Older blog entries for Skud (starting at number 71)

Cold, wet, miserable. Swedish keyboards suck.

Went up to Stockholm yesterday with Ingvar and did some sightseeing. Went to some museums, took some photos, walked around the city, etc. Lots of oldish tallish buildings with pointyish roofs. Chestnuts, too... we don't have them lying around on the ground in Melbourne, you know... they sell them as luxury foods, in fact.

Did I mention that Swedish keyboards suck?

The town I'm staying in, Nyköping, is insanely clean and neat. Almost sterile. Walking from the railway station to the office today, I saw only one (count them, one) piece of graffiti. All the houses are neatly painted. The gardens are tidy. And the people don't jaywalk. That's just not natural.

Another unnatural thing: Dilbert cartoons translated into Swedish. I will take some home to scare people with.

On a more relevant note, however, I spent a chunk of this afternoon talking work things with the potential bossman. The work looks interesting and the remuneration looks adequate, but I'm not entirely sure of the extent to which it will be compatible with my personal goals wrt Open Source software.

9 Oct 2000 (updated 9 Oct 2000 at 10:12 UTC) »

In Sweden, sleeping at ingvar's house. Today I'm in at his work, being shown around and stuff. The terminal I'm using has a swedish keyboard but US keyboard mappings, so I'm mostly touch typing and ignoring the apparent placements of the punctuation keys.

Went to Leiden, NL on the weekend for a get-together of alt.fan.pratchett type people. I had a nasty, nasty head cold so I didn't drink anything other than water and lemonade, and spent most of the time blowing my nose loudly and coughing up huge chunks of Canadian phlegm. Skud's travel tip #42: don't catch foreign colds to which you have no immunity.

The Netherlands surprised me by being so stereotypically Dutch. I mean, I figured that the whole "windmill" thing must be like kangaroos in Australia -- sure, we have them, but they're not jumping around in the streets. But it turned out that there *were* heaps of windmills. And water. And bicycles. My ghod, the bicycles... everywhere!

Airport reviews

  • Tullamarine (Melbourne, Australia): dull but not offensively so. 6/10.
  • Honolulu (Hawaii, USA): ugly brown decor, too warm, and a packet of nuts cost me about $7 (AUD). 3/10.
  • Toronto (Canada): pretty normal for an airport; confusing checkin/security arrangements; deeply evil US immigrations stuff. 7/10, minus 3 for the US immigr ation
  • Ottawa (Ontario, Canada): small and simple, excellent bookstores. 8/10
  • Los Angeles (California, USA): large, noisy, lots of food places and bars, fairly well organised checkin/security, but hard to find a decent bookshop. Wou ldn't want to be stuck there for long, but an hour or so is OK. 6/10
  • Auckland (New Zealand): recently refurbished, colourful, good shops. 8/10.
  • Singapore: Omighod! Saunas! Swimming pools! Movie theatres! In-transit hotel s with wakeup calls in time to catch your flight! But I was stuck there for 5 hours with a high fever and a head full of Canadian snot, so it only gets 4/10 .
  • Frankfurt (Germany): Grey concrete, rude immigrations/customs officials, barbed wire, smoking inside the terminal, and not many shops in the transit area. And uncomfortable chairs making it nearly impossible to sleep. The worst airport I've seen so far. 1/10.
  • Arlanda (Stockholm, Sweden): Pleasant, with real wood panelling throughout. Very fast customs/immigration, but hard to find taxis. 7/10.
  • Schipol (Amsterdam, Netherlands): HUGE, with MANY shops. Good signposts and clear multilingual announcements. Free train transport to/from the airport for KLM ticket holders. 8/10.

The surreality of the universe tends towards a maximum:

  • Gulf Air hostesses are all blonde, heavily made-up, and wear heels, short skirts... and a head veil that looks like a reject from "I dream of Jeanni e"
  • Arlanda airport has a hopscotch court in the departures area
  • JAL has a 747 painted all over with Pokemon figures
  • KLM's frequent flyer program is called "The Flying Dutchman"

Arrived in Sweden, via Singapore and Frankfurt. 36 hours... argh! I also managed to pick up some sort of head cold, probably in Canada, which means that my head is full of Canadian snot and I was sick as a dog between Singapore and Frankfurt. Luckily the flight staff were good and looked after me pretty well.

Swedish keyboards suck. If I have strange things come through in my diary entries, it's because none of the punctuation keys are in the right places.

Off to the Netherlands today for an alt.fan.pratchett meet. My ears are still blocked from the last flight (an airbus, ugh, they always do bad things to my ears even when I don't have a cold) and I'm slightly worried that I'm going to end up with an ear infection like I did in Sydney one time. I wonder if this country's socialised medical system extends to furriners?

Back in Melbourne, briefly, before heading off to Sweden for a week.

My summary of my opinions of Ottawa and e-smith: "Attractive". The city is really nice, the people are cool, and the job looks *good*.

Now I'm trying to find someone who'll bring me pizza at lunchtime. Hey, it's evening in *Canada*.

More Ottawa photos

I leave Ottawa tomorrow and head to Sweden, via Melbourne. No, don't ask... it's one of those stupid airfare sagas that you just don't want to know about.

Dad emailed me and asked if he could pick me up from the airport "because I need to ask you about a problem with my computer." Ugh. Jetlagged Windows tech support is not my idea of a good time. OTOH, it saves me a taxi fare.

People have reassured me that FormMagick looks a) useful and b) doable, so I shall start hacking on that when I get back from Sweden. Or maybe even while I'm there, if I'm feeling enthused.

