Eric D. Schabell: December 2006

Friday, December 29, 2006

Year in review 2006!

I like to take a quick look back at some of the major events in my life over the last year, not only in the private sphere but including my software and sporting milestones too.

This year started with a trip to the states for me, visiting family and my best friend that was just back from Iraq. It was a very nice trip with a surprise phone call from my wife telling me that we were expecting our second child!

I was able to finish up all the major project on our house that were in the planning, such as a new brick path in the backyard, finishing off the loft and fixing up the second room for my daughter in expectation of our second child.

In the summer vacation we were on the route of the 3rd stage of the Tour de France, which was very exciting to see! I had pretty much just started cycling myself at the end of last year so it was nice to be in Limburg and to climb many of the better known hills in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately a month later I crashed on my bike and broke my left hand, pretty much ending my cycling for the year (did ride a bit since then, but the weather has turned bad so that was that for this year). My total for the year was a single flat tire and over 2700 km’s (and around 1300 km’s on my bike I ride to work)!

Just before the World Series started my wife arranged for digital television here which gives me the NASN and all the live USA sports one could wish for! I was in heaven and finally saw a World Series game live!

For Halloween I arranged for my daughter to be able to trick or treat in the neighborhood. This was greeted with such enthusiasm by everyone that we ended up with a rather large group going door to door and many new faces that want to be part of the event next year!

I was also surprised with the naming of my best friends baby boy to include my name! An honor and a treat to see ones name being passed on: Matej Eric Roth, my little buddy!

On the software front, AbTLinux has taken off with another student group providing the requirements for our configManager. I have started working on the design and implementation of our package manager and much more, see the site!

My Publication Management System (PMS) was adopted by the entire Computer Science institute after being used at our departmental level for over a year. This was good news as it gives me a larger user base and more feedback to improve on this software.

Of course, the biggest event of the year is only a few weeks old and lying next to me on the couch as I write this… my son, Max Orson Marius Jody Schabell! We have been truely blessed this year!


From my family to yours, we wish you a happy new year!


Monday, December 11, 2006

A baby boy!

This one is a bit of a personal posting, to mark the birth of my baby boy! He arrived in this world today, big (4885 grams and 55cm) and very hungry!

I will be taking off the rest of the year to relax (all you fathers out there know that ‘relax’ is a relative term here in this context with a two year old and a new baby in the house) and enjoy the family addition. ;-)

Thursday, December 7, 2006

How Google ranks our pages?

I read a very interesting article at the American Mathimatical Society about how Google works the Internet and comes up with an quantitative value for the relevance of your page(s):

How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack

I wanted to post this as a follow up to my previous entry, “Google page ranking tools”, so now we have a better idea what these tools are reporting! ;-)

Divide by zero solved?

I read this morning that Dr. James Anderson, from the University of Reading’s computer science department has solved the divide by zero problem… can you believe it!

You can read about it in the bbc article here and more about Dr. James Anderson here.

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Mutt mailer index overview!

I have been getting tired of having to look up the various Mutt flags that show up only once in awhile on the index view. 

I decided to put them here for myself and maybe for you out there who need only this information and not a complete Mutt tutorial to plow through. 

;-) 

Status Flags 

In addition to who sent the message and the subject, a short summary of the disposition of each message is printed beside the message number. Zero or more of the following “flags” may appear, which mean: 
  • D message is deleted (is marked for deletion) 
  • d message have attachments marked for deletion 
  • K contains a PGP public key 
  • N message is new 
  • O message is old 
  • P message is PGP encrypted 
  • r message has been replied to 
  • S message is PGP signed, and the signature is succesfully verified 
  • s message is PGP signed 
  • ! message is flagged 
  • * message is tagged 
Furthermore, the following flags reflect who the message is addressed to. They can be customized with the $to_chars variable. 
  • + message is to you and you only 
  • T message is to you, but also to or cc’ed to others 
  • C message is cc’ed to you 
  • F message is from you 
  • L message is sent to a subscribed mailing list