Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 11


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June 5, 2003

I've been away a lot lately, luckily having the chance to, and will put some findings as usual on a fresh new (local) diary page.

All pictures on this page are copyrighted by me

France, pictures, and Jazz in the mid country




This one is probably from Saumur (by heart) taken from an illegal spot in the area of the big castle.



The Ronald Baker Quintet performed in Jarze in the mid of france in may, which could be witnessed for a moderate entry fee. I made a few short video recording and a few photo's. Some war is progressing.



Theo (my name) junior is appearently a popular religeous book series title in france. This a the window of a major bookstore in Tour, where I found no book at all about Gregory of Tour.

The titles and atmosphere indicate bad influence, Jesuits, I'm sure. Religions of the word. The very nicest qoutes from the bible. The words of the bible. The thora, told to children. God, who is He? Jesus, told about by children. The first spring of the world. The bible, what is that? My prayers.



What do these trees tell us about nature in this area? Well it is not a straight (or dull or dead) as for instance in germany or holland. There seems to be some fullness and greenness around.



I did a bit of quick charcoal drawing while away.

Gregory of Tour, presentia of a saint in mid france.

I visited the place Tour, which existed already 1500+ years ago. Greogory and st marting have lived here, the latter has a tremendous cathedral on his name, of much later date, though, while saint Gregory has been almost muffled away in a small classroom size dim, completely unrepresentative dump of a chappel as part of a clinic. Where there was a very thick and big tree though, which probably isn't as old, but may be from the middle ages.

Louvre in Paris: pictures and movies.



Unless one pais no little money for some official cellar garage, I remembered this surrounding from about a decade ago to be a good louvre area parking space neighbourhood in Paris, which prooved still true.



The louvre palais court.



This part has no 'sense of direction', which there is a bit further on towards the Mona Lisa, which also officially may not be photographed. Loads of people had their cameras clicking and beeping and even flashing, though...

I made more than a few pictures in a drawings room, where after major photography and video work and guards walking by all the time found out when I left there was a no photo's sign at the input. Well, anyway, what's ancient art for if you can't even take home a photograph?


   A michelangelo drawing.



Better than art? A cafe restaurant near the Louvre. The middle painting sais 'Artistes francais, grand palais'.

French major strike a day after having left.

I got this from le Monde some time ago in the library where they have a recent one always:



   CHUT !! ILS PENSENT !

It was a nice day at the louvre.


   The Champs Elisees were ornamented with all kinds of actual, full scale trains,
   and of course have heavy traffic.

The next day, when we had safely returned to holland, the roads developed up to 150 (!) kilometers of jammed traffic, when the airlines and all kinds of public services went on strike.

What timing.


Germany, Nürnberg: european tcl/tk conference visit





The conference room during break.


The right hand side was dedicated to the everlasting and almighty *internet connection*. And coffee.


Just around the corner of the fachhoghschule where the above was.



Near the lift up. Die feimaurere: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (freemasons: myth and reality).



Just around the corner of the fachhoghschule. Kirche jesus christi und der heiligen letzte tage, (church of Jesus Christ and the latter day saints), the 'Church Education System' or 'Bildungswesen der kirche fur junge erwachsene', for young adults. Oh oh.



Along the highway I think somewhere near frankfurt. Green, electricity poles, more green, train wires, trees. There was a warning for rat poison on the parking area, and the toilet required the use of a flashlight to operate in a closed way.

The recharcheable quality amp does electrical guitar

The amplifier I showed on previous diary pages, based on mos end amplifier chips, has been put to use as guitar amplifier fed with recharcheable batteries (in fact a pack with 20 cheap penlights).

What a wonderfull clean sound, almost unbeatable, and even good bass lines from the little speakers.

Using the wall warth supply can get you distortion, and of course the input sensitivity is a bit low and so is the impedance, but the sound could carry far, and it is convenient to play in the grass.

Windows XP repair experience

Ever met a XP sys which messes up because of some virus or other malfunctions?

Ever get used to those darned virus check things anyhow?

I didn't much, because I don't like them. Every now and then, I make a harddisc rattle for some time to see if its still ok, but that's normally it. Not some time ago last year, when I encountered an NIMBDA virus on a system I hadn't used, which took some research and then proper precaustions to get rid of succesfully.

But what if internet messes up, the virus killer has too, and system recovery does, too?

