Unfortunately, LinuxTag, Europes largest Linux event, moves to Wiesbaden next year. The last three years it was in Karlsruhe, the town where I live. So I could simply walk to the event in about five minutes. I also visited it before, when it still was in Stuttgart, which is about 80 km from Karlsruhe. The presentations were always truly interesting and gave me new input. Lets see if I will make it to Wiesbaden next year; its about 150 km from Karlsruhe which is still not that far.

While I introduced myself into python lately, I was also looking for a useful tool to create documentation from python sources. Although doxygen claims to be suitable for python, I did not get any useful results from it (at least not out-of-the-box). I was also not satisfied with epydoc, since it fetches the documentation for all super classes, which is quite a lot for Qt derived classes. Finally, I found synopsis, which created very good results without requiring much configuration. The Debian package was orphaned, and the latest version in the Debian archive was 0.5.0 while the latest upstream version is 0.8.0, so I decided to adopt it. A preliminary package is now available at mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/s/synopsis/,

the RFS was sent and I hope to find a sponsor soon :-)

I will never understand why people write applications in Java(TM), and then distribute it in some binary form, like .exe files for MS-Windows or .bin files for Linux/Unix. Instead of simply downloading a .zip or .tar.gz file, you have to choose the native platform you want the application to run on, and then execute some installation program like this:

Really great ...

The cool thing in this specific case is that it is SUN Microsystems themselves where I downloaded the package from, to be more precise the J2EE reference implementation.

Going to look for the jar files I need somewhere else now...

Today I was able to try the amd64 port of Debian on an Intel Pentium D processor with EM64 technology. I dont have a broad overview of the various 64 bit technologies yet, but as far as I learned today the ia64 port is specific to the Intel Itanium processor, while the amd64 port supports both AMD64 CPUs and Intel EM64 CPUs. The current business card image booted well, but unfortunately the keyboard did not work anymore as soon as the debian installer showed its first menu. I tried both an USB and a PS/2 keyboard, but both have shown the same behaviour. Seems like there is more research necessary :-)