Agilo's Weblog

Last week on Tuesday I decided to go snowboarding with a guy from the university I had gotten to know; Tom, who had told me he was a snowboard instructor himself, so I thought that might be fun.
We went to SnowWorld, where I've been many times in the past.
At around 10:00 PM I was really wearing myself out and getting tired but I didn't plan on going any time soon, which turned out to be something I'd come to regret..

I went up the slope (slope 3 no less, which has no obstacles on it whatsoever, just a plain long slope) and decided to practice some backside 360s on the flats (never did those on the flats before even though I can do them on a jump since a few weeks).
The first one went perfectly, which pleased me, but then when I tried to do it again, overconfident as I was, I came down hard on my side with my elbow between me and the surface of the slope, and really hurt my side!
At first I just laid there on the slope having difficulty breathing (which I've had experienced in the past, even to the point of nausea) but then the pain set in hard.
Tom came up to me talking me through it (breathing patterns and all) but the pain just didn't go away and breathing was still very difficult.
I decided it would be best to just move to the side of the slope instead of lying in the middle of it and try to shake it off there (as I didn't want to alarm anyone at the time), so I stood up and snowboarded the last few meters down and to the side.

After having been lying down for a good 20 minutes or so, it just didn't seem to get any better and I told Tom I'd want to go outside to sit there, and it would maybe also be a good time for us to leave for home.
So I got up and I tried walking toward the exit of the slope but every step I took just hurt a lot!
Having walked for only around 10 meters I came to realize that this wasn't just going to disappear and I wasn't physically able to continue on walking, so I told Tom I'd have to stop.
I sat down on a bench which was nearby and Tom rushed to get an in-house medic to take a look at me.
A guy from SnowWorld itself arrived and analyzed me by asking some generic questions but, him not being a doctor, he told me it would be best to just go to the emergency room at the hospital and gave us directions on how to get there (Tom was able to drive me).

Upon arriving at the hospital, I walked up a few painful steps to the counter where it was requested I should urgently be gotten a wheelchair.
I tried to calm down the desk employee by saying I'd walked for a while and it would be okay, walking would be fine (it had also seemed that standing hurt the least whereas it hurt a lot whenever I sat or lied down), but she would have none of it and expressly told that it wasn't a request, so I sat down and was driven to an examination room.
I explained what happened and how much my side hurt and I was given an intramuscular injection to ease the pain (which I was later told was Morphine — which really surprised me because I'd sooner associate that with much more severe injuries).
After a long time, it was becoming more and more apparent that I wasn't going to be leaving the hospital that night and that was exactly what I was eventually told (after having done an Xray and was told that it wasn't a fracture), so I was driven to an observation room (IV and all) at which point I said goodbye to Tom.

By this time, it was around 1:30 AM, and I was told to get some sleep and I'd be under observation for the night and to let them know if anything was off.
Sleeping, however, almost seemed impossible!
Lying down hurt like hell; I just wasn't able to breathe!  Just sitting in my bed hurt (the only way I didn't experience much pain was sitting straight up on the side of my bed).
I hyperventilated a few times, gasping for air, but was calmed by a nurse who told me to focus on my breathing and try to calm that down, which helped; about an hour into this tormention, I was able to find some rest (I would be repeatedly awoken that night for blood samples and a blood pressure test).

Morning came, and a doctor came to me to tell me that I experienced blunt trauma to my abdomen, spoke of something called "kidney concussion" and said I was going to have an ultrasound and a CT scan to have a better view of my abdomen.
The ultrasound revealed internal bleeding and it was not clear where it came from or if it had stopped, which concerned me (causing me to hyperventilate — this is really annoying when you can't take deep breaths and every gasp for air hurts like hell).
After that it was off for the CT scan, which also required quite some effort on my part: lying down (which hurt), moving my arms above my head (which hurt), holding still (which hurt) and taking deep breaths (which hurt even more).
Needless to say, that took a lot of time to do.

After all that was set and done, I returned to the observation room and I just had to wait for the results to come in.
My brother came by to see me during that time (I had, the night before, called my mom to let her know what was up and she had since told my brother who immediately left his work to stop by and see me).
At this point, I was hoping to get the results back and be able to go home (as I didn't want to miss classes at the university and work) but when the doctor came in with the results, it was going to become clear to me that this was far from being over.

