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This is a shortened version of my personal diary for November 2004, shortened to those entries of interest to computer people. See http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary.php for my personal diary.
Through Frankfurt to the Talhütte restaurant in Kalbach. It's amazing to see how things change. Went down the Mörfelder Landstraße, where I lived 32 years ago, and it seemed completely unchanged. I commented to Yvonne that in those days there was a Wienerwald restaurant (one of the original German fast food restaurants, now almost completely forgotten) round the corner, and wondered what was there now. We drove past: still Wienerwald. Nothing seems to have changed in that time.
Going through town, it was clear that things have changed a lot in the town centre, even since we left 7 years ago, and by the time we got to Kalbach we hardly recognized the place. The Talhütte is still there, though it's changed owners. They still knew the old Tandem mob, though, and gave me an update on what had happened. Seems that HP closed down the entire department.
Then out to Rosbach to look at our old house, which looks pretty much the same as before, then to see Peegee Whone, the last survivor of the HP fracas. He's been with Tandem^WCompaq^WHP for 27 years now, and it looks like he'll be there until he retires.
To Sim Lim Square to buy a Ricoh Caplio R1 digital camera, which had caught my eye because of the wide angle zoom (equivalent to a 28-135 mm range on a 35 mm camera) and its fast reactions (only 50 ms claimed delay on the shutter release). Found a surprising amount of dishonesty amongst the merchants: after I had agreed a price and gone to get the cash (they charge more for credit cards), my chosen merchant told me that the accessories were not included, and asked if I would like them. Got quite annoyed, but still appear to have got a good price.
Also spent some time playing with my new Ricoh Caplio R1 digital camera. It has some nice features, but USB support doesn't seem to be one of them. It seems that most digital cameras automatically appear as a SCSI device, but this one just shows:
ugen0: Ricoh Company Ltd. Caplio R1/RZ1, rev 1.10/0.00, addr 2
Installed gphoto2, yet another badly documented multimedia program, and finally concluded that it couldn't access the camera either; looking at the code, it looks as if I'll have to modify it to at least recognize the correct USB IDs.
Things looked better with the USB SD card reader that I had also bought (thanks to Joe Karthauser for the info):
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0 da0: <Generic USB SD Reader 2.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device da0: 1.000MB/s transfers da0: 121MB (248320 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 121C)
I was able to mount the card and read the images in almost exactly the same way as for the Nikon CoolPix 880 that it replaces. The results are interesting: the colours are better, of course the resolution is a little higher, and the zoom range is much better.
Also tried the “movie” mode, which is in proprietary AVI format. mplayer should be able to handle that, but it seems to drop the last few seconds of the data. Since that was all I recorded, there's little to show. I must investigate alternatives.
I used to read several magazines. Nowadays it's only c't, and even that is keeping me so busy that I'm a couple of issues behind. Where does the time go?
While in Germany I bought a copy on CD-ROM of “Das deutsche Wörterbuch”, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. It's an interesting contrast to the Oxford English Dictionary for a large number of reasons:
$w ins insert "Tatian" {s1 } $w ins insert " 85, 4) " {s2 } $w ins insert "erklärt sich durch übergang der adjectiven stellung in substantive und durch häufigen gebrauch des wortes, ebenso die im mhd. schon theilweise erfolgte kürzung des stammvocals. schwierigkeit macht nur das verhältnis der ags. und altnord. wortformen" {s1 } $w ins insert " hearra, herra, " {s2 } $w ins insert "die sich nur dann in beziehung zur oberdeutschen bringen lassen, wenn man annimmt, dasz die letztere als titel für höhergestellte sich nach norden zu ausbreitete und in die genannten dialecte als lehnwort eindrang, eine annahme für die manches spricht." {s1 }The very first one is of a different nature, though:
=== grog@wantadilla (/dev/ttyp3) /home/Texts/DWB 2 -> ./DWB xset: bad font path element (#93), possible causes are: Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions Directory missing fonts.dir Incorrect font server address or syntaxI don't suppose you can blame the software for inadequacies in xset's error messages, but it took me a session with ktrace to find that the program is letting xset loose on a subdirectory of supplied TrueType fonts without a fonts.dir directory (so at least the error message was correct, if vague).
Today I finally got round to installing TrueType fonts, with some help from an article by Jim Weeks on on Dan Langille's site. Installed Xfstt with no trouble and then discovered that I had to move all the fonts to the TrueType font directory (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType), since xfstt doesn't seem to handle more than one directory.
Things weren't helped by not reading the instructions properly: clearly the font paths needed to be updated to include the TrueType font directory (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType), and that's in /etc/XF86Config (or wherever it might be; lately I've been looking for the location of the config file in /var/log/Xorg.0.log). As a result, I updated /etc/XF86Config to include the font path, stopped the server and tried to restart it. For some reason it couldn't reinitialize the second display card, so I had to reboot. And that caused a panic, a trap holding Giant. Only after rebooting did I read the man page for xfstt and discover that xset has an option to update the font path without stopping the server:
xset fp+ unix/:7101All seems to work well now, but it's not clear how the font server is supposed to get opened at boot time.
