Search Results: "jan"

24 September 2006

Brett Parker: Django Packaging

Well, I've been added to the python-modules project on alioth and am looking at getting the django development in there over the next week, just need to get my head round how this works first and checkout Raphael Hertzog's repackaging of the 0.95 debs that I did in to the new python policy style. Will also need to work out what to do about different python versions, django-admin.py would need to call the right python depending on some setting - not sure how to do that yet - with the previous format there where just 2 different python-django packages for the 2 different versions of python, and then an alternative to point to the "right" django-admin.py within site-packages of the correct python directory - with the central install this is going to be more interesting. Any thoughts on this gratefully recieved to my email address (linked from the bottom of my website.

21 September 2006

Clint Adams: The Creek of the Edmung Fitzcarraldo

Ola and Kari Dunk stared down the vale and the vale stared back with contempt. That would look so much better with a six-lane highway lined with strip malls! they declared, and plunged down the hillside until they came to the hobbithole of The Right Reverend Mr.-or-Mrs. Frump. Frump, they said, We're gonna build a six-lane highway lined with strip malls right through here! Aren't you totally excited or some junk? What? Right here? You want to demolish my hobbithole and my Creek of Piety? Frump demanded. Like, yeah, the Dunks replied. But you'll have a new, better house. We'll get you a double-wide trailer and bolt it to the side of an Arby's and it'll be totally radical. Um, that doesn't sound better, grumped Frump. Yeah, it'll be awesome, the Dunks continued. But if you don't like it, there's no problem. We'll just demolish your double-wide and get you a pre-fab polystyrene shack that you can staple to the side of a Borders. Anyhoo, you have no choice, so you might as well just embrace it! As they moved down the line, they encountered people who were willing to part with their homes for a promise of progress, and people who were more resistant than The Right Reverend Mr.-or-Mrs. Frump. Days passed, and on each day a few people would climb to the Dunks' ch teau and plead with them not to demolish their homes, and on each day some people would circuit the homes of the vale, offering various opinions. One group comprised Fulano, Mengano, and Zutano, and one one occasion this group bivouacked on the prow of the hobbitboat Sloop Johnny Five. When Frangelico Admiral Lady Bernard da Gamboa approached to confront the trespassers, Fulano shouted, Ha! Ha! You are being divisive and not a team player! and Mengano shouted, Ha! Ha! You are fucking assholes for being uncooperative and preventing us from getting a Filene's Basement! Why can't you just submit to the demolition and see what happens? It can't possibly be that bad! and Zutano said, Ha! Ha! This is not in actuality a sloop! and Frangelico Admiral Lady Bernard da Gamboa chased them overboard with a sugar cane. Up in the ch teau, the Dunks were negotiating real estate contracts. This is totally gonna be good for the vale! said the Dunks, and Fast Food Franchiser LeRoy said, Damn right it's gonna be good for the... for the what? and Corporate Conrad said, Look, we need to get this construction underway before the end of the fiscal year, or there's gonna be trouble, so let's get this done soon, a'ight? So the Dunks donned their Amulets of Eminent Domain and waltzed deftly into the vale and muttered, Look, um, we can't build this highway all by ourselves, so you're gonna have to help us. Fulano, Mengano, and Zutano cheered. Karel Novak, go help Ola and Kari, while we argue about politics on Usenet! they cheerfully suggested, and Karel Novak joined the Dunks. Frump and da Gamboa gestured obscenely toward the demolitionists. Janez Novak (no relation to Karel) screamed out, HOW CAN YOU BE SO RUDE TO YOUR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS? THEY HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING TO DESERVE THAT! THEY ARE JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU! ANYHOO, THERE HAS BEEN CONSTRUCTION IN THE VALE BEFORE; HOW DO YOU THINK YOUR HOMES WERE BUILT? , Jon Dilianger-Heys prepared a nice mushroom salad, and Corporate Conrad tapped her watch.

