Random stuff

GNOME: prostituting ourselves to big-money for the chance of being a media-recognized standard since 15th August, 2000 :-)

I was looking at the coins problem. I can see a solution if you know the bad coin is heavier (or lighter -- just s/heavier/lighter). Here is a solution for that: Split the coins into 3 groups of 4 coins. Put two of the groups on the balance. If they weigh the same, the third group contains the bad coin. Otherwise, the heavier group contains the bad coin. Add two coins from one of the good groups to the bad group, and split those coins into 3 groups of 2. perform the same weighing operation to find the group with the bad coin. This leaves 2 coins. Weigh the last two coins. The heavier of the 2 is the bad coin. This doesn't answer the original problem, but may give some idea of what it would look like. If you know the bad coin is heavier and can do 3 weighs, you should be able to pick the bad coin out of a group of 27 coins.

On IRC: <raph> UTF8 really is simple enough to do in your head <raph> assuming your brain has SHL and SHR instructions <jwz> you need help, raph The book I am tech reviewing must be almost finished.

I released a new version of dia on sunday. Didn't get everyone's patches in, but I thought it was important to get another release out because of how long ago the previous release was. Of course, after doing the release someone finds an XIM bug, I notice that the SVG CR has been put out (so the recommended namespace URI's have changed) and I didn't tell the translators about the release. So I will probably put out another release of dia soon with these fixed. Tomorrow (9th August) is my parents 25th wedding aniversary.

I should put out a new release of Dia soon. The next release will be the first release as an official part of the GNU project, which is pretty good. Lots of nice user interface improvements. Just one more feature before the release :) Over the weekend, we pulled through a few CAT5 cables in the house. By putting the cable through the wall cavity there is no coax running through the doorways anymore. This should also reduce the problems of trying to find out which computer's network card has gone crazy when the network stops working. The Sun open office source release should be interesting. Some of the details are still being thrashed out, but things look good. In a worst case senario, the code will be released under GPL, so we can grab all the good features and integrate them into existing apps :)