Yesterday, my Tungsten C arrived. Read all about the new gadget and its role in my life by clicking here
Ken Livingstone: Could someone explain this to me?
On the one hand we have Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, known for a life long of campaigning against racism and anti-semitism.
On the other hand we have Oliver Finegold, a reporter of the Evening Standard. The Evening Standard is a sister paper of the Daily Mail, the paper that supported Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 30s. This context is important.
So Finegold approaches Livingstone after a party at City Hall. Livingstone does not like newspaper people. He asks Finegold whether he’s a “German war criminal”, referring to the Daily Mail issue mentioned above. Finegold obviously has to contribute that he’s Jewish. Livingstone replies: “You’re just like a concentration camp guard. You’re just doing it because you’re paid to, aren’t you?”
MoonEdit (and my new website)
I was just chatting to Jorik who was on about ME this and ME that. So I’m like, “what’s ME”. So Jorik’s like “ME is MoonEdit, a real-time collaborative text editor”. So I’m like, “Oh wow, that’s like SubEthaEdit, the application I’ve secretly been admiring but haven’t been able to run because of an acute lack of MacOS hardware”. So he’s like, “I don’t know what SubEthaEdit is.”
Well, it turns out MoonEdit is a collaborative text editor (see the movie on their website!), a little like SubEthaEdit, somewhat less slick, but available for Windows and Linux. Go play with it. Collaborative text editing is da bomb.
Solving the frikking BadPixmap Firefox/Thunderbird crash on Debian Woody
Okay, you’re running Debian Stable 3.0 (it’s also called woody, or Linux 1958). Because this distribution is older than yer grandpaw, you have the firefox and thunderbird backports from www.backports.org installed.
However, you’re not happy, because these otherwise fine packages crash more often than you can open a window (in fact, that’s what makes them crash, for example thunderbird’s login window or the find window in firefox). In fact, you’re downright homicidal. Even admiring your brand-new mullet in your hand-mirror is not cheering you up!
Zyxel 650R-31 nat loopback
I run a CVS server on a little linux box at home. This box is behind a Zyxel 650R-31 hardware firewall/router thingy that passes ssh connections from the outside to the linux box. I have a static IP, so a CVS spec looks something like: :ext:me@my.box – this works from the big bad internet. However, on my home LAN, the linux box has an internal non-routable IP, so CVS sandboxes on my laptop can’t be updated, as they have the my.box CVS root stored, and the Zyxel router only does port forwarding on its WAN interface.
World, the time has come to push the button
My music tip of the week is: Go and get the new Chemical Brothers album Push the Button. Now.
On a related note (ha ha), this weekend I acquired a Maxfield G-Flash 1GByte MP3 player. I am most satisfied with my acquisition, thank you.
Multi-agent frameworks and Python
The 3 second status update: I had a truly wunnerful December holiday in South Africa, featuring an abundance of sun, sea, crayfish, beer, meat, fish, various tasty molluscs, a very exciting jaunt in a 4-seater Cessna plane (thanks Dave!), good friends and fun-loving family.
After re-adjusting to Dutch weather and getting back into the work thing for a few days, we spent a weekend in Koeln (or Cologne; that’s in Germany for the geographically challenged), worked some more and spent this past weekend debauching terribly with a large group of friends in Bradford-on-Avon, a picturesque little town about an hour’s drive from Bristol (that’s in the UK, again for the geographically challenged readers).
phpBugTracker
This weekend I decided that it was time to install web-based bug-tracking software to allow the users of DeVIDE (all 2 of them) to be able to report bugs and to allow me to be able to keep track of all the reports.
Because of my experience with the phpBugTracker installation used by Kitware for VTK, ITK and a bunch of their other products, I decided to go with this software.
However, after installing and configuring this, I got the following error message when trying to login for the first time:
Lush, OCaml and more
I took a long hard look at the OCaml functional (well, mostly) language this weekend. One of the many interesting aspects of OCaml, is that, in addition to offering an interpreted environment, it comes with a REALLY good compiler. So, you can sit there prototyping your latest numerical trick and when you’re happy, you can compile the code to a blazingly fast native binary.
So, whilst reading up on all this, I remembered a question from the [Lush][2] (a lisp-like scientific languages that can also be compiled) [FAQ][3]: “How does Lush compare to Matlab/Octave for speed?”. So the author then shows that Lush is like 50 billion times faster than Octave. (Go look.)
Nexus NX-3500 “Real Silent Power Supply”
So, a few weeks ago I spring-cleaned inside my trusty little linux server machine before installing the replacement hard drive. I think I was rewarded with about a kilo of dust and other muck, but at least the machine is now clean. I then replaced the little CPU fan with a brand-new ball bearing fan (4cm). That was a huge improvement, but I was still not happy with the level of noise.