Use the wizard and/or hand save all user files (going over a lot of dirs...) get all that on some CD's or other medium, and reinstall the whole thing, I guess...

Don't make virus scanners do all the work, they may not know what file recovery dirs are.

Double windows XP installs do work, I've used that myself, so that can save the day at least.

Traveling Salesman Mathematics

I put this on the tcl wiki too, it is about a good network optimization example.

Consider a salesman with a number of customers spread all over a country or continent or neighbourhood. He wants to visit all customers or suppliers, and do so in the shortest, most efficient way.




The point of the problem is that finding the optimal solution(s) may take very much work. The most certain way is to simply travel in thoughts over all possible routes, which takes order (N-1)! possibilities to go over and take the minimum of  faculty numbers gro very fast, even faster then powers. In this case, there are 5*4*3*2*1= 120 possible routes to visit all yellow blocks. When we take 10 cities for instance, there are 3.5 million (3628800) possible ways to visit them all. Taking 20 sites, the number of possible orders to go over them is a number with 18 zeros... (2.43290200818e+018)

On a computer which would take 1 clock cycle to complete one full route, with let us say 10 GigaHerz clock rate (doesn't exist yet, probably), twenty places and all possible routes between them would take 2.4e+18/10e+9 is about 2e8 seconds to complete. That is 200,000,000 / 3600 / 24 / 7 = 40 weeks of full time computing on such hyperfast computer. For just all possible permutations (orderings) of 20 places or things. Just 20. Imagine how many possibile orderings there are for all addresses in the phonebook of a major city...

In physics this permutation problem is well known, and it plays an important role in the theoretical (nuclear) physics.

Of course one may say: for the optimal route, I usually can look at a limited set of possibilities. One is not going to travel more efficienty by going from Stockholm to Paris over Madrid instead of over Amsterdam, so going to neighbouring places is probably always more efficient. Unless one wants to count that certain roads are less efficient because they require toll to be paid, or that certain airroutes may be cheap at some point. Then still an amazing number of possible routes have to be considered of course, but at least it is more overseeable to find some reasonably efficient route.

I remember when I was starting to do my graduation work the were companies coming up which as only main product were into using computers for the logistics of such type of problem.

Luckily the telcom companies don't ever try to compute how many possible ways there are for each person in a country to send one other person a letter, and the number of possibilities  to try to take into account who can do that prior to who... What an unpredictability. Beats flipping coins or throwing dices by far.

The little drawing above shows a bwise block graph with 6 blocks which connect to all other blocks with their inputs and outputs over seperate paths. This can be used to by hand or automatically go over certain connections and make paths that way. Each output connects to another block, and the 'going over' the connection can be seen as having a cost associated with that output of a certain block.

The graph has been automatically generated, and could be generated for any number of blocks. A comparison can be made with various (computer, multi tasking or distributed) processes sending each other data.

On a dutch beach

I was at the each and took some pictures in moderate wether conditions.





Amsterdam, some atmosphere in pictures

The trees grow different, there.





I was looking for a book I discussed on some older pages, and didn't find it (yet) when the library closed.





Former Muzish Centre, Jazz and such

I happened to be at what is now called Delft University (and others) Cultural Centre, which is in fact a straight continutation in a nice brand new building (just about the time I wasn't there much anymore) of the old muzisch centrum which I very much have played music and all that can go with that, and in fact did various courses, too, including harmony theory and video shooting and montage.

By chance, it would seem without further information, there was a jazz workshop the evening, so I thought I'd see some people and a grasp of what's going, and of course excert some influence, as I was used to.

I played the piano after the workshop and performance, and put a small lyric blues on video, which can be downloaded here:

  Me at the grand piano video (windows media player)
  modem (0.6 MB)   DSL (1.9 MB)

Use the right mouse button and 'save as' to download, then double click the downloaded video file in file explorer. You can also right click and 'copy link location' one of th files in the browser, and then open windows media player, click the 'File' menu, and invoke Ópen Url', which gives you a place to 'Paste' (right mouse button menu, or type control-v) the url from this server, and of course click or press OK. The latter method can give you video straight away, this server can keep up with the lower bandwidt version for sure, so you can enjoy immedeateplaying, the other is just on edge, so you may get some hickups along the way, depending on the player buffer settings.

Once either file is downloaded, it should play fine, I tested them.