voyager.tzn

(English below)
Hieraŭ la Esperanto-Klubo Durbano denove renkontiĝis en la Durbana Botanika Ĝardeno por la renkontiĝo "Krokodiloj en la Parko" Estas renkonto kiu celas komencantojn kaj ne-esperantistojn. Male al la kutimo, krokodilado estas permesata.

Ni ĝojis bonvenigi novulon Wynand kiu estas meminstruita kaj sufiĉe bone jam komprenas Esperanton.

We had our first Durban City Orchestra concert for the year on Wednesday 1 August. We performed at Durban Girls College with their choirs. The programme was quite varied ranging from musicals to classical. We performed two orchestral pieces with pupils from the school as soloists. We accompanied the choirs in a few medleys from musicals, as well as Elton John's "Don't let the sun go down". Our encore was Marriage of Figaro Overture, famous for it's difficult bassoon passages. The tempo was manageable though, and it came off well.

Finally, some time to reflect about the first 27 Dinner (http://27dinner.pbwiki.com) in Durban. There were 27 people present and it was on the 27th of oh-seven, 2007. Isn't that cool?! The dinner attracted a surprisingly diverse group of people. Web design, IT, programming, retail, education, open source, marketing and dentistry were all represented. The evening was hosted by Dave Duarte (http://www.daveduarte.co.za) and Marc Forrest (Durbz Blog, http://durbzblog.blogspot.com) with Graham Knox (Stormhoek, http://www.stormhoek.co.za) and Anice Hassim (Immedia, http://www.immedia.co.za/), and Michael Chadbourne (Mike's Desk, http://www.mikesdesk.za.net/) doing the speaking. Eran Eyal (eSquared, http://esquaredfashion.co.za/durban/) gave away a designer t-shirt voucher in return for some thoughts. There were freebies a plenty, with wine sponsored by Stormhoek, and goodies by (Storm, http://www.storm.co.za) and East Coast Radio.

I was bored, so I went to amatomu. There I noticed Durbzblog, by Marc. The posts about Mauritius caught my eye, and I started to read further, and doing so I found a link to Marc's Facebook. Amongst the wall posts I noticed Dave Duarte (whom I've run into a few times on the interwebs), asking Marc for help organising a 27dinner in Durban.

By now you might have heard of Microsoft's new computer design, called Surface (video).

Using the latest multi-touch screen technology, they've developed a "table-top" computer with an interesting user interface, almost like a horizontal version of the Minority Report UI. The screen is also monitored from below by infra-red cameras which allows the computer to react to barcoded objects being placed on the screen.

At work we recently started using an Eclipse-based IDE. It integrates with a gdb-based debugger, but everything is very unstable and I have to constantly power-cycle the box and programmer that I'm working with.

Since I've been playing with emacs the last few months, I decided to see whether I can get the compilation and debugging working from within emacs. (pause for effect)

Yes, indeed it is possible. (applause)

My shiny new blogroll is built using the Drupal modules Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views. The CCK lets you create new "content types" very easily and without writing a line of code (which is a good thing in this case).
Everything in Drupal is/should be a node. This post is a node, of the type Blog. CCK lets you set up a collection of data fields into a new node type or add custom fields to existing node types.

How to set up GPRS modem over bluetooth

Step 1: turn on bluetooth on your phone

Step 2: start bluetooth on your box (as root)
# /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

Step 2.5: (not sure whether this is actually necessary but it won't hurt)
$ kbluetoothd

Step 3: Pair your computer and your phone in the usual way

Step 4: find your phone's id and DUN channel
# sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...
Searching for DUN on 00:17:4B:19:17:01 ...
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10007
Service Class ID List:
"Dialup Networking" (0x1103)

The following script copies files given in a text file. It preserves the tree structure, and copies it to a base directory. It uses a nifty mkdir-like function that takes a lot of the nitty-gritty out of the process.

import os
import os.path
import shutil

def makepath(path):

""" creates missing directories for the given path and
returns a normalized absolute version of the path.

- if the given path already exists in the filesystem
the filesystem is not modified.

- otherwise makepath creates directories along the given path