9 September 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Wil Wheaton reviews TNG

Y’all remember Wil Wheaton? He was Gordie in Stand By Me, Wesley in The Next Generation, then disappeared, then started blogging, wrote some books, … Now he’s reviewing Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (contains spoilers). The first is now available. Wil’s resentment of how the writers treated his character on TNG has been known for a long time. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the review is Wil discussing the lines he was given:
[….] I also got to say lines like, “So you mean I’m drunk? I feel strange, but also good!” In fact, John D.F. Black — who I didn’t realize at the time hated me — also wrote Justice, where he gave me the awesome line, “We’re from Starfleet! We don’t lie!” Thanks for that one, too, Mr. Black.
But the review is not just snarking agains former bosses, it is a real review. It contains a synopsis (spoilers, beware!), a personal behind-the-scenes memory, a (very!) memorable quote, and an interesting take on the “bottom line”. I’ve always liked Wil’s writing. This one is not an exception.

4 September 2006

Margarita Manterola: RC bug-squashing second-week

So, last week was a bit bumpy since I was sick for a couple of days, and then had a power outage on Friday and Saturday, thus not being able to keep up with my daily RC bug fixing, but I've been catching up since then. I've uploaded patches done by Arjan Oosting, for packages that wouldn't compile with autoconf2.6: #379812 (kde-style-polyester), #379813 (kxmleditor) and #379815 (klog).

I uploaded a patch by Mart n Ferrari for lilo: #374477 (use MAKEDEV instead of mknod at postinst), and another patch by Mart n for courier-authlib #378571 (fixing the permissions of /var/run/courier/authdaemon).

I uploaded a patch by Andreas Jochens for ntlmaps: #379700 (fixing the build-dependency). A patch by Luca Bruno for predict: #379495 (fixing a change of location of forms.h). And a patch by Mike O'Connor for stardict: #379152 (fixing a misuse of size_t that made it fail in 64bit architectures).
Stardict had a problem with rpath that made me get to know the LIBTOOL_IS_A_FOOL hack, and I had to apply that, so that the binaries were not screwed up.

I also uploaded a fixed version of yacas, that included patches from Arjan Oosting (fixing #379261 and #379895) and Braun Gabor (fixing non-RC #295413). However, it's not like the only thing I've done is upload patches done by others. I've also done some patches myself: The amount of bugs currently affecting the next release is 247. It's not a secret that we are a bit behind the schedule (we should be at less than 200 bugs by now). But it's also totally possible to get back on track if we work together on fixing the current bugs and we stop uploading unneeded new releases that trigger new transitions.

3 September 2006

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber: aide 0.11 in unstable

After over two years without a release, and after having release candidates in experimental since October, aide 0.11 was released a few days ago, and I have just uploaded 0.11-1 to unstable. This time, I even haven’t forgotten to use the -v option to svn-buildpackage to have the changelog entries for the package versions uploaded to experimental in the unstable upload notice as well.aide is the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, a program which compares the real state of the file system with a database which holds various file attributes such as inode data and/or cryptographic checksums. In 2005, the Debian maintainer of aide, Mike Markley, has accepted me as a co-maintainer, and since I have done the biggest part of the work in the last months, I have adopted the package as responsible maintainer in January 2006. Mike is still listed in Uploaders and can commit to our alioth svn, though.

2 September 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Haskell responses for Eric Warmenhoven

Eric Warmenhoven asked a couple of Haskell questions. Here are my answers. BTW, do you want to be added to Planet Haskell? If so, drop me an email. Also, be sure to subscribe to the Haskell mailing lists. Where did all the shared libraries go? Turning a Haskell module into a static library looks like it s fairly straightforward, but it looks like it s impossible to create a shared library that s usable by other Haskell programs. See the GHC FAQ. Why do header files have a bizzare suffix? If module A uses something from module B and module B uses something from module A, there s a circular dependency that GHC can t resolve on its own. The solution to this is to create a boot copy of module A that defines the things that B depends on without depending on B. In C this is called a header file. In GHC this is called a boot file and is given the extension .hs-boot . There are no header files with Haskell. Or rather, there are (the .hi files), but they are generated by the compiler when compiling the module. The .hs-boot files are not header files but a workaround for GHC’s inability to compile circularly dependent modules (which the language spec requires). Why does everyone ignore all the practical stuff? I read through five tutorials before I finally found one (on Monads, of all things) that actually had a usable getArgs example. Perhaps many people consider the practicals easy and want to discuss the hard things instead. Where s the Debian-specific documentation? For example, there s a GTK module. Where is that? How do I get it? Is there a package for it? If not, how do I make one? (I saw the debian haskell mailing list but didn t feel like wading through the archives hoping that one of my questions might be answered.) There is no Debian-specific documentation apart from a draft “policy”. Googling, I found this repository that contains Gtk2HS debs. Haven’t tried them, though.

