Andreas Klöckner's web page

The State of OpenCL for Scientific Computing in 2018

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 19:39:00 -0600

As someone who maintains a fair number of software packages that build, in one way or an other, on OpenCL (and keeps creating more!), a friend recently asked me what I thought of the state of the OpenCL ecosystem in 2018. In part, I am writing this to support the …

Nvidia Highlights PyCUDA/PyOpenCL Applications

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 14 Feb 2016 13:18:00 -0600

Nvidia’s Parallel Forall blog recently highlighted two applications that are using my Python HPC packages to accelerate their computational science workloads:

Increasing the Luminosity of Beam Dynamics with GPUs, a writeup of Adrian Oeftiger‘s work on CERN’s PyHEADTAIL code.
Open, Reproducible Computational Chemistry with Python and CUDA …

Tutorial: Domain Specific Languages and Code Generation in Python

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 18:55:00 -0600

At SC15 last week I had the opportunity to present a tutorial on how to design, build, and compile your own domain-specific language using Python. I am now releasing the tutorial material under a Creative Commons license for the community to use and build on.

Browse tutorial

Specifically, the material …

Dr. Dobb’s article series on PyOpenCL

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 16:10:00 -0600

Gaston Hillar has written a very nice introductory article on using PyOpenCL, to be part of a two-part series. I’m already looking forward to the second part. :)

If you’d like to try to follow along with the article, check out the OpenCL installation howto, then follow the easy …

The Devil’s dictionary of programming

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 02 Nov 2013 13:55:00 -0500

As someone who, on occasion, has created a domain-specific-language or two, this entry of the Devil’s Dictionary of Programming hit close to home:

DSL

A domain specific language, where code is written in one language and errors are given in another.

Link (found on hacker news)

New (Py)OpenCL tutorial

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:10:21 -0500

Simon McIntosh-Smith from Bristol University just let me know that he and Tom Deakin have published a new set of lecture slides and excercises (with solutions!) to teach (more generally) OpenCL and (specifically) PyOpenCL. I’ve added a link to this and a few older tutorials to

PyOpenCL’s main …

Quote of the day

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 03 May 2013 09:14:38 -0500

Quote of the day:

In Python 2.6, no one can hear you scream.

(source) This reminds me of that one time when I was debugging some odd interaction between threading and contexts in PyCUDA. Never again, hopefully. :)

Job? UIUC!

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:58:29 -0500

After many long weeks (months, really) spent applying for and searching for the right job, white smoke! (sorry, couldn’t resist) I will be joining Luke Olson, Bill Gropp, Mike Heath and everyone else in the Scientific Computing Group at the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois at …

GPUs and Python at PyData NYC 2012

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 17:42:54 -0600

This October I had the honor of presenting my work on using Python with GPUs at PyData NYC 2012.

There was also a panel discussion on Python+Parallel that I was a part of—great fun.

Also be sure to check out all the videos of the other great talks …

PyCUDA and PyOpenCL at Nvidia GTC 2010

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:55:56 -0500

Like last year, I had the honor of being invited to present PyCUDA and PyOpenCL along with a few examples of their use to a great crowd at Nvidia‘s inaugural GPU Technology Conference 2010.

Please click the following link to view the slides: PyCUDA and PyOpenCL at Nvidia GTC …

PyCUDA at PyCon Quattro (Italy)

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 20 May 2010 08:34:32 -0500

At the recent PyCon Quattro, which took place in early May in the beautiful Tuscan city of Florence, Fabrizio Milo gave a talk on PyCUDA entitled

PyCuda: Come sfruttare la potenza delle schede video nelle applicazioni python (PyCUDA: How to make use of the power of graphics cards in Python …

Putting the “Hard” in “Hardware”

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:15:04 -0600

Quite often, I hear complaints that coding for GPUs is difficult. In response to such comments, I believe that, for correct perspective, the discussion needs to be framed somewhat differently.

First of all, squeezing the last drop of performance out of modern CPUs is hard, too. Here’s a nice …

Why is GPU Computing significant?

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:01:35 -0600

In my opinion, GPU computing is significant because I—as a grad student—can easily afford a machine that allows me to perform a simulation like the following in 40 minutes instead of a whole workday. That’s why.

If you’re curious, this shows the density of a vortex …

You are being preyed on

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:22:45 -0600

Do you have a free checking account? A free credit card? Do you perhaps even get money back from your credit card company? Ever wonder who pays for all these freebies? This Frontline report (also embedded below) provides some answers and sheds light on the shady things going on in …

Submitted: PyCUDA: GPU Run-Time Code Generation for High-Performance Computing

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:12:13 -0600

Nicolas Pinto, Yunsup Lee, Bryan Catanzaro, Paul Ivanov, Ahmed Fasih and I have recently submitted an article that explains how PyCUDA allows the user to do run-time code generation (“RTCG”), and how that is an enormous boon to implementation efforts of most high-performance codes. Among many other things, PyCUDA also …

PyCUDA talk at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:20:11 -0500

This past week, I had the honor of presenting a talk on PyCUDA at Nvidia‘s inaugural GPU Technology Conference.

Please click the following link to view the slides: PyCUDA talk at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference.

Update: Nvidia has posted a recording of the session that you may watch …

Nena vs Eminem

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:27:14 -0500

Is it possible to take the instrumentals from one track, the vocals from another, and come up with something that you’d actually want to listen to? Turns out yes:

Amazing what computers can do these days. (via Holger Levsen)

Original 1, Original 2.

SciPy‘09: Advanced Tutorial on PyCUDA

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:23:03 -0500

The SciPy‘09 conference ended less than a week ago. At the invitation of the SciPy‘09 organizers (especially Fernando Perez), Nicolas Pinto gave a talk in the Advanced Tutorials track on how to use PyCUDA to do GPU scripting.

