… with that tune (grabbed via the U1 music-store of course *g*), shake well add some “Autobahn” and “Landstrasse” on top and you’ll get a grin going from one ear to the other!

Not that I’m much of a soccer-fan - but hey - Germany won the fourth round. Well done folks! Only do I feel bad for my colleague and good friend Neil. He’s such a big soccer fan and I cannot imagine the agony he must have lived through… especially for the not given second goal for England.

I even probably made it onto belgian local TV, when taking part in a capoeira-show at the Afro-Latino festival helping out our friends of Mundo Capoeira in Bree, Belgium on Saturday.

This weekend I really released the freak in me… shaked the stress away… was just myself. This I need to do more often, does wonders to the state of mind!

This weekend I made already 380 km on it. All within the break-in phase of the engine, which means don’t rev it above 6000 rpm (max is 11.000 rpm) before a mileage of 1000 km is reached. There’s quite a lot of “feel for the machine” to regain after years of absence from motorcycle-riding. My cornering-skills aren’t as elegant as they should be - especially on such a Ducati - but there are still many weekends left in this season.

Too bad I couldn’t get the licence-plate “AC - MM 42″ like I wanted, that would have been the icing on the cake.

Iian, Thomas, Rodrigo and Nic when will we do a road-trip across Europe?

… soon, very soon

The weather is getting terrific these days. During the day, especially at weekends, I can hear all those superbikes rev’ing through the winding roads of the Eifel. At these moments it is very hard to resist the seduction of the two-wheeled dream above.

I went to a Ducati-dealer today. I sat on a 848. Even just standing still it felt marvelously thrilling… and the right chunk of the grey matter between my ears screamed “Do it! Do it! You bloody chicken-head, show some balls and do it!”.

This blog-entry is rather a note to myself, that the left half of my brain thinks, I’m about to make my biggest mistake ever.

The bzr-branch (rev 424) can be grabbed with:

• bzr branch lp:notify-osd/lucid

Release notes:

• notify-osd 0.9.29 is a maintainance and bug-fix release. The main issues fixed are LP: #546650 (click-through regression) and LP: #451086 (correcting rb-cover-art display).

ChangeLog:

• change the way the “empty” 1×1 pixel large input-mask is created
• fixed the masking out of the bubble on mouse-over for the non-composited desktop
• reset the stored filename (or path) of an icon, when an icon is passed via a hint
• added C-example testing updating the icon of a notification using all three possible approaches (image_path hint, image_data hint, icon-parameter)

I guess in a few hours this will be automatically available to every user of Lucid (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) via the software-center, synaptic and apt-get thanks to the magic of the MOTUs.

All examples have been migrated from git to bzr and put on launchpad. You can check out their sources from there. While doing that I also moved the repository of lowfat to launchpad. For lowfat’s code I also got a couple of “Where to grab the code?”-questions in my inbox. So now everybody should be happy and be able to easily get hold of the sources.

Here’s the quick list for the impatient readers:

• cairo-gimmicks
• bling-it-up
• gl-cairo-cube
• gl-cairo-simple
• gl-cairo-aatrick
• lowfat

Since glitz has been deprecated and completely removed from cairo’s source tree I also updated some of the examples, which used glitz-related code. So far I’ve not been able to add support for the new shiny cairo-gl backend, which the new coolness. I started on it, but stuff only segfaults around.

All that took so long because I can hardly force myself to do any spare-time hacking. It’s just not fun anymore, when you sit in front of the computer day in and day out. There are certainly tons of interesting things to do or try, but motivation is just zero.

If you like electronic music, be sure to check out these tracks:

• “Misson Complete” by Kap10Kurt
• “Revolte At 22H10″ by Danger
• “In The Right Path” by Tektoog

The first alpha version of blender 2.50 (what will become blender 2.60 once final) is officially out. It is being stress-tested by their user-community and by the artists working on “Sintel” (the newest installment of the OpenMovie-series by the blender foundation).

I’m really looking forward to this new short, even more than I anticipated the last two ones. Because this time around I, or rather the martial-arts team I’m a member of (banGang), is going to help out the creative minds behind “Sintel” with fighting, acrobatics, stunts and reference footage.

It’s almost 2010! Have the people, who implemented that web-interface, ever heard of Unicode or do they expect international travelers to not use anything but ASCII to supply their (usually non-english) names, which carry the high probability with them to not use ASCII characters only? For me it’s just the ü in my surname. I wonder what people with funkier names do, when they have to diverge from the correct name-spelling to something this ESTA-system accepts. Once they succeed there, I bet they have a hard time trying to convince the staff at customs, that they are really themselves, because the spelling of their name on the passport doesn’t even remotely match the spelling in the visa-waiver-form.

I once almost wasn’t let aboard a plane in Germany, because the travel-agency booked my flight on “Mueller”, but my passport says “Müller”. Is all that the legacy-fault of Cobol?