the corner office

People who take their time signing credit card slips at the shops.

Everything, from the half-second assume-the-position body shuffle and arm-adjustment in preparation for the glorious signing event, to the meticulous, painstaking nursery-school style writing-out of the Ridiculouslylongsurname seems geared to frustrate and annoy the 500 people behind them in the queue. What do these people want? A gold star and a Noddy badge for having a neat signature? You want to just shake these people, or kick them, or better yet, just grab the pen and sign for them.

Of course, you can't, because if you did actually tell the person to get a fuggen move on, they'd be all upset and everyone else around you would think you're a real wally, and you'd never be able to show your face at the local Woolies again. But still.

I'm in assignment crunch mode again, so not doing anything particularly not-studiously interesting, but I wanted to link to the Puakma Tornado server, which has now been GPL'd. Congratulations and good luck to Brendon Upson. It's a big step doing something like that, and I hope it brings good things.

(Once I'm up to date with assignments, I will be tinkering!)

Passed away at 60.

That's that then. Not by design initially, but I probably ended up watching more France games than anything else, and I was kinda rooting for them, especially after Germany lost. It had seemed me that Italy were the most likely winners though, and so it ended.

What was with Zidane? How strong the provocation? I'm sure there'll be quite some discussion about that in the next few days...

Next up, 2010. ZA had better start pulling finger.

Last week's Gentoo upgrade left some Java stuff wonky on my system, and I ended up in something of an upgrade hell, trying to keep up with a slew of Gentoo upgrades this week.

The first big change I got caught up in was moving to Xorg 7.0, otherwise known as 'modular X'. This is the first version of X windows that doesn't come in a single, huge tarball. Instead, the entire package has been broken up into about eleventy billion little packages, each of which can be compiled and upgraded separately. This modularity is obviously a great improvement, but the upgrade process hasn't been easy. My policy is simple: if a Gentoo upgrade requires a long, complicated HOWTO, (two, actually), it's best to avoid the upgrade for as long as possible.

Modular X finally went stable this week, so I just had to ride the torpedo and do the upgrade. Thankfully, it was mostly hassle-free. The only gripe I have is that one of my favourite fonts is now missing. The font, called 'Clean', was a really crisp terminal-friendly monospace font. No luck finding any obvious reference to the underlying font files in my backups, and I soon learned that the word 'clean' is not a useful search engine term. X fonts aren't my forte, and I'll have to make do without it until I have time to dig around and see if I can get it back.

The second big change has been an upgrade to Gentoo's Java configuration system. Gentoo has a really nifty tool named java-config, which manages VMs and whatnot. A major limitation, though, was that many Java packages don't compile cleanly with 1.5 yet, and all sorts of unholy horrors would get unleashed if you accidentally set your system VM to 1.5, &c &c. The latest version of java-config has a number of nifty improvements, and is now smart enough to work with 'generations', so separate packages can be built and/or invoked with different VM versions.

The upgrades to get to this 'generational' set-up weren't too smooth (<- understatement), but I finally have everything sane again.

Gentoo's source-based philosophy means that their Java library management gets really, really complex, because they eschew the 500-copies-of-the-same-jar-file-on-your-system approach that everyone normally follows. Instead, they aim for a more reusable, /lib-friendly set-up. I find myself a bit skeptical of whether their source-based java set-up is worth the effort, but I have to take my hat off to the Gentoo devs for keeping a handle on everything.

Finally, I'm now using Eclipse 3.2, aka Callisto. I read a 'what's new' article a few days ago, and there were no 'wow' changes that caught my attention. The main thing I wanted was a bug fix in the CDT plug-ins: the 3.1 compatible version had a frustrating bug where it would take a few seconds to close each source file window. Waiting half a minute to close a bunch of .h and .cpp files was getting a little annoying, and I'm glad to see that CDT 3.1.0 (which is for Eclipse 3.2, confusingly), has fixed this.