First, I would like to use this opportunity to publicly …

Introducing UIH: Math + Unicode, Happy Together

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:04:22 -0500

As a math person, you’re often faced with the task of communicating about math. Unfortunately, most modern means of communication, be it email, the web or instant messages, aren’t really suited to typing math. Fortunately, however, many of these means do allow the use of Unicode, and Unicode …

Debug Python in Style

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:39:06 -0500

I’m happy to introduce PuDB, a full-screen, console-based visual debugger for Python that I recently cooked up.

Download it here

Or install it simply by typing

easy_install pudb

into your Unix shell. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Python has had decent debugging support for a while …

Git Commit Timelines

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:39:18 -0500

Here’s a waste of time I could just not resist: MIT‘s Project SIMILE has released a rather nice Timeline Web Widget. Combine that with GitPython and a bit of glue code in Python, and you get a neat, one-page summary of the software work I’ve done as …

1 Billion seconds on this Earth

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:45:43 -0500

Happy 10⁹-day to me!

date -d'NNNN-NN-NN + 1000000000 seconds'
Mo 13. Apr 01:46:40 EDT 2009

World Builder

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:01:27 -0500

From the department of “what’s Andreas wacthing on Vimeo“: Here’s something amazing you can apparently do with one day of filming and two years of post-production.

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

One thing I could especially relate to about this video is the feeling of time-constrained …

Credit Crisis? What Credit Crisis?

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:01:52 -0500

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the global economic meltdown. You’ll probably have also listened to people explain it, maybe even understood what’s going on. Regardless, this video I recently found sums it up again very nicely:

The Crisis of …

boostmpi: Initial Release

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:28:36 -0600

I’m happy to announce the initial public release of boostmpi, an MPI wrapper for Python.

boostmpi is a high-quality Python wrapper around the Message Passing Interface (MPI). MPI is a standardized interface to libraries such as OpenMPI and MPICH that provide high-performance inter-process communication for distributed-memory computing.

boostmpi uses …

CodePy: Initial public Release

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:58:50 -0600

I’m happy to announce the initial public release of CodePy, a native-code Metaprogramming toolkit for Python.

The idea is the following:

You build a string that is actually C code.
CodePy compiles it, links it, and dynamically loads it into the Python interpreter.

Ta-da: Instant native-code performance, with no …

Talk slides: PyCuda@MIT

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:14:08 -0600

Nicolas Pinto at MIT was nice enough to invite me over to give a talk in their CUDA class. I made a bunch of slides that I think are of general interest to people who are interested in PyCuda. You can find them here.

Submitted: “Nodal Discontinuous Galerkin Methods on Graphics Processors”

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:19:47 -0600

Tim Warburton, Jeff Bridge, my advisor Jan Hesthaven and I have recently submitted an article detailing our efforts to accelerate Discontinuous Galerkin computations by using Nvidia CUDA GPUs. DG seems to be a good fit for these machines.

Get it while it’s hot: Arxiv, Brown SC reports, JCP

Abstract …

Boost Numeric Bindings 20081116

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:05:19 -0600

I’ve just rolled release 20080816 of the bindings, with the following stuff changed:

Fix asserts in gbsv.hpp as suggested by Vardan.
Sync Thomas’s remaining fixes.
Apply patch to gels* from Naoki at http://mathema.tician.de/node/391.
Remove duplication in lapack_names.h.
Fix line endings in …

PyCuda 0.91

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:16:34 -0600

I’m happy to announce the availability of PyCuda 0.91. There is full, up-to-date documentation available.

The following exciting stuff is in PyCuda 0.91:

Support for Windows and MacOS X, in addition to Linux. (Gert Wohlgemuth, Cosmin Stejerean, Znah on the Nvidia forums, and David Gadling)
Support more …

Brown Beamer Template

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:58:09 -0500

If you’re anything like me, you go to Brown University and really like Till Tantau’s Beamer LaTeX package for making slides. Unfortunately, Beamer’s theming can be a bit obstinate, and figuring out how to give your slides a Brown flavor (yum!) can be tedious.

Luckily for you …

Reproducibility in Scientific Computing

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:29:10 -0500

In this recent paper, Finite Volume guru Randall J. LeVeque addresses an issue that is near and dear to my heart: Computational Scientists must start thinking about the reproducibility of their results.

Scientific results obtained by experimentation are expected to be reproducible. This has long been demanded of published results …

Joint release 0.92 of PyUblas and PyUblasExt

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:33:04 -0500

I’m happy to announce the availability of PyUblas and its companion package PyUblasExt in version 0.92. While PyUblasExt is available for the first time in released form, these are the changes made to PyUblas:

Sparse wrappers are now not compiled by default. You have to request them using …

TagPy 0.94.1

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:11:53 -0500

Responding to a patch from Bill Nottingham, I’ve uploaded TagPy 0.94.1. It fixes building TagPy against TagLib 1.5 and also fixes a mis-wrap of the clear method of the Map type.

In case you were wondering, 0.94 was a dud, but by the time I …

Release 0.91.2 of Synoptic

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:32:36 -0500

Yay, here I go again. (Update: and again) There were a few small wrinkles in Synoptic 0.91 (and 0.91.1) for which I felt it warranted to push out a followup release, aptly called 0.91.2. It fixes the following things:

Depend only on Python 2.4 …

First real public release of Synoptic

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:18:58 -0500

I’m happy to announce the first truly public release of Synoptic, my own web-based dynamic note taking application. If you find yourself lost in a jumble of either paper notes, text files on a hierarchical file system, or an overgrown Tomboy wiki, and find yourself craving order, categories, and …

Boost Bindings 20080405

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:28:54 -0500

I’ve rolled another new Boost bindings snapshot, dated 20080405.

