I recently watched a TV programme on Discovery Channel about traveling around the World using the human power only. The Expedition 360 (formerly known as Pedal for the Planet) launched by Steve Smith and Jason Lewis in 1994 still goes on... It's all very impressive. As far as I know, Jason is currently preparing for the Indonesian leg, and Steve is no more participating in this event. He abandoned the expedition after the Hawaii Hike. Anyway, I watched the episode where they crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a small pedal boat (they are the first to pedal the Atlantic Ocean from East to West). This took them "only" 111 days.

By day 55 we had reached the mid-Atlantic Ridge and were suffering badly from salt sores, chronic tiredness and the mental stresses which build under confinement made worse by constant motion. Imagine a funfair ride which becomes irritating and ultimately nightmarish as it refuses to stop to let you off in order to maintain a positive outlook we opted to avoid depressing fatigues by both sleeping for 8-10 hours every 10 days and leave the boat to drift...

More at www.expedition360.com
and www.goals.com/Expedition360/

I bought a new camera yesterday, Sony DSC-P100 (info). It's very fast and the image quality is excellent.

Unfortunately, the camera is currently not supported by the Linux kernel, so I had to hack the drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h file (v2.4.24) and add the following code:

UNUSUAL_DEV(  0x054c, 0x0010, 0x0500, 0x0500,
		"Sony",
		"DSC-P100",
		US_SC_8070, US_PR_DEVICE, NULL,
		US_FL_SINGLE_LUN | US_FL_MODE_XLATE ),

Now it works fine.

Hacking

I released IMM 0.3 today.

Roadmap to GNU Anubis 4.0

v3.9.95
the maintenance release.
release target: July, 2004.
v3.9.96
will introduce Dixie's new testsuite.
release target: September, 2004.
v3.9.97
after this release, no considerable changes will be added to the CVS repository.
release target: October, 2004.
v3.9.98
after this release, we will focus mainly on removing all critical bugs first.
release target: October, 2004.
v3.9.99
the final test!
release target: November, 2004.
v4.0 is out!
release target: December 15th, 2004.
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blogRight! is ready, Sir.

I'm moving my blog to my home page, here, but for a while I will still be doing some updates on advogato.org. This blog uses the blogRight! engine, the code I wrote.

A long time ago I mentioned about writing my simple educational compiler. Well, this is still true and the work is in progress, but very slow progress. I hope to finish it by the end of this year. In the meantime I wrote a tiny, mini intro-example to a few basic compiler techniques, uhm. Send me the feedback if you like it ;).

There is one missing feature on Advogato.org site; it is when you read some old people's diary entries and you want to go forward in time. There is no a convenient way to do that (there is only an X older entries... link :/). Sigh.

Tired a bit (am both studying and working as a programmer). I'm glad the weekend has finally come. Recently metaur discovered some vulnerabilities in GNU Anubis. This was the first serious (and hope the last one) bug report since the last stable release in Dec 2002. Now heading the v3.9.94...

Finished a major reorganization in the Mailutils documentation. It's still not up-to-date and there is missing a lot of stuff, but I believe it should be now easier to complete it.

Watched Jackass: The Movie... yuck. Where is my brain?

Not much... just a little mailutils hacking. We now support the maildir format, which is very cool, the file: auto-detection url is great, and all from-like utilities now use rfc2047 decoding. We have also a new tool, called movemail.

And yesterday I went to listen to the 2,5h lecture on LaTeX. I already know Texinfo, which is obviously similar, but has different goals and is less powerful.

Today it was a hardware hacking day ;). I have moved my old Amiga hard drive (Seagate 1.7 GB) to my current workstation. There were six AFFS partitions, so I had to compile AFFS support into Linux kernel. I made several back-ups (old source codes, images, documents, etc.) and reformatted the drive using a common ext2 file system.

Not much to do... Savannah is down. This means no CVS write access.

Now reading an interesting article about the MSIL Assembly Language. Huh, this assembly language is even object-oriented, kinda funky ;). I was also googling for a document which shows the difference between .NET 1.1 and 1.2, but couldn't find anything. Then I finally started reading the C# 2.0 specification, which looks quite promising.

Hacking

Sergey and I made a lot of progress on GNU Anubis... :). The Ident protocol will be superfluous soon, but this still requires a lot of work to be done. I expect that version 4.0 will be released in Q1/2004.

Released a fresh new memory testing tool, designed as a wrapper around the standard libc memory allocation routines malloc, calloc, realloc, and free. It is called IMM and it's licensed under the LGPL.

Today I downloaded GNU Hurd image for Bochs. At last! Now I must find a real machine where I will be able to try GNU/Hurd as a native OS. Check out my homepage (hurd) to see the screenshots with Hurd running under Bochs.

Learnt some parts of C# and, as a usual exercise, wrote a simple stack and queues implementation. Now I am writing (just for fun ;) a simple RPN calculator with variables and function definitions. All on my home page. Today I also discovered a silly bug in Mono, which makes Ahead-of-time compilation disabled while using mono foo.exe instead of mono ./foo.exe (of course after doing previous mono --aot foo.exe). At the beginning I couldn't find the reason for this strange behavior, but lupus on #mono pointed me the solution.
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Saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico at the cinema last Friday. Not bad, even funny, but Desperado (1995) was much better (thanks to Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino). Fortunately, Depp's performance was solid (memorable CIA t-shirt :)).

"I dreamt music."

I just watched Welcome to 2019 with an alternative music for Blade Runner. Yeah, it's a fan fiction videoclip, but very cool, and Pink Floyd's Welcome to the Machine alongside BR movie -- outstanding! Although I am a big fan of Pink Floyd music, I still think that the original soundtrack by Vangelis is one of the best ever made and the only one right for this great movie. I also hope that "BR: Special Edition DVD" isn't only a rumor...

Eureka!

I think I've found a good solution for my recent problem with the authorization mechanism in GNU Anubis. The idea is quite innovative and requires adding a new special mode. Probably it will take an extra 3 months to implement and test the solution. Right now, I won't write any details about it. Be patient.

Movies

Recently I saw Pirates of the Caribbean with an excellent performance by Johnny Depp. This is good and very entertaining movie. Johnny is cool. I can't wait to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico, here in Europe. I also saw a beautiful movie called Hero, which IMHO is good as or even better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.