Now I can finally get back to doing really productive stuff.

Sir Richard Branson launched Virgin Money last week. From the M&G:

In his usual inimitable style, Branson launched the new credit card with a daredevil stunt - zip-lining 450m (equivalent to a height of 25 storeys) from the roof of the Sandton Sun Hotel into the parking lot of Virgin Money's headquarters in the plush Johannesburg northern suburb of Sandton to establish a new South African record for the longest and steepest foefie slide (sliding down a rope by means of a pulley system).

That's probably the first (and last) time I've ever seen a newspaper use the term 'foefie slide'.

As for Virgin Money, if they shake up the banking industry and make it more competitive, then good for them. Of course, I wonder how many people are going to be like me - very supportive of the idea but too lazy to do anything, and rather hoping that everyone else switches, so that my own bank is forced to sort itself out, too.

I've never written a Gnome app before, but I might need to soon for varsity (it's either that or Visual Studio on Windows, 'nuff said). I stumbled across a document titled Overview of the Gnome Platform, which seems to be nice and up to date, and details the various bits and pieces that make up 'Gnome'. Even for normal Gnome users, it's useful to be able understand what the various components do and how they fit together.

I came pretty close to draining the Gentoo rice paddy this evening. I've been a devout user for nearly 2 years, but it's been getting a bit much recently. It was a great learning experience in the beginning, but the marginal satisfaction return on the new things I'm learning is getting a little slim these days. The final catalyst for my near-treason was this month's upgrade, though. It was hard-masked hell trying to get various bits and pieces lined up so I could keep using Java 5. Then when I finally got that sorted out, I got to see the download list, and I need to haul down nearly 400 megs of source code. It'll take ages to download, blowing my ADSL cap in the process, and the compiling will take even longer.

Some of my colleagues have been having fun with Ubuntu, and it looks really impressive. That, combined with the long-standing recommendations of people whose judgement I respect, and its general popularity and support, means it's been looking mighty attractive recently. That, and Mark Shuttleworth is Sefrican, and must be Adoringly Supported.

Then I started digging around, and learned that AMD64 support in Ubuntu ain't too great for 32 bit apps. I decided that Gentoo may have its faults, but having to jump through hoops to run 32 bit code isn't one of them. If the laptop thing happens (still procrastinating), it's likely to be an Intel machine, and I'll try Ubuntu on that. Until then, I'll stick with Gentoo, despite its quirks.

I'm about 100 megs into the downloads...

You might not expect it, but Muammar Gaddafi has a website (via Commentary, where Laurence highlights some loco world cup talk from the man.)

Oddly, I was listening to the Dead Kennedys in the car today, and chuckled (as I always do) at this line by the Secretary of War in Kinky Sex Makes The World Go Round:

Libya? El Salvador? How 'bout Northern Ireland? Or a 'moderately repressive regime' in South America? We'll just cook up a good Soviet threat story in the Middle East - we need that oil... We had Libya all ready to go and Colonel Khadafy's hit squad didn't even show up. I tell ya... That man is unreliable.

And there's me quietly tootling along the N1 every day, trying to keep a safe following distance. This BBC article discusses train surfing, a new fad amongst young South African train commuters:

The most dangerous is train surfing proper, standing on top and dodging bridges and high-power cables.

Then there's a trick that involves swinging out of a door as the train travels through a tunnel and running along the sides.

The mildest, and most common, move involves jumping off the train as it begins moving, and jumping back on board again.

...

Lebohang Motsamai, a strapping young man with hair braided tightly, describes another move, known as "gravul" from the gravel on the tracks: "I get under the train, when it is in motion, and kick the stones, kin, kin, I play with my legs."

Surrounded by a clutch of admirers, he says he plays these games to impress girls. "Because when I do this, they are going to love me. They are going to say, eish, this boy is clever."

Kids do stupid things all the time, but that's just crazy.