This time around, I’ve done a bit more than update to current svn. I’ve tried to scavenge past contributions from the Ublas mailing list that got dropped on the floor. I’ve created a new version control tree …

On Hybrid Scientific Codes, Part I: The Idea

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 13:37:45 -0500

How should scientific codes be constructed? Scientific codes are often experimental in nature, and therefore need to be easy to change, and, of course, quick to develop in the first place—who wants to invest any more than necessary into an idea that might not work out after all? On …

Getting the Most out of the Home Row

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:59:18 -0600

If you’re willing to exchange a bit of memory for a lot less strain on your wrists, let alone work speed, this is your lucky day. In this post, I will describe how I’ve tuned my everyday work environment to a point where it feels completely unnatural for …

Barf Detergent and other Successes of Modern Marketing

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:41:38 -0600

I had a good laugh off this list of unintentionally offensive product names. As the title hints, Barf detergent is up there. But there’s one name that takes the cake. It hails from Germany, as it had to. To be precise, the electronics firm Trekstor decided to name the …

Hey, Americans!

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:51:09 -0600

If you’re choosing between Obama and Hillary, here is a compelling argument brought forward by someone who knows what he is doing. (transcript)

I couldn’t agree more. Go ahead, spread this! :)

Forums!

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:06:34 -0600

Since I’ve received a number of calls for help with regard to my software packages, in particular MeshPy and PyLinear, I’ve decided to create a public forum for these requests for help. Here they are: the MeshPy forum and the PyLinear forum.

Here’s to years of useful …

Visualizing Greenhouse Gases

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 10:16:32 -0600

Have a friend who does not believe CO₂ emissions are real and may be harmful? Show them this:

TagPy 0.93

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:53:57 -0500

I’ve pushed out yet another version of TagPy. This time it is to mop up after some rather unhelpful default in TagLib. That is, unless you have the magic lines:

import tagpy.id3v2 as id3v2
id3v2.FrameFactory.instance().setDefaultTextEncoding(tagpy.StringType.UTF8)

in your code, the generic API tag …

Yuck!

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:08:57 -0500

1,662,780How Many Germs Live On Your Keyboard?

(xkcd is great.)

Möbius Transforms

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 23:10:04 -0500

Complex analysis on YouTube:

Yup, too cool not to share. :)

TagPy 0.92 released

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:10:34 -0500

In order to fix Debian bug #438556 (a crasher that made almost all of the ID3v2 infrastructure useless), I have just release version 0.92 of tagpy. Go get it while it’s hot.

Not enough Flash video yet?

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:12:42 -0500

Then go watch something sad and then laugh.

PSI Smilies in Gaim/Pidgin

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:45:06 -0500

Thanks to Debian, I got pidgin 2.2.0 today, and with it, its new atrocious smiley theme—eyebrows and all. This prompted me to make a smiley theme out of Psi‘s old smileys, which I still remember liking the most.

You can download that theme here: PSI Smilies …

Fermat’s Last Python Script

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:58:45 -0500

def fermat(n):
    """Returns triplets of the form x^n + y^n = z^n.
    Warning! Untested with n > 2.
    """
    from itertools import count
    for x in count(1):
        for y in range(1, x+1):
            for z in range(1, x**n+y**n + 1):
                if x**n + y**n …

What they don’t tell you about VTK XML binary formats

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 09:52:10 -0500

You might have been trying to implement the new-style VTK XML file formats. And you might have realized that what they tell you in the file format “specification” is just incomplete. Well, here are a few bits of information missing from there:

Binary Blob Header: In front of every binary …

Books, Books and more Books

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:55:55 -0500

I’ve found it sad for a long time that I’ve read many books in my life, but my memory of them is slowly fading, and I would at least like to keep a list around. As you have probably guessed, you would not be reading this if I …

Singing the praises of

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:07:13 -0500

Here’s a chicken-and-egg problem for you. And you can be part of the egg. I’ll show you how in a minute.

I bet you’ve noticed that bajillions of websites have little links that say “next” and “previous”, right? Like previous page, previous item, previous whatever. And sometimes …

New release of Boost.Bindings tracking Boost 1.35 CVS

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:11:02 -0500

I’ve rolled a new release (20070826) of the Boost.Bindings library to track what’s currently going on in the Boost CVS tree leading up to release 1.35. What’s released works with current CVS as of 8/26/2007, I assume it will also work with the …

Dmn spmmers

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:05:39 -0500

Ok, the spammers yet again figured out how to circumvent my anti-spam measures. So yet again, I’ve disabled anonymous commenting. Only this time it’s final. And I have a mess of seven bajillion comments to clean up.

I’m just so sick of these people: :barf:

Trip to the Northwest

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:21:04 -0500

For the first two weeks of August this summer, Frank and I went on a two-week trip through the northwestern United States. The trip was nothing short of amazing to me, and I’m having a hard time adjusting back to the dull (by comparison) life in Providence. We saw …

Back in Debian

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 23:28:49 -0500

So after madman is currently orphaned in Debian and might get kicked out of the archive along with xmms kicking the bucket, I just noticed that one of my newer pieces of code made it into Debian: tagpy! :) That’s awesome.

To everybody who is holding their breath waiting for …

Trust

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:59:49 -0500

Watch this:

You won’t regret it. :) (PS: Yes, I know it was made by a bunch of Germans, and yes, they misspelled “belief”, but that doesn’t kill it, in my opinion.)

Embarassing Update: I figured out how to embed youtube videos. :)

New release 0.91 of lircd-xpc

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 19:35:34 -0600

I have just uploaded version 0.91 of lircd-xpc to the site. This should make the daemon a bit more resilient against a state where one endpoint thread crashes, and the other lives on, resulting in an unresponsive daemon. If you’ve encountered this, you might want to update. This …

Merry Christmas

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 21:33:43 -0600

Dearest readership! It is with great pleasure that on this second day of christmas I offer you my best wishes for the feast of love—with this picture that I have, in true christmas spirit, lifted from elsewhere:

Merry Christmas to all anyway… :)

Attachments

bethlehem-400.jpeg

Why does the Web have a Problem?

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 12:28:21 -0600

Because when you’re looking for Runge-Kutta methods, you find neat stuff and end up playing with it. That’s why.

