshop:
Ongebonden by Katherine Angel (second copy, to be give away
to someone) for € 6.99.
Jotie T'Hooft verzameld werk by
Jotie T'Hooft,
ISBN:9789085422884, for € 9.99.
De Hobbit (The Hobbit) by J.R.R. Tolkien for € 5.00.
At 20:25 in the evening, I bought the following book:
Belangrijke voorwerpen en persoonlijke bezittingen uit de
collectie van Lenore Doolan en Harold Morris, inclusief boeken
kleding en sieraden (Important Artifacts and Personal
Properties from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris,
Including books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by
Leanne Shapton,
ISBN:9789023454021, for € 1.25.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Saturday, February 15, 2014