As you might have noticed, there is a new block to the left: "Recent feedback". Since it is nice to be able to see comments to older posts, I wanted this feature. After some fiddling (it even exposed a bug in the feedback plugin) I got it to work.

I'm using Frank Hecker's feedback plugin for my comments and writebacks instead of the "normal" comment or writeback plugins or derivatives. Yet, all the recent feedback kind of plugins were written for those. Still, since the feedback plugin uses a format very similar to the other plugins, I decided to give it a try.

After some comparing plugins, I found the writeback_recent plugin, which pretty much did what I wanted and even got comments and documentation (as opposed to some of the other plugins). To my surprise, it pretty much worked out of the box with feedback.

I used the following configuration in writeback_recent:

my $writeback_dir       = "$feedback::fb_dir";
my $trackback_extension = "wb";
my $trackback_flavour   = $blosxom::flavour;

I use $blosxom::flavour here, since feedback does not use a different flavour to display commetns as writeback does. To make sure that the reference to $feedback::fb_dir in the first line would work I updated the feedback configuration replacing my with our in the fb_dir configuration line:

our $fb_dir = "$blosxom::basedir/feedback";

Last night, I was chatting in #larp as I have done a lot this week (since the last Symbols Event). A fiend of mine was complaining about her exams and that she was fed up with learning for them. She wanted to go and do something fun with somebody. I don't remember exactly how or why (don't have the IRC logs handy), but somebody proposed I went over to her and I ended up thinking that was a good idea.

So, after just over two hours of train and bus (Enschede Drienerlo - Hengelo - Zutphen - Arnhem - Ede-Wageningen - Wageningen) I arrived at her place in Wageningen. I spent most of the time in the train calling with an old friend and thinking about what the hell I was doing ;-)

As she promised, there was lots of tea and as expected not too much sleep (she had to get up for a presentation at university at 0900...). So, I'm pretty much broken now and on my way back to Enschede to check the finances of Pro Deo and theatre sports repetition after that. I might not fully stay awake tonight, but, it was worth it :-)

I've prettified the category listing at the top of the page using the menu plugin this week. Instead of showing all categories recursively, it now shows just the (sub)categories in the current category, so you can browse them. Also, the current category is show using the (slightly modified) breadcrumbs plugin.

I've also started tagging posts using the tagging plugin. Tagging is a very freeform way of categorizing posts, without limiting them to just one tag. At the bottom of the posts, all the tags that are stuck onto the post are show, click on them to see other posts with the same tag. The tagging plugin also supports listing related stories, I might enable that as soon as I've tagged a few more posts.

Also, look at the fancy "tag cloud" to the left, which shows all tags I've used (bigger and darker means more frequently used). Not too many yet, but that'll change soon.

I've found a bunch of other plugins that seem useful too, so I'll be spending some more time in the train (as I do now) configuring and embedding those plugins soon. Let's see if I can get some kind of photo gallery up and running now...

(Disclaimer: This post is about a game. It is all fiction.)

Last weekend was the first special of the Symbols LARP. I'm playing in a very nice group of Nightkin there, a race of moon-worshipping nomad like vegetarians. Our pack is called the Nocona and we're hanging out in an eventful and mysterious town called Runewall.

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I've been working on my own binary clock for a while now. I've managed to get the PIC microcontroller from Microchip working for some time now. After being busy with other stuff I slowly resurrected this project. Since the microcontroller part is mostly done (the software works, for the limited prototype hardware I have so far), I am focussing on the actual casing for the clock now.

Casing

The casing of the clock has a big influence on the rest of the hardware (and thus software) design. The basic idea of a binary clock is to have 3 rows of 6 LEDs each, one row for hours, minutes and seconds, each representing a binary number. Since representating a binary number isn't limited to leds but anything that can represent on and off, 1 and 0.

I'll settle for leds for now since they are easy to use and give pretty lights. The exact form is not decided yet. I had this idea of making the clock a very flat box, probably black, with 18 small (1cm) squares that illuminate (something like the TIX Pattern clock, but smaller). For that I would need white leds and colored, halftransparent plastic to put in the squares.

