In software development projects we usually struggle with the issue that developers do not document well what they changed when checking in code to the version control system. Looking at the logs of our repository, maybe 30-40% of the check-ins have a description. Why do people twitter every ten minutes what they are doing but cannot come up with a one line description of their code changes at the end of the day?

Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa and Marina
San Diego, California, USA
December 14-16, 2009
https://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/ms09/

The 3rd Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics will be a one-day
workshop to be held during the IEEE International Symposium on
Multimedia (ISM’09). It will take place in
Dec. 2009 in San Diego, USA.

The 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT’09) organized by the Institute of Information Systems & Information Mangement, will take place on December 2-4, 2009 in Graz.

The conference serves as a platform for international networking and the presentation of new research results from academia and industry. It targets at narrowing the large disparity between the low-level descriptors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media – The Semantic Gap.

Detailed information about the conference and the submission of high-quality contributions is available at http://www.samt2009.org.

I’ve an old desktop PC to with Fedora Core 7 installed and wanted to connect a Netgear WG111v3 to it. Googling (too superficial googling, as I know now …) brought up a number of successful reports of how to install that device on Linux so I assumed it would work on Fedora as well.

There is no native driver, so I used the ndiswrapper kernel module with the Windows driver. However, the computer froze everytime the device was activated. There are a number of posts on the issue (e.g. [1], [2]) but it seems there is no other solution than building a kernel without the 4K stack option limitation the Fedora kernel use by default.

So before building a new kernel I updated to Fedora Core 10, which did not change anything. Building the kernel following the Fedora how to went well, but X server did not start any more …

As I’d found a number of posts on getting WG111v3 running on Ubuntu I gave it a try and booted the live CD – and WG111v3 (as well as my other hardware) worked right out of the box!

I’ve written about the trouble of font embedding in PDF Files before. It seems publishers get more and more picky about that, requesting you to create fully self-contained PDFs, i.e. also containing all the standard fonts such as Times or Helvetica.

If you do not have the (expensive) original Postscript versions of these fonts, Adobe Distiller will not embed them in your PDF but leave replacement to the PDF viewer (which then uses an appropriate font available on the system).

To embed them you can use the free versions provided by URW (available e.g. from CTAN). You might need to replace font names in the Postsscript file. If you create LaTeX documents you can configure dvips to do so; in any case you can do a simple search & replace in your PS file (a list of the URW font names is e.g. here). Then you just have to make the .pfb files of the fonts known to Distiller as described in the second part of the previous post.

Thanks to comments on the previous release, I’ve released an updated version of the CppUnit framework that fixes the installation directory issue.

The project is based on CppUnit 1.12.0, made with Xcode 3.0 and built as universal binaries for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later. The limitation is that the graphical test runners are currently not supported, however this should be possible at least for the Qt test runner.

The framework project is available here, the framework binary package (including the header files) is available here.

This is from a mail I received today:

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Greetings from the Center for Asia Pacific Women in Politics (CAPWIP) and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UN-ISDR)!

Not sure about the connection here.

My colleagues at IIS have launched riese (the acronym is also the German word for giant) today, a very interesting effort for representing the Eurostat dataset using RDF,
deploying it with XHTML and RDFa.

One small step for your Web browser, but a giant leap for Linking Open Data!

When the gPhone is finally there – will it have an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that calls the first person it finds in your phone book?

This screenshot is from the German version of Leopard. It warns you, that your data is lost, when you forget your password. Ironically, the last word of the sentence (“verloren” = “lost”) is lost …