ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (805, 0))


ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (785, 0))


And then more blabla. Not very nice, I would say. Apparently, it is a conflict between certain versions of Sage and Maxima.

My solution: building Sage myself from source. Not hard to do, and you get the latest version fully installed. Disadvantage: it takes a couple of hours of compiling!

Solution: updating KMyMoney!

Something I miss in comparison with Arch, or even Ubuntu: the constant (rolling) updating of your total system. I know selecting all possible updates is possible somehow in Yast, but still…

Taxonomy Menu is a very nice Drupal module that lets you create a menu based on a content type’s taxonomy. The taxonomy terms form the menu structure, and the way the nodes are displayed when a menu item (= taxonomy term) is selected can be customised using a custom view. I really like it. I like it so much, that I wanted the taxonomy terms displayed in the header of my nodes to link to the same menu structure, so that clicking on them was the same as clicking on the same term in the Taxonomy Menu.

Here enters Taxonomy Redirect. This module allows one to rewrite the url that the Taxonomy module creates. So instead of blabla.com/taxonomy/term/999 you can make the link blablabla.com/goto/this/instead/999. For this, you can define a redirect as plain text, or with a php snippet. Due to the link structure Taxonomy Menu uses, I had to resort to php for dynamically creating the Redirect link. The standard format for the link structure for Taxonomy Menu is “sitename.com/category/vid/pid1/pid2/tid” (with vid the vocabulary id, pid a parent term id, and tid the term id). The term “category” can be set in the settings for Taxonomy Menuy. Using plain text to define the Redirect link would f*** things up when the taxonomy term did not have any parents. Php worked fine, once I found out that the Redirect module defines a variable $tid for the term id, that you can use in your script. The code I used:

The “1″ behind “category” in the first line is for the vocabulary, so you’ll have to check what value you need there. Note that using php might not work straight away for anonymous users. To resolve this, have a look here…

After I was done, I noticed that while knetworkmanager still showed the available wireless networks, I couldn’t connect to any of them. Clicking on a connection that had been set up before, didn’t seem to do anything. Never underestimate the power of Linux, however. (OK, it shouldn’t have broken in the first place, but well…) What did I find in /var/log/NetworkManager? This:

Not being a Linux-guru myself, this didn’t mean a whole lot to me, but it provided me with the necessary seeds to sow in the google-field, and true enough, after a couple of minutes, google bore a nice ripe peace of fruit: the answer. A short synopsis for the not so adventurous: I had to remove the (inadvertently installed) package “NetworkManager-kde4″, which worked perfectly.

Now openSUSE and I are on friendly terms again.

I’m pretty sure everybody with some graphical experience has seen a cracked version of Adobe Photoshop at least once in his life. And rumour has it that Photoshop condones this, because there’s no way that young kids, for example, are going to pay $500+ for a legal version. By using cracked versions, the kids learn to work with Photoshop, so that once these talented kids start working for real, they are hooked. Free promotion.

While obviously, Adobe won’t admit this, I guess there are some good reasons for them to try and hook as many people as possible. And one of them is the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). At least at amateur level, there’s not much one can do with Photoshop that you can’t do with GIMP. The main problem for GIMP is: it’s different from Photoshop. I think nobody will baldly claim that Photoshop is easy to learn. Everybody who hasn’t had much graphical experience before, will need a couple of hours to find out what the basic principles and possibilities of PS are. That’s because there’s an awfull lot that Photoshop can do.

If a Photoshop user starts using GIMP, he can be assured that what he wants to achieve is possible. The only problem is that when he starts looking in the menu for a certain function, chances are he can’t find it: a lot of functions are called differently, and sometimes placed in a totally different menu. GIMP is different.

The thing I missed the most, when I started using the GIMP, was ctrl-clicking a layer, for selecting all non-transparent items. I couldn’t find it, and for a while, I really thought that this was a Photoshop-only killer feature. And then, the day of relief dawned: I found it. While it’s not a shortcut, the function is easily accessible by right-clicking on a layer, and selecting “Alpha to Selection”. You can find it as well under Layers>>Transparancy>>Alpha to Selection.

By now, I’ve forgotten most Photoshopisms, and I feel using GIMP like I felt using Photoshop before. (That is: I’m sure somebody can do it, but I’ve no idea where to start myself… ;)

So if you have a crackedl version of Photoshop on your pc, and it gives you a quirky feeling, just give GIMP a try. And make sure not to give up too easily, because I can promise you: there will be times that you curse GIMP for making you feel like a beginner, looking for half an hour for something you could easily do in 2 minutes in PS. But trust me: it’s worth it…

ps: For the curious-but-conservative people: there’s a GIMP plugin that tries to mimic Photoshop behaviour and menu structures in GIMP: GIMPshop. Haven’t tried it myself, so feel free to chip in your comments.