The doctor came to me with the results and told me that I've had impact trauma to my spleen and it was ruptured!
He told me in a dead serious tone that I wasn't going to be going home for quite some time!
The standard procedure is to keep a patient under close observation to see if the rupture resolves itself; if it does, I won't require surgery but if it doesn't, well, out goes the spleen.

To conclude an already long story (I didn't plan on writing this much to be honest, heh): I ended up spending a week there bound to strict bed rest, my spleen ended up healing itself shut to stop the bleeding and I am now under way to recovery.
A full recovery will take up to 6 weeks, during which time I will be unable to do any physical exertion (which includes bicycling, at least for the first weeks, which sucks) and I will have to be very careful (walk slowly, take my time going up and down stairs, etc).

Urgh.. what a week.

One final note to end this entry: thanks a lot to my friends and university classmates who came to visit me at the hospital!

Today marks my 23^rd birthday!
Hurray!

Ever since I saw a Pokemon Mini with a backlight I've really wanted it on mine as well.
Lupin^ posted the steps to build it yourself on the forum of the Pokeme website but there was a problem with it: the required parts can no longer be found anywhere (most notably the tiny inverter).

I though I was never going to see mine with a backlight until I asked Lupin^ directly if he happened to still have any parts left to build one, to which he replied that he did have one complete set left!
After hearing that, I asked him if he could build it into my Pokemon Mini if I sent it to him and, well, long story short: he did!

A picture of my new backlit Pokemon Mini (next to a normal one for comparison)!

I got it back yesterday after spending some time traveling up and down from The Netherlands to Germany and back but it was well worth the wait!
Not only did he build in the backlight into the unit at super speed, but he also cleaned the encasing/buttons and replaced the screen cover (because it had some scratches on it)!

Thanks a lot, Lupin^!

This summer, I've devoted practically all my free time on two things: work and snowboarding!

SnowWorld (in-doors ski/snowboarding facility) offers various kinds of membership subscriptions, lasting from anywhere between a month to a year.
They also offer one specific membership subscription which lasts for the entire months of July and August and costs only 100 Euros (normally it'll cost 25 EUR to snowboard for 4 hours).
Needless to say, I bought that option!

I gained a lot of new skills on the park from all that boarding, I could already do frontside 180s and several grabs (indy, method, mindy, nose/tail grabs, etc) but new things I can now do are: frontside 360, backside 180, backside half-cab (which is a frontside 180 but you pop it riding in switch — it's backwards due to the fact it's a trick which is normally performed in a half-pipe).
Especially the backside 180 took me the longest time to be able to do, because I was scared to throw my board blind-sided (in fact, I was able to do the frontside 360 before I could do the backside 180 ).

Aside from those trick I went to several placed to snowboard, including Snow Planet, which had a seemingly nice park (from pictures) but was actually not all that fantastic.
It did, however, have a HUGE jump which is the largest one I've done to date!
So far, there hasn't been a single jump I didn't dare to take!

I've also bought a new snowboard tailored specifically for the park: the K2 WWW, 2009 model.
It cost me only 190 Euro's because it was the 2009 model.
(I was actually considering getting the K2 Parkstar, 2010 model, which comes with the new Jib Rocker technology, but I decided I could always buy it later. )

It seems like such a long time ago since 1 terabyte hard disks were first announced and I remember being amazed over such an amount of storage space.
However, today I've actually bought my own 1 terabyte hard disk!

I bought the Samsung SpinPoint F1 (HD103UJ), to be exact, and it functions beautifully!
The price I bought it for was only €79,95!

After having invested a lot of time and effort into the admission exam for the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), I finally managed to pass it!

The way the Dutch education system works is hard to explain, so I won't do that here now, but it can at least be said that in two years time (after I've finished my education at the Hogeschool) I will be able to start my masters study there.
Most likely, it will be the study Computer Engineering, which appeals to me the most.

Around Christmas, I received a Freecom MusicPal as a gift from my job.

Having some fun with it I found an admin panel in the web interface where there was an option to turn on a Telnet daemon, this (after logging in) confirmed my assumption that this thing ran Linux.
I found the SDK and Toolchain on the official site and e-mailed all my findings to the rest of my co-workers.

