Daniel’s Blog

So, I’m now about halfway through this term’s written exams. So far I have sat the exams in both of my major subjects, Math and History, and of the minor ones in German and Physics. The topic for Math was linear algebra, and the History exam was about the peculiarities of the German development and attitude around the first world war and beyond (Deutscher Sonderweg). What’s left is English, Political Science, Computer Science — that’s a laugh — and the second round of my two major subjects.

I already got the results back for Math — 12 points out of 15 —, and History — 15 out of 15! Looks like I’m on a run of luck there. Mind you, with results like that, exams can even be fun. I literally inquired my teacher whether she was trying to kid me when the results of History were handed back to us. And I eagerly await the results of the German exam, where I wrote in a cock-sure manner about matters I hardly have a clue about. The task was to discuss Georg Büchner’s understanding of art. Will she notice?

Today I sat the exam in Physics, which went fairly well given my frequent absence during the first couple of weeks after the last holiday. Yesterday I had to teach myself the basics of quantum physics (discovery of the photoelectric effect). Luckily we were given ample time to explain this one.

Still, this were all just this term’s exams. The big showdown will be next year around Easter, with the Abitur finals.

Tonight I had to move two project directories from a public Subversion repository over to a private server. Usually, to do this you’d dump the whole thing with svnadmin into one flat file and load it again at the new location. But to run svnadmin you need shell access to the Subversion server.

However, given that there are lots of tools around with names like cvs2svn I figured that something similar might exist for plain svn to svn migration. So I tried my luck and googled for “svn2svn”, and behold — I struck gold. It’s a hack and puts a quite heavy load on the server in order to retrieve the difference of every single revision to the next. But it worked like a charm:

• mkdir tmp; cd tmp
• svn mkdir http://destination/directory
• ruby svn2svn.rb http://source/directory http://destination/directory

That’s really all there is to it. The project directory is now at its new location, and has its history preserved. Many thanks to choonkeat for sharing his work!

After a somewhat difficult start into my new working life, including illness and missing school, tonight I’ve got some small but real work done. And what’s more I felt like my old hacker-self again. I think the last time I had this feeling of accomplishing something worthwhile in code was back in my huge gtkmm and gvim hacking days. It’s really not a good idea to only do stuff that nobody else will ever see, even if it is interesting and mind-bending. I used to do that way too much.

It feels good being back. And I’m going to blog more regularly too. Promise.

Maemo 2.0 requires the legacy Scratchbox 0.9.8 which does not support the amd64 architecture natively. However, I’m running Ubuntu on amd64 and managed to get Scratchbox working inside a 32-bit chroot environment. Scratchbox itself is built around chroot, so this approach has the weird consequence that I’m now running two nested chroot environments — like matryoshki.

In order to save others the hassle of figuring out how to set this up (read: Murray extorted it from me), I put together a little howto on the subject. Enjoy!

I’m fairly new to all this blogging stuff, and one of the first questions I had to resolve was what kind of anti-spam measure to deploy. I was almost set to just install CAPTCHA as it had been recommended to me and get on with it. However, while looking into the topic I have been informed that CAPTCHA is not only a good anti-spam solution but also a huge show-stopper for accessibility. It’s rather obvious actually.

As a contributor to the GNOME project, who is aware of the huge accessibility effort put into it since GNOME 2.0, I feel at least a bit awkward to completely shut off my blog’s comment area to a part of our user base. And no, I don’t think that it is unreasonable to assume that visually impaired people actually want to use my site. At least it’s no more unreasonable than to assume that someone is going to read my musings at all.

In short, unceremoniously shutting the gate against disabled people to solve a problem that has nothing whatsoever to do with them is completely unacceptable to me. Heck, I’m not the social romantic kind of guy, and I know that a dedicated blog like mine would probably not be of much use to e.g. many of the mentally disabled. Or to my grandma, for that matter. But there’s no reason whatsoever why this site should be less useful to the visually impaired than to people with perfect eyesight. After all, blind people are uber-geeks who communicate in a secret code resembling an extraterrestical alphabet from planet Braille.

Thus, I decided to rely on Akismet as non-intrusive anti-spamming measure for now. First-time posts are always moderated so no spam should get through. As I don’t have much experience in this matter, it might turn out later that something more is required to cope with spam. I had a look at Hashcash which seemed a nice solution at the first glance. However it makes heavy use of JavaScript features, thus requiring a fairly solid and complete interpreter. From what I understand this rules out current screen reader tools and therefore defeats the purpose.

Maybe I better start piling up some sandbags right now.