Michael Janssen: Weekend Weeviews: Brewster's Millions, All That Jazz

Brewster's Millions

Richard Pryor and John Candy in a classic story retold many times. I had seen parts of this movie on TV or in the background and thought I should give it a try all the way through. Spending lots of money isn't quite as easy as it should be in this comedy directed by Walter Hill (48 Hours). I thoroughly enjoyed the story as much as is really possible in this type of plot. I thought that the acting was somewhat over the top and the main plot meandered a bit, but at 101 minutes it never went too far off the mark. The payoff at the end, even though it was obvious and expected, left me smiling while the credits rolled. I give it a 8.

All That Jazz

Life is not normal for Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) in this foray into the backstage of directing and coreography directed by Bob Fosse. In a setting where the only normal part of life seems to be the morning wake-up routine, a duality of mind and reality appears in the beginning. There is also a great interplay between Gideon and his daughter. I was dissappointed to continue on through the ending, which was completely flat leaving me wishing I had hit the back button on the remote and watched the first half over again. A fascinating tale of the struggle between personal and professional life turns into a disaster of an ending. It scores a 4.

Michael Janssen: Late at night when the wires in the walls

After my iBook problems last week, I tried to install Debian on the thing. I have narrowed down the problem to something with the hard drive inside, because the machine seems to run fine and go through most of the installation without any trouble, but once I start using the hard drive, it completely freezes. I successfully ran the hardware test disc which came with it a couple times in extended mode, but I'm not sure that it uses the hard drive in it's tests long enough for it to exhibit the problem. The failure seems to be somewhat random in nature, occuring at different times in the install process. Now I have the unhappy decision of trying to save this laptop which is more than 3 years old, or to attempt to buy a new one. Right now I am leaning toward buying a new one.

Honeywell seems 1.5 times as long this week, mostly because I'm making up for a day which I missed a couple weeks ago. Things have settled down there in terms of software failure, so I'm back at the normal coding which I am doing. The code uses Ogre, which is a handy 3d engine, making it much easier than learning something like OpenGL, and as a bonus adding portability. I am considering building some play applicaitons with the toolkit at home just because it would be fun.

Tonight I need to build a couple presentations covering some papers which were in CVPR this year to present at a reading group at Honeywell. It would be fine except that I am completely unaware of any of the recent history of vision research, so it makes it much harder to build the presentations. I hope I can finish them in a reasonable amount of time so I can watch Eureka tonight.

The TiVo Diet is still working out as expected. I discovered that I don't really have anything to watch on Sunday or Monday of the week. I'm getting much more productive work done than I used to. One downside of the diet is that I tend to not want to just sit and veg at the end of the work day - I think it frustrates [info]ceilingsarecool a bit because I'm always going off to the office to do something on the computer.

I recieved and watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip yesterday. Being an Aaron Sorkin fan, I am excited for another of his shows to broadcast. Judging by the pilot, it should be a decent show.

Sidenote: Planet Debian seems to like one of my weekend weeviews a little too much, and is regrabbing it for the front page every so often. I can't figure out why this is happening, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, in a couple more posts it should be off the RSS feed.

Michael Janssen: I can work overtime I can work in a mine

Labor day weekend approacheth, and myself and [info]ceilingsarecool have secured a little getaway for ourselves. It is proving to be a nice way to relax a while before a big rush of work. I have been in all true form not updating the blog lately, so I get to give everyone a big update all at once.

