Hugo Jonker

One crazy and sad month

July 26th, 2012

It’s been a little quiet here, somewhat unanticipated. I mean, right after New York, you’d expect me to at least have one post linking to the photos, no?
Well, it was quite a busy month, with a sad event in the family (and that’s enough of that in a public forum).

Other than that, more things happened (which makes it more weird): I went to a conference and won “Best paper” award (hooray me & my coauthors!), I organised a summer school, and me and my brother drove about 700km inside NL in one weekend on a “visit-the-family” tour. Aga’s bike broke while she was in the mountains (she survived, as did the bike), my bike visited Echternach and Germany, and at the summerschool we had a fight about the cheese with the other group staying at the same venue — one of my co-organisers was even pelted with a cork :) Nothing malicious, mind you, all good intended up-stage-man-ship :)

Well anyway, this is basically an intermediate post. I figured it’s been a while, and it’ll be a bit longer before I get round to having a non-meta-post, I fear. Life is finally slowing down, especially and also since I decided to take it easy this week. That has helped me to fight the “stack” of things to do, and even, slowly, make my place more habitable and such :) Not quite there yet, but the week isn’t out yet either :) (and putting stuff back in its place is fun — you find all these awesome clothes that were stuck underneath a pile, that you had been looking for for ages :)

This weekend, I hope to go to Echternach by bike. Again? No, yesterday I only got within 5km, not all the way. So I have something to make up for.

PS: Unrelated note: The Avengers movie was really cool, and I wanted to see it again. But it’s no longer in the cinema. I googled around, and imagine my disappointment: I have to wait to September before I am able to spend money on it again. Do you hear me, movie companies??!?! There’s a 3 month gap, in which I would like to give you money for your product, but I cannot. Seriously: why?

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New York quick post

June 5th, 2012

Right before we have the last breakfast here, a quick overview of the highlights. In general:

There’s a boat-load of French here!
The foreign language I heard most often spoken (by members not from our group) was French. Might be due to an underexposure to Chinatown, but still.
The toilets are broken!
There’s water in the loo. Standing. In Europe, this’d indicate a broken toilet. Here, all toilets are like that. I’m guessing plenty of New Yorkers find the European loos as quaint and unhygienic as their lavatories come across to us.

Before departure day

Waiting for Aga to finish packing. She just returned from a trip the day before (well, arrived at Lux Gare after midnight, so technically: this day), and still needed to pack and fix a gazillion other things. Some of which were of immediate importance. I checked the train schedules, but we were still pushing our luck a bit. The 17:00 train to Brussels was so much delayed, that that connection fell through. That left the 17:20 train with Thalys connection and the last option of the day… Hmmms.

The Thalys train is expensive — tickets for two were about twice as expensive as without Thalys. But, since we were running low on options, we still took that one. Thalys train was quite nice. And had WiFi (“Message sent from my iTrain” — that one never gets old :).

Hotel was… weird. Okay, but weird. Room was airtight, without airco. Heating was arranged via cooling the walls, which works, but isn’t quick. It was 24 degrees in our room… ouch? We turned down the heat and took a walk. Came back after 40 min, then it was 23… erms…
Luckily, with a bit of conniving, it all worked out.

Departure day

“Show up 3hrs before departure”. Sure. Except that check-in isn’t open yet….. After re-fixing Anke’s visum (the fact that there are no (letter-)O’s in a passport number didn’t bother the visum request, just the boarding card …), we went to the plane and still had plenty of time. Aga opted out of the x-ray (which is probably smart, if you care about your health), and we went through. On the plane (which was quite small for a transatlantic flight — the smallest one I ever had for an intercontinental flight ;-), I watched the new Sherlock Holmes movie (entertaining), Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (fine if you like action, but shallow), and err… another movie whose name actually escapes me (Edit: it was New York Confidential, episode: the Bronx). Apparently, I’m for shallow entertainment.

Getting through customs went ok, and we were treated nicely, relatively speaking. Okay, so I am not a big fan of having my fingerprints taken.
We made our way to the hotel fairly easily, and then went out a bit. I forgot where, probably because I was enormously tired. I went back to the hotel, while Aga went for her one and only run around central park. I remember waking up at 2 in the morning, and wondering where she was, seeing the time, getting ready to call the police, and then noticing she was already there :)

Okay, next updates later!

