2004-07-30
Or Genever, as it is also spelled. And the expensive variety called Korenwijn, not to be confused with Barley Wine, which is a kind of beer. I like my glass of whisky or whiskey just as much as the next thirty-something, but being Dutch, I prefer to delve into the depths of jenever and korenwijn -- Dutch gin.
2004-07-27
We went to Göttingen one Saturday to see my father off, who was to stay only one week with us. Unfortunately, Max Maulwurf threw a shovel into the works, so we had to cope with a detour by bus, in addition to four trains. However, fortunately, that bus went through Arnstadt, and past the palace. This palace is in the process of being restored, and the contrast immediately grabbed my attention:
2004-07-25
When I gave Zeborah, our friend from New Zealand, a tour of Deventer on the occasion of her visit to us, we did not neglect to visit a few of the dozen or so second-hand bookshops that Deventer can count among its blessings. In one of those, I found The Yew Tree's Shade, a detective novel by Judge Cyril Hare.
Having hung out on rec.arts.sf.composition for quite some time, Charlie Stross is not an unknown to me; besides, his blog is in my blogroll. So when Singularity Sky turned up in the local bookshop in Deventer, I didn't hesitate to buy my copy. It is, by the way, quite a measure of success to get your books into the four metres of English language science fiction and fantasy Praamstra stocks.
When writing these blog entries -- I should be coding on Krita, but I forgot to put an up-to-date copy of CVS and the Qt docs on the Pismo Powerbook I take on holidays to offload the holiday snaps on, so I can't continue much -- I am in the little town of Steinbach-Hallenberg, in Thuringia, former DDR, about and around the place where 1632 is situated. No venomous spiders spotted yet, but a couple of cool snakes. Of course, not having Internet access in the little holiday home we are renting, you're reading this only because I've returned home safely (take note, gentlemen burglars), and because I turn out to still have Internet access, which wasn't the case last year, when we went to Greece.
2004-07-06
Phew! I've added the beginning of support for histograms to Krita tonight. A nice KisHistogram class to compute the stuff (done, apart from median, stddev and percentile, which I haven't got a clue about), a widget and a plugin. What I still need to do is create the bar chart pixmap and the gradient pixmap, but the rest is mostly done. Not bad for an evening's work.
2004-07-05
Some time ago, I played with qtjava and gcj, creating a native code version of a java application that called Qt. However, the qtjava library had already been wrapped in jni for us by Richard Dale. Going the other way, wrapping Java code in CNI and calling that from C++ was more challenging, especially since I have only a very sketchy knowledge of gcc's command-line options. That's what comes from trusting to automake. You don't learn how to craft a compile command yourself anymore. But today I succeeded in creating a small natively compiled shared library in Java which I could call from C++. Not rocket science, but nice nonetheless.
2004-07-04
My father went to North Holland for a week, to walk along the beach, to visit Egmond (where he and my mother had their first real house), and to visit Alkmaar, where I was born. And in Alkmaar he bought what call a real cheese. Old, ripe Edammer cheese. Red. Hard. Sharp. Delicious with a glass of port or on a slice of dark brown bread. He bought half a cheese for us to start with, and a whole cheese to keep for a while. And here's what remains of the first half, accompanied by lesser cheeses, like Stilton, grottin de chevre and a Basque cheese I forgot the name of:
Maybe I should attempt to do a painting of this cheese, it reminds me a lot of the 17th century Dutch paintings.