11 Aug 2000 bernhard   » (Master)

Long time no diary. It seems my diary is turning into a mensary. I don't know if that's a real world, but a log that's updated about once a month could probably be called something like that.

Sketch

I've created a new Sketch mailing list at SourceForge because the old mailing list which was run by Olof Kylander at Frozenriver was down. In fact all frozenriver servers seem to be down. Nobody seems to know what happened to Olof and Karin and Frozenriver. I heard some rumours from a Gimp developer, but no real information.

Fortunately the transition went quite smoothly. As luck would have it I had a quite recent list of subscribers of he old list, so I didn't have to start from scratch again.

On the development side, the next stable version will be released tomorrow, hopefully. It would be mostly a bugfix release with only a few minor new features if it weren't for a slightly improved SVG export filter (it handles some gradients now) and especially the new PDF export filter. Thanks to ReportLab, I was able to implement it with just about 300 lines of application specific code.

I've also started hacking on a PDF import filter for Sketch. It already works to some degree on the PDF files generated by reportlab, but its overall desing is still in its early stages and it will take some more iterations before I feel I can let it loose on the public by checking it into CVS.

Reading

I've been rereading parts of Goethe's <it>Faust</it> in recent weeks. I read it for the first time after I had seen the Gründgens Film in a cinema in Göttingen in IIRC, 1990 or 1991.

I'm not sure whether it's good or bad that we didn't read <it>Faust</it> in school. I mean, I would probably have liked it much more than <it>Iphigenie</it>, but OTOH, having to read something takes away some of the fun of reading.

Anyway, <it>Faust I</it> is probably the most often quoted piece of German literature. Some cool quotes:

Mephistopheles:
Der Geist der Medizin ist leicht zu fassen;
Ihr durchstudiert die groß, und kleine Welt,
Um es am Ende gehn zu lassen,
Wie's Gott gefällt.

Mephistopheles:
Die Mädels sind doch sehr interessiert,
ob einer fromm und schlicht nach altem Brauch;
Sie denken: duckt er da, folgt er uns eben auch.

The Coin Puzzle

To make it a little more difficult, try not only to find which coin is different, but also whether its heavier or lighter than the others. All with at most three weighings.

It's possible. I've written a Python program that demonstrates the algorithm (or at least one possible algorithm, there might be more). Here's a gzipped base64 encoded version (to avoid spoilers):
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