Older blog entries for mathrick (starting at number 41)

So. I wanted to get around the city and look for cheap bikes today. Instead, I got flat tyre and spent entire time I had allocated on first attempting to fix it, and then getting new one and changin it. Ghrr. Also, the laptop I’m using right now has danish keyboard, in small notebookish layout to that. And some genious invented having “Fn” key instead of Ctrl, and Ctrl slightly to the right. So I need to aim to the right when I want to hit Ctrl-Backspace, which often results in Alt-Backspace instead. Which for some reason means “delete everything” in IE (yeah, I’ll be installing FF ASAP here). So first half of this post has been already typed in 3 times. Yay for great ideas. Now I need to finish before I run out of battery juice, because I have the laptop, I have the power adaptor, but I don’t have cable to connect that adaptor to the mains :>

Wow, an update. There haven’t been one in something like… 4 months? That means I had to delete several thousands of spam comments before doing anything :(. I need to finally update to WP 1.5, hopefully it’ll cope better with spam. Honestly, I’d like to just have my spamassasin but for blog, and a way to delete all the spam comments at once.

Anyway, I’m in Denmark now (been here since Thursday). Thanks to Socrates/Erasmus programme, I’m in Odense (take a look at the coordinates which should be somewhere close to this post :), as an exchange student. So far it’s very cool, if you have ever seen kids books illustrations of typical Danish town, there’s a news for you: it’s all true. The houses really look like they do on pics, most are small and very, hmm, cute. Also, the interior design seems to be universally good, you just don’t get to see badly arranged houses.

The city is all crazy about bikes, Odense being one of the biggest Danish towns is also the most bikified one. You can get by bike everywhere. And you have special bike lanes on every street, including roundabouts, which is something completely uncommon in Poland. That’s the part I really like about it, although I still don’t have a bike on my own (I will be going to town to look for a bike tomorrow). What totally beat me was young woman, with two small kids, doing quite significant shopping, and then riding home by bike. Turns out that with a basket, kids seat and a trailer you can do it.

There’s still a lot to do before the term starts, good thing my “buddy” (the person you get assigned to help you get around in the city when you arrive, sort out the paperwork, etc.) is a very nice guy, and extremely helpful. Thanks to him, I have a bike before I get my own, same thing with a computer (I don’t have a laptop, and couldn’t really take my desktop with me here).

One very noticable thing (besides everyone speaking Danish) is that you can get away with English almost anywhere. Even the old ladies walking with dogs will tell you you don’t need to be afraid in English once they notice you don’t understand Danish :>. Another is that Danes really like their Danebrog, there’s a good chance to see a flag on every street, and about every other shop is called “Dansk something” (the rest is called “Fynsomething", Fyn being the name of island Odense is situated on). Quite similar to Americans and their love of Stars & Stripes, I think.

That’s enough for today, I need to get up early tomorrow and look around the city for a cheap bike.

Had the strangest bug today.

During Computer Architecture labs we were supposed to write utterly trivial distributed app using PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine or something) libs. And so we did. All was nice and dandy, app would spawn worker processes, send them data (that is, 3 integers) which would then get summed and sent back to master process. Everything was cool, working set was split into correct number of messages, each was sent correctly, replies sent back, except that the very last one just wasn't making it. It would simply disappear into oblivion, leaving parent process hanging there ad infinitum.

Obviously we debugged it, added some control printf()s (debugging distributed app on remote site with no gdb installed isn't nice in general, but this one was hopefully trivial enough to only need couple of printf()s here and there), corrected few obvious mistakes and, umm, nothing. It would just hang there. So we got LA (Laboratory Assistant) to take a look at it if we didn’t make any stupid mistake in PVM code. Nope. All clear and correct. We tried fiddling with size of data and number of child process – now it ran to the end and exited cleanly, but results were clearly bogus. Change back to old settings – hang.

So, we analysed it over and over, checked the algo several times, nothing. During random bashing of debug printf()s, I moved one few lines down in the code to get it to print slightly different set of data, and then – *poof*, it just worked. I moved exactly 1 (one) printf(). It changed no control flow. But suddenly, the app just worked. When I got the printf() back into old position, it still worked. The untraceable bug just disappeared, appropriately, without trace.

Update: So advogato doesn't allow <acronym></acronym>. Grrr

SamBakZa strikes again! In case you haven’t seen first part of “There she is!” yet, you can see it here as well.