(How’s that for a first journal post after fifteen years, huh?) :)

GCC 4.1 breaks Pylinear

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:49:17 -0500

If you get errors like

multiple definition of 
`_ZN5boost7numeric5ublas21scalar_divides_assignIT_T0_E8computedE'

when compiling PyLinear, it is because of this GCC bug, and it’s quite likely that you are using GCC 4.1. Supposedly, this will be fixed in GCC 4.2. This bug will likely also affect other UBLAS applications.

The …

Comcast, DHCP and MTU

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:50:33 -0500

If you are a Comcast customer (particularly in Illinois) and your Voice-over-IP (or other large-UDP-packet-using) application does not work as it should, don’t worry, it’s their fault. :P

For some reason, they include

...
OPTION:  26 (  2) Interface MTU             576
...

in the replies from their DHCP …

Version 0.91 of TagPy is out

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:33:17 -0500

I’ve just released version 0.91 of TagPy. Besides some minor fixes, the biggest change is that you don’t say any more

tag.setArtist("Fat Boy Slim")

Instead, the (IMO) much more pythonic

tag.artist = "Fat Boy Slim"

is now where it’s at. Reading these attributes (and …

Clockwork now shows statistics on the current day

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 00:57:49 -0500

I’ve made a minor update to clockwork that now allows you to immediately see how much longer the current workday is supposed to last, from the output of clockwork howlong. This update came out of a particular need that I had at my new summer job at the Math …

Rattle back, Rattleback!

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 13 May 2006 14:20:46 -0500

As part of the course requirements for the mechanics class I took, a team of which I was a part designed a Rattleback. A rattleback is a top that appears to have a preferred direction of rotation, i.e. if you start spinning it the wrong way, it (unintuitively) will …

Boost Bindings update for UFsparse

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 00:07:48 -0500

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 …

Think of those out there in the cold.

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 17:34:53 -0600

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 …

Audio player problems

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 17:17:40 -0600

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 …

Rain Damage, Rain Damage, Go Away

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 20:05:39 -0600

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 …

Taking notes like Germans do

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 22:09:41 -0600

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 …

Sports & The obligatory Aftermath

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:29:43 -0600

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 …

2005 in Review

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 07:49:47 -0600

Since it’s been relatively (cough) quiet around here, despite promises to the contrary, I’ll add a summary of my highlights of 2005, and hope that that will shed a bit of light on the latter half of the year, where many of you might not have heard as …

Initial fixes

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 12:56:40 -0600

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 …

A Stapler for PDFs

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 20:39:15 -0600

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 …

madman added to FreeBSD ports

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:18:57 -0500

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.

The beagle has landed

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 15:16:56 -0500

We made it! Since last Friday (pretty late) night, we’re officially in Rhode Island. For the time being, we’re staying at Ginny-B campground, and they are a pretty decent place. I mean, they didn’t prevent the rain yesterday, but you don’t get that at many campsites …

Selling my stuff

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 11:51:27 -0500

While I’m in the process of packing up all my stuff, why don’t you help me out by buying some? I’d, you know, really appreciate that. And, knowing that it was mine, you know that it’s some quality junk. ;) And I do take Paypal.

You can …

Linux on an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R52

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 09:31:52 -0500

This post summarizes my experience of making the hardware in my shiny new IBM ThinkPad R52 work with Linux.

I initially tried Debian on this computer, but later on headed over to Ubuntu with a home-built kernel for a bunch of reasons on which I won’t elaborate here. Update …

Life in London

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 12:30:08 -0500

The pictures from our trip to London are up. Enjoy this one, as well.

I’ll update this post with an account of the trip soon-ish. Before then, let me just add that you should not stay at the “Smart Backpackers Hyde Park Inn Hostel”, even though they tend to …

Life and the Office, and Work, too

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:00:31 -0500

Did you ever wonder how much the terms “guilt” and “office” are connected? Did you ever wish to just relax while working (and have your work benefit from it), but didn’t actually do so, since it looks bad? Wish you could work at home, knowing you’d be more …

Trip to Augsburg

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 03:39:45 -0500

The pictures from our trip to Augsburg are up. Enjoy.

Losing my Faith in Debian

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 06:09:48 -0500

I really do not like the way things are going in recent times within the Debian project. I feel that a group of people has gained way too much control over how things are run, and those people do not seem to care about users, they seem to care about …

These are turbulent times.

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 18:52:19 -0500

To follow up on the previous post, my laptop did find its way back to life. But unfortunately, only briefly so. It started all the way into X just once, and now seems to be dead forever. In the light of this, I’ve given in and ordered aramis‘s …

Uh, yay.

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 18:48:00 -0500

This July 4th could have been better. While it was a very appropriate day to get my visa (yay!), the evening was actually fairly bad. First, I discovered that a heavy rainstorm this afternoon has found its way into my laptop through an opened window. As yet, the laptop is …

Hendrik on Spiegel Online

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:35:32 -0500

A friend of mine, Hendrik, is on Spiegel Online with his pet project, the Stanford entry into the DARPA grand challenge. His team also made Slashdot a while ago. :D

Go, Hendrik! Will you ever talk to me again, now that you’re famous? ;)

ARPACK/LAPACK Symbol Duplication

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 19:26:29 -0500

Update: The packages distributed here have been superseded by the new autotoolized ARPACK.

This evening, I ran into a pretty frustrating problem with ARPACK. It aborted without being able to compute an Arnoldi factorization from within one program, but the same snippet of code (with the same matrix!) would work …

Burning you were to know…

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 06:39:42 -0500

…the true origin of Darth Tater. Wait no longer.

While pretty unnecessary, …

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 17:31:51 -0500

…I think it’s cool that somebody at Radio Bremen translates each month’s news into Plattdüütsch and Latin. Such things only happen when commercial interest is not at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Find the word

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 13:49:14 -0500

Josie’s doing something with kids tomorrow, and she needed a word puzzle. I made her one. No. I made her a program to make any number of them. :) Like this one:

KJAPANINAW
ACOUSLAPDO
NIUSBELEUR
GPRDIPPAPC
ASOUDEHCTE
RBCBHGAERS
OEKYMOUSET
OOEALEHLIE
WIRIJSELAR
CATNGMHIDU

I’ve attached the Python Find the word …

Sieve of Erathostenes

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 15:41:00 -0500

I challenge you to come up with a shorter/simpler piece of code that executes the Sieve of Erathostenes than this Python snippet:

N = 1000
candidates = range(2, N+1)
i = 0

while i < len(candidates):
    candidates = [n for n in candidates
        if n % candidates[i] != 0
        or n <= candidates …

LinuxTag is not free any more (Update: or is it?)

