The other day, while "travelling Deutsche Bahn", I read an article in the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. To my slight surprise, it included a link to some government document in form of a tinyurl.com URL - (http://tinyurl.com/cr8qso). As I had no internet acccess at the time I read the article, I had to defer checking out the link to some later time. Then I began to wonder how stable those URLs are compared to the stability of the link they service and of the newspaper article itself. The description of the link would probably allow for some targetted google searching, but is it not the responsibility of the newspaper to allow their readers to research the link in a couple of days, months or maybe years? Does tinyurl.com maybe have an enterprise feature where they guarantee long-living links to newspapers and similar customers?

Over the Easter holidays, I finally did a bit of real programming again, adding some quantum chemistry related C++ code to OpenBabel and Avogadro. I added support for molecular vibrations to the NWChem and Molden file formats, as well as writing support for the MOLPRO input and output formats mostly from scratch. The latter was something I wanted to do for a long time, as I have been almost exclusively using MOLPRO for my Ph.D. over the last couple of years. The event which sparked my interest was the addition of animated vibrations in the Avogadro 0.9.3 release on April 1st, something I considered one of the last missing features in Avogadro in order for it to be useful as a general purpose quantum chemistry visualization app.

Once I had started coding, I decided to also do contribute to the visualization of molecular orbitals in Avogadro. So far, it was required to have formatted Gaussian or Q-Chem checkpoint files (both seem to use the same format, but you do not usually have those around) or Mopac2000 logfiles (Mopac2000 is non-free, unlike Mopac7, which is in Debian). My patch adds support for reading orbitals from MOLPRO logfiles on top of that. It has to be said that rendering molecular orbitals (while a bit unintuitive from a GUI perspective) is really impressive in Avogadro, thanks to the work done by Marcus Hanwell. See for exampe this picture for a Povray rendered molecular orbital exported by Avogadro.

If I manage to find some more time, I would like to (i) move the basis set and molecular orbital parsing code to OpenBabel, where it rightfully belongs and (ii) enhance and unify the OpenBabel quantum chemistry input file export code, so that they can be used by Avogadro directly. Right now, Avogadro reimplements a GUI and code for exporting an input file for each supported quantum chemistry package (Gaussian, Q-Chem, GAMESS and Mopac2000, currently).

My experience with LapStore's used-ThinkPad warranty repair service

My ThinkPad T40 arrived back from warranty repair today (well, actually yesterday, but I had to run off to the Gnome-2.26 release get-together in Munich so I did not have time to open the box then). I bought it used roughly two years ago at LapStore when my R51 had died. I had bought the R51 new with a one year IBM warranty but unfortunately within two years the graphics chip with got damaged and would freeze the notebook after a couple of minutes. I then decided that I do not really need a new notebook anymore, and opted for a used T4x series (there were no used X40s available at that time).

I chose LapStore because they offered a one-year "Garantie" (guarantee? warranty?), which was rather unusual for used notebooks - at best, you would get a one-year "Gewaehrleistung" which is the promise to fix things which were supposedly broken already by delivery. Even better, one could optionally extend the warranty to two years, which I did. The notebook they sent was in pretty good condition (apparently a business out-of-warranty return) and I put in my R51's hard disk, the ipw2100 WLAN card and the RAM (unfortunately, I realized too late that the keyboard and the CDRW/DVD drive do not fit).

I was pretty happy with it (and LapStore in general, I recommended it to a couple of friends since, and e.g. my current flatmate bought a T42 there a while ago as well) until the fan started dropping out and making weird noises by the end of 2008. So just before the end of warranty, I sent it (after removing hard disk, optical drive and battery) in to LapStore to see how their service is. I also mentioned a clear bright spot on the display (apparently some fatigue, you see it often mentioned in ThinkPad eBay descriptions) and a crack in the palmrest between the cursor-right key and the hard disk slot. When they sent a mail that the ThinkPad had arrived at their site, I also followed-up via mail that the "indestructible" keyboard caps stickers they used to mod a Scandinavian(?) keyboard into a German one were pretty much destroyed by now and would also need servicing.

