A short advert^Wentry about a play that will be performed on january 25 by Evolution Events and a lot of supporters, in a theater in Baarn. The play is written in the context of our Lextalionis Vampire LARP event, but is going to be a perfectly normal play about the utopic city of Altenstadt, ruled by the ambitious politician Bruno Wolff van Metering.

If you like theatre (or are just curious what we have created), you should visit the play's site and make reservations at once. Note that both the play and the site are in dutch.

Just in case you're wondering, I do not have a part in the play. I will, however be playing a role in the audience. I will visit the play as Pieter Beemstra, a ghoul to Michelle du Croix.

I've just spent a weekend in a cottage in Frankenau with Evolution Events. It was just a nice weekend of vacation together, which proved very fun and interesting.

I've just been in the train for a few hours, from Ermelo to Enschede. While waiting on the train (delay: 25 minutes), I noticed it being quite cold. Still 3 days away from official winter, it's already below zero in the Eastern part of the Netherlands. The frozen catenary above the trains did result in some nice fireworks of sparks and smoke, but unfortunately I forgot to make pictures...

I did make a nice picture when I got out of the train.

Everyone has it every now and then: You see or read something that you can completely identify with, thinking "This is so me".

I just stumbled onto this comic.

For the last couple of months, I've been having issues with my Linux hibernation. I had it working from the start, but for some unknown reason, it ceased working as of kernel 2.6.16. For the past months I have been unable to upgrade my kernel, since I did not have enough time to find and solve the problem.

This was nasty, since the newer versions of my wireless network drivers require > 2.6.16, the wacom tablet drivers have a few new features in 2.6.18 and there should be support for my (built-in) SD card reader since 2.6.18 (really generic support for SD host controllers ). None of which I could use, since upgrading would break my hibernation (and I really can't use my notebook without hibernation).

Last week, 2.6.19 was released. Even though I couldn't find anything in the changelog that would fix my hibernation (I'm nearly done reading it), I decided to give it a try anyway. Well, waddayaknow? It worked right away! I have to admit that suspend and resume is slower than it used to be (5s vs 2s for the actual writing/reading to/from disk), but it at least it works.

Also, the generic SD card reader support worked straight away, despite a warning in my kernel log:

sdhci:slot0: Unknown controller version (16). You may experience problems.

So far, I've not experienced any problems, though I haven't really done any real testing yet...

Another weird side effect of this new kernel is the occurrence of APIC errors:

APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)

So far, there have been no ill effects apart from this message, so I'll just ignore it for now. It is typical however, that I get this error roughly every 1000 seconds. Oh well...

As an added bonus, 2.6.19 introduces "MSI laptop extras". This allows me to query the state of my WLAN/Bluetooth button and allows my to set the display brightness programmatically. Real nifty, though I'm not sure how to use it just yet...

Update: It seems that suspend code now no longer swaps out applications before writing the memory to disk. This means the actual writing takes longer but starts earlier. In particular it also means that after desuspending, I don't have to wait until firefox gets unswapped first.

After a few weeks of being busy and getting not enough sleep, I've finally managed to sleep really late this morning. Since Brenda had to go to work today (ie, get up at 7), we went to bed early yesterday (around 2330). I didn't get up together with her but slept on until 1300, for a total of more than 13 hours of sleep. And, for the first time in weeks (or maybe months..) I feel fully rested. Now let's try to keep this up.

I'm writing this while I'm in the train to Enschede. As you may well know, the dutch railways have completely redesigned their schedule, to make it 'better for the majority of passengers'. So far I have found nobody that belongs to that 'majority', but, optimistic as I am I expected the new schedule to be better able to be without delay.

Well, consider my bubble bursted. When I arrived at the station in Ermelo the train had a delay of 10 minutes, which ended up being 15 minutes when the train finally arrived. The only positive thing about the new schedule is that this didn't really matter, since I would normally wait 20 minutes at Zwolle so I am still in the same train I would have been in without delay (though this train to Enschede is also delayed, so in the end, I am still late...).

On a related note, did you know that it takes you exactly 6 minutes to walk from Brenda's place to Ermelo station when you walk really fast because you forgot you had no bike available?

I've been struggling away on exporting figures generated by Matlab for use in LaTeX. First attempts using the "Save as..." dialog looked promising and even listed SVG. Unfotunately, trying that resulted in the cryptic error "the svg device option is only supported for simulink systems", while I was trying to export a simulink generated figure... Oh well...

After some fiddling around with the eps option and the File->Export options... menu, which also allows exporting to eps but with some more options, I did a few exports. Unfortunately, doing these by hand every time (File->Export Options, Load the settings, apply to figure, Zoom to the correct scale, press Export, type filename, select EPS, click save, click ok, close window) was a little too much for my commandline-oriented brain.

Looking around in the help found me the print function, which one can use as follows:

print -f1 -deps Filename.eps

This, as expected, prints figure 1 to Filename.eps in the (black and white) eps format. If you want to print another figure, say figure 3, use -f3. If you want to have coloured eps output, use -depsc instead.

The only thing that still needs to be done by hand is zooming the figure, if appropriate, and closing the window (but IIRC a close all command at the end will close all figure windows).

Now, let's get to actually putting my exported .eps figures into my paper!