Recent blog entries for philikon

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Visit worldcookery.com for some info on my book.

My current blog is located on the z3lab.org website.

Compiled a new patch for subversion according to what came out of Greg's (gstein) and my discussion yesterday. Looks like this one is going through ;)

A few days ago I wrote an email to the ZDP (Zope Documentation Project) list saying that we should teach Zope newbies more ZPT instead of DTML. The reason for this email was that I experienced many DTML related questions by newbies in the #zope freenode irc channel. ChrisMcDonough and I had a little thread (threat?) over the past few days and discussed where the problem lies and what needs to be done. As it turns out, I volunteered (damnit, it happened again!) to work over the Zope tutorial which hasn't been touched for decades (well, if you round it up ;)). Let's see whether I actually find the time to do that.

Otherwise I started armageddon on my bank account today:

• bought new Shimano Deore brakes
• bought new Continental 2.3" tires
• bought a 30 liter back pack which is specially designed for long bike tours
• bought a rack and a bag that goes with it to be mounted on the seat post
• ordered a seat post with shocks
• bought road maps for all eastern and southern Germany as well as northern Italy.

I'm almost ready to go and might leave next weekend. This is not certain, however.

Discussed my subversion patch with Greg Strein (gstein) and cmpilato on the Subversion devlist. It seems like we've found a solution with which all of us are satisfied. Now we just need to implement it ;).

More bike tour preparations:

• became a member of the Alpenverein (Alps club); their member card gives me discounts in huts.
• ordered six maps of the region in the Alps in question and a roadbook called TransAlp which describes numerous paths and passes suitable for crossing the alps with your mountain bike
• phoned several people in several cities on my route and asked whether I could stay with them for a night
• set up a ZWiki so I can write a diary when I'm on my bike tour and find an internet café (very unlikely at 2500m in the Alps, though ;))

Went jogging again in the evening.

Yesterday:

Merged changes from subversion trunk into my working copy, updated my patch and re-sent it to the mailinglist. Still waiting for a response, but it's weekend, so I'm not expecting anything before Monday.

Bought a ton of new bike-related stuff in the afternoon:

• gloves
• functional underwear
• shirts
• shorts

Then I went to see Fried play LaCrosse and qualify himself and his team for the German national championship. Fried's already playing for the German national team, so I expected nothing else. Plus, it was his birthday which we celebrated afterwards.

Today was just jogging in the morning, researching for more bike accessories and answering emails. Usual Sunday business.

Send a patch to the subversion dev list. When this patch is applied, SWIG will build shadow classes for the subversion bindings. Before you had to access C structs through accessor functions. The patch not only involved the make file and some SWIG .i files, but also some changes to the python scripts accompanying subversion. Wonder whether it will be accepted then...

Did more preparations for the bike tour:

• ordered a map of huts in the Alps
• bought new tires, tubes, brakes, a computer, pump, toolset; thank god for plastic money, otherwise I would have choked seeing how much money changed hands today...
• went shopping for a back pack and/or a bike bag; still can't decide what equipment do take and whether to just go with a back pack or not.

Federico emailed me that I was very welcome. He just thinks I'm crazy. Oh, yes I am.

Conrad, who served in the army the same as me and whom I met during skiing in Berchtesgaden this year, came to visit from Bayreuth. He graduated from Stanford last year and now he's staying over for the weekend to go to a (German) reunion which is held in Berlin tomorrow.

So, I woke up this morning and decided I will do a bike tour to Venice, Italy. Here's what I've done for preparations today:

• Wrote a biiig TODO list.
• Browsed Amazon and found two guides on trans-alp bike tours. One is still in the works so I ordered the other one.
• ordered a discount card for German hostels and a directory of hostels in Germany and Europe.
• looked at a map of Germany and figured I could reach the Austrian border and thus the alps in about 8 to 9 days.
• emailed my good friend Federico in Padua that I will be coming in three weeks or so.

Played with the SWIG python bindings to subversion the rest of the day; went jogging in the evening.

Spent most of the day reading up Python's C/API and SWIG. Boy, it's been a long time since I've used C. 4 years or so... I think I grasped a lot of the details though. I guess programming is like biking - you can't unlearn it.

Not that dusting-off all these C books in my shelve wasn't nostalgic enough, but Martin, an old school mate from the Bonn days, sent me my first Unix book that he still had borrowed. It's called "Standard Betriebssystem Unix" by Hans-Josef Heck. It was published in 1991 when Linux was still wearing diapers.

Believe it or not, I learned Unix with that book without actually having a copy of Unix on my computer. At the time I was still using DOS. When I eventually installed Linux, I knew all about cat, grep, chmod and vi. I think I was in tenth grade then. And now just look at these kids today. They feel like computer pros if they can change the color of their Windows XP desktop. Oh well, I'm talking like my grandpa now...

Thanks to Akira, faassen, MJ for certifying me. All my thanks are belong to you.

We had a power outage this afternoon. Seems like everybody in the neighbourhood was notified except us. Although my iBook could run from battery, the internet, telephone and everything else was dead. So went to paper work and did my taxes while listening to my battery-free solar-powered Discover Channel radio. Though that didn't help my mood either.

Yay, I got my advogato account. Besides that I worked on 'subversive', a Python package that simplifies subversion's python bindings. Talked to Ben Collins-Sussman today on IRC about that and other things.

Also, I cleaned out my car today; took out the radio, the speakers and all these things. I hope I will find somebody who will still buy it or at least give me what the gas in the tank is worth ;)