No, my thumb hasn't gone moldy despite the rumors... I've started growing Stevia at home.

Errr... growing what you may ask?  Stevia.  It's a leafy green plant native to Central and South America that is incredibly sweet (about 300x sweeter than sugar). 

I stumbled onto Stevia a couple of years ago, and tracked down a supplier here in Germany.  I've been ordering the processed stevia (white powder) and using it in my tea and other food for quite some time now.  It has a slightly different taste than regular sugar.  Sometimes you get a faint hint of licorice taste in it if you taste is raw off the tip of your finger.  Mixed into food it just tastes sweet... very sweet.  It is not as "heavy" tasting as sugar... best to say it's an acquired taste, and given the choice I definitely prefer it over sugar.

Anyway... growing it.  I managed to find a supply of seeds and ordered a package.  The seeds are tiny.. really tiny and also almost impossible to convince to germinate.  I researched and tried a dozen different methods, sorted out the husks and grey seeds from the black ones (the black ones are supposed ot be the good ones that will germinate).  I tried planting direct in some potting soil, I tried soaking and planting etc etc.  The only successful method was to sprinkle the seeds on some wet paper towel, and put the paper towel into a plastic bag.  I set the bag on the window sill for a couple of weeks, keeping it wet, and checking for sprouts. 

It took about 6 weeks, for the first hint of green to show.  From there I carefully transplanted the little plant to a pot, and hoped it would keep growing.  The first few failed to grow... but eventually I managed to convince one to stay alive, and now... now I have a fast growing plant.  it's looking good.  Another couple months, and I'll be able to sample it

From what I read, I should be able to simply use the leaves of the plant - mixing them into my tea or food wherever I want something to be sweet.  I can either use them fresh, or I can dry the leaves. 

It's an interesting experiment, but certainly takes patience to see results.

So... errr.. ummmm... yah... I went to Prague last week.... not for vacation though... this was work related.  Stopping in at the Sun offices in Prague was great.  Some really interesting people working there, and it's a very nice location/office.

Prague.... how do I feel about Prague as a city and a destination?  Well... it's a stunningly beautiful old world European city.  It has all those old elements of what many people think of when they picture Europe in their minds... old buildings, amazing architecture, statues on bridges... Prague also.. is... ummm... not sure of the right word or description here... something about the city feels a bit out of place like pebble in a poorly fitting shoe.  It is badly overrun with tourists (I don't like overly touristy places), and has a real strange mix of massive modernization and growth mixed in with places where time stopped a couple of centuries ago.

Thee things that I liked:

• The dark beer that I had in the restaraunt the first night I was there
  
• The metro system
• The architecture in the old town
  

Thee things that amused me (in one way or another):

• The animated dancing stick figure on the side of a building
• The brazen druggies in KFC doing lines of coke on one of the restaurant tables
• The persistent touts out in front of the many many "clubs" and "cabarets"

Three things that surprised me:

• The brazen druggies in KFC doing lines of coke on one of the restaurant tables
• The cost of things (much much higher than I expected)
• The blandness of traditional Czech food (at least what I ate was bland)

• The smoking.. oiy, the Czech people smoke.. way too much

(I know, that makes 4 things that surprised me, but... )

Well... I've sold out.  I have an iPhone

My mobile phone contract was up for renewal, and the phone company has been nagging me to renew it.  They were calling me once every week or two, they were sending me letters.  I kept humming and hawing... not biting on their sales pitches.  They kept sweetening the deal, offering me more for my contract price... different phones and so on.  Still I wouldn't bite... I was busy looking at what phones were available and which ones met my minimum "I want" criteria.  I would find a phone that looked right, do some digging and discover it was running on WinCE.  Bzzzzt.. automatic disqualification in my books.

Anyway, the phone company finally offered me a free 3G 16Gb iPhone with an all the extras contract for the same price as I was paying already, plus a couple months free, plus a few other goodies.  I went for it.

Like a numpty.

And now....

Well....