Shopping spree

So I went shopping today and returned with a bunch of stuff. I got some fully transparent and half transparent sturdy plastic from a hobby shop, I got some colored half transparent plastic from a carrying folder and a handful of leds in yellow, green, blue and white. I also returned with a toy gun (full metal, so nice and heavy!) for lextalionis perhaps, liquid latex that is hopefully fit for making LARP weapons and looking for a box of pins, a nice 1000 page book about hardware design of game consoles, but that's beside the point.

The box design

I also found a box meant to hold sewing accesoires. It is a half-transparent plastic that contains 18 compartments (or 17 really, since one panel is missing). When I saw it I got a vision of the backside of the box, every compartment being one bit of the clock, with leds inside.

It turned out this idea actually seemed to work out nicely. I haven't been able to try this with multiple compartments lighting up at the same time, I expect I need to add some extra (light) shielding between the compartments. Also, I need LEDs with a bigger angle. Since my leds focus the light in a tight angle, only a part of the compartment backside is lit. If I put the led within a compartement, only a small circle of light appears at the outside. I need to put the LED about 10cm from the backside to get full coverage, which is impractical and reduces light strength.

Though this design seems to be quite nice, there are two main disadvantages to it. First, when it is turned off, the clock will probably look butt ugly. After all, it's not more than a plastic bogs when the lights are off. Second, the box is big. It's way bigger than needed to hold the leds, wiring and other electronics. I would say somewhere between 95% and 99% of the space is unused. Not so nice.

I'll get some wider angle LEDS first and then I'll see if I'm gonna build it like this. For now the box serves as a way better storage for a bunch of resistors, leds and other electronic components than the small glass bowl that used to contain my electronic junk.

The squares design

As noted above, I was envisioning some sort of black box containing coloured squares that could light up. I tried this design using a few layers of paper (not black, but you didn't see the difference with the lights off) with a hole in them. I put a coloured piece of plastic with a white light behind it. This was not very succesful. The white light is so bright, you barely saw the blue colour of the plastic. When using uncoloured plastic, the light was just too bright to look in.

The other approach, using half-transparent uncoloured plastic squares, with coloured LEDs behind then, worked out better. The red, yellow and green leds had the advantage of being less bright (nicer to the eye). The blue led looked nice, but was still a little bright.

All leds suffered from the same problem as with the box design above: Their viewing angle is too small. I had to put the leds at a distance of around 5cm from the paper, which is way more that the thickness I had in mind. Also, due to this focussing the center of the square is brighter than the edges.

This looks like a very promising design. I need to get a decent piece of (black) wood, plastic or cardboard to do some more tests once I can get my hands on some wide angled LEDs.

Note to self: Get a cheap digital camera, since conveying these ideas in words is crappy ;-)

I'm following a course called "Concurrent and Distributed Programming" (CDP). It concerns programs that run at the same time in a multiprocessor, multiprogrammed or multiple device environment. The main part of the course is proving correctness of such programs. In layman's language: If multiple things happen at once (such as lots of cars driving on a crossing), how do you prevent certain things from happening together (cars driving in perpendicular directions) without the risk of waiting forever (always letting one direction first).

Pretty interesting stuff, actually. Quite a different mindset from normal programming. I've already had some experience with this in other courses (Operating Systems, Programming), but this is more formal and actually proves that algorithms are correct. Something I like :-)

The nasty side of it is that the classes are pretty chaotic. The teacher doesn't really do a good job at explaining the stuff. Add to that that a lot of her sheets (containing very formal, non-trivial to understand code) contain stupid errors and you get a pretty lousy class.

Anyway, I've been installing spin, the validation tool used for this course. I have yet to understand what it can do, though. For now, I was able to do the first (easy) assignment by clicking around in the graphical front-end, xspin. Both are pretty easy to install. Spin is written in C and needs a simple compilation, xspin is TCL/TK and works out right away (if you follow instructions).

