Note: this post written on March 20-21 and posted after our return.
(two women looking into the crypt at St. George s Basilica) We ve had a good couple of days in Prague. The city definitely feels more, well, foreign than Germany and that is perhaps accentuated by the fact that I don t know any Czech at all, while I know some basic German. It s been slow going at times, and surprisingly easy at others. Despite my lack of knowledge of Czech, I d say communicating here has been roughly as easy as in Germany. That is perhaps partially due to the fact that, of the places where we ve needed to communicate, we are either making simple requests (buying bread at a bakery) or the people we re talking to know some basic English. (Or, in one case, a guard at a museum at the Prague Castle complex used German to ask me to check a bag at the coat check, mildly surprising me and confusing Terah when I started to comply with instructions she didn t understand, and didn t know how I did.) The very first time we had a situation where it was a bit difficult to communicate, in the bakery, I got into my difficult to communicate mode and accidentally slipped in a couple of German words. Oops. Terah was laughing at me later, and commented that the store owner might have also been laughing at me or perhaps at his employee that also accidentally slipped into basic German mode. On Friday, we visited Vy ehrad Castle, the one that nobody that visits Prague seems to know about. That is perhaps because the palace/castle part of the complex has been mostly destroyed (but we did know that before going there.) It is in a nice, quiet, and beautiful park, and has the beautiful and old Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, as well as a large ornate cemetery. Then we visited two iconic Prague places: V clavsk n m st (Wenceslas Square) and Starom stsk n m st (Old Town Square). Both were beautiful. And, unfortunately, also packed with tourists and made-in-China plastic trinket shops. There I got my first clue that large tour groups tend to have a detrimental effect on any free site in Prague. They come in, the guides yell, they clog up things, and also generally miss the sites of true interest because buying tickets to them makes the price of the tour uncompetitive. On Saturday, we took the tram out to Pra sk hrad (Prague Castle) the one that everybody knows about. We got there at about 8:15, and although the grounds are open, most of the buildings weren t open until 9. As a result, we had 45 minutes almost to ourselves in the nearly-empty castle complex. We could walk around on the giant squares, take some photos, and generally enjoy a crisp and quiet morning. At 9, it was still pretty empty and we went into the ticket offices to buy our tickets. By the time we got out a few minutes later, it was packed mostly due to the arrival of innumerable tour groups from all over Europe and, apparently, Japan. We went to the Star kr lovsk pal c (Old Royal Palace) first, since I knew from their website that it would close at noon due to a visit from Prince Charles. That was a beautiful building, and it s amazing to read about the features of it that are centuries old or even almost a thousand years old. The Vladislavsk s l (Vladislav Hall) and chapel particularly caught my eye. Underneath the palace is a museum, including some 1000-year-old jewelry and flooring, and some clothing that is several hundred years old recoverd from burial plots.
(Vladislav Hall) Next, we went to the iconic (and free) Katedr la svat ho V ta (St. Vitus Cathedral). Our audioguides fortunately allowed us to bypass the long line, and we could step inside at a side door. That was one of many times in Europe I stepped inside a building, and suddenly came to a stop with a wow . That building is every bit as much impressive as it is made out to be, even crowded as it was. We also went to Bazilika Sv. Ji (St. George s Basilica), which one of the guides described as ancient . It was another wow moment, and it felt like the oldest church we were in yet. I think it probably was, actually; last rebuilt in 1142. For lunch, we asked for a recommendation from our hotel. They suggested one place, which we walked to. It was a nice easy walk down some Prague side streets, but the restaurant and all the others along our walk were closed on Saturday. We eventually made our way back to the hotel and asked for a new recommendation, which was successful this time. Terah ordered some ribs, while I ordered a more traditional Czech goulash, which happened to be served in a bread bowl. A minute later, the waiter brought Terah a fork and knife. And he brought me a bowl of water with a slice of lemon, and announced wash for you. That was a surprise, and a bit puzzling one at that. Turns out that eating bread that had stew served in it is indeed a bit messy, and having some water to clean up with is indeed helpful. We met up with Anna from Leipzig and one of her Czech friends for dinner Saturday night. We found a nice local Czech place. I had ham with sauerkraut in a folded potato cake. It was excellent, and the total bill for Terah and me came to 235 Kc or about $12.50. We had a nice walk back to the hotel in the crisp, dark evening. Sunday morning we had breakfast at our hotel the only time we ate a meal at a hotel this whole trip then got on the tram, the metro, and the bus to the airport. Total cost for that trip for two: 52 Kc, or about $2.75. Far cheaper than a taxi. One weird thing happened to us in Prague. We were riding the tram towards downtown, and as we would be on it for several stops, Terah was sitting. I was standing as there wasn t an available seat for me. Terah and I were both looking out windows, until Terah was startled because her arm was wet. She looked around and it turned out a middle-aged woman had spit on her, and was glaring at her. We never did figure out why. About all we can think of is maybe someone else, such as a very old person, had gotten aboard but Terah hadn t noticed and therefore didn t offer to give up her seat. That was probably the only real rude gesture towards us on the entire trip. We ran the story by Anna s friend (the native Czech) and she was as surprised and baffled as we were. As I wrap this up, we re sitting at our gate in Prague waiting for our flight to Munich. In this airport, in an out of the way corner on the very lowest floor, I spotted only the second drinking fountain I ve seen in Europe this entire time and also perhaps the continent s most expensive cup of coffee. After we get to Munich, it s a flight to Chicago, another to Indianapolis, and finally a drive home Monday.

Note: This post written March 13, and posted after our return. Yesterday was a day of travel. We said goodbye to Jacob and Oliver in the morning. We had thought a lot about how to tell Jacob what was happening and when to tell him. Ultimately, he doesn t really understand time or distance very well yet, and we know that he worries about the unknown. So although he knew about the visit to Indiana for awhile, he didn t know that Terah and I would be going somewhere until th emorning. He wasn t pleased, but seemed to take it well. We told him that we re going to a hotel in Germany and reminded him of other times we ve gone to a hotel. I also reminded him that sometimes a babysitter comes to our house while Terah and I go somewhere else, but we always come back later. That seemed to help. We got to the Indianapolis International Airport in plenty of time for our flight. They have built a completely new terminal building; the old one we were familiar with is now abandoned. The new building is beautiful, sunny, open, and even inspiring. I was impressed. Newark Liberty International, on the other hand, had all the ambiance of a Greyhound station across from the county jail. It reminded me a lot of Chicago Midway, which I used to go through regularly: dark, a bit run down (water stains on the ceilings), and nowhere near enough seating in the gate areas. We wound up standing for an hour before our flight left (late). The food court in Concourse C was something special. As we were witting there, Terah remarked on the constant stream of passengers that walked up to the food court, glanced around, and made a look of THESE are my choices? Which was our exact reaction a few minutes before. Yep, it s the first food court I ve been in where McDonald s was the upscale choice. The sit-down Mexican Cafe had hamburgers with mexi-fries as its main attractions. Terah tried out the dodgy pizza place while I tried out the even more dodgy Chinese/sushi place (I was not silly enough to try sushi there). Ultimately we decided that perhaps the point of the food court was to make us eager for airplane food. The choices in Indianapolis sure put that to shame: TGI Fridays was a real gourmet option compared to the choices in Newark. I was really a bit embarrassed; Newark is a major international airport, and many visitors to the United States will be greeted by a foul-smelling food court and a dingy airport. Yay for being welcoming? Well, really we had a good day of travel and I shouldn t be ragging on the Newark airport so much, so I ll say something positive: there s a pharmacy right behind the food court, which is probably a very convenient location to meet the needs of many diners. Anyhow, our flight left Newark about an hour late, at about 7PM Eastern. As I write this, it s about 7:30 CET (1AM Eastern) and our plane will be on the ground in about an hour. I m excited for the coming week! I got some sleep on the plane, but not a lot. I m hoping that I will have the energy for a good weekend.

As some people know, I had a vacation in February. Only very few knew that I was heading down to Taiwan. I was leaving Germany at the 8th and back here on the 24th of February. Yes, that neatly fit this years Chinese New Years parties. Was at home for four days (and at work for one), after which I went off to this years Cebit. Until the day I arrived in Taiwan it looked like we do not have a booth there, but then everything changed while I was having a nice vacation. I really have to thank Alex here. Cebit was actually my task, but he jumped in and did all the preparatory work that was needed right in the time I started my vacation. Without that either my vacation would have been much different and less nice or we wouldn t have had a booth. I am back home since some days now, without any travel plans for the next few weeks/months to come. Though I wish I had a job (and private life) that would allow me to just go off again, ie. something I could do everywhere where there is net. Meh. Of course I did take some pictures (more than 2500) and also some notes during the trip. And having a blog that one or two people read, I think I should bore you all with it. But hey, you can skip it if you want. :) Yes, I should really take some time and work a bit on the pictures I took. Right now I only selected around seven hundred which I show off to people (and to link to from here), but they are basically just copies. While some are great in itself, many can need a bit of work here and there (cut out unimportant, blurry, colors, the usual stuff). And I also prepared multiple shots for HDR processing or to make a panorama view from, but thats something that takes time and has to wait. Just for the record, I think that this, this and this are very nice ones.