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 31 May 2005 14:24:42 -0500

Just now, I was thinking about which weekend I’d have to reserve to go to LinuxTag, which will be taking place in my current home town, Karlsruhe. Turns out that I don’t even need to decide that: They will be charging 35€ to get in this time around …

“Sith” is a four-letter word

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 31 May 2005 01:30:49 -0500

Think anagrams. ‘Nuff said. :)

Don’t shop at K&M

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 27 May 2005 08:22:11 -0500

If you ever thought about shopping at K&M Elektronik, don’t do it. They suck. Here’s why:

I bought a wireless card from them a while ago, which, over time, ~~bit the bullet~~kicked the bucket. I am supposing that I was seeing thermal problems, since the card …

Drupal 4.6

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 25 May 2005 17:47:44 -0500

I’ve just finished updating this site to Drupal 4.6. It went pretty smoothly, except for some hiccups with the image module. I like the new version, even though not much is different. The slightly changed look of the site might give this away, too. If there are any …

Check…

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 18 May 2005 14:42:22 -0500

…this out. :)

Misspelling my Domain

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:48:46 -0500

In recent times, I’ve actually seen more misspellings of the domain which hosts this journal than accurate ones. I’ve seen

tinker.net—which, in reality, is a site on how to catch reel big fish.
ticker.net—which, in reality, is held by some domain squatter.
fiker …

madman meets musepack

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:43:52 -0500

Thanks to Scott Wheeler’s tireless work on Taglib, madman (the development version in Arch, really) now has support for Musepack (or “MPC”) files. This was half-way to being added once before, but support in Taglib makes this a no-brainer. Seems like tag writing in Taglib is still not 100 …

Debian packages of the development version

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:41:35 -0500

Ben Montgomery made some Debian packages of a recent development version of madman. Try them out, and bother Ben or the list if you have trouble. Yes, I do agree that this is a strong sign that I should release 0.94 ASAP. It’s coming, don’t worry. ;)

Update …

Semolina Pudding / Grießpudding

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 15 May 2005 13:41:50 -0500

Yesterday, Josie and I were shopping at Penny and found a pack of semolina that had a really gorgeous-looking pudding on the front. I mean gorgeous, like, just the right reflectiveness, wobbliness, everything. And the pack, whose side conveniently showed the recipe, was only 35 cents. Arrr. Soo good. In …

snort

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 14 May 2005 05:08:00 -0500

Courtesy of Andrea (who’s giving Josie socks), I give you Darth Tater:

Attachments

darthtater.jpg

Who’s gonna pay for that content?

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 07 May 2005 06:59:06 -0500

If you are like most everybody else, you keep music on your computer, be it in MP3 or some other format. Then, most likely, not all of that music got to your hard drive in ways approved by the recording industry. You feel bad for that, don’t you? You …

We wash so much whiter…

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 02 May 2005 03:28:59 -0500

…and that’s guaranteed! :)

Summer is here!

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 01 May 2005 08:14:16 -0500

So, how come I finally noticed? We had a phat BBQ yesterday, starring some salad, grilled veggies, steaks, and finishing with Josie’s berries’n’cream dessert. While your mouth is watering, I’ll also tell you that to enjoy this, I spent much of yesterday cleaning our balcony. Sounds …

Harmful and privileged

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 17:00:12 -0500

Imagine that you have a habit of harming other people. Imagine that other people feel nauseous in your presence and can’t stand your stench. And it’s not like you couldn’t be like everybody else. You are choosing to be toxic. What would you expect society to do …

And white smoke has finally risen…

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 17:00:23 -0500

After a 10-day visit to the US, much pondering with friends, and a late night, a decision has finally been reached. And no, I’m not talking about the pending election of the new pope. Instead, I have (in cooperation with Josie) chosen where to spend the next few years …

Trolltech broke my madman

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 06:09:17 -0600

Apparently, Trolltech made some incompatible change to QTable’s code, and by “virtue” of this change, in-line retagging doesn’t work for me any more. I’ll endeavor to have this fixed soon, but I’ll be out to the US for about a week and a half at the …

Äl Jawala

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 05:58:56 -0600

The sole purpose of this entry is to provide some Google Juice to Äl Jawala, a two-sax, two-drummer band. We saw them outside Karstadt yesterday, and apparently they were at Sauschdall in Ulm last week. They rock. :yes: We bought their live CD “Balkan Big Beatz”. Dude. Kewl. 8)

If …

Buying pants in Germany

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 05:36:36 -0600

Let’s start by stating a fact: Pants sizes are an at least two-dimensional affair. You have the waist and the length. Both are correlated, but not so strongly that it would be effective to make a one-dimensional measurement out of the two. Obviously, some are fatter than others. (For …

We’re not creators of ourselves

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 01:35:21 -0600

We’re not creators of ourselves
We are only skin and bones
Our universe immersed in glass,
and now it’s raining stones…

Lyrics by De Phazz, “Keep it simple” on “Natural Fake”

De Phazz - Natural Fake

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:42:17 -0600

After a little more than a week of owning De Phazz‘s new album Natural Fake, I’m not as excited as I was at first. Maybe that has to do with how much I listened to it. But altogether, I have noticed that many songs are much more repetitive …

When I grow up, …

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:41:19 -0600

… I want to be just like him.

Photo trip through Ulm

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 14:51:34 -0600

Josie and I went on a brief end-of-winter-walk through Ulm on Sunday, and even though it was pretty cold, we got a hold of a few shots. Enjoy.

