nutmeg's blog

All in a below average season. Although we had lots of snow in December, my first day on-piste was December 22nd. Riding in snowstorm or thick fog is just not my kind of thing. The christmas holiday season was absurdely warm, getting rid of most of the snow again. I managed 7 snow-days from December 22nd to January 1st, but this was more sport than fun. Really sunny days were rare in the whole winter. Due to minor injury and minor illness I had to take long breaks from snowboarding (just two snow days in the periode from January 8th to February 15th!). Early easter cut the season short.

This year I ended up in skiline.cc's top-100 list for both most meters of altitude in a single day and the whole season which shows that other people had a short season, too.

On the plus side, we had enough and good snow. This is also evident from the balance sheet below, I almost always went to Diedamskopf where there is almost no artificial snow.

Here is the balance sheet:

Ski-lifts are closing tomorrow, but I have the perfect thing to look at for the next 8 months:

My receiver (Topfield SRP 2410) has the nasty habit of rescaling to fill the display, ignoring the aspect ratio. So I am reencoding, adding padding (black bars) and top and bottom. In this context avconv has offered some less cryptic errors.

The one that cost me most time was this one:

[libx264 @ 0x8f29ca0] constant rate-factor is incompatible with
2pass.
[...]
Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect
parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

libx264 interprets a missing bit-rate specification as a request for constant rate-factor encoding. Which does not work with multi pass. Setting a bitrate (avconv syntax -b:v 1200k) fixes the problem.

As I was upgrading harddisks I thought about giving windows 8 a spin. and got what I deserved. ;-) I had expected Grub to be wiped, however I was a little bit surprised that the existing Windows (Vista) installation (which was automatically integrated in Windows 8 bootloader) did not boot anymore. Vista's automatic system repair failed, manual intervention on the system console (bootrec) seems to have shredded the system (The partition table is messed up.) No data was lost, as I have simply switched back to the old hd again. I will need to re-do the harddisk upgrade, though.

I have recently read ECB/2011/14 (GUIDELINE OF THE EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK of 20 September 2011 on monetary policy instruments and procedures of the Eurosystem) and have stumbled upon the following gem.

An institution may access the Eurosystem's standing facilities and open market operations based on standard tenders only through the NCB of the Member State in which it is incorporated. If an institution has establishments (its head office or branches) in more than one Member State, each establishment has access to these operations through the NCB of the Member State in which it is established, notwithstanding the fact that the bids of an institution may only be submitted by one establishment (either the head office or a designated branch) in each Member State.

At first glance this fine, it is easily readable. (All abbreviations are explained at the start of document.) However a more attentive examination corrects this impression. Compare the two highlighted versions below:

An institution may access the Eurosystem's standing facilities and open market operations based on standard tenders only through the NCB of the Member State in which it is incorporated. If an institution has establishments (its head office or branches) in more than one Member State, each establishment has access to these operations through the NCB of the Member State in which it is established […].

An institution may access the Eurosystem's standing facilities and open market operations based on standard tenders only through the NCB of the Member State in which it is incorporated. If an institution has establishments (its head office or branches) in more than one Member State, each establishment has access to these operations through the NCB of the Member State in which it is established […].

Perfect contradiction. Either only the "own" NCB works or any NCB where we have a establishments.

Ex falsum quodlibet and Bob's your uncle. ;-)

Panasonic's G1, G2 and G3 micro four-thirds cameras are missing a dedicated orientation sensor. With a lens featuring image stabilisation the camera makes use of its sensor. Otherwise (e.g. with the Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7) the Exif image orientation tags are not correct for portrait format images.

Here is how to write correct tags (compatible with the camera's preview function) with exiv2:

Camera rotated anti-clockwise (shutter button on top):
exiv2 -k -M"set Exif.Image.Orientation 8" -M"set Exif.Panasonic.Rotation 8" -M"set Exif.Thumbnail.Orientation 8" P1020800.JPG

Camera rotated clockwise (shutter button at bottom):
exiv2 -k -M"set Exif.Image.Orientation 6" -M"set Exif.Panasonic.Rotation 6" -M"set Exif.Thumbnail.Orientation 6" P1020800.JPG

I have just uploaded exim 4.80 rc4 to experimental. As the GnuTLS code has been overhauled testing would be appreciated.

Finally a year with real snow again.

Winter started rather late this year, I was still hiking at above 2000m end of November with zero snow there. First day of snowboarding was December 21st. Starting from there we never had too little snow. At home we topped out at 175cm, and had more than 125cm for a long time. Start of February was very cold, I had to skip a good day of good weather as I got a tiny bit of frostburn on my nose. (1200m of descent was a little to much at below -20°C.) A very warm end of March/start of April neverless quickly killed the snow here down at the bottom of the valley. There is still lots of snow in the mountains, although the ski-lifts have closed April 15th.

Judging from the number of snowboarding days the season was a bad one. It started late and ended early (31st of March). In spring I simply need good weather to have fun. - Cloudy nights are too warm, the slope does not freeze properly, which is perfect only for breaking one's leg.

Nevertheless if I could choose between a repetition of 2010/11 or 2011/2012, I would always go for the latter. :-)

On a sidenote, my local hill has switched from www.hoehenmeter.com to www.skiline.cc to provide statistical information.

Here is the balance sheet:

GnuTLS 3.0.x is finally available in unstable (and squeeze). Please consider upgrading. (Development package: libgnutls28-dev)

exim 4.77 rc4 is available for testing in experimental. This release contains an incompatible change. Exim no longer performs string expansion on the second string of the match_* expansion conditions: "match_address", "match_domain", "match_ip" and "match_local_part". Named lists can still be used.

See explanation and rationale on exim-announce mailing list.