Posted in backblogging, holidays | Comments Off on New York quick post

To Echternach and Back!

May 29th, 2012

The weather has been lovely here in Luxembourg for the past few days. And I was recuperating. Also known as being terribly lazy :)
Well, I promised myself I’d do something to enjoy the nice weather. So, I decided to bike to Echternach and back. That isn’t exactly next door, so it’d take me a while.
On the way to, it was easy going. Sure, there were plenty of uphills, but even more downhills. A suspiciously large number of them… at one point I wondered if I wouldn’t end up at sea level like this. At any rate, thanks to all this downhilling, my average speed lifted from the paltry 17 it was before, to about 20.3. One other thing was the detour — I don’t know if it’s this or my slightly more remote location, but it was 49.79 km to get there. I kind of figured that that’d induce some ouch on the way back. Oh, top speed on a downhill was 52.6km, but the coolest part was breaking the law by speeding 20km — ok, in a 30km zone, but still :) most I’ve ever gone over the limit on a bike (though not the fastest by far).

That would be of later consequence, first to enjoy the city! So, I’m here, let’s do the enjoying part!!
Options were:
– sit on a terrace and have food / drink (no thank you)
– go to a shop and buy something I don’t need (no thank you).

Given my famously short attention span, I left within an hour of arriving. Probably shoud’ve given my legs a bit more rest, but what the hey.

I kind of was right about the more rest thing. In the beginning, my average was below 15. Thankfully, a downhill part notched it up a bit, and I managed to motivate myself into peddling somewhere around 16, 17 an hour. Geez! Had a few breaks, and my tush was kind enough to inform me that it had had quite enough of the saddle, thankyouverymuch.

With an emergency piece of pie from a cafe on the way (they had just closed the kitchen half an hour before I came, can you believe that??), I made it back to the University, where I had a more extended rehydration break and then went back home.

107 km in 5h20. Yeah, Tour de France beware and such :) But: at least I moved a bit.
(and, better: consdorf and berdorf are near there, meaning I can bike there to go on a hike!)

Posted in fun, holidays | Comments Off on To Echternach and Back!

Remove protection of OpenOffice/LibreOffice spreadsheets

May 2nd, 2012

Sjouke and I just ran into a minor hitch with a spreadsheet: some cells were protected, and in the new Ubuntu / Open/LibreOffice version they just looked plain wrong.
How to fix this?
Turns out that protection isn’t that hard to break. In a nutshell, an .ODS file is very much like an EPUB file — it’s also a ZIPped file which also contains a structure with a mimetypes file and a content.xml file.

To remove protection, edit contents.xml and change the attribute *protected="true" to say false. Rezip the file in the correct way, that is: store mimetype uncompressed as the first file, the rest doesn't really matter. Et voila, you have removed protection!

In a nutshell:
mkdir tmp cd tmp unzip ../FILE.ods sed 's/protection="true/protection="false/g' content.xml c2.xml mv c2.xml content.xml zip -0X ../FILE-unprotected.ods mimetype zip -r9 ../FILE-unprotected.ods * -x mimetype

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ZSH tricks

April 30th, 2012

For a while now I’ve been wondering how to do the equivalent of jot (which generates a list of numbers) in ZSH. It’s pretty obvious that ZSH could do such a thing, but how? Jot isn’t installed by default, and I am lazy. Lazy enough to never look into it.

For a change, I did. Success! Here is one way to do it, which is sort of elegant:
while (( i++ < 10 )) { echo i is $i; }
Do note the remarks on the above link: playing around with the syntax might kill it quickly.
Using repeat might be neater, but that's only when you just need to iterate (and not keep track of the iteration).

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Gnome tidbits

April 25th, 2012

Just came across 2 tidbits. One wasn’t enough to post, but two… I had to ;-)

1. Remove annoying “hover over me” scrollbars

(From WebUpd8.)

In the newer versions, Gnome did away with the scrollbar. There is this scroll-hint which, if you hover over it, changes into something with buttons. Which you cannot click, because the exact center of the two buttons (up/down or left/right, depending on vertical/horizontal scrolling) is projected below your mouse.
It is annoying. It confuses me every single time. But, the good news: it is not necessary.