I, for one, am glad that spring has finally sprung in Germany. Just imagine. I was out in a T-Shirt today. And …

It feels good…

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 14:32:04 -0600

…to have a door again.

That will be all.

The Battery Rant

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 18:41:05 -0600

No matter what you do, do not ever buy the 2000 mAh rechargeables from Hama. They seem to have a pretty high defect rate. Today I finally got a refund for my set of four, which I had exchanged no less than twice before. Each time I came home with …

The State of 802.11g Wireless Networking in Linux

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 18:40:34 -0600

This entry describes my way to wireless LAN in Linux. It is an update of an earlier article. All I wanted was an 802.11g-compatible PCMCIA card with a reasonably open and functional Linux driver. I find it ok if the card’s firmware is not open source, but I …

AutoDJ from Source

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 18:43:15 -0600

I just committed a first cut of the much-requested “AutoDJ from Source” functionality. I’d appreciate feedback on how well it does for everybody. 0.94 is well on the way, but as you may have seen from my journal, my life has sped up rather than slowed down since …

I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes, but…

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 14:05:06 -0600

Good news, everyone! :D My parents just got a letter from Brown University stating my admission to the PhD program in the Division of Applied Mathematics there. Yeeeee-haw!!!! :D 8) Oh, yeah, there’s plenty of financial aid to go around, as well, including a fellowship for the first year …

Back from Snowboarding

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:45:33 -0600

I’m back from snowboarding! It was great. :D Snowboarding rocks. Even the one ski person we had on the trip had to admit that. }:) We had seriously great weather. Sun during the day, snow during the night, fairly warm, good snow conditions. I don’t know what could’ve …

Digital Camera Kung-Fu

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 11:47:28 -0600

Since the beginning of this month, I’m the proud owner of a Canon PowerShot A95 digital camera. (Note that the new category “Digital Photography” has sprung up on this site.) I’m very excited about the camera. The battery life is just incredible. The only hair in the soup …

Eat that, C++!

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 10:57:08 -0600

You didn’t know that Python can actually have custom infix operators, like vector1 |cross_product| vector2, did you? From where I’m sitting, I can see C++ turning green with envy. :) Of course, this is a hack, but it’s actually not so horrible that it wouldn’t be usable …

Out for snowboarding

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 09:10:56 -0600

If you’re trying to contact me, and it’s the week between Feb 19 and Feb 26, you might as well give up now. I’m enjoying myself snowboarding somewhere in Austria. Wish me sunny weather, good snow and all that.

See you week after next! 8)

Someone is trying to fool us…

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 02:44:51 -0600

…us as in the Germans, and, sadly enough, it’s working. When I first saw the brand of bags called “Down & Out” (Pleite & keine Hoffnung), I thought them to be an oddity, something that no-one would buy. Then I saw them in the wild, and even better, on my own …

Every Mathematician should have a Coq

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 18:23:41 -0600

(No, not what you think.)

For work today, I had to proofread some lecture notes for my boss. After work, I started wondering: What if we could leave the tedious verification of our math to computers? To me, math is about understanding and constructing, and not so much about meticulously …

The Lowdown on Amsterdam, Day 4 (Saturday)

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:01:05 -0600

(You might want to read day 3 and all the days before this one to avoid getting confused.)

Day Four was very much reserved for the van Gogh Museum. While “museum” always has that dusty, old sound to it, this is certainly untrue of this particular one. After grabbing lunch …

SomaFM/Groove Salad rocks the socks off Internet Radio

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 08:31:54 -0600

I’ve been listening to Groove Salad at work for a while now, and their mix has rocked my boat continually. Highly recommended. I have yet to try their other stations. 8)

Update: Embarassing typo in the previous Title line: Does it really rock the socks of Internet radio? I …

The Lowdown on Amsterdam, Day 3 (Friday)

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 15:13:05 -0600

(You might want to read day 1 and day 2 first.)

Friday was most likely the most serious sightseeing day we had during our time in Amsterdam. We started out in a wool store for Josie, had lunch that gave me heartburn for the rest of the week, and then …

The Lowdown on Amsterdam, Day 2 (Thursday)

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 07:35:37 -0600

(Read Day 1 first, otherwise you might get confused.)

On the way out of the hostel yesterday, we had stumbled upon an outdoor gear store. I had been on the lookout for a new backpack for quite a while, and right there in that store I saw what I had …

madman news now syndicated from my journal site

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 18:25:00 -0600

madman’s home page now semi-automatically draws its news from the madman category of my journal. I hope that this will encourage me to update madman’s news more frequently by making the process more convenient than writing PHP source code. (ugh) As an added benefit, you may comment on …

The Lowdown on Amsterdam, Day 1 (Wednesday)

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:23:18 -0600

To say the least, the trip was great. Amsterdam is a very cool city, with all that water, all the bridges and the people, something is just right there. Sadly for you, there aren’t going to be any pictures, at least not for a while, since all we had …

Functional Analysis II Summary

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 15:09:27 -0600

Just in case you are interested, Functional Analysis II Summary is a PDF link to my (German) summary of Dr. Christoph Schmoeger’s Functional Analysis class of 2001. While those that have taken that particular lecture and need to take an exam on it may be a dying breed, I …

Groeten Uit Amsterdam

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 05:25:29 -0600

Hi people, greetings from the Flying Pig in Amsterdam. I completed my degree! Did that last Monday at 10:47. (The last exam could have been better—I got a 1.7. But who cares now? }:)) Then, I completed my applications to grad schools in the US. Did I ever …

Dirk Werner rocks my life

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 06:46:34 -0600

Dirk Werner is the author of an excellent functional analysis book, one of the two which I am presently using to prepare for my final exam, Rudin’s almost-classic being the other one. I enjoy Werner’s writing a lot—more than Rudin’s, and to be completely honest with …

The Dinner Fairy

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:47:31 -0600

While pretty seventies-looking, I actually like the brand name Penny came up with for their canned food. “Dinner-Fee”, which is German for the dinner fairy, took care of my lunch for today quite marvelously. Thanks, dinner fairy, you’re the best! :P

Note: Whilst writing this, I almost let my …

Sick before my Exam

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:11:33 -0600

I was supposed to have my last exam to complete my Diplom degree on Friday, but unfortunately, I got sick with flu-like symptoms on Sunday. One of my examiners has already agreed to move the exam to Monday the 24th, and I hope the other will, too. Now if I …

Sipgate and KPhone

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 04:58:48 -0600

The future has just begun, our phone and DSL connections were switched over from the big pink monopoly to Arcor. Unfortunately, their phone rates border on highway robbery (by being at least double as expensive as cheaper providers). So, I decided to give Voice-over-IP a try, using kphone as …

Excuse me? We’re living in a… what?

