“Not too sentimental, but I want you to know,

that I drove past your street tonight on my way back from a show,

and I was less than one hundred footsteps away from you I suppose,

and I could feel your sweet eyes watching head lights roll by

maybe you noticed one swept by a little too slow …

– Josh Pyke

I’ve moved my bzr plugins so that they’re all in one repo. I tried adding symlinks to make the old URLs work, but it didn’t .. and I’m lazy. Apologies for the stuffing around.

Plugins are here now under here http://michael.ellerman.id.au/bzr/plugins.

Despite the slightly crappy weather, which drove us momentarily to investigate flights to Italy, we decided to stay in Böblingen over Easter, and not do any crazy travelling.

Well sort of anyway. Having chilled out on the Friday, drunk too much beer (suprise), Jk, Arnd and I headed down to Konstanz on the Saturday. If you’ve ever wondered if a Nissan Micra can do 160 Kmh, I can now confirm it’s possible! Arnd’s Micra at least.

We’d hoped the weather might be a bit better further south, and it was, but not drastically. Apparently Konstanz is the only place in Germany you can grow banannas, but it wasn’t real warm while we were there.

Still it’s a beautiful city, despite the insane traffic, and we walked around for a few hours taking pictures and generally taking it easy.

We popped into Switzerland on the way home to check out the Rhinefall, which is a big arse waterfall, apparently the largest in Europe. It was pretty damn specy, even if it was raining again!

On the way back to Böblingen we stopped at Arnd’s place in Tübingen and made sort-of stir-fry curry kinda stuff, which turned out pretty well actually. Afterward we had Tiramisu for desert which was seriously tops. A rocking day.

View the photos »

Thanks to Ben and his very accomodating family, we spent last weekend hanging out in the amazing city of Strasbourg. For the uninitiated, it sits just inside France on the border with Germany, and has changed hands a few times, so has a flavour of both countries. It’s the capital of Alsace, and as the locals will tell you also “the capital of Europe”, being the seat of the Council of Europe.

We got a train from Stuttgart, which was entirely painless, I love German trains. Ben had organised for us to stay at the hotel of a friend, which was sweet, right near the train station and easy walking to town.

Ben’s dad picked us up and drove us to Ben’s mum’s apartment, where we drank some nice wine and admired the view from the 12th floor. Then we headed to the uni bar and met some friends of Ben, before heading to town for some awesome food. We started with bone marrow, mmmm, and then had famous choucroute (ours had more meat than that!). Needless to say we were full as several googs by the end of it all. Oh, and I forget the 7 bottles of excellent Riesling!

Afterward we headed to the restaurant of Ben’s friend, yes Ben knows everyone in Strasbourg, and had crazy beer with Orange in it, strong! Some of us made it back to the hotel after that, and some of us went somewhere else? A good night indeed.

Saturday we hung out at Ben’s dad’s place for the 18th birthday of Ben’s little brother. Much wine, cheese and other good things were eaten. Ben’s family were all there, and all spoke excellent English to us while tolerating our apalling attempts at French, it must be painful. Spent the afternoon walking around town, climbed the Cathedral, took lots of photos.

For dinner we hit the best Cous Cous restaurant in town, and boy was it good. If, like me, you’ve only ever had cous cous while hiking then you have no idea how good it can be, boy! Well I guess it’s really the stuff you have with it, but still, we need more of it back home! We weren’t really up for another night out, so just had a quiet beer at Ben’s old haunt, suprisingly similar to a certain pub in Kingston.

Sunday began with more walking, particularly around “Petit France”, the really old part of town. As opposed to just the very old part. We also popped into one of the churches, not the biggy, and I couldn’t resist taking a photo, it was so nice. I guess that’s probably blasphemous …

To round out the weekend we popped into Ben’s dad’s monkey farm, a logical progression. The monkeys were really cute, well except for the ones trying to eat each other, and really inquisitive. Some of the stories Ben’s dad had to tell were a little eye opening, monkeys aren’t always so cute!

Perhaps it’s just that I’m an Aussie, and from Canberra as well, but being in a city that’s nearly two millennia old was pretty mind blowing. The amount of stuff that’s happened there is just hard to grasp. And that cathedral, my god! It’s so damn huge, it’s no wonder it was the world’s tallest building from 1493 until 1874.

A few photos from the adventure, but nothing like being there …

View the photos »

Last week we all headed for a bit of a drive to the nearby town of Tübingen. It’s a bit bigger than Böblingen, around one quarter of the population are students, and it also happens to be where Arnd lives.

Apart from being a very nice town, with a gorgeous river and lots of cool old buildings, it’s a pretty amazing place for those of us whos country is less than half of the age of Tübingen University. Gotta love it.

As it got dark we headed back to Arnd’s place, with a truck load of Döners and several boxes of beer. As you can imagine chaos ensued, Segher even cracked a Forth joke, but got it wrong .. who could guess why.

Thanks to Arnd for letting us trash hang out at his place, and to all and sundry who gave us lifts to and fro.

View the photos »

Flying is fun … flying for 50+ hours door to door is less fun … not having any pants when you land is a little less fun again … having no pants two days later is well, kinda sucky.

Still, this is a photo of Norway!

And a few more shots from along the way, including a few beers with Queeny.

View the photos »

Spring has not quite sprung.

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Got bored in between build/reboot cycles today and had a browse on flickr, there’s lots of good photographers on there and lots of good shots.

Don’t miss the best of DWS, from just up the road.

“Bouldering in the Tatras” © by Spakman (http://flickr.com/photos/spakman))

A series of interesting shots, although not for the faint hearted, of Andy Walker’s little mishap.

Some character called “sandstoner” has a good collection, this one in particular, and the rest from Indian Creek, wherever that is.

Whoever klokoy is cleary has too much time and money, but takes some nice shots. Don’t miss the 244 from Morrocco

And if that’s left you feeling a little house bound, don’t despair, there’s always alternatives.

Oh, and where are the Tatras?

Rode up Black Mountain twice last week, great ride, tough on the way up and fast on the way down, especially cool coming down in the dark.

My first attempt took 33 minutes, which is a tad slow, I managed it in 20 the second time around. I’ve heard of normal humans doing it in 15, and someone has done it in 12 apparently. Yowsers.

Update: Mikey reckons that going by his times up the Alp d’Huez, Lance Armstrong would do it in 7 minutes, freakin!

Update: Steve Hanley chimes in with the full story. 8:44, that sure gives me something to aim for.

Update: Cool comparison of the various hills ’round town by Mikey. (This update brought to you by Tom)

Mikey has gps data for the ride which is kinda interesting, in particular the grade is pretty solid.

For the Radioheadly challenged.

Dear Google, please remember this for me … it’s late and my head hurts:

static int blob_open(struct inode *inode, struct file *file)
{
    if (inode->u.generic_ip)
        file->private_data = inode->u.generic_ip;

    return 0;
}

static ssize_t blob_read(struct file *file, char __user *buf,
        size_t nbytes, loff_t *ppos)
{
    /* Need to be able to get the size out of the blob struct somehow. */
    struct blob_thing *blob = file->private_data;
    return simple_read_from_buffer(buf, nbytes, ppos, blob, blob->size);
}

struct file_operations blob_fops = {
    .read = blob_read,
    .open = blob_open,
};

struct blob_thing my_blob;

static int __init blob_init(void)
{
    debugfs_create_file("my-blob", S_IFREG | S_IRUGO, NULL,
        &my_blob, &blob_fops);
}
__initcall(blob_init);

Then in userspace:

# mount -t debugfs debugfs /sys/kernel/debug
# dd if=/sys/kernel/debug/my-blob of=somewhere