The iBook problems which I mentioned in the last blog entry proved to be fatal to the machine, so I went out and bought a shiny new MacBook to replace it. Given the pricing behind most of the small laptops and the experience that I had with my iBook, I was happy with my decision. I plan to add ram (Apple's ram is so expensive) and replace the hard drive (also cheaper elsewhere) sometime before the end of the year. After I bought the new book, looking through my old receipts I discovered that my iBook is still under AppleCare so I took it in to get it fixed. The Genius Bar at the MOA store was very busy today so we had to walk around the mall and then wait for ages still. However, we successfully got the thing to freeze twice in the presence of a MacGenius(tm) so it is now off to the magic depot in the sky for fixing before I sell it used to someone. It is a nice machine and works great other than the freezing which will be fixed, and I was informed by the MacGenius(tm) that the AppleCare travels with the machine, so if it breaks in the next 8 months or so the buyer can get it fixed for free.

Honeywell this week was pretty hectic and non-normal. There was a deadline which required the working of an application I hadn't planned on having working until the end of the week, so I had to work Monday and Tuesday, putting in 20 hours before mid-week. This made it slightly hard to get anything else done, but still not bad because it means I have a little leeway for next week. The good news is that we got it done, and the even better news is that it's possible to focus on other things which I have more experience in there now.

After the weekend (which I'm sure we'll have pictures from) is the start of the new school year. This means that my schedule is being impacted a lot, and I will need to get used to classes again. With any luck, this semester will be the last time I ever take classes in grad school. I also need to start a paper next week which is due on the 14th, so it's a little tight on the scheduling end. Hopefully I will be able to pull it off, because the conference is in Italy next year and [info]ceilingsarecool has a keen interest in going with me.

But for now, I get a little R&R time before rejoining previously scheduled overwhelming work, already in progress.

1 September 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au will be held from 15 - 20 January 2007 in Sydney, Australia.

Hopefully, Bruno and I will be given the opportunity to share with others our experience with upstream/downstream maintenance of Mondo Rescue. The presentation we have submitted about this is called "Mondo Rescue & Debian - an Example for Upstream/Downstream Collaboration".

It would be positively fabulous to actively participate in the conference and to be surrounded by people that share the same interest in FOSS. And meeting Bruno in person would be cool, too - after all, we've worked quite closely together for a year now without even speaking to each other. Maybe we'd even get some hacking done! ;-)

I am excited!

27 August 2006

Russell Coker: Linux on the Desktop

I started using Linux in 1993. I initially used it only in text-mode as I didn't have enough RAM to run XFree86 on my Linux machine. I ran text-mode Linux server machines from 1993 to 1998. In 1998 I purchased my first laptop and installed Linux with KDE on it. I chose KDE because it had the greatest similarity to OS/2 which I had used as my desktop OS prior to that time. At the same time I purchased an identical laptop for my sister and gave her an identical configuration of Linux and KDE.<br /><br />Running a Linux laptop in 1998 was a lot harder for a non-technical person than it is today. There was little compatability with MS file formats and few options for support for Internet connections and third-party hardware and software (most things worked but you needed to know what to do). One advantage of using Linux in this regard is that the remote support options have always been good, I was able to fix my sister's laptop no matter which country she was in and which country I was in. Her laptop kept working for more than 5 years without the need for a reinstall (try that on Windows).<br /><br />It was when VMWare first became available (maybe 2000) that I converted my parents to using Linux. At first they complained a bit about it being different and found VMWare less convenient than the OS/2 <span style="font-style: italic;">Dos box</span> for running their old DOS programs. But eventually they broke their dependence on DOS programs and things ran fairly smoothly. There were occasions when they complained about not having perceived benefits of Windows (such as the supposed ability to plug in random pieces of hardware and have things all work perfectly). The fact that using OS/2 and then Linux has given them 14 years of computer use with no viruses and no trojans tends to get overlooked.<br /><br />Of recent times the only problem that my parents have experienced is when they bought a random cheap printer without asking my advice. The printer in question turned out to not work with Fedora Core 4, but when Fedora Core 5 came out the printer worked. Waiting 6 months for a printer upgrade isn't really a serious problem (the old printer which had worked 6+ years was still going strong).<br /><br />My parents and my sister now have second-hand P3 desktop machines running Fedora. P3 CPUs dissipate significantly less heat than P4 and Athlon CPUs, this significantly reduces the risk of hard drives dying when machines are left on in unairconditioned rooms as well as saving money on electricity. For the typical home user who doesn't play 3D games there is no real need for a CPU that's more powerful than a 1GHz P3. This of course means that there is less need for me to reinstall on newer hardware which also means more reliability.<br /><br />I always find it strange when people claim that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. I provide all the support for three non-technical users of Linux on the desktop and it really doesn't take much work because things just work. Corporate desktops are even easier, in a company you install what people need for their work and don't permit them to do anything different.<br /><br />It seems to me that Linux has been ready for the desktop since 1998.

