New digikam and kipi-plugins 1.8.0

Another month, another bugfix release from the digiKam team, and it's already in the tree. Enjoy, and remember, this all needs at least KDE 4.5!

As a side note, please don't expect any working ebuilds for digikam-2.0.0_beta1. First, the great new upstream feature is bundling of all the required libraries, including even some pre-release of kdegraphics-4.7(!). Several maintainers have already pointed out that this is not such a great idea, with no effect so far... Second, the entire source tree layout may still change until 2.0.0 release, so this is a bit like chasing a butterfly...

P=NP, the next try

It could be hot, if it were correct. Now, it has to survive the scrutiny of mathematicians and theoretical computer sciencists from all over the world: Vladimir Romanov has published in his blog and on the arXiv a manuscript with an (as he says) polynomial-time (i.e. "fast") algorithm for the so-called 3-SAT problem from theoretical computer science. Now, that particular problem is known to be one of the class of NP-complete problems, and if any NP-complete problem can be solved in poly-time, then all NP problems (these are "hard ones") can be, i.e. P=NP with P as the set of problems solvable in poly-time. This may sound pretty exotic, but it has enough interesting consequences to make P?=NP one of the fundamental Millenium Prize Problems of the Clay Institute. Interesting times and a potential $1.000.000 bounty ahead...

Yay! Another KOffice version bump!

In a way this blog post is a bit late, since the "big bump" from KOffice-2.2.2 to KOffice-2.3.0 was already a few days ago. But- starting now, we have the brand new zero-day version KOffice-2.3.1 in Gentoo portage, ready for your perusal. Keyword and enjoy!!!

As a side note for those who have not heard it yet, the KOffice 2.3 series will be the last one with that well-known brand name. Owing to certain disagreements and an effective fork of KWord, development will continue as "Calligra Suite", with some less-than-inspired new application names (Words, Tables anyone?). Ah well.

Power failure

Oh yes, and I was stupid enough to forget my UK plug adapter at the London hote

Very British

Travelling again... this time I took a small break between two meetings, and ended up in warm(!) and sunny(!) London. Main task, however, was getting a decent amount of sleep first, so I ended up being inappropriately lazy. Ah well... Saturday evening I went to see Stomp - a strange but fascinating hybrid of pantomime, percussion, and dance performance. Now I know what things you all can use to make a bang! A later highlight was an exhibition of advertisment poster art by Rene Gruaud for Dior. My personal favourite is the Flower Woman... See here for a nice review and the source for the image. unfortunately it's completely impossible to get poster prints for a reasonable price. Otherwise it was great again to wander through the City, well to be accurate mostly through the West End and surroundings. It's been such a long time, I had not even seen Millenium Bridge, Tate Modern, or the Eye yet. (Well maybe except for on Doctor Who.) It's still a vivid, beautiful, fashionable, young, and exclusive place, where something's happening all the time. When I left, at Leicester Square the red carpet was just rolled out for the gala premiere of Burlesque with Cher and Christina Aguilera. And I really started laughing when I went to see the crown jewels in the Tower, and one of the golden ceremonial maces was missing and marked not with "under restoration" as a republican foreigner might expect, but with "in use"... Monday finally was shopping day. (Not only for me but for a few million Londoners as well I guess...) Various museum shops, Waterstones, HMV, Harrods, ... I'm starting to wonder what the Lufthansa agents at the airport will tell me though. Anyway. Time to get to Britain more frequently again.

Server moved and nearly fully operational again

Just a quick update: the new picture gallery server, a Xen domU instance hosted at ispOne, is running fine, so after some tests I changed the DNS entries and www.ostpforte.de is now served from Frankfurt. A few files are still missing, but that will be fixed soon. Finally, since the server is now located outside the internal Maximilianeum network, the picture upload feature as implemented previously does not work anymore. I'll have to come up with a new mechanism... soon... in the meantime, please just mail me a DVD :)

Ostpforte going virtual

It was a fragile thing from the start, just leaving an old piece of hardware in the basement of the student home as a (low-priority) webserver, and moving out to a different city in a different country... From that point of view it was quite surprising that the picture gallery server that I was administering kept working nicely for years and years. That's over now... some combination of freak accidents left it unbootable. Most likely that is only a software problem (the kernel comes up but udev does not generate any devices), and by now, I've moved back to Bavaria and am only 90min by train away. Anyway, though, when I'm in München I usually have better things to do than sitting in a dusty basement (that I dont have any key for anymore) and fumbling around with rescue cd's.

The real world comes to the rescue. I am constantly amazed about new lows in pricing for about everything computer related, and this time it was virtual server hosting. I mean, I used to be up to date, but then some time passed when I was busy otherwise, and now suddenly one can get a small Xen instance with Gentoo preinstalled and unlimited server traffic for 5€ per month! OK, I may in the end go for a slightly bigger package since the data does not entirely fit into 20GByte, but anyway... rsync is running. :)