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:30:31 -0600

Well, until just now I was caught in the misbelief that we’re living in a western-style democracy. After watching the news today, this has suddenly changed, to my surprise. :O

Bremen’s senator of the interior is in trouble for authorizing the use of emetics by the police on …

El sistema

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 07:16:48 -0600

This image was nicked from here. I recommend this if your Spanish (like mine) is a tad rusty.

A strangely cleansing experience

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 06:29:26 -0600

I recently got back to Karlsruhe from being home for the holidays. Besides the usual heap of problems waiting for me at my “normal” home, I was pretty surprised how easily you get spoiled again by the amenities of having a mom around (and a dad, to be fair). For …

Just don’t use ACPI on old computers

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 06:27:34 -0600

A brief hint for those using Linux: If you have an old computer, and Linux chooses to disable ACPI, leave it at that. That is, do not use acpi=force. I just had a case of a computer that appeared to work fine with it. Only that the ACPI option …

Comment Spam

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 21:56:45 -0600

I’ve had this site for barely two weeks, and even this short time was enough for comment spammers to catch on. The site emailed me with notifications of new comments, and even from the notification emails, I was pretty certain as to what had happened. Somebody was trying to …

What were they thinking?

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 04:56:18 -0600

The German tax administration has published software to file your taxes online, and they promise that you’ll get your money back faster if you do that. That sounds good, doesn’t it? But, as often, they missed the mark ever so slightly. Why, oh, why does the thing have …

Review: “Der Palast von Alhambra” (board game)

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 16:15:29 -0600

My parents gave me Der Palast von Alhambra by Dirk Henn of Queen Games for christmas, and I’m writing this review to warn you of buying this game. Despite a recommendation from my aunt Conny and the “Spiel des Jahres” (game of the year) prize of 2003, this game …

More Drupal wizardry

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 14:37:14 -0600

I’ve been molding this site according to my publishing needs, and in the process of doing so, I’ve ventured into the Drupal source code. I’ve made a few changes that I believe are generally useful. Besides submitting them to the respective maintainers, I’ll post them here …

Simple CD burning in Linux and the Real World(tm)

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 19:28:34 -0600

There’s an issue surrounding recent (2.6.8 and newer) Linux kernels and CD burning. This Gentoo forum thread summarizes the technicalities. Basically, up until 2.6.7, everybody with read rights to a device was allowed to send control messages to it, and thus (for example) overwrite an …

Drupal wizardry

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 14:33:34 -0600

If you are trying to set up your personal site using Drupal, these insights might come in handy. At least, those were the points that cost me the most time to figure out.

As far as web writing markup goes, do not use Textile, do use Markdown. Not only does …

Happy new year to you!

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 07:46:24 -0600

I hope you had good holidays and that 2005 will turn out just the way you wanted it to. If there is one thing that I am hoping for the most, then it is that I do get into a good US graduate school for my PhD in the fall …

Parental Services, Inc.

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 05:46:38 -0600

For the past few days, I’ve been doing what I suppose most kids who are at least a slight bit tech-savvy have to do when they get home for the holidays: Fix their parents’ high-tech stuff. The day before yesterday, I finished pushing my parents over to Linux, with …

My least favorite day this week

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 11:57:52 -0600

Today I took Josie to the airport to go home. As I’m writing this, I’m on my way to my parents’ house in Überlingen. For more than one reason, today wasn’t my favorite day this week.

Let’s start at the beginning: the last few days were …

A real journal on the real Internet!

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 26 Dec 2004 20:30:52 -0600

So, the site is finally out on the real Internet. Thanks to Josie for co-funding this server. This means that we’re now open 24 hours a day, fast and not behind a flaky DSL line. And the people rejoiced. :D

Math Archaeology

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 06:11:07 -0600

While researching the specializations of the faculty at UMD, I stumbled upon a link to the Cornell Digital Math Library, which I find really neat. They have scanned old volumes in mathematics that have gone out of copyright, and made them freely accessible to anyone. No username/password mess. Along …

Another day of administrative joy

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:02:52 -0600

Another day totally dominated by activities related to applying to grad school. Like trying to get my recommenders to send their letters the right way. Finding out that, in fact, UMD does not support online recommendation. Filling out stupid ETS score report forms using Scribus just to fax them off …

Sokoban

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 10:47:41 -0600

So, I was wasting time before going to bed last night, like, by setting up this site, and by playing Sokoban. KSokoboan to be precise. Now, I made it up to level 12 of David W. Skinner’s Microban level set, which is rightfully said to be pretty easy. Well …

Earthquake

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 10:32:24 -0600

While I was setting up this site late last night, I felt like something was wrong. I heard my wardrobe make aching noises, and the ground started moving. First slightly, then more and more. At the end, it felt like our house was swaying from side to side with an …

Funny

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 16:36:23 -0600

Someone just posted this to Planet Gnome. Appropriate. :)

Moved in.

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 15:48:33 -0600

So, after spending an ungodly amount of time setting this up, I finally feel at home. Time to say something in here. Well, I should have been spending all this time working on my applications to the graduate schools which I plan to go to in the fall of 2005 …

Proprietary = bad.