16 August 2006

Evan Prodromou: 28 Thermidor CCXIV

I spent most of the day today putting polishing touches on the OpenID MediaWiki extension I took to Wikimania a couple of weeks ago. It was fun to work on, but spending a lot of time with Jonathan Daugherty of Janrain Inc., David Recordon of Verisign and David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios let me know that there was still a lot of work to do. Needless to say, helping kate of Wikia and Travis of wikiHow step through the installation and testing also was a humbling experience. "No... don't do that... Ouch... No, I didn't think of that... Uh, I'll definitely get to that later..." Probably the most painful moment was having about 4 people all at once exclaim in horror that I was storing searchable data inside a blob in the database. "Uh, see, it was just easier that way..." Harsh stares for Evan, you can believe. So today I've been sanding a few of the rough edges and doing some optimization (indexed columns -- what a concept!) and otherwise fudging with the code to make it work better. Jonathan had done some quick hacks at the conference, and I've been adding in his patches as well. tags:

Tha Grill Maj, Amita June and I went out to dinner at the Tha Grill on rue Laurier and St. Laurent this evening. We had some anniversaries to celebrate, so it seemed like a good day to go out for dinner at a new restaurant. The Grill is at the portal between Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal hipster neighborhood and foodier-but-also-hipster Mile End. It's got huge, open windows on St. Laurent and we got to sit right off the sidewalk, perfect people-watching spot. The room is big and airy with pleasant wood details and lots of Thai statuary -- all in natural wood tones. It's a very nice room. The food was great, too. We got crab claws in curry sauce, and a green curry, with papaya salad and fried squid as appetizers. It was all done very nicely. Most pleasant was the proprietor coming to our table with small, heart-shaped slices of melon d'eau (watermelon) for Amita June. Les enfants sont sacr s en Tha land, he gave as explanation: that is, children are sacred in Thailand. Ah, if that were only the case everywhere. It's hard to see summer slipping away in Montreal -- especially since we're off to Wikisym this weekend, and by the time we come back it will be a few days into September. Such a good place to be when the sun is warm, really. tags:

14 August 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Fire

There was a fire on a nearby apartment house on Friday and again on Saturday. I went to see the house Saturday afternoon, just to see the last fire truck leave the scene. They still had a hose connected to the underground water pipe. To my knowledge, nobody was hurt, and everybody who lived in the building has found new logdings.

13 August 2006

Brett Parker: New Django Packages

I've been slacking a bit of late on updating the django packages - and there was a new release (0.95), so if you're using my python-django packages of 0.91, beware, the latest version has some backwards incompatible changes - you'll be wanting to look at http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/BackwardsIncompatibleChanges which documents all the changes... I've also made new python-django-svn-trunk packages (guess what they follow ;), so they should be ready for use now. Go forth people, and make the web a better place :) Oh, packages at: deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ sarge django or deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ sid django

9 August 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Laptop down

A half an hour ago my brand new Dell XPS M1710 laptop stopped working. It just turned off and would not turn on again. I got my old HP lappie out and went to Dell site for debugging. After several quite nice debugging steps the fault fell into a generic “no idea what it is, but it sure is bad” category and I was told to contact the support, which I did - by email. Let’s see how long it takes to get this thing fixed and how will they respect my Linux partitions if I will need to send it in.
Oh well, that means that I will go to bed early today - yay! (P.S. As one might note, I am very keen to find good thing behind anything. I got into this habit when I was fired from my job last January. It helped me a lot. Repeat after me - every change is for good. It is that simple, you just need to find the good things sometimes. Sometimes it is hard, but the search is rewarding.)

