Mining aluminium - we're the champions

Our kindergarten participates in the 'Těžíme hliník' (Mining aluminium) competition. This year we're the best in the town.

The goal is to put aside any aluminium waste and deliver it separately. It's organized entirely by volunteers and any money made come directly to the participating organizations. Which is around 5000 Kč (200 €) this year.

Last year our family had some leftovers from the cellar, but this year we were completely dependant on yoghurt lids and a couple of beer cans donated by friends, so I doubt we made more than ~1 kg. Apparently the other kids more than compendsated for it and the average was 2.4 kg per kid.

Awesome!

Upgrading Mandriva to Cooker

I was needing some fresher system libraries and since the release of the next stable Mandriva Linux will be in just a few days, switching to Cooker (the development branch of Mandriva) was the easier option.
Here are the steps to switch Mandriva Linux to Cooker, taken from the Mandriva wiki:

1. First, remove media for the stable release : urpmi.removemedia -a
2. Add the required media for Cooker : urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://api.mandriva.com/mirrors/basic.cooker.$ARCH.list'
3. Update all installed packages : urpmi --auto-update

I had to repeat the 3rd step several times, partly due to lagging mirrors. 

So far, I haven't noticed a bug, it seems 2010.1 will be one of the best releases ever.

Contact lens

Today I went to my ocularist to give contact lens a try. I am wearing glasses for 25 years already and never tried lens before, so it was a brand new experience to be able to see sharply with a full field of vision and nothing on my nose. I'll have one test round before deciding if this is what I want, but so far, so good.

Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10

Couple of days ago the beta version of the SunOracle compiler was released. I'd swear it did not list OpenSolaris as a supported plaform five days ago, but now the download page, as well as the Customer Feedback mail I just received say: "will be available for OpenSolaris in the near future". I'd say it's a good news for OpenSolaris (where the long silence regarding its future is making many people nervous) and Studio as well.

I did install the tarball version successfully on b134 and was able to compile cmake 2.8.1 without a glitch.
With the rest of the kde4 workspace I unfortunately hit a bug, so in case we start using it, we'll have to use a wrapper for the CC command to sort the options. I developed something like that a couple of months ago, but never got as far as to commiting it to the workspace.

KDE 4.4.4 for OpenSolaris

I've just published binary packages of KDE 4.4.4 for OpenSolaris. We did not need to modify any of the 4.4.3 patches, so it went pretty smoothly. A bunch of other packages were bumped along the way, most notably Amarok, Konversation and QtCreator. More details in the forum.

No screenshot today, I did not even try to install it. Lets hope it ain't borked.

mBank, the no-fees bank, starts charging $$

Hey, it's been two weeks since I created an account at mBank, the bank with a no-fees image, two days since I activated their credit card ... and now they're announcing a change in the pricelist. This includes a wild web of confusing rules and fees so I need to double check if it's still worth it. Thanks to my laziness I haven't moved anything yet, so I'm still quite flexible.