After that off to Marion to find some cheap second-hand monitors:
The monitors were $5 a piece, and claimed 1024x768 resolution, which I haven't had a chance to check. There are lots of them; it's amazing how quickly things go out of fashion. All seem to be newer than the right-hand Eizo monitor on my desktop.
Getting my phones reconnected is a real pain. Telstra have a “cheap” plan (HomeLine Budget, only $18.50 per month, much less than the going rate of $27 to $30, but much more expensive than the $11.65 that we paid 7 years ago. Why are phone rates going up in Australia?). Applying for it seems to be a problem. On Friday, a consultant called Hamish promised to send me the application forms, but nothing happened. Today I spoke with Lea, and by the evening nothing had arrived. I'm getting the feeling that Telstra wants to discourage this option.
Made more progress on my documentation, somewhat punctuated by more suggestions from other people in the company. Amusingly, once again they're proposing something that Monkey could do 12 years ago.
Work is heating up too. Spent a lot of time with mail messages and talks on the phone. Looks like Monkey will be used earlier than expected.
Confused day today: more email discussions and more work on the documentation. Things are taking shape, but once again I made less progress than I had hoped.
Off to Sydney in the afternoon. Flying is becoming less and less pleasant: planes seem to be more cramped than ever before, maybe because the are almost always full. Food is also getting worse: today we got a packet of almonds and a packet of cheese sticks:
To add injury to insult, it was stuck together with tape which attacked and damaged the magazine I was reading. Things are going downhill. Paradoxically, there were free drinks (beer and wine), but the overall impression is negative.
In the evening to Bar Broadway to meet some of the BSD people in Sydney. Pleasant evening, but why are all these places so loud?AUUG board meeting today. After my comments about the last one, Steve Landers asked me not to mention specifics. I decided not to change the policy I had decided on, not to mention specifics.
In the evening—yet again—to the Bar Broadway with the Victorian contingent. It was even louder than last night.
Back home and again got offered “food” that I couldn't be bothered to eat. Qantas seems to think it appropriate to serve no real food on 2 hours flights. I fear we're looking at American conditions.
Trying a new web browser again today. I had discovered a web site for the Le trésor de la langue française, unfortunately with really broken HTML. Due to the lack of character encoding data, it would at random display all accents as ?, making it almost illegible. That's not really netscape's fault, of course, but I thought I should set a default character encoding. After hearing great things about firefox, decided to install it.
People say that firefox is a small, fast browser. The source tree was 430 MB, about the same as for the entire FreeBSD operating system, and it took a couple of hours to compile. By comparison, Emacs, once the benchmark of bloatware, is done almost instantaneously, in less than two minutes. When firefox was done, all my Emacs key bindings were gone and had been replaced with something Microsoft-like. Nobody I knew seemed to know how to reenable them; it seems that people don't use editors any more.
No, this isn't a vi/Emacs rant. It's a question of being able to use any kind of editing commands beyond Backspace without taking your hands off the keyboard. This seems so basic to me that it shouldn't be removed without a very good reason (not stated) or at least as an option.
Spent some time looking for how to reenable the keys. You'd expect that it would be possible via the Preferences menu, but it seems that all browsers nowadays expect to run under other bloatware like GNOME and KDE. Is this really the way software should be evolving?
Finally found the answer with google. I had to create a file ~/gtkrc-2.0 and add the following entry:
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"Not a big deal in the end; what surprises me is that nobody seems to care any more. Is this a sign of growing illiteracy?
Another new development that everybody except me seems to love is “tabbed browsing”. This is an attempt on the part of individual programs to take over the job of a window manager, and to ensure that you don't see more than one window at a time. This baffles me: it seems to be so much the opposite of what anybody would want. I'm still trying to understand some advantage in the concept. Is it maybe because window managers are becoming too complicated, or that the reliance on the use of a mouse has made it inconvenient? Spent some time trying to find a way to disable the feature, finally finding a plugin that completely disables tabbed browsing. Surprises weren't over, though. I couldn't download the plugin: I had to let the remote site install it. What kind of security model is that?
firefox is an enigma. Turns out that I can't just install flash on it (Macromedia claims it can't find anything for my platform; maybe I need to find a way to pretend to be a Linux system), and for some reason I see the same rendition problems that I've already seen on Opera and Microsoft “Internet Explorer”: the lines are far too far apart in relation to the (relatively large) font. By contrast, Netscape gets it right. This time I didn't find any knobs to twiddle, and when I discussed it online, the general feeling was “that's the way things are nowadays”. Do we have to throw out long-established best practices in the name of ”progress”?
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