Once a month I play a game of No limit Texas Hold em with some friends. In my first game ever I lost because I was “pot committed“. I only learned this term after reading some poker books. It means that I invested a lot in the pot and I wanted the follow through not based and what was the probability of winning the hand versus the possible gain.
In simple terms this meant that I thought my hand was more worth in my mind than in reality. When I was 12 my grand father wanted to learn me the basic principles of economy where he explained me the consumer theory and the indifference curve. These are very scientific and statistical measurable theories.
But they forgot the human aspect. Strange psychological behaviour kicks in and people are more committed to goods they already own and value them higher than a equal good not in their possession. They tried to prove this theory with psychological behavioural tests. This field is called Behavioural Economics.
Off course there are scientific researchers questioning this endowment effect. But in my personal opinion it explains being “pot committed” in Texas Hold em. Being informed you should recognize this behaviour in your game plan and avoid this at all costs. In a next post I will explaining hand odds and probabilities.
Disclaimer: I’m not a poker champion are even a reasonable good poker player.
Filed under: Texas Hold em, howto on December 14th, 2008 | No Comments »
I refrained myself this year from buying a PS3 to play GTA 4. The promises for the PC version where to good to be true with online gameplay, modding, improved graphics etc.
I pre-ordered it from steam and downloaded as soon as it was available at a blazing speed of 1.7mb/s. I started the game and I noticed I couldn’t see anything past the hood of my car. I looked into the graphics section and it seemed I only had 256mb video memory. The bear minimums to play the game was 256mb video memory and the recommeded 512mb.
But I have 2 nvidia 7800 gt cards with 256mb each in SLI. So I checked and checked and stumbled on to following document: GTA VI Graphics Settings. It says it supports crossfire but not SLI and to wait until they release a pacht and oh yes probably new video card drivers too.
Tomorrow I’m of to the shop buying a video card with enough ram on board to play this game. This will set me back a PS3. I hope this works because I’m reading all different kinds of horror stories…
Filed under: ranting on December 3rd, 2008 | 2 Comments »
To speedup eclipse in Ubuntu install the SUN java package and make sure it is the system default.
sudo update-alternatives –config java
When installing the aptana plugin you will receive the error missing swt-mozilla-gtk.
sudo apt-get install libswt-mozilla-gtk-3.4-jni xulrunner
This will help you to run eclipse with the aptana plugin without errors at improvement performance.
Filed under: Uncategorized on November 27th, 2008 | No Comments »
After updating my monster resume I got a lot of emails from recruiters. But this morning I got an odd one. It was for a project manager role in Brussels. But the recruiter was someone based in India.
I have experience in off shoring development teams to different locations on the globe. We used recruiters that knew their local market. But using recruiter to recruit people on the other side of the planet… What is his added value to the recruitment process? He just matches the job specifications to the abilities listed on the resume of the possible candidate. But does he investigate if the ambitions of the possible candidate match the strategic direction of the future employer. Does the culture inside this company matches to the candidates expectations?
Anyway I don’t think he will ge a reply from me.
Filed under: ranting, work on November 20th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I have been using the E-text editor Codignitor bundle from sellersrank for some time now. But the E-text editor is windows only and Textmate is mac only. But they both use same XML bundle format which have a big advantage.
Bundles are like templates with tab stops in them. Also it is possible to call external programs to fill in data dynamically. This improves development speed considerable.
On Linux you have Gedit and the snippets plugin which replicates the same behaviour. Off course this snippets plugin uses a different XML structure. So I wrote a small perl script that parsed the bundle CI XML’s and reworked them into a XML format used by Gedit snippets.
I did not have time to test the external calls to see if they work on linux.
Download the GEDIT CodeIgnitor snippets.
Instructions: Copy the file to ~/.gnome2/gedit/snippets
Filed under: programming on November 15th, 2008 | No Comments »
I’m very happy about my sweetcron lifestream. But my blogging favourite is still wordpress. Recently they released the second beta release 2.7. Which has a lot improvements especially the UI in the backend got a serious overhaul.
Upgrading was easy so I had some time left to redesign my theme. Some fancy rounded corners. Mixing the main green colour with some brown. And reducing the 2 sidebars to a single sidebar. I think it is a improvement 
Filed under: thissite on November 11th, 2008 | No Comments »
De gordel is yearly happening which carries a very political burden due to the ’special’ Belgian situation.
Anyway it is very wel organised and they measure your time when you climb the ‘Muur’ in Geeraardsbergen. It rained all day so the cobblestones where wet and slippery. It was very though butI managed it.
Filed under: 3athlon on September 10th, 2008 | No Comments »
I installed Sweetcron and started lifestreaming. It won’t be my default start page until I re-branded the theme.
See it in action!!!
Filed under: life, thissite, work, writings on August 29th, 2008 | No Comments »
This is the cloud versus desktop/own server. After buying my D40 and trying to spend some effort photgraphing I will share my pictures on flickr.
My old pictures (snapshots with old ixus) will remain in my own hosted gallery2.
You see 2 pictures on the right hand side of this page. Top points to my flickr the one beneath to my own hosted gallery.
Filed under: photography on August 21st, 2008 | No Comments »
Last night I worked for 6 to 7 hours to get my laptop working again. It felt great! At work I’m no longer ‘doing’ the actual technical stuff. I advise and guide people to solve problems. But this team it was me and the laptop trouble.
The setting:
My laptop was installed with XP on one giant partition. Don’t believe the hype I always prefer VISTA over XP on a decent specced machine. So I created a second partition with the ubunut live CD and gparted. On which I installed VISTA.
After a month using onlu VISTA and forgetting I ever had a XP partition I wanted to install Linux because this is my preferred OS. I Installed Ubuntu on the fist partion deleting XP. I installed a /boot, / and swap (3 new partitions).
When I rebooted no VISTA in the grub bootmenu. Well I can fix this I presumed and added the correct code to grub. Bummer it doens’t work. After some searching ldis -l’s etc. I noticed VISTA was on the logical partition and this is something VISTA doens’t like.
Solution would be to delete my new ubuntu installation and add the free space to the VISTA installation, creating one partition. This process took 3 hours voor 70gig. After this I needed to restore the VISTA bootloader which could be easily done with the VISTA Rescue CD and the repair option. Also I needed to restore the BCD (kb927392)
Yes I could boot into windows… But C:\ did not exist and everything was on the D drive. We can change this with device management but the shell was crippled and I could not start any program. I googled and found out that microsoft had a solution (kb223188). But how can I edit the registry without being able to start a program? Well VISTA rescue CD to the rescue. I booted the CD went to repair and started a CMD in which I opened REGEDT32.EXE. I loaded a hive (system32/SYSTEM) and followed the registry hack from the Microsoft kb.
I rebooted crossed my fingers looked at the clock (1 o’clock at night, started at 6.30 that evening)…… And it worked. Eureka!!!!! It felt great.
No I’m going to gpart the disk again and install ubuntu in the second partition.
Filed under: howto, windows on August 21st, 2008 | No Comments »