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 12:59:18 -0600

Ok, so I’m in the process of setting up this site. I thought, ha, even Josie has a blog. So, for the times when content on my own site is few and far between (like…err…now), I should just syndicate her blog, so I’ll be cool by …

Blog.^H^H^H^H^H Journal.

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 12:39:31 -0600

Well, hi planet. Everybody has a ~~blog~~journal these days, so why not me? Let’s get started.

Update 1: Did anybody notice how cool I am? My blog can be accessed using SSL. Damn secure, man. Damn, damn secure. (Actually, not any more since the site moved to Alturo …

Madman bug/feature trackers closed down

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 09:04:01 -0500

Trackers are closed now. The Sourceforge bug, feature and support trackers are closed now, effective immediately. Please turn to the mailing list for your support needs. Anonymous posting is allowed, but please request for yourself to be cc’ed. If you have data in the trackers, it has not been …

CVS dropped as madman’s means of revision control

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 09:06:46 -0500

Giving CVS the boot. Work on 0.94 is continuing nicely, with Guido as a notable addition to the development team. Shawn is considering a rewrite of the criteria language. And you’ll probably miss all this new development if you only check the SourceForge CVS—it is out of …

Lots of new madman packages unleashed

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 09:11:21 -0500

Package frenzy. Within minutes of each other, both Christian Hammers and Jaako H Kyro made packages available for their respective distributions. So now, if you have Fedora Core 1 or Debian, it’s never been easier to get madman.

Thanks to the packagers!

Friendly neighborhood spiderman completes work on madman during night

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 25 May 2004 09:20:32 -0500

Greetings from the night shift. Guess what. CVS HEAD madman is now based on Scott Wheeler’s TagLib. I’ve decided to delay many other features planned for 0.94 and release as soon as possible. Hang in there…

Rogue library programmer confounds madman author

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 24 May 2004 09:23:20 -0500

libid3tag. If only anybody had told me this: I was just investigating why some ID3 tags just aren’t written for some MP3s. I stumbled upon this piece of code, hidden deeply in the guts of libid3tag:

  /* hard general case: rewrite entire file */

  /* ... */
done:
  return 0;

To those not fluent …

A mixed bag of items

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 24 May 2004 05:26:35 -0500

More Slackware. SlackCare has also made Slackware packages, which they claim are more correct than Adam’s. Find the link to their packages on the download page.

Email trouble. Some people have complained that they were unable to get anything posted to the mailing list or sent personally to me …

Way to go, Adam!

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 21 May 2004 09:29:37 -0500

Adam Ward made Slackware packages for madman. Get them from the download area.

New version of madman unleashed upon unsuspecting planet

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 20 May 2004 09:37:49 -0500

It has finally happened! The madman source has finally reached a state that I deem worthy of being called 0.93. Go grab it while it’s hot!

The most massive changes since the last stable release (which was gasp 0.91.1) include the addition of a very capable …

Somebody else’s problem affects madman

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 08:38:55 -0600

Is madman randomly crashing on you? The good news: It’s not madman’s fault. :) The bad news: XMMS 1.2.9 has a bug that causes programs controlling it to abort every once in a while. So, before complaining, please upgrade to XMMS 1.2.10, which is available …

A candidate asking for your support

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 21 Mar 2004 08:40:52 -0600

Madman 0.93 release candidate 1 has finally happened, while my thesis is keeping me busy… It’s a pretty massive update, with lots of potential breakage. Please give it a round of testing. Depending on the amount of actual problems, 0.93 will be out very soon.

You can …

SHOCK! Mailing list appears out of thin air

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 08:41:02 -0600

madman now has an actual mailing list, with people on it and everything. Wow. Little did I know. ;) Also, madman has an IRC channel to hang out on, that is #madman on irc.freenode.net. I can be found lingering there every once in a while, everybody else is invited …

Shawn = Mr. AutoDJ

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 23 Nov 2003 08:42:41 -0600

0.93 is still well underway. Shawn Willden agreed to rewrite the AutoDJ, and Christian Plagemann made a new logo for madman, which will be the official one from the next release. :) As for myself, I’m down to three simple items on the TODO list before 0.93 goes …

Weird. It keeps getting BETTER

Andreas Klöckner — Tue, 11 Nov 2003 08:44:23 -0600

I just finished a pretty long coding session on madman, and it just keeps getting better and better. Tonight, passive song announcement popups and tray icon support went in. 0.93beta1 will be out real soon nowÃ¢Â„Â¢, there are only a couple of things left to do. Preheat …

SCANDAL! Release lost to change-o-mania!

Andreas Klöckner — Sun, 26 Oct 2003 08:45:39 -0600

Oops. Release 0.92 will never happen. There are too many changes in the code base already after the release candidate. Instead, release 0.93beta1 will be the next one out. 0.92rc1 seems to be fairly high-quality, so I’d recommend using that for right now.

0.93 will …

Candidacy extended!

Andreas Klöckner — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 09:48:31 -0500

Released version 0.92rc1. This is a source-only test release for the next big version of madman, 0.92. It contains many exciting new features like a web server, remote control and Auto DJ as well as the usual slew of fixes, this time, among others, for unicode cleanliness, UI …

Quick fix released

Andreas Klöckner — Sat, 28 Jun 2003 09:49:21 -0500

Released version 0.91.1 to fix a compilation issue regarding overloaded setAttribute calls. Reported by Frank Baumgart.

BEST madman release EVER!

Andreas Klöckner — Fri, 27 Jun 2003 09:50:44 -0500

Released version 0.91 with many new features. Here’s the freshmeat announcement:

This release adds fuzzy search, plugins (for CD burning), a separate preferences dialog, and play history collection. Each song now has a ‘Performer’ field as well as play statistics and can be rated on a scale of …

Mr. Quicker-fixer-upper unleashed

Andreas Klöckner — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 08:52:04 -0600

Released patch version 0.90.1 to fix dependency on Qt 3.1.This new release only requires Qt 3.0 or higher.

I humbly present…

Andreas Klöckner — Wed, 26 Feb 2003 08:53:14 -0600

Released initial version 0.90.

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