---

This is a public version of this text, so names and also various events and days have been cut out. Yes, people who know those in my pictures will know names, but thats no reason to feed the evil $searchengine caches more with hits for their names. Flight down, 8 Feb. Flight down from Frankfurt, using KLM so it went via Amsterdam and Bangkok (short Transit stop) to Taipei. The days before we had lots of snow and cold and all that stuff which tends to get flights cancelled, but I was lucky, none of that for me. The only slightly annoying thing was in Taipei, where KLM demonstrated how much a Business class Priority luggage sign is worth for them sometimes. We came in half an hour before schedule, but then had to wait an hour for our luggage (while all of economy luggage passed by). I think the business class Priority sign actually meant Priority to wait . The food on the flight from AMS to BGK was good, having a No Lactose Meal actually tasting well. Can t remember what it was, but better than the fish I got from BGK to TPE. Catering from Thai Airways, they do not know anything besides Fish when preparing No lactose meal and then they also manage to prepare it in the most boring way possible. Sad thing, but happened four times now, all the times I had catering prepared by them. Other than those points, no trouble at all. Immigration was done in about 20 seconds, customs didn t want to look at me, just the asians in front and behind me, all fine. Met my Travel Companion outside and off we got. First to the Taipei Main Station, where we got some food. Some rice (with a bit of meat) and red sauce, together with a soup. And a glass of tea, but that had an oily surface. Umm. Guess the cup wasn t all that clean, we both skipped that. Then I tried to get money from an ATM. First had to find one that actually wants my european credit card. And then, as usual when I travel offroad, I managed to forget my pin. Bah. Well, found an HSBC somewhere that actually takes my Maestro card, so at some point I got money (a pretty helpful thing, that is).

---

Wednesday, 10 Feb. First night in a new Timezone which is 7 hours before my normal one. Makes my body think I should not be allowed to sleep much. So it only allowed me some two hours before I woke up again. It didn t listen to any argument and didn t care that it was all dark and night, so I couldn t sleep more. Wellwell, got up at the same time as $TC then, we got some breakfast, egg/ham sandwich and tea. From there I set off and juggled my way through Taipei MRT over to YuanShan Station.

It is good for a visit of the Confucius Temple and also the Dalongdong Baoan Temple which is right beside it. Later on I got told there are much more impressive Confucius temples elsewhere, but it is still a good place to start off. And it just means I have one more reason for another visit. After those two temples I moved over to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Took about an hour to go through that museum, which again made it pretty clear to me: Some people just have too much time and money. I do not even get the setup in the entry hall, even though it looks nice, and let s not start about the rest they show there. Definitely not my thing, Fine Arts , nothing worth to waste money on, at least for me.

So I left there after just about an hour and fought the MRT again. This time it spit me out at the Taipei Zoo station and I went through that. Appearently the nice sunny weather let some animals have fun, and that all in public. Tssk. Won t someone please think of the children?! :) Otherwise it is a pretty big area with lots of animals. Not all of them seem to be in areas that (I think) are big enough for them, though I m no expert in that. But it looked small for them. Also, while I thought it pretty well visited, many people there, I bet for Taiwanese standards the zoo was nearly empty. At least looking at their preparations for queues, like in front of the koala house, they are used to deal with like 20 times the amount of people. I count me lucky that there haven t been that many, else I would have needed to wait everywhere, which I hate. Queues are bad, mmmmmkay? As I already mentioned, the weather that day was pretty nice. Mostly sunny, only few clouds and some 25 til 29 degrees. No rain. Now that s a nice winter day.

Dinner was scheduled for 1800h, a Hot Pot session. 5 people in total. Appears you order the meat for the hot pots from the waiter and let them bring it, but all the additional stuff you get yourself. They have a big selection of vegetables, seafood, bread/cake like stuff and whatnot you can take. I first also went there and got a small dish with stuff. But stopped right then and let the Taiwanese do the rest. Better that way, they know it. And hey, we had been 5 and they got stuff for like 35 people. :) It was a nice 2 hour session, in which we had lots of different kinds of additions to the hotpot (two pots actually, one spicy and one not spicy). I know of some meats, some vegetables, but then there also was said to be duck bladder and some other organs which they couldn t (or didn t want to? :) ) name in english. Now, db sounds worse than it is, it doesn t have a special taste and is mostly boring, I think. Of course, not liking seafood, I skipped on that, but about all the rest was nice. I like Hot Pot :) After this session the other 3 left for various reasons and $TC and me had a nice walk around/through the University, before going back to $TCs place.

---

Thursday, 11 Feb Had another short night as I only got to bed around 2AM, just to get up around 9AM. Additional fun that my body again insisted in being elsewhere, not accustomed to the timezone in Taiwan yet, waking me up a few times during the night.

Got an easypass for the MRT as that is a little better than buying a chip for every single trip and battled with MRT again, finally emerging at Danshui station. Sat a bit at the beach eating breakfast before finally starting a walk out to the Fisherman s Wharf . It is some 4 kilometers to it, made out as a bicycle path, but I just walked. Visited Fort San Domingo on the way and then went all the way up in that Wharf area, another kilometer. Got me a nice peppermint ice tea, though it was a funny process to it. The salesperson didn t speak english and my chinese is - well, limited is a too soft word to describe it. But it worked pretty well, with us pointing around on the menu and then the salesman showing me various additions, if I would want them. Like showing a milk bottle Want milk in tea? , showing sugar,

At the bridge in that Wharf I was approached by some Asian people, asking me to take a picture of them in front of the bridge. Fine, did it, did it again in another setting and then, when done, they asked me where I am from. When I said Germany they thanked me in German which surprised me a little. :) That is something funny anyways. Wherever I go, people look. They aren t much used to someone my size. Kids are usually more direct with pointing, grinning and sometimes crossing my way on purpose, just saying hi (some kind of test of courage, I bet). Every now and then I also get asked if they can take a picture with me. Right now there are like 20 pictures of me (that I know of) all over Taiwan that I didn t take, nor have. :) Now, who here loves Spongebob? This is the country for you! The picture only shows one small table, you can find much much more. Same goes for Hello Kitty and other such stuff.

Dinner this day was initially planned to be at some place called Maokong, but then plans changed, as $TC and others that we should meet there needed to pack for the next day. So $TC and me just went to the Shilin Night Market. Right beside it is a big food plaza. Like a thousand square meters (or probably a few more, what do I know, I haven t measured it, but it wasn t all too big) having some hundred or more little kitchens where you can get a very broad mix of things. We had cold noodles with some slightly spicy sauce and then some fresh guava juice. Tasty tasty. Though noodles with chopsticks was something new, but it worked out well enough. Later I had a noodle soup, that was something more tricky, but in the end you just need to find the right trick.

After food we went through the night market. Well. Parts of it. It s big. And its crowded. About the most crowded place I ve been to. Heck, half of Taiwan was in that street area. :) Didn t buy anything. The only stuff I thought interesting was a T-Shirt with a Taiwan map on it, but do try getting some in my size. Ha. Small asians. They say they have big sizes, but then its XL only (or a totally ugly color, brrr). We finished early here, as the packing for the trip starting Friday right in the middle of the night still needed to be done, and getting up at 6AM you do not want to stay up too late. But it was nice there anyways.

---

Friday, 12 Feb Got up early. I mean, early. 6 AM. ARGS. Not really my favorite thing to do, but as our plan said we have to get the HighSpeedRail to Kaohsiung at 7:42AM there wasn t much else to do. Pretty nice train, lots of room to sit, even in second class. Don t know business, but probably even more. And it looks fast, if I can trust the display it had we where going near 300km/h. After arrival in Kaohsiung we went out to $TC s place to get our luggage away, as it is annoying to move around with all the stuff. I got another easypass here, this time a lent one from $TC s Mother. It s fun, there are two MRT systems in Taiwan using the same technics, basically the one in Kaohsiung is built like the one in Taipei, using the same style of RFID cards (and chips for single trips). But they made them incompatible. One can not use a pass from Taipei in Kaohsiung and vice versa, for whatever reason. It s not like the two cities are very far away from each other, it would actually make sense to be compatible, but that is probably what stops them doing it. We took this Friday and also the Saturday to get around Kaohsiung, visiting several places. As the MRT in Kaohsiung has a different station design at every of its stations we did look at some of those too. Especially Formosa Boulevard , a station that has two points describing it best:

• it is largely oversized for the function it serves. I guess the people who build it only thought of the health of the passengers, who have to walk a marathon distance from one trainline to the other. It s huge.
• it has a Dome of Light inside, which does look nice. I do have some more pictures of that Dome and whenever I find some time I should try making a nice panorama out of them, but not now.

Right outside one of the exits is a funny little cosmetic surgery. I only remember it thanks to the english name of the Doc, but somehow I don t think it was chosen wisely: Dr. Luck . . Aiik, you need be lucky to get out there looking better? Dr. Unlucky might not be good for you taking a wrong cut? :) (Yes, I know, I m crazy, don t tell me. Ok, if you really want, queue up, you aren t the first.) At one point we went out to Sizihwan, where we walked to a ferry. Actually we tried renting bikes, but this little bike shop wasn t prepared for a small german like me, not having bikes my size. (And no safe way to get the saddle of the smaller ones into a height I could start using the bike). So walk it was, not nice bike trip. Still ok, got to the ferry, got over to the other side and had a nice walk there to the/along the coast.

We bypassed multiple temples there, at one of which a great cite came up: Temples in Taiwan are something like 7-eleven. They are everywhere. I love it. And somehow it s true, you can find one around each other corner, a little like those churches in Puebla, Mexico. In the evening we had been out for a night market. The first one was pretty boring. While having been announced in the MRT station near it to be a night market for New Years things, we found it to be about empty and very boring, so we went over to another one nearby. Wasn t as crowded as the Shilin one, and not as large, but nice. At the end of it had been a small game stand, where one could shoot balloons to get some price. I ended up getting the biggest available, as this isn t really a challenge. How anyone can miss hitting a balloon there I don t know. They are only like 3m away, not moving, you have clear view, and if you really need it even get a laser pointer on your gun. Anyways, was fun enough, I repeated shooting enough times to get the biggest available Patrick doll they had (a meter). Hrhr. Who likes Spongebob, eh? Speak up! :) I got a few nice shots of the night skyline of Kaohsiung late one of those evenings, where we went to the Dream Mall and up into the big wheel . Also had some game spots there, but turns out I m not as good throwing things at a target than I am shooting at them. We also went out to a historical sugar refinery, looking around. Of course, this being Chinese New Years eve, there haven t been that much people moving around, it was pretty empty. And the people working there all just waiting for their shift to end. But still got some pretty nice pictures from and around it. Also tasted a new kind of icecream (new for me that is), which actually has a kind of sand like feel. I like it. Like I actually liked most of the food, pretty much all the time. Of course everyone has things one does not like, but in general the food is great. Especially the largely different style compared to the european way of cooking. I ate lots of things I won t ever touch here in Germany.

