Older blog entries for eskil (starting at number 66)

If I get elected to the board (yeah right), I will recommend sensitivity training for everyone who is subscribing to the g-h list. Or at least one long deep breath before pressing send (or should that be sendMailNow ?)

I think that about concludes my propaganda. Now start figuring out who else to vote on.

None what so ever, well, almost, went eating & drinking with assorted eazel people last night. Arlo knows the good places to wine&dine.

Steph is now working at Eazel (congrats!), so I guess that makes the apt in SF the official Eazel SF Office.

Og en af de første ting hun bemærkede var 'følgelig hvordan folk sviner hinanden til udenfor arbejdstid... Mmmm, tilsvining af kolleger...

Og forresten har en af personagerne fra biksen prøvet at køre den danske sektion af min dagbog igennem et oversætter. Men der' vist tilpas meget slang og andet hø i disse skriblerier, til at det ingen mening gav. Hah!

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Much nautilus bootstrap installer work. It's a mixture of fixing small libeazelinstall oddities, but mostly making the bootstrap installer use the info given by the lib, and acting just a bit sane (or at least manage to install nautilus).

I have now completely lost track of the flow in the program...

Need to do gnome-pilot hacking as soon as the pr2 madness is over.

Blam - that was tough getting back. There was quite a lot to do at eazel, and as a result, I have had no interesting experiences lately that would warrent a diary entry.

I still missing some of my stuff from the plane trip back. It has apparently been in SF since the day after I arrived. But somewhere in between United Airlines, Lufthansa and the kindergarden called US Customs, the loot just hasn't gotten further. Impressive...

george was at the office thursday, and instead of flying back home, I persuaded him into skipping classes friday and go drinking. It wasn't that hard to persuade him. Vores teamleder dummer sig stadigvæk engang i mellem. Men han er blevet bedre. Fyren er enormt usikker på sig selv, ikke just en god evne i en sektionsleder. Dertil kommer at mit hold virkelig efterhånden bare er det mest usete hold i firmaet, selvom vi får at vide at hvad vi laver er enormt vigtigt for bixen. At have et ryggradsløs tykt dyr som chef hjælper jo heller ikke på.

Nu har jeg en håndfuld personlige emails jeg skulle have skrevet for lang tid siden, men jeg har stadigvæk ulæst post fder går 2 måneder tilbage, suk.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

So I've also been persuaded to be a candidate for the gnome foundation. While my candicacy statement should have indicated that I'm not in either of the two groups that I personally think candidates normally are in. While not being opposed to being in the foundation, I just know that I 1) cannot get as engaged about it as others 2) cannot use the same amount of time (there's hacking to do). Therefore, I judge myself as not being a good choice for the foundation. But the candidacy is serious, it is not a joke.

As we finally began to use the installer on peoples weird machines, we of course found a load of weird rpm corner-cases; the most nasty are the ones where a rpm --rebuilddb is needed, but there are also cases where people have been force installing stuff, erasing stuff, rpm's with real bad dependencies and whatnot.

So it's been a long week of putting out one fire after the other, as these bugs are PR2 requirements, and often they block testing of the bootstrapinstaller.

But robey has done some nice stuff in the bootstrap installer, which we now need to move into the install view.

Also made a set of gnome-pilot 0.1.55pre tarballs, that I need to test and upload today.

Back from .dk. Frankfurt airport still blows chunks.

Anyways I had a real good time those two weeks. Enough to make me look forward to moving back. I got around to do all the stuff I wanted to do, and saw almost all the people I needed to see (missed three).

Basically I was spending the two weeks seeing old friends, getting drunk and engaging myself i general debauchery, sort of like what I was doing before I moved to SF.

The flight back was uneventfull, except that I got delayed 6 hours, ended in Chicago with half my luggage, thanks Frankfurt Main...

Oh, and the wankers in .dk voted no on the Euro, next they'll be voting for the creepy rightwing parties, *sigh*.

København er nu altså bare bedre når man er "en and i sin bedste alder", jeg savner at kunne vakle hjem fra louises i dejlig god brandert.

Selvfølgelig var der meget der var ændret, nye folk på Studenterhuset og Cafeen?, men mange af de gamle. Jeg tror at efter noget tid bliver det mindre festligt, flere og flere vil være kommet videre og have forladt stederne. Men der vil stadigvæk være hyggelige Nørrebro og Vesterbro, muligheden for at vade fra sted til sted, shawarma'er, ordentlig kaffe og leverpostej.

Og jeg vil lige pointere, at selv om Kbh er så meget federe, kan jeg nu stadigvæk godt lide at bo her, men det ændrer ikke på, at for en ung and med mine vaner er her ikke "optimalt".

Men jeg glæder mig til næste besøg, håber på omkring 20/12 til 10/1, pul og nytår under ordentlige forhold (guld tuborg og pissekoldt).

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

I almost couldn't remember where my cube was...

