I finally bought a camera, the Canon SD700 IS (AKA IXUS 800 IS). I am very satisfied with the camera, it has an excellent build quality and good image quality. The camera even worked out of the box with GPhoto and GTHUMB. Right now I am trying to decide if I should stick with F-Spot or switch to the WINE powered Google Picasa for GNU/Linux.
The picture was taken yesterday at Hanging Rock State Park and has been cropped and resized in The GIMP.
I’m leaving the office for today to go play disc golf, should be fun (and varm). I guess I should have played some more freesbie before I left Denmark – I am sure I will lose big time :)
I have heard rumors that some of the packets containting an “illegal” sequence of zeros and ones that has been sent between kazaa peers have been routed through routers and switches made by Cisco, D-Link, HP and many others and ethernet cable produces by many other different companies. I wonder when the record industry will sue and settle with these companies?
Actually, I saw a guy speeding on the high way once, I’d better sue the guys making asphalt. They should totally create a form of asphalt that automatically detects speeding and drunk drivers and notifies local police.
The day before yesterday Andy took me hiking at the Eno River. 
We saw a bunch of different animals, including a large snake, fireflies and numerous frogs and toads. In total we spent about two hours walking the narrow trails by the river.
Yesterday I was sitting at my temporary Duke office, and found, what I thought was a bit of dirt, on my right leg. It turned out to be a tick instead. It must have been sitting on my leg since the Eno trip the day before. I raced up to Andy and got a tweezer and some antiseptics, I succesfully removed the tick, and it is now alive and well, crawling on my desk inside a water bottle. I am keeping it for now in case I caught any disease from it. It looks very much like the one in the picture, which is an American Dog Tick (Dermacentor variabilis).
Yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to take a complete backup of a subversion repository containing some code that I am currently working on. The generic way to do this is
svnadmin dump path-to-repos
but svnadmin only works on local repositories. However, I do not have shell access to the machine containing the repository and can only access it through its webDAV interface. I thought that since all revision information is available through the normal svn client, someone would have solved this problem nicely already. I googled around and could not find any obvious solutions. I found a the source to a program, svn-push in the subversion repository contrib section. It is a bit unclear what this program actually does and I was unable to actually make it compile. After some more searching I stumbled acroos svk which is a program build on top of subversion. Eventually I found out that I could abuse this program to create a dump of my remote repository. First make sure that you have no previous svk history:
rm -rf ~/.svk
Then get information of the repository by issuing the following command and follow the instructions on screen
svk ls [subversion-repository-URL]
svk should then have built a local repository, the first two revisions to this are local svk information, we simply dump the rest:
svnadmin dump -r2:HEAD ~/.svk/local > my-repository-dump
If you have stored the repository with the same name as you original repository as part of the “ls” command, my-repository-dump should now contain the full revision and log information of the original remote repository. yay.
Today Lars got me a Duke CS t-shirt, I wonder if I dare wear at at Turing-0. In other news I am going to see some baseball this evening. The game is supposedly very boring, I know it will be jazzed up sometime in the next 994 years, but that will not do me any good now :). Yesterday I went to a pizza place called Randys Pizza, their pizzas looked huge so i ordered two slices and some fries. Apparantly, in America even the pizza slices are large, in spite being quite hungry, I only managed to eat one slice and the half of the other one, I left my fries mostly untouched. Another weird thing over here is that they have chloride in their tap water, now I have seen that many places – but here they actually use this kinda water slightly filtered for the coke machines with the result that I get an distinct after-taste of chloride with every sip, like drinking pool water. Or maybe it is just a combination of a placebo effect with my paronoia mixed with the fact they actually have a slightly different way of making coke here (they use a different kind of sugar or something).
Today was my first day at Duke University, Lars took me eating – american style. For breakfast we went out and had scrambled eggs and sausages/bacon, for dinner I had some weird fish thingies with rice and we just returned from a sports bar where we had dinner. For starters we had chicken wings and following that I was served a huge cheese burger with fries. The coke was ad-libitum :). Right now I am both very jetlag-tired and very full, goodnight people :)
Tonight I am joing Mikoline, Mette and David for dinner somewhere downtown, afterwards we will go see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. I am not sure what to expect from this movie, I hope to get pleasantly surprised. The reviews sure make it out to be entertaining, yay.
So I am back from SWAT now. We had a nice time and a lot of beers :). Pictures might follow if I can persuade GRUB to boot my old Windows XP installation. (Samsung only releases windows software for their cellphones, grrr).
In a few hours I will leave for the Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory (SWAT 2006) with Allan. We will take the bus to Aarhus Airport and fly via Copenhagen to Riga. It figures that we are leaving Denmark just when the summer is peaking ;|. Apparantly Copenhagen Airport is rather crowded these days due to added security requirements and low staffing, I hope we will make our connecting flight. Anyways, have a nice week everybody ;)