gregoa's blog

november was a busy month for me. "travelled" (i.e. attended seminars & conferences) several times, tried to cope with a whole lot of work at the office, & accumulated approximately 40 hours of overtime all together.

now I'm looking forward to 4 days off (december 8-11) ...

opened the window before going to bed: snow is lying everywhere & still falling. some people like it ...

update 1: even more snow in the morning, and fat ugly snow flakes tried to block my way to work.
update 2: it's still snowing (or snow raining) now in late afternoon, the streets are more wet than snow covered but on the grass and the parking cars the unnecessary stuff piles up. some 10 to 15 cm I'd guess.
update 3: no snow in telfs, not a single grain ... but on the highway an accident near zirl (without any snow or ice on the road).

some current annoyances:

1. snow: yesterday snow was falling when I went to a bar by bike. *sigh*
2. bike: some idiot smashed my bike against the wall in front of the bar; now the front light is not working any more (I had my bike's lights repaired just the day before yesterday). *sigh*
3. foot: the splinter in my foot (cf. this blog entry) starts hurting again. *sigh*
4. /tmp: cron can't write to /tmp any more on one of my machines. hu? *sigh*
5. windows: a friend has problems with his windows machine - the machine/mouse/network/whatever is terribly slow. a virus? - I guess I'll have to go there and take a look. despite one of my favourite t-shirts. *sigh*
6. postgresql: why is there no DROP SOMETHING IF EXISTS foo? - if I use DROP statements I get errors about non-existing stuff, if I leave out the DROP lines I get errors on CREATEs because stuff already exists. - no problem for manual interventions, but dbconfig-common breaks. deadlock? *sigh*

*sigh*

update 1: fixed items #2, #4, #5. working on #6.
update 2: fixed item #3.

today was the first morning with frost.

snowfall is pending, forecastfox announces it for the night from wed to thu.

I need to get my gloves, winter shoes and the thick pullover out of the locker.

oh, well ...

submitted a whishlist bug against randomplay containing a small patch, & 28 minutes after sending it (& 18 minutes after the report arrived at the debian BTS) the package maintainer (= upstream author in that case) responds:

Thanks for the patch. That looks good. I'll give it a try and assuming all is well will incorporate it shortly.

view bug #337783 at the debian BTS for details.

update: randomplay 0.49 is released now (incorporating my patch with slight modifications).

what are people doing on rainy saturday afternoons in november?
right - they go shopping.

and what are they doing in the shopping malls?
they all participate in the contest "walk-as-slow-as-you-can-without-falling-asleep- & -always-leave-your-shopping-cart-in-the-middle-of-the-aisle".

argl.

randomplay

reading planet debian yesterday I stumbled over adam's post about randomplay. apt-get install'ed it, read the man page & liked it. - summary: a CLI/xterm music player with randomizing capabilities, a history & weighting functionality. the options seem very logical & intuitive, & it has been running here for the last hours ;-)

aptitude

I don't remember where I read about the nice feature, but it's really handy to see which archive a packages is in when using aptitude.