I am kinda of impressed with the silly thing   I love the reasonably fast internet access it has, and the interface is slick and easy to use.  it has the gadgets I like... like interactive Google mapping that ties in with its internal GPS receiver.  it works well for other things too.. like being a phone.  And most of all..... I can turn the volume up high enough for my deaf ears to hear when I am using it as a phone!!!  That was actually my number one criteria... volume.  This is the only phone that has enough punch in the volume that I don't have to keep it at max and then ask people to repeat themselves all the time.  I can even have the volume at half and still clearly hear the person I'm talking to.... yay!

OK, that's all the gooey puppie dogs and butterflies part... what isn't so good?

Well... within an hour of taking it out of the box I broke the OS it runs on... broke it so bad it went into a corner to pout and refused to come back out for about 3 hours.  Basically, to activate the phone I was forced to use iTunes, and Apple refuses to support Linux with their iTunes monstrosity.  This means I was forced to find an old copy of Windows XP, install that in a virtual machine, and then try to activate the phone.  It all seemed to go OK until iTunes decided that the phone needed a firmware upgrade.  In the process it rebooted the phone a few times... which kind of confused the virtual machine a little with the connect, disconnect, connect, disconnect, and the firmware upgrade failed.  No worries.. right?  Just boot the phone in recovery mode, reconnect it to iTunes in the virtual machine and "fix" it right?  Nope... more of the same, and then worse... total lockup of the virtual machine... and then for some bizarre reason.. the Linux host died a horrible death too.  There was nothing I could do to get that combination to work and do the firmware upgrade.  I was seriously annoyed.. broken iPhone, broken virtual machine, broken Linux... nothing in my apartment was happy... in the end I was forced to dig up an old hard drive, install XP on it natively and boot that XP on the "bare metal", and then fix the phone using iTunes.  That worked... just.

So... phone fixed, I disassembled the XP side of things, booted back to Linux, apologized
profusely to my computer for making it run XP. and things slowly returned to normal.  Mostly.

Since then I've been exploring the iPhone apps library - loads of free stuff in there, and just basically having fun.

Last night though... last night... I discovered... Podcasts.  OK, I knew about Podcasts before, but never really got into them all that much.  The bad part is.. in the podcasts listings... are... all the episodes of Happy Tree Friends which are now saved to my phone   Oh right... there are other Podcasts too.

So despite the rather annoying start... I am starting to really like this silly phone.  Have I joined the iCult of iApple?  Mmmmm not quite yet.

Well, OK, I'm not really Steve, but I did recompile my 2.6.27 Linux kernel this weekend.  That should count for something

Long ago back in the prehistoric days of Linux... say... around 10 years ago, I used to recompile my kernels on a regular basis.  Ha, it was almost mandatory just to get sound working back then since the default kernel with most Linux distributions didn't have that part of the kernel working either as part of the kernel or as a kernel module.... at least on my computer hardware at the time

Since then though... I've become lazy... or is it my comfortable rut haunting me again?  Whatever it is, I haven't rebuilt my Linux kernels for years... I've just used whatever was shipped with the Linux distribution I happened to install.  Funny thing is... it wasn't hard to do at all.  A quick reminder on the Wiki page about building kernels... a few short command line steps, a nice menu editor for the kernel options I wanted to enable, and an hour later I was running on my own custom kernel.

Why though did I do this?  Why did I make an attempt at being Steve?  Well... you see, I'm an avid gamer (yes Virginia, there are games in Linux), and on the latest openSUSE release, game performance took a real dive.  After lots of digging and asking questions, it came down to a couple of options that I needed to change in the default openSUSE kernel.. specifically  setting the Preemption Model to Preemptible Kernel (Low-Latency Desktop) (this is set to off in the openSUSE kernel shipped with openSUSE 11.1) and Timer frequency to 1000Hz (this is set to 300Hz in the openSUSE kernel shipped with openSUSE 11.1).

Was it worth it?  Well... in a word YES.  I ran a test on the default kernel - a timedemo in Call of Duty 4 running in Cedega 7.0.0 with all graphics options on max including AA on 4x.  I booted to the new kernel and ran the same timedemo with the same settings... and saw a 37% increase in frame rates.  That is a pretty substantial improvement between the default kernel and my rebuilt one.

