Qte.dk

After some pressuring from my mother I finally decided to Christmas decorate my apartment, although I am properly not going to see much of it since the project is going to take most of my time this month. My mother made me a pair of red elf hats for the ximian monkeys - wohoo, so now it was time to dress the little monkeys and see how they look.

Well look at the photo below, I think that tells it all :-) Kim Schulz told me he was going to ask his girl friend to make some hats for his monkeys as well, so the Christmas spirit is spreading through out the #fundanemt.

More images can be found at my gallery

I have just committed the first version of a new series of extensions to Fundanemt - power tools. Power users has requested added functionality that would make their life maintaining Fundanemt websites easier. As a power user and developer my self, I decided to do something about this need and a few weeks ago I created the first power tool, a tool to validate all pages on a Fundanemt website and check for broken links.

During this week I used the tool quite frequently to test all my qte.dk pages in order to help Christian debug a difficult Fundanemt bug. Instead of having to manually validate +50 pages I could just click "Validate" in the tool and a minute later the result would appear. While trying to fix the bug, the error moved from one page to another so it was nice to see which pages did not validate after updating from cvs.

Today I sat down and cleaned up the code, added support for selecting which pages to validate and made a prettier result-list, and finally committed the tool to cvs so others could start playing with it.

I still have some items in my TODO file for the tool, so stay tuned for more updates.

• Add CSS validation using jigsaw.w3.org
• Button to remove selection of all pages

Sunday night I stepped into a casino for the first time in my life. Aalborg Casino had a open night event with no entrance fee, a small buffet and an opportunity to play a free game of roulette or black jack.

We walked up casino 6.50pm, 10 minutes before the doors were supposed to open (7pm) and only 10 people in front of us, so it looked good, although Tinus thought it took too long before we could loose our jackets and get registered, and he suggested that we could have showed up 15 minutes later. I pointed out that there was around 50 people behind us, so guessed it was ok to wait outside in the cold 10 minutes before the doors were opened.

When we finally, after having been pushed around by some old ladies, stepped into the casino room down stairs Tinus and Lars wanted some of the free food, apparently the Burger King burger we got 20 minutes earlier was not enough. After another 15-20 minutes we walked over to the black jack test table, where a female (wohoo!) croupier introduced the black jack beginners (my self included) to the rules and we got 300 points. Rasmus quickly left the table, since he went bankrupt and wanted to play some roulette instead. Lars and I played for a while until the croupier was told by a head-croupier to close the table and allow other people to play test games later on. When I left the table I had around 3000 points, so small ego boost before going to the real-tables where real money are lost :-)

After a grabbing a beer in the bar we went over to one of the black jack tables to look at some of the gamblers loosing and winning lots (compared to my SU budget) until we finally sat down at tried our luck. 3-4 hours later we left the casino, only 250 kr poorer, so it clearly did not go as well as with the test game, but I blame that on the fact that the female croupier did not sit at the black jack tables when we wanted to play :-(

I found it really fun to be at a casino and fell the rush when playing and seeing others play (for considerable larger sums that I would ever dream of betting) and at the same time discovering wetter or not I would have a hard time stopping while it was still fun, instead of betting and loosing any savings I might have.

On a slightly related side note I watched most of half hour documentary about a brit with incredible control of his mind. He could mind-read other people and slightly mind-control as he demonstrated by having a girl pick out the exact card he wanted to complete his flush (poker) from a card deck. Furthermore he was able to remember exactly which cards had been in play at a black jack table and demonstrated with a hidden camera in a casino where he quickly won 2.500 pounds, by betting on getting smaller than a 5 instead of standing on 16. He got a 4 and stood on 20 instead... and won.

Finally he demonstrated that he could remember exactly where in a deck any given card was, even after the croupier had shuffled all 6 decks of cards, by "simply" counting and remembering positions when the croupier shuffled. His trick was to imagine a house with a floor for each thing he wanted to remember (one for cards). In the room on that floor he had 52 objects, each one representing a specific card. When he expanded from 1 deck of cards to 6 (the number of decks used at many casinos in black jack), he placed a small note for each deck on each object and removed it when the card had been in play. When all notes were removed from the object, the object was removed from the room as well. Quite simple? I think not. Remember, this all happened in his head!

If anyone reads this blog using a RSS-feed reader you will properly have noticed that most of the blog entries weird text formating. This is because of a bug in Fundanemt that I am awaiting to be resolved before I active text-to-HTML conversion again.

If you are unable to read the entries or click on any of the links, you can visit the web-version of the blog entry (using the permanent link in your RSS reader).

Apparently my previous post, about what your Linux distribution says about you, struck one of Eckhart's nerves so I guess it is time to do a response.

Eckhart starts out with "But it is (relatively) straightforward to write scripts that will update all your software automatically at night, and you can also install new software over night"

Only "relatively straightforward" to write a script that will handle automatic updates, wow. With all the skills learned from installing and maintaining a gentoo system, it is still not easy to write a simple script? In my favorite Linux distribution, this can be done by placing a file with:

#!/bin/sh
urpmi --auto-select --force

in /etc/cron.daily and voila you would have your automatic update, and it would properly only take a few minutes to run.

Eckhart continues with: "I have not reinstalled it more than once". Excuse me for this error, but it is kinda hard to tell when someone spends 90% of their time compiling and recompiling.

"The advantage of all this, is that I know how to set up X properly"
I have been using Linux for 5-6 years now, and I have spend my share of time configuring X, kernels etc. so I am not a totally unskilled when it comes to configuring systems from bottom-up. I must however say that I do not miss the days old days. I see no reason for spending more time than necessary configuring my system, which brings me back to one of the original points about gentoo users, they have so many good excuses for not doing any real work. The few hours a day I have some free time university and work, I do not want to spend it looking at configuration files.

Before I finish I just want to make one more personal attack on Eckhart :-) Eckhart has stated that he knows how to set up X properly, but strangely enough he did not know how to disable the NVIDIA splash screen, which appears each time X starts up and pauses the process for a few seconds. How on earth could I, a non-gentoo person, figure this out? Because if I have a personal best friend called Google, who can help me answer most of my questions.

To conclude on Eckhart's post, I have still not realized what is the great thing about gentoo, that lead to someone saying "beats all the competion in terms of everything, except install time". What makes gentoo special except its installation tool?