The bigger challenge was to make a screenshot of the application showing the simple Promela model, the output and my name. After doing the necessary resizing and converting (I had to hand in the screenshot in PDF format...), I got it done. Let's hope the classes will improve a little and this might turn out to be a fine course.

Due to a recent abnormally long post I decided to finally look for a plugin to chop up my posts, using a "read on" link or similar. This keeps my blog frontpage is little more clear, prevents huge RSS feeds and makes sure I won't take up the entire front page of the Wereld van Pro Deo.

To do this, I installed the seemore plugin, which pretty much works out of the box. I think I want to replace the "See more..." text with something different, but I should first think about what that should be.

First, let's get some sleep. (And yes, I know that the link above is broken, see my post about markdown for why).

Until now I would type every post I made in pure XHTML. That is, paragraphs start with <p>, links were put into <a> tags, etc. Since that can become quite some work, and I wanted an easy way to insert links into my text (for example, I don't want to type http://www.debian.org everytime I want to include a link to Debian). Therefore, I searched for something that could do this kind of stuff for me.

The are a lot of Blosxom plugins that can automatically create paragrahps and generate other kinds of markup. Most of these plugins are based on some wiki syntax, but I actually liked none of these. Besides easily including links to fixed sites, I also wanted to be able to include links to posts within my blog, or images in some configurable directory.

I've decided to use Markdown for all this. Markdown is simple formatting language meant for blogs. It is designed in the style of email communication and should not just render pretty XHTML, but also look good in plaintext. Nobody will probably ever read my entries in plaintext besides me, but still, they look pretty now :-)

I had to modify markdown a little, though. Normally, all links used by markdown are in the same document (blog post in this case). That is, if I want to link to debian, I don't have to type the URL at the spot of the link (I can just say link to "Debian"), but I do have to type it somewhere in the post (to define that "Debian" actually means "http://www.debian.org").

I've hacked in support for reading a file that defines a number of links that can be used in any document without specifying the URL. This file contains the links that I expect to be using more than once.

This also allows me to easily insert sections and lots of links in a post, which I needed for my huge post about my new laptop. Also note that right now, links to blog entries, wikipedia or images do not work yet, since Markdown has no support for that. I will probably use the macrolinks plugin for that.

Anyway, about The notebook I ordered finally arrived a week and a half ago. I have been playing around with it during the last week, therefore I have not posted this earlier :-)

I rather like the notebook already. I have yet to name her, but she's cute, small, a little alternative (with an AMD processor instead of an Intel one) and gothic (Dressed in all black). It's a perfect fit in my backpack, but I still want to get one of those second skin notebook sleeves to protect the notebook from the other residents of my bag :-) I've ordered one at the the Mediamarkt, but I'm not sure if it will fit properly (My screen is 12" widescreen, which is a few cm wider than most 12" laptops).

Read on for specs, linux hardware support, ACPI tables & voltage optimization.

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For a little then. Mastercard apparently made this briljant commercial starring MacGyver doing his usual MacGyver thing.

It has been nearly a year since the last release of OpenTTD and it has been about two months since the first time we answered the "When is the next release?" question with "Soon", but it is now finally here: OpenTTD 0.4.5.

I haven't done too much for this release, since I've been busy with all kinds of other stuff, but I'm building the Debian package right now. I'm still looking for a good way to do packaging (combining with svn and a few other tools), but since I do not get so much practice (few releases) stuff is still a little flakey. Ah well, still learning.

I've been studying graph theory all night, mainly reading at first. Since I have only little time until my exam tomorrow afternoon, I don't have the time nor the concentration to fully comprehend and prove the correctness of all that I read (which I normally tend to do). Also, I have barely done any exercises, apart from a practice exam just now.

It's not hard given the appropriate definitions and theorems, but since they are not given and I do not know all of them by heart, we'll see what happens tomorrow. I'll try to remember some more definitions in the morning and hope they'll stick... First some sleep, though.