At that time, my boss jokingly asked me about when to expect Pong for it, so.. I made him a Pong game for it (I made a movie and uploaded it to YouTube) :

The game mechanics work well with the knob wheels.

I also decided to publish the source and binary: see files/mppong/ for all the files.

February, I went snowboarding on a backcountry snowboarding trip organized by McNab Snowsports!
I've always talked about doing such a dedicated trip as I've always prefered the backcountry (off the slopes through tree lines etc.) over regular snowboarding in resorts.

I asked Ed and Mick to go along with me but they felt the price tag was too steep, so I went alone.
At first I felt that was kind of dissapointing but then it dawned on me that this would be an excellent oppertunity for me to find out if I'm independent enough to manage in a foreign country all by myself, not knowing anyone (having to get familiar with new people etc).
The reason for that is that I'm thinking of moving away after having done a full education here in The Netherlands.

The trip was a week long and was spent in Chamonix Mont-Blanc.
I trained (by way of running) to get in shape for the long hiking trips I would have to endure to get to the tops of the mountains and it was still very tough to cope for me.. but I managed (if just barely).

My group, hiking our way to the top of the mountain.

Highlight of the week would have to have been the heli drop I joined (together with Neal McNab himself — the founder of McNab Snowsports): the ride down was absolutely amazing!
So much powder everywhere, the awesome sights of the mountains, it was really great!

Me, snowboarding down the mountain.

Other notable things that happened were:

• I fell 5 meters (16.5 feet) down a cliff wall!  I got off without a scratch albeit shocked to shits.
• While traversing a mountain side, I suddenly found myself in an avalanche!  It was a smaller avalanche (thankfully) but it did break one of the (metal!) hiking poles I had retracted which I used to fence off the boulders of snow coming at me!  One of those boulders went over the edge off my board and nearly dragged me down with it!  Quite an experience!

In all, though, the trip was really awesome and the people I met were really cool.
I would love to do a heli trip next time!

One of the assignments of a class I had in school last semester was spend 28 hours on trivial tasks such as helping out at open houses, being a peer coach (that is: helping first year students out with classes they need some assistance in), etc.
I decided to take a slightly different twist in spending those 28 hours on account of two classmates of mine asking me for help with PHP and HTML.
I asked the teacher in question if it was alright for me to spend my 28 hours in this fashion and sure enough, I was answered with that it was more than alright.

I decided to focus my lessons on a couple of different web related topics, namely (in order):

1. basic tagsoup HTML
2. CSS
3. XHTML
4. Accessibility standards
5. Javascript: basics
6. Javascript: DOM-manipulation
7. PHP: basics (variables, basic i/o, forms)
8. PHP: filesystem i/o, making a guestbook using a flatfile database
9. PHP: using SQL
10. Security: SQL injections, HTML injections/cookie theft, miscellaneous other tidbits (how to circumvent HTML restrictions in websites that filter HTML, injecting HTML/javascript by exploiting UBB code parsers, etc.)

Giving these lessons was really a lot of fun, so I found out.
I was also given a lot of positive feedback and some constructive criticism regarding the pace of the lessons (some felt it went a bit too fast).

At the Queensday fair (April 30th) of 2008 I bought a fully working Amiga 500!
When I bought it I knew little about it, except for its reputation (in relation to the scene) but that quickly changed.

Upon returning home I wanted to hook it up and explore it but I quickly came to realize that I didnt have a way of hooking it up to my TV; there wasn't any cable provided for me to do so!
After doing some research I quickly found some pinout schemes to convert the DB-23 connector on the Amiga (which is used for video) to SCART and I decided to go with one I found on pinouts.ru (alternatively: hardwarebook.info).

It was a quite interesting process as I didn't have a DB-23 connector; I did, however, have a few regular DB-25 cables (which I used in the past on a couple of ZIP drives) and I also had a multi SCART type of plug (which is a total ripoff, by the way, as the inside is just a very cheap board with elongated traces to which a few connectors are attached — the connector that is used closest to the output gets the TV's attention).

Anyway, the reason I mention the multi SCART plug is that the wires that are soldered on to the board are a one-to-one match with the pins at the end of the main cable (so I basically cheated).

