I was finally getting ready to release the first alpha this week. I registered davedina.org (it was about time). I added a status page with the help of Kristof and his excellent MySQL formmaker.

Then yesterday, after having uploaded the whole tree and the ISO's, I said to myself, "Well I should give this one final test before releasing". So I burnt the CD's, broke out the QBIC box, and proceeded to install. Bad move. I had done the install from NFS all the time, and the CD didn't contain the graphics for some reason. So I tried over NFS again to check if I missed anything, but for some reason I couldn't get the QBIC connected to the network. I tried on three places with four different cables, even going so far as to move it back to the freshly installed and cleaned living room, but nothing worked. No network. And my VMWare trial license had expired.

That left me in a pissy mood for the rest of the night :) Everything was ready, and now it seems like I'll need to redo the iso images. Let's just hope I can cut corners some way by only changing a small part of the iso's, though at this point it looks easier to regenerate and take care of some other cosmetic details while I'm at it.

DirectFB & Dave/Dina

I decided to try Ville's TV/OUT Howto again from scratch. This time, I went with pristine sources instead of the Red Hat kernel source. It still didn't work. Then I tried with the other Matrox cable that I thought belonged to the other card, and that made it work. Sigh. I wonder how many times I had perfect TV output but the wrong cable before :) Which reminded me of a very important self-discovered engineering lesson: When things don't work, it never hurts to try illogical ideas out and look for logic afterwards.

Just make sure nobody is looking in case you have it wrong again :)

It also reminded me of two other simple lessons I seem to recall getting out of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: "Write down everything what you're doing with results to test your hypthoseses" and "Only change one factor at a time and note the resulting change".

Anyways, I now have perfect 720x576 PAL tv output. Which people tell me is the proper resolution to output to. Only, if you do a little math, you'll notice this seems to indicate that the pixel image has a 5:4 aspect ratio, why the TV has a 4:3 physical aspect ratio, just like a computer monitor. Does this mean I have non-square pixels ? As a matter of fact, yes - this page explains it a lot better than I can.

So now I'm trying to decide if I should stick with this so-called perfect resolution for PAL TV, having to change from 800x600 everywhere and having to live with non-square pixels being the norm. The latter will make it hard to properly develop applications on regular computers, especially on my desktop and laptop LCD screens that obviously have square pixels.

Anyways, looking forward to doing some DirectFB experimentation soon.

Apartment

Everything starts falling into place nicely now. We finally got ourselves a washing machine and a real bed.

Last weekend when my parents came round we managed to hang up the hammock as well. So this is our new bedroom. And this is how DIY guys express their love.

This fine lass often cooks for me and does that very well.

And last time we went out, I wanted to wear my selfmade pants, but the button had dropped off. I had two spare buttons, a cool navy anchor one and the silly cow. After discussing it with Kristien, the silly cow won.

And this is what they call hammock hacking. (Or, rather, chatting).

This weekend, we went on another IKEA shopping spree, this time taking home only about 320 euro worth of stuff. That included a much needed TV cabinet for the living room. The cabinet itself looks really nice, but it's a bitch to work with. It has holes at the back for running cables, but of course since the rest of the back is closed there's a lot of groping in the dark going on to insert cables.

Anyways, I ran speaker cable all around the room between the wall and the wooden floor covers, so now I have four big speakers doing fake quadrophonic audio. This all in preparation for the eventual possibility of getting an actual surround sound system someday.

Life

On Christmas, we spent some time together with the two of us. Very nice dinner, and in the afternoon we went out blading for three hours. All along the sea, all the way through the old town during siesta, wonderful. It was incredibly sunny, must have been close to 20 degrees, and this on Christmas... After that we went to see Elephant. Quite OK, not too fantastic.

Friday, more food, and at night there was a Christmas skating gathering. A hundred people wearing silly hats and all sorts of Christmasy things, skating through the old town, by the sea, all the way up to Gracia. Very nice, very good routes. After that, Kristien had agreed to come see Alien with me.

Bad move. I don't think she saw any of the scenes that needed to be seen :) I'm hugely in debt to her now, so if people can keep me updated on the release of a new Barbie movie, let me now ...

And now we're preparing for the flood of people dropping in on us for New Year's Eve. The first two arrived yesterday evening. Uraeus is arriving just about now, and the other fourteen are soon to follow...

So if you don't hear from me for a while, you know why !

Happy holidays, y'all.