Miscellany.

The Acrobat Reader 5.05 linux plugin just works with Mozilla 1.0rc3. Of course. :)

Here is an interesting article about why Eric S. Raymond likes Python. It’s an interesting read, whether you’re an esr fan or not.

My VisSym 2002 trip to Barcelona was great fun. We made good use of the time in Spain and even spend a few nights in a Parador in Cardona. This was on the pricey side, but is definitely worth it.

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I’m an engineer in the body of a computer scientist.

I’m in browser heaven. I bought Codeweavers Crossover 1.1.1 for a measly $24.95, so now my already hard-core Mozilla 1.0rc2 can also make use of all the winblows browser plugins, such as Quicktime, Windows Media Player 6.4 (ugh), Flash 6, Shockwave and so on. This is a great piece of software and it’s stable too!

Did you know that “xam = reduce(operator.add, map(operator.mul, xa, xa)) ** .5” calculates the magnitude of n-element vector xa? I had to wipe away a tear when I wrote that. It’s fast too. To run an interesting python benchmark, download this.

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Grrr…

If it were up to some politicians, South Africa is not going to have a population to worry about in a few years time. The president’s (Thabo Mbeki’s) view on the AIDS / HIV link is disturbing and so is the racism with which he and some of his supporting members of state approach scientists who oppose them. Mbeki’s strong point has never been his intellect; unfortunately he does not seem to realise this.

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Another day, another desktop…

Since PWM, I’d gone back to fvwm2 and then back to icewm. Seemingly, that wasn’t quite enough hopping around, so I built the latest greatest gnome 2 preview using the GARNOME distribution, which is a pretty cool BSD ports-ish way of building gnome 2. Well, gnome 2 looks good but isn’t there quite yet.

Soooooo, I thought that I should give KDE a try again, seeing that they’ve passed the 3.0 milestone. My oh my, it’s even prettier than 2.2 and the strange thing is that it’s quite a bit snappier as well! I have it running with Mosfet’s high performance liquid and it’s seriously drool-worthy. For a run-of-the-mill screenshot, click here. There are even debs for testing available (go to #debian-kde on openprojects.net to see where and how) so installing is a cinch.

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Hello fans

Too many beers last night…. ugh. Fortunately there’s soma fm for some soothing streaming music. I just can’t seem to decide between the Groove Salad and the Secret Agent (“The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life”) streams, although my mysterious life does make me biased towards the latter.

Soothing music + not moving too often or too suddenly == productivity. I think.

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news flash

We’ve just moved into beautiful new house in the middle of Delft. The only problem is that I’m stuck on dialup till May 7. Groan.

I found Best of Led Zeppelin I and II in a CD shop today. They’re mine now. :) They don’t make music like they used to, do they?

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