As for the DB-25 connector, however, this was a much more troublesome affair.
I began by taking one of my many DB-25 cables and sawing off the two unnecessary plugs from the female connector.
After that I proceded by cutting the cable and have a look at the wiring inside but since there is no set standard in wire coloring to determine what wire goes to which pin/plug (as there is, for instance, in the RJ-45 connector of network cables), I was pretty much left standing on my own.

I decided it might be worth having a look at the male connector of the cable (which I was going to discard anyway) in the assumption that the wires matched one-to-one at the female connector's side, so I took a knife and removed the plastic cable insulation from the connector only to find that the entire wiremess that I expected was fixed in a lump of glue!
This made everything a lot more irritating for me to find out which colored wire led to which pin in the connector as, now, I had to cut through the lump of glue (and be very cautious in doing since otherwise I would run the risk of cutting a wire and lose my point of reference)!

After a very long time I was able to find which wire belonged to which pin and I was subsequently able to attachs the cables and construct the finished cable.

The finished DB-23 to SCART connector in an improvised encasing.

After the connector was finished, I could finally begin the Amiga experience! ..or so I thought.
I came to find out, as I booted up the Amiga, that this was only the first hurdle I'd overcome.

As I booted up the Amiga, I was warmly greeted by the Workbench 1.3 startup screen at which it proceeded to do... nothing, which I found a bit odd as I expected to see some sort of GUI.
I stared at the screen for a short while wondering if it had crashed or I was expected to push a button or something, before deciding to get some answers from the internet.

After some searching and still no real answer, I went to a place I knew I could find some knowledgable people that could help me; IRC (#amiga on EFNet, to be more precise).
I explained my perdicements and was explained that I needed something to boot the system off (either a boot disk/game or a hard disk, which I didn't have).
What's more, the Amiga doesn't read (by todays standards) conventional floppy disks either, it needed double density floppy disks and could only read off Amiga's own filesystem format.. unless I had a later version of Workbench, which will allow it to read off FAT formatted disks..

I've since bought an Amiga hard disk (the A590) to play around with the system but right now I'm thinking about whether to install a newer version of Workbench or trying to get a hold of an Amiga 1200 (which is kind of the same thing, or so I'm told).
Anyway, it's a cool system and the demo's I've seen for it (in videos) are really awesome.. can't wait to really start experiencing them on the system itself.

Another year has come to an end and so, just like previous years, it's time for me to reflect on events of the past year.

It's no secret that I haven't been writing many weblog entries this years, which has a reason: time (or lack thereof).
School in combination with my work are eating up so much time I have little time left to do other things, and if I do get around to doing other things, writing weblog entries isn't on the top of my list.

I do feel bad for not writing about it, though, because it doesn't give me a chance to read back on my life when I'm X years older in life, the very reason I started keeping a weblog in the first place.
Some may think that writing a weblog entry doesn't take much time and I should just write brief reports on what happened, but I won't do that simply for the fact that some events that have happened deserve their own individual weblog entries because of having a profound influence on my life (or just because of the scale of the event).
What happens next is that these events stack up and the task of writing about them becomes so great it's actually becoming demotivating.

At any rate, for the sake of my regular new years reflections I will list them here in short headlines (as I have done in previous years) just to have them written down; it'll remain to be seen if they'll ever be written out in large.

So without further ado, 2008 has been the year of…

• …one of the most important decisions in my life, to change my education to Computer Engineering (i.e. Technische Informatica).
• …getting my Propedeuse, within my first year!
• …Pokemon Mini, for which I've started developing passionately (but not enough due to lack of time, which I hope to better this year).
• …me and my younger brother went on vacation to italy (in the summer of 2008).
• …starting a class of my own at school, in which I give lessons to my peers in XHTML/CSS/JavaScript/DOM/Accessibility- and Webstandards/PHP/PHP+SQL.
• …Wintersports vacation to Val Thorens, for which I've bought my very own snowboard: Nitro's Pantera.
• …booking a backcountry snowboarding course with McNab Snowsports for February of 2009!
• …having went on a Company trip to Rome!
• …Symphony X, whom I've finally got to see, many times over (together with Dream Theater)!
• …finally buying a DSerial EDGE after waiting seemingly endlessly for Natrium42 to start producing and selling DSerial carts again.
• …buying a new mobile (smart)phone, the Samsung GT-i8510 INNOV8 with 8 megapixel camera.
• …buying an Amiga 500 (more on this very soon, in a separate entry).