More things that are different here in Ottawa, Canada:

  • Light switches go the other way
  • There is no standard direction for water taps to turn
  • Many pedestrian crossings do not have buttons to press
  • you can only buy alcoholic drinks from official government liquor/beer stores
  • bandwidth is so FAST and so CHEAP! Wheee!
  • Maples maples everywhere, but the woods don't smell of anything (no eucalyptus aromatics)
  • squirrels, not possums
  • geese, not kookaburras
  • nobody's on goofey when I am
  • most shops and public buildings have "airlock" doors, to keep the warmth in
  • the doors *always* open outwards
  • the coke cans are only 355mL (not 375mL) which is *just* enough to notice the weight difference as you lift it

I'm fiddling with a web form toolkit which I'm calling FormMagick (yeah, I know, it was one of those stream-of-unconsciousness software naming things). I've put some documentation up on my site, and would appreciate feedback from anyone who feels the urge to take a look. Drop me an email if you're interested in helping code it, too... I could definitely do with some help on this one.

Tomorrow I'm heading up to Montreal to meet up with a bunch of #perl people and see the sights, including a visit to the Whisky Cafe.

Wheat: Take a look at Locale::Maketext ... it's not very well documented, but it does a heap of stuff which gettext doesn't do... the best thing is that it's good for translating stuff where the english is "You have $num new email message(s)" and the translation is something like "Email message(s) $num you have now", where the variable goes in different places and it has interesting grammar rules (eg pluralisation).

Well, it's been a few (very busy) days since my last update.

I've spent most of this week in at e-smith and being touristy. I think I've walked around half of Ottawa by now.

On Monday night I walked right around most of downtown Ottawa, found the local gay bookstore, and had "all you can eat mussels and fries $9.95" for dinner at a Spanish place in the Byward Market area. On Tuesday I took a tour of Parliment in the morning (see the photos link above). For lunch e-smith provided pizza and all the Australians here provided vegemite in the very special form of "vegemite worms". I also handed out musk flavoured lifesavers. I had dinner with Kim and Joe from e-smith at a *very* nice restaurant.

Wednesday (yesterday) I had lunch with dhd who I know from #perl. He works for Linuxcare in a very cool office actually *in* the Byward Market building. I had a good look round the market after lunch and all I can say is: "CHEESE!"

Most of the day was spent brainstorming architecture things to do with i18n and form-building toolkits. Spent the night at charlieb's place (he's an Australian working at e-smith) and ate lots and lots of Tim Tams.

This morning I woke early (7am, eeek) and went for a long walk around the area where charlieb lives. It's on the Ottawa River, and there are bike/walking paths all around. I walked for about 2 hours, up to the Mud Lake reserve and back again, and took a heap more photos. The weather was the coldest it's been since I arrived; I think it was probably just above freezing when I went out, and there was still a fair bit of frost around at 9am when I returned from my walk. It's now almost noon and my legs still have that "ouch, you froze me!" cold feeling (I'm just wearing cotton cargo pants).

Today I'm playing with Locale::Maketext.

25 Sep 2000 (updated 28 Sep 2000 at 15:40 UTC) »

So. I'm in Canada, and this is my travel diary so far.

I caught the plane from Tullamarine airport at horrible-o-clock on Sunday morning. The only way to be up at that hour is to stay up all night. This turned out to be a very good idea as it put me on the right timezone when I got here. No jetlag! Woo!

The flight was about 24 hours in total, via Honolulu and Toronto. It was reasonably comfortable (especially as I had a double seat to myself to Honolulu) and the food was OK... much better than on the domestic flights I've taken before.

I met Anthony DeBoer from alt.sysadmin.recovery at Toronto and we had a drink in the airport bar before I caught a domestic plane to Ottawa. In Ottawa I was picked up by some E-Smith people and taken to dinner, via the B&B where I'm staying (so I could shower and change).

The B&B is situated about 20-30 minutes' walk away from the E-Smith offices, and the walk is right through a very interesting part of town -- past museums, art galleries, parliament house, the canal, etc. I spent an hour doing the walk this morning, and took a number of photographs along the way. Apparently there's a scanner here, so if it's working I might get photos processed as I take them, then put them up on infotrope.

Over breakfast the woman who runs the B&B asked me what I do. I sort of mumbled "computers" and thought that would be it, but she asked me what field I specialised in. I took a deep breath and started my "linux 101" talk: "Well, have you heard of an operating system called Linux?" She replied "Yes, I'm running Red Hat." Argh. Wow. Even the older couple staying at the B&B had heard of it. I was stunned. I don't know whether this is a Canadian thing, or whether it's just that the whole world is starting to know about open source software.

I got in to the E-Smith offices about 11am and have spent most of the time since then meeting people, setting up a workstation, etc. I'm now poking around their developers website trying to absorb stuff.

Things which are different in Canada:

  • The fire hydrants are yellow and blue (not red)
  • The pedestrian traffic lights have a hand for "stop" and a white man for "walk" (rather than a red man standing for "stop" and a green man walking for "walk")
  • The water level in the toilets is much higher

  • They don't include the tax in the listed price of things, so you have to mentally add 15% on top
  • The taxis aren't yellow
  • You can't see the Southern Cross in the night sky
  • You have to remember to look the *other* way when crossing the road

The good news is that it isn't cold... yet. The weather here is not unlike Melbourne's weather at the moment, so it was no shock to the system. This morning was bright and sunny but cool, and this afternoon it's clouding over a bit.

I'm in Canada. Infotrope is broken (moving our server to a new colo location, I believe), so I won't be posting a long diary entry until it's back up. Also, I won't see my email for a while, so if you've emailed me in the last 36 hours or intend to in the next 12-24, I might take a while to get it.

62 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!