---

Sunday, 14 Feb; Monday 15 Feb A nice two days some way out of Kaohsiung. Found out I am pretty good at losing various things: I got a bag full of (Li n w ; Syzygium samarangense; wax apple, love apple, java apple, bellfruit, see the wikipedia page for more on it) and about an hour later I totally had lost track where it ended up. The same happened with a big bag of tissues I had bought. Somehow both of the bags got feet and ended up elsewhere without telling me.

That one evening we went out for Dinner, a big party of people. Was a place right beside the ocean, so yes, seafood. Oh yay, I don t like that too much. Happy enough there must have been a conversation going on like Hey people, this silly german doesn t like seafood much, lets get one other option too . So we had a plate with some cold chicken on. But I tried various of the seafood dishes too and liked some of them. Actually some I had tried in Germany at some point where I learned to hate them and now I liked them as I got them in Taiwan. People also seemed to think I am good at using chopsticks, though I think I am just fiddling around and be lucky when I get my stuff. But maybe it just means Hey, it looks funny what you are doing. Keep going, we like to laugh. :) ). We actually had been around this place a little earlier that day, taking a walk around it, drinking some tea, that type of thing. And got a set of nice bottles of fresh coconut juice. My first time i got it fresh, I think. But I also managed to lose track of it. I bet somewhere there is a party consisting of tissues, (Li n w ) and a bottle of coconut juice, singing classic songs like Strike, we escaped the german Lunch the other day happened to be a big family meetup. Lots of people, lots of chatting, lots of fun (I think :) ). When we arrived it started out by about all of them trying to get me to sit down somewhere. And me bad impolite german not wanting to. But there was no way to escape, so finally they won and I sat, with a number of people around me, trying to chat with me. Which is actually hard work for both sides, but every now and then gets a good laugh. But my chinese is far far away from being useful for even a small meaningful sentence, so they had to activate their english knowledge, especially for the times $TC had been elsewhere and couldn t help out translating. Somehow the job got done, they asked their questions and I hope they mostly understood my replies. Bad me, speaking too fast english sometimes. We had a nice lunch there, with the most notable part being the way I got called to it. It s interesting how much you can say by just using body language and pointing. (Oh, of course food was very good too, but that fact is one you can take as a given, even if I don t mention it again). Later on a dice game started, and after a short explanation of the rules I joined in. Took only a little, but then I got the rules, its easy. I didn t get any of the chatting that happened during the whole game, but it was very much fun and really insane (so would also fit DebConf very well) and nearly no times you do need words to understand what is going on. I like this game and they gave me a set of dices, so I can train it and come back to play again. Ha. A bit after that dice game people unpacked some of the sweets I brought from Germany. One of them being spicy. Really nicely spicy, at least for the average Taiwanese. If you happen to have been at DebConf9 and also had the luck to be one of those I offered some chocolate or wine gum to, you know what I write about. The stuff here was slightly less spicy, but still more than enough to leave a nice impression. They had lots of - well - fun trying them out, gave a good set of laughter. And ordered more for next time. Uhoh, I already know which I will take with me, but then there have to be special preparations before testing. :) I ve also got invited to come back next year. Might be I haven t made the worst impression. Well, lets see if I can take this up and if they still want me in a years time. At least my chinese should be much better by then, given another year of training. (Even if I find it actually hard to learn. For some reason its not easy for me to memorize language things, at least not chinese. Oh my, one year, I should have some 3 words more, I hope :) ). In the evening, back in Kaohsiung, $TC also told me rules of a second dice game that I had seen some people playing. Also seems like fun if played with enough people.

---

Tuesday, 16th Feb

We started the trip by taking the train from Kaohsiung to Taitung. We had been a little late for it, had to run from the MRT to the train station. Silly me took that as an opportunity to fall down a set of stairs. Only to discover, when getting to the platform, that the Taiwan Railway wanted to give me a feeling of home, delaying the train. First by 31 minutes, later it got up to 43 minutes. Somehow felt like Deutsche Bahn, being late is also their best quality. When the train finally got in we saw that we had been lucky to have seats reserved, this train was full, lots of people moving around within Taiwan that day. We got to Taitung all fine and had the Hotel send someone to pick us up at the train station, as it is a long way from the train station over to the Hotel. Got our room and left it pretty soon again to look around.

Spotted a funny little Hello Kitty car and got some food for lunch followed by a walk along the beach. Found some sculptures made of wood, where one of it seems to have some bad stomach problems

Later on we had a nice and long walk through Taitung Forest Park. Took some time, got some nice pictures. It was getting dark when we got back into town, time for Dinner already. Yay, food. Next day a train trip to Hualien was set, but only for the afternoon, so we had time to look around. We first went through the Peinan Cultural Park, but unfortunately

we had no dog to park there. After that we rented a scooter to get a little farther away from the train station. After getting some fuel for it we headed to National Museum of Prehistory (which was much more interesting than the Fine Arts one earlier) and later on just drove around some time. Just looking around, without a clear direction, simply for the look around. Was fun, but too short actually. But we had to head back at some point to catch our train over to Hualien. In Hualien we again got a Taxi to the Hotel. We left that soon after arriving, Hotel rooms are boring, and it was food time again anyways. Only a little annoying, one of the few days we had rain and I can imagine something nicer than rain when I am outside. But somehow this damn weather doesn t bother to stop raining when I go out.

---

Thursday, 18th Feb A full day stay in Hualien, no Hotel change. Just a trip over to the Taroko Gorge.

Which is a very nice and impressive place to visit, sure too much for a single day, I definitely have to come back here. (Well, I have to come back for multiple other reasons, but this sure is one). We took the bus to the first stop in that park, somewhere around the Leader Village Taroko. Probably a nice place for a night or ten.

There was a short trail we followed, getting some more pictures and impressions, but it didn t take us long until we where back in a queue for a bus, this one going all the way up to the furthest away spot a bus goes to. There we had some lunch before we wanted to start walking around. Unfortunately (for my nose) we then passed by a place selling Stinking Tofu . Other customers there said that this is not the best available, but I got a taste of it. Don t really need that version more often, even though its not as bad as it smells or the name suggests. We walked a little there and I got some more pictures before we set off to climb the stairs to the Hsiang-Te Temple of Taroko .

Looking down from there we saw a lot of buses which was our sign to get back to the bus station, as the last bus was scheduled to get off somewhere at 3 in the afternoon. And as we didn t have a Hotel place here it is pretty helpful to catch the bus. So we queued up once more and had a bus ride back to the train station. Next time there should definitely be a night or more in some Hotel somewhere there. On the way back we took a slight detour, having another time at the beach, not enjoying the weather which insisted on a little rain and lots of wind.

---

Friday, 19th Feb This day saw us moving to Luodong, another place with a day of rain. Still, my gps log tells me we where moving around a lot, even though I do not have a single picture from the whole day. And as pictures are the main source of my memory ups. Well, I remember the rain, of course. I also remember that I got a steak at some place and that we bought various kinds of food (and tea and juice! :) ) on one of those markets, eating it in our Hotel room. (Rain is bad, mmmmmmmkay?!). And there was some kind of park too, in which I got a funny little game. Oh well.

---

Saturday, 20th Feb

There is nothing nicer than starting a day with a fun bus trip in the morning. Going high up into the mountains. On a day where the clouds reach down to some level underground, more or less. Using very narrow streets and the usual mountain like narrow curves. While not being able to see far. We got up to Taipingshan all fine but once there we had to wait for our room to be ready. So we took a walk around. Actually not a walk. More a climb. Being a mountain place, and those mountains never having heard of those nice invention called elevator or that other named escalator, people setup stairs. Millions of them.

Besides the stairs it is a very nice place to walk around. We took various of the trails through the area and besides me sometimes nearly falling down (damn slippery grounds) it was great. At some point in the afternoon we got our room and also ate some instant noodles before taking another trail, one that took us some 2 hours. You should really take a look at all the pictures I took, as the few I link directly sure do not present this area right. Taipingshan starts at Picture 434 and continues up to Picture 634, but a good number of them is from the second day too.

---

Sunday, 21st Feb Contrary to the day before there wasn t a single cloud to spot. Ok, ok, there have been some, pictures proof it, but it was a nice sunny day. Nice start of the end of the trip through Taiwan (still one and a half day in Taipei to follow, but the trip around country is over). Of course that meant taking a lot of pictures again,

and soon after breakfast we took the BongBong Train over over to the Maosing station. There are again a few prepared trails, most of which we took. We only skipped on the one going to the waterfalls, as it wouldn t have fit into our schedule. Got compensated with a pretty adventurous track with lots of nice sights following the old train tracks. Thanks to a number of landslides there is no train going anymore and thus it is a nice way to walk.

It is a 1500m long walk and sometimes you really have to be careful, but it provides many great views and is a really nice trail. Got a few hundred pictures, yay. Including a proof I ve really been there. I hate pictures with me, really, they are just shit by default (maybe I shouldn t be in them?), but in total I got 11 pictures that proof I was really there and not only sent a camera (four of those are included in that gallery I always link to). We got back to the main place around noon and after Lunch we took the Bus back down to Ylan. The bus was scheduled to go at 15:30h, so we went to it fifteen minutes earlier. While we had a sunny day, clouds had started coming in at 15:00h, and at the time the bus started it was all white and there wasn t much too see for the driver again.