So, browsing the web I’ve come by this screenshot with extremely fine piece of art in it. Now I have it on my desktop too, but there’s a problem: I know literally nothing about the image, author or source of it. So if you can recognize anything about the image, please drop me a line (you can do that via comment form, for majority of you who read it via some syndication :). I’ll be very grateful for anything that would help me identify the drawing somehow.

Just finished Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Very addiciting game, has drawn me away from doing more productive things :\\. Really, the evolutions that guy does are totally incredible, make Matrix look like bunch of acrophobia-ridden weenies. The only weakness is that it’s short (13h total) and after you end it, it’s closed – nothing left to be done, you’ve seen everything. Oh, and also camera sometimes tends to be high on crack, which is annoying. But gameplay makes you forget about insignificant details like that ;). Graphics are very nice, a “bit” of progress since original PoP, but it’s addicting just like back then.

On unrelated note, comments spam is becoming very annoying. I can stand a lot, but aggressive porn spam is just a bit too much. Dunno, maybe I should disable comments entirely? But I like when people have comments on their sites, so I want to have them in my blog too. Definitely should look for some spam-assassin for WordPress, anyone has good recommendations for that to spare me some unnecessary R&D hours? If so, drop me a note (yes, you can use comments for that ;)

Just finished Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Very addiciting game, has drawn me away from doing more productive things :\. Really, the evolutions that guy does are totally incredible, make Matrix look like bunch of acrophobia-ridden weenies. The only weakness is that it’s short (13h total) and after you end it, it’s closed – nothing left to be done, you’ve seen everything. Oh, and also camera sometimes tends to be high on crack, which is annoying. But gameplay makes you forget about insignificant details like that ;). Graphics are very nice, a “bit” of progress since original PoP, but it’s addicting just like back then.

On unrelated note, comments spam is becoming very annoying. I can stand a lot, but aggressive porn spam is just a bit too much. Dunno, maybe I should disable comments entirely? But I like when people have comments on their sites, so I want to have them in my blog too. Definitely should look for some spam-assassin for WordPress, anyone has good recommendations for that to spare me some unnecessary R&D hours? If so, drop me a note (yes, you can use comments for that ;)

Just finished Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Very addiciting game, has drawn me away from doing more productive things :\. Really, the evolutions that guy does are totally incredible, make Matrix look like bunch of acrophobia-ridden weenies. The only weakness is that it’s short (13h total) and after you end it, it’s closed – nothing left to be done, you’ve seen everything. Oh, and also camera sometimes tends to be high on crack, which is annoying. But gameplay makes you forget about insignificant details like that ;). Graphics are very nice, a “bit” of progress since original PoP, but it’s addicting just like back then.

On unrelated note, comments spam is becoming very annoying. I can stand a lot, but aggressive porn spam is just a bit too much. Dunno, maybe I should disable comments entirely? But I like when people have comments on their sites, so I want to have them in my blog too. Definitely should look for some spam-assassin for WordPress, anyone has good recommendations for that to spare me some unnecessary R&D hours? If so, drop me a note (yes, you can use comments for that ;)

As it turns out, “OOo_1.9.m65_native_LinuxIntel_install” is in fact collection of RPMs stuffed into .tgz (!?). Great installer indeed. How cool that 1) I have Debian 2) I don’t want to install it systemwide but only have a quick peek. Yay for great installers!

Released Libmms 0.1 earlier today, finally. This is also my first release ever, quite a bit of knowledge to swallow. Following the release, gst-mms also got commited to GStreamer CVS repo. Still has some issues, I have my suspicions, we will see.

This is very good timing, btw, as today is my birthday. The feeling that you’re able to contribute something useful back to community is the greatest gift I could get. Also, got boxed copy of Fallout to replace for lost CD of one I bought long ago (too bad it’s PL version, not EN, but oh well), and new mouse to replace my beloved A4Tech SWW-5 NetEasy 3D Mouse, which recently started showing signs of age. New mouse if from Media-tech this time, and is called “Web Master 4d Mouse", although my bro (who has his birthday tomorrow :) immediately renamed it to “Darkness Master” as it’s black and pretty bad-ass looking :). What I like about it is symmetry, making is suitable for both left- and right-handed part of population. Of course it has 3rd button under thumb (that’s very basic requirement for any mouse I’m supposed to even touch), mirrored on the other side, totalling to 5 buttons (left, right, left thumb, right thumb, and under the wheel). Gotta see if I can program this wealth of buttons to do something useful under X. Oh, and it’s old-fashioned, non-cordless, non-optical mouse, just as God intended. Yay!