I have released a new version of the Boost Bindings that fixes a problem with UMFPACK now typically being packaged as part of UFsparse. While I don't think that this kind of packaging is a smart idea, Debian has recently jumped on the bandwagon, and thus this fix is necessary. The only change is from

#include <umfpack/umfpack.h>

to

#include <umfpack.h>

to let the code find an umfpack.h that is now under a directory called ufsparse.

Note: This version diverges from boost-bindings CVS, by this one change.

While I don't typically propagate knitting or crochet content, this one was too good to pass up. :)

So, if you have a pretty pitiful-looking tree outside your window, why don't you do it a favor, and...

...KNIT IT A SWEATER? :D

Oh, and Josie (whose friend Jay pointed her to this story) will claim that she posted first, which is untrue almost untrue. But my post has a picture. And more original commentary. So, there. Me = better. :)

I have generally been very happy with my new Samsung YP-MT6Z, until I hit a snag today. From my tests, it seems that the total lengh of all folder names on the device cannot exceed a certain number, on the order of a kilobyte or so. That boils down to, say, 50 decently-named folders. That's it. No more. Oddly enough, that kind of kills the advertised second use of the device as a means of data transport, seeing how it has more than enough storage, a gigabyte to be precise.

And the best part is, if you have more than that, the player will fail unobviously and gracelessly. It will simply display NO FILE in the LCD and refuse to find or play all my audio files. There is no error message, alerting me to the fact that I might have hit an internal limitation. It also won't just ignore any extra folders. No, it insists on just ceasing to perform its main function altogether. Great work there, Samsung software engineers.

To top it off, I had the pleasure of speaking with Samsung Technical Support, who, after lenghty "research", claimed that the device would not support more than one folder. I got the sneaking suspicion that the guy didn't even know what I meant by "folder", and terms such as "nesting" or "hierarchy" seemed to give him endless trouble. Yay!

Buyer, beware. It's a good device if you can live with this limitation, which I will have to.

Be proud to show it:

PS: It's food coloring. I wish I had that kind of control. :)

As I previously reported, my old laptop, aramis, got rained on and sustained water damage resulting in--lo and behold--not a dead computer. In fact, most of it was fine, it even booted into X, and all of its components were usable, it would just always crash after around 15 minutes. That led me to believe that maybe, by switching out the mainboard, I might obtain a usable machine again.

Putting that plan into practice, I downloaded IBM's maintenance manual for the laptop, which, for the record, was an IBM Thinkpad A-Series A21m, and looked up the "FRU" (Factory Replacible Unit) number of the mainboard, which, in my case, was supposed to be 08K3264. These boards were hardly to be found on ebay and were hideously expensive, whereas a good bunch of cheaper boards labeled with FRU 12P3156, which suppposedly are compatible with ThinkPad A20 and A21 models, were readily available. I was unsure, but decided to take the risk--given that the 12P3156 board cost only $44.

After two nights of rather nerve-wrecking work on the laptop, I can announce that it is functioning again. :D The difference between the two boards types seems to be only that the one I had (which turned out to be FRU 12P3288) had a header for TV-Out, whereas the new one didn't. Big deal. I can use my 800 MHz CPU on it, and as far as I can tell, it is being run at full speed.

It turns out that my old board had some visible corrosion damage that probably caused the trouble I described above. If I had taken my laptop apart right after the water came in, it might have dried and thus been rescued right away. May this be a lesson to whoever has to do this next. :)

Summary: When buying laptops, buy IBM! Why?

• Sturdily built
• Maintenance information available
• Existence of a sizable components aftermarket.

That said, I'm not sure Lenovo is going to do as well, but I hope so.

Since the semester at Brown starts back tomorrow, I was a little concerned about my total lack of writing material. I still have my non-standard ruled paper from last year, but since a) it's not a standard size, not even US-Letter, much less A4 and b) I don't like ruled paper, I figured, hey, I'm going to take notes in style like I used to.

Tadaa: Good old German NOT FOUND: 1=graph paper, letter size, 5mm squares on it.

Courtesy of Incompetech. :)

I spent today doing something very laudable: :yes: I went on an extended bike ride. Of course, riding your bike is not half as fun if you can't waste some time letting your computer process the greatness of what was achieved. Fortunately, the Google Maps Pedometer comes to the rescue! If you follow that link, you can even see a height profile of my ride, and you can witness the fact that I fulfilled my private goal of riding into Massachusetts. Not that I knew that I did, since there were no big "Welcome to Massachusetts" signs around. It was just when my legs started hurting badly enough that I thought the return trip might not be fun if I didn't turn around now.

Well. Let's think about that for a second, and make it into a general law of cycling:

Don't wait till your legs hurt to turn around!

Otherwise, the return trip might hurt. Badly. Not that this reflects my experience today or something. (Owww... my legs...)

(As an added bonus, and since the GMaps-pedometer is so fun, I also put in my way to school.)

I have just released Version 0.90.1 of TagPy to fix a few build hiccups that were reported. Keep up the good work! Additionally, and as a cool benefit of me using Drupal for these pages, you can subscribe to the TagPy RSS feed. :)

And of course you may download the new version from the TagPy home page.

pdftk is a piece of GPL software that I've been looking for for a long time: It can split, join and otherwise mangle PDF files, which in my specific case helped me submit one of my (many) take-home final exams as a single file instead of three separate ones, reducing the margin for error on the professor's part. :)

Oh, and of course, Debian's already been there:

aptitude install pdftk

:)

Daniel Roethlisberger wrote in to note that madman is now in the FreeBSD ports collection, which should make it a lot easier for you BSD'ers out there to try madman. A corresponding note has also been added to the download page.