But it turned out that this makes no difference. The driver must have a very prominent wish to die while taking his passengers with him. Or he is insane. Or has a very important appointment somewhere else. Whatever it is, he drove down, on narrow streets, very tight curves, not too much sight and all that with a speed thats incredible. Several times a part of our bus was out over the abyss. I found it pretty fun and all that, especially as it made for a set of very nice views all over the area, and appearently another passenger thought similar, but $TC did have quite the opposite of thoughts and did not feel all that great. We arrived in Ylan one hour before schedule, which, on a 70km trip through mountain area should give a hint how it was. Took a minute off to regenerate and then we wanted to look around a bit. Having our luggage with us that is annoying so we tried to leave that at the train stations baggage service counter. Turns out the personell there is a bunch of crackmonkeys not following their own advertised opening times. Probably wanted to go home early, those lazy dolts. Fortunately the people at the ticket counter were better and exchanged our tickets and we took the Train back to Taipei a little earlier than initially planned.

---

Monday, 22nd Feb Bad day for all those people who had a nice vacation during Chinese New Year, they had to get back to work. I didn t have that problem and so went around Taipei a bit. Initially I had plans of going to some tourist spots, like the National Palace Museum or others, but then just skipped them all and just took a walk through various spots of Taipei. Basically just Get out of MRT station XY, walk around . The GPS track later told me that I actually covered about 15 km that way, and my feet agreed to that. At some point I did bypass a German Cuisine restaurant, called Zum Fass . Don t ask me how the food is there, I wasn t in, but still had to grin a little when reading the menu. In the evening we went out to get me some Tea to bring back to Germany. Well, some is some kind of understatement, it was lots, as much as I could pack. But good stuff, some of it is steaming right now right besides the keyboard here. Yummy.

---

Tuesday, 23rd Feb

As always, the worst day of any vacation. The day you have to leave and go back home. My flight was scheduled for 20:00h, so I took another half a day just looking around Taipei. Which made me even more jealous of those not having to get away, as I happened to pass by some preparations for the Lantern festival. Which happened only a few days after I got away. Next year I have to plan better and stay longer, what I saw on preparations, and that only at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall definitely makes it worth it. Timing in the afternoon was very tight, I actually got the last bus that was in time for my flight. Just one later would have created some trouble, my total time on the airport was something around 30 minutes before boarding started. Just enough to get the minimum needed amount of postcards written and off to boarding. The flight back was boring. Food from TPE to BGK was a pretty good variation on No lactose , some noodles with stuff. Of course from BGK over to AMS it was fish again, same boring Thai Catering as usual. I was unable to sleep well on the flight. Somehow I woke up very often despite earplugs and eye mask. With all that I turned out to be half asleep when we arrived in Amsterdam and so I accidently took an opened half litre bottle of water with me through security. Funny, they didn t spot it. Instead they decided to make a big fuss about my camera bag, asking me in detail what I have in there, supposedly trying to check if I know what I carry. And made an even bigger show of scanning it again. And that bad liquid that those idiotic stupid laws written by brainless monkeys from our governments forbid got no notice at all. Imagine what I could have done to air safety with it! Oh my. Back in Germany my luggage got out first, so no waiting at all. I passed by work to leave some weight there (Hello boss, want some tea?) and went back home. This was also my first trip where I had a noticable jetlag after coming back. For nearly a week my damn body insisted on being in Taiwans timezone, waking me up at times I should sleep, feeling tired when I should be awake. Tssk. Conclusion of this trip: I will be back in Taiwan for sure. I don t care if you take this as a promise or threat, but I will be back! :)

Following up my post about using google-code-prettify to syntax highlight code on Blogger, I want to share what I did to tune it for a dark theme.

Big warning: I'm completely ignorant of any web development, html/css/js are kinda arab (no offense intended) for me, so I'm quite sure there are more elegant solutions to this, but at least it works, and seems to have broken nothing :)

So, the default CSS has some bad values for tokens colors, in particular for the keywords and tags (that are in dark blue) and for the plain text (that is in black, so completely hidden).

What I did was to simply override those values, using this table as reference; so now the code to add to Blogger "Minima Black" template (the one I'm using) is:

<link href='http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify.css'
    rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<style type='text/css'>
.pln   color: #C0C0C0;  
.kwd   color: #4169E1;  
.tag   color: #4169E1;  
</style>
<script src='http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify.js'
     type='text/javascript'>  </script>

The recent development of the situation in China or Iran reminds me of the importance AND fragility of the freedom of speech on the Net. As the influence by the Net on the general public grows, attempts by governments to control and tame the Net will be aggravated, in a more sophisticated, crowd-pleasing way (for example, by claiming a need for Internet Driver's Licenses). How can we deal with this? Freenet can be a key to solve this problem. After almost 10 years of continuous development, it seems that it finally became an usable product(I don't say it's perfect -- there are still a lot of things to be done, especially around its UI). Freenet has its own dark side and I don't expect that it will become the standard way of the communication over the Net, but we always need the last resort to enjoy our everyday life. Unfortunately, most of Freenet-related information on the Net, especially about the installation method on GNU/Linux, are severely outdated. Freenet is a Free Software(GPL'd), and Debian did have a .deb package for Freenet long long ago, but it's basically gone and defunct. Since the pace of current development is quite fast and sometimes the backward compatibility is broken, it's not really a good idea to ITP and upload Freenet to the main Debian archive for now. Thus, I cooked up up-to-date .deb packages of the modern Freenet and publish them by myself on people.debian.org. I tried to follow the Debian packaging convention as much as possible, so at least they can be installed & uninstalled cleanly ;-) Also, Build-Deps are carefully set, so you may rebuild it without much hassle if you need. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/freenet ./
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/freenet ./

Then run "apt-get update" and install "fred" package. This is basically all you need(you might also want jSite or FMS). Then take a look at /usr/share/doc/fred/README.Debian. You might need to copy seednodes.fref into /var/lib/fred if you want to use Freenet's Opennet mode for the first time. After that, access http://localhost:8888 and follow the instructions. Recommended readings on the modern Freenet:

• The Wikipedia entry for Freenet is surprisingly rich and informative(and not so obsoleted).
• The dark side of the internet, a recent featured story on Freenet from The Guardian. As the title indicates, it inclines to emphasisize the negative side of Freenet, but it's a good read anyway.
• The Gurdian writes about Freenet, a quite well-balanced response to The Gurdian article by Ian Clarke, the originator of Freenet.

Enjoy.

Tag this post with del.icio.us!

Another attempt to shorten my list of movies where not having seen them makes me an absolute philistine, according to various friends: Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffmann. Ignoring the tragic history behind it (the French penal system in French Guiana during the colonial era I didn't know about this from school), it's great entertainment. There is a kind of happy end, but nowhere close to what Hollywood does to its stories these days... A long time on the to watch list: The Fifth Element by Luc Besson. I don't know why but I had always been sceptical if I'd enjoy this one, but my feeling was completely wrong. Real fun. While I think the basic idea of superheroes getting older and having a midlife crisis, or a daughter, (and of course during the film, getting back into action) could make a wonderful film, the ending of Watchmen left me with a bad feeling about the whole film. But then I never read or watched superhero cartoons anyway, so maybe it's just that I'm not the intended audience for this one. Finally, V for Vendetta is another interpretation of the 1984 theme (actually, it's the interpretation of a graphic novel, but I've not read that), with a very well chosen John Hurt as Big Brother (or, I should say, High Chancellor Adam Sutler.) With quite a few slapstick moments, this isn't really as dark as the theme might suggest.

This spring I'm taking a class that does all its programming assignments in MIT Scheme. The last time I had to write Scheme for class, we used PLT Scheme, and thus the DrScheme editor. This time, with that option out, I've decided to do the assignments in Emacs. It is, after all, an editor built out of lisp. I've used vim for the last five years or so. Some people ask me why this is so I do go to MIT after all, where Emacs was originally written. The answer to that is simply that Debian got to me first, and at the time at least, the people I knew there used vim. I've heard Emacs is good, but up until this point every time I've tried it I've thrown it down in frustration and then couldn't figure out how to exit the damn thing. This time I was more determined, and made it through the initial hump of being completely useless at the editor. Here are a few of my observations so far, after mucking around for a couple days over a period of about two weeks:

• The movement commands seem much more awkward to me. Since I'm using the Colemak keyboard layout, I have backspace bound to Caps-Lock, and it is not available to be a Control key. It may be that I just need some more time to get used to emacs not being modal.
• It's awkward to switch between split windows using C-x o when I have 4-6 open at a time. I'd like to be able to jump between specific ones directly.
• C-x 3 will always split the window containing the current buffer evenly in two, which makes it difficult to, for example, create three equally sized vertical windows, side-by-side. Vim defaults to creating evenly sized windows even when you invoke a split twice in a row.
• The paradigm of being able to have e.g. a scheme buffer or a shell as one of my split windows is nice, though I haven't yet gotten used to having to use emacs special bindings to interact with those buffers rather than what I'd use if I'd just invoked the command from a terminal.
• I noticed that emacs automatically detects the VCS in my directory. It seems incredibly bizarre to me to interact with my VCS from my editor. Do people actually do this?
• Emacs's use of the tab character to perform code indentation is interesting. It does solve the problem of code being auto-indented when you don't want it to, which sometimes happens to me in vim, but I wonder if it actually ends up saving keystrokes in the end, since I think not auto-indenting is the exception rather than the rule for me.
• There seem to be two different methods for completion: "dynamic abbrev" expansion, which I believe is analagous to what I'm used to in vim, and M-TAB (what a horrible keybinding, as most window managers will grab this for window-switching), which seems to be some sort of language-specific completion. I haven't yet seen how this can be harnessed since the symbolic completion seems to be irrelevant for scheme.
• Emacs's syntax highlighting gets at least one thing right about scheme that vim doesn't: extended comments between # # patterns.
• Bookmarks seem waaay more verbose/awkward than vim's marks. C-x r m NAME huh? I like being able to have a very short pattern to mark and jump back to points in a file, like vim's m/ syntax for marks. Maybe I'll need to bind the bookmark functions to something else.

