I've spent last week in Frankfurt. My parents weren't at home for the most part of it, so I had a pretty relaxing time with my notebook hooked up to our DSL/WLAN router sitting in front of the TV watching the olympic games or outside in our garden, while I abused my parent's P4 box as build machine. After I managed to build GNU Mach with Alfred's NIC-update, I was even able to SSH into it while it ran Debian GNU/Hurd. I finally managed to build glibc for hurd-i386, it took a ext2fs server compiled with a glibc from CVS to circumvent the nasty linkref bug. I also built new binutils and gcc-3.3/3.4 packages, getting the hurd-i386 toolchain back on track. It seems the only thing missing is an update of the hurd package itself, switching the kick-ass Hurd console on by default. Then, the K7 set should be able to go gold.

On Saturday, I passed by the real-life Debian Bug-Squashing-Party, meeting a couple of friends there, most notably Frank Lichtenheld and Peter de Shrijver. The party took place at the Lichtwiese in Darmstadt, the place I passed my first two years of studies in the last 90s. Well, I was not able (or perhaps motivated?) to squash bugs a lot, but just hanging out there during the barbecue was fun enough. Unfortunately, I forgot the AC adapter for my Thinkpad, so I was more or less forced to leave the party at around 2 AM. Many thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and the others for organizing it.

I also finally did some non-Debian hacking again, adding Turbomole file format support to OpenBabel (CVS commit pending) and hacking on the libghemical autotools setup. It was nice to see that some guys from the University of Iowa are working on ghemical as well, they try to interface it better with the GAMESS software package. However, I believe that support for electron densities and vibrational frequencies should really be included in OpenBabel and hooked into ghemical from there.