Search Results: "cesco"

23 March 2024

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2024)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

9 March 2023

Charles Plessy: If you work at Dreamhost, can you help us?

Update: thanks to the very kind involvment of the widow of our wemaster, we could provide enough private information to Dreamhost, who finally accepted to reset the password and the MFA. We have recovered evrything! Many thanks to everybody who helped us! Due to tragic circumstances, one association that I am part of, Sciencescope got locked out of its account at Dreamhost. Locked out, we can not pay the annual bill. Dreamhost contacted us about the payment, but will not let us recover the access to our account in order to pay. So they will soon close the account. Our website, mailing lists and archives, will be erased. We provided plenty of evidence that we are not scammers and that we are the legitimate owners of the account, but reviewing it is above the pay grade of the custommer support (I don't blame them) and I could not convince them to let somebody higher have a look at our case. If you work at Dreamhost and want to keep us as custommers instead of kicking us like that, please ask the support service in charge of ticket 225948648 to send the recovery URL to the secondary email adddresses (the ones you used to contact us about the bill!) in addition to the primary one (which nobody will read anymore). You can encrypt it for my Debian Developer key 73471499CC60ED9EEE805946C5BD6C8F2295D502 if you worry it gets in wrong hands. If you still have doubts I am available for calls any time. If you know somebody working at Dreamhost can you pass them the message? This would be a big, big, relief for our non-profit association.

24 March 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Lost in Math

Review: Lost in Math, by Sabine Hossenfelder
Publisher: Basic
Copyright: June 2018
ISBN: 0-465-09426-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 248
Listening to experts argue can be one of the better ways to learn about a new field. It does require some basic orientation and grounding or can be confusing or, worse, wildly misleading, so some advance research or Internet searches are warranted. But it provides some interesting advantages over reading multiple popular introductions to a field. First, experts arguing with each other are more precise about their points of agreement and disagreement because they're trying to persuade someone who is well-informed. The points of agreement are often more informative than the points of disagreement, since they can provide a feel for what is uncontroversial among experts in the field. Second, internal arguments tend to be less starry-eyed. One of the purposes of popularizations of a field is to get the reader excited about it, and that can be fun to read. But to generate that excitement, the author has a tendency to smooth over disagreements and play up exciting but unproven ideas. Expert disagreements pull the cover off of the uncertainty and highlight the boundaries of what we know and how we know it. Lost in Math (subtitled How Beauty Leads Physics Astray) is not quite an argument between experts. That's hard to find in book form; most of the arguments in the scientific world happen in academic papers, and I rarely have the energy or attention span to read those. But it comes close. Hossenfelder is questioning the foundations of modern particle physics for the general public, but also for her fellow scientists. High-energy particle physics is facing a tricky challenge. We have a solid theory (the standard model) which explains nearly everything that we have currently observed. The remaining gaps are primarily at very large scales (dark matter and dark energy) or near phenomena that are extremely difficult to study (black holes). For everything else, the standard model predicts our subatomic world to an exceptionally high degree of accuracy. But physicists don't like the theory. The details of why are much of the topic of this book, but the short version is that the theory does not seem either elegant or beautiful. It relies on a large number of measured constants that seem to have no underlying explanation, which is contrary to a core aesthetic principle that physicists use to judge new theories. Accompanying this problem is another: New experiments in particle physics that may be able to confirm or disprove alternate theories that go beyond the standard model are exceptionally expensive. All of the easy experiments have been done. Building equipment that can probe beyond the standard model is incredibly expensive, and thus only a few of those experiments have been done. This leads to two issues: Particle physics has an overgrowth of theories (such as string theory) that are largely untethered from experiments and are not being tested and validated or disproved, and spending on new experiments is guided primarily by a sense of scientific aesthetics that may simply be incorrect. Enter Lost in Math. Hossenfelder's book picks up a thread of skepticism about string theory (and, in Hossenfelder's case, supersymmetry as well) that I previously read in Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics. But while Smolin's critique was primarily within the standard aesthetic and epistemological framework of particle physics, Hossenfelder is questioning that framework directly. Why should nature be beautiful? Why should constants be small? What if the universe does have a large number of free constants? And is the dislike of an extremely reliable theory on aesthetic grounds a good basis for guiding which experiments we fund?
Do you recall the temple of science, in which the foundations of physics are the bottommost level, and we try to break through to deeper understanding? As I've come to the end of my travels, I worry that the cracks we're seeing in the floor aren't really cracks at all but merely intricate patterns. We're digging in the wrong places.
Lost in Math will teach you a bit less about physics than Smolin's book, although there is some of that here. Smolin's book was about two-thirds physics and one-third sociology of science. Lost in Math is about two-thirds sociology and one-third physics. But that sociology is engrossing. It's obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't thought before about the practical effects of running out of unexplained data on a theoretical field, or about the transition from more data than we can explain to having to spend billions of dollars to acquire new data. And Hossenfelder takes direct aim at the human tendency to find aesthetically appealing patterns and unified explanations, and scores some palpable hits.
I went into physics because I don't understand human behavior. I went into physics because math tells it how it is. I liked the cleanliness, the unambiguous machinery, the command math has over nature. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding physics is that I still don't understand human behavior. "We cannot give exact mathematical rules that define if a theory is attractive or not," says Gian Francesco Giudice. "However, it is surprising how the beauty and elegance of a theory are universally recognized by people from different cultures. When I tell you, 'Look, I have a new paper and my theory is beautiful,' I don't have to tell you the details of my theory; you will get why I'm excited. Right?" I don't get it. That's why I am talking to him. Why should the laws of nature care what I find beautiful? Such a connection between me and the universe seems very mystical, very romantic, very not me. But then Gian doesn't think that nature cares what I find beautiful, but what he finds beautiful.
The structure of this book is half tour of how physics judges which theories are worthy of investigation and half personal quest to decide whether physics has lost contact with reality. Hossenfelder approaches this second thread with multiple interviews of famous scientists in the field. She probes at their bases for preferring one theory over another, at how objective those preferences can or should be, and what it means for physics if they're wrong (as increasingly appears to be the case for supersymmetry). In so doing, she humanizes theory development in a way that I found fascinating. The drawback to reading about ongoing arguments is the lack of a conclusion. Lost in Math, unsurprisingly, does not provide an epiphany about the future direction of high-energy particle physics. Its conclusion, to the extent that it has one, is a plea to find a way to put particle physics back on firmer experimental footing and to avoid cognitive biases in theory development. Given the cost of experiments and the nature of humans, this is challenging. But I enjoyed reading this questioning, contrarian take, and I think it's valuable for understanding the limits, biases, and distortions at the edge of new theory development. Rating: 7 out of 10

29 May 2015

Mike Gabriel: DXPC retroactively re-licensed as BSD-2-clause, nx-libs(-lite) now really DFSG-compliant

We recently had an intensive phase while reconsidering the DFSG-compliancy of the nx-libs(-lite) code base. TL;DR; In May 2015, all versions of DXPC released before version 3.8.1 (sometime in 2002) have retroactively been re-licensed by all previous maintainers of DXPC as BSD-2-clause. This blog arcticle is a modified version of the nxcomp/README.on-retroactive-DXPC-license file [1] and gives an overview of the discussion thread that lead to the retroactive re-licensing of DXPC. For the full discussion, see doc/DXPC_re-licensed::debbug_784565.mbox [2] in the nx-libs source project or #784565 on the Debian bug tracker [3]. [1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/nxcomp/README.on-re...
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/doc/DXPC_re-license...
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ STEP 1 In May 2015, a serious license issue around the nxcomp code shipped in this source project was raised and solved on the Debian bug tracker (thanks to Francesco Poli and many others): http://bugs.debian.org/784565 
From: "Francesco Poli \(wintermute\)" 
To: Debian Bug Tracking System 
Date: Wed, 06 May 2015 19:35:32 +0200
I noticed that the debian/copyright states:
[...]
  Parts of this software are derived from DXPC project. These copyright
  notices apply to original DXPC code:
read more

31 July 2012

Christian Perrier: Discovering a new package: HotelDruid

What is good in "my" job in Debian are opportunities to discover new interesting packages. While surveying the completion of debconf translations in unstable, I thus noticed a new package named "hoteldruid", that has a few questions and interaction with users. After my usual mumble because French and a few other languages were *finally* virtually 100% in unstable for a few days...... I went on my usual task in such cases: propose a review of debconf templates and package description to my fellow debian-l10n-english co-workers (/me bends to Justin B. Rye, our tireless, picky, efficient and very clever Master Reviewer for over 5 years now). Then I discovered what HotelDruid is about: this is a piece of PHP-based software meant to manage....an hotel or bed and breakfast...or any kind of such facility. Real end-user software. Really useful software. For real people...:-) Not the gazillionth obscure development language, or yet another encryption library, or yet another mysterious virtualization thing used by 10 people in the world (even if they host thousands of machines). These are the free software pieces I like the most. Probably Marco Maria Francesco De Santis (the upstream author and Debian package maintainer) somewhere in, I guess, Italy is running a small B&B (or maybe his parents, or his wife/cousin/whatever) *and* is a free software addict. And he wanted to run his business with free software. Same for this French genealogist who once wanted to display his data over the web (and make a real use of that obscure Ocaml language.....yes, pun itended to my friends, here). Of the person who wrote LedgerSMB to manage his business. Or those who use free software to manage hospitals (hi Andreas) or schools (hi DebianEdu folks...and special hi to Petter). Real software for real people. Of course, developed with obscure geeky things used only by those weird geeks who like to sometimes travel half a planet to just gather together and develop the best free operating system ever. Guess what? I like this! And guess what? I proposed the HotelDruid author to check whether we could imrove....translation, of course..:-)

13 May 2012

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2012/19

like in the last two weeks, this week's bug squashing was mostly related to the gcc 4.7 FTBFS bugs:

6 April 2009

Francesco P. Lovergine: Current tasks for DebianGis

I'm still waiting some clarificatons by HDF team about their HDF5 roadmap with SONAMEs and libraries name. It seems they partially learned to manage libtool properly to follow C API changes, but still some oddities are present, such as using the same names for MPI and serial flavors. I will probably have to again diverge from upstream names, which is generally something I don't like, as in the case of GDAL. A summary document about HDF5 plans is due in a brief also.
When finished with HDF updates, I will concentrate on a couple of new beasts which still are lacking in DebianGis and are of so much interest, that are Ossim and the CNES Orfeo Toolbox. In the meantime I would hope that debian-science team will define a squeeze-related policy for MPI.

As always, I'm still worried of the low level of activities in the DebianGis team, which is a constant since years. Unfortunately, this is a situation I see quite common also in many other teams, but I still don't see a right way to improve the status of the team to avoid an almost one-man show. Also I would like to see again Qgis in main, but I'm still waiting for feed-backs by past/current contributors to my last qgis-dev list and off-lists polls.

14 October 2008

Francesco P. Lovergine: OSM and N810

I finally managed to use my Nokia N810 to do some GPS logging for OSM. The Nokia internal GPS is quite slow, so I used an external antenna and the well known Maemo Mapper tracking capability to log my first 60 kms in my area. I'm not too much happy with the result, because it seems the Nokia tablet is quite slow in tracking points: other trackers are someway configurable on those regards, but Mapper seems not taking in account any user preference about data sampling. Too bad, even if it is able to use OSM maps as default background, which is a great plus for a mapper. Definitively it needs a look to sources to understand what happens under the cover.

26 July 2008

Philipp Kern: Stable Point Release: Etch 4.0r4 (aka etchnhalf)

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads. From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

17 January 2008

Francesco P. Lovergine: Vlogger with a named pipe

In an old post I dealt with the nice mod_chroot module to secure your multisite server. I also adopted recently vlogger in order to manage better apache logs for virtual hosts, when you have dozens or hundreds of them. Unfortunately the suggested way to use it (a simple piped command) does not work nicely with mod_chroot, because the piped command has to run in the chroot jail.

Of course, it is not a good idea installing the whole perl intepreter and all required modules in a minimized jail, so I adopted an oldish classic trick (the old things are always the best) to solve the issue: using a named pipe. You basically need to do something like the following:

mkfifo -m 600 /var/run/apache2/logger && chown www-logs /var/run/apache2/logger

cat /var/run/apache2/logger /usr/sbin/vlogger -u www-logs -g nogroup -s access.log /var/log/vlogger >/dev/null 2>&1 &

/etc/init.d/apache2 start

Of course your log directives will be something like:

LogFormat "%v %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"% Referer i\" \"% User-Agent i\"" vcombined
CustomLog "/var/run/apache2/logger" vcombined

You absolutely need to run the reader before the writer, else the init script would hang for ever. It is easy adding a simple init script to run vlogger before apache and it has also the big advantage of not requiring re-fork a perl intepreter at every damn log action. Piping rocks.

12 December 2007

Francesco P. Lovergine: Beamers

I ask myself again and again: why it is always a challenge using a laptop with a beamer? It is not rocket science, but I always find problems due to lack of sync with certain beamers and certain laptops combinations. If you are lucky, you can see an image, but probably some parts of the screen (and of your slides) are invisible. It happens also under Windows, but it happens too many times under Linux.
Lately, I'm finding difficult to use my Thinkpad X31 under that respect, even if I always managed to use it without great issues until some months ago. Does it need a macumba before use?

17 September 2007

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "The Best Blue Is Through The Trees" 2.20.0

Sound Juicer "The Best Blue Is Through The Trees" 2.20.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Also thanks to the tireless translation team: Djihed Afifi (ar), Ihar Hrachyshka (be), Alexander Shopov (bg), Runa Bhattacharjee (bn_IN), Jordi Mallach (ca), Ask Hjorth Larsen (da), Hendrik Richter (de), Tshewang Norbu (dz), Kostas Papadimas (el), David Lodge (en_GB), Jorge Gonz lez (es), Ivar Smolin (et), I aki Larra aga Murgoitio (eu), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Christophe Benz (fr), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ankit Patel (gu), Eyal Mamo (he), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Francesco Marletta (it), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Young-Ho Cha (ko), Erdal Ronahi (ku), ygimantas Beru ka (lt), Raivis Dejus (lv), Arangel Angov (mk), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Wouter Bolsterlee (nl), Tomasz Dominikowski (pl), Og Maciel (pt_BR), Duarte Loreto (pt), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Nickolay V. Shmyrev (ru), Danishka Navin (si), Matic gur (sl), Elian Myftiu (sq), (sr), Daniel Nylander (sv), Dr.T.Vasudevan (ta), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Baris Cicek (tr), Maxim Dziumanenko (uk), Clytie Siddall (vi), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Chao-Hsiung Liao (zh_HK, zh_TW).

20 March 2007

Francesco P. Lovergine: Lessons of the life...

Waiting hours to complete GRASS importing for an Hyperion 242 bands data set, just to discover that all bands are zeroed as result. At least, I also find that the latest Envi 4.3 is not able to read those HDF files correctly. Free software is any way better...

14 March 2007

Francesco P. Lovergine: To package or not to package...

... this is the problem

I just casually saw Norbert post about the ion3 querelle. This a very unfortunate example of collapsing interactions among upstreams and maintainers. My general advice (but for suggesting to use wmii or dwm instead of ion3 :-)) is avoiding packaging of development branches, but this is a decision which sometimes is difficult to take: some programs seems in development for years and stable releases could result largerly unusable or limited. Surely our - and generally speaking any distribution - release cycle and maintainance are not adequate for many on-the-edge software out there.

When upstreams releases [a]periodical milestones, those could be packaged, but upstream will not support them: we have already our problems in supporting regular releases for security independently by upstream for mainstream programs, without adding pieces of casual crap around.

Packaging a casual snapshots is out of question IMHO, but for using it in sid/experimental, so I can understand the upstream opinion, because many users report problem to upstream instead of maintainers. I see definitively no silver bullet anyway, but for maintainers' capability of understanding what should be packaged or not and opening an unbreakable communication channel with upstreams to be up-to-date in respect with upstream roadmap.

Francesco P. Lovergine: Playing with mod_chroot...

... or why PHP sucks so much?

It is quite common (at least for me) finding abused web applications on shared hosts around. The most typical case is finding some kind of IRC bot running as www-data and a few unauthorized files around used for phishing, cross-site scripting or what else. That motivated me to try playing with mod_chroot in order to minimize the possibility of webapps abuse from our friendly kiddies^Wcrackers. Mod_chroot is a nice tiny Apache module whose purpose is the confinment of webapps within a limited tree, where nothing but a few files and dirs are available to try exploits and abuse badly written code.

Unfortunately, I found that mod_chroot poses one major problem (among others, see its CAVEATS doc): the sucking mail() function is not working out of the box, because PHP folks - God knows why - decided to implement that stuff by calling a local /usr/sbin/sendmail program within a shell call. The most sane option is simply ignoring the issue and living happy with a disabled local mail() function. A nice solution in that case is using a PEAR Mail module, which is able to send mails via SMTP in much more elegant way. Unfortunately, there are quite a good number of morons out there, and that could be not a viable option if you are the system administrator of a bounce of shared hosts which are exposed to those morons, who absolutely need a working mail() function.

After a few googling around, I did find that many people had the same problem, but none found (or explained) a working and neat solution for a working mail() implementation, so I'm writing some notes about that. My implementation is based on a nice tiny program (mini_sendmail) which has the great advantage of not requiring a configuration file or a spool directory to work. It also works without suid bit on, which is a good thing as well. It is statically compiled by default, so it simplifies things a lot. In order to have mail() working you need also to install a (statically compiled) shell, e.g. bash-static as sh under the /bin directory of your chroot tree (a more tiny shell would be appropriate). I commented out the silly username autodetection code in the mini_sendmail.c source, because it creates some problem within an empty chroot tree (it failed with a "can't determine username" message with or without the /etc/passwd file available).

Now, the next step is using an entry like

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -fwww-data@your.domain -s127.0.0.1

in your php.ini file. You can also use another IP address if your SMTP server is not your localhost or you used some more exotic routing setup. Having a suitable /etc/hosts is also useful. A final trick is adding a var/lib/php4 or what ever directory is required to store PHP session files. No other files should be required in order to have all working. Of course, you have also to use inet sockets for any required connection (e.g. mysql) but this is typically the default in etch. I would also suggest to add only ad hoc statically-compiled binaries within the chroot tree when required, else you will need to store all required shared libs: in that case you will need to find binaries requirement by using ldd and chroot to find loading/running errors by means of an usual trial-and-error cycle.

15 November 2006

Erich Schubert: Eclipse just doesn't work

Eclipse just doesn't work right for me. I'm so pissed by this crap... I've been following this tutorial (whoever had the idea to use screenshots for the actual code parts... ever heard of copy'n'paste?). At one point you need to add a class. A new class. Derived from Object. So I chose the menu option in Eclipse to, well, add a new class. After pressing "Next" in the wizard, eclipse froze, using 100% CPU. After killing and restarting eclipse, it had only created an empty file. But since I have to type in the data from the Tutorial anyway, ok. Next step in the tutorial: edit the faces-config.xml file with the faces-config editor. Sounds easy. I click on the file, open with, faces-config editor. Boom. First some content type error message is displayed, but the details actually list a NullPointerException: 
java.lang.NullPointerException
    at org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.StructuredTextEditor.update(StructuredTextEditor.java:3047)
    at org.eclipse.jst.jsf.facesconfig.ui.FacesConfigEditor.addPages(FacesConfigEditor.java:396)
    at org.eclipse.ui.forms.editor.FormEditor.createPages(FormEditor.java:142)
    at org.eclipse.ui.part.MultiPageEditorPart.createPartControl(MultiPageEditorPart.java:276)
    [... 40 more lines of backtrace ...]
Error handling in Java sucks, too. Usually you just get a 50 lines+ stack trace. [Update: deinstalling XML buddy resolved the last problem, and I could add a second class without another crash]

12 March 2006

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "Let's Go Back, Let's Go Way On Way Back When" 2.14.0

Sound Juicer "Let's Go Back, Let's Go Way On Way Back When" 2.14.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Bug fixes: Translators: Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Duarte Loreto (pt), Elian Myftiu (sq), Francesco Marletta (it), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Gnome PL Team (pl), Hendrik Richter (de), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), J r my Le Floc'h (br), Jordi Mallach (ca), Kjartan Maraas (nb, no), Lasse Bang Mikkelsen (da), Leonid Kanter (ru), Maxim V. Dziumanenko (uk), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Petr Tome (cs), Priit Laes (et), Rajesh Ranjan (hi), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Rhys Jones (cy), Rostislav "zbrox" Raykov (bg), Satoru SATOH (ja), Tino Meinen (nl), ygimantas Beru ka (lt).

14 January 2006

Francesco P. Lovergine: Italian, really!

Ok, ok, I like pizza, mandolino and do it better... I'm definitively condamned to live in the same country of Berlusconi, sigh!





Your Inner European is Italian!









Passionate and colorful.

You show the world what culture really is.



Who's Your Inner European?

8 January 2006

Moray Allan

Some of the books I read in 2005:

Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces
Bob McCulloch, My Fare City: A Taxi Driver's Guide to Edinburgh
Origen, On First Principles (translated by G. W. Butterworth)
Sin-leqi-unninni, Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: from paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD
M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them
Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories (translated by Ronald Hingley)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Otto F. A. Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
R.W.B. Lewis, Dante: a life
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture
Arturo P rez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (second edition)
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated by Desmond Lee)
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins, Rosslyn: guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail
Ginevra Lovatelli, Secret Rome
Dauvit Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy (editors), Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (translated by Walter Hamilton)
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown)
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Georges Perec, A Void (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Saul Bellow, The Victim
Franz Kafka, The Trial
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount; Baron in the Trees; The Non-Existent Knight) (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)
Eusebius, The History of the Church (translated by G. A. Williamson)
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar's trial by fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room)

10 December 2005

Francesco P. Lovergine: My new toy landed

After the sudden death of my beloved Compaq Presario 2715 (friends said that it finally did commit suicide after almost 5 years of tortures), I finally got a new Thinkpad T43P for my Debian and not-so-Debian activities at home. Transferring the full contents of the Compaq hard disk and changing a bit its configuration on fly for the new hardware (SATA controller and a few other things) went well. I really hate installing my own boxes from scratch and managed to use Ubuntu-Live to startup the box and fill in the disk with my sid tree and home.
So now my second Thinkpad is on the road...

Next.