2008 (on par with 2007, actually) has also been one of the most busy years of my life (which shows in the amount of weblog entries this year, heh).

Anyway, I close this entry wishing everybody a very prosperous 2009!

Yesterday was the official ceremony in which I was handed my so-called Propedeuse.
I was able to obtain it within my first year and I actually already had enough points to receive it back in June.

With this in hand, I'm well on track on getting my Bachelor's degree in three years from now.

Today I turn 22 years of age and it feels like a nice number.

I don't really have much else to write about, other than I'm busy with all sorts of things and I keep postponing writing weblog entries.. maybe soon! ;)

Well, I've not been so active in writing weblog entries the past few months and because of that I missed out on some stuff that happened because I wanted to really take my time in writing about them.
However, it's getting seemingly more apparent that I never will get around to doing that so therefore, I'll just write about it in this entry.

Last February I went snowboarding in France (Val Thorens) together with Mick and Ed.

Leading up to that, we decided to rent snowboards as we've been doing in the past, however by the time we got around to actually rent the snowboards all the snowboards had already been rented out.. so we had the choice: either rent snowboards in France, or buy our own snowboards.
I didn't plan on doing that but I had been thinking about it in the past and I did have some money saved up, so I decided it was time to actually go through with it and buy my own snowboard.

Because I'm in my element the best off the slopes I sought after a good mountain style snowboard and I eventually landed on Nitro's Pantera.
It's a beautiful board and it handles really well!

Nitro's awesome snowboard called: Pantera.

As for the rest of our stay in France: we hated the place (Val Thorens), it really sucked.  Snow conditions were bad but in all the terrain was really boring and really not that interesting.
It was fun being on our own, though, not having to worry about classmates or people in our group.
Not only that, we also experienced what it was like having to provide for ourselves staying in our little appartement and such, which I thought was really cool.

Since then I've also seen Symphony X perform at De Lantaarn (a.k.a.: the middle of fucking nowhere) and De Boerderij.
The shows were really fucking amazing and Michael Romeo was absolutely fucking awesome!

Two plectrums I recieved from Michael Romeo during the show.

I managed to score two plectrums from him (one of which I got through shaking his hand during songs)!
Also, equally awesome, I managed to get exclusive footage with my camera in which he performs a piece of the song Sea of Lies for my camera!
The footage can be seen on YouTube: Symphony X - Sea of Lies (live in Zoetermeer, Netherlands).

Did I mention the performance (in Zoetermeer) was mindblowing?  No?  Well, consider it mentioned because it really was absolutely mindblowing!!

I also spent some time (however little) on the Pokemon Mini (though not as much as I'd like to).
I fixed the Text Engine bug and I also wrote a little random number generator using an algorithm based on an article published by DonTronics (which I modified to work on a byte instead of a word).
The random number generator also taught me to work with the PM's timer, however basic it still is.

Also, really exciting news is that a long standing member of Team Pokeme, Asterick, is working on a new Pokemon Mini emulator (Minimon version 2) with recently reverse enginered information!
Not only that but he's also set up a new Wiki which will replace the old (and somewhat inaccurate) Pokemon Mini Hardware Reference!

I'm also thinking of moving onward with programming for the Gameboy Advanced (so as to teach myself to work with the ARM CPU) but that'll come when the time comes.

Lastly, I've booked a flight to Sicily for the upcoming vacation to go and see my Father together with my little brother Emanuele; can't wait to be back there again.

About a month ago I changed my education from Computer Science to Computer Engineering (Technische Informatica).
Reason for this is that this type of education is more technically challenging; not just saying "visit this site, download this, copy/paste that there and you have a program" but now more like "the first x bytes are used as a file identifier, then follows xx bytes for ..." (etc.), meaning: deeper into the technical side of things, which I love more than just creating generic applications.
This will also give me deeper focus on the thing which I've come to love the past few years: embedded devices (such as, for instance, the Nintendo DS or more recently the Pokemon Mini).

In all, I'm happy with the change, even though it means I need to seriously brush up on my maths skills (which is close to none right now since I previously didn't have anything related to maths).
Anyway, I'm guessing with enough work it will turn out fine.

