Older blog entries for jooon (starting at number 16)

I am curious to see what I think about my own diary and also if this will affect people's diary writing habits. Will we be more careful what we write? I probably won't, considering how seldom I write and how careful I already am of what people think. Looking back at my diary entries, it feels like an announcement list: "Look at some of these cool things I've done!" more than a random thoughts blog thing, but that is perhaps just as well. This isn't the place for complete brain core dump and I already have one of those blog like thingies, and my random thoughts are much more in Swedish and about girls than free software.

I like reading the advogato recentlog. It's comfy somehow. Breakfast with tea and advogato. :) I hope it won't get corrupted.

25 Jun 2002 (updated 25 Jun 2002 at 10:33 UTC) »
Bookmarklets

mglazer wrote about bookmarklets. The Wayback bookmarklet idea was nice. I modified it slightly to get the Google cache instead. This will solve slashdotted pages much better, because the Google cache is more recent, than what you get from wayback machine, and also faster. I removed the replace(/res:[^#]*#/,'') because I don't know when it's useful and it works fine without, but added an enclosing escape() to quote special characters like &, which otherwise would get eaten by Google. Not sure what void(null) does at the end either, but I let it stay. I really don't like javascript. For me, it's a tool of pure destruction, like a weapon. I know "people kill people, not guns", but people just suck at writing javascript, and it has caused so much agony over the years it has existed. Bookmarklets are good though, but they are only on my computer because I put them there and can modify them as I want.

Google Cache Add this link as a bookmark and use in case of emergency, or just click on it to see the google cache of the current page.

raph: haikus are fun. Made my own after reading about yet another company making their own license instead of taking an existing one:

Macromedia Open Source License: Just like IBM / but this baby has our name / Macromedia, Inc

Regarding doing business with dual-licenses. It seems to work for MySQL at least. When I was at LinuxTag about two weeks ago I noticed a nice diagram at the MySQL booth about their business model. A bit messy with lots of colorful boxes and arrows everywhere, but two things stood out. "Generating revenues" on the left side and "Serving Humanity" on the right side. I talked to David Axmark about the serving humanity bit, how he listened to Stallman's ideas, way back before I even got my first computer, and why GPL is good. I forgot to ask about how much of their income come from the dual license part, but I guess if it wasn't a big part, they wouldn't have chosen the dual license style.

12 Jun 2002 (updated 12 Jun 2002 at 12:48 UTC) »
Linuxtag over

The organizers did well. Very much to see and hear. As predicted, I was at the Debian booth most of the time. I met lots of nice new people, but I don't think anyone I met had an Advogato account, not very active at least, not that I am active, except reading.

Wrote a small Linuxtag review in my Karlsruhe diary, which just kept growing bigger and bigger and now I have had time to develop and scan all the pictures as well, so it's really huge for just a diary entry. :)

My camera sux though. First, it's not digital, then of all the really good non-digital out there, it's a shitty APS from some company that also make pencil sharpeners. To make it worse, the scanner is probably pretty bad as well. A funny thing though is that it makes alan's hat matches his eyes.

Oh, yeah, I did meet someone with active Advogato account, rasmus. I am still not sure if he believed me when I said how cool he was to name his baby Carl (Christine And Rasmus Lifeform). I have now certified him as Master. :)

Confusion

Some people didn't at first get that the "loser" in my last diary entry is me.

Linuxtag

It's currently Linuxtag here in Karlsruhe, during the next couple of days. I am going to meet lots of people I've never seen or even heard of before. I am constantly surrounded by people that all know a lot more about computers and specifically Linux than I do. I'll probably hang in the Debian booth a lot and annoy all the people there, although I am not officially enlisted. It all feels very odd. This perhaps began as a day for linux people in Germany and Europe to get together, but this feels very corporate, you have to register, watch people in tie. I haven't seen much mention of Linuxtag in the recentlog list, but if anyone is going there, or perhaps is even there now, reading this, come and meet me. Ask for Jon, the Swedish guy, and everyone will know. :)

14 Apr 2002 (updated 14 Apr 2002 at 05:02 UTC) »
cactus: Yeah, right. Check out this guy. He is real loser.

He hasn't done a single piece of anything in about a month. He stays at home, feels sorry for himself, watches Buffy, and never speaks with anyone except through irc and some obscure message boards.

Morpheus to use Rebol

Just noticed the deal that is going to bring rebol to millions of computers out there. Cool, hopes it works.

The net

The wireless network has been working great up until friday evening. All of a sudden I couldn't get an IP address through DHCP. My computer just stood there and waited and waited. I took my laptop with me and roamed the campus trying to find an access point that would give me an IP address. Found one just around the corner, but the DNS server was not functioning properly so I couldn't access the VPN gateway. Luckily I had a log somewhere which revealed the IP address and finally I could read my mail... but not at home, only on a freezing bench at Berliner Platz (here in Karlsruhe). It must have looked waaay geeky, seeing me there with my laptop. Cold is something the screen of my laptop doesn't like. Or at least not when I use X. In console mode everything is ok, but in X, the screen goes completely blank every other minute when I am outside. Weird.

I did find a reasonable solution. I can access Internet if I have the antenna on my balcon, but then I can't close the door completely, and I don't know how well the antenna is doing. It's an indoor antenna but hopefully it won't die on me. If I can't get the net working properly I have to ditch the local network here in the apartment, which my housemates have been looking forward to. I read an article here on Advogato which lead me to the smoothwall project. It may just be what we need.

School

I gave up the lab course Mobile Communications. It was fun, but took too much time. And I already have two other lab courses (Compiler Construction and Speech Recognition).

In Compiler Construction lab course we are making a minijava compiler in Eli. It took a while before I got the hang of Eli, but know all pieces are starting to fit. As it is free, I really should look into it more and get it working on my laptop.

In the Speech Recognition lab course, we are making a Klingon Speech Recognizer (or are going to). Did I tell you I am a Star Trek fan? :) Up until now, it have mostly consisted of learning a tcl-language.

Shakespearelang Wiki hacked

Our nice wiki was hacked. It was inevitable though, so many people visited our page, mostly because of the slashdot effect and we had the most insecure system ever, flat files with a PhpWiki.

ion and galeon

Been hearing a lot about ion and galeon the last few weeks. I have been using galeon at least a year and ion since several months. Good thing that people finally get it. :)

Karlsruhe, Germany

Have been here for three weeks now. My German is slowly coming back to me. I've studied German for seven years (from age 13 to 20), but have also had three years of forgetting. My brain has begun to think in German, which makes it really hard for me to write this diary entry, because I had to reboot into English mode. :) No problem with my Swedish though. I've also met three Swedes down here, two girls that works in a pub nearby, and one male student, but I've heard there are some more.

I have been searching for a place to stay so I haven't followed the news much lately, neither computer news or normal. But I somehow heard of this Anthrax disease in Florida, and wondered what the band's statement was, and today I found it.

Anthrax vs. Anthrax

Before the tragedy of September 11th the only thing scary about Anthrax was our bad hair in the 80's and the "Fistful Of Metal" album cover. Most people associated the name Anthrax with the band, not the germ. Now in the wake of those events, our name symbolizes fear, paranoia and death. Suddenly our name is not so cool.
Money

Now I have to go to the bank and pay a bill. I bought a wireless network card, Dell TrueMobile 1150, and an antenna, Elsa Airlancer Extender. Works great under Linux. It's actually just a Orinoco card in disguise. It was pretty cheap, 279DM (+ 179DM for the antenna), but the rent is high as hell. I shouldn't complain though. I live exactly by the university, in fact, looking out of the window where I am sitting right now, I see the main building with the sign "Technische Hochschule". And as I live so close to the university, I have access to the wireless network.

I wonder how much this year is going to cost. It's going to be scary for sure. But by next year, the currency changes, so everything will cost half as much, but in Euro. :)

5 Sep 2001 (updated 5 Sep 2001 at 17:12 UTC) »
The Slashdot effect

It's almost unbelievable how many people there are that read that site. The Shakespeare Programming Language that I and my friend Kalle wrote as an assignment in a syntactical analysis course got slashdotted. The student web server, where we had our homepage, died in perhaps 10 minutes after the article appeared on slashdot's front page. We redirected the traffic to another web server and just put up a temporary web page. In under 24 hours we had gotten 300 000 unique visitors according to the access log. Pretty cool. I tried to describe to my father that I just had some fifteen minutes of geek fame. He didn't understand why, but thought it was funny that his son was an Internet celebrity for fifteen minutes. Now I have put the web page on sourceforge. Just in case something like this happens again, at least our student web server won't die. :)

We also received a perl script that translates brainfuck to SPL. It doesn't work quite right though, but when it does, we can have all those nice brainfuck programs, like DeCSS, in SPL.

Trust metric

Just had a peek at Badger's advogato stats. Before the the change:

Master 378 persons, Journeyer 753 persons, Apprentice 332 persons.
After:
Master 392 persons, Journeyer 1251 persons, Apprentice 649 persons.
30 Aug 2001 (updated 30 Aug 2001 at 23:27 UTC) »

Dear Diary, it has been long since I wrote something, but you know... Life, stuff and everything. No hard feelings, right? OK, good! I've had some terrible months and some good months. And there has been nothing in between. April was a bad one, I had too much to do but no time to do it. School and work occupied most of time. May was good. We finished our strategy game Gecco. June good as well. I met a girl from Italy AND a girl from Gothenburg. Confused but happy. July bad, the girl from Italy went home, to Italy, and I lost connection with Gothenburg girl. August good. I and Kalle finished our Shakespeare Programming Language.

Gecco

During the winter and spring I had a course called Program Development Project (translated roughly). We were to create a general strategy game which would be used by the decision support group at Nada. I don't know exactly for what they were going to use it, but the Swedish defence research department (FOI) were also interested. We had some great ideas, but had a hard time coding the thing, and although we put more effort into our project than many other groups, and even won the project competition, it still felt a bit unstable and unfinished when we left it. Nada hired my friend Kalle (who was also in the project group) to work on it during the summer though and FOI is also working on it now so it is probably going to be used for real. The one best thing about the whole project though, was that we convinced them to have it licensed under GPL. We had received some concern from FOI, but once we explained the benefits to having it open with GPL, they were ok with it. As we retain the copyrights we told them that we could change the license for them if it was absolutely necessary, but they accepted GPL. I was really surprised at first, because when we visited them for a grand tour of their equipment on which the thing eventually would run on, everything was very hush hush secret secret. As the project changed from a student project to a research project it now has a new official homepage

The Shakespeare Programming Language

It's finally finished. I and Kalle have spent way too much time on this assignment but it was worth it. The meaning of the exercise was to show that we could handle both syntactical and lexical analysis of some sort. Make a pretty printer syntax highlighting for Java code or similiar. We decided to make our own language instead, after having seen some very funny esoteric languages out there. (Chef, Sorted, etc.)

After several months we finally have an implementation of the language. The main purpose of it is to have its source code resemble a Shakespeare play. Not a real play, but more how it's built. Character declaration at the top, acts, scenes, people entering and exiting, and saying stuff to other people. We also added some stacks to have infinite memory space, which makes it Turing complete, although we haven't made real proof yet. Although Hello World is quite big, it was very easy using the stacks to write a program which reads from stdin and outputs it backwards on stdout.

Germany

I am going to study a year at Karlsruhe University in Germany. I am leaving Sweden the last week of September and I am very excited but also very nervous. I still haven't found any place to stay. I received an e-mail from a guy that said he wanted to rent me a room but I haven't heard from him in one week so perhaps he has bailed out. I guess there is no chance that someone reading this, is from Karlsruhe, who can help me with accomodation. If there are, you can have a Swedish computer geek as a room mate. What about that!? :)

other random stuff

Cool WikiFeature gary. This will give all those Wiki diaries out there a nicer interface :)

I haven't used my Amiga in ages. Is this goodbye? Yes, probably. But I'll buy the AmigaDE and try it out some time.

After using it for some months, I've become addicted to Ion. It's a window manager who takes care of the windows for you. It clashes with some programs because of different views of concept, but still, it's not hard to use for example Gimp, even though it follows the manymanymany small windows everywhere shadowing each other concept

Wow, it's mirwin length on this one :)

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