Present Perfect

Art

The Flemish Museum of Contemporary Hacker Culture would like to confirm their successful acquisition of one pristine and unique set of original nattoons by the reputed artist Mr. Friedman.

Due to massive crowd attendance during the exposition, not everyone was able to fully admire the inspiring work of this budding young sketcher of daily life and the situations it presents. Hence we have been asked to provide photographs of said set and make them available.

• shot 1
• shot 2

Music

Went to see Evan Dando play this week. My ex-girlfriend called me up on the day itself and said her date couldn't go, so she took me along. Had a great time. He opened up with my favourite Lemonheads song, "The Outdoor Type". It was hard to tell if he was in a very good mood or just totally wasted... He played "The Great Big No" while lying down on the ground, pulling the microphone stand towards him, but he played it fantastically. Strange concert. His between-song-banter was funny too.

I lost a few entries due to random APM failures, so It'd be good to note that over the last few weeks

• Tom McRae was nothing short of amazing live
• Ed Harcourt is an incredibly talented live musician
• Interpol, while having released last year's best record, were incredibly disappointing live due to bad vocals and drowned sound
• Nada Surf charmed the crowd immensely while playing a great set, and as if by magic had at least 100 people on-stage during Popular, who all politely stepped back off after the song was done

mach

Close to a 0.4.0 release. It's about time. It really is true that 90 percent of an application gets written in 10 percent of the time. I'm tying up loose ends. Right now I can, from scratch, type

mach -r redhat-9-i386-fedora-stable --sign */*.spec

and it will build packages from each of those spec files, in the right order if packages depend on each other, and then sign the resulting packages as well as md5sums of the files.

Now I need to think about how it will work on the Fedora build server.

Laptop

Fitted it with a new 60 GB hard disk (MORE MUSIC) and 512 MB RAM. On the downside, there still is something incredibly sluggish about the Red Hat 9 kernel. I only really realized something was very wrong when I installed debian on the '98 Powerbook I have, and noticed how it always feels responsive and never skips on playing back music, while this 866 MHz Pentium III skips *all the time* when changing workspaces or other things.

If you know WHY it feels so slow then please drop me a line.

mx

Heh, you're welcome :) Yes, it really is great that it is actually possible to get help and learn from peers, and I'm glad I can sometimes help too.

Also, be advised that my advice is mostly from personal experience, and from the belief that systems should be easily upgradeable and thus /usr is best left to the package management system.

Of course, I break this rule myself for mach development, because mach has an suid binary that has some of the paths hardcoded in it for security, so then it really is faster to configure the source to be installed in /usr. The trick is to know why and when to break the rule.

Fun

A friend of ours had her birthday last weekend and invited us to the beach. A great time was had at all. Strangely nobody took pictures while the five of us were playing sissyball in the sea. Rules of sissyball are very simple : find the shortest distance between five people that allows them to pass the ball without dropping it for 40 passes.

My dad bought a Propcycle. It's an arcade game were you have to ride a bike. The harder you pedal, the higher you can fly across a landscape and catch flying objects. (I am not kidding you).

You probably never heard about it because it wasn't ever successful anyway. My dad saw it on holiday and spent at least two hours in the arcade every day. He didn't have much competition because it wasn't the coolest game around :)

He found someone who sold these units, and it arrived last week. It still needs to be assembled.

I took the opportunity to attach the PlayStation and Dave/Dina to the screen, and having such an incredibly big screen to play and watch on.

Peter thought this picture of me working was cool. Peter is strange. I'll miss him when he goes to South-Asia this year to ride his bike with his girlfriend for half a year.

Meanwhile, I'm considering going to work in Barcelona. Anxiety.

GUADEC

Going to GUADEC in ten days. Psyched to be there, I've been wanting to go there for a whole year. Strangely enough I feel less psyched now that it's clear. It might have to do with me doing a presentation there, and realizing I still have work left to do, when my time might be better spent doing more stuff on GStreamer proper.

Art The Flemish Museum of Contemporary Hacker Culture would like to confirm their successful acquisition of one pristine and unique set of original nattoons by the reputed artist Mr. Friedman....