A few months ago (and I don't remember if this is because of Dark Fader's website or pouet.net) I came across a very cool little device made by Nintendo called the Pokemon Mini; the smallest handheld console in the world to be cartridge-based, have a black-and-white LCD display, rumble feature, shock-detection, include an infrared port for multiplayer and have the more common buttons you'd expect from a handheld (namely a D-pad and three input buttons; B, A and C).
Aside from that, the system has a 4 MHz proprietary CPU called the Nintendo Minx.

A picture of a Pokemon Mini

Why did I find it so exciting?  I mean, it's a Pokemon-related device to begin with..  Well, it has very severely been reverse engineered by the people over at Team Pokeme!

The reason I mentioned not being certain how I came across it is because I've been somewhat into the Nintendo DS homebrew scene (as a by-stander), from which I came to know of Dark Fader, but I've also been into the demo scene for about a year now (again, as by-stander so far ) from which came one of the coolest scene demos, made by Team Pokeme (which won first prize in the wild compo at Breakpoint 2005), called: SHizZLE.
That prod really opened my eyes as to how cool a device such as the Pokemon Mini really is and what can be achieved on that architecture; needless to say, I wanted to play with it (i.e. program for it) myself, badly.

After reading about how to get started it became clear to me that I needed a flash cart to place a program on to be able to test on actual hardware (like the video of SHizZLE shows at the end), the only problem was, however, that flash carts stopped being made by Team Pokeme at around 2004, so I was shit out of luck (as it seemed at the time).
At around this time I decided to get onto IRC to the room where Team Pokeme housed themselves; #pmdev on EFNet.
I idled in the room for about a week to see what they were up to themselves (as I usually do when I enter a new scene) at which point I decided it was time to let my interest be known.

I talked to a guy called ph0x at the time, telling him (and the room) I wanted to get started sometime soon; invest time into PM development because I thought the device was just awesome.
After some time I asked (knowingly) if flash carts were still being made or sold, to which he replied that sadly, they were no longer being made nor sold.
I didn't want that to be the end of it, though, because I really wanted to do something with this, so I asked if the schematics for the PCB was available for me to have, so I could potentially build it myself.
Ph0x told me to contact a guy called pop or another guy called Lupin^, who happened to be idling in the room.
As I continued talking about my intentions Lupin^ rose from his idle state and asked me if I had any experience in soldering anything.
I told him I didn't but I was willing to learn it, at which point (after some discussion) he gave me all the information I could hope for; complete schematics of both the Flash Cart and the Linker PCB (as it needed a way to program the actual cart)!

Immediately after that I started gathering resources which could help me put the flash cart into realization.
Shortly after that, I was told by Lupin^ that he had a fully functioning linker and a flash cart which only needed to be soldered ready for me to buy from him!
This, of course, was perfect as it enabled me to get started a lot quicker, so I paid him 30 Euros for them (they used to go for 30 Euros each!) and the only thing left for me to do then was wait, buy the necessary parts and eventually solder the parts to the flash cart so I could get started.

During the time spent waiting I asked a teacher (who is a Computer Engineering teacher himself, which is why I approached him) if he would be able to help me with the soldering, as I've never soldered anything before (also expressing my love for embedded devices such as the Nintendo DS).
The teacher said he'd love to help me, picking up on my interest for his department, and referred me to another teacher that would be better suited to help on the actual soldering.

At this time I was told by Lupin^ that he would be able to solder it for me himself (perhaps out of empathy)!
I felt kind of bad for the teacher who was willing to help me (and for myself as I didn't get the chance to learn to do it myself now) but I accepted his offer because, as I mentioned before, it enabled me to start getting into this more quickly (remembering that I could always just make another flash cart based on the board schematics).

Before everything arrived I started getting ready myself by setting up a development environment (i.e. getting the assemblers, emulators and documentation needed ready to dive into it when the time came) and when it finally did arrived I was able to jump right into it.

So far I've toyed with some of the features of the Pokemon Mini (using Lupin's Pokemon Mini tutorial and the Pokemon Mini Hardware Reference) and already came across some oddities (such as the rumble feature not working unless the LCD is initialized).
Nevertheless, it's a very fun and awesome platform to work on, especially since everything is in Assembly.

To see my creations (thus far), visit: /files/PM

Many thanks to the PM dev scene and especially Lupin^ for all his help so far!