Older blog entries for ajk (starting at number 44)

It just hit me.

What? you ask.

My passphrase to Advogato.

Lots of stuff has happened since I forgot it. I graduated last December (read my thesis). The department awarded me a Best Thesis 2002 prize for that thesis today. I'm a employed as an assistant (a teacher/researcher of the lowest kind) by the department, and I have taught several courses. I'm lowering my Debian workload, and working on a fun project and then some. There is probably something I'm forgetting.

I cleaned up my certs. People who don't need my cert and have not certed me back just lost my certification.

Go cert juhtolv. He's the penguin sticker guy :-)

My application for changing my major subject was accepted. I am now a mathematical information technology major.

And immediately I started passing tests.

Yesterday was Independence Day. I visited my mother in Tampere and we both visited a cousin of mine and his other relatives in Lahti to congratulate him of his passing of the matriculation exam.

It's one of those nights again. I am alone and I just feel the pain of being alone in the night. But then again, who'd want a man like me with my way too heavy body.

It'll be better in the morning. But there will be more nights like this.

Johanna Sinisalo's first novel Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi ("Before sunset cannot") won this year's Finlandia, the most prestigious literary prize in Finland. This was the first time the prize was awarded to a SF novel.

The title of the novel is an excerpt from a popular Finnish song telling a sad love story between a sunbeam and a gnome: "Kas menninkäinen ennen päivänlaskua ei voi milloinkaan elää päällä maan" ("For a gnome before sunset cannot ever live on the ground"). There is an English translation of the lyrics of the song, although they leave a little to be desired. The title verse of the book is the following in that translation (title words emphasized): "Because no gnome can before the sunset walk - On the ground or he could die".

The prize is worth 150000 Finnish marks, a little over 25000 euro.

I just turned in my application for changing my major subject

I have a problem.

I have not been able to pass an exam since spring. And I've taken several.

My mother tells me it's probaly a motive conflict based on the fact that I major in mathematics but primarily study and work on computer science. Once I change my major subject, the problem would vanish.

I trust her on these things.

I still cowardly don't do anything about it. Maybe it's because I long thought that mathematics would be my life's work. I worked hard the last four-five years in school to get an excellent score on mathematics in the matriculation exam and to thus get easily to study maths. Well, it worked beatutifully my first year in university: I studied maths only, and got a perfect score in most courses I attended, and near perfect in the rest.

Then I got a summer job at the University Computing Centre, with the aim of writing and publishing a guide on LaTeX. At that time there were no up-to-date Finnish guides on LaTeX. I wrote the book, which had a length of 180 pages in the final version, and turned it in one month late. When I finished it, all the fall courses had already started and I missed most of them. The book was published in October 1998, and remains today as one of the best guides of LaTeX in Finnish (I'm told so, so it might be true:-)

I spent the better part of the fall of 1998 doing nothing to my studies. I would wake up at 1 or 2 pm and play computer card games and listen to radio for a couple of hours. Then I'd go to "Camelot", the University Computing Centre Linux lab and spend the evening reading email (especially Debian email: I put forth my developer application in September, 1998). I would then go to bed at 4 or 5 am.

It all started there.

Now I am unable to pass a course. And unable to resolve it. Hopefully I'll have enough courage to turn in the papers nxt week.

On Wednesday we had a memorable guest: President of the republic Tarja Halonen visited Central Finland, and one of her ports of call was Agora, our shiny new workplace. Tuomas even got to give a short talk to the president, and I passed by her in the hallway, almost by pure accident :-) Boy, didn't we experience something Really Grand(tm)? There are pictures of the visit and of the visit of President Martti Ahtisaari (in office 1994-2000) in Jyväskylä on the same day, one of them featuring Tuomas.

I discovered Alvin Maker. Reading "Heartfire" now. I also have "Dorsai!" ready for reading, and I got today Johanna Sinisalo's (one of the leading Finnish SF writers) first novel. It's amazing how books make you sleep late.

I have a dream: that is, to learn write good fiction. I think I have the theory already, but I'm missing a lot of practice, and usable story ideas that sound true to me.

There's a lot of exciting things happening now with GZigZag. Tuomas got virtual structures going, and I'm battling with a network-enabled CVS-like version management system for ZZ spaces. Cat has put out a incomplete but very good draft for the user's manual. We got an IPAQ and two Cassiopeias for porting GZZ into them.

Thanks to everyone who helped me survive my birth day :-)

I remembered yesterday the following exchange between Riker and Worf in the 2nd season TNG episode "Peak Performance":

- You're outmanned, and outgunned. What do you have left?
- Guile.

(Somebody should check the actual wording from the episode.)

It feels like that exchange makes a fun Guile ad.

I was born on 1977-11-02. Please make me happy tomorrow :-)

*wants virtual hugs*

We're hosting a small ZigZag workshop here in University in the weekend. There are some seven (eight?) people attending (limit was set at fifteen, for various reasons). It's a very hands-on workshop: six hours of computer time and five hours in a classroom for discussion and planning. And we had an informal dinner yesterday evening at a local pizza buffet place.

The dinner was fun but a little spooky. I cocreated the Finnish moderated newsgroup on programming, sfnet.atk.ohjelmointi.moderoitu with Rauli Ruohonen in the fall of 1998, and we are co-moderating it with three other volunteers. I had never met him personally, we knew each other mainly from news postings. It turned out, in a slightly embarrassing turn of events, that the guy from Helsinki University of Technology (where Rauli studies nowadays), sitting opposite to me in the table, was in fact - Rauli Ruohonen himself. Well, after the fact was uncovered, we had some very good time there.

The stable GZigZag 0.1 series was released on September 27, 2000. We're now at 0.1.3, which was released on October 10. This release engineering and arranging the workshop have taken most of my paid time since 15th of September. I hope that next week brings me time to start thinking about Clang once more (and about ZZ networking, which is another important and interesting subject).

Today it was discovered that I had the universal key to about a dozen rooms in the new Agora building. Exchanged it then to the correct key. I wonder what will happen next. A guy gets access to the whole building by accident?