Martin Geisler Online

I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately, let me just give you a quick run down of them:

• Vanilla Sky was a little strange at first, but turned out to be a really fascinating movie.

• Kiss of the Dragon was fairly good. Lot of karate but a weak story.

• Men in Black II was good, but nothing spectacular. It continues the line from the first movie as expected.

• Eye of the Beholder was strange and didn’t make much sense.

• The Believer was good and provocative. I feared that it would be a film just about violence, but it turned out to be much more than that.

• Rules of Engagement was great but the ending was a little weak.

I plan to see Minority Report soon — it sounds like a really interesting movie. I also think that Goldmember would be a good laugh.

Sorry about the lack of updates here at gimpster.com — I’ve been on vacation for the last 14 days. I started with a week home in Aalborg, and after that we traveled to Cyprus. My Grandma was also with us on the trip.

The first thing I noticed when we had landed in Pafos was the heat. The temperatures in Denmark had been around 20° C (about 68° F) whereas the temperature in Pafos was around 35° C (almost 100° F) — way to much for my taste. Because the humidity was high, the heat felt much more annoying, it really sucked all energy away from the body when you went from an airconditioned room to the outside. We stayed in a holiday apartment at the Pagona Hotel — the only room with aircondition was the bedroom, which meant that I spend quite some time there reading…

But we didn’t stay at the hotel all the time — we went on a bustrip to the Troodos mountains where we saw the Kykko Monastery. That was a really nice trip: the temperature dropped about 10° C when we got up in the mountains. It was also on interesting trip because our guide used the time on the bus to talk about the history of Cyprus, the economic and social conditions and so on. So we could sit there and enjoy the beautiful landscape while being educated at the same time :-)

Another nice trip was the Catamaran Cruise. We started in Pafos which lies in the south-west corner of Cyprus. We then sailed north along the cost to Coral Bay where we could swim. They had snorkel gear on the boat that we could borrow — it was great fun to swim with extra fins on the feet. We also had a great lunch on the ship. Throughout the trip, our guide would sneak up on us and shoot us with a water-pistol loaded with ice-water! Some of the children soon began to fight back with water from their water bottles… The ice-water came from three large boxes that were full of icecubes when we started in the morning, but now that most of the cubes had thawed, the water was perfect for a little water fight. In the end Thomas (our guide) took one of the boxes and poured the water onto some of the girls that were sunbathing at the front of the ship! Great entertainment :-)

Now that I’m back in Denmark, I’ll look at the emails that I’ve received while I was gone — it might take a while, but I will answer them over the next couple of days, so be patient.

You probably know the old game where you’re have to guess an object that someone else is thinking about. You have 20 questions, and the objective for you is to narrow to amount of possible objects down to only one. You can play this over the Internet.

It’s the computer that plays against you — you have to think about something, and the computer will guess it. It’s quite amazing how good the computer is: it has guessed all the common things that I’ve tried. I also tried with “the weather” as the object. The computer came very close, but it couldn’t decide if I was thinking about “life” or “the weather” :-)

I just saw this huge discussion over at the Debian-devel mailinglist about whether or not the LPPL (LaTeX Project Public License) is a free license. That is free in the Debian sense: it has be fulfill the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) before it can be included in the main section of the Debian archives. There’s currently lots of stuff in the archive that’s licensed under the LPPL, but the Debian guys would rather see that it was distributed under another license, or that the LPPL is changed to conform with the DFSG.

The problem seams to be, that the LPPL forbids you from modifying a file and then redistributing it using the same filename. This is important for us LaTeX folks, because one of the promises of LaTeX (and TeX) is, that a document processed today will look identical when it’s processed 10 years from now. If everybody is allowed to change important files, then that promise would be hard to keep. This isn’t just a theoretical concern — it has happened that someone changed the Computer Modern fonts made by Donald E. Knuth and distributed them as the original set. They thought that they were helping people by improving the fonts, but that wasn’t how others looked at it. I don’t know exactly what the problem was, but if they had changed the width of a character just a little, then it could mean that lines would be broken differently, something that must not happen. If an author has prepared a document using his own installation of LaTeX, then he has to be absolutely sure that the publishers version of LaTeX will place the letters at the exact same position on the page.

One the other hand, then the Debian guys want to reserver the right to change the files in their LaTeX distribution, in case they discover a security risk or something like that. This is a very hypothetical situation, but they want the right to do this anyway.

So, is boils down to a question of trust: do the LaTeX community trust the users not to cause havoc by distributing modified files from the core of TeX and LaTeX? Apparently not, and after the story about the improved CM fonts, I can understand their fear. I don’t think they fear that the teTeX maintainers would go crazy, it’s more about the principle that people has the option of changing those files.

I hope that they can works things out — it would be a real shame if this “battle of principles” should end with moving the teTeX packages to non-free, as almost everybody recognizes that TeX and LaTeX are some of the finest examples of free software.

What have I been doing lately? Well, I’ve been relaxing and I’ve worked on some of the projects that has been neglected for some time now. One of those are my simulation of Rubiks Cube — I’ve tried to make a camera system so that one can examine the cube from all sides. It kind of works right now and it’s great fun to hack on. I’ll put the code here later.

I’ve also been on a trip to the Danish island Møn with my Mom and Dad. We visited my dads sister Susanne who own a summer residence there. Møn is an interesting island with lots of beautiful sights. The most impressive thing I saw was the Cliff of Møn: a cliff that reaches 128 metre at it’s highest point.