Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Erase feature
For some days I would really like to have an erase feature, at least for some a wipe tools for some sect... ehm, hours.
On last Friday I was on my way to buy a birthday present for my mother. This needed some back and forth across the city. When I tried to get up to the lab quickly when finished I ruined by bike's chain. One of the rivets broke half loose. OK, I could still drive and so I did.
Medha's washing machine that resides in our shared flat and that I can use. Yesterday night I put some clothes and my loved fleece jacket for some washing cycles into the machine and waited - and waited - and waited - and... After about five hours the machine was still "tumble drying". Strange. I decided to go to sleep. In the morning the machine was in the same state. I stopped it. It didn't pump the old water out of the machine. Strange. Today in the morning I took out the clothes.
I decided to go to the bicycle repair shop cause of the mentioned chain problem. I arrived there at about 9:30 in the morning. But they would not open until after 10:00. So I decided to go to the lab first and come back in the afternoon. Bad idea. I did not make it a hundred meters up the hill when suddenly the bike blocked. OK, now the chain was ripped I thought. No, not the chain, the whole rear of the derailleur (yes, I had to lookup up that word, beside some others) had broken away! Doh! So I went back to the repair shop, got some chocolate milk and some bred with cheese and waited for the shop to open.
When they opened and I showed the guy in the shop what happened he told me something like: Ok, we can fix this, but it's gonna be expensive. And he meant it! But since a new bike would cost a lot more and a "new used" bike of comparable class would be about the same I decided to let them do the repair. Now I'm one week without a bike. This just at the time that I got used to drive up the hill every day...
When I came back in the afternoon there was still that broken washin machine... When Medha came back we had a look and put some of the beer crates to a good used and put the machine on two of those. We opened a small tube to get the water out of it. There we also found a hair-band of Medha. After removing we did some tests and at least this machine was working again... I hate hardware. It always breaks.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
It can see!
Last week I finally ran the new FireVision software for the AllemaniACs on the robot with a full pipeline. It works and it didn't crash. But it still needs a lot of work to be robust enough to be used in a real-life scenario. And this must be done in a minimum of time as computing power is pretty limited... So now it is like a really old man with bad eyes who is looking for his glasses. Now we've got to help him find these.
I installed Fedora Core 4 on my notebook. Following the Yum upgrade FAQ it just installed on the FC3 box without a glitch. I added all the 3rd-party repos that I use and there were no conflicts. Great work done on this release and especially Yum! I like the new look though a little bit brighter would be nice. Finally NetworkManager is playing nicely with my internal Atheros WLAN adapter. Now I have to check out the VPN support for university. There are quiet some updates that I have to do now at my university job now...
GCC 4 works pretty good. Since we already had to fix most of the bad things for 3.4 we didn't have really big problems. It is more strict and issues a lot more warnings about missing non-virtual destructors (even Qt spits out a lot of these). You should read the GCC manual chapter about static defines. This helped me to fix some unresolved symbols in some of our libraries. It's kinda strange but if you follow the recommendation it works again. I liked the definition in the class file though. After all it just took about a dozen changes to the software (not too bad in >500.000 code lines).
I also bought a new external hard drive. Finally I have more space for all the stuff that you collect over the time. Tested LUKS on this drive which works just fine. Will document some little hints that can be helpful in the Wiki soon.
With this I also bought an Soundblaster Audigy NX 2 USB sound card. This was the final reason for installing FC4 now and not later. But as it turned out that didn't help. The FC4 kernel comes with ALSA 1.0.9rc2 but the modifications I wanted for that driver to work nicely and not in there before rc4... After upgrading to the current version it worked just fine. You have to do some tricks though to get it play in a 5.1 setup if you only supply stereo. Will put that also in the wiki soon on how to get that running.
Pretty tired after this week. Have to to some more physics learning tommorrow. We expect a hot weekend so Anne and I will probably truly lie in a park the whole sunday. Nice :-)
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Supreme nerd
This nerd test (found in the Xfce dev blog) showed that I'm a supreme nerd with a score of 93. Yay, who would have thought. Probably Anne saved me from getting a nerd king :-)
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Darts
Playing darts with Henk is a lot of fun. This is what we did in tonight's pub event here in the dormitory (well, kind of). We played Cricket. Henk clearly won the first game. In the second game he threw two triple 19 in one go. I managed to get some points to get close again by throwing a couple of bulls I it became an interesting game again. Finally he won. In the third and last game it was similar. Henk started with a couple of triples closing a couple of fields early. In the end it came down to throwing more bulls faster again. This time I made the race. Nice evening.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
There is no appendix!
It started on Thursday, May 19th with some "feelings" in the stomach region. Nothing to worry about, probably just too much coffee during the last days for learning and hacking, must be. But tremendously reducing my consumption of drugs like caffeine and pure chocolate did not make it anything better. On friday night it started to hurt a little bit. Ah, no problem, had that before, comes and goes! But it didn't. On Saturday Anne and I went through the city looking through some stores, especially outdoor equipment stores to find some shoes for her for our Scotland trip in late summer. We ate at Subway. But at that time already I only ate small portions due to bellyache.
Saturday night we went to the cinema to watch Star Wars: Episode III. I think this episode is better than the earlier two. Although it could easily one hour longer to a little bit more of the story.
The night form Saturday to Sunday was terrible. Almost no sleep at all. In the morning I decided to see a doctor. So Anne organized Helgar's car (thanks Helgar!) and drove me to the nearest hospital where I was send by a phone hotline for medical emergencies. The doctor asked after a short examination: "Do you still have your appendix?" - "Yes" - "Not that long anymore I think!". So he sent me to the university hospital.
With the bad feeling in mind that this may take longer I asked Anne to drive me to the election office so that I could vote for the ongoing regional election. Good choice as we should see.
In the university hospital I had to go through a lot of examinations by half a dozen doctors. In the end they decided for appendicitis. So it came to in-patient treatment. One try to escape and one examination later one of the doctors I had seen before came again and strongly suggested to go for surgery because of high leucocyte values. We decided quickly and about an hour later I was in the operation room. That stuff that they use to beam you to distant dark places is really impressive: Almost instantly you are in a dreamless deep sleep.
The first thing a nurse or doctor said was: "Hey, did you know that you do not have an appendix for years!?". Doh! As it turned out later it had been removed about 15 years ago during another operation. And nobody remembered, dammit! But at least the could look around to make sure that there is nothing else in my lower abdomen causing the problems... A doctor explained to me that they never can be sure that it is not the appendix if there is any pain in that region. In this case they always go for surgery. As he told me they often enough find a perfectly sane appendix. None at all was indeed new.
During the following days it got better and better. No more pain besides the suture. And after two days of hunger I was finally allowed to eat again. Now I'm home and resting a little bit. Who gives me back this lost week!?
