Just returned from it. Southern France is a great place for people who enjoy beach-style holidays, with sunny weather, refreshing breezes, great food and mostly acceptable prices (It's not Poland, but it isn't Switzerland, either). Unfortunately, being naturally receptive to sunburns, I'm not particularly into lying on the beach all day, but it was still quite entertaining- while the area may be lacking the inns that tend to mark places well-suited for hiking and no major (> 250m) height differences can be found there, it's still a fun place to just wander around and explore. Still, next time I go on a vacation I should take the time to learn the basics of the native language spoken in the country I'm going to- while not being able to understand even some of the most basic signs and phrases is sufficiently embarassing already, having to fall back to a third language (usually english) is downright impolite. At least IMO. Although I'd be the first to admit that the necessity to visit a bathroom wins over politeness most of the time.
Life
10 days without net access. And while I'm away, HP buys the
big Q, the Andromeda TV series starts, and an utterly insane
amount of e-mails piles up in my inbox. Ten days sure are
more than they used to be... I blame time dilation. Time has
been slowing down perpetually ever since we started
collecting information in information networks. The
conclusion is obvious- information has a negative mass, thus
we're building a white anti-hole now.
And now for something completely different.
claudio: You do qualify for a 'master'
ranking- you've worked on a wide variety of Free Software
projects, both commercial and non-commercial, in user- and
in kernel space, both contributing and leading development,
on a large number of platforms, in war and peace, above and
beyond the call of duty. Besides, you like Pokey the
Penguin. Anyway, you have a much better idea of what you're
doing than I have [of what I'm doing], and this ought to be
reflected in some way.
FreeSCI
Time to start focussing on a new release. I've been told
that the Win32 port has been improved in some major ways,
but I'd prefer it if there were more updates to the UNIX
side than just bugfixes. Well, it's not as if there was
nothing left on the TODO list, but starting something grand
and new doesn't fit particularly well with "focussing on a
new release"...
School project
Working on a communication protocol for this thing (page in
German) here. It's a, well, bike of sorts. And it's stuffed
with an insane amount of technology (No, you won't be able
to buy this thing any time soon). We were originally
planning to use one of Compaq's iPAQ systems (running Linux)
to act as the speed indicator and general configuration
management system (allowing centralized parametrization of
the devices connected over the bus), but Compaq's reluctance
to support us and their recent troubles may force us to fall
back to a different device.