Landing On Water - Neil Young

So, apparently (according the bio Shakey) Neil Young has said about Landing On Water that it is a bad record... unlike for example Everybody's Rocking that he will 'defend to his dying day'.

Sure there is some lame keyboards on landing On Water, but there is also some amazing violent songs, with cool young guitar and cool drums sound... I Got A Problem, Violent Side, Touch The Night, Weight Of The World all deserve a place in the catalogue of Neil Young Classic.

remove the keyboards, and add a bassplayer up to standard with the amazing drummer (Steve Jordan) and we would have a classic

So in short, this album can be found for a real bargain (almost given away for free). Go get it, go.

The Vosges mountains in France is a great place to be, even when it rains.... Only drawback... Internet access is hard to find..

Niagara falls are quite nice. For some reason though I thought they were bigger..... 

Thomas and Asger 

Python rules

It only a week ago I started to port SegyMAT, a Matlab/Octave toolbox for reading/writing SEG-Y formated files, to a Python module (SegyPY), and man I am impressed with Python.

First of all the direct proting of the fascilities in SegyMAT was painless and took very little time, hust a few days.

In addition, I can see that Python provides so many nice features that SegyPY AT soon outperform SegyMAT in terms of features and ease of use.

I just need do dive into Python classes...

Try Python before your neighbor. It is really impressing how far one can go with just the Python Tutorial...

Diving into python - SEG-Y files and Python

I just started diving into Python, and it is allways good to have something specific to do when learning a new programming language. So, i have started to implement a SEG-Y reader/writer for as a Python module. The structure of the module is borrowed from SegyMAT.

It may not be the fastest libraray but it will bring SEG-Y files into Python, and i have looked at matplotlib that seems to be a really great 2D plotting module whith Matlab like plotting functions.

I call the Python module for SegyPY, nd it can currently load an IEEE formatted segy file. Get it from CVS at : SegyPY homepage

The road to Ubuntu

I started using linux back in 94, when I inherited a PC with some version of Linux allready installed. The guy i got it from used a bunch of floppy disk to get it running, and he was my hero. I was instantly hooked. I was a student (and single) at the time at had plenty of time and spent nights diving into the system.

It is fair to say that my graduation got postponed quite some time beacuse of this... Anyway..

The first distro i got hooked on was RedHat. I can't remember the version. To this day i still like redhat/fedora/RHEN quite a lot.
I used RedHat for many years, and had a little business running on the side implementing redhat+openvpn to build secure connections between small business offices.

It was during that time that I found redhat less than optimal to use as server, mostly because i had to reinstall the system every year or so. I started to get into Debian, and loved the APT package system right away. Also at the time RedHat made the descision to stop support for redhat, and shift its commercial attention to the enterprise servers, while developing the community supported Fedora. It some ways RHES was what I was looking for since i wanted a system that was guaranteed to be supported for a number of years.

But, the commercial side of things made me look closer at Debian. I played with debain stable on my workstation, but i was allready too hooked on reading about new features in linux and gnome that I could be satisfied with Debian stable on my workstatsion. I upgraded to Debian Testing and also Debian Unstable to try out the new stuff. This resulted in a quite buggy system, and sometimes some failure to do basic stuff like read my mail... But, I got what i asked for.

I ended up with a feeling that debian stable was the ultimate box for a server, like the ones i set up to run OpenVPN, stable and with very little downtime. I would choose it, for my business server purposes, over RH, any day.

But for my workstation, I found Debian testing a bit too unstable and not very attractibe to use. Fedora on the other hand looks great and is very easy to use on a daily basis. I do love the way the Debian system works though....
So, last year i saw that yet another Linux distro was annouced : UBUNTU. Based on Debian/Gnome, with the latest sowftware, and good looking. I didn't expect much since it was the first release, but i have been more than satisfied.

All my hardware worked out fo the box. External USB drives, PCI Wireless DLINK Network card. Also, The way gnome was setup suited my likes perfectly. Clean beautiful desktop, without tons and tons of applications in hard to find menus. Clean, simple and fast....

I upgraded to the development version of ubuntu some months ago, and have had no problems, except a but of trouble enabling suspend/hibernate on my IBM R51 laptop.

All in all UBUNTU is what suits me bests in the linux world of desktop distros : based on Debain, whith a system setup that I like and a great package system, beautiful desktop, the latest of the essential applications (OpenOffice, Ximian, Firefox) and acces to alle the great software in the debian archives..

The latest version of UBUTU (the Hoary release) is due out any day now.

Try it. They even ship pressed CD to you at no cost
http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

Iggy Pop masters

I listened to Raw Power and Instinct yesterday. Amazing powerful records that I am sure the next generation and the one after taht can find something fresh in. Both on the top 20 of all times albums....