A series of unfortunate events

This spring I accepted a new job in Darmstadt, with a starting date in July, so in late May I quit my old job in London, hoping to use the time (except for that spent moving) to finish the digitization of at least the 1904–1970 issues. Unfortunately, this plan was thwarted by a series of unfortunate events. June saw one legal, one medical, and one veterinary emergency, which together consumed all my available time. When I finally arrived in Darmstadt, it took nearly two months after signing up for Internet access before they came to install the cables. And to top it all off, shortly after we got wired, my laptop became irreparably damaged, so I had to procure a new computer on short notice and transfer all my data onto it.

The new computer is all set up, now, and the Internet is the fastest I've ever had. Here's a comparison of the specs of my old machine and the new one I'll be working with:

	sable (old machine)	ferret (new machine)
CPU	Intel Core2 Duo T8300 @ 2.4 GHz	AMD Athlon II X2 260 @ 3.2 GHz
RAM	4 GB DDR2	4 GB DDR3
Hard disk	250 GB SATA	500 GB SATA II
Display	39 cm TFT @ 1440×900 (WSXGA)	61 cm TFT @ 1920×1080 (1080p)
Graphics	Intel 965 GM	AMD Radeon HD3000
OS	openSUSE 11.3	openSUSE 11.4

So as you can see, the new machine is a modest improvement on the old one in every respect: it's got a faster CPU and faster memory, a larger and faster hard drive, a larger and higher-resolution display, a better graphics card (not that that matters much for the 2D imaging work this project is concerned with), and a newer operating system.

Because the machine's architecture is slightly different, and because it's a completely new install of the operating system, I'm going to have to recompile jbig2enc, Leptonica, and some various support utilities I've written myself. After that I can get back to work, so watch this space for updates in the hopefully very near future…