muesli

Photosynth is a software aiming at detecting and combining several similar photos to create a big 3D world. Pictures (or rather a vido in that case) speak more than a thousand words: Watch Microsoft Photosynth in action.



The software seems also to be able to find similar pictures to a given photo and even promises to automatically identify known objects on images of various different sources.

I just had my MacBook for a few weeks and now the battery already died. It won't power up without its power-adapter at all, and once it is running OS X just tells me "No batteries available". Seems I am not the only one.



Guess I got to go to the Apple Store tomorrow and ask for a quick replacement. I just hope I don't have to wait weeks for a silly new battery. First revision Apple products... what did ya expect.



sigh,

muesli

Today I discovered Ketchup, a little command-line tool to manage your Linux kernel sources. If you're one of the weirdos, who is still compiling his kernel manually for whatever reason (like I do), I can only recommend it. Ketchup nicely eases up the entire process of checking for updates and applying them to your system.



Let's not hesitate and look at few usage examples... Want to know what's the latest version of a particular kernel-tree?



$ ketchup -s 2.6

2.6.17.7

$ ketchup -s 2.6-mm

2.6.18-rc1-mm2



Let's play with your kernel sources a bit. First of all, you surely want to check what version you currently got lying around...



$ cd /usr/src/linux

$ ketchup -m

2.6.17.6



Let's assume there is a newer kernel version available and you want to download it, bunzip it, revert the old patch and apply the new one. Nothing easier than that:



# cd /usr/src/linux

# ketchup 2.6-tip

2.6.17.6 -> 2.6.17.7

Applying patch-2.6.17.6.bz2 -R

Applying patch-2.6.17.7.bz2



That's really it. It will download the patches, revert and apply them, so all you will have to do is watch and wait

Switching to an entirely different kernel versions is just as easy:



# cd /usr/src/linux

# ketchup 2.6.16.2



Final note: If Ketchup should abort with a gpg error, then it couldn't verify the patch's or kernel's signature. Either add the 2.6 public key to your keyring (this is the proper solution) or call Ketchup with an additional -G parameter (this will override signature checking). I'd suggest the former, which is really easy to do by downloading it from a public pgp server:



# gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 0x517D0F0E



Have fun compiling,

muesli

Usenet just doesn't cut it for me. Too much spam, too little quality, too much hassle. Not just once I've been thinking about the good old FidoNet and started wondering what actually happened to it.



So I googled a bit and read up on the topic. Basically the net still exists and it's not that hard to setup your own point/node and start receiving Fido message packages via the Internet. The Nodelist flags were adapted to the new situation, of course (itn,ibn). I'm currently really pondering setting up a system myself (again).



The only thing stopping me so far is one simple question: How much is really going on there nowadays? Anyone got some stats on Echomail? The Nodelist itself doesn't seem too impressive: "just" a few thousand nodes are left. I remember the file being at least four-times as big



Hopefully there's still some active FidoNet user out there, willing to answer my questions...

How sad is that?

I don't understand what was going on in Zidane's head at that moment.

What a career-ender I just hope people will remember him for other things than this foul.



Must say, I quite enjoyed the world-cup over the last month. Sometimes I really wish it would take place more often than just every four years. Then again, maybe it's only so exciting, because it's a once-in-four-years happening you just don't want to miss.



Congratulations to Italy, something the tifosi can surely embrace during the disturbing time of mach-fixing allegations.



See you in another four years, I reckon.

Just reinstalling OS X on my MacBook. Customized my installation and deselected some software packages. That's when I noticed that iDVD (the DVD player and burner for OS X) eats up 1.8GB of my harddisc size. What's wrong with you, iDVD? Get in shape, man.



Someone got an explanation for that?



cheers,

muesli