I assumed that they would service the fan (which looked like a clear-cut warranty issue to me) without arguing, but probably not the display and palmrest (and did not know whether they got the mail about the keyboard stickers), so when they sent another mail two days ago that they sent the notebook back without asking further questions, I became worried about what happened at all.

So, long story short, I was totally positively surprised when I opened the box today and read:

"Aktion: Lüfter, Display, Palmrest und Tastatur getauscht"

(action: fan, display, palmrest and keyboard replaced)

The replacements are still used parts (and the keyboard is still not a real German one, but one with new stickers on it), but they basically changed my almost-totally-broken-will-fall-apart T40 back into a almost-as-good-as-new T40. (not sure whether that is positive or negative, but they also forgot to remove the service-hard disk they put in to test things, I guess I will send it back to them)

So all in all, I am very much impressed by their service. I would have expected this kind of service from IBM/Lenovo if I had a manufacturer warranty, but not from some random sell-used-ThinkPads shops on the net. I can now even more strongly recommend LapStore as the place to buy good notebooks. Certainly you can get cheaper prices at some eBay stores, but you do not get real warranty then and what about the service?

I recommend geting a T42 - I believe the T43 is inferior to it and the T40s and T41s don't have "LapStore Garantie" anymore. You can get them without operating system and can customize the hard disk, memory and optical drives - unfortunately you cannot downgrade those, which is my only gripe with them.

Yesterday evening, I mistyped my GPG passphrase a couple of times. I wasn't very worried back then and didn't try further, after all I was at a pub before and had one or two beers.

Today, I wasn't able to correctly type my GPG passphrase, either. At this point, I got a slight panic. I don't have my GPG passphrase written down anywhere, didn't make up any mnemonics for it and I wouldn't be able to easily write it down anyway - it just flowed naturally through my fingers until today. In fact, I couldn't even tell how many characters/digits there are exactly. Maybe once or twice a month I would make a typo, but always get it right on second attempt. And now, from one day to the other, my fingers just couldn't remember anymore.

I literally tried hundreds of times, with different characters and character combinations, but once I started thinking about what my passphrase might be, I couldn't just type it in sub-consciously anymore. After a while I became really worried - are these the first signs of Alzheimer or something? I even tried doing something else for a while as a distraction and then suddently jumping back at the keyboard, hoping the magic would return into my fingers when they got taken by surprise.

A couple of hours and countless retries later, I suddently typed in the correct passphrase once. Luckily, I was even able to reproduce it after a couple of more retries! However, it took me another five minutes to figure out what was the problem, now that it seemed natural to correctly type my passphrase again. In the end, it turned out my fingers forgot to capitalize a letter.

Opensync updates

Some time ago, Opensync-0.38 got released, and it is now available in experimental. The evolution-data-server and the Opie plugins are now available again, as well as the new tomboy (in NEW) and a rewritten google-calendar/contacts plugin. The google plugin requires the new libgcal, which I have just uploaded to NEW.

Unfortunately, kitchensync is still not ported to latest Opensync-0.3x (and got dropped for KDE4.2), so one still needs to use the command-line msynctool program. Also not ported are the (KDE3) kdepim and the currently under development Akonadi plugin. Other important plugins missing for 0.38 are the Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm and IRMC plugins. I tried to suggest making 0.38.x point releases including more ported plugins, but it seems development is turning towards 0.39 already, and yet some more API changes were done, this time mostly removing unnecessary interfaces, which should be a good thing in the long term. Some other good news is that there are now weekly IRC meetings of the Opensync developers, so there should be steadier progress towards Opensync-0.40 from now on. Unfortunately, I was mostly absent during all of the three meetings so far.

Along with Opensync-0.38, libsyncml saw a new major release 0.5.0 which should fix lots of bugs and provide better support for mobiles. However, lots of problems with syncml were due to bugs in the wbxml2 library. Michael Bell has hopefully found the most critical ones and I have uploaded a new wbxml2-0.9.2 to unstable today which I hope will get into lenny soon. The main problem with wbxml2 over the last year was a unresponsive/MIA upstream; however, recently wbxml2 maintainership got tranferred to the opensync project and moved to its Trac. Michael Bell has been fixing most of the outstanding issues and is currently preparing a 0.10.0 release, so this project should be back on track now.