Since August of last year, when I received a GMail invitation from Rudolph, I’ve been running all my mail through GMail. In other words, GMail was my primary interface to any and all email.

It went swimmingly! This is a fantastic product: to my mind, it’s not so much the 1G storage, as it is the fact that you can search for and find emails in the blink of an eye and, quite importantly, the idea of dumping all processed emails into a great big container, called “All Mail” by GMail. The only thing that is still missing, is the possibility (I would pay for this) to change one’s “from:” address to one’s business or other email address. Reply-to is not good enough. My emails should appear as if they’re originating from the networks of my employer, the TU Delft.

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Yesterday, my Tungsten C arrived. Read all about the new gadget and its role in my life by clicking here

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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?”

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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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