Ich bin wieder aus Korsika zurück, schon seit fünf Tagen. Die Wanderung über den GR 20 war großartig! Wir sind in den 13! Tagen ca. 180 km gelaufen und haben dabei jeweils über 10.000 Höhenmeter nach oben und unten überwunden. Wir hatten perfektes Wetter und es gab keine nennenswerten Verletzungen.

Doch leider hat mich der Alltag so schnell wieder eingeholt, dass eine Nachbereitung noch warten muss. Viel zu tun auf Arbeit, die Wochenenden sind schon wieder gut verplant und auf Autosuche sind wir ja auch noch. Bilder gibt es also erst später. Zuerst braucht mein Laptop eine größere Festplatte damit die ganzen geschossenen RAW-Bilder draufpassen und entwickelt werden können.

Vielen Dank an Phil und Christine für die Unterbringung, das leckere Essen und die Entsorgung unserer Gaskartusche!
Viele Grüße and Simone und Kristina - es waren wunderschöne gemeinsame Tage mit Euch, ich hoffe Ihr übersteht die GR 20 Nordetappen gut - sowie an Florian und Svetlana - Ihr seid recht herzlich nach Leipzig eingeladen (nicht nur zum Fachsimpeln über Fotografie).

Nach einer sehr stressigen Woche ist nun endlich Freitag. Alle Besorgungen sind gemacht, vor mir liegt ein großer Haufen Ausrüstung und daneben ein kleinerer mit Sachen dann noch ein neuer Rucksack und ein noch neuerer Daunenschlafsack. Alles will heute zusammengepackt werden - und hoffentlich nicht so viel wiegen - mal sehen ob ich beim Erstellen der Packliste richtig gerechnet habe.

Morgen Vormittag fahren wir (André und ich) nach Berlin, 14 Uhr geht der Flug nach Bastia, und mit viel Glück bekommen wir auch noch den Zug der uns irgendwo um Calenzana wieder ausspuckt. Wenn wir dann noch irgendwo her eine Gaskartusche bekommen sind wir absolut vollständig ausgerüstet um ab Sonntag den GR 20 in 13 Tagen zu bezwingen. Diesmal hoffentlich ohne Zwischenfälle.

Another shell snippet I'm looking for regularly...

To resize a block image file (like those that are used as virtual disks in Xen) from 2GB to 10GB you need the following. The used filesystem is ext2/3.

dd if=/dev/zero of=<image file> bs=1M conv=notrunc count=1 seek=10000 
losetup /dev/loop0 <image file>
e2fsck -f /dev/loop0
resize2fs /dev/loop0
e2fsck -f /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0

I always want this screen configuration at random places, so here it is.

Place this in your home directory as .screenrc

# ~/.screenrc
# use visual bell
vbell on
# set a big scrolling buffer
defscrollback 1000
# Set the caption on the bottom line
caption always "%{= kw}%-w%{= BW}%n %t%{-}%+w %-= @%H - %LD %d %LM - %c"

Let us hope...

Lately the Maven project has been taking a lot of heat from various sources about stability and over-all quality. For the most part, they were right. The Maven team is very strong and certainly no one intends for these problems to happen, but ultimately they were.
...
During a review of the open issues while planning 2.0.10, I became aware that a significant number of open issues start with "this used to work until 2.0.[x]". I became frustrated and a little embarrassed to realize how bad of a regression problem we had going on.
At that point I decided that my personal priority for 2.0.9 had to be No more regressions.

Cited from Brian's Enterprise Blog

Sooner or later almost any Linux admin feel the need for a history of configuration changes. May it the X server configuration which got corrupted while you experimented with the Composite extension and OpenGL or may it the apache configuration you jumbled while updating the popular web server.

Gentoo Linux brings some powerful tool's (dispatch-conf, etc-update) out of the box to manage and update those configuration files. dispatch-conf is even able to store older versions inside of /etc/config-archive with RCS, but dealing with this ancient VCS is't that much fun and self written config files are not included by default.

SVK is the answer.

Great news for OSGi users/developer and those who care about a good component design, Java modules and a clean classpath. Ian Skerrett cited the quarterly OSGi newsletter on his blog:

In the time since my last e-mail to members, the OSGi Alliance has welcome two new members. One of the, Sun Microsystems, is a previous (and actually founding) member, and the other, SAP, is brand new to the OSGi Alliance. I welcome both of them and look forward to their participation and contributions to the OSGi Alliance. In fact, both of these organizations have nominated candidates for the OSGi board —

For a half year I own a ThinkPad X60s, my fifth ThinkPad and my smallest but fastest laptop I ever had. The first time after installing Gentoo Linux on the new machine I was surprised that suspend to RAM was instantly working, I just had to stop my WIFI card (ipw3945) and woops, it went to sleep and it even resumed well. Using the hibernate-scripts a perfect setup inclusive locking of the KDE session was easy to configure (just uncommenting the right lines). In the need for more hard disk space (this digital SLR camera is by far a greater space killer than my (growing) ogg vorbis music collection) I bought a new 160 GB SATA hard disc. Migration was easy, I just connected the second disk with an external USB to SATA bridge and rsynced the partition content.

I updated the firmware of my digital SLR camera Canon EOS 400D to the newest version 1.1.1 and now I can download the images from the directly connected camera with Digikam 0.9.2. This is possible because Canon added support for the new Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) USB protocol. Before, only the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) was available which was not well supported under the Linux/Digikam combination.

Unfortunately I have not much time to investigate into building a better Java package management system I talked (or better ranted) about yesterday. But sometimes walking rather slow means also avoiding walking too fast. There is more time for looking around. In the past I analyzed different projects and code bases, e.g. Maven, Raven and Buildr or Portage, but I didn't found a best match. Of course I'm seeing much potentials in Portage, but it's written in Python and this could be a no go for some developers.

Today I discovered the Kepler Project. Carlos Sanchez blogged about the Eclipse Summit 2007 and the need for a plugin/bundle repository for Eclipse. As he stated, one wish or idea is to use a Maven compatible repository. Kepler tries exactly that, beeing a standard package repository while preserving compatibility to other package formats. I will have to keep an eye on this project.