5 August 2006

Michael Janssen: iBook failure recovery, and what else I've been doing

Well, I discovered last night while I was writing a blog entry that my iBook G4 is somewhat broken. After ignoring it for most of the day today, I am currently working on getting my home directory off of it so that I can try installing Debian later tonight. I think that some piece of hardware has failed, because I haven't seen OS X sieze up like this before. However, I haven't yet had a freeze occur when I am in Linux of some kind. The symptoms of this failure vary between not being able to boot (blue screen before progress bar) to booting and then freezing completely, to the point of no mouse movement, to booting and freezing partially allowing for mouse movement but no interaction of any kind. I'm trying to view this as an opportunity to install Debian now that the Airport Express works in Linux, but the type of failure is very frustrating. rsync to the rescue, to restart backups where they left off before they froze.

It seems that software isn't being nice to me lately either. When I tried to start Visual Studio .NET at work on Tuesday, it refused to start, including without a .sln being loaded up at all. This caused a complete work stoppage for me, spending about half the day trying to discover what was wrong and putting calls in to various help desks. The other half of the day and half of yesterday was spent attempting to setup a second system with the files needed for working. I think that when I return on Monday I will be in a state where I can just start working again. As a bonus, they should have my original machine (which is fairly beefy from a hardware standpoint) reimaged so I can start setting it up once more with the tools for work.

Other than the constant computer problems, I've been playing a fair amount of Battlefield 2. I've managed to get almost all of the basic badges, and I am quickly on my way to another promotion. The TiVo TV Diet is working out well, I am actually watching less TV than I planned for, mostly because I'm not really up for watching Jeopardy every day. That knocks me down to less than 2 hours a day. I seem to be getting a lot more personal work done, and watching more of my Netflix movies. I uploaded new packages for vgrabbj, codeville and bogosort. I am happy with the state of all of them excepting bittorrent, which is still a very old version due to the new license they switched to for the 4.X series. There has been some movement on that front lately however: apparently the Ubuntu people are bugging Bram and friends as well as myself about changes that the license needs. Crossing my fingers!

One Year Ago: The good part is that it does actually help you, well, get things done.
Two Years Ago: Tuesdays have now become my TV night.

4 August 2006

Evan Prodromou: 17 Thermidor CCXIV

I was pretty happy to see that Arthur Frommer, of Frommer's, said that Wikitravel may help in planning your trip. It's true, too. He doesn't give the kindest description of Wikitravel, but then again, he doesn't really have the incentive to. (Thanks to Jani, who spotted the article and posted it in the Wikitravel logbook for 30 July 2006.) Don Marti, who has a new blog at LinuxWorld.com, had an interesting take on Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, originally from Dave Weinberger's notes on Wikipedia credibility. Wow, that's a lot of links. Anyways, the upshot is that Britannica has its back up against the wall, and is in this venom-spitting defensive position, much like wp:Richard Nixon in his last days in the White House. You kind of have to feel sorry for the ol' Brit. I don't think it should have to work that way. At least for Wikitravel, I want traditional travel publishers to know that the user-contributed, user-fact-checked information on Wikitravel is theirs to use under a very liberal copyleft license. You've got as much right to the travel guides as anyone else, and they can help your business and your readers. I also think there's a place for the first travel publisher to start sharing their copyrighted information into Wikitravel for continued development and use. There's a lot of positive publicity in it for the company that starts devoting photos, data, and copy to the public good by putting it in Wikitravel. My phone is on and my email slot is open (see my Wikitravel home page for contact details) if there's an executive or editor with the courage and foresight to take the plunge. tags:

28 July 2006

Michael Janssen: Work and Procrastination: A six-hour study of the (10+2)*5 hack.

