After hearing from Anna Kournikova, which is in fact a technical term in Poker with the meaning “Ace King - looks really good, but rarely wins”, I was asking myself about the exact odds of those two cards. So I started to write a small program called PokerBuddy to answer questions like these.
Last week during a training course for the IOI this year, one of my friends called Patrik, showed me some useful GDB tricks which I want to share here. Let’s start with a simple example program “perm.cpp”, which is intended for printing out all permutations of a given sequence S. Please note that this program will produce a (wanted) run-time error which we are going to debug next.
Finally it arrived, my tiny new home server! Immediately after unwrapping the 17cm² sized Intel ITX board (D945GCLF), I put all the parts together - at least them, which were possible, because the case is still missing, because I am unsure what to buy. Anyway, with or without case, the server is working great. Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS x86_64 is already installed and the Ethernet driver had been backported according to this instructions.
Here you can see it in action, while streaming music over DAAP and serving as DNS:
Currently a minimal Ubuntu installation (without X of course), OpenSSH and NFS are installed. Furthermore, I have installed Tangerine (thank you Armin for the great tip) and dnsmasq as local DHCP and DNS server and I am probably going add squid (as web cache) in the near future. Please let me know if you have any good tips, or if you know any good case. The current ATX power supply is quite annoying because of the big fan, running loudly all the time. I probably have to replace it with a bigger one, but in general, I am quite happy with my new toy.
One great hacker (I think it was Robert Love in one of his books) once has pointed out that hackers are, in contrast to the leading opinion, not living in caves all the time and I think he is definitely right. But it’s not only because of those horrifying bears and spiders living there, it’s also about society and, far more simply, fun.
That’s why we, from the ubuntuusers.de Webteam, came together last weekend in Nürnberg/Germany to our second Coding Weekend. Our main goal was to eliminate all Django dependencies from Inyoka, the software we have developed for ubuntuusers.de, and I think we have done well. All common parts (like the user models) are migrated and we have already started to port the bigger applications.
During the development phases, we had up to 14 concurrent, highly active branches in the revision graphs of hg, but we only had to merge a few files manually. Mercurial just rocked the world. Anyway it will still require some time until we can deploy those changes, because most parts of the portal are currently broken.
But that’s still not everything we have done. We learned how to eat all those different kinds of Sushi, ate half a square meter of pizza and slurped milk. Many thanks to Matthias (aka smurf) once again, for the nice stay and service there. In the meantime we also played Teeworlds and signed the GPG-keys of the new members in the team. It was just great and I am already raring to meet all the people again at the Ubucon in the upcoming month.
Web development is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and a lot of new web sites and services go online every day. So, taken all the persons working in that sector into account, it’s easy to believe that the languages, platforms and libraries are near the optimum. But actually, it isn’t. There are moderate improvements in that area, mainly because of some popular Web 2.0 sites, frequent AJAX requests and the hardware industry, but I think it’s mostly proprietary development behind closed doors. So I am a bit frustrated with the current situation.
Some of you might remember that this isn’t my first blog. Unfortunately I had neither much time for blogging, nor the time for removing spam comments the last time, so I decided to take it down. But now it’s different.
A completely new design, should help me to stay motivated, and Textpress, an upcoming, well maintained blog software should do the rest. It’s still under development but it’s already quite usable and easy to extend, so I am sure, the kick-ass features will follow soon.
For the beginning I have created an experimental Xapian based search plugin and, of course, I am going to release it in the following days, but at the moment it needs an overall code cleanup.
Update 2008/08/20: The plugin is now part of the Textpress core. It’s still under development, but you can already use it. Happy searching!
