Things are back to normal after my long warm summer break, I’m having lectures and classes as usual… except that our assignments are pretty easy right now because we’ve just started with Standard ML of New Jersey which is a pretty cool language. You can see me reading in our fine textbook Elements of ML Programming on the right.

The image is one of the better images I’ve taken with my new Sony DSC-V1 camera. I took it using the self-timer on a bright summer morning a couple of weeks ago. As one can tell, then there wasn’t a single cloud on the sky — I ate my breakfest outside and played a little with the camera before I headed for DAIMI.

I’ve already taken over 800 images in the three weeks I’ve had it, but I’ve “only” kept 280 of them for the rest were either boring (lots of test shots of my room), badly shaken because I’ve experimented with slow shutter speeds in low-light conditions or out of focus. But I believe I’m getting better as I practice more and more. The huge amount of images has made me think of making a program that can be used categorize the image. The program should be able to parse the EXIF headers that my camery embeds in the JPEG images and also be able to associate arbitrary keywords with each image. The program should probably also be able to do the copying of the images from the camery to the harddisk, for it’s important that the program gets to the images before they’re rotated or altered with other programs. The problem is that programs like the GIMP and feh remove the headers when they re-save the image. This is kind of annoying for the headers contain a lot of information about the shot, most importantly the date and time that could be used to sort the images nicely into monthly folders.

I guess that I’ll have to make some sort of image gallery here at GimpsterDotCom, but the images are huge — 2 MiB JPEG from the camera. I can probably bring them down to between 50-100 KiB by resizing them to 800×600 pixels (from the huge 2592×1944 pixel image the camera delivers) and compressing them harder, but that’s still between 10 and 20 MiB with 200 images! I’ve only got 15 MiB left of my quota here at GimpsterDotCom (where did the other 85 MiB go?) so I’ll have to clean up first or put the images somewhere else, such as DAIMI or something like that.

I had my last exam today — I got the grade 11 again. The exam was in DAIMI:dDistSik and I had to talk about “LAN systems and LAN technology”. I liked the question for I’ve been playing a lot with LANs in the last five years. I talked about the topologies of LANs (buslans, starshaped, ringshaped LANs) about the media used and about the MAC protocols used, that is the media access control protocols that determine how the media is shared between the hosts connected to it. It all went rather well.

When I had talked for about 15 minutes they started to ask me questions, they wanted to talk about an entirely different thing (it’s almost always a good sign when they want to change the subject radically) namely transactions. My lecturer asked me if normal two-phase locking (as opposed to strict two-phase locking) would be enough if we were given the guarantee that all transactions would be commited by the clients, that is that there could be no aborts. It was a rather specific and tricky question in my opinion — I knew about transactions, locking and was able to talk about that, but I couldn’t come up with a rigoursly argument for or against the use of two-phase locking… I guess that’s why they gave me 11 and not 13.

Anyway… this was my last exam, so I’ll be relaxing for a couple of months now. I’m really looking forward to it :-) I’ll buy a new computer sometime soon now and I also have to play with [PHP Shell][] (I’ve figured out how to implement a commandline history using JavaScript) and my new SPAM filter POPFile which is a learning filter instead of my old filter TMDA. I’ve been using POPFile for a couple of days now and it works very well, it learns incredibly fast.

Happy holidays to everybody (my apologies to those who still have a couple of weeks left… :-)

I’m still looking around for a new quiet system to replace my old system. Today I found the SID FutureClient® which is a complete, modern PC built without any fans at all!

The PC is build around a special liquid cooling system which means that it can use a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 without requiring a fan. The power supply is able to deliver 170 W with an efficiency of over 85%. This means that it will loose 30 W of power as heat to the air when drawing 200 W. The rest is converted from AC to DC and then later turned into heat in the CPU, the harddrives, the RAM etc.

The case is built from aluminium and looks very stylish. It’s so strong that I will be able to put my big Philips 201P10 21″ monitor on top of it.

All very nice… the catch is the price tag: about 2,000 €. That’s a lot of money for a new computer, especially when you don’t get bleeding-edge performance. But then again, such a PC isn’t aimed at people who require the latest hardware to play the latest games, it’s rather aimed at people who are willing to pay that extra to get a completely silent PC.

I guess that if I saw one of these in real life running GNU/Linux, then I would buy it right away — for now I’ll look around a little more. I’ve had my old machine since September 2000, so a month more or less doesn’t make a huge difference. It also seems that I keep finding new interesting quiet products, it’s certainly nice to get an idea of the available options before you go and pay more than 1,500 € for a new machine.

One of the reasons as to why I haven’t update GimpsterDotCom for a while is, that I suddenly cannot resolve any DNS names?! There’s nothing wrong with my connection to the Internet, I just cannot resolve DNS names to IP addresses. So I haven’t checked my mail for the last five days, and I haven’t looked after GimpsterDotCom until now.

Although I can’t use the Internet, or at least not use any part of it for which I don’t know an IP address, I’ve still been able to utilize my fine broadband LAN connection through the use of FreeNet. Fortunately my FreeNet node knows most of it’s peers through an IP address, so it still works even though the rest of the system doesn’t. That’s pretty cool! I’ve been trying to upload all the eight CDs that make up the latest stable release of [Debian][]. So far I’ve uploaded two CDs, it’s awfully slow and takes an insane amount of RAM. But it’s doable, it just takes time.

So, please bear over with me until I get this DNS thing sorted out.

Update

I’ve now sorted things out again — there’s now two DNS servers for our LAN, 10.2.2.10 and 10.2.2.12, the first of which doesn’t work at the moment. My machine has a permanent IP address, so I’m not using DHCP and therefore I didn’t discover the change automatically, which left my computer without a working DNS server.

I’ve just emptied my mgeisler@mgeisler.net mailbox and I’ll come back to you as soon as possible. There were 400 mails waiting for me, but the vast majority of these are either SPAM (which TMDA “reads” for me) or traffic from the various mailinglists I follow.

But it’s good to be back on the Internet! :-)

I’ve just found this super plugin for Mozilla called Electrix. This makes it possible to edit text areas in an outside editor, such as the great [GNU][] [Emacs][]. This is very handy for editing a site like this where big text areas are abundant…