pvaneynd

The Things from Watts, who is slowly getting 'preferred author' status from me.

Following the announcement of the source+throw away binaries route for uploading packages I've had a brief discussion with our FTP team.

The implications of the new method would be that if you upload a package it will automatically be recompiled from source by using the packages already in the system.

For cmucl which needs cmucl to recompile itself it means that we can only use the previous version of cmucl in the archive, not the one we are just uploading. This won't work as the compiling cmucl needs to be hand-patched to be more 'like' the new version, otherwise you cannot rebuild it.

The conclusion of this discussion is that systems like cmucl are no longer possible under this new system.

The FTP team suggested to change cmucl to be able to do this. Needless to say we already have this, after several years of hard effort by multiple people, it's just called sbcl.

So in the end the 'everybody uses C' camp won and cmucl on Debian will die a quiet death. It's a sad end for a system hand-patched from PDP10's to modern CPU's over the coarse of almost 30 years...

This weekend I finally did what I've been planning to do for some time and wrote a iPhoto exporter. See the alioth project oipe or "Offline iPhoto Exporter".

At home I backup my iMac to the debian server, but the iPhoto folder was just a mess and zoutke complained she could never find anything.

This is because the iPhoto folder itself is just a dump of your 'rolls' when you imported the picture. When you cleanup and classify nothing happens to the real data (which is good). So I needed something to take an iPhoto folder and turn it into something that other people can use...

The exporter is written for sbcl for now and use cl-sqlite to extract the folder structure of iPhoto and the pictures in those folders to generate both a link-farm with hard links to those images and a (really bad) set of webpages showing the thumbnails and linking to those pictures.

The advantages are that it is really fast (less then a minute for > 7000 pictures) and doesn't take up much more space.

Future plans include nicer web-pages, also having a 'Faces' and 'Location' hierarchy and adding the tags back to the pictures.

I sort of installed Civ on my ipod touch.

Just 'checking if it worked' costed me 2 hours... so when I go and do something 'quick' and don't come back for hours don't worry too much ;-)

A short summary:
- trip there: uneventful with stopovers in Houffalize and Altstad in .ch.
- caravan: Monday morning model with non-functional power system, unclosable door, panels that were falling off and a front wheel that keeps dropping down when driving rendering the whole system dangerously unstable.
- camping: (jesolo international) great!
- weather: okish, a bit of rain now and again but hot enough to enjoy the sea and pool
- health: nearly broken tow from playing too much in aqualandia, some insect bites
- plans: visit Venice again, make more pictures.

Future plans:
- don't rent from http://www.caravans-deblock.be/ again

So yesterday I had to 'sit' at the elections. In the end I was the 'second guy' who double checks if you are on the voters lists, marks you and gives you the voting card.

In our district we vote electronically. We have a bunch of ancient PC's with light-pens and you insert the card, select the person you want to vote, confirm and then you get the card back. Then you leave the booth and insert the card into the urn.

Which then checks if you indeed voted (voting is compulsory, if you don't want to you have to select 'blanco') and that the card is readable.

Most of of other people were more or less willing to do the job so we had fun and interesting discussions. At one point the head mentioned that the paper trail (voting list, double entry of presence, stamping of cards etc) would be better done electronically. I obviously protested and was joined by a guy who does safety coordinator at the railroads. We both agreed that a copious amount of paper is the only good way forward unless you have serious equipment (multiple WORM installations, the whole HIPA/FDI dance).

The most popular votes was the owner of the local ice cream saloon who brought ice for everyone, thanks 'Glacé Joseph'!

All in all a nice time, and later on I was very happy to learn that most of the ~ 800 people I gave to cards did not vote for the censored VB anymore.

( Read more... )

Todo: unpack and cleanup all the stuff still.

From a friend who is now a professor:

A student has to give a talk about the general relativity theory. (In English)

He starts the talk with "I'm going to discuss Genital Relativity", instant reaction from the smart girlfriend in the audience: "yeah honey, blame it on Lorentz contraction".

Strangely enough none of my non-physics friends seem to get the joke, from nwhyte I expect he also gets it :-)

for the non technies, that's my CCIE number. 3 weeks of working and now it's over!. let the partying begin!