Does this make me a Steve?  Naah.. probably not... I mean, there were no cyber goats or fembots involved at any stage of the process.

PS, in case you were wondering what the heck I'm talking about with this Steve thing and cybergoats... take a look here: http://www.ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54

I am a creature of habit... or maybe I just get easily stuck in ruts?  I have long resisted moving over to a 64-bit OS because of troubles I've encountered the last time I tried it.

A couple of years ago, I accidentally installed a 64-bit Linux distro.  It correctly identified I had an AMD64 CPU and quietly selected the right kernel for my hardware.  I never noticed that it had done this until I wanted to add multimedia support and a few browser plugins.  Then.. the chaos of mixed architectures began.  It was messy... I didn't like it... I reformatted my root partition and went back to 32-bit and have been there ever since, carefully selecting the 32-bit kernel with each OS upgrade/reinstall.

Recently someone brought it to my attention that the specific objections I had from past experiences are long fixed, and it should be no issue at all to install 64-bit. 

Hmmm do I dare leap out of my 32-bit rut?  I already have my 64-bit install DVD ready to go.. just have to suck it up and go for it I guess.

The 4th of April, 1984... I know what I did that day.  I was just 14 years old, but I know exactly what I did that day.... 

One of the teachers at the school I was attending at the time decided that all the students should get together and do something silly... put something in a time capsule.  Being 14 at the time, my contribution was... predictable, and a funny snapshot of life in rural Canada.  The funny thing is, many things have not changed much...

The condition of the form is... rather sad.  The time capsule was a glass jar.  Not exactly the best choice for a container you were about to bury in the ground for 24 years.

Some funny bits from the list of favorites (what most of the page consists of):

Food:  Pizza
Pastime:  Video Games

 Hmmmm... nothing new there.  Pizza is still high on my list, and video games... sadly I am an addict... particularly of World of Warcraft.

TV Show:  Hardcastle and McCormic
Movie:  Boy Did I Get A Wrong Number

What was I thinking?  Hardcastle and McCormic? Boy Did I Get A Wrong Number?  I don't remember being such a fan of tacky 80's shoot'em ups or Bob Hope Movies

Subject:  Math
Teacher:  Apple II E

Math has always been a favorite of mine.. all through school and university.  There is something about how it all works that can keep me occupied for far longer than it should.  And My favorite teacher was Apple II E?  Hmmm an indication of things to come... computers were just starting to "arrive" for the average person, and I was already hooked.

Animal:  Animal!

Hehe... I loved the Muppets then... and I still do.  Animal... my favorite of all of them.

Beverage:  Irish Cream

Hmmmm at 14.... how did I know about Irish Cream?

Book:  Red Planet

I was a SciFi fan then and I still am.  Red Planet by Heinlein was and still is one of my favorite books.

So... despite 24 years passing, It looks like little has changed... I'm still rather eccentric, enjoy pizza and SciFi books... I think, though, that my movie tastes have moved beyond Bob Hope classics, and my favorite TV Shows are... well.. not much better and include the new Dr. Who series and... sigh... Top Gear.  OK, so I'm still 14 years old

snow falls on Hamburg
it is cold outside today
i hate winter

There... that is about as close as I have come to a Haiku in 30 years   I wish I could take a photo of this horrible white stuff.  It's falling in big clumps... not flakes anymore.. clumps... and melting as it hits the ground.  Snow is... my arch nemesis... my enemy... snow is something you fly to... ski on, and then fly away from... not something you need to walk in to get to and from the office.

Sigh.

One year ago today I had just arrived in Kigali, Rwanda... walking off the airplane into warm sunshine, and taking a deep breath of African air (there is a distinct difference in how the air smells in Europe vs Africa).

Today, I am in the office, looking out the window at a typical Hamburg winter day... cold, steel grey sky, slightly foggy, and damp.  Where did I go wrong?