I'm pretty sure at this point that I'm still trying to bend emacs into being vim with different keybindings instead of figuring out how emacs wants to be used. It's also difficult to compare and contrast between the two editors in that my .vimrc contains years of tweaks and customizations whereas my .emacs started out as a clean slate. There are two things I'm doing to try to mentally separate emacs from vim, to avoid my fingers' muscle memory from becoming confused:

1. I'm always using emacs in an X window with dark-on-light text, whereas I always use vim in a terminal with light-on-dark text.
2. I'm only writing scheme in emacs. No other languages so far.

I'm planning to keep working on these programming assignments in emacs, despite it being annoying slower than I would be in vim. Tips and pointers for improving my experience are welcome.

Having stupidly, and very painfully, ruptured a ligament in my foot (while getting off a bus. Not drunk, no sports whatsoever.) I was less mobile than I wished to be and could finally make some time to watch Nikita by Luc Besson (I've not seen much he was involved in; L on was one of the exceptions which I like very much. I've got the DVD of The Fifth Element right here, so no need to chastise me that I haven't seen that one yet.) But back to Nikita: you may know that I like strange movies for some values of strange. Nikita obediently starts off in a very dark mood. And then suddenly turns into quite a normal secret service thriller with a romance element. I liked both parts of the movie very much, but it took me a bit by surprise at first. I also like fun stuff, and so I've watched my first three episodes (9 to 11) of Kottan ermittelt, wonderfully silly Austrian whodunnits from the late 70s/early 80s. If you don't speak german (and understand it well, even I have difficulties understanding some of the Viennese dialect), you just don't know what you're missing. Or if it is translated (don't know): probably like watching Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis in German. Which I did, because my french is not that good, but I'll have to watch it again en fran ais, just to get the Authentic Expierence of this wonderful movie. Update: Speaking of a foot, and of movies: I don't think I've mentioned My Left Foot on my blog so far. The biography of Christy Brown, a cripple who grows up in a poor Irish working class family to finally become a famous artist. I found it just a bit corny (hmm. Not sure if that's the right word here, shows up for kitsch in any case), but still very impressive.

I was driving home from a late night at work recently, and I was almost home, when the car behind me lit up like a Christmas tree. My immediate reaction was, "Oh crap, I'm tired and I wasn't paying attention to my speed". So I pulled over. To my relief, it wasn't my speed that was the problem, my left-hand tail light was out. The officer was very nice about the whole thing, but he gave me a fix-it ticket. He told me I had until I think some time in February to fix the problem, then I had to get a police officer to sign off that it had been fixed. I thought that was the end of it, and continued on my way home. The other day, I got this official looking letter in the mail the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. My initial thought was, "ha, the fools have issued me a jury summons like they did for Sarah. Can't they tell I'm an alien? Nanoo Nanoo." So I open the letter and start scanning it. It's a courtesy notice. The first actual sentences I run into start with "Failure to respond to this notice by the due date may result in your bail being increased...". Huh? Bail? What? It turns out that there's a bit more to the fix-it ticket story. Not only do I have to get a police officer to sign off that I've had the tail light fixed, to avoid going to court, I have to pay a $25 "dismissal fee" (also known as California is broke and needs every dollar it can get). Today was the first day that either of us have had any time to scratch ourselves, so we trekked off to Toyota. The guy yanked off the cover inside the boot, and was poking around to show us where to change the bulb, when lo and behold, it started working again. So it was just a loose connector. Dammit. So now I have to track down a police officer. Preferably under the cover of darkness, as we've tinted the front windows of the Prius, which is apparently cause for another fix-it ticket. Although I'm struggling to find the wording that specifically says that.

Had you been on our yard tonight, you would have seen a strange sight. Me, dressed warmly (but not quite warmly enough), jumping on the icy and snowy hood of my pickup. Some maniacal fit? An obscure part of my 3-day-long taking out the trash routine? Not exactly. Before I tell you why I was doing such a strange thing and almost in the dark I feel compelled to take a detour through ancient Greek poetry. You heard right. I ve been reading ancient Greek poetry lately. Those Greeks were forever running around receiving signs and portents from the gods. If ever a bird flew by carrying a live snake, and you saw the snake bite the bird while looking over your left shoulder, you knew Zeus was telling you not to attack the enemy that day. Or something. And if you, fool that you are, attacked the enemy that day anyway, you should be not in the least surprised to find a spear through your shoulder in just a few pages time. If ever someone received a sign from Zeus in modern times, surely it was I, tonight. I say that because, as I was trying to close the hood on my pickup after charging its battery, the hood nearly snapped in two. The hood is supported by some spring-loaded brackets in the back, so to close it, you have to push down on the front. I did so, and was surprised that it was going down so easily. Then I realized, apparently in the nick of time, that only the front was going down. The back was staying put, aiming up in the air as ever. So I tried to straighten the hood back out. I then tried to get it down by pulling at it halfway back, but just couldn t get enough leverage to make it budge. So what next? Why, jump on it of course. I got it most of the way closed that way, then jumped/slid down, latched it in front, then crawled back up there to push down the sort of rusty mountaintop that had formed halfway down the hood where it was buckling. OK, sorted. So to recap By this point, I ve had the battery charging for 24 hours, inflated the tire, removed the bungee cord around the brake pedal, removed the battery charger, coerced the hood shut. Time to start it. I hop in, pump the accelerator a few times, and turned the key to start. I heard the sickening aaaaaaaaRRRRRRRRRRRRuuuuumphhh . of a weak battery. So it wasn t charged enough to crank fast enough to have any hope of starting in winter. So I go get the car, pull it up close, being careful to leave myself enough room to maneuver between it and the electric fence. I get out the jumper cables. Then it occurs to me: I have to open the hood again. DOH! I open it just a bit, and hook up the jumper cables. It turns over a bit faster. For just a bit. I get a small sputtering of life from it, but it fades faster than an enemy of Hector at the battle for Troy. So I have Terah come out and put her foot on the accelerator of the car while I try to start the pickup. This too proves futile. So I disconnect the jumper cables, close the pickup s hood with significantly less care than a 31-year-old rusty and nearly-broken hood deserves, roll the window back up, and go for plan B: 4 trips to the road with stuff in my car trunk, and leave the giant cardboard boxes that are covered with snow in the pickup bed for next month. Obviously I have displeased the gods. Forgotten to offer up a sacrifice to Penzoil, feared goddess of internal combustion, perhaps? Or perhaps it was just a sign that I need a new pickup? I m so convinced of the latter that I didn t even bother to replace the bungee cord. Postscript Terah walked in, and said, Ah, I thought I heard you writing a blog post. Yep. It s about pickups and the Greek gods. <very slight pause> Oh, of course it is.

Well that is the end of my time off, tomorrow it is back to work. However my break started with snow and it seems its finishing that way.


Unfortunately despite my previous enthusiasm this weather is becoming a little tedious. Schools have been closed today so I had to child mind instead of getting anything done.

Speaking of getting things done...I have completely failed to do anything productive whatsoever for the last couple of weeks. I have played some computer games, watched some TV read some books and listened to music and you know what? Aside from a tiny guilty feeling, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I suppose I should apologize for not contributing to all those open source projects that could have used my help, but that would imply remorse which I seem to be lacking. Oh well

Mentioning music, I have acquired a selection of new music over the holiday which I ought to talk about. In no particular order:

• Iron and Wine - "Our Endless, Numbered Days"
• Paramore - "All We Know Is Falling", "RIOT" and "Brand new eyes"
  
• Phoenix - "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix"
• Lady Gaga - "The Fame Monster"
• The xx - "XX"
• Muse - "The Resistance"
• Cymbals Eat Guitars - "Why There Are Mountains"
• St. Vincent - "Actor"
• Carter Burwell - "Twilight-The Score"
• The Darkness - "Permission to Land"
• Oasis - "Stop the Clocks"
• Chameleon Circuit - "Chameleon Circuit"
• Hank_Green - "I'm So Bad at This" and "So Jokes"

Unfortunately none of it was outstanding which sometimes happens when I take a punt on a large pile of new music. On the upside none of it was particularly bad either, so a kind of "no win" deal. Though on re-listening the "XX" album is starting to grow on me and the albums from the DFTBA label are so inexpensive they are more than worth it.