Fix 1: sudo echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars
Fix 2:
1. apt-cache search 'liboverlay-scrollbar', and remember these packages (e.g. as $PKG-TO-DELETE),
2. sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar $PKG-TO-DELETE.

The search gets around the problem of slightly different package names (version number changed) between Ubuntu 11.04/11.10/12.04.
On a related note: stop putting your version number in the package name!

Split Nautilus window in two for easy moving

(From a Slashdot comment)

Either fix ought to work. The first leaves the packages and modifies behaviour, while the second nukes the functionality. Haven’t tried either yet, curious though.

Ever need to move a file from one place to another?
Open Nautilus (i.e., “Places”). In the window, press F3.
Ta – (explitive deleted) – daaaa!

Wish I had known that sooner.

Posted in software, unix/windows | Comments Off on Gnome tidbits

Thunderbird’s “get mail” button broken?

April 25th, 2012

Thunderbird logo I’m quite happy about Thunderbird (mail reader). Yes, I’ve had my struggles with it (as those of you who follow this blog know), but in the end, it all works.
All?
Almost all.

There is one button, no matter how hard I try, I cannot get to work.
You see, Thunderbird has a “Get mail” button. And I press it and press it, but do I get mail? nooooo….. ;-)

Posted in fun, Thunderbird config | Comments Off on Thunderbird’s “get mail” button broken?

Updating Thunderbird on Ubuntu

April 15th, 2012

Thunderbird logo My Ubuntu 11.04 at home was still running the old Thunderbird. The old, end-of-support-almost-reached Thunderbird. Time to fix that. Lessee, open Thunderbird and look for “update”… nope.
Hmms, get updates for Ubuntu then? … nope.
Hmms. Okay, let’s do this the hard way. Download the new TB, run it… hey, that looks a lot like my old TB! “Help > About”… it is my old TB?! WTH?!
Okay, turning to the Google for more updates.
Aaah, here’s how it’s done: tell your system updater to include packages from Mozilla, and then it should work.
Test one: err, nothing to update?
Test two (a few days later, different package-address included): still nothing??
You know what, this is silly.

And just when I was ready to give up:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunderbird

Apparently, there are all sorts of mozilla-related valid words (e.g., combinations with “security” and “release”) you can enter after “ppa:”. Some of them work , but don’t update your system. Such as the aforehinted mozilla-security-ppa and mozilla-release-ppa. This one does.

@Mozilla: is this really necessary? Just provide some sort of warning with pointer to the right location in the non-updating PPA’s, would you?

Posted in software, Thunderbird config | Comments Off on Updating Thunderbird on Ubuntu

Backblogging again

April 15th, 2012

Things that happened recently:

The Queen visited Luxembourg, and the Univ.
I was there for some of it. The Queen sat in a direct line between me and the photographers. So yes, there are pictures. Yes, I am visible in the background. Yes, there is at least one published photograph of me yawning or looking away or something equally embarrassing. And no, no links. If you want to see embarrassing material, go find it yourself.
Easter in Poland.

Seriously: a White Easter? I can just hear Bing Crosby sing it: “and may all your Eazzterzerzzzz / Be white”. Apart from that: great fun to meet Agnieszka’s family. Her brother & sister-in-law are great people — actually that goes for the whole family — and her nephew and niece are adorable. Spent a tiny amount of time in Warsaw, most in Gdansk. It was soo cold there. And they don’t even eat three eggs for Easter?! Well I did anyway :)
Which reminds me: review! (was working on it there, but didn’t finish yet)

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A Gig ain’t what it used to be…

April 1st, 2012

The other day, my desktop at the office got a memory upgrade: from 4 to 16 gig. So, after this glorious update, I booted my computer and clicked the system properties to see how much memory was reported. 14.8 Gb.
Le huh? 1.2 Gb evaporated? Still quite some improvement, but whatever happened to the 1.2 Gb? Local helpdesk: “that’s normal nowadays”.

In a second story: I bought another USB stick of 32 Gb. Plugged it in just now, and checked available disk space. 29.8 Gb.
Le poep?!?! 2.2 Gb down the drain??

So guess what:

16 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 14.9 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024
32 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 29.8 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024

This is probably old news to some people, but it’s news to me. It feels like underhanded tactics. I feel robbed!

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