The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
H. P. Lovecraft
Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Today I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on a desktop computer. I am pretty distro/desktop agnostic (see my ten year anniversary post), but since Debian Etch is a bit old for a desktop and Hardy Heron has Long Term Support (I do not want to update/fix a computer every half year!!) Ubuntu was my choice.

There are unlimited gnome improvements which I don't care about, but some things stand out for me in this release.

screenshot,background Leiden (by Jochem)

So thanks again for all free software developers!

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Posted by jochem on 20th April 2008, last update on 22nd April 2008
Dead on

Good presentation on captchas by google. See this video. The group that is headed by the prof doing the presentation should easily be able to break current current used image captchas if their statements are true...

Perhaps I like it because perfectly reflects my own opinion though ;-).

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Posted by jochem on 3rd April 2007, last update on 3rd April 2007
Away

Linux and 64 bit computers are a good combination. The first linux 64 bit support dates from 1995. To be able to compile everything from source really helps supporting a platform. Windows mostly runs 32 bit programs at this moment, because proprietary software vendors (which account for most windows software) are not really fast in releasing new versions. Not all is well for linux though. Macromedia Flash is such a proprietary program of which no 64 bit player exists. Now, I do not really like flash (see also a previous entry about this, but for some reason flash is used to display movies on the web. If you think that that is weird, I agree. What has a vector renderer to do with a movie codec? The masters from youtube.com can perhaps tell you; we just have to comply.

I like to watch movies, so now I have a problem... Or not? Fortunately the flash way of bringing movies is just an container trick around a normal mpeg movie, and my favorite audio/movieplayer mplayer can play them just fine.

So if you are on debian, add contrib to /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get install iceweasel iceweasel-greasemonkey mozilla-mplayer (the mplayer plugin is broken for firefox in etch at this moment). Now you only need a way to let mozilla know how to feed the movies. This can be done with a simple script like Michael Sheldons's.

So finally I can be an ultrahip blagotuber and and bring you movies ;-)

Happy Christmas Everyone!

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Posted by jochem on 26th December 2006, last update on 26th December 2006
Kaleidoscope

During some longer than normal train travelling I had time to rework some site bits. Permalink code is rewritten, pages are now integrated into my journal and the archive navigation is date based. Tag support is added to site and feeds

Also I added photos from an autumn week in Morocco. This trip is really recommended in october.

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Posted by jochem on 6th November 2006, last update on 6th November 2006
Promise(d) me

As promised here, I wrote a better version of the quickviewer for the vim calendar plugin. It now properly wraps around year ends. 

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Date::Calc;

$dir = "~/diary";
for ($i = 0; $i < 90; $i++) {
  $fn = "$dir/$y/$m/$d.cal" 
    if(($y,$m,$d)=Add_Delta_Days(Today(),$i));
  if (-f $fn) {
    printf "%2d %s", $d, substr(Month_to_Text($m),0,3);
    open IN, $fn; while (<IN>) {print "\t$_" if (! /^\s*$/);}
    close IN;
  }
}

Compared to last year's entry you could say I was far more efficient in 2005 than in 2004, but also a lot lazier. I leave it to you to assess the correctness of this statement.

Happy 2006 everyone!

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Posted by jochem on 29th December 2005, last update on 29th December 2005

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