I know that when you ride public transit in any country, you are bound to run into some of the more eccentric types... it's either that public transit draws them, or more likely that you are putting a group of people together in a small area and the odds are that some will be a bit.... odd... different... (yes I include myself in that eccentric group )

The bus route I ride on has its fair share of the strange.  One guy in particular stands out.... I call him Sudoku Guy.  I see him usually 2 or 3 times per week... sometimes on my way home, and sometimes on my way to work.  At first glance there is nothing unusual... he is well dressed, carries a briefcase, and could be any one of many people on their way to and from a normal office job. He stands out thought because he spends the whole time he is on the bus doing Sudoku puzzles. 

Now, there is nothing unusual about someone doing puzzles while they ride on public transit.  It is a great way to keep your mind busy and maybe even challenge your mind a little.  What is unusual about this gentleman is HOW he does his Sudoku puzzles.  He always has one of the large puzzle books you can buy at almost any newsstand... and he methodically works his way through every single puzzle by looking up the answers in the back of the puzzle book and copying the numbers to the puzzle he is working on.  He never actually tries to solve a puzzle... he just starts a new one by copying the answers from the back, line by line.  When he's done copying, he moves on to the next one.  Each puzzle takes him maybe a minute, and as you can guess, he goes through his puzzle books fairly quickly.  He is always intensely focused on his task of copying the answers from the back of the puzzle book, and oblivious to everyone and everything around him.  I wonder some days if he misses his stop.. he is that involved in copying the answers.

Every day is an adventure when you ride public transit  

I live near the Hamburg-Harburg S-Bahn train station.  People like to tease me about it being a slightly dodgy area of the city... which is emphasized by the fact that this particular train station has full time security guards patrolling the train platform.

Normally the guards are just there, wandering about, chatting together, or sometimes chatting with a commuter that they happen to know.  You never really noticed them.  Lately that has changed.

To set the scene though you have to understand how the people here travel on the train to work each day.  Harburg station is a one of the main train stations which means that there is a lot of people converging on that station to get on the S-Bahn train.  There is a train scheduled to arrive on the underground platform every 4 minutes, and generally speaking the trains are usually pretty close to on time.  So, you have a large train station, and a train departing every 4 minutes heading into the Hamburg city center.  Now comes the people.  They arrive up top, and run down the stairs to the train platform.  They run as if all the demons of hell are chasing them.... especially if they think there is a train pulling into the station.  They will practically kill themselves to get to the train... and when the train door closing alarm sounds they sprint even more.  This is normal... despite the fact that there is another train arriving in 4 minutes, the people still do this.  I think they are insane, but that's a topic for another blog entry

Now, lately, the security guards have taken to standing near the last train car, just at the bottom of the stairs... waiting... and when the door alarm goes off and everyone starts that last mad hell-bent sprint to get on the train before the doors close, they start shouting and yelling... it is a bit startling to come down the stairs and be yelled at by some security guard... especially in my case where I don't speak the language, and some big guy in a uniform is yelling in my general direction "HALT!..." and a few other words I don't know.

Life in Germany... it's weird some days...

Hmmm... yet again, I have been neglecting my blog, not posting anything.  I can't even really say I've been too busy... I just haven't had a lot to say I guess... and for those of you that know me, yes it is possible that I don't have an opinion on something

I've been reading a really good book lately... the autobiography of a man I really admire... Nelson Mandela and the book is called Long Walk To Freedom.  It is a really interesting insight into who he is, where he came from and the drive he had to make South Africa its own again.  It's a good read even if you are not much of a fan of biographies.

Been keeping busy with nerdy projects at home - a friend gave me a nice Koolance water cooling kit for my computer, and this past weekend I set it all up.  I have been interested in water cooling because my computer tends to run so hot.  I've done a lot with it to try and reduce the noise - the computer sits in my living room, so noise is an issue.  I replaced all the stock fans with low dB fans, and bought an expensive Zalman CPU heat sink.  My video card is a passive cooled nVidia card.. and so on.  The result was that the noise level was dramatically reduced, but at a cost of increased heat build up, especially when I started pushing the CPU and GPU a bit.  Under load, the GPU would heat up to 80C, and the CPU would peak around 60C.  Even the case temp would build up rather quickly... if I stopped the case fans (I have 2) then things would get even hotter.... not so good. 

So.. water cooling is now in place for the GPU and CPU, and there was an immediate difference.  First off, the 3 radiator fans are noisier than my previous heatsink and air cooled setup.  Second... even under load the temps don't move much.  The CPU sits idle at about 25C, and under load gets to 42C.  The GPU is idle at 40C and under load at 44C (the most dramatic difference).

One last think to think about.. the Northbridge heatsink gets hot... really hot... I am thinking maybe I should bring it into the water cooled loop as well...

Oh, and I plan on replacing the 3 radiator fans with some low dB fans to make it all nice and quiet again.

Wow.. I am a boring person aren't I?  Oh well... c'est la vie.

This past weekend, the guys responsible for The Sims have released a new game called Spore.   The basic premise is your character starts as a simple organism in the primordial soup of a newly formed planet.  Your job is to guide your little amoeba-like character through its evolution into a space-faring race, and then conqueror the galaxy.  Simple... right?  Well kinda.

First problem... I use only Linux at home.  EA have released this game only for Windows and Mac. [1]

I bought the game from the EA Store with the intent of downloading it direct instead of buying a box set from a shop.  So out came the credit card, and away I went.  Tappity tappity, and my card was charged, and I was all ready to download my new game.  Nope... not possible.  EA requires you to use their proprietary downloader tool... Windows only.  I tried installing the downloader in Cedega, but it was a no-go.  I contacted EA Customer Support asking if there was another way to download the binary... and was not-so-politely told to go away. 

Well, there is always a solution... I fired up my trusty VirtualBox, and booted a Windows XP VM.  I installed the EA downloader there, downloaded and decrypted the Spore installer (for some bizarre reason they "encrypt" the main download).  A bit of fiddling and I had it moved over to my Linux /home. 

Now the test... the big test... will it actually install in Cedega.  I warily launched the installer and to my surprise... it worked... it actually installed with no complaint.  I also installed the DirectX9 Redistributable (part of the Spore install process).

The next test... will the game itself launch... well... it worked!  It actually worked (using the latest Beta RC from Cedega).  Cool.  There are a few minor issues - such as two error messages on startup, but they are not critical and have no impact on gameplay that I can see.

There are a few problems with the game though... DRM being the major one.  EA in all their wisdom implemented one of the stupidest DRM schemes ever in an attempt to limit or stop piracy... they used SecuROM (one of the most hated DRM "solutions" on the planet) and they limit ALL paying customers to 3 activations.. after that you're out of luck and cannot install and play the game anymore.  All they have succeeded to do was alienate a significant portion of their potential customer base, and drive even more people into pirating the software... if only to circumvent the stupidity of the DRM.  To add insult to injury, the crack for the DRM was actually available online several days BEFORE the actual release.  EA 0, Software Pirates 1.  EA lost the fight before they even released the software.  How stupid can they be?

That said, the game is a lot of fun, and I'm really enjoying designing my own spaceships and taking over the galaxy.  If you do decide to give it a try, be aware that the SecuROM DRM stupidity is almost impossible to remove from your computer (assuming you still use Windows) without a reformat and reinstall.

[1] The Mac port was done by Transgaming, the same company that produces Cedega for Linux - the Wine engine you can use to install and play a lot of Windows games in Linux.

When I was back in Canada this summer, I stopped by the place I grew up in... not much is left actually.  A few broken down houses... and a couple that are still lived in.  The house I feel most connected to.. the one I lived in with my family from 1976 until 1984 is still standing... barely.  It stands abandoned and looking rather shabby... but still I have good memories of that house.

I remember one particularly snowy winter, there was a nice big snowbank up against the side of the house.  It was perfect for sliding down on my Crazy Carpet.  I would climb up on the snowbank which reached almost to the roof of the house, jump on the Crazy Carpet and go careening down the slope into the yard.. over and over.  It was getting late, and my mother wanted me to come in.  She tapped on the window and called me to come in.  I had to get that one more slide in... just one more.  I lined up, and then slid backwards into the dining room window.  I didn't end up in the dining room... but I did break the window... one of those big old style wooden framed windows with stained glass at the top.... in the winter time.  I was not exactly popular around home that evening.  I wonder if my parents remember that little incident?

You cannot see where that window was on the photo.  The place where the window was is covered up by the grey house.  Hmmm that's another long story.  As the family grew, we needed more room... so my parents bought the grey house next door, lifted it up and moved it up against the original yellow house.  Then knocked a hole through between the two houses right where the old (broken) dining room window was.  Result... instant double sized house, and no broken dining room window to replace.

Life in that home was... well... we had no running water in the form you probably know it.  There was a big cistern in the dug out basement under the yellow house.  We filled it with water from a 1200 liter tank in the back of a pickup truck.  This meant water rationing to save what water we had.  We started out with a hand pump in the kitchen, but that was soon replaced with a simple pressurized system my father cooked up.  We had a bathtub... first a galvanized tub we filled with heated water from buckets.. then a "real" tub with a shower once the pressure system was installed.  The toilet was a 20 liter pail in a "chemical toilet" (a metal can with a toilet seat and lid).  Heating the home was through something called a Gravity Furnace fueled by propane (LPG) and a big wood burning fireplace in the living room.  I guess you could say life there was pretty basic, but I loved it.

Hmmm I think I miss that old house... 

I just returned from a trip back home to Canada.  This is the first time I've been back there in 6 years.... and a LOT has changed.

When you're gone from your "home" you don't think much about it.  Well, I don't anyway.  Traveling back this time though was... weird... I felt so out of touch with life there.  Everything was so... big.. and spread out.  The city I was born in has almost doubled in size.  The small town I grew up in has almost disappeared.  The people I knew when I lived there have all grown old.  Errr... maybe I am doing that too   There is a nice description (with some photos) of the place I grew up on the Ray Cooley website.  The garage described in the story there is the same one my father owned and operated from the mid '70's to the late 80's.

I had a good time though.  I went to two reunions while I was there.  The first was a reunion for all the students who went to Cereal school.  The second was a reunion for my massive high school graduating class... all 9 of us.  It was pretty interesting to see everyone again... it's been 20 years (eeep!) and the funny thing is.. most of us still look the same.  Not really any older... maybe a little less "Breakfast Club", but still the same.

One thing that will stick in my mind was the "Time Capsule" dig.  In 1984, one of the grade school teachers in Cereal got this idea to get the whole school to put together a bunch of stuff and bury it in the school yard.  We filled in a questionnaire and put it all in a jar and buried it a little over a meter deep in the school yard.  The hole was dug straight out the back doors of the high school wing, right where the sloped ground met the level of the baseball diamond.  Photos were taken, and then the hole was filled in, and most of us forgot about it.  Some remembered... kind of.  No one really remembered exactly where this hole was dug, and conveniently... the playground had been landscaped a couple times in the 24 years the capsule was buried.  The slope off the back of the school was gone... the teacher who arranged the time capsule is no longer alive... and all we had to go on was some vague memories addled by the years.  Despite all that one of the former students found a backhoe and we set about digging.  We guessed where to start and found... a gas pipe... weeping tile from the 1940's... and no time capsule.  We excavated an area big enough to bury a couple pickup trucks and put in a nice swimming pool... no capsule.  After several hours of this we gave up, filled it in and called it a lost cause. 

A couple of people wouldn't give up though.  They went digging through the archives and found some old photos.. compared the landmarks in the photos to landmarks that still exist, and worked out to within a half meter where they thought the capsule was... about 3 meters away from where we dug the swimming pool.  The next day out came the backhoe again, and... they found it.  Ha cool.  I am getting some photos of the contents sent to me in the next week or so... looking forward to it.  I'll see if there is anything worth sharing here... if anyone is interested in what a goofy teenager put into a time capsule 24 years ago.  Ha.