Q: How much wood would a Richuck chuck if a Richuck could chuck
wood?
A: Quite a bit.
The few times in the past when I was able to get my hands onto a
tree or three, I thoroughly enjoyed turning them into firewood.
It's good workout, you get fresh air, and you can actually see what
you accomplished with your hands. Back then, I had access to a
hatchet, a felling axe and a single wedge. Splitting anything
larger than 20 or 30 cm in diameter was tedious work, though still
enjoyable.
Two weeks ago, I was presented with several cubic meters of
spruce; log diameters ranging in between 10 and 50 cm, pre-cut to
two meters in length. Plus, access to a chainsaw. Yay. After some
research, I ordered two helicoidal splitting wedges (they turn
themselves when driven into wood), a splitting axe and a
splitting maul.
The rest of the equipment handed to me is probably older than I am,
but still working perfectly fine. You have to admire the simple yet
efficient design of the
cant hook. Something I
could not find an English name for is the German
Sapie, in itself loosely
defined as "any tool you can use to pick up, turn, drag or
otherwise move logs". There's a surprising variety of these tools,
but then, moving wood around has been a necessity of life for
millennia so people are bound to come up with good designs.
Last weekend, the chainsaw wasn't running very smoothly or much
at all, resulting in hours spent coaxing it to cut at least enough
for
some hacking (the wood, not the computer kind). Other
than our chainsaw troubles, that weekend was very pleasant and I
ended up splitting tons of logs.
We had the chainsaw overhauled and resharpened during the week
and picked it up again on Friday, planning to resume cutting early
Saturday, a plan that was spoiled by torrential downpour and
hail.
In the afternoon, I started splitting some left-overs around the
house and used a short break from the rain to head out into the
woods to where the logs are piled. The place I chose for splitting
is somewhat exposed and even though the mix of rain, sleet, snow,
hail, and everything in between resumed soon enough turns out you
simply stop caring at some point. While temperatures were around
freezing, I ended up being drenched in sweat in no time at all.
There is something primordial and deeply satisfying about simply
working away at these logs, ending with piles and piles of
firewood. Of course, using my favourite new toy,
4.6
kg of forged stainless steel fuck you, increased said
satisfaction immensely. Between the two wedges and that maul,
splitting any middle-European conifers is a breeze. Add in the
splitting axe for slim trunks and splitting will take less than 60
seconds per cut, no matter how many branch knots or pockets of
shock-absorbing partially decayed wood you encounter. If only I've
had those tools a decade and a half ago...
While I am feeling muscles I forgot I had, I am planning to
pursue this new-found old hobby for at least the foreseeable
future. Especially since I sourced more logs and a few trees,
already.
The RcppDE package required a bug-fix release. One of the tests compared
results to those from the
DEoptim package this
is based upon, and these are no longer equal, leading the tests to fail.
While I was at it, I finally committed a few more things that had piled up.
Below are the corresponding ChangeLog entries
Thanks!!!
This is a drastic drop compared with last year (about 60 students submitted 70 proposals). However, this drop can easily be explained: To even apply we required a small patch, which is a big hurdle.
Today I took that final step:
good news: it looks like more & more people are working on RC bugs &
doing NMUs. here are my contributions from this week:
If you are one of those 
If you're an admin or a mentor, you can produce a similar graph for your
own org(s) - just download this 
I got into a discussion recently about what a Linux distribution actually
is. To some people, a distro is just a convenient way of source of binaries
from which to pick what you install, either on your own computer or when
creating an embedded system, or some other specific kind of system.
To others it's a way of life, and the realization of the ideals of
software freedom. To yet others, a distro is an outdated concept that
will go away in the near-ish future, to be replaced by ... something.
Here's my take: a Linux distribution is defined by the following
things:
