If you’re interested in the final, working solution, skip to the end of this post (the part where it says “UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE” :).

You’ve made your award-winning illustration in Visio 2003, and now you’d like to include it in your award-winning LaTeX proposal. You find this page with tips, but you’ve also discovered that none of them work for you, or that you don’t have the necessary software, or that they half-work in a very frustrating fashion (this was the case for me with visio -> emf -> openoffice draw -> eps and borked transparencies).

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Hi there kids!

Remember, all operating systems suck completely, even Loonix, the shareware system written by Luunis Torvaldez, the Mexican hacker responsible for other shareware greats, such as the desktop environment Gloom.

Because this is a long(ish) text, I’ll subtly hint at the conclusion: print support in Ubuntu sucks really badly, which is all the more crappy because Ubuntu is otherwise a fine distribution. Now back to my story…

In any case, today I lost a few precious hours of my life (I really had more important things to do) trying to configure the printer on my Ubuntu 6.06 server as a public / guest access printer. In other words, anyone attached to my network should be able to print to this printer.

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Reading the NRC Handelsblad of yesterday, I come across this article. For those of you who don’t read Dutch, here is the BBC’s version of more or less the same issues.

In short, the South African government, and specifically the intellectually (greatly) challenged minister of health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, believe that AIDS and HIV should be treated with cutting-edge medication such as garlic, lemons and beetroots. To add insult to injury, at the South African stall at the international AIDS conference in Toronto, representatives were demonstrating said garlic, lemons and beetroots.

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Hi there mystery imaginary audience! I’m making this entry from my brand new HP NC 8430 Core Duo laptop! T2500 (sounds like a killer robot from the future, doesn’t it?) 2GHz dual core Yonah CPU, 2 GBytes 667 MHz DDR memory, 100 GB SATA 5400 RPM disk (budget budget), ATI Radeon X1600 with 256MB of video memory, gooorgeous 15.4″ 1680×1050 screen. Oh thank you kind and generous TU Delft!

After having zapped across gigabytes of data over gigabit ethernet from my trusty HP NC6000, I’ve been setting things up. As part of this, I’ve been searching around for tools with which I can keep an eye on the CPU temperature (yeah, I’m one of those control freaks).

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A man is rudely treated and fined 80 pounds by the London police for saying that the metal detector thingies used in the tube are a “piece of shit that wouldn’t stop anyone”. Sheesh.

Read the article in the Londonist by clicking here.

(Found on BoingBoing – don’t go to this blog, you WILL waste time.)

(ps. Yes, I’m back. David Allen’s GTD does work.)

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I *should* be working on an already-past-the-submission-deadline article like a crazy man, but hey, it’s saturday night and I need to relax.

So, get the latest release of envedit, the friendlest and most flexible windows environment variables editor, while it’s still hot! Click here to go to its homepage and download the installer or the source code.

Night night.

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In just 14 days, my Movable Type trackback script, mt-tb.cgi, has generated 500MB of traffic. Thank you, idiot trackback spammers!

Since we don’t really use this feature (I think), I’ve disabled this script and added the following rewrite rule to my htaccess:

<br/> RewriteRule ^weblogs/mt-tb.cgi - [F]<br/>

This way the spam scripts get a 403 without being handled by the wiki.

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Hi there gang,

I’ve just released envedit 6.3.13, my extremely user-friendly and super-free (BSD opensource even) Windows Environment Variables Editor. Go to its homepage for more information on this little tool.

subliminal message: download envedit. use envedit. like envedit.

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We’re on the train on our way to Bonn. T-Mobile GPRS works like a charm, especially with the transparent image compression done by speed.t-mobile.nl.

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I’m doing some image processing heavy-lifting this weekend with DeVIDE ng1.phase1 (that’s the not-yet-released next generation). The Windows XP scheduler is quite crappy, so on my laptop (1.6GHz Banias, 1G ram, 5400 RPM HDD) this kind of work tends to slow everything else down. So, I upgraded my Linux server box’s RAM to 1G as well (it has an Athlon64 2800+ and is running Centos 4.2 Linux, 7200 RPM HDD) in order to use this for some of the heavy processing.

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