Robey had been hacking on my bugs while I was away, and of course he had found a spiffy case (updating libtiff of all things), which libeazelinstall couldn't handle gracefully. "gracefully" means figuring out what to download and not just say "fuck off" to the user. And fixing the case proved to be non-trivial, since I've already bolted so-and-so many special cases onto the code. So this weekend has been spent remodelling a lot of the code.

I would also like information on any ilbrpm hate clubs out there.

T-2...

Well, I finally got my IAP-66 back today, they really know how to make you feel like a second class citizen over here. But now I can go to .dk with a 80% chance of being allowed back into the country.

T-3....

Looks like I've got an INS/AIESEC issue. I've got this funky pink piece of paper (IAP-66, and here), that states that I'm "in good standing" with my workplace. So when I want to leave the country (at max 28 days, let's not forget that), I have to mail this paper to AIESEC, get them to sign that it's ok for me to leave the country, and then them mail it back to me.

So ideally, when I return to El Statos, I can show this paper plus my visa and they'll let me in.

The issue is, that I haven't gotten the paper back yet, and I'm taking off tuesday morning. As far as I can remember, my visa is invalid without said paper, which means that if I do not get it, I can be denied reentry... blech.

This could prove interesting...

And my temporary drivers license expires while I'm gone, and the friggin DMV haven't gotten their finger out of their collective big butt yet and mailed me my real one.

Så evt. bliver mit besøg længere end planlagt, nå de smider mig på det første og bedste fly tilbage til europa og jeg må tomle vej fra Athen til Kbh.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Ack. Since the usable milestone is probably going to end right after I get back, I have to finish my hard tasks (libeazelinstall) before I take off. Basically, it's the tasks that require knowledge of all the library's parts, and thus would be timeconsuming for the others in my group to fix.

So therefore I have to close an estimated 32 hours of tasks before monday. Today I got around to the worst ones and have closed almost 20 hours (luckily some of them were far less then the estimate), but it's bloody 4:30 and I want to go home and sleep.

So now I'm down to one ugly bug that looks like gnome-vfs chokes on my rpm search urs...

T-9...

We had an earthquake just last saturday. Fits well, since Robey at work commented that the weather was earthquake weather... I was at the kilowatt with my neighbors Andrew and Guatam(sp?). But apparently it could hardly be fejt in SF.

Weekend almost over (three-day weekend, Labourday (ala første maj, bare uden øl eller hygge). Spent yesterday at the San Gregorio Beach, doing nothing, mmm...

Got the my irda port running, so I can now try and track down the gnome-pilot problem with irda ports.

Oh I also feel the need to tell about a funky native ritual. Whenever it drizzles a bit, (we're not talking hard rain here, we're talking det drypper), the natives begin to believe they've angered the gods. So they begin a series of human sacrificing on the roads, where they drive at normal speed, and they normal distance (which even in dry weather is way to short). So oddly enough, going down the 101 means passing a few accidents, whereof one had closed all lanes in the northbound direction.

Imagine how scared the natives would get if they had snow.

The natives here are not the wisest on earth... de' faktisk en bunke tumper som kører 10m fra hinanden ved omkring 120km/t på en regnvåd motorvej. Og bagefter brokker de sig i avisen over at vejdirektoratet ikke sørger for ordentlig sikkerhed på vejene, heh.

Other then that, it was nice having a few days with clouds and light rain, ala, now it's back to blue sky and sun...

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

T-12...

Survived the trip Lassen National Forest. We (robin, george and I) left Eazel around 17 and arrived at the park around 1 (ugh). It was pitchblack, so our initial plan about leaving the parking lot (a gravel pit) and camping at the head of the trail were abandoned, so we just set up camp immediately.

Next day we headed out, and we camped a Big Lake (or such) around 17. It's a really nice area, neat lake, trees and you can see the stars (haven't seen the milky way since I moved here). George and I harassed the Happy Camper family on the next peninsula by skinnydipping to get the days grime of us. This night it was bloody cold, more then we had anticipated and/or had gear for, guess the lake played heatsink plus the added elevation did the trick - but we survived.

Next day (sunday), we headed back by an alternating route, fed live frogs to snakes (had to get some amusement out of those little pests), and ended up at the parking spot, did the skinnydipping trick again (that lake had the most gross sludge at the bottom) and then began our gruelling 7 hour drive back to SF.

All in all nice way to spend the weekend, other highlights were

• "why did I take off my underpants ?" George Lebl, 2000.
• spit that made wood burn
• dry...
• boots that needs repair (guess the CA dryness finally got to them)

Back at eazel, the required-featuers milestone for Nautilus loomed, and it's been 14 hours workdays since I got back, ugh.

Yesterday the police dropped by, since the alarm went off. Apparently me puttingmy hands in my pockets made them uncomfortable, so I was "asked" to take them out again, not entirely as friendly as the ye good olde FalckSecuritas guards at DBC, handguns and sticks vs. pipe and a flashlight...

Okæh, vores nye chef er en vist nar. Han startede for nogle uger siden og har vist haft svært ved at vænne sig til den anderledes kultur samt at finde ud af hvad vi egentlig laver. Så idag (et møde i morges kl. 11, som jeg selvfølgelig ikke dukkede op til da jeg først kørte hjem kl 5) fik hele holdet en balle for ikke at lave fremskridt nok. Shane fik en balle for at tage to (to!) dages ferie i næste uge, efter at han har arbejdet 14 timer om dagen i snart tre måneder).