Recently I discovered the (10+2)*5 dash courtesy of Merlin over at 43 Folders, and I thought that I would give it a try. The concept is fairly simple: work for 10 minutes, screw around for 2 minutes, repeat 5 times, and voila! you have filled an hour with 5/6 productivity. The first thing that I did was download a Konfabulator widget which keeps track of the time and pops up a warning box when you should be screwing around and working.

I worked for approximately 6 hours under this regime today at my Honeywell job, even though I don't use task lists as diligently as I should there. I found that tasks which I regarded as small were finishing in a snap, partly because I wanted to get them done before the next 2 minute break, and partly because if I didn't finish for a break, my mind didn't just stop thinking about the problem. It was very advantageous to think about something else for 2 minutes and then get back to the action because it was like taking a fresh start. I was using the dash to do some coding (the major portion of my hours right now) - finding bugs that normally would have me staring at the screen for a couple minutes seemed easy when I was just coming back from a break. The only issues which I had with it was when I got interrupted by Workrave rest breaks (I turned off microbreaks) or a coworker. I am definitely doing it again, the next time I have an hour uninterrupted.


Michael Janssen: Serendipity plugin for LiveJournal markup

Serendipity is my blogging software of choice lately, but in the past I was a happy user of LiveJournal. Fortunately, now my friends at LJ can keep up to date with my current blog, because of a great event plugin which mirrors posts here on LiveJournal (configurable of course). On LJ people use markup like [lj user="jamuraa"] in order to make a handy link to the page of the livejournal user in question. I was missing that feature, so I coded up a small plugin for s9y which converts that into [info]jamuraa. This is version 0.1, which only does the user tag. It also works in comments if you enable it. In the future, I hope to add code to detect the user type correctly (on LiveJournal there are other icons for different user types). I also probably should not hotlink to the .gifs on the livejournal servers.

To install, just unzip into the plugins/ directory of your s9y installation.

Download the LJ Markup Plugin 0.1 for Serendipity

27 July 2006

Michael Janssen: Weekend Weeviews: Omega Man, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

A month between postings. Who needs regular updates? I've got a few of these weekend weeviews piled up, so I'm going to do them two at a time every couple of days. Omega Man Charleton Heston makes this post-apocalyptic world view quite the masterpiece. Considering his current stance on guns, it is easy to throw a couple of cheap shots at the movie in which he plays a gun-crazed doctor. Thinking you're the only one left in existence has got to be pretty hard on the psyche, and it shows in the character. Robert Neville (Heston's character) obviously doesn't think he's really alone, just the only one left who shouldn't be shot on sight. The rest of the human race was hit by a crappy plague, 28 days later-style. This plague apparently doesn't kill all brain functions, but only crams you into a religious sect which could only be described as luddite. Movies aren't interesting without a love interest, so Heston finds out early about Lisa (Rosalind Cash) who is keeping a set of children who are immune. Robert is also immune, and hopes to create a serum from his blood. This 70's end of the world is remarkably watchable, although it has it's moments of Action Movie. The acting is well done, although the cult of luddites is somewhat overplayed and has strange overtones of vampirism for some reason. Omega Man gets a 7. (imdb, amazon) Conquest of the Planet of the Apes As a child of the 80s, I never saw any of the original Planet of the Apes movies, and always assumed they were campy and not well done. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they actually have a plot and are interesting. This fourth movie in the series of 70s movies presents it's moral message with a generous heaping of.. it's moral message. Years after his parents travelled backward in time in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, the only talking ape left, is incognito with the circus master who raised him and comes to the city for the first time. At this time the plague which killed all pets has already ravaged the nation, humans have decided that apes are more useful as slaves than pets, and already have a large monolithic "Ape Management" section of government. Caesar gets thrown through the system when his "owner" gets brought into questioning for.. questioning the treatment of an ape. Being highly intelligent, he quickly gets snatched up for his skills by a top government official. Starting an underground resistance movement is the next step, and dominos start to fall from there. Conquest.. then degenerates into a large-cast action film, with hundreds of extras in a street-level ape vs. human fight. It's not the most interesting movie ever, but considering my expectations I can happily give it a 6. (imdb, amazon)

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