My girlfriend is annoyed with USA timekeeping. More particularly with the way Sunday is the first day of the week in the Gnome calendar applet that shows up when you click on the time applet. After some searching I am unable to find how to change that short of changing the source code.
Help me, lazyweb!
Edit: yes it was meant to be Sunday and not Saturday.
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I have now gotten into baking bread at home and I like the result greatly.
The inspiration came from an anime Yakitate!! Japan! - a very funny anime about bread bakers with lots of parody on other anime and lots of over-the-top reactions to bread. It also has a lot of tips on baking your own bread which helps people get started. I have heard that ‘Yakitate!! Japan’ caused a bread baking mania in Japan on par with the Go mania from ‘Hikaru No Go’ (Off-side note: I wonder if making an anime about developing free software would turn people in Japan and all over the world to do it more?) I watched the anime a couple years back and promptly forgot about it, but now when I was thinking about what anime to show to my girlfriend it came back to me. After that we both decided that we need an oven to bake bread in, unfortunately the flat we are in has no oven, so we had to buy a free-standing one. After much research and deliberation and some good advice from my friends, I got us a Samsung CE1071AR microwave oven with grill and a convection oven function. It has been the best decision - cooking with this thing is easy and painless. It is large enough for one large loaf of bread or a bunch of cookies in two levels. It has a steam-based self-clean function and an automatic preheat function. It can do all the things that a microwave oven can do and also combine regular oven with microwaves. And best of all it also has a 40 degree setting in the convectional oven mode - that is perfect for raising bread right in the oven.
I am starting with the simplest bread recipes from The Fresh Loaf site tutorial section and in short order was able to produce some of the best tasting bread I ever had. You can see the result above. Now when my girlfriend and her sister decided to cook all kinds of stuff for Christmas I was not bored, but rather the opposite happened - I participated and had fun. Even more so - we are now watching the ‘Yakitate!! Japan’ anime, together with my girlfriend, looking for new tips for the cooking. I just might try to make a croissant next 
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I see that Erich is also trying to do something with AI classification of web pages. It would be interesting to find out what algorithms he is using and what the validation testing results are - I just did my Masters in a similar direction. But alas, his blog has no comments 
The thing i would suggest is trying out the algorithms using some existing tool sets, such as WEKA from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. I used it in my Master’s thesis and got very nice results. I found that with non-topical categories tree based classifiers and support vector machine classifiers (in the SMO variation) produced acceptable results.
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Last night we celebrated Christmas with some friends by doing a lot of cooking - baking mostly. In the end we had some regular sweetbread dough and some gingerbread dough left over. On a whim I suggested to put them together - we rolled out both doughs very thin (3-4 mm), put them on top of each other (with some vanilla powder in between) then rolled that into a big roll and cut it into 1 cm pieces. After glazing that with beaten egg and cooking for 15 minutes in 200 degrees C oven we got what can be seen in the photo above. The taste is phenomenal - it has the hard and crispy layers of gingerbread and soft layers of the regular sweetbread and sweet all through. In some cookies the innermost core was made of a chunk of soft gingerbread - that tasted the best.
I also got myself an oven and have started to bake home-made bread, but that’s for another post :). Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!
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On Monday I was at a Vanessa Mae concert in arena “Riga” in Riga, Latvia.
The concert was almost an hour late due to flight delay. It would have been fine if the organisers would let us into the hall or at least informed the several thousand people about the delay and its reason and not just have us stand in the rather restricted lounge. around half an hour after the planned start time, we were let to our seats and some ten minutes later an announcement was broadcasted explaining the reason for the delay.
Vanessa came out with her own band and a local Latvian string orchestra. I wonder if she played with local orchestras in other locations as well. The orchestra preformed perfectly as far as I could tell, which is not much because they were mixed way down and were barely audible most of the time.
I am a big fan of Vanessa Mae - I like classical music, I love her interpretation of that music and I appreciate how she made classical music more acceptable for a modern teen to like. That said, the concert was a mix of joy and disappointment for me.
The joy came from hearing the music that I know and like and seeing how it is played in real life. It was a great joy and most of the time I was bobbing in my chair as a very happy boy.
However, there were moments when I cringed and unfortunately there was more than a handful of those during the two hour concert. The problems could be put into three categories:
1. Vanessa missing a note or even a handful of them badly. I will be an optimist and blame that on the tuning - just the day before she was playing in Seatle in 80% humidity and then came to Riga and 20% humidity. She had to retune her wooden violin after each song because of that. She apologised for that mid-show.
2. Spotlight and camera missing the action. At times Vanessa steps back and one of her band members goes on a solo, but most of the time the person controlling the spotlight and the person controlling the camera were not ‘in’ the action and just stayed on Vanessa. The worst cases were when a couple seconds into the solo the camera would start to pan over to the band member playing the solo part, spend a couple more seconds framing and focusing and then after another second the spotlight did the same and by that time the solo part was over. Two cameras and two spotlight should be used for such cases with people controlling them having a clear idea of what happens next. One camera should always be on a wider angle shot and one for closeups, so that when a switch is coming, you could switch to wide angle a couple of seconds before the switch, give the closeup camera time to change target, re-frame and re-focus and then switch to it. And for the spotlights, one would always track the main person and the other seeking out the next person of interest.
3. Mixing problems. Vanessa was always way too loud and drowned out the other instruments even when that was not desirable. Background orchestra was too low. In general the mixing was very pop-ish - no dynamic range. The worst cases of this were Bolero and Storm. Storm is my favourite melody and I especially love the slow and quiet beginning of the song, but that was skipped entirely in the concert cutting straight to the loud part. Some other songs were also brutalised that way.
I know that true artists generate most of their income through concerts and for that reason I recommend every Vannessa Mae fan to buy the tickets to her concerts, but if you are an audiophile .. don’t go there - stay at home with you trustworthy stereo system and FLAC recording of great sound. The concert is there to support the artist and for the atmosphere not for the best sound, unfortunately.
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In reply to: Daniel
In Russia it is common to create pronounceable words from abbreviates and use those ‘crippled’ names instead in the spoken language, so “BMW” (the car brand) is not “Bee eM doubleU”, but a much more pronounceable “Beemer” or even “Boomer”.
Brought to you by “The more you know” (picture a rainbow).
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Everyone knows that Webmin is nasty - it does things in wrong way on a pure and nice Debian (and Ubuntu) systems and for some reason is not included in Debian (post-sarge) or Ubuntu. That does not inspire confidence in a root-running web based software to say the least.
I have a need to have a Linux server and give an administrator the ability to add/remove users, configure some LAMP settings, some email settings (SMTP, POP, IMAP, Spam/Virus protection), Samba and those kinds of everyday system administration tasks on a SOHO Linux server without having to know much about Linux.
Unfortunately I am very hard pressed to find anything that I could just set up and forget. Does anyone have any good experiences on this?
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