Så der skal til at ske noget chef-irettesættelse nå vores overhoved kommer hjem...

Og ja, han var self irriteret over at jeg ikke dukkede op (til et møde kl. 11, duh!)

Men lad os give ham en chance til...

Bixen er forresten ved at blive mere og mere formel, flere politikker og et distribueret kalendersystem.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Much more libeazelinstall and nautilus-installer hacking going on. I've been spending a lot of time making the installer nicer, eg. using the nautilus-druid widget and whatnot. I can now only agree with Shane : "gtk hates you".

But it looks like the library will shape up nicely, still have a heap of things to do, before it can handle all the dependency conflicts I can imagine (as in, now it detects them, but doesn't handle them in a userfriendly way).

Yum, blight send me the two remaining red warszawa albums.

Ugh, LWE is over. While it was great to see so many businesses take linux seriously, it was bad karma to see the commercialism rule at the trade show, half the booths did not even have any technical staff to answer technical questions, all they could do was point to their webpage blablabla.

yakk was here for the week. That was pretty cool. He flew 26 hours from Perth to SF for just one week, getting his contract with eazel and attending the LWE.

We got up at the crack of dawn on tuesday, to make it to the keynote speech by Michael(sp?) Dell (ceo of dell. We wanted to see it, since he was supposed to demo nautilus. Well, the demo consisted of launching his presentation from nautilus and took about 10 secs - and we missed it. The rest was an hourlong commercial for Dell. Gah.

Thereafter I strolled around at the trade show, didn't feel well, and was tired. I met a lot of the helix people again and some of the rhad labs people. 'twas good. Also got intercepted by campd, whom I haven't seen since the 99 guadec.

At 13, the gnome press conference was on, where the shaking news of sun, ibm and hp adoption of gnome as the default desktop (instead of CDE) was revealed, plus their place in the newfounded Gnome Foundation. All good news, though some people understandably are nervous about it.

But anyways, after strolling around a bit, it was time for my boothbabe duty. So I sat for some hours doing the same 10 min demo of nautilus over and over again, while being bombarded with either good questions or hostile kde evangelist questions and the amusing questions from marketing drones who didn't get the free software thingy at all.

Well, at the end I truly felt like crap, so lucky we got home rather early.

Next morning we didn't go too early, I was defintely running a low fever now and wasn't really feeling like another tour of boothbabe'ness. But I did it, but still got to sneak away to actually bond with the various hackers present. Later that night was the Eazel/HelixCode LWE party, which was good, loads of hackers and free beer - good combo. Luckily I was feeling much better at this time. rebecka came up with the idea of using the suite we had at the hilton for an extended after-party. So there we were, in the suite with loads of beer (roomservice, ah...) and hackers. There was loads of the Redhat guys, some Helix people and others, highlights were

• Maciej being groped on by some girl
• Komrat Judy - you will drink for the party!
• seth singing to his rootbeer under the table
• getting hugged by josh (wah!)
• Martin Baulig wanting to get out of the car on the 101 to piss - two times!
• ordering wakeup service for 7 o'clock (I wasn't staying there...)
all in all, successfull.

So finally on the last day, it was loot gathering time - got four t-shirts and random crap. Bought some cool mints for Bjerregaard. All was good.

On friday we didn't get to work till noon, and then there was marathon meetings followed by post LWE beer bash. So all in all, I didn't get any work done this week. Also dropped the car of at a mechanic. My heat problems was probably related to the fact that the radiator fans didn't come on - so now I get to exercise my 12 month warranty, yay. Later that we ate at Ruth's Chris Steak house. Pricy but excellent steaks, it still goes Moo whenever I go to the shitter (lidt som den 1200g culotte jeg delte med Jacob på Bryggeriet).

Saturday evening, Frederik and Rebecca(sp?) showed up (old komrade from Studenterhuset). So we went for food, chitchat in our highspeed encrypted communications systems (danish) and then for beer at the Kilowatt. It was real good to have a dane by again. They crashed at our place (which meant I got to sleep in the futon with george - eek!). Next day we went up to the hill at the top of 16th, great view. Then we went to Haight Ashbury for some food, dropped of Rebecca who needed a shopping fix, while Frederik and I went for the Lombard Street experience. Of course this was in the car he had borrowed, wouldn't go up that hill in my car with manual...So after that, they took off, we'll hopefully go for the usual highway 1/santa cruz/highway 84/35 drive on wednesday or such.

Back home, it was satellite dish assembly & mounting time. All went well, and we've now got access to unlimited amount of crap on the tv. Bliss!

Tænk, ingen har rigtig generet mig denne uge, hverken folk jeg bor med eller kolleger. Dvs for at holde gennemsnittet, bør denne uge have en høj koncentration...

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

LWE took a lot of time, but I'm prepping the nautilus bootstrap installer.