It's not that often that I start something from scratch. It's an amazing feeling to start a new project, to start writing something new. I like that. It's creation, it's an artistic part of our computing stuff. I feel like a code artist. And what I like even more is that little feeling that you are going in an unknown land. Some area in this tech world where nobody ever came before you, or only a few pioneers. That the sensation I got starting to using Cython, Python 3 and various other tools. I just spent half of my time trying to fix problems, rather than working on *my* code. Problems in autoconf macro not knowing Python 2.6 or Python 3.1. Problems and limitations in Cython. And problem in Python. That last one was a hard one. I'm still a beginner in the Python world: I barely know anything. And I was trying to use something nobody never did: building an embedded Python with a set of built-in modules. I spent hours trying to find why one type of module importing was badly failing. I finally found the answer thanks to a guy. who has the same problem A guy ? No. A pioneer. What do I say? A hero. He's been my week-hero! Thank you Miguel Lobo because you found the bug I chased for hours and because you even reported it as issue 1644818, including a patch! How not damn wonderful is that? I will not bore you with the technical details of that bug, since nobody cares. Nobody cares, even the Python guys, since that bug has been opened for 3 years, and nobody even reviewed in that time. I found an old thread about that bug where some guys were wanking about how they should do the review, because Miguel pushed for several weeks to have a review, back in 2007. But that bug was in my way. I had to do something. So I prepared my mail reader, mounted my web browser and here I was for a uniq quest: getting a Python bug fixed. At that point, if you did not stop reading earlier, you might get very excited. Don't be, spoiler, it's still not fixed. You'll have to wait the end of the season and see all the episodes I'll have to write to get the end of the story! Let's continue. I had to create an account on the Python bug tracking system. That was a trivial task for a man like me (you bet). Then, I launched a verbal attack, something you rarely see in a bug tracking system. Something I knew would awake any developer caring about their software.

Julien Danjou: Is there any chance to see this *bug* fixed someday?

I had the deep feeling that my quest was starting here. How many days would I have to wait until I get an answer? Time was passing. Minutes were ticking while I was waiting, sat in a comfortable sofa in a softly lighted room. It seemed like all my life was shorter than the delay I had to wait to get an answer. After waiting for hours, suddenly, and only 15 minutes later, I got an answer:

Martin v. L wis: Please ask on python-dev. I may be willing to revive my five-for-one offer.

Martin? Don't know that guy. Who is he? Who is he like? Will he fix that bug? What is this offer? So many question without an answer. But he asked to ask on python-dev, and I said: challenged accepted! I will write a mail to python-dev to get that bug fixed. Which I did. I sent a short (but well written you know, I made efforts) "WTF?" to pyhon-dev. And then the guy asked me to review 5 bugs so he will review and fix this one. And this is how I said that he was pissing me off for blackmailing me to fix a bug that was its "duty". Therefore, this is the end of the story so far. Will that bug be fixed some day? There's a hope, because another guy jumped in and took the bug assignment. To be continued. My conclusion about all that story: that is a little rude to start something new, with new tools, and get quickly into teething troubles. It's even more harsh to enter a community because you just found bugs, and be not very well received when you ask to apply a 10 lines long fix somebody wrote 3 years ago to fix it. I'll probably still use Python :-), but I get a darker image of its community now.

Over Thanksgiving this year, we took a train trip to visit Terah s family in Indiana. Here s the story of the trip. The Train to Indiana Our last train trip (to Chicago) was in May, before Oliver was born. Jacob always has enjoyed the train, but this time wow. We told Jacob about the trip the day before we were to leave. Several times in the day, he d get a sly smile, and ask, What are we going to do? Terah or I would spell out the day s activities, and when we d get close to the part where I d wake him up at night and we d go to the train station, he d have a big smile. The big hour (2AM) arrived and Jacob woke up while Terah was putting his shoes on. I was there a moment later. Normally Jacob is terribly grumpy after waking up, even more so if somebody else woke him up. That day, I saw a very groggy-looking boy. I asked him, Jacob, are you ready to go to the train station? He answered, YEAH! while rubbing his eyes. Dad, let s go! We had Amtrak s family bedroom for the first time this trip, and it worked out great. Jacob actually slept, despite his extreme excitement. He d been talking about eating in the diner car for quite some time, and was really excited when breakfast time rolled around. We sat down, and he pressed his nose up against the window right away. He counted the freight trains the he saw, pointed out train tracks and crossing guard lights , noticed barns and trucks, and gave us frequent updates on how fast we were going. His voice was high-pitched from excitement, and sometimes we d have a running commentary we could barely interrupt, and other times he d sit there silently just soaking it all in. But he didn t eat. He didn t want to turn his head away from the window for a second to take a bite. I kept reminding him to take a bite, and finally, fearing he d be really hungry as soon as we went back to our room, fed him a few bites for the first time in ages. I don t believe he realized that happened. He just opened his mouth by reflex and once I had to tell him to close his mouth around the fork that was in it. It was much the same story for lunch, and for dinner on the train though less so for dinner since it was dark outside. At dinner, a man sitting across the aisle from us said, If you weren t getting your meal free [since we're in the sleeper], I d buy it for you. Your boys are amazingly well-behaved! I thanked him politely Jacob and Oliver both were doing well but didn t really think it was that unusual. Oliver and Jacob were both big hits on the train. They got smiles from so many people on board and in the stations. Several of the dining car staff seemed to linger at our table longer than elsewhere, looking at them (and especially Oliver). Oliver slept well on the train: And here are a couple of typical Jacob photos: In Indiana I ve got to start this out with one of the family gatherings at Terah s aunt s house. They have a large kids area in their basement, and a swingset with a slide outside. Jacob loved all of this, and spent hours playing with me. Sometimes if I d go upstairs with the adults, I d hear Jacob s voice from the basement a few minutes later: DAAAAAD!!!! Shall you come back downstairs? DAAAD! And, of course, it s hard to resist a 3-year-old that wants to play with me, so I inevitably would. We played air hockey Jacob shrieked with delight whenever anybody scored a goal in any way. At one point, he stood up, looked around, and said, Hmmm. Where are all the trains? Apparently he expected every home to be stocked with toy trains, and this one wasn t. A few seconds later, he was all excited. He ran over to a toy semi, and said, I will use the semi train! Outside the short slide had a ladder going up to it. I held Jacob s hands while he climbed up the first few times, but I knew he could do it himself. I started helping him less and less, and eventually refused to help him at all. He was rather frustrated with that for a moment, but a couple times later, climbed up and said, Dad, I got up here all by myself! A few times later, it looked like he was having trouble, so I tried to help, and got shooed away with, No, dad! I can do it. The best moment of the weekend came during the drive back to Terah s mom s house where we were staying. Terah was driving, and I heard Jacob say, Shall you come closer? Not sure how to do that from the front seat of the car, I reached my hand back there and he held it. He held one or the other of my hands for 20 minutes until he fell asleep in the car. It s funny what feeling needed by a 3-year-old makes a person feel, but that was surely a happy day. Jacob got to see all of his Indiana grandparents on this trip, and loved playing with them. He especially liked using a perfect red train (his words!) he drug home from the nursery at church on Sunday, and a child-sized tent in the basement. I m not sure how many times I heard Gampa Mike! Shall we go to the basement? that weekend. One point he wanted me to come down to see it and play with him, so I did. Then he decided we all needed to be down there, and told me I ll go pick up mom. I ll be right back. Stay downstairs, dad. Fearing that Terah wouldn t know what to do when Jacob attempted to pick her up , I tried to discreetly follow at a distance. That was no match for a 3-year-old. He looked back at me from the top of the stairs, pointed an accusing finger at me, lowered his voice, and said, Dad. Stay. Terah and I spent a day in South Bend and stayed at the Oliver Inn while Jacob and Oliver got some time to themselves with their grandparents. We had dinner at the beautiful Tippecanoe Place, just next door. The Trip Home We had a few hours in downtown Chicago on our way home. We went and ate at a small Indian restaurant. Jacob kept alternating between three things: This food is very spicy! I like spicy food. I need another drink! A little while later, Terah decided we should have some dessert. So she and Oliver stayed in the waiting area while Jacob and I went asporing (exploring) to find something. We walked a block or two to the nearest Dunkin Donuts, then to a Starbucks, and then back. Jacob carried the sack of donuts, guarding them so carefully that I was afraid he might smash them. (They were cream-filled so that wouldn t have been good.) He had a lot of fun exploring Chicago Union Station, and also enjoyed walking in Chicago (though not quite as much; it was all a little too loud for him.) In the train station, he loved the escalators. Up and down we went, whenever we wouldn t get in people s way. I had to eventually drag him away from them as I was getting a little self-conscious at all the people standing around watching us repeatedly go up and down the escalators. Jacob has found a 3-year-old way to express his feelings: he ll pretend to be a kitty, and say the kitty is sad or something like it. All day he had been saying the kitty is hungry. He hadn t had a big breakfast, but he had plenty of opportunity to eat at lunch, and a snack. We were a bit confused, but I think we finally figured it out on the train back to Kansas. We didn t have time to eat breakfast in the diner on the train from South Bend to Chicago, so Jacob missed out on the dining car then, and I think he was disappointed or confused about that. Once we had dinner in the dining car, he was happier. Since we ve been back home, he s been talking about our next train trip. He says which suitcases we ll take, that we ll eat in the diner, that it will be a night train we take, and generally is still very excited about it. It was a fun trip.

I've spent the past 24 hours playing with my new phone, and so far have enjoyed it. I've put together very very rough documentation on what I've done so far which is just:

• Installing a terminal.
• Installing an ssh client.
• Uploading wallpaper, ring tones, and similar.

So far I've not had any major problems, and my biggest issue is the lack of TAB, arrows, and ctrl keys on the keyboard. I've put together a local packages for the novacom/precom USB connection utility, and will share if there's any interest. Happily it "just works" and was trivial to compile so theres probably not really any point in uploading as such. ObFilm: Dark Angel (TV Series)

The Motorola Droid A855 is the first Android 2.0 phone. I have been using one since Monday, having switched from a BlackBerry Pearl. I also wrote about Terah s iPod Touch recently, so I ll be making comparisons to it too. Here s my review. Hardware Physically, the device is very nice. It fits well in my hand. It comes in a fairly small box. It s surprisingly heavy for such a small device, but it isn t so heavy as to be a problem. It feels solid, sturdy, and durable throughout. Terah has the most recent iPod Touch 8GB, and compared to that, the Droid is thicker and heavier. The Droid s screen is awesome; a little longer but not as wide as the iPod Touch s. The iPod Touch screen seemed to offer less friction as I d slide my finger over it, which was nice but not a terribly big deal. I don t share some other people s annoyance with the keyboard. It is far better than the BlackBerry Pearl, or many other BlackBerries I ve seen. Along the bottom of the screen are some silkscreened buttons. My gripe with them is that they are easy to accidentally press. I ve done that more than once while using the phone in speakerphone mode, but you can lock the phone keyboard while you re on a call. I also don t share the complaint about battery life. It is excellent compared to the Pearl. Despite having a long-life battery, if I had it charged fully when leaving work at 5PM, by the next morning at 7AM it would often be completely discharged (though sometimes only half discharged). I believe that has to do with my home being in a poor reception area, and it spending a lot of energy looking for signals. In any case, the Droid has impressed me with its battery life and I have no complaints there. The screen, as I said, is brilliant and sharp. It is readable in various lighting conditions. By default, its brightness adjusts with the brightness of the ambient light. That s normally fine, but it can be annoying to stand in front of a light with the Droid in a shadow, watch its screen darken, and then shift a bit and it becomes bright again. There is a setting to disable automatic brightness. Button-wise, it has four physical buttons: the power/lock button at the top, volume up/down on the side, and a camera button on the side. The camera button only works when the phone isn t suspended (locked), and disappointingly can t be remapped to something actually useful. Just beneath the screen are four touch buttons: back, menu, home, and search. These are the ones I complained were easy to accidentally press. MicroSD and USB The Droid comes by default with a 16GB MicroSD card already installed. This is one huge advantage over the iPhone or iPod Touch: you can actually put things on the phone yourself, directly, without having to use iTunes and its limited features. I have, for instance, downloaded a PDF on the Droid and later copied it to my PC. I also copied a KeePassX encrypted password database from my Linux computer to the Android, for use with KeePassDroid. The iPhone/iPod Touch password programs don t support this kind of copying of files from your PC to the device, though one will let you put a database up on a webserver you control and download it from there. Plugging in a MicroUSB cable will start charging the Droid automatically. In order to make the SD card mountable, you must simply drag down the notification bar (which is how you get detail about what it s telling you normally) and touch the USB icon. When the SD is mounted on the computer, the Droid won t see it, of course. Touch the USB icon again to mount it on the Droid again, or just unplug USB. Wireless and Wifi The wifi support works like you might expect: pretty well. The cell phone reception works well, as does its Bluetooth support. It has an easily-activated airplane mode which disables all wireless features, which can then later be re-enabled. You can also individually disable wifi and Bluetooth. Oddly, you can t disable the cell phone network individually. The only way I could find to disable it is via Airplane Mode. User Interface The user interface, overall, is very slick and polished. However, I would have to say it is not as slick and polished as the iPhone/Touch interface. A few of the animated effects have a low framerate, which isn t really a big deal. More of a big deal is that settings and options can be scattered in many different locations, making them hard to track down at times. The device also offers fewer visual cues than the iPhone/Touch, though that is perhaps not significant. Like Apple s device, the Android 2.0 UI offers you three home panels, which you switch between by dragging your finger left and right. The iPhone shows some dots at the bottom of the screen, a standard UI indicator on that device that you can flick left/right, while there is no such indication on the Android. This is somewhat nitpicky though. I would put Android 2.0 and iPhone in the same general class of user interfaces, way above any other such device I ve tried. The Droid has an on-screen keyboard similar to the iPhone/Touch, though somehow it felt like the keys were smaller or easier to mistype. I m not sure why that is; maybe they really are smaller. The physical keyboard can be used at any point too, of course. Background Apps This is an area where Android really shines over iPhone. Android supports background apps everywhere. That means that your weather widget can be always correct, instead of being hardcoded at the factory to show 73 degrees as iPhone s weather icon does until you tap to open it. It means that more apps remember where you were and what you were doing when you switch to/from them. And it means that you can do things while that PDF downloads. Finally, it means that you can have native Jabber clients on the Android without having to do some mess with Apple push notifications plus third party servers, significantly reducing the complexity of such apps. Browser Now moving on to the applications preloaded on the phone, I ll start with the browser. It is, in a word, awesome. It is far faster and reliable than the browser in my N810. Compared to BlackBerries, of course, this is a real browser, not their limited one; and even so, it is still faster. It is also faster than the iPhone/Touch browser, sometimes significantly so. The pinch to zoom feature of the iPhone/Touch is lacking, and it must be said is both useful and pretty. Zooming softkeys appear on the screen when you tap, and do work well. It also automatically zooms if you tap on the page to fill out a form, for instance. The bookmarks save thumbnail images similar to the iPhone, and you can put bookmarks on your home screens as well. Rotating the Droid to landscape orientation causes the browser to also rotate, and on most websites it will also zoom in by default at that point, since it s got a wider orientation and doesn t have to shrink stuff to fit as much. The physical keyboard is very nice for filling in usernames and passwords. iPhone-optimized sites, such as Bloglines, work great on the Android. Though many of them fail to autodetect the Android as an iPhone-like device, and thus you have to manually ferret out their iPhone-optimized URLs. Email This is both a strong and a weak spot of the Droid. First off, it comes with two email client apps preinstalled: one for Gmail, and one for everything else. I haven t used the Gmail one, so this review doesn t consider it. You can connect the email program to your IMAP, POP, SMTP, or Exchange (ActiveSync) accounts in the predictable way. Each account can be configured with its own notification preferences, so you can easily see an icon, vibration, or beep when you get new mail on one account and not the other. All folders on an IMAP account are accessible, which is a very nice feature that is not shared by the BlackBerry. You can view your mail as a unified INBOX if you prefer. In such a few, a thin color bar to the left of each message summary tells you which account it came from by its color. This is a nice way to quickly deal with all new email, wherever it may be from, and ought to be emulated by some desktop clients. You can, of course, also view each account individually. The email program supports attachments, both viewing and sending. It does not appear to have the iPhone/Touch bug if failing to display emails forwarded as attachments. Now to the drawbacks. First of all, it inexplicably doesn t support the IMAP IDLE command. As a result, IMAP accounts are polling-only; there is no near-instant notification of new mail as there is with Exchange accounts, even though IMAP supports that trivially. Like the iPhone/Touch, Android 2.0 s mail program has a great deal of trouble with self-signed SSL certs, or SSL certs that are unusual in any way. Both devices refuse, by default, to talk to mail servers with self-signed SSL certs. Neither one offers to let you add an exception to recognize a particular cert in the manner that the built-in web browser on these devices would do. On the iPhone/Touch, at this point you need to obtain the cert by other means, stick it up on a web server, browse to it from the device, and add it that way. This trick doesn t work on Android 2.0, nor does adding it using the import from SD option. There appears to be absolutely no way to teach the mail program to use a self-signed cert on Android. The good(?) news is that you can choose to have Android accept any certificate. Many people in forums suggest that, and it does let it connect. Of course, it also removes much of the security benefit of using SSL/TLS in the first place, and is a terrible excuse for the lack of proper self-signed cert support. Both iPhone and Android devices have a horrible user experience in this area Quickoffice The Droid comes with some sort of Quickoffice software pre-installed. It can be used to view PDF, Word, and Excel files (at least; maybe more). But it is a rather strange beast. It has no icon on the applications screen. The only way to open Quickoffice is by opening a file that it supports in another app. So, for instance, tap on a PDF in the browser or open a Word attachment in email. I haven t played with it much, but I can say that it s read-only but seems to have high-quality rendering of all document types. Its PDF viewer is glacially slow on any page that has graphics. Flip the page to one with graphics and up pops a progress bar. And good thing too, because it might take 15-30 seconds to render a page. I will be looking for better PDF viewers in the Market; there are quite a few. Lack of file manager And that brings us to the next surprising limitation: there is no built-in file manager. I downloaded a PDF from the browser, and saved it to the SD card, but there was no way to look at it from the phone! Absolutely none. No way to delete it, rename it, etc. Several people recommended Astro, which solved all of those problems. Not having such a program built in is a weird glaring oversight. Of course, the iPhone/Touch doesn t have one built in, but in their case the glaring oversight is not having any files to manage Calender, Contacts, and PIM features This is an area of exceptional strength for the Android. I believe it s got the best PIM features of any mobile device out there, though it s not without its quirks. There are two calendar apps on the Droid, and they both have virtually identical interfaces and feature sets. I am rather at a loss as to why we are burdened with two separate apps. In any case, the app called Calendar works with a local calendar, or with Google Calendar syncing. It supports all the features you d expect, and plenty you wouldn t, including excellent support for meetings, viewing other people s calendars that you ve configured access to on google.com/calendar, viewing subscribed iCal calendars, etc. It has push syncing with Google Calendar, so new events appear in about 10 seconds. It is well-executed and completely flawless in every way I could see. Corporate Calendar is the same, but for hooking into Exchange or Exchange-compatible calendars via ActiveSync. We are evaluating groupware, and have so far tested it with Zimbra and Scalix. It worked well with Zimbra, and not so well with Scalix. That s not to say there were no problems. The meeting invitation emails Corporate Calendar generated appeared to have no body in the Zimbra mail client, or in Thunderbird (though if you look at the raw email, you see it does have a vcal entry in it). Meeting invitations sent to the Android can be displayed in the Email program, but the Email program doesn t offer accept/decline buttons, so you have to manually pull up the event on your calendar to accept or decline it. Other than that, it worked flawlessly with Zimbra. Scalix exhibited several data integrity issues that will probably make it unsuitable for syncing with an Android at this time. There is a built-in Calendar widget you can put on your home screen. It will show you the date and info about your next appointment. I miss the BlackBerry Pearl theme that showed me the next two appointments. There are some apps that claim to do this, but none of them work well. Contacts are also quite powerful. The contacts viewer aggregates your contacts from multiple sources into a single view, which is nice. It can sync in Gmail contacts, ActiveSync, and Facebook contacts. (How s that for a device with corporate and personal appeal?) The viewer works better than Apple s, and creating a new contact lets you choose which source you d like to add it to if you have more than one available. Continuing the trend of many recent devices, the Droid has no task/todo list support built in. Maps I ve heard people be all excited about Google Maps, saying it s the best maps ever in a phone (though I suspect they have forgotten that Garmin has added on a phone to their GPS products in the past). In general, they are probably right. And also they are probably irrelevant. The first thing that must be said is that the maps on the Android, like the iPhone/Touch and other such devices, are not actually installed on the Android. Consequently, for mapping or navigation to work, you must have a data signal, either wifi or CDMA. That immediately turns this into a GPS accessory, not a go-to device, because who wants to be stuck without a working GPS someplace without cell phone reception? (Such as several areas right near my house) I have a Garmin Nuvi 500 (see my review), and despite not being a terribly expensive GPS, it runs circles around the mapping in Android 2.0 (or iPhone for that matter). The 3D display on the Nuvi is very helpful for driving in dense city streets, and that s not available on Android or iPhone. The Nuvi has nice features such as one-touch detour calculation, excellent geocaching integration, accurate and sensitive receiver, etc. I will not be leaving it at home for trips just because the Android supports maps. That said, there is something to be said for having maps of Android s quality. It can be a nice crutch if you re somewhere unfamiliar but didn t expect to be, and thus left your GPS at home. It also can give you routing on transit sources, which Garmin can t, so if you re in an urban area with bus/subway options, the Android maps could be very helpful. I will probably try that out when we re in Chicago next and still pack the Garmin unit for driving around rural Indiana. The Phone The last built-in app to discuss is the phone feature. Yes, the Android is a phone. As expected, the phone integrates well with the system. There is not much of any great interest to discuss here. It s a phone. It integrates with contacts. It works. I use Google Voice, and have had their BlackBerry app for some time now. The Google Voice android app is far nicer. You have the option to make all calls via Google Voice, none via Google Voice, prompt each time, or only international calls via GV (which is presumably cheaper for such than your carrier). A couple of annoyances, though. One is that you have to touch a button to activate the keypad (to send touch-tone digits while you re on a call). It should be activated by default. Android Market vs. App Store I know some people love it, but to me the Apple App Store is like a cross between the sleazy guy selling watches from his car trunk and the tourist trap strip malls that sell 50-cent useless plastic memorabilia for $20. Yes, there are some quality apps in the App Store that aren t overpriced, don t violate your privacy, and do something useful. But you ll have to look hard. It still boggles the mind that most of the secure password storage tools for Android think they need access to the GPS, Internet, and at least one of your contacts, phone number, logs, etc. Yes, you heard me right. A password storage tool wants GPS and Internet access. And, being Apple, we all know how tight they ve locked down the App Store. Emulators are banned. Useful apps get arbitrarily banned at various points. Now, the Android App Market is better than the Apple App Store in the sense that it has a lower percentage of the crappy apps, and perhaps more useful apps, at least to my taste. That s not to say it s without crappy apps. It boggles my mind why most weather applets on the Market think they need to know my phone s status and identity, and why some apps that have nothing to do with the Internet or location services want to know all of the above. I don t install such apps. But there are gems out there. The small 400K weather applets that do what they advertise, and do it well. My absolute favorite is droid48, an emulator for my beloved HP 48GX calculator. Yes, an emulator. You can also find various NES, SNES, and C-64 emulators on the Market; Apple famously removed the latter from their App Store recently. And you re not tied to the Market either; you can install apps from wherever you like. KeePassDroid is another one. It reads the same database as KeePassX for Linux or KeePass (.kdb format only) for Windows. It s a secure password management system, and I can periodically copy the file from my desktop over to the Droid and have all my passwords at my fingertips but encrypted, of course. There is simply nothing that convenient for the iPhone/Touch because the device doesn t permit it. Music and Video I haven t played with these much, but the music player seems to just see MP3s placed anywhere on the SD and presents them as you d expect a music player to do. It looks fully-functional and easy to use. Conclusion Overall, I think the Droid is a very nice phone. It isn t perfect, but it bests the iPhone in a number of areas. I think it s probably the best phone for many right now, and the iPhone for some others. Update Nov 11: Two other annoyances I forgot to mention. One is that the power-button shortcut menu, as well as the lock screen, have a quick shortcut to put the phone into silent mode. Very well. Except, confusingly, these buttons not only enable silent mode but also disable vibrate mode while checking the silent mode checkbox in settings does nothing to vibrate mode. There is no built-in shortcut to enable vibrate mode; you d have to unlock the device, use the volume keys to go down the vibrate. The app Silent Mode Jammer helps with this. Second is that the documentation is as poor as any other cell phone around. For instance, there s a setting that says Voice Privacy. It s a checkbox. The description is Enable enhanced privacy mode. Thanks, but that tells me nothing. Nobody online seems to know either. A few overconfident forum posters claim it s encryption, linking to posts from 2003 about a Sony phone with a checkbox with the same name. Maybe it is encryption, but that is hardly definitive. The bottom line is it s not documented anywhere. Neither of these change my conclusion above though.

Techcrunch wrote recently an enlightening article about Scam ads in social games.

Irony is the techcrunch article itself showing scam banners as well:

Today I've uploaded usplash-theme-debian_5 to sid, making it the first upload since more than two years. To celebrate this and to make the (upcoming) change(s more) visible, I've exchanged the artwork against the one by Chad Albers. In the future I plan to provide alternative splash images too, like the one done for Lenny (which sadly was never uploaded), a new one for Squeeze (once there is one) or this darker theme. Of course, the old theme will also be reintroduced by then and equally of course, I'm interested to hear about more good artwork!

If you want to help out, usplash-theme-debian is maintained in the collab-maint repository in alioth and the BTS is eagerly waiting for your bug reports and patches :-) Currently supported resolutions are 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1365x768 and 1600x1200. 1024x600, 1280x1024, 1440x1050 and 1900x1200 are already on my list of what's nice to have, what other resolutions are there you need to have? :-)

And then, I plan to upload a new version of usplash itself eventually as well, and again, I'd be delighted if someone would work on this with me... :-)

I'll publish this post on debian-devel@lists.debian.org, please reply there. Thank you.

A topic I've been trying to understand more about for some time is color calibration. I've used lprof to get a very rough starting point for my old CRT (sorely in need of replacement by now...) Since hardware colorimeters are not cheap and probably not many can be used with Linux (I've not really looked, to be honest) I've wondered if I couldn't use the one device that is (should be) calibrated that I already have: my camera. With some kind of feedback loop like shoot screen, analyze img file, adjust settings, shoot again (and the same process for the printer, and, possibly a bit more error prone since the freshly calibrated printer would be used to produce the template, the scanner), shouldn't it be possible to arrive at sane settings? The camera explicitly allows using sRGB or Adobe RGB color model, so I'd think the colors should be more or less narrowly defined, at least when shooting raw or using manual white balance. (Another thought: I have a dual screen system. Can X even do this? And if X can do it, is it possible to tell Gimp to set this up? But this is just idle speculatio. I've not really looked at Google's results yet, either.) Update: Haven't really thought about ambient light. But the display emits light, so I'd shoot the screen in a darkened room, with white balance of the camera set manually. OTOH thanks Jo l if I can get a colorimeter for not much above 100$, it's not worth investing too much time. I had always thought these devices were much more expensive. divide_by_zero Yes, I know CRT are usually much better than LCD, but OTOH my screen apparently starts to show its age: it will suddenly, and visibly, change brightness and color every few hours. I suspect the high voltage circuitry is not too stable anymore... And I won't buy another CRT, those things are just huge...

Over the weekend I bit the bullet and purchased a new camera, a Canon EOS 1000d (many page revie). I've taken a few hundred shots with it so far, trying to get a feel for what it can do, and what I can do now that I couldn't before </Lady Teldra>. As my first DSLR its a pretty significant upgrade and I'm enjoying it a lot - especially since I've managed to persuade a few local people to pose for me. Now is the time to wonder how to store, share, and organise the pictures I've taken and will be taking in the future. Currently all my pictures are beneath ~/Images, replicated across a number of machines for redundancy. As a sample I have:

skx@gold:~$ ls /home/skx/Images/
Computer  Flat  Misc  Parties  People  Pets & Animals  Travel

Beneath these top-level directories I have more directories for specific items, such as ~/Images/Travel/2009/York, or ~/Images/People/kelly. I think that I should probably be looking at using some image-manager application to allow me to tag, date, and export images more easily though. Right now I'm not really sharing anything except a few sample shots:

• A bike
• Some feet

Those are quite nice shots, but I suspect sooner or later I will have pictures I do wish to share properly. So I need to come up with an URL scheme, or a library tool which will export specific shots and keep the rest of my archive private by default. Any suggestions are welcome .. ObFilm: The Dark Crystal

I was pointed to this Toast to Turing, by Matt Harvey. Very much worth sharing.

Here s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
very carefully scripted but at least it s not encrypted
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?

What, don't you know who Alan Turing was? Read a bit on him then, one of the core seminal minds for Computer Science. And a scientist vilified for being different from what is regarded as normal. [update] And answering to some people's doubts: Why this toast? Because the UK Government, in the voice of the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, after over 50 years of leading Alan Turing to commit suicide due to criminally accusing him for gross indecency for being a homosexual and forcing him into a deep body-altering hormonal therapy to cure him, has finally posthumously apologized. Brown said, So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.