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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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:

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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.)

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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.

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Right, for those of you who don’t know yet, my group very kindly sent me to attend IEEE Visualization 2004 this week in Austin, Texas, USA, Earth.

The flight here was of course less than pleasant, but this is par for the course when considering any kind of flight longer than 8 hours. One tip: pre-ordering vegetarian meals can make all the difference. Instead of eating one of a few hundred pre-prepared plastic-like food imitations, you get one of 5 or 10 lovingly prepared tree-hugger veggie meals. The difference is astounding, and the lady sitting next to me was obviously very jealous.

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The Seagate 120G drive in my firewall machine died at the very young age of 8 months. I sent it in to Seagate via the RMA procedure and got a new one back within about 3 days, which I did find quite impressive. In the mean time, I started using a cheap-assed hardware firewall/router/modem thingy, which means I have a machine to play with.

Ubuntu went on there without a hitch and I must say I’m VERY impressed. It’s Debian-based, but without all the crap that so sours the otherwise healthy Debian experience. It also has a *much* shorter release cycle. Mark Shuttleworth, a South African who’s rich beyond belief but uses his money for really groovy things like being a space tourist and sponsoring deserving open source projects and whatnot, seems to be inspiration behind the whole project. I’m definitely convinced.

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