Advogato blog for liw

26 Oct 2002

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 09:12:18 GMT

I noticed that almost all the people who have certfied me, especially those who have certified me as master, have been inactive on Advogato for ages, as in years. I wonder if I should take this as a hint.

Actually, given that I rarely, if ever, read the diaries anymore, and that pretty much all the articles are boring, I probably shouldn't be returning here daily. Hm. Yes. Old addictions go away slowly.

27 Mar 2002

Wed, 27 Mar 2002 11:52:16 GMT

Stupid usability problem of the day: I use some programs that bind ctrl-backspace to delete-previous-word, and others that use alt-backspace. Yesterday, I was typing in something and hit ctrl-backspace to delete the preceding word. That didn't work, so I typed alt-backspace instead. Or at least I tried: I failed to let the ctrl key come up properly, so I inadvertently hit ctrl-alt-backspace instead. Bye bye X.

12 Dec 2001

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 07:57:23 GMT

My latest hobby project, Lodju, released yesterday. I'm still high from the excitement, even though no-one seems to notice. :-)

(Yes, of course this is a way to advertise.)

My friends who play in LARPs talk about pre-low, pre-high, post-high and post-low periods surrounding a game. I seem to have skipped the pre-low period altogether. I hope the post-low doesn't come either.

3 Oct 2001

Wed, 3 Oct 2001 21:02:57 GMT

I don't seem to be as much of a mental exhibitionist I thought I was, since I haven't written diary entries for a year. During the year many things have happened, of course, which I'll completely skip. I will note that I have retired from the Debian and Kannel projects and am trying to find the time to finish my studies, work full time, complete some hobby hacking projects and also continue my new hobby: photography. Some day I might write an essay or two on my experiences with Debian and Kannel, but not today.

5 Aug 2000

Sat, 5 Aug 2000 22:18:20 GMT

Back from about a month and a half vacation: both real vacation and medical leave. Boys and girls: hacking enough to get back problems isn't worth it. Even a small amount of exercise, attention to ergonomy and taking a fifteen second break to stand up and stretch every half hour or so seems to give a very good return on investment: one is then able to continue hacking even in the long run. End of sermon.

The reason I hacked so much was to get over a death. It was a good thing in the short term, but I got too addicted to hack mode to notice when I had gotten over things. So I continued until my back stopped me. On the whole, it might have been a better idea to have a life instead.

I've solved the mystery of the missing life, I think. Too much work, too little time for friends, all hobbies concentrated on computers. I've decided not to work overtime, and to make a special effort to spend time with friends, and to get a new hobby. RPGs and amateur acting seemed fun before, so I'll start with them.

I've sold my computer. I have a laptop from work that now handles all my computing needs. A nice enough laptop, at that: an HP Omnibook 900, only problems are that it weighs about a kilogram too much and has an abysmal battery life of only about 3 hours. I do not miss having to admin several computers. Having only one makes life easier, and if it has to be only one, a laptop is a very good choice, at least for me. I like the fact that it's small (compared to a desktop - there are much smaller laptops) and mobile. Mobile computing happens to be interesting.

The Palm V is not a computer: apart from backups it requires no administration, and crashes only about once or twice per year. I don't even yearn for new software. I'm quite content with the current selection of installed software: the builtin stuff, a better launcher, a calendar and to do list summarizer, and a game. Oh, and a `hack' for making åäö easier to input.

With the home computer I lose my TV card, so I've bought a real TV set instead. Should be nicer to watch DVDs on a somewhat larger image than the 10 by 25 centimeter one I had on the monitor.

I notice that I've just about stopped reading diary entries on Advogato. There's simply too many of them: it gets too hard to keep track of who is who, and even just the total volume is too large to read, now that I'm back to work. This is probably a loss.

On the automake thing: autoconf is useful enough, but I won't use automake, as long as it generates Makefiles that are both huge and complex. In theory, if the Makefiles would always do what I wanted, that wouldn't really matter, but of course there is sometimes a tweak or two that needs to be done to make them work in a particular scenario. Not very often, but the risk is too high even so. Makefiles are hard enough to do portably, I don't need them to be incomprehensible as well.

22 Apr 2000

Sat, 22 Apr 2000 23:49:53 GMT

Been trying to keep 15+ hour hacking runs to distract myself from death in the family. Mostly been re-writing the HTTP code in Kannel. It now seems fairly stable and does about 2500 trivial requests per second when talking to itself, and serving static content directly from memory (see test/test_http2_server.c). This is good enough for now.

Branden Robinson claimed that I suffer from the NIH disease. I guess he's correct. I could probably have found something usable instead writing things from scratch, if I had spent a day or two at it, even though that didn't bring positive results last summer. On the other hand, since HTTP happens to be crucial for Kannel, it good to know the protocol pretty well, which I do now.

I was looking at my bookshelf today, trying to decide what to read next. I have about a shelf meter and a half of bulk fantasy novels which I bought cheaply last year (49 books at about a USD each), and I still haven't found the enthusiasm for reading any of them. I browsed a few pages of Eddings and it didn't seem all that interesting. Perhaps I'll give the bulk things away and concentrate on the good stuff. Which means, essentially, that I'll get to go on a shopping spree. Yesh.

I'd like a DVD player as well, I'm getting really annoyed by the low mechanical and image quality of video tapes these days. Unfortunately, the player would cost a bunch, especially if I want one that accepts DVDs from any zone.

Mandatory meta comment: There's too many diary entries popping up each day, so the "Recent diary entries" page is becoming less than useful for catching all of them, especially if you can't read Advogato for a couple of days. Perhaps a list of similar pages, each listing entries added during a particular day, spanning the last 14 days?

19 Apr 2000

Wed, 19 Apr 2000 20:20:13 GMT

Customers with weird problems and non-networked servers are a pain in the ass. It doesn't help if your relatives die at the same time.

I noticed Ankh say a bit about managing developers. I'm doing just that for a team of open source developers (who were, with the exception of Richard, not involved in open source beforehand). Being a manager or team leader is sort of fun, but also quite scary. I've found the book Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister very good. Recommended reading: it's rather well written and makes sense even to a hacker. I'm on the lookout for similar texts directed especially at open source development.

I don't use any management tools. About the only thing in that regard is the Kannel status page. I also have the feeling that having the whole team sit in the same room is causing the project to be cathedral like, even though we want it to be a bazaar. Mostly I think this is because we discuss things with each other, face to face, instead of doing it on the mailing list. We're trying to improve, however.

18 Apr 2000

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 22:34:06 GMT

WapIT housewarming party today, or rather, tonight. At about an hour before the party starts, I'm told that a large customer has serious problems and I need to solve them immediately. Oh great.

I worked around the problem, but then I had to stay sober in case the workaround didn't. Blech.

The party was too noisy, but fun otherwise. I should probably learn to dance.

18 Apr 2000

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 00:12:47 GMT

I see I am a Master now. I wonder what broke.

Spent most of today processing e-mail (why is it that every time I get involved in a freeware project, I start to get swamped in e-mail?) and discussing design of the memory allocation checking in Kannel and ways to profile mutex congestion with Richard Braakman (who may or may not get an account here - I'm keeping him busy enough that he may not bother).

Oh, also prepared for the company housewarming party tomorrow.

Heather Alexander's Midsummer CD is still the best piece of music I've heard for a long time.