Just found this The Radiant Vista – The Daily Critique by way of this entry on the I Like Cameras blog. I find this video critiques on photos simply amazing. It explains so well, how a pro approaches a picture. You can learn a lot by watching these video sequences and how some small changes can improve a pictures.

So far I’ve watched 9 of the critiques, but I’m definitely going to watch all of them.

Vor 7 Jahren und ca. 50 Minuten (10:32 Uhr) erblickte Meret das elektrische Kerzenlicht der Welt.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag.

I’m currently digging into Instant Messaging within the company. I’ve come to the conclusion, that we could greatly benefit from IM. A colleague and me have been using it for about two weeks now and I must say, it’s great fun and even more importantly useful. I have been thinking, that without being a decent typist IM wouldn’t really work, but this is really not the case. Now I need to promote it to my other colleagues.

My IM protocol of choice is Jabber being completely open. I originally started with the Jabberd2 as the IM server. I should have been able to connect the server to the Windows Active Directory with the LDAP authentication module, but I couldn’t get it working with the native LDAP module. There were a couple of other situations, where I couldn’t get the AD authentication working, i.e. with Apache. The queries from the command line always worked fine, but a no go from within the application. I always received Operation Errors. In the end I could get working anyway by using the Jabberd pipe module for plugging some command into the authentication system. Using the Apache::AuthenLDAP module as a blueprint I was able to create a short Perl script, which then did the authentication against the Active Directory. This worked immediately as opposed to the OpenLDAP based native code. The Jabberd2 unfortunately at this point doesn’t support Multiuser Chat. At least not directly out of the box (some additional software installation required, which is not yet available as a Gentoo ebuild).

So, I switched to the Jive Messenger, which is written completely in Java and also supports Multiuser Chat. The connection to the Active Directory through LDAP worked immediately. Additionally Jive Messenger has a very good administrative interface. Even better, jivesoftware.org is providing the SMACK Java library to build your own clients.

Last weekend the Gentoo folks marked GCC 3.4.4 as stable. Since there are C++ incompatibilities the move to 3.4.4 involves quite a bit of compilation. Fortunately there is a migration guide. This eased the transition somewhat. It took me until today to complete the migration for 3 systems on which I’m running Gentoo Linux. I took as much advantage of binary packages as I could but it still took these 4 days (this included recompilation of OpenOffice 2.0).

Main problems were, that the migration guide only described how to find and fix the dependencies concerning libstdc++ and not that there are possibly other C++ libraries, which needed rebuilding as well and that revdep-rebuild didn’t get the rebuilding order of all packages correct (which is basically the correct behaviour, since I was only looking for libstc++ dependencies). One example for the first case is, that revdep-rebuild reported, that the package festival needed rebuilding. However festival is linked against a C++ library from the speech-tools, which is not directly linked against libstc++. So it took a couple of restarts, until I found, that I needed to rebuild the speech-tools as well before I could successfully build festival. An example for the building order problem is, that both showimg and digikam were reported as be to rebuild by revdep-rebuild, showimg first. However since showimg uses libraries from digikam it needed to be compiled after digikam. So, the complete rebuilding process required a bit of manual intervention to get everything compiled.

The last problem, which took a bit search searching, was with libtool. I rebuild the sg3_utils package several times, each time finding that it was still linked against the older libstc+++.so.5 instead of the new version 6 libraries. I fixed this in the end by reemerging the libtool with the new compiler. The migration guide mentions the utility /sbin/fix_libtool_files.sh in the “Hints and problems” section, which might have fixed this, but I didn’t think of it until I already had libtool reinstalled.

So I’m all set now, including successful kernel rebuilds.

My TFT display died after only about 9 month usage. I bought it beginning of March and now this.

Fortunately there are tools to the rescue in particular Cygwin X11 and Cygwin. I installed the Cygwin tools on the Windows box and after reconfiguring the kdm login manager to allow XDMCP request I was able to work on the Linux box as I was on a real display. So, until a replacement for the defect display can be arranged, I’m going to work remotely.

And since I’m sitting in front of the Windows box anyway, I don’t have an excuse any more to not finish the fine tuning of all the photos I’ve take with the Canon 350D.

Update: You never know, what information is available on the Web. A collegue pointed me to this address: http://www.prad.de/, which is a review site particular for TFT/LCD monitor and TV-sets.