Congratulations, Flipper!

Yesterday, Kirsten Flipkens, after having had a pretty bad year in which she couldn't even enter the Wimbledon qualifiers, reached and won her first-ever WTA finals, in Quebec City.

Flipkens, who was a junior world number 1 when she won the junior US open and Wimbledon tournaments in 2003, has had a fairly troublesome career, with some injuries at some bad times, and some bad luck as well, culminating in a career-high ranking of 59.

In that light, it's refreshing to see everything finally coming together for her, and having her finally clinch that well-deserved title. With today's win, she jumps from a 102nd position to a whopping 69 in a single week.

So again: Congratulations, Kirsten!

Mel Gorman is my hero

It's taken years to get here, but Mel finally got a series of patches into the kernel, including this one, which should prevent deadlocks of machines doing swap-over-NBD. This means that one of my longest-running wishlist items has finally been attended to.

Mel, I owe you a beer.

Update: Mel seems to think I don't owe him beer. Obviously he's wrong.

Questions

Last weekend, I was a member of the off-stage choir in the Cinderella production in Wilrijk. As the off-stage choir didn't have all that much to do (out of 24 scenes, only five of them had music with the off-stage choir; and then, one of them only required women, and another only required male voices for about 8 bars out of 200+), I had a lot of spare time on my hands; and since I'm in the possession of a laptop with 8h+ of battery life, I used some of that time for hacking on dvswitch.

Obviously, when you're typing away on a computer using an uncommon user interface (I use awesome as my window manager), questions will arise. I expected this; and luckily, dvswitch is not the kind of code that requires a lot of explanation for people to understand how it's useful—a short demonstration is very enlightening.

For most people, that simple demonstration would be enough. But one person asked me a question that I've heard other people ask me in the past (albeit in relation to different projects), and that I've always found the most baffling question people can ask someone who's writing some computer program:

"Why?"

Setting aside the fact that no, his example of Adobe Premiere cannot do what dvswitch can, I've never understood the thought train that leads to "it's been done already, so that's useless." Why does a poet write poems, when they'll never get something similar to Shakespeare's works on paper? Why does my father insist on painting portraits of people including their hands, when he knows he's not very good at it? Why does my mother teach a bunch of amateurs in the ways